I am a sociology major. Granted, this does give me a level of bias when it comes to this field, but something that comes up in every one of my classes when discussing social issues is the question of “What do we do about it?” The easiest answer anyone can typically offer is to educate people on the issue and hope that justice is the end result. But how do we begin by educating people? Since it is not required by a lot of colleges to take a sociology course, or 12, I thought I would give a list of reasons as to why everyone should voluntarily decide to take classes and/or broaden their knowledge about this field.
- Empathy
- Something you learn quite a bit about in sociology is the struggles that all different kinds of people go through. It gives one a sense of understanding for their fellow human
- It opens your mind
- Too many of us come from areas in which we are only exposed to one type of culture. What sociology does is exposes a lot of the different kinds of cultures that people may have
- It will probably match your political ideologies
- One of the great things about sociology is that people that study individuals and structural institutions tend to look at things from a lot of different political perspective. People tend to think that we are all just radicals trying to over throw the government, and that’s not true.
- It’s incredibly interesting
- OK, I know. That is my opinion and not everyone is going to share it. But you have to admit that how people work and why we do the things that we do is at least a little bit fascinating.
- It affects you.
- A lot of the things that we learn in sociology is how people in society are treated unfairly. There is always some aspect to this research that will relate to your personal life in some way. Learning about how sociology affects you might give you the education you need in order to begin to change things.
Social change can only happen if everyone knows what the problems are. I strongly encourage everyone to try to learn more about sociology.
