The Family, Education and Society (RLE Edu L Sociology of Education)

Frank Musgrove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415506311
• eBook ISBN: 9781136460869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this provocative study the author challenges many contemporary assumptions about the modern family, the circumstances of home life which lead to academic success and the proper relationship between home and school. The modern family is not 'in decline'; its history is a success story. It is stable, unsociable, emotionally potent. Over the past three centuries it has turned its back on society. It is less remarkable for rebellious children than for the remorseless pressures it can exert upon the young, particularly for 'success' in the school system.

In the home-centred society the school is an extension of the home, created in its image. Academic success seems most certain when the 'good home' and the 'good school' form a determined alliance. The combined pressures of home and school often seem to produce withdrawn, self-disparaging and negative young men and women. The author argues that the good school must counter-act many of the influences of the good home and that the educational system must re-order its affairs so that it is able to encourage and assess achievement which comes from joy rather than neurotic drive.

VI

Satisfactions at Home, Club, Work
and School

IN 1965 the author attempted to discover the personal needs which young people (between 14 and 20) in a northern industrial region expect their homes to meet, and the extent to which they think their needs are met. A complex of social institutions exists to meet the needs of young people: schools, youth clubs, and work make their contribution. The inquiry was designed to show the different kinds of demand made upon these different institutions, and the extent to which they provided satisfaction.

The relationship between the ‘press’ of institutions and personal needs has been systematically investigated in American colleges. Job-satisfaction in America has similarly been explored by comparing individual needs with the satisfaction provided by employment.¹ On a self-rating questionnaire the subject indicates the importance he attached to allegedly universal human needs such as ‘Dominance’, ‘Recognition and Approbation’, ‘Dependence’ and ‘Independence’. He also indicates the levels of satisfaction in these various areas which he derives from his work. Need-strength can be compared with need-satisfaction.

The congruence or incongruence between personal needs and the practices and provisions of American colleges have been explored by Pace and Stern.² Again, the point of departure is supposedly universal human needs such as ‘Achievement’, ‘Affiliation’, ‘Order’, ‘Sex’ and ‘Understanding’. The psychological needs of subjects are inferred from their responses on an ‘Activities Index’: they indicate their preferences ‘among verbal descriptions of various possible activities’. There are descriptions of orderly behaviour, dominant behaviour, deferential behaviour and so on. On the College Characteristics Index subjects score true or false corresponding descriptions of the college environment. Needs can then be compared with the perceived satisfaction, pressures and demands of college life.

But needs are felt in relation to particular institutions. It is true that an institution which manifestly aims to satisfy a particular need may in fact satisfy others. But the boy who goes to a youth club is unlikely to expect satisfaction of the needs which are met through work, or to feel frustrated if these latter needs are not met by the club. He may have a great need for achievement which the club affords little chance to satisfy; but he will not feel disgruntled, because he never expected it to do so. The author decided to allow spontaneous statements of need in relation to home, club, school and work respectively. No prior assumptions about needs were made: their nature would be determined only after inspection of responses given in an open-ended questionnaire. Satisfactions would be established from corresponding (spontaneous) statements about actual experience of the institutions in question.

Two-hundred-and-fifty members of 6 mixed youth clubs in a northern conurbation completed usable questionnaires, 67 secondary school children who were not members of youth clubs, and 50 young workers who were not club members. The needs for which subjects sought satisfaction at home were elicited by the following sentence openings:

‘At home you should always have plenty of chance to . .’.
‘First and foremost home should help you to . .’.
‘At home you should always be able to feel that...’

The same three openings were applied to school, work and club respectively. Corresponding cues were then provided to elicit statements of actual satisfaction (or frustration):

‘At home you always have plenty of chance to . . .’
‘Above all else home does help you to . . .’
‘At home you do feel that . . .’

Thus six statements were made by each subject about his home, his club, his school if he were still at school, or work if he were at work—a total of eighteen statements. Questionnaires were completed anonymously, but classificatory information was obtained and attached to each questionnaire: age, sex, type of education, age of leaving school or proposed age of leaving, examinations taken and passed, professional qualifications, type of employment (for those at work), and father's occupation.

There is an apparent danger that statements of needs are in reality statements of frustration; that the boy who writes, ‘At home you should always have plenty of chance to express yourself,’ says this precisely because he is given no such opportunity. The same difficulty arises in the ‘need-press’ analysis of Pace and Stern and the job-satisfaction inquiries of Schaffer. But the latter did not find a negative correlation between need-scores and satisfaction scores, and significant correlations have not been found between corresponding scores on the College Characteristics Index and the Activities Index.³ In the inquiry reported here there was no significant tendency for statements of need to reappear in negative form in the second part of the questionnaire, as statements of dissatisfaction.

The type of projective test used in the present inquiry has the advantage that it does not present the subject with a perhaps arbitrary and possibly irrelevant list of ‘needs’ and ‘satisfactions’ which he is forced to reject or endorse. It has been fruitfully employed in America⁴ and England;⁵ and Symonds⁶ found that a sentence-completion schedule not only supplemented personal data obtained in interviews, but was useful in correcting them. (Thus a report based on interview may describe a man as ‘energetic’; responses on a projective test may show that a more accurate description would be ‘nervous’.) It has the disadvantage that the need categories to which responses are assigned cannot be established in advance of the inquiry.

A coarse twofold classification of responses was made initially into ‘expressive’ and ‘instrumental’ categories. The distinction is taken from Talcott Parsons: ‘Action may be oriented to the achievement of a goal which is an anticipated future state of affairs, the attainment of which is felt to promise gratification.’ ‘There is a corresponding type on the adjustive side which may be called expressive orientation. Here the primary orientation is not to a goal anticipated in the future, but the organization of a “flow” of gratifications (and of course the warding off of threatened deprivations)/⁷ ‘Problems of expressive interaction concern relationships with alters which ego engages in primarily for the immediate direct gratification they provide.’⁸ By extension we refer not only to expressive and instrumental actions and functions, but to expressive and instrumental needs and satisfactions.

After scrutinizing all the responses six subdivisions which appeared logically distinct were made of the instrumental category, and seven of the expressive category. Two judges working independently were able to assign statements to these thirteen subgroups with virtually complete agreement. The instrumental category (I) was subdivided thus: (1) Intellectual skills, understanding and enlightenment; (2) Physical skills (including competence at games and sports); (3) Manual skills (including competence in domestic tasks); (4) Social skills (including poise and self-assurance in relationship with others); (5) Moral development (including references to ‘forming a good character’, ‘becoming a good citizen’, ‘learning to be self-reliant and stand on your own feet’); (6) Personal advancement (including passing examinations, obtaining promotion, getting on in life).

The expressive category (E) was subdivided into: (1) Ease/emotional security (feeling at ease, wanted, loved, welcome); (2) Freedom/self-direction (including the freedom to express your views, have your say, ‘be yourself); (3) Friendship; (4) Sense of competence (including ‘having a chance to prove yourself); (5) Support from adults (including ‘knowing that you can take your problems to parents/teachers/youth leaders’); (6) Sense of identity with the group (‘feeling one of the crowd/a member of the family/as if you belong’); (7) Sense of purposeful activity.

When the subjects who took part in the inquiry stated not what their institutions should, but did, provide, statements could be either positive or negative (‘At home you always have a chance to relax’, ‘At home you always feel unwanted’). Statements referring to expressive satisfactions were divided into Expressive: Positive (E+) and Expressive: Negative (E—). The latter referred to (1) restrictions, constraints, humiliation, belittlement, rejection, and (2) boredom and demoralization.

The author first administered the questionnaire in six mixed youth clubs which were selected to represent different social areas within a large industrial conurbation. Two clubs were in well-to-do residential suburbs, two in working class districts, and two in socially mixed, transitional, areas. The clubs had a nominal membership of over 300. The clubs were given a week's notice of the author's visit. Club members co-operated well, and over 90 per cent of those present completed the questionnaire. Two-hundred-and-sixty-eight questionnaires were filled in; 18 were incomplete, illegible, or otherwise unusable; 250 were used in the analysis.

There were 135 males and 115 females. The age range was 14 to 20; 129 (51·6 per cent) were 16 years of age or over. One-hundred-and-sixty-three (65·2 per cent) came from the homes of professional and white-collar workers. Two hundred were still at school, 130 at grammar schools and 70 at modern schools. Sixty-seven of the grammar school pupils were in the sixth form. Twenty-four boys and 26 girls were at work. Twenty-nine of the workers had attended grammar schools and were all in non-manual, white-collar employment; 21 had attended secondary modern schools: the 8 boys were all in manual occupations, but 10 of the 13 gir...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• I. THE CHANGING PARENT: THE SUBSTITUTION OF INFLUENCE FOR POWER
• II. HOME AND SCHOOL: AN HISTORIC CONFLICT
• III. SUCCESS STORY
• IV. A THREAT TO SOCIETY
• V. THE ‘GOOD HOME’
• VI. SATISFACTIONS AT HOME, CLUB, WORK AND SCHOOL
• VII. A BRIDGE TO THE WORLD
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX