"We live in a society." This internet meme is typically a parody of society’s failures, with figures like the Joker as a symbol of alienation. Yet it touches something real: many people feel a gap between them and the social order, a sense of not quite fitting the roles society assigns.
Such a throwaway line resonates so widely. This itself is a small social fact worth reading, precisely what sociology teaches. Beneath the meme sit the questions the discipline exists to ask: What forms the society we live in, and how are its norms set? How do people come to identify with a community, taking on its roles and obligations? How do our present troubles stem from the structure and the failures of society itself?
The second session in our course, “Foundations of Society,” taught me how sociology can answer those questions and more. What follows are my reflections from that session, read through my background in technology and the humanities.
Social institutions
The lesson began with the six major institutions of society: education, family, religion, politics, economics, and health. They form the structure of society; sociology, as a discipline, exists to study them. From here, we can explore belief systems, worldviews, social class, power dynamics, and culture.
While this course is about Educational Sociology, we cannot isolate education from the other institutions of society. Instead, we can apply sociological theories to understand educational processes, structures, and changes. The discussion did that by showing how society can be seen through different lenses, such as the structural-functional, feminist, and sociobiological theories.
Tylor, culture, and me
No academic discussion on culture would be complete without Edward B. Tylor’s definition:
“Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
Hearing this again after so many years brought me back to my twelfth-grade self studying Understanding Culture, Society & Politics. It felt like a superpower even then to parse cultures and societies through Tylor’s list. Organizations, communities, and religious systems could be understood and appreciated for “that complex whole.”
It has been almost a decade since I finished senior high school, and in that time, I have been to three continents, enough to put Tylor's "complex whole" to the test. Among the Filipino communities of Canada and the United States, I saw aspects of culture adapt into something neither fully Filipino nor fully "Westernized." I also felt the vibrancy and music of South Africa and the fast-paced dynamics of Hong Kong and Macau. In each place, Tylor's list stopped being a definition to memorize and became a lens, a way to read a culture as a whole. I have also lived through what it means to graduate into an IT field that AI has upended. It is an upheaval reminiscent of the Industrial Revolution, the very shift that gave rise to sociology. Watching my own profession reorganize around a single technology gave me a first-hand feel for the forces the early sociologists set out to explain.
As we studied “The Foundations of Society,” I realized that it takes maturity, empathy, and imagination to understand the human experience. No single theoretical lens can capture a culture in full; each paradigm reveals what the others miss. This way, sociology provides frameworks that can guide explorers like me, especially in the field of education.
Fueling my curiosity
During the lesson, research questions lingered at the back of my mind. For example, the subject of "culture and class" reminded me of the digital divide and social stratification. Who actually receives EdTech in Philippine public schools, and does it reproduce or reduce inequality?
The "ideal versus actual beliefs" resonated with EdTech non-adoption. Many teachers may be trained in EdTech and classroom gamification. They may even believe that it can elevate classroom engagement and learning retention. However, their lived experiences, school culture, and economic factors might constrain innovation. The challenges of Western "ethnocentric" AI and learning frameworks also matched the points on "emic/etic" and the "equivalence of meaning." How can access to EdTech or AI impact economic, cultural, and symbolic capital? That question came to mind as we explored Bourdieu's theory.
The AI phenomenon hit every sector, including education. This class made me think: what is the lingering effect of AI as a socialization agent? If students learn from chatbots, what norms and worldviews get quietly transmitted?
I look forward to exploring these questions as the semester deepens my grasp of educational sociology.
More relevant now than ever
Our session closed with a provocation: given how heavily the concepts of culture and society have been critiqued, are they still useful at all?
My answer is yes, and AI makes the question more urgent. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini are trained on an enormous but deeply uneven slice of digitized text: overwhelmingly English, recent, and drawn from the connected Global North. What they absorb is not humanity's culture but the fraction of it that reached the internet, which means the very inequalities I noticed earlier (the digital divide and the question of whose knowledge gets counted) are now built into the tools themselves.
This is exactly why culture and society remain indispensable concepts. An LLM does not digest Tylor's "complex whole"; it digests a partial, unequal fragment of it, then reflects that fragment to us as if it were the whole. Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into a technology that simulates a fluent, knowledgeable voice across almost any domain. If we mistake its sliver of culture for the entirety, we risk teaching a generation a narrower world while believing we have handed them everything. What, then, will become of our culture, our society, and our humanity? What world will our children inherit if they grow up letting these systems think and decide for them? And what will the classroom look like then?