Toward a Sociology of Education

John Beck, John Beck, Chris Jenks, Nell Keddie, Michael F. D. Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000680317
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

By including material from literary, philosophical, and anthropological sources, and by selecting readings which consider educational practice both within and beyond formal educational contexts, this book broadens the character of sociological inquiry in education. The editors bring together material they have found valuable when working with students of education and sociology at all levels. Many of these articles and extracts are either inaccessible or have not been reprinted. The collection should stimulate inquiry about the assumptions underlying current debates on curriculum, streaming, school organization, methods of teachin, and preconceived notions of ability.

Part One

Childhood as a Social Construct

In both the sociology of education and in the dominant branches of psychology the prevailing conceptions of childhood have been markedly ethnocentric, paying little regard to conceptions of childhood which have prevailed in other times and places. Indeed the constructions of childhood that we meet in literature may even differ in important respects from those current among many groups in our own society. To treat our concepts of childhood and adolescence as relative to our own normative values may allow us to see how the conceptions and categories which we take for granted are socially situated rather than to attribute to childhood an absolute status. By relative we do not mean that ‘anything goes’, but that concepts have coherence and are explanatory within the context in which they have currency and differ from those coherent in other social contexts. This may enable us to see more clearly how we conceptualize childhood in our own society. In particular, we may be wise to treat with extreme caution developmental schema whether they have a biological (eg Piaget, Bruner, Chomsky) or a sociological epistemology — (eg Durkheim and Parsons) especially when these are treated as containing universals which can legitimately be applied to children in other societies and to working-class children and the children of minority groups in our society.

A prime example of the way in which Western schema have been imposed on other societies is the preoccupation of anthropologists with Freudian constructs to explain ‘socialization’ processes in ‘primitive’ societies, constructs which have little relevance to members of those societies and serve no explanatory purpose for them. (For the implications of this kind of activity see Horton’s ‘Sound Sense or Sinister Prejudice’ in this Reader). Frequently such accounts (for example, those of Mead and Wolfenstein) are so permeated with Freudian ideas that it is impossible to recover from their accounts what meaning their data had for the members of the culture studied. As Gladwin (1967) has pointed out anthropologists have been almost exclusively concerned with what is generally termed ‘affective’ development. It is a given maxim in the social sciences that people can be treated and understood as an amalgam of measurable attributes and the division between ‘affective’, ‘cognitive’ and ‘social’ development is ingrained in educational literature. One must assume the theoretical basis of such divisions is one of convenience which lacks a serious concern with the acquisition of human experience (Cicourel 1975) and an understanding of how it is acquired.

Our contention is that there are significant differences across social settings and that it is not the business of the sociologist either to rank such differences or to seek some universal explanatory scheme, but to try to understand members’ accounts and practices in terms of the meaning they have for any given group’s way of life. One pay-off this may have is to help us to understand how our beliefs about childhood in our own society are socially constructed.

The readings grouped in this section thus include historical and anthropological material which range from Ariès’ contention that childhood as we understand it was an alien concept to medieval man to Musgrove’s argument that adolescence was ‘invented’ in the eighteenth century. Necessarily all these writers use interpretive schema to provide for the sense of their data. Thus Musgrove uses an economic model which is hardly adequate to deal with the sources he uses, Raum uses an essentially functionalist model and so in a different tradition does Platt. The extracts from novels and autobiographies can suggest to us what it is like to be a member of a culture different from our own — they are also often all that is available in the area since social science studies are lacking or imbued with ethnocen-tricism. The extract from ‘Mill on the Floss’ may remind us that some of our educational practices are still the result of our particular notions of sexual differentiation and that Maggie’s problems are central issues in the Newsome Report’s comments on the education of girls.

References

A V CICOUREL ET AL, Cognitive Sociology — Language and Meaning in Social Interaction>, Penguin Books, London 1973.

T GLADWIN, Culture and the Logical Process, 1967. Reprinted in N G Keddie (ed), Tinker, Tailor: The Myth of Cultural Deprivation>, Penguin Books, 1975.

1

Chaga Childhood*

Otto Raum

Preliminary Methodological Remarks

Of all the sociological sciences, Education is the least advanced. The reasons for this are partly to be found in the past connexions of Education with Philosophy and partly in the educational situation itself. It is obviously difficult for an outsider to observe the educational process in a family fairly. This difficulty is increased among native peoples, as parental sensitiveness and the shyness of children are often fixed by tradition at a much higher pitch than in our society. It may, for instance, be assumed that the scarcity of observed cases of corporal punishment is partly due to this modifying factor.

Reliance on informants clearly suffers from the presence of many sources of error, such as the suggestibility of children, intentional bias in statements made by parents, and the unconscious colouring of reminiscences by natives who are neither parents nor children. Statistical methods, so useful in other sociological sciences, could therefore only be applied with great caution, and are in fact seldom or never used.

It is clear that the fundamental difficulty is the definition and classification of educational phenomena. From the educational point of view it is necessary to find an answer to the question of how a given people, such as the Chaga† deal with a certain educational situation, eg, how they treat a disobedient child. We would falsify our observations if we did not consider under the heading of disobedience the type of behaviour to which the Chaga themselves apply that word, but used European standards. Viewing it from this angle, the fieldworker, by a careful combination of methods and by avoiding generalizations at an early stage of his study, will be able to collect adequate material on indigenous education.

Sociologically education can be defined as the relation between consecutive generations. This relationship, like all other social relations, possesses the characteristics of mutuality and reciprocity. It is usually assumed that in the educational process the child is subjected to a multiplicity of formative forces, eg, family, play group and tribal organization. If one tries to visualize the situation, one is easily led to imagine the child crushed by the action of many social forces. There are, however, three factors which restore the balance.

First, the sociological significance of the child is extraordinarily great and contrasts strongly with its biological dependence. The possession of a child raises the status of the parents among the Chaga. A young woman, who is called mbora from the time of her circumcision, receives the status of a malyi after the birth of her first child and that of nka after the arrival of her second. The status of her husband, too, is raised. His father gives a heifer to the young couple when the first child is born. On the other hand, barrenness in woman or man is considered a fault in character and leads to divorce. The death of a child is put down to the agency of sterile women or co-wives resorting to sorcery out of envy. Sociologically the Chaga child is therefore the founder of a stable marriage, just as marriage procures for the child the status of legitimacy.

Secondly, the psychological significance of the child for the parents must not be forgotten. Its trustfulness, simplicity, light-heartedness and fancifulness produce pleasurable emotional responses. Even the polygynous Chaga father cannot escape these influences. He fondles his baby, tickles it and addresses it respectfully by his father’s name. The mother’s lullabies have not only the purpose of quieting the child, but are an expression of her own experiences in adult society, as an examination of the texts reveals. Very significant in this respect are the names given to children. In many cases they embody a story, or hint at an event which is of importance to the parents.

Thirdly, the child is not a passive object of education. He is a very active agent in it. There is an irrepressible tendency in the child to become an adult, to rise to the status of being allowed to enjoy the privileges of grown-up Chaga. The child attempts to force the pace of his ‘social promotion.’ Thus, at five or six years of age, a little boy will surprise his mother one day by telling her that he wants to be circumcised. The mother will hear nothing of it and threatens to beat him if he repeats the request. But the demand will be made with increasing insistence as the child grows up. In former times it was the clamour and restiveness of the adolescents which decided the older section of Chaga society to start the formal education of the initiation camp.

The Child’s Social Environment

The child’s position in the Chaga family is determined by the fact that Chaga marriage is as a rule patrilocal, and not infrequently polygynous. Since the households of the wives do not form a kraal but are scattered over the district, this means that the father is only an occasional visitor to the child’s home. The early intimacies between father and child are superseded by a period when the father is held up as a bugbear to the toddler by the mother. Later he comes to be feared for his disciplinary interventions. The mother’s mediation prevents this fear from becoming a permanent mental state. But when the father departs from the compound the children cannot but make merry, and the mother joins in laughingly, saying: ‘When the bull is gone, the lizards slip out to sun themselves!’

The child’s attitude towards the mother is determined by the closeness and continuity of the contact. She knows the worries and troubles of her little flock. The sharing of trivial experiences in field and hut and her partial exclusion from affairs of court and community make a woman a member of the children’s group. She stands out in it because of her wide knowledge, but the confidential relationship which she maintains with her children often makes it difficult for her to enforce discipline. She allies herself, therefore, to the father’s authority and reports to him when the children have broken rules of conduct. As her mediation may, however, be favourable to a particular child, the children are ready to do their mother a good turn; cg, the boys, by taking a piece of roasted meat from the slaughtering place, circumvent for their mothers the taboo which prohibits them from cooking meat before the husband’s return from the butchering party.

The Chaga family can thus be looked upon as having three layers of disciplinary authority. The bottom layer is formed by the children, for even among them the boys and the older girls rule the others. The top layer is represented by the father and the central one by the mother. She holds a crucial position, much more so than she can possibly do in a monogamous marriage, where the attempt is usually made for the parents to take up an identical attitude. The three layers find their expression in the rules of etiquette observed.

These rules can be sub-divided into terms of address and polite manners. Within the first two or three years a child learns all the names, proper, descriptive, and classificatory, of the members of the family group. The parents, notably the father, occasiotially test the knowledge of the child as regards these names. The parents are differentiated from the children’s group by the descriptive terms awu and mai, or the classificatory terms baba and mama, respectively. The latter terms are used by smaller children, who also, when they want to confide something to one parent, use the proper name of the other parent.

The teaching of polite manners starts later than that of terms of address, as I was able to establish in my observation of Chaga family life during a number of years. It takes place between three and six years of age. The formalized kinds of behaviour comprise such acts as handing over things to older people with two hands and getting up from seats on the arrival of important persons. Polite manners to some extent imply the employment of a new and elaborate set of terms of address, involving the use of the clan name and other ceremonial phrases. Confusion with the ordinary set is unavoidable and is looked upon as normal. The method of training used is not one of attempting to ensure that ‘right for the first time is right for all time’, but rather of gradually restricting the originally vague boundaries of application to the appropriate persons.

Etiquette undoubtedly enhances the authority of the parents. Yet it is not a mere bolstering up of prestige, but a necessary factor in all family life, as it helps to create ‘social distance’ under the levelling conditions of close contact. That this is so is shown by the fact that parents observe some sort of etiquette towards the children, as they do, in turn, among themselves. The parents are particularly polite to the eldest son, and there is a formalized way of dealing with the youngest child. Again, the children, besides taking up a ‘parental’ attitude towards their younger brothers and sisters, address the eldest brother as wawa and habitually submit to his authority and give him precedence. This is not only of educational significance, but is an important element in the social organization of the Chaga. The classificatory application of the term wawa to eldest sibling, father, and paternal uncles implie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General introduction
• Part One Childhood as a Social Construct
• Part Two Social Pathology Models and the Sociology of Education.
• Part Three Ability as a Social Construct
• Part Four Teacher-Pupil Relations
• Part Five Perspectives on Learning
• Part Six Knowledge as a Corpus
• Part Seven Education and Rationality
• Further Reading