School As Agent of Socialization

Sociologists publishing about school show research that details how schools teach manifest lessons like reading and writing and latent lessons like patriotism, obedience and consumption.


School Values, From Sociology of Education

Teacher socialize students to embrace certain values and behaviors.  Brint, Contreras and Matthews (2001, Sociology of Education) observed elementary school teachers and they coded the messages that teachers relayed to students.  They observed over 1000 interactions between teachers and students.

For student discussion:

What do you think the messages were that teachers relayed?


After we discuss the messages.



This research highlights what socialization messages elementary school teachers convey to students.



Obedience
Obedience is illustrated in this rhetorical piece called Beavis vs. Barbie, also available here:
https://mathprojectsjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/beavisandbarbie.pdf


Consumption
Consumption in schools is illustrated by Murray J. Milner, in his book,  Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids.  The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture explains that Milner,

...argues that the teenage behaviors that annoy adults do not arise from hormones, bad parenting, poor teaching, or the media, but from adolescents’ lack of power over the central features of their lives: they must attend school; they have no control over the curriculum; they can’t choose who their classmates are. What teenagers do have is the power to create status systems and symbols that not only exasperate adults, but also impede learning and maturing. Ironically, parents, educators, and businesses are inadvertently major contributors to these outcomes.
An absorbing journey that stirs up a mixture of nostalgia and dismay, Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids shows how high school distills the worst features of American consumer society and shapes how we relate to our neighbors, partners, and coworkers. It also provides insight into how our schools and the lives of teenagers might be transformed.

School Culture Socializes the Students Within it

Lisa Nunn researched how school cultures shape the students that attend each school.  Her findings are published in her book, Defining Student Success.


Read a preview from Google books here.


And a detailed review from Dr. Judson Everitt of Loyola University Chicago, available on JSTOR here or from U of Chicago Press here.



From Rutgers University Press, also available through JSTOR here.

The key to success, our culture tells us, is a combination of talent and hard work. Why then, do high schools that supposedly subscribe to this view send students to college at such dramatically different rates? Why do students from one school succeed while students from another struggle? To the usual answer—an imbalance in resources—this book adds a far more subtle and complicated explanation. Defining Student Success shows how different schools foster dissimilar and sometimes conflicting ideas about what it takes to succeed—ideas that do more to preserve the status quo than to promote upward mobility.
Lisa Nunn’s study of three public high schools reveals how students’ beliefs about their own success are shaped by their particular school environment and reinforced by curriculum and teaching practices. While American culture broadly defines success as a product of hard work or talent (at school, intelligence is the talent that matters most), Nunn shows that each school refines and adapts this American cultural wisdom in its own distinct way—reflecting the sensibilities and concerns of the people who inhabit each school. While one school fosters the belief that effort is all it takes to succeed, another fosters the belief that hard work will only get you so far because you have to be smart enough to master course concepts. Ultimately, Nunn argues that these school-level adaptations of cultural ideas about success become invisible advantages and disadvantages for students’ college-going futures. Some schools’ definitions of success match seamlessly with elite college admissions’ definition of the ideal college applicant, while others more closely align with the expectations of middle or low-tier institutions of higher education.
With its insights into the transmission of ideas of success from society to school to student, this provocative work should prompt a reevaluation of the culture of secondary education. Only with a thorough understanding of this process will we ever find more consistent means of inculcating success, by any measure.

Religion and School
Success in school is also shaped by religious affiliation.