The Interpersonal Children Perspective

Behavioral expectations or, in the language of the sociologist, roles may be laid out in an interlocking pattern which can be conceptualized as the social structure, but how are they actually learnt? Learning has been seen very much as a part of the province of the psychologist. What has the sociologist to say about learning that is of help to the teacher In beginning to answer these questions must be switched from looking at social structure to an examination of the manner in which people interact at a face-to-face or interpersonal level. Once something has been understood of the way in which learning takes place in a model situation where two people interact, then the possibility exists of extending this process to socialization in all parts of the social structure and at all stages of the life cycle. Basically, what has to be explained is how an individual indicates to another his definition of what social reality is in such a way that the other learns this version and makes it his own.

One useful model for examining the way in which socialization takes place at the interpersonal level is to use the idea of 'feed-back'. This concept may be applied to the way in which two persons steer each other as they interact with one another. Let us take as an example a teacher in a primary school. She has expectations of herself in her role as teacher and of the behavior of the children aged, say, seven in her class. Her pupils likewise have expectations of their teacher and are willing to imitate or to obey her in order to learn what they take to be socially acceptable behavior. They may be willing, and this is important, either because they value their teacher or because they see her as powerful enough to insist that they do as she wishes. In either case they interpret the cues that the teacher feeds back to them consequent upon any action that she observes or knows them to have made. The teacher signals to them by a nod or a smile that to throw papers into the waste paper basket is valued behavior; it meets the value of tidiness which she wishes to teach to her pupils. But she may also indicate to them by a from or by words of disapproval that to throw paper darts even into the waste paper basket is not acceptable; it contradicts the value of orderliness upon which she puts great emphasis and which she hopes will become a valued part of the social reality that she will recreate in her pupils.

A point worth noting is that the range of behavior tolerated in any role is usually quite wide. There are strict and less strict, tidy and less tidy teachers. Because of this each individual has some chance to make, rather than just to take, his own role. When one remembers the very large number of positions that anyone person has to fill at any point in his life - for example, son, customer, holiday-maker, adolescent and so on - it is clear that there is considerable room for individuality in the way in which interpretations of each role are combined. Social devices do, however, exist to restrict the range of tolerated behavior in certain positions. Thus, many schools insist that their pupils wear uniforms that ensure that they are highly visible and cannot, therefore, easily deviate from the behavior desired by the school authorities.

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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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Socialization Between Children And Family

The socialization of the young has a more direct relevance to education.

Although any group must initiate its recruits, the family socialize its young in a different way because of its peculiar structure. This ensures that there is a difference in age between the older members - the parents, and the new recruits - the children. Thus, particularly where the children are young, the parents can exert great power over them.

Family provides not only physical care, but also teaches to the children the parents' interpretation of social reality around them, and it is within the family that the child's personality is developed in the early and the formative years.

The family is not a necessary social institution from the biological point of view, since reproduction of the species does not demand such an organization. But within the limits set by hereditary potentiality the personality is formed, and in most contemporary societies this development takes place best through the socialization of the young within a small group such as the family.

The child learns the patterns of behavior needed to exist in his environment. The young learn not just how to subsist but how to exist socially. Boys learn what to wear and how to treat other boys and girls. They learn what behavior to expect from other children of the same and the other sex. They notice how their parents behave, often internalizing these patterns through their play, as, for example, when children dress up to play at weddings.

It is important to note the complementary nature of any role, since it includes both the expected behavior of that role and also the behavior expected in others towards that role. Furthermore, to be fully competent in their social existence, children must ultimately learn the relevance of third parties to themselves and to the others with whom they interact. It only by knowing each other's roles that we can.cooperate with one another. Children may play at roles like actors in the theatre, but ultimately they become these roles. The girl playing at mother takes on the characteristics of personality associated with women in that society; the personality expected in an American woman is different from that expected in an English woman. In their earliest years children are egocentric, but as they grow older they gradually achieve the capacity to put themselves in the positions of others.

This process takes place mainly within the family. For example, the child comes to know that his mother may be too busy to attend to his immediate needs. In sociological terms he has begun to appreciate that roles are complementary. The child learns that age governs behavior as he watches his mother and father. He comes to have a wider view of adult roles as he makes visits with his parents and observes other adults. He also learns from his parents and other adults the many occupational and leisure roles that are current in his environment. As the child grows older the process becomes more complex.

The older child or adolescent comes into contact at school or at work with values that may be very different from those held within his own family. His parents, as members of an older generation, may not change their values as quickly as the younger generation. There can, therefore, be discontinuities between the values of the family and its young. This becomes more possible after the adolescent has left school, as he meets an even wider range of values. The young worker can have encountered three different and conflicting codes of honesty, that of the home, of the school and of the factory. Thus it is that the process of socialization often ends in conflict and sometimes in rebellion by the adolescent.

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Socializing The Children

The nuclear family can teach a child when to shake hands or how to eat a meal, but it cannot easily teach the child how to read or to do complicated mathematics, particularly if both parents go out to earn a living. Two problems are at once raised. At what age should education outside the family begin and what alternatives should be available both at the start and later?

These are administrative decisions and here the important point is that, by the age of five or six when children in most European countries start at school, the family has already done a great deal of an educational nature. Much of the culture has by this age been transmitted. Also, during the next few years when the majority of children are very malleable the school works alongside the family which still has a very potent influence. There is the possibility of a partnership of or a clash between the two institutions that are socializing the child.

The danger of conflict is probably lessened by the fact that the school tends to stress the instrumental learning needed for future life in a complex industrial community, whilst the family on the whole stresses the expressive development of the personality and the emotions. A nuclear family is of one social class and mainly meets members of the same or almost the same social class. In industry, however, a manager or a workman must meet all social classes and know how he is expected to behave in each different social situation.

The school can provide experience of a wider range of adult roles in a less emotional frame of reference than the family. This opening of the world to the child is one important function of the school that is often forgotten by teachers in their stress on sheer knowledge and on the inculcation of moral virtues. Yet though the family cannot do everything and may clash with the school it does much more than teachers are sometimes prepared to admit.

Children come to learn what is expected of them and of others. 'You're a big boy now, you mustn't cry.' 'You don't do that to smaller children, do you?' They begin to learn how their family views adults of other social classes that impinge on them; the middle-class child who imitates his mother's telephone voice when she orders from the local grocer has begun to learn something of the social class system. Vocational aspirations may be mainly of an unrealistic type in very young children. 'I want to be a fireman.'

But, when the child is older, the family has been found to have a very strong influence on occupational choice, and often this power is exercised without the more precise knowledge that the school could give. Sex roles are learnt, as are views on modesty, the latter often in the process of toilet training. Nursery rhymes are the songs, first at home and then in early schooling, begin to stress the moral virtues .

The family teaches the child a great deal, both consciously and unconsciously, during the first few years. Later the school takes over part of the task, but few teachers come to influence a child as deeply as his parents do. This deep influence does not only extend to the transmission of the outward signs of the culture. It has already been pointed out that the child tends to become the roles that he plays. The connection between the family and personality therefore requires attention.

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Personality Of The Children

There are inherited determinants of personality which put limits on the molding that society can do. These, if anything, form the core of individuality in a person. But how is it that individuals show their singularity against a basic personality that is common to their own culture and different from other cultures?

Anthropologists have reported some of the most significant cases of such differences. Each sex had the personality characteristics that one would associate with the tasks allocated to it. In the neighboring tribe the pattern of tasks and of personalities was more akin to that in our own culture. As in these two cases, each society ensures that its members have a substantial degree of conformity in this respect, so that individual personalities fall within the permitted range. In this process the link between the community and the personality is the family.

There is a basic psychological need for the child to attach himself to others, especially to adults. The nature of such attachments is very general. The child loves its mother, not any of her specific acts. The loved adult becomes a model that the child will imitate. He will attempt to imitate all the different roles that the adult plays. These roles are structured differently in each individual, and the emphases put on different parts of the role structure are different from those in other individuals. The child internalize these systems of roles to lay the foundation of his own personality. Personalities come to differ because of varying inherited potentialities and because the experiences that are met, even in early life, are not common to all members of society. But the traits of personality that are common to anyone country can be understood to have their beginnings within the family.

There exist very few technically sound empirical studies by sociologists of the ways in which children in early childhood learn. This is probably because of the great difficulties of employing the usual sociological methods with subjects of this age. However, recently the results of research done in an underprivileged area of Sydney have supported the aptness of applying the model of mutual steering to the socialization of very young children. Mothers and their children aged three to five, some of whom were at nursery school, completed a number of tests to discover whether the children learnt certain values that their mothers held. The mothers were found to hold an integrated cluster of values that emphasized self-reliance, cooperation and compliance, as did the nursery school teachers concerned.

The children also held these same values in a similarly integrated way, but where their mothers held these values more strongly, and where the child went to nursery school, the values were held more firmly. In addition, the more accepting of her child the mother was, the more fully did the child appear to learn the appropriate values. It seemed also that the children developed a personality paralleling this cluster of values that they had learnt by conforming to the expectations of the valued others with whom they interacted. Here the personality of the pre-school child was being formed through a process of mutual steering.

Although the development of personality is a process that continues throughout life, the foundations are laid before the child goes to school. By the age of five or six the child has begun to learn within the family how to cope with the many tensions and frustrations that are inescapable in life with others; how, for example, to control his anger or how to postpone his immediate desires.

After the child goes to school, his teacher may become the model that is imitated and hence a potent influence upon the development of the child personality. In this respect teachers and the school once again can reinforce or conflict with the foundations laid in the family. Under modem conditions, however, there is one particular way in which the educational system can be of great assistance in the development of personality.

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Children On The Way To Youth

It is only recently that much research has been done that is relevant to the latent role of social class in peer groups. For the working class in particular, youth sub-cultures provide chances to break the weak links in the socialization process in the family or the schools and, therefore, to create discontinuities in the transmission of culture to the next generation.

Within the constraints of time and money working-class boys strive during their brief adolescence to fulfill their longing to be the daring, tough and fun-loving men that they see as the ideal for males. Within the space, by convention still somewhat more restricted, available to them girls try to create a style that will win them their man and found a secure family of procreation.

Ironically, the attempt to create discontinuity often does little more than overemphasize characteristics of the culture of the older generation and, even if a small measure of discontinuity is achieved, this is a temporary situation that works to ease later movement of the younger generation into its inevitable position as the next parental generation.

By the stage of adolescence it may well be that the social class of aspiration rather than that of origin largely influences behavior. The adolescence group can be divided into three sub-groups: the 'middle class', the 'working class' and the 'rebels'. Each group had very different attitudes, learnt at home and at school, which governed their response to their environment and particularly the sort of life to which they aspired. Members of each category seemed to have a different style of leisure activity. Those with middle-class aspirations had a best friend who more often lived outside and expected to marry later than those in the other two categories. The 'rebels' had low occupational aspirations, related more closely to the local area, and were more approving than the other adolescents of fighting. Some young people, however, may not be deeply involved in any of these local sub-cultures and they are more likely to opt for official youth clubs or for some aspects of the commercially provided national teenage culture.

Middle-class youth sub-cultures seem more diffuse and individualistic and, hence, less centered in well-articulated groups. Many hobbies, particularly those attractive to middle-class youth, are of a type that can be practiced alone or with close friends rather than in peer groups. When middle-class youths do join groups they are more likely to become members of such approved groups as Scouts or Guides.

Just as much expected behavior may differ by social class, so may misbehavior, and the very different social situations of the social classes do seem to result in differing types of deviance. Stealing and pilfering are quite usual activities in a working-class area, though adolescents are fully aware that this behavior is seen to be wrong by those with authority. The deviant behavior of middle-class adolescents is more often associated with the two characteristic differences in their structural position, namely their greater wealth - for example drug taking; and their lengthier exposure to the educational system - for example 'dropping out'. Similar arguments can be used to explain the fact that most politically radical students have been middle-class. In all these cases, whether amongst the working or middle class, such deviance is seen by agents of respectability as part of the current crisis in authority and, since youth is seen in this respect as the source of possible social breakdown, repression is often felt necessary.

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Fascist Taxpayers Neglecting Our Children

Apparently Florida is going to start drug testing welfare recipients. And someone on Facebook actually stated that he thinks they should take it a step further and test for alcohol and nicotine and cell phones because drugs, alcohol, nicotine, and phones are "social items" that HE as a tax payer shouldn't support if those welfare recipients can't pay for the roofs over their heads and the food in their mouths, etc.

I am SO SICK OF FASCIST TAXPAYERS. To all you fascists: why don't you think of the CHILDREN of the welfare recipients? What happens when a welfare mom gets drug tested and comes up hot for drugs? Are you going to rip the child out of the home and put them in the overcrowded foster care system, thus spending MORE taxpayer dollars for THAT? Or are you going to just not give that mom assistance and let her children starve and live on the street? It's ONE OR THE OTHER, SO MAKE UP YOUR MIND. THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

You fascist taxpayers do not know many welfare recipients apparently or you wouldn't be fascist. I AM a recipient of your tax paying dollars. MANY single moms are and often it is because our TAXPAYING MEN have abandoned us and left US with the CHILDREN. And I don't smoke the pot but if I DID I would be getting it FOR FREE from a TAXPAYER because I can't afford such "social items." So don't worry, FASCIST TAXPAYERS: IF I BECOME A DRUG ADDICT I WILL MAKE SURE TO TAKE YOUR DRUGS RATHER THAN PAY FOR THEM WITH YOUR MONEY THAT GETS FILTERED TO ME THROUGH THE HUD AND FOODSTAMPS I RECEIVE.

There are so, so many beautiful, thoughtful, loving, intelligent, empathetic, wise people that have come from welfare homes, and yes: even welfare homes in which the parents abused drugs and/or alcohol, and still they are of admirable, heroic character. Children that have been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused are some of the most successful people in the world.

Another thing about the drug testing: the Facebook post mentioned that ALL other professions are drug tested so why shouldn't the welfare recipients?

Teachers are not drug tested. I know of a kindergarten teacher who sniffs coke on a regular basis. There is an elementary gym teacher that is a crackhead. I know a few teachers that smoke pot.

I know a lawyer who gets drugs from his welfare clients.

There are MANY, MANY professions out there that do not require drug tests and I don't know who YOU FASCIST TAXPAYERS hang out with, but the people I know that DO smoke the occasional blunt or whatever, and are coming up for a job that tests, those people most certainly find their way around that test whether it be to flush their system, to quit for a minute, or to use someone else's pee. Welfare recipients will do the SAME thing. So Florida and other states that follow suit, will be wasting precious taxpaying dollars on drug tests that will not be effective anyway, when they COULD be spending that money building beautiful playgrounds in our most poverty stricken ghettos....or creating after-school programs that our multi-faceted welfare children will feel comfortable and safe and loved in.

We could spend some of those tax dollars on our farmers too: the worst-paid, most important people in our society.

We could do a lot of things for the CHILDREN with our taxpaying dollars. Making sure that only the rich kid's parents do the drugs and consume massive amounts of alcohol in front of THEIR kids is, to me, just absurd. The many, many children of middle and upper class families I guess, are just going to be shoved under the rug and left to their own devices. Because THEIR parents pay taxes.

To the empathetic taxpayers, thank you. To the fascist taxpayers, go live in a nation that suits your ideals and leave those of us that are trying to be a compassionate nation alone.

Yours truly, a welfare mom who is six credits away from her master's degree and who was raised in a welfare home with three brothers, all of whom are very successful, educated professionals with generous hearts and exceptional minds!

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Children International GCE Examination

Releasing of GCE O Level Results (2010 batch

Image by seektan via Flickr

The GCE examinations are aimed at only the top 20 per cent of the ability range. But they also remain elitist in a far more profound sense. They embody in microcosm a political structure with fundamentally hierarchical, non-participatory and alienating tendencies. Organized by universities and subject associations and administered via the university boards, knowledge becomes congealed into discrete packets of subject matter which constitute a form of transmittable property.

Teachers who pass on the certificated knowledge derive authority from it. Pupils who receive it become differentiated from others, as owners, and are given access to further rewards in consequence. Via the examination structure pupils and teachers are socialized into notions of competition and failure, of hierarchy and bureaucracy, of knowledge as a possession which differentiates, stratify and excludes.

Examination credentials help to make hard visible distinctions, they help to transform advantages which lead into inequalities which appear intellectual.
GCE A-levels are now the major university selector, and the syllabus tends to represent the maximum pre-university teaching that cannot be crammed in, particularly in the sciences and older disciplines. The pressure of selection imposes excessive specialization on pupils.

The narrowness of the examinations is such that half of the candidates who sit A-level fail, and in any case only one-third who take A-level will go on to a university or polytechnic degree course. Nevertheless, any proposals to broaden the sixth-form course, as to provide more subjects studied to a lower standard have brought the threat of university demands for more four-year courses to keep up degree standards.

The examination boards are therefore kept firmly under university control. Their overriding preoccupation with a particular view of standards and secrecy must inevitably restrict the involvement of teachers, the range and choice which can be offered in the syllabi, and the kinds of skills that can be tested. Teachers on the boards and panels tend to be older and from selective schools, or from upper forms and selective streams; and as many as one-third of the markers are not practicing teachers.

Choice can only be introduced into the papers at the cost of variability of standards. And innovation is slow because of the difficulties of signaling changes to the schools: teachers tend to use old examination papers as teaching devices, and to adopt textbooks geared to the examinations; The boards are not kept on their determination by competition: they borrow syllabi, and have largely regional catchments; and following criticism they brought their timetables into line, a move which prevented schools from entering candidates for more than one board examination and thus from direct and invidious comparisons of standards.

In any case switching boards or entering for several boards in different subjects is more expensive in cash, books and teachers and pupils time.
The boards offered teachers the option of a more participatory relationship in course construction and assessment where teachers who wished to do so might devise their own syllabi and assess their students work, with external moderation by the boards. However, the boards were strict about what they would accept. And more significantly, teachers proved reluctant to take up the offer.

Ironically, in spite of the rigidity imposed by concern to keep up standards, there was no adequate continuous cross-monitoring between the boards. Syllabi and patterns of assessment varied between subjects, between different parts of the same paper, between boards, and over the years, in ways which made continuity and comparison of standards virtually impossible to maintain or check. Evidence published recently by the boards in defense of the comparison of their certificates is by no means reassuring. Nor do examinations predict performance in other, unrelated subjects or in jobs in other fields, although this is the purpose they are often made to serve.

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