Children, Sanctions And Rewards

The process of mutual steering may indicate to the learner how he is to behave, but what has still not really been explained is why he behaves as is desired. In any teaching situation, whether formal, as in a school, or informal, as in a family or small group, the sanctions used by the teacher or parent are crucial to the whole process since it is because of them that he can make his definition of the role stick. The term sanction is being used here in a non-emotional sense to cover all measures used to ensure that an individual behaves as is desired. Sanctions may be positive in the form of rewards or negative in the form of punishments. They may take a physical form, e.g. corporal punishment, or be material, e.g., prizes or fines, or immaterial, e.g. the giving or withholding of love. The system of sanctions that a teacher or parent selects from the wide battery available depends very much upon his own background, and the age and the sex of the child that is being socialized. Evidence seems to show that corporal punishment is more frequently used by working-class parents with young children, whilst middle-class parents in their turn more often use the threat that they will with-draw love. In all social classes girls are treated somewhat differently from boys, but their fathers are more indulgent of them than their mothers. In somewhat stark contrast to these tendencies, prefects in independent schools for upper middle-class boys apparently still use corporal punishment more frequently as a sanction than their equivalents do in state schools for boys of the same age.

The need to use sanctions to make a role stick has raised the question that has already been hinted at, namely the nature of the relationship between the teacher and the learner. Very often, particularly in the case of young children, the system of values held by the parent or the primary school teacher is absolutely unquestioned by the child. There is in effect a common system of values. The child wants to behave as the parent wishes him to do or to learn what the teacher has in mind for him. The sanctions, whether in the form of rewards or punishments, that the parent or teacher uses are seen as such by the child. The goals implicit in the behavior are jointly held and the authority of the adult is accepted.

Suppose this were not the case. Immediately, important questions of control are raised. Where there is no consensus on values, then some form of power must be used to make the child do as is expected of him. A middle-class child will accept the threat 'Mummy won't love you any more if you do that again' as a sanction because he values his mother, but a teacher may have to deal with children who do not either want to behave as he feels right or hold the same values as he does. In such a case, where immediate obedience is required, coercion or the use of power or at least the threat of it will often be used. Thus, parents deprive their children of pocket-money or physically force them to do what they want and teachers use systems of detention or in some cases, even where supposedly this action is not permitted, such physical punishment as blows with a ruler to force children to do what the teachers value highly.

In these latter cases the situation is one of conflict as opposed to those described beforehand where there was agreement. Recently there has been much more emphasis put in sociological writing on explaining situations in terms of conflict, since, especially perhaps in the field of the sociology of education, there has been a tendency to assume consensus. For this reason, the model of mutual steering that has been outlined here as a way of analyzing the process of socialization at an interpersonal level, has been developed in such a way that it may be used to examine situations that have the characteristic either of conflict or of consensus. This is apt, since situations of both types exist in whatever socialization takes place, whether in childhood or amongst adults.

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