Functionalists and Conflict Theorists

For these first few weeks of classes, I found it very difficult to think of what I wanted to blog about. I always find it much easier to discuss something that I am truly passionate about, as I am sure most people do. I noticed that a lot of what we have been learning was the basic background information of where sociology has started and how it has progressed over the years and more importantly, how it interacts with the Education system. All this aside, I know that everything that we have learned thus far will help us to connect it to what is happening in schools today and that it was necessary to learn. I started to wonder if this is what the class was going to be like all semester, but last week was the last class of background knowledge and we are now going to begin the lessons that will help us deal with issues/concerns with the schools.

To date, we have discussed three theories that exist in sociology. They are functionalism, conflict theorists and interactionist theorists. I would like to summarize the first two, so that we not only see them separately, but how they also compare to each other. When we were first discussing them, I was always getting confused about who thought what, but after we summarized them last class, it helped me to separate them easier. In my next blog, I would then like to discuss the ideas of Interactionist theorists and how it fits compared to these two.

Overall, no matter what the problem is, functionalists always try to find the positive. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the conflict theorists are suspicious of everything. I find that both of these theories are on opposite ends in their beliefs and I do not fully agree with one or the other, but rather see truth in certain points from each.