"Education" means different things to different people. To some elementary and secondary school children, it can be an exciting intellectual experience; to those poorly motivated or presented with a dull and unimaginative curriculum, it can be a deadening ordeal; to college students education may be a means to acquiring the qualifications, for a job, a way of escaping lowly social class origin, or a time for experimenting with a variety of social and personal identities; to parents, education for their children may represent the realization of their own unfulfilled aspirations, to those who operate the schools—teachers, principals, and administrators—education means a job, a place where career aspirations may be worked out. This list of the meanings of education could be expanded indefinitely. However, it should be sufficient to illustrate the multiple meanings of education to people in various roles and subgroups in the society.
    What does education mean to the sociologist? How does he begin to structure and make sense out of this multifaceted phenomenon called education? Basically, sociologists regard education as a distinctively social phenomenon or "institution" which, like other social phenomena, is amenable to objective scientific analysis. A sociological perspective on education requires that one "step back" from that which he is examining, set aside his personal and cultural biases, and take a long, hard look at the phenomenon of education. This is not an easy task. At times it is made more difficult by the fact that teachers, administrators, and concerned segments of the public may expect immediate answers to the questions of policy and technique to emerge from the sociologist's research on education. Sociologists, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with building a body of verified knowledge about education and only secondarily with the problem of applying their findings and conclusions to the concerns of the educational practitioners. Though most research on education by sociologists has some policy implications, sociologists vary in the extent to which they spell out these implications in their work. Ultimately, the extent to which this is done is a matter of style and most sociologists have adopted a style in which policy recommendations are left implicit rather than one in which explicit programmatic statements and policy recommendations are made. The readers are then left to extract (if they care to) the implications of the research and ideas presented for questions of policy and action.  According to the author, education enables students to have all the following EXCEPT ______.