once upon a time in a sleepy town of Marxville, there lived a curious little boy named Billy.

Marxville USA

Billy was just finishing up his final year at Marxville elementary school. That means that he now gets to complete the huge fifth grade project that all the older kids get the privilege of doing! In honor of the town name, kids are asked to create their own Sociological research project!

Although Billy was excited to finally get to do this important school project, he had no idea where to start or even what to do! what even was sociology? Why is it important? Besides Carl Marx, who are some other important people in this field? 

Where do I even start?......

Confused, Billy goes to ask his teacher the next day, various questions that will help him get started.

The project asks us to create a sociological question based off of what we see in our everyday society. How could I approach that??

Well Billy, remember from what I taught in class about sociology, at its simplest form, scientists study how people behave and interact with one another. The purpose of this project is for you to make an experiment where you observe people in our society and see how they behave.

An example of what I mean by society could be our entire town of marxville, or something smaller like our school, or even just our classroom! whatever grouping of people you can observe, go for it!

What you might not have noticed, but sociology has been around for much longer than you think. Its importance has grown over decades when it was a first studied science in the early 1800's to study human behavior and interactions between social classes. like the relationships between the rich and poor, And about stuff people experience during that time as well like various different hardships.

And with the divides between the groups of people and the hardships that they faced as well, scientists tried coming up with reasons that could explain why someone may act the way the do in their society!

Yes! He created something called the conflict theory right?

Now you know who we named this town after? Karl Marx?

Yes! Karl Marx came up with one of the three sociological perspectives that explains human interaction. We use these three perspectives to think more with our sociological imagination, which just means that we think outside of ourselves and try to view things from other people's point of view!

For example, Marx's theory explains that our society and its people inside are constantly in a state of conflict with one another over things like resources, that make things like government power necessary in order to maintain balance.

Another theory is from a man named Emile Durkheim, who created the structural functionalism theory. He believed that we make individual groups that help to join everyone together as a whole. For example, we have school to prepare children for the future so that our society as a whole are better off for survival.