As all other human infants, you were not born with the ability on the knowledge necessary to participate in any human activities in your society. You were utterly helpless, unable to feed, clothe and protect yourself. Neither could you neither walk nor communicate meaningfully with those around you. You had not conception of your own body as something distinct from other objects and you had no idea of your own self.
Yet as we all know or are aware of, if a human infant has congenital abnormalities and diseases occur after birth, he will inevitably develop abilities and slowly join in its own society. That is to say, that a human infant is endowed with the biological potentiality to
Gradually change from his helpless baby form to a recognizable human form with own musculature, bone structure facial traits and many other distinct body characteristics and developments. It is true in another sense that a human infant is predisposed towards social living and definite 36 relationships and towards the social acquisition of knowledge, skills aptitudes, behaviors, attitudes and so on.
But our biological endowment can barely enable us to begin forming relationships with other humans or to ourselves in and function within our own society or social group.
For example, can the fact that you are tall, short, muscular, or bony enable you to know how to behave when meeting your elders, before the law, in a social gathering, or how you should treat and relate to others? Can it enable you to be responsible as a parent, husband, wife, a civil servant or a company employee, a school teacher a doctor, or a politician? Can it enable you to adapt proper ethics, and help you decide whether you should smoke, drink, take drugs, hurt others, damage property, lie, steal, embezzle money, and so on. Or whether you would like be honest, kind, courteous, patient, hard working? Can influence you into becoming an atheist or otherwise?
The general to all these questions and others like them is that our biological inheritances, such as our physical traits, are not capable of influencing the development of non- physical traits, or social characteristics. Therefore, as we grow physically mature, there must be something else to help us acquire the social characteristics of human being. That is to say, that our physical maturity must be accompanied by a process of social learning if we are to develop as acceptable members of our society. We must be taught; we must learn, internalize and finally practice what is taken to be our society’s ways of life. Another important factor: newly born –child is quite unaware of his society’s way of life though he is predisposed towards social learning.
This fact that a human infant is completely naive regardless of its society’s ways of life is what underlies the process of socialization and the need for every society in the world to evolve its own specific methods of teaching its neonates its social ways.
Wilfykil answered the question on March 2, 2019 at 08:37