Social Foundations

Chapter 6

Culture, Socialization, and Education

- What cultural patterns influence instruction at schools?

- How does school culture socialize the young?
- How have television and other mass media affected students?
- Do sex roles and sex differences influence learning and achievement? If so, how?
- How do aspects of youth culture affect the schools?

A society ensures its unity and survival by means of culture. The term culture encompasses all the
continually changing patterns of acquired behavior and attitudes transmitted among the members of a
society. Culture is a way of thinking and behaving; it is a group’s traditions, memories, and written
records, its shared ideas, its accumulated beliefs, habits, and values. Habits of dress, diet, and daily
routines … all constitute cultural patterns and identities. Socialization, which prepares children to
function first as young people and then as adults transmits culture; and thereby allows society to
function satisfactorily.

Individuals and institutions play a part in socializing children and youth. The family is most important
for young children. The school serves as perhaps the major institution for maintaining and
perpetuating the culture. Schools uphold and pass on the society’s values, beliefs, and norms (rules
of behavior).

1. Agents of Socialization

- The Family
It is the first medium for transmitting culture to children. Its members teach a child what matters
in life, often without realizing the enormous influences they wield. The behaviors adults
encourage or discourage and the ways in which they provide discipline also affect the child’s
orientation toward the world.
Many children do well in school because their family environment has provided them with good
preparation for succeeding in the traditional classrooms.

Children in Poverty: Poverty is a major problem for many families. Poor children often face
educational difficulties.
Single-Parent Families: Many observers connect the substantial poverty rates among children
and youth with the high incidence of single-parent families. Much research has concentrated
on the specific effects of growing up in a home where the father is absent. Negative effects,
including a greater likelihood that families will fall into poverty and that children will suffer
serious emotional and academic problems. A large percentage of families that “lost” a father
also declined in social class, and this change in status makes it difficult to identify the separate
effects of each factor.
Increase in Working Mothers: The percentage of working mothers with children under age
eighteen has increased steadily since 1960. Several reasons account for this increase: family
financial pressures that require a second income, and changes in traditional cultural attitudes
dictating that mothers stay home.
Latchkey Children: The situation of latchkey children who return to unsupervised homes after
school is particularly problematic because many of these children spend much of their time
watching television or on the Internet. That is why in United States, schools created a kind of
after-school programs where children spend time there doing some recreational and learning
activities.
Pressures on the Children: Awareness of the growing importance of education in
contemporary society has stimulated many parents to overemphasize early learning. The
desire to raise so-called super babies appears particularly prevalent among middle-class
parents, from whom the “ABCs” of childhood frequently center on “Anxiety, Betterment, [and]
Competition.” To meet the demands of such parents, many preschool and primary classrooms
may focus so systematically on formal instruction that they harm children in a misplaced effort
to mass-produce “little Einstein.” Some developmental psychologists characterize such
parental pressure as a type of “mis-education” that creates hurried children and deprives
young people of childhood.
Overindulged Children: Whereas many children may be pressured to meet parental demands
for early learning, others are overindulged by parents who provide them with too many material
goods or protect them from challenges that would foster emotional growth. Many observers
believe that overindulgence is particularly among young middle-class parents: These
“cornucopia kids” may find it hard to endure frustration, and thus may present special problems
for their teachers and classmates.
Child Abuse and Neglect: Children from any social class may suffer abuse or neglect by their
parents or other household members. The victims tend to experience serious problems in
emotional, intellectual, and social development. Thus, these neglected and abused children
may not only have difficult time learning but may also behave in ways that interfere with other
students’ learning.
Assessment of Trends Related to the Family: Historically, according to many analysts, our
system of universal education drew support from the development of the nuclear family [two
parents living with their children]. The nuclear family has been described as highly child
centered, devoting many of its resources to preparing children for success in school and later
in life. With the decline of the nuclear family, the tasks confronting educators appear to have
grown more difficult.
By examining family trends in highly industrialized countries such as Sweden and the United
States, it appears that “post-nuclear” family emerged, which emphasizes “individualism”
(individual self-fulfillment, pleasure, self-expression, and spontaneity): Adults no longer need
children in their lives, at least not in economic terms. The problem is that children…still need
adults… many social scientists also worry about the “total contact time” between parents and
children.
The Peer Group

Whereas family relationships may constitute a child’s first experience of group life, peer-group
interactions soon begin to make their powerful socializing effects felt. The peer group affords young
people many significant learning experiences—how to interact with others, how to be accepted by
others, and how to achieve status in a circle of friends. Peers are equals in a way to parents and their
children or teachers and their students are not. Peers don’t have formal authority to make their friends
obey rules; thus children can learn the true meaning of exchange, cooperation, and equity more
easily in the peer setting.

Peer influence increases in adolescence, by which time they sometimes dictate much of a young
person’s behavior both in and out of school.

Peer Culture and the School: Educators are particularly concerned with the characteristics of student
culture within the school. Peer culture frequently works against academic goals at school. Coleman
and Goodlad (educators) found that [through their studies] that high-school students gained the
esteem of their peers by a combination of friendliness and popularity, athletic prowess, an attractive
appearance and personality, or possession of valued skills and objects (cars, clothes, records).
Scholastic success was not among the favored characteristics; in general, the peer culture hindered
rather than reinforced the school’s academic goals.

To foster peer relationships that support rather than impede learning, some educators recommend
conducting activities that encourage students to learn cooperatively.

Participation in Extracurricular Activities: Polls show that students consider their cooperation and
interaction with peers in extracurricular activities a highlight of their school experience.

Research suggests that participants—especially in athletics, service, leadership activities, and music
—fosters emotional and physical health as well as students’ aspirations to higher educational and
occupational attainment.

Research on Bullying and its Prevention: Bullies—youngsters who severely harass their peers either
inside or outside the school. Most schools have implemented policies to reduce bullying [sexual, the
use of computers, cell phones, cyber bullying…]. Factors cited as causing some children to behave
as bullies include neglect and abuse in their homes, the influence of television, and a lack of social
skills that lead to a cycle of aggressive behavior. The majority of bullies are male.

School Culture

Education in school is formal. Group membership is not voluntary but determined by age, aptitudes,
and frequently gender. Students are tested and evaluated; they are told when to sit, when to stand,
how to walk through hallways… The rituals of school assemblies, athletic events, school songs, and
cheers—all convey the school culture and socialize students.

Student Roles and the Hidden Curriculum: According to Volvodas, there are three major student
roles in the school: By examining teachers expectations, she found out that the student role is one in
which teachers expect students to be “patient, docile, passive, orderly, conforming, obedient and
acquiescent to rules and regulations, respectful to authority, easily controllable, and socially adept.”
The receptive learner role requires students to be motivated, task-oriented,…good achievers, and
as such, receptive to the institutional demands of the academic curriculum. The active learner role,
students go beyond the established academic curriculum both in terms of the content to be mastered
and in the processes of learning. Traits of the active learner include curiosity, active probing and
exploring, challenging authority.

However, Volvodas also found that students exemplifying the active learner role sometimes are
rejected by teachers. That is, many teachers respond negatively to active, independent, and assertive
children. The difference is large between the school’s academic curriculum which demands
successful mastery of cognitive material, and its hidden curriculum which demands institutional
conformity.

The hidden curriculum is what students learn, other than academic content, from what they do or
are expected to do in school. In addition to teaching children to passively conform in the classroom,
the hidden curriculum may be preparing economically disadvantaged students to be docile workers
later in life. It can communicate negative racial and sexual stereotypes through material included (or
omitted from) textbooks. Excessive emphasis on competition for grades may create a hidden
curriculum teaching students that “beating the system” is more important than anything else.

Classroom Culture:

Philip Jackson found a diversity of specific subjects but few different types of classroom activity. The
terms seatwork, group discussion, teacher demonstration, and question-and-answer period described
most of what happened in the classroom. Further, these activities were performed according to well-
defined rules such as “no loud talking during seatwork” and “raise your hand if you have a question.”
The teacher served as a “combination traffic cop, judge, supply sergeant, and timekeeper.”

The “rules of order” that characterize most elementary – school classrooms, Jackson concluded,
focus on preventing disturbances. Thus the prevailing socialization pattern in the culture of the school
and classroom places its greatest emphasis on the obedient “pupil” role.

Goodlad wrote, students “rarely planned or initiated anything, read or wrote anything of some length,
or created their own products. And they scarcely ever speculated on meanings.

Such systematic emphasis on passive learning by rote is in opposition to most contemporary ideas of
what education should accomplish.

Why do classrooms so often function in this way? Reasons they have offered include the following:

1. Institutional requirements to maintain order: Emphasis on passive learning; routines govern

interactions between students and teachers.

2. Student preference for passive learning: Some students resist active learning to minimize the risk
of exposing a mistake. These students hold back and persuade other students and teacher to help
them in their work.
3. Accommodations, bargain, and compromises between students and teachers: With institutional
requirements for order and students’ preference for passive learning, a compromise or deal arises
between the teacher and students whereby students are non-disruptive as long as the teacher
ignores the fact that they are not diligent in their class work.

4. Teachers’ allocation of attention: Many teachers feel compelled to give most of their time and
attention to a few students. In some cases, these will be the slowest students. In many other cases,
however, attention goes primarily to the brightest students, leaving those in between unattended.

5. Society’s requirement that students learn to conform: It is expected that children will adapt to the
teacher’s authority by becoming “good workers” and “model students” (socializing students to follow
appropriate routines and regulations). The transition from classroom to factory or office is made easily
by those who developed “good work habits” in their early years. This goal of schooling is part of the
“Hidden curriculum”.

6. Teacher overload: It is difficult for teachers to provide active, meaningful learning experiences
when they must cope with the demands of large classes and class loads, a variety of tasks and duties
outside their classrooms, pressures to “cover” a wide range of material and skills, and other
responsibilities.

Television and Digital Media

Some social scientists refer to television as the “first curriculum” because it appears to affect the way
children develop learning skills and orient themselves toward acquiring knowledge and
understanding. Because using television and other media require little effort and skill, educators face
big challenges in maintaining students’ interest and motivation in schoolwork. Clearly, many
educators are concerned that the use of television and other media may lower achievement for many
students.

Apart from their possibly negative effects on school achievement, television and other media, such as
movies, video games, and the music industry, deeply influence the socialization of children and youth.
The media both stimulate and reflect fundamental changes in attitudes and behaviors that prevail in
the society, from recreation and career choices to sexual relationships, consumerism and drug use.
Overall, however, according to a committee of behavioral scientists, “television violence is strongly
correlated with aggressive behavior as any other variable that has been measured.”

Social scientists also are becoming particularly concerned about media effects on the socialization of
girls. They stated that television, music, video games, music lyrics, magazines, movies…. all had
damaging effects on the girls’ self-image and healthy development.

It also is true, however, that television can be an important force for positive socialization. Example,
the program Sesame Street has helped middle-class and working-class youth academically, and that
children can become more cooperative. Cyberchase program can help elementary students improve
in mathematics.

The Net Generation in the Digital Age: They are the young people growing up in the emerging
digital age. Tapscott believes that the Internet is quite different from television—it stimulates
interactive participation rather than passive viewing. Tapscott predicts that the Internet will produce “
a generation which increasingly questions the implicit values contained in information…[and in so
doing forces children] to exercise not only their critical thinking but their judgment…and thus
contributes to the breakdown of the notion of authority.

Tapscott believes that the digital revolution’s primary effects will be liberating for individuals and
productive for society. However, like other analysts, he is concerned that digital media and learning
will increase the already troublesome gap between the haves and have-nots, that is, between middle-
class youth who have good access to new technologies and low-income youth who have relatively
poor access and thus may be further disadvantaged.

Gender Roles and Sex Differences

Not only does society demand conformity to its fundamental values and norms; it also assigns
specific roles to each of its members, expecting them to conform to certain established behavior
patterns. Socialization is particularly forceful regarding gender roles—ideas about the ways boys and
girls and men and women are “supposed” to act. Gender roles vary from culture to culture, but within
a given culture they are rather well defined, and children are socialized in them through an elaborate
schedule of selective reinforcement. For example, a preschool boy may be ridiculed for playing with
dolls. When children go to school, they discover that it is dominated by traditional norms of politeness,
cleanliness, and obedience. Teachers generally suppress aggressive behavior. This can be a
problem for boys because research indicates that boys are more aggressive than girls due to
hormone differences. Some reports, thus, state that discouraging aggressiveness helps account for
boys relatively high rates of alienation and violation of school rules.

By way of contrast, the problems that girls encounter in the educational system generally reflect their
socialization for dependence rather than assertiveness. Historically, most girls were not encouraged
to prepare for high-status fields such as law or medicine. Instead, they were prepared for roles as
wives and homemakers.

Although socialization in the elementary school frequently intends to make boys obedient and
cooperative; in high, however, school the emphasis placed on athletics means that boys have often
received more opportunities than girls have to learn leadership and competitive skills useful in later
life.

Sex Differences in Achievement and Ability

Recent studies indicate that sex differences in achievement are relatively small. However, those who
believe that ability differences between the sexes are present at birth point to differences in the brain
functioning of boys and girls. For most people, the left hemisphere of the brain specializes in verbal
tasks, whereas the right hemisphere specializes in nonverbal ones, including spatial functions
important in mathematics. In this respect, brain research suggests some differences associated with
sex hormones that begin to function at birth or even earlier. Among the right-handed people (the
majority), women handle spatial functions more with the left hemisphere than do men. Women also
use the right hemisphere more in verbal functions. However, many observers argue that the
possibility that relatively poor performance of certain women in math stems from socialization
practices that make them anxious and fearful about mathematical analysis.

Educational and Occupational Attainment of Women

Women now constitute nearly 60 percent of college enrollment. Related gains have also been
registered in the occupational status of women. Now schools and the wider society are seeing the
effects of efforts to eliminate sexism from school curricula, encouraging girls to attend college and
prepare for the profession, support for girls and women to enter scientific fields and computing, and
other actions to equalize opportunity.

Adolescents and Youth Problems

In modern technological societies the young are forced to postpone their adulthood for a period of
time called adolescence or youth. A major reason is that modern society no longer has an economic
need for young people in this age group. One unfortunate result is that youth have become more and
more isolated from the rest of society.

 Drugs and Drinking: General use of drugs and alcohol among youth has growth markedly
over the past half-century. Many high-school students are regular users of alcohol and/or
drugs. Educators worry that this may reinforce or stimulate alienation from social institutions or
otherwise impede the transition to adulthood.

 Suicide: Reasons for the increase in suicide rates appear to include a decline in religious
values that inhibit suicide, influence of the mass media, perceived pressures to excel in school.

 Teenage Pregnancy: Teenage pregnancy has fallen substantially partly because of the
availability of contraceptives and abortion.

 Delinquency and Violence: Juvenile delinquency has increased in recent decades, paralleled
by related increases in single-parent families, peer culture influence, drug and alcohol use, and
the growth of low-income neighborhood around the cities.

 Effects on Schools: As you have seen, young people do not simply leave larger cultural
patterns behind when they enter the schoolhouse door. In response to youth problems in
general, schools now employ many more counselors, and social workers. Further, thousands
of schools are implementing programs to improve school-wide discipline, and teach students
conflict resolution skills.