Interpersonal Relations and Education

David H. Hargreaves

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415300018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351857758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia dell'educazione

Originally published in 1972, this title provides an analysis of social interactions in educational contexts and opens up the field of the social psychology of education as an area in its own right at the very heart of the process of education.

From a 'symbolic interactionist' perspective, the author develops a framework for the study of relations between teachers and pupils, discussing the basic ways of analysing social interaction, including the concepts of perception and role. He examines the distinctive perspectives of teachers and pupils on their relationships, bringing together into a coherent framework the insights of such writers as John Holt and Carl Rogers, and within this context he explores the notion of 'voluntary schooling'. The book also deals with other important aspects of education such as discipline, classroom group dynamics and the relations between headteachers and their staff.

The theories put forward by the author are firmly grounded in the daily experience of teachers and pupils in the classroom at the time. The book was expected to be of value to experienced teachers and student teachers alike, as well as to teachers of the social sciences in general.

1 Introduction

This book is about education and about social psychology. It is written because I am a social psychologist with a profound interest in education. Each of these two areas can shed considerable light on the other. Quite intentionally I have not called this book a ‘social psychology of education’ because I have tried to avoid one of the main faults of books on the human sciences applied to education. The books entitled ‘the psychology of education’ or ‘the sociology of education’ or ‘the philosophy of education’ are often unattractive to their readers because they seem to be loaded with technical language or jargon. Such books aim, often within a relatively short space, to give the reader some insight into how a psychologist, sociologist or philosopher approaches and analyses educational issues and problems. In so doing, the expert has to use some of the basic concepts in his discipline. These terms and concepts have a much wider meaning and significance for the expert. The technical language in which the concepts are couched are devised, not to be obscure or esoteric or pseudo-scientific, but in order to use words with a more specific meaning than is given in everyday language and in order to bring together under the umbrella of one concept a very wide range of phenomena. When such terms are used in a treatise applied to education, the attention is focused on educational phenomena. The reader, who is often quite unfamiliar with the parent discipline, cannot always see the need for the concept since he is unaware that the concept can be usefully applied to a wide range of phenomena that are irrelevant to or quite distinct from educational phenomena. Thus to him the book seems to be unnecessarily and heavily loaded with jargon. In a real sense he is right, for the book has obviously failed to make the wider value of the concept clear. His charge that such books merely state the obvious in a complex way is not without foundation. A second, but associated danger of writing books such as these is that eventually the reader goes away with relatively little understanding of the discipline and its major concepts, yet also without his understanding of educational phenomena having been increased. He may, for examination purposes if he is a student, remember some of the most important names and concepts for a short period, but the general approach is forgotten with the factual knowledge. The reader has learned nothing of the psychological, sociological or philosophical perspective.

In this book I have tried to avoid both these dangers, though the reader alone can judge with what success. I have taken the view that the reader will have to learn quite a lot of social psychology before he can understand and then evaluate what a social psychologist can say about education. For this reason the book is rather longer and more daunting than I had originally hoped. The book deals with many traditional problems examined from the perspective of social psychology, a discipline that has not been popularly or extensively applied to education. Such an examination does, I believe, shed light on the old problems as well as throwing up new problems, or at least problems which are not adequately acknowledged, formulated and discussed. This is perhaps the most important task of the application of the human sciences to education—at least from the point of view of the educationist. If it fails in this task, it fails indeed, and the human scientists should keep their musings about education strictly among themselves. In view of this, large sections of the book are devoted to an exposition of some basic social psychological assumptions, perspectives and concepts, to empirical research and to theoretical formulations. Inevitably the book is selective in that some major areas of social psychology have been excluded as have even larger areas of the field that we call education.

Broadly speaking, social psychology is the study of interpersonal relations and small group behaviour. The boundaries of the discipline, which lies between the two giants of the human sciences, sociology and psychology, are fortunately very blurred. The two giants have often left that area lying uncomfortably between them relatively unexplored with respect to education, though in recent years there has been a growing recognition of its importance, indicated by the increasing willingness of psychologists and sociologists to spread their nets in this direction. The importance of the area rests on the fact that one of the most central features of education is its social quality. Education occurs within the relationships of teachers and pupils, pupils and pupils, teachers and teachers. It takes place within groups, both formal like the classroom and informal like the friendship group. Psychology deals with intrapersonal dynamics and structures; sociology with institutions and organizations. Social psychology deals with the exciting area of human behaviour, the structure and dynamics of relationships between people, or interpersonal relations. But to treat the interpersonal aspects of educational processes and events, we need a broader understanding of the interpersonal in general. It is for this reason that so much of the book, especially in the early chapters, is concerned with social psychology rather than with specific educational problems.

Broadly speaking, the approach taken in this book is that which is usually referred to as ‘symbolic interactionist’ and thus the two dominant concepts that pervade most of the chapters are interaction and social influence. Since interaction and social influence are self-evidently important aspects of relationships between people in education contexts, it is easy to see what led me to write this book. It is difficult to say whether I am attracted to these concepts because they seem relevant to the analysis of interpersonal relations in education or whether I am interested in education because I am fascinated by these two concepts. Of more relevance to the reader is the fact that a social psychological approach to education could be made on the basis of different concepts. Peter Kelvin's The Bases of Social Behaviour, an excellent introduction to social psychology, uses order and value as its central concepts. If one were to use these for a social psychological analysis of education, the selection of educational phenomena and the interpretation and analysis of them would probably be rather different.

I must also confess to the reader that with some notable exceptions I find many textbooks, both on the social sciences and on the applications of social science to education, exceedingly tedious. Like all writers I have tried to avoid boring or confusing the reader. In places I have tried to introduce ideas or illustrations that are intrinsically of interest rather than simply relevant to the point under discussion. I have also tried, quite intentionally, to be provocative. I have made little effort to be ‘objective’ or ‘coolly detached’; it is difficult to be either with respect to the passionate subjects of human relations and education. Nor have I heeded the academic warnings against being prescriptive. I have always found the dichotomy between objective analysis or description and prescription rather false. As Lionel Trilling's incisive comments on the Kinsey Report show, it is when one tries hardest to be non-evaluative and non-prescriptive that one's concealed assumptions and prescriptions become most dangerous. Also, in order to avoid boring the reader and making the book too unwieldy, I have not always given detailed references to the relevant social psychological theory or research, nor have I always added to my summaries or statements about social psychological work those qualifications that are strictly in order. Whilst I have not sought to mislead, I have assumed that the interested reader will follow up the social psychological aspects by referring to the many competent textbooks in the field.

It is also important for me to advise the reader that this book is not about personal relationships in the sense of encounters between persons. The main focus of the book is on interpersonal relations, as the title suggests. This distinction is a difficult but necessary one, largely because these aspects of human behaviour represent somewhat different theoretical and empirical approaches. Both approaches are necessary in education, but they are not easily combined in one book. In learning about interpersonal relations the reader will soon enough realize how much needs to be done in the area of personal relationships in education.

It would have been much easier to write a book such as this if the audience for the book were better known. Basically it is written for teachers, though it is well known that only a very small minority of teachers ever reads a book like this. I would also like to think that it would reach that mysterious person we call the ‘intelligent layman’, but since I know so little about him I cannot tailor the book to his needs. It is not written for academics, either educational or social psychological; we write too many highly specialized books for one another as it is. At the same time I have sought to make a real contribution to both education and social psychology and am content to be subjected to the critical scrutiny of my academic colleagues in this respect. However, my main audience, I am forced to conclude, will be formal students of education. This is a very mixed audience, containing at one extreme the first year college of education student and at the other the middle-aged teacher with many years of classroom experience taking a Master's degree in educational studies. If one speaks largely to the former, one is open to accusations of condescension or labouring the obvious from the latter. If one speaks largely to the latter, one is open to charges of incomprehensibility from the former. Since I wanted to speak to both, I have tried to aim somewhere between the two, hoping that the more sophisticated reader will generously bear with the lengthy expositions and frequent repetitions, and hoping that the less sophisticated reader will not be disheartened by those sections which appear to be rather difficult or obscure. I trust that both will forgive me for being unwilling to write two books, one for each, on the main themes.

A social psychologist who is no longer a classroom teacher in a school cannot pretend to produce many answers from his study of those educational issues which are of interest to him. Where I am heavily prescriptive or critical, the views are offered in the spirit of an outsider whose position has some advantages of less immediate involvement as well as the obvious disadvantages of being out of touch and unrealistic, and perhaps even unfair. In many places I have tried to make it clear that I am giving a highly personal view, based on either a personal selection or reading of the evidence or on no evidence at all, by using the personal pronoun I as a preface to my remarks.

In the last analysis it is the members of schools who will make the changes, by analysing their problems and finding solutions to them. This book seeks to shed light on some of the problems and some of the possible solutions. It is not my analyses or my solutions that are important, but rather the reaction of the reader to them. If it helps to clarify the reader's thinking, if it boosts a failing idealism, if it disturbs some taken for granted assumptions, then the book will have reached one of its goals. In the end it remains a book, and for teachers and social scientists alike, it is worth remembering La Rochefoucauld's maxim: Il est plus nécessaire d'étudier les hommes que les livres.

2 The self

It would be easier to begin this book if the teaching and learning of social psychology could be approached in a similar way to the teaching and learning of mathematics or a language. In the case of these latter subjects there are fairly obvious simple and primary elements that must be mastered before moving on to more advanced areas. It would be unusual to begin a book on mathematics with calculus and end it with simple algebraic equations, just as it would be strange to teach the pluperfect of irregular verbs in French before teaching the present tense of regular verbs. The teacher of these subjects can assume in a broad way a linearity in the subject. All disciplines are really spherical rather than linear, for all the elements of a discipline are inter-related in complex ways, but some subjects are more readily adaptable to linear treatments than others. Social psychology does not lend itself easily to such an approach—the standard text-books take very different starting points and paths through the subject.

Since the chapter structure of a book implies some degree of linearity, even though a spherical shape has no obvious beginning or end, some justification is required for entering the sphere at a particular point. We shall enter the discipline of social psychology by looking at a concept which is closer to the middle of the sphere than to its outer edge, or, to change to a more popular metaphor, by plunging the reader into the deep end. One of the more central conflicts within social psychology is the tension between the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’. It is a conflict within other social sciences too, but there it is not so central. Sociology claims that its central concerns are with social phenomena, social facts and social explanations. The ‘individual’ aspect is of secondary importance. Thus Albert Cohen, whose book Delinquent Boys (1955) is one of the most important and influential sociological approaches to delinquency, writes: ‘We are not primarily interested in explaining why this boy adopts a delinquent solution to his problems and why another boy does not . . . This book does, however, have implications for the explanation of the individual case.’ The task which Cohen dismisses is often regarded as the task of psychologists, for psychology is concerned with the ‘individual’ rather than the ‘social’. It takes as its central focus individual phenomena, (cognition, perception, motivation etc.) and their internal structure and dynamics. The research, theories and explanations of psychologists are rooted in individual behaviour, in its prediction and control. Psychologists recognize the importance of the ‘social’ but they are interested in it not in its own right but in so far as it affects the individual's behaviour.

The tension between the ‘social’ and the ‘individual’ is at its most acute in social psychology, which takes as its central focus interpersonal relationships. Social psychology is social for it seeks to analyse the relationship between two or more persons; it is individual in that it takes account of what an individual contributes to a social interaction or a relationship and how he is affected by it. The dichotomy between the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’ becomes largely artificial, though it remains a useful and convenient distinction.

We shall begin this book by trying to come face to face with (but not with resolving) this central tension and it is nowhere more obvious than in the concept of the ‘self’. At first sight this seems to be an ‘individual’ rather than a ‘social’ concept, but on further analysis such a simple view is immediately undermined and we are forced to recognize the tension which is inherent in all social psychology. Because the concept of the self is toward the centre of the sphere of the discipline of social psychology, it is linked with all the other concepts in a very complex way. It is one of several threads that run through all the chapters, implicitly or explicitly. It cannot be dealt with and then dismissed in one chapter as if it were an isolated bit. This is the danger of the implied linearity of books, a danger for the author in his desire to carve up the field into convenient segments, but an even greater danger for the reader who may come to perceive these convenient segments as the inherent structure of the discipline. For this reason the reader should perhaps re-read this chapter when he has finished the book. He can then consider the concept of the self from a more sophisticated position, recognize the over-simplification necessary in an early chapter, and, armed with greater understanding and insight, acknowledge that the imposed structure has been convenient, arbitrary and tentative. In the end it is simply one of many possible approaches.

The self and the body

A baby still within the womb leads a totally dependent existence. Its needs are automatically satisfied by the mother's bodily processes. At birth, the point of physical separation between child and mother, the activation of a number of basic mechanisms, for example breathing, guarantees independent physical functioning to the child, whilst in other respects, for example feeding, his dependence on mother persists. One of the most dramatic changes arising from birth is the fact that the baby's sense-organs now begin to receive stimulation from the new environment—sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. Perhaps, as William James suggested, the new-born baby is confronted by ‘one big blooming buzzing confusion’. Of the many problems which the baby must learn to solve, three are of special interest to social psychology since they are problems involving other people which persist into adult life. First he must make sense out of all the apparent chaos which surrounds him, structure into a meaningful pattern all the data which impinge on his sense-organs and which come to make up his experience of the world. Second, he must achieve a degree of autonomy and independence whereby he can exercise some control over the environment, both interpersonal and non-personal. Third, he must learn to develop satisfying interdependent personal relationships with other people.

These problems are aspects of learning to cope with the external and social world. Clearly a prerequisite of this is the development by the baby of an ability to distinguish himself from that environment, which is no longer co-extensive with him as was the case in the womb. He must learn that certain objects ‘belong’ to him whilst others do not: his hands and toes are part and parcel of him in a way that mother's breast is not. Mother, her nipple, his toys and his cot exist outside himself, independently, beyond the control of his whims. Many of the baby's earliest frustrations originate in his inability to control such objects in the satisfaction of his needs, but it is because the environment is frustrating that the baby needs to come to terms with it at all. Also he must learn that objects which are not physically part of him have a permanent existence of their own and that they do not cease to exist when they disappear over the edge of the cot beyond the range of his sense-organs.

The primary element of becoming a person consists in coming to terms with the environment in terms of learning to differentiate between self and not-self. Initially, the problem is a physical one, learning to distinguish one's own body from everything else. The body continues to be of great importance to a person's self conception, or to what is often called the self-image. One's conception of who and what one is cannot be unrelated to one's bodily characteristics since we all learn that certain characteristics are socially valued. A woman's self-image is enhanced if she is beautiful as is a man's if he is physically large and strong. The booming cosmetic industry and the Charles Atlas courses testify to our social valuations. Adolescent girls have to learn to be embarrassed by their acne. The relation between the self-image and the body is often part of our taken-for-granted experience, because we adjust ourselves to our bodies. But those who are suddenly smitten with some physical defect or disfigurement tend to experience severe problems associated with their image of themselves (e.g. Goffman, 1963a).

The point becomes dramatically clear in the experience of John Griffin (1962) who, in his desire to see the life of the American Negro at first hand, intentionally took a drug to change the colour of his skin. When t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The self
• 3 Perceiving people
• 4 Roles
• 5 Interaction
• 6 Teacher—pupil interaction
• 7 Discipline
• 8 Friends
• 9 Groups
• 10 Youth, youth culture and the school
• 11 Changing attitudes
• 12 Staff relationships
• Addendum to Chapter 6
• Bibliographical Index
• Subject Index