Most Important Functions of the School are given below:
1. Conservation and Perpetuation of Social Life:
One of the most important functions of school is to maintain the continuity of social life by handing down traditions, experiences, values and customs of the society, from one generation to the other.
Thus the school provides minimum general culture to all the pupils which is indispensable for a successful living in the present-day complex society.
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2. Promotion of Cultural and Civilization:
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The school not only transmits the cultural heritage to the rising generation, it also trains children in a manner that they enrich and modify that heritage through their own effort and thus help in the establishment of a better and happier society.
As D.J.O. Cannon has said, “If each generation had to learn for itself what has been learned by its predecessors, no sort of intellectual or social development would be possible and the present state of society would be little different from the society of the old stone age.”
Thus, the school performs the important function of constantly re-organising and reconstructing human experiences for the promotion of culture and civilization.
3. All-round Development of the Individual:
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The school develops the whole personality of the child, physically, intellectually, morally, socially, aesthetically and spiritually, through its curricular and co-curricular activities, through craft work, games, sports, society, artistic and other impulses. Thus the child not only acquires knowledge but also develops the requisite habits, skills and attitudes.
4. Promotion of Social Efficiency:
To live in democratic society children must be trained in democratic methods through education and the school programme is planned accordingly. Training for effective participation in democratic government and cultivation of a balanced sense of rights and duties, is an important function of the school.
This is done by the school by having a clear concept of democratic ideals and then directing educational programme accordingly. The school goes on studying and analysing the social development as a result of rapid changes in the economic, political and physical conditions.
On the basis of this study and analysis, it will modify and re-adjust its educational programme so as to reflect the process of social evolution and progress.
5. Post-School Adjustability:
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Brown says that “the school has a direct responsibility of preparing the individual child for post-school adjustments.”
In words of John Dewye, “We send children to school to learn in a systematic way the occupations which constitute living.”
A child spends about a decade of the most impressionable period of his life in the school. And after completing his school education, he is generally to adjust himself with the society outside the school, to the best of his capability and capacity. If this adjustment is desirable and proper, the school has succeeded in its aims and objective.
If not, it has failed to discharge its responsibility. The success or failure of a school system is judged by the end product. An in-disciplined and frustrated adult is the bad product of education.
So one of the main functions of the school is to turn out of its portals such young men and women as may adjust themselves properly and usefully with their social groups and lead successful lives on professional, public and private levels.
6. Inculcation of Higher Value of Life:
Moral and religious education which was formerly imparted by the family and the church is now also the responsibility of the school. Joint family system is rapidly breaking and the church is losing its hold over the people. This gap is now to be filled by the school.
So long with the social, economic and democratic ideals, the school is also to develop moral sense of children so that they may distinguish between right and wrong, virtue and vice. School education must develop in the children a sense of true appreciation of truth, goodness and beauty.