2.5 continued ... School

 The Importance of School as a Socialization Agent in the U.S.

School is mandated in the U.S. until age 16 and most students attend until 18.  And while enrolled in school, students are there for approximately 8 hours per day for 12 years of their lives.  Some of the functions of school are to teach manifest lessons; the most obvious being to teach reading, writing, math, history and science.  However, schools also influence students in more subtle, implicit ways, or latent lessons.  

Schools and Latent Lessons

Liberal Values?
Schools have been criticized for latently teaching students progressive values since at least 1974.   Three sociologists wanted to research if teachers indoctrinated their students with "liberal" values and what values those were.  Brint, Contreras and Matthews (2001) observed elementary school teachers and they coded the messages that teachers relayed to students.  They observed over 1000 interactions between teachers and students.


2.  Individually Take a guess - brainstorm what you think the messages were that teachers relayed to students most frequently?

DO NOT SCROLL FORWARD UNTIL AFTER ANSWERING #2

Sociologists Brint, Contreras and Matthews observed elementary school teachers and they coded the messages that teachers relayed to students. They observed over 1000 interactions between teachers and students.

They found that the most common references that teachers reinforced to students were:

• Be orderly.
• Work hard.
• Show respect and consideration.
• Participate.
• Be in charge of yourself.
• Cooperate.
• Justice/fairness.
• Responsibility.
• Self-control.

3.  How many of these did you guess in #2? List the messages that you guessed in #2 that were the same as those above.

4. Now, using the list above, decide what % each of those references were out of 100%.  (The total should add up to 100.)

[ANSWER #3 and 4 BEFORE MOVING FORWARD]

Here are the actual totals:

College and Latent Political Attitudes

Campbell and Horowitz (2016) studied whether liberal values were a product of higher education.  They focused on civil liberties, gender egalitarianism and political party affiliation.  They found that college seems to affect the belief in civil liberties and gender egalitarianism but that political party affiliation was more likely influenced by family background.