socialization messages in primary schools: an organizational analysis · 2016-04-29 ·...

Sociology of Education 2001, Vol. 74 (July): 157–180 157

Socialization Messages in PrimarySchools:

An Organizational Analysis

Steven Brint, Mary F. Contreras, and Michael T. Matthews

University of California, Riverside

Using the tools of organizational analysis, this article presents a framework for

understanding the volume and content of socialization messages expressed in 64

primary school classrooms. This framework specifies five levels of classroom and

school organization in which socialization messages are embedded. It links the

behavioral ideals expressed at two of these levels—teacher-initiated interactions

in the classroom and schoolwide programs—to the schools’ organizational inter-

ests in maintaining order and work effort and encouraging students to identify

with the school. It links the values expressed at two other levels—the formal cur-

riculum and the routine practices of everyday classroom life—to a blending of old

and new cultural influences. The framework specifies two ways in which new val-

ues can enter the schools—through the influence of social movements institu-

tionalized with governmental support or the adoption of pedagogical philoso-

phies consistent with changes in adult middle-class life experiences.

ome of the best-known work inthe sociology of education hasfocused on the contribution of

schooling to the formation of children’sbehavior and values (see, e.g., Dreeben1968; Durkheim 1923/1961; Jackson 1968;Waller 1932). It is not surprising that some ofthe best-known work in the field has focusedon this topic; socialization has long beenconsidered one of the major societal purpos-es of schooling (see, e.g., Bendix 1968;Bowles and Gintis 1976; Brint 1998; Collins1977; Karabel and Halsey 1977; Parsons1959). In recent years, however, sociologistshave shown only a limited interest in theschools’ role in socialization; instead, studiesof the schools’ role in reproducing socialinequalities and improving academicachievement have been central.

Given this low level of social scientificinterest in school socialization processes, itis perhaps surprising that few topics havebeen of consistently greater interest to thepublic than the role of schools in helping toform students’ behavior and values.Opinion polls have consistently shown thatthe public is as concerned about theschools’ role in solving social problems,such as drug use and teenage pregnancy,as in dealing with any other educationalissue (Gilbert 1988) and that an over-whelming majority think that schoolsshould teach “basic moral values” as onemeans of combating social problems (S.Glazer 1996). Nor do teachers considersocialization to be a matter of secondaryimportance (Farkas, Johnson, and Foleno2000).

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158 Brint, Contreras, and Matthews

Social commentators and politicians havealso had much to say about the schools’ rolein socialization. Cultural conservatives, suchas former Secretary of Education WilliamBennett, have urged a return to curriculaemphasizing “moral virtues,” such as hon-esty, fairness, perseverance, compassion, andcourage. In the introduction to his best-sell-ing The Book of Virtues, Bennett (1993:11)wrote: “Where do we go to find the materialthat will help our children in [the] task [ofdeveloping moral literacy]? The simpleanswer is we . . . have a wealth of material todraw on—materials that virtually all schoolsand homes and churches once taught to stu-dents for the sake of shaping character. Thatmany no longer do is something this bookhopes to change.”

In the 1990s many cultural conservativesdeclared that a “culture war” was flaring inthe schools between those who advocatedmulticultural curricula and the importance ofmodern values of self-expression and thosewho hoped to maintain an emphasis onWestern history and literature and to reintro-duce character training in the classroom (see,e.g., Bernstein 1994; Cheney 1987, 1990; N.Glazer 1997; Healey 1996; Hunter 1991,1994). The concerns of conservative criticshelped to spark interest in “character educa-tion” curricula, which were adopted by hun-dreds of school districts during the 1990s(Healy 1996).

But do we really know that socializationmessages in the public schools no longerfocus on virtues like honesty, fairness, reliabil-ity, and responsibility or that they nowemphasize the values of cultural diversity, self-esteem, and self-expression? Journalists andpoliticians may be unreliable guides toanswering questions like these because theycan be tempted in the nature of their work torely on anecdotal materials, selectively chosenand presented for dramatic effect. The fewrecent studies by social scientists have lookedat only a limited set of indicators of theschools’ role in socialization. Some have con-centrated on representations of Americanheroes in textbooks or on teachers’ answersto questions about values they considerimportant to teach (see, e.g., Farkas andJohnson 1996; Fitzgerald 1979; Frisch 1989;

Sharp and Wood 1992; Wong 1991),1 where-as others have discussed the subtle ways inwhich teachers can act as moral exemplars inthe classroom (Jackson, Boostrum, andHansen 1993). However, no studies haveinvestigated the range of socialization mes-sages that are prevalent in today’s schools orthe relationship of contemporary socializationmessages to the structure of schooling or thelarger social contexts in which schools areembedded. In so far as social theorists havediscussed school socialization messages inthese more comprehensive terms, their workhas often appeared as a Foucauldian critiqueof the “disciplinary regime” of the school andan appreciation of the subcultures of stu-dents’ resistance to this “regime” (see, e.g.,Giddens 1984; McLaren 1989; Willis 1979).2In the absence of research, it is not clear thatschool socialization messages fit these imagesof authoritarian control any better than theyfit the images of moral abandonment or cul-tural conflict favored by conservative critics.

The analysis presented in this article isbased on a view of schools as multichanneland multilevel organizations set in a specificsociohistorical context. Although we presentboth qualitative and quantitative data, thearticle is intended to be read primarily as pro-viding a conceptual framework for understand-ing the volume and content of the activities oftoday’s schools in the area of socialization. Thisframework is based on an examination ofsocialization messages found at five levels ofclassroom and school organization. Theframework includes an analysis of the majororganizational and societal forces shaping thesocialization messages of today’s schools ateach level, including an analysis of why thecontent of messages varies across levels.

Because we are interested in the socializa-tion messages of schools, our analysis focuseson the actions and practices of teachers andprincipals. It does not address a number ofimportant issues related to school socializa-tion, including the distribution of conformistand nonconformist students, students’ inter-actions with one another and with schoolauthorities, and the complexities in their rela-tionship to the socialization messages of theschool. We believe that a clear understandingof these issues depends, in many ways, on

Socialization Messages in Primary Schools 159

first understanding the socialization climateof today’s schools as expressed in the actionsand practices of teachers and principals.

Our research began with a simple ques-tion: Have cultural conservatives accuratelyperceived a shift in school socialization froman emphasis on moral virtues to a celebrationof cultural diversity, self-esteem, and self-expression? Although our analysis provides ananswer to this question, our interest gradual-ly broadened toward thinking about how tounderstand the overall volume and content ofsocialization messages in the schools. As ourinterest broadened, so did the scope of ourinquiry. We began by concentrating exclu-sively on messages that are conveyedthrough teacher-initiated interaction in theclassroom. We gradually concluded, however,that such a treatment would leave out a largeproportion of the total number of socializa-tion messages conveyed by the school.Teachers do communicate values in theirface-to-face interaction with students, butvalues are also communicated in other ways.In the schools we visited, teachers and princi-pals sometimes used public spaces to pro-mote behavior and values by adorning class-room and school walls with value-relatedmessages or by interrupting instruction forcollective rituals. We saw that socializationmessages were also conveyed in the storiesand lessons of the formal curriculum and inthe routine practices of classroom life, fromstanding in line to working in group projectsto taking tests, that make up the “hidden cur-riculum” of schooling. Most schools alsorequired students to participate in at least afew schoolwide programs related to behaviorand values. Consequently, we expanded ourdata collection to include an analysis of social-ization messages conveyed at several levels ofclassroom and school organization.

THE SCHOOL SOCIALIZATIONSTUDY

Our analysis grew out of a study conducted in64 classrooms in southern California duringthe spring and fall of 1998. Follow-up surveyson the use of classroom time were conducted

in late 1999 and early 2000. The setting ofthe study in southern California is important,since some practices that are characteristic ofthe schools we studied, such as the use oftoken economies to encourage conformity,may not be as prevalent in other states orregions.

Data Collection

We collected data using three methods: class-room observations, interviews with teachersand principals, and reading of curricular andprogram materials.

Classroom Observations For each of the 64classrooms, we observed interaction for onehour during the school day at a time whenwhole-class instruction was occurring. So asnot to bias teaching behaviors, we did not tellthe teachers that we were interested in social-ization messages; instead, the letters invitingteachers to participate indicated that we wereinterested in “patterns of classroom interac-tion.” During the period of observation, wecoded every socializing message the teacherscommunicated to students on code sheetslisting 16 values and six classroom contexts inwhich values are conveyed. The values cate-gories can be thought of as divided into fourareas: (1) values connected to work perfor-mance (orderliness and industriousness), (2)values connected to interaction between selfand others (respect for others, participation,cooperation, self-control, and self-direction),(3) “traditional virtues” (honesty, fairness,considerateness, responsibility, reliability, andcourage), and (4) “modern values” (appreci-ation of cultural diversity, appreciation ofone’s own culture, appreciation of individualuniqueness and special talents, and apprecia-tion of choice and variety as values). We char-acterize these values as modern valuesbecause they do not address generallyapproved character traits, but instead thevalue of a wide range of different abilities andcontributions.

We report descriptive statistics on ourobservational data. However, because theobservational data are subject to certainminor variations across raters,3 our discussionemphasizes the rank-order differences and


the relative magnitudes of difference amongthe values coded, rather than the precisenumber of messages in each of the 16 valuecategories and six classroom contexts. Wehave a high level of confidence in the rank-order and relative magnitude differences thatwe found.

Interviews Following the observations, weconducted interviews with each classroomteacher and later with each school principal.During the interviews with the teachers,which lasted approximately one hour, weexplained our interest in the schools’ role insocialization. In addition, we asked the teach-ers to refrain from discussing the study withtheir colleagues and asked all new interview-ees whether they had discussed the studywith their colleagues. None of the 64 teach-ers in the sample said that they had discussedthe study with their colleagues. In the inter-views, we also asked the teachers to tell usabout the rules and incentive systems thatthey used in their classrooms; the frequencywith which issues related to respecting oth-ers, working hard, fairness, and honesty cameup in their classrooms; how they dealt withproblems in these areas; other values theyconsidered to be important and how theyincorporated these values into their teachingpractices; the relationship of the formal cur-riculum to the teaching of values and behav-ioral ideals; the impact of multiculturalism onclassroom practices; and the role of schools inpreparing students for citizenship. Follow-upsurveys asked the teachers to estimate thetime they spent on various types of instruc-tional activities, such as group work andwhole-class instruction, during an averageschool week. The interviews with the princi-pals focused on formal schoolwide programsand the principals’ perceptions of change inthe priority attached to the schools’ role insocialization by parents and public officials.

Curricular and Program Materials We ana-lyzed the content of the literature and socialstudies textbooks used in the schools westudied because these texts included a largeproportion of the value-relevant messagesfound in the formal curriculum. In addition,we collected information on school programs

aimed at influencing or reinforcing behaviorand norms of conduct, ranging from schoolassemblies at which students were recog-nized for behavioral conformity to conflictresolution curricula used in most of theschools. We also collected information onrequired professional development programs,notably those aimed at developing cross-cul-tural awareness among teachers.

School Sites We conducted observations andinterviews at four primary schools in twoschool districts, which we refer to as “DistrictA” and “District B.” District A is composedprimarily of two predominantly working-classcities with a large number of Spanish-speak-ing families. The school district is 49 percentHispanic and under 30 percent non-Hispanicwhite. It includes a large proportion of fami-lies who qualify for state subsidies; 78 percentof the students are on reduced-price or freelunch programs. The four District A schoolsthat we studied closely reflected the district’soverall demographic profile.

In contrast, District B includes several pre-dominantly non-Hispanic white and middle-class communities. The school district as awhole is 31 percent Hispanic and 49 percentnon-Hispanic white. The four District Bschools in our study had a lower Hispanicpopulation (an average of 28 percent) and ahigher non-Hispanic white population (anaverage of 51 percent) than did the district asa whole.

We also conducted observations and inter-views at two private schools in a third com-munity. Both private schools were academi-cally selective and were attended primarily bythe children of professionals and executives.

Data were collected from second- andfifth-grade classrooms. These two grade levelsallowed us to examine how socializationchanges as children move from lower toupper grades. We chose them so as to avoidtransition grades. Altogether, we collecteddata from 60 public school classrooms—15classrooms in each grade in each district—and four classrooms, two in each of the twoprivate schools.

The classrooms and schools we visitedwere more similar to one another than weexpected. Only a few bivariate associations by


type of school, community composition, andgrade level were statistically significant.4 Wedid not, for example, find demands for orderand conformity to be more common in theworking-class schools of District A than in themore middle-class schools of District B. Nordid we find encouragement for self-directionand autonomy to be more common inDistrict B than in District A. These findingslead us to doubt Bowles and Gintis’s (1976)thesis that working-class children are social-ized to conform to authority while middle-class children are socialized to exercise self-direction. Expectations for high levels oforder, attentiveness, and hard work were per-vasive in the classrooms of both working-classand middle-class schools. Sociologists haveshown that the instructional practices andacademic expectations of schools often varyby schools’ social-class composition (Anyon1980, 1997; Carnoy and Levin 1985;Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000). Thesefindings may apply less well to behavioralexpectations and values. In their expectationsabout behavior and values, the schools westudied would best be characterized as mid-dle-class environments (see also Lareau,1989).5

SOCIALIZATION MESSAGES IN CLASSROOMS

In this section, we provide evidence on thesocialization messages conveyed at five levelsof classroom and school organization: (1)through teacher-initiated interactions and theclassroom rules framing these interactions, (2)through the subject-matter curriculum, (3)through routine practices embedded in every-day classroom life, (4) through students’ par-ticipation in schoolwide cocurricular programs,and (5) through the use of public space in visu-al displays and oral and verbal rituals.

Classroom Interaction

Socialization messages are conveyed mostdirectly through interaction in the classroom.Framing this interaction are rules that areintended to identify behavior that is permissi-ble and desirable from behavior that is imper-

missible or undesirable as defined by theteachers. Our observations of classroom inter-action indicate that the great majority ofteacher-initiated socialization messages haveto do with orderliness and effort—in otherwords, with the operational foundations ofwork performance.

We coded an average of more than 18teacher-initiated interaction messages perhour of observation. Approximately three outof four of these messages were related toorderliness in the classrooms (see Table 1).These messages reflected the teachers’ effortsto quiet the students, to keep them fromanswering questions without recognition, orto redirect their straying attention to the taskat hand. In these classrooms, the teachers fre-quently quieted students and controlled theirmovements with observations, such as “youcan’t be talking and working at the sametime.”

The next most frequent messages—approximately one out of seven—had to dowith work effort. They included teachers’mentions of the students’ need to stay ontask, finish on time, work faster, and the like.Specific students and entire classes wererepeatedly told that they “should be busy.”The teachers frequently noted, “I don’t see[student’s name] working.” In two-fifths ofthe classrooms, the only messages we codedduring our hour of observation had to dowith orderliness and work effort. No otherbehaviors or values began to approach thesetwo in frequency. These findings support theconclusions of sociologists who have arguedthat schools as performance-oriented bureau-cracies have fundamental interests in orderand effort (see, e.g., Cusick 1992; Lortie1975; Waller 1932). Schools are the first per-formance-oriented bureaucracies that chil-dren encounter, and the great emphasis onorderliness follows directly from their interestin coaxing effort out of “immature workers”in settings where opportunities for distractionare great.6

The next most common messages con-cerned the regulation of the self and the self’srelation to others. In this category, we includ-ed messages related to respect for others,participation, cooperation, self-control, andself-direction. These messages have to do


with how others are to be treated and theconditions that require the self to engageothers as opposed to acting in its own right.Teachers are interested in helping studentscontrol their impulses in ways that allowthem to work well with others and, at thesame time, to learn to make choices for them-selves about how to use their time and solveproblems.

A few teachers paid special attention tothese issues. Thus, in one second-grade class-room in District A, the teacher encouragedparticular students to participate in the dis-cussion by asking them to describe a charac-ter in the story the class was reading andemphasized the need for self-direction inmanaging time and completing work. “Youcan either keep going or you can stop. Youchoose,” she said to one student. To anotherstudent, she said, “You can either drawchecks or circles. It’s your choice.” Otherteachers praised students for solving prob-lems by themselves without asking for helpand asked students to help others if they hadfinished their own work. Each of the valuesrelated to the regulation of the self and the

self’s relation to others accounted for approx-imately 2–3 percent of all the socializationmessages that were coded. These messagesare comparatively common in primary schoolclassrooms because many children areinclined to follow their personal predilectionsand need cues about the conditions underwhich they are expected to act with othersand to act alone.

The third most common messages con-cerned traditional moral virtues, includingmessages about fairness, responsibility, perse-verance, courage, and honesty. Each of thesevalues accounted for approximately 1 percentof all the socialization messages that werecoded. The teachers were particularly inter-ested in encouraging the students to takeresponsibility for their actions and to perse-vere even in the face of difficult work. Theywere also interested in helping students totake responsibility for solving issues that cameup in the classroom—for example, to helpresolve conflicts in the classroom. Oneteacher in District A observed, “Even thesesecond graders need to learn to be responsi-ble for bringing in their homework and for

Table 1. Behavior and Value References in One-Hour Observations of 64 Primary SchoolClassrooms

Reference Category Percentage of Total N

Basic Organizational ControlsOrderliness 71 839Industriousness, hard work 13 147

Regulation of Self and Self’s Relation to OthersRespect, considerateness 3 38Participation 3 38Self-direction, autonomy 3 29Cooperation 2 21

Traditional Moral VirtuesFairness, justice 1 15Responsibility 1 12Self-control 1 11Courage .9 10Honesty .6 7

Modern ValuesIndividual uniqueness .4 4Choice, variety .3 3Respect for group differences .3 3Respect for own group culture .2 2

Note: Total references = 1,179; references per observation period = 18.4.


the consequences of their actions.” Oneteacher in District B said, “Fifth graders learna lot of new concepts, and it can be difficultfor students who have learned easily up untilthen, so it’s important to . . . persevere, butdon’t be too hard on yourself. Don’t give up.”Issues of honesty and fairness rarely emergedduring our classroom observations becausediscussions about honesty and fairness tendto be provoked by specific events, and theseevents do not occur every day. In the inter-views, the teachers said that incidents relatedto stealing, cheating, or conflict over per-ceived favoritism came up periodically duringthe year and were addressed when theyarose.

The least frequent messages had to dowith modern values, including the values ofindividual uniqueness and special talent, cul-tural diversity, choice, and variety. Thesemodern values accounted for well under 1percent of all the socialization messages thatwe coded. The values of individual unique-ness and cultural diversity were more likely tocome up during specific occasions in theschool year than during an ordinary day. Ifthe students were studying about immigra-tion in social studies, for instance, this topicnaturally gave rise to discussions about thecontributions of different ethnic groups.Stories about exceptional persons oftenencouraged the teachers to mention theimportance of individual uniqueness. In oneclass, for example, students were readingabout the jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis,and this story elicited several remarks from

the teacher about the special talents of indi-viduals. The teachers were certainly notopposed in principle to modern values, butthey had little occasion to bring them up dur-ing an ordinary classroom instruction period.

We observed only a few instances—fewerthan six in the 64 classrooms—in which theteachers broke away from their instructionalfocus to discuss moral or behavioral issues.One such discussion had to do with a cheat-ing incident and another with an altercationon the soccer field. Instead, most of thesocialization messages were delivered as arunning commentary in the context ofinstructional activities. Thus, the general fla-vor of classroom life is similar to that of acoaching session in which the coach peppersin comments on the level of individual andgroup attention and effort as she or he pro-vides instruction on a specific skill. In class-rooms, as in coaching, these comments con-tribute to the pacing of the class, as well as toits moral tone. Many comments about valuesconsisted of brief slogans, such as “Be thecaptain of your own ship!” and “Go the extramile!”

Socialization messages tended to be deliv-ered in a neutral manner of mentioning ordirecting, rather than of criticizing or praisingparticular students. Mentions of and direc-tions concerning behavior and values werethree times more common than either criti-cism or praise (see Table 2). Many teacherstold us that criticism and praise were not nec-essary because “students know the rules.”However, it seems likely that in the inclusive

Table 2. Context of Socialization Messages in 64 California Primary School Classrooms

Percentage of Total MarksExcluding Marks for

Context Percentage of Total Marks “Orderliness”(N = 1,179) (N = 340)

Teacher mentions 56 50

Teacher criticizes 18 14

Teacher praises 15 21

Classroom ritual 8 4

Classroom discussion of issues 2 6

Discussion of stories, lessons 2 4


environment of the school, praise may also beavoided for its tendency to create resentmentamong the nonfavored majority against thefavored few, while criticism may be avoidedfor its tendency to encourage alienationamong the nonconforming few against theconforming majority.

The written rules framing interaction in theclassroom also emphasized operational fun-damentals related to orderliness and workperformance. Every teacher had a set of rulesthat he or she used to set behavioral guide-lines. Most teachers posted these rules ontheir classroom walls, along with lists of therewards for good behavior and the conse-quences for misbehavior. The two domains ofclassroom life that were the most likely to becovered by these rules were “respect for otherstudents” and “following directions.” Rules inthese domains were found in approximatelytwo-thirds of the classrooms. The next mostcommon rule domain, found in one-third ofthe classrooms, concerned work effort. Rulesin this domain included “do your work ontime,” “do all your homework,” and “do yourbest work.” In addition, approximately one-quarter of the classrooms had rules requiringstudents to “respect school property,”“respect teachers and principals,” or “workquietly.” Thus, the six areas most commonlyaddressed by classroom rules all had to dowith operational fundamentals as seen fromthe perspective of the school authorities:order, work effort, and compliance withschool authorities.

The Subject-Matter Curriculum

The subject-matter curriculum is a secondorganizational level of schooling in whichsocialization messages are embedded. Not allcurricular materials are strongly inscribedwith socialization messages; even in languagearts and social studies, many materials aredirected less to teaching values than to pro-viding information or awakening a sense ofcuriosity about the world. Thus, stories maygive information about interesting andunusual occupations, such as movie directoror environmentalist. They may seek to createa sense of wonder and interest in learningabout outer space or unusual animals, for

example. Or they may help students under-stand the world by, for instance, discussinghow people find their way around a city.

At the same time, it is clear that manyvalue-related messages are incorporated intothe language arts and social studies curricula.Our content analysis of the language arts andsocial studies texts used in the two districtsindicated that approximately three-quartersof the stories and lessons included value-rele-vant messages. It is here that both traditionalvirtues, such as persistence and responsibility,and modern values, such as appreciating cul-tural diversity, come most explicitly into playin the life of the classroom.

The value messages found in the languagearts and social studies curricula were a blendof the new and the old. All the second-gradetexts included many messages that encour-aged the students to recognize that peoplehave different special talents, that the countryis made up of people from many differentbackgrounds, that it is important to under-stand and to appreciate these different cul-tures, and that we all depend on other peopleand should learn to work together in a coop-erative spirit. In addition to emphasizingthese modern values, the second-grade litera-ture texts also included many messages con-nected to such traditional virtues as therewards of hard work, persistence, andcourage in the face of hardships. These mes-sages were frequently found in adventure sto-ries, such as Survival at Sea. The same mixedset of values appeared as dominant themes inthe fifth-grade literature text adopted by bothpublic school districts.

In contrast, the fifth-grade social studiestext adopted by both districts provided a rel-atively conventional treatment of Americanhistory from the period before European set-tlement through the Civil War. Themes relat-ed to diversity and tolerance, the ways of lifeof different peoples, and the importance ofinterpretation from multiple points of viewwere certainly apparent in sections of thistext. Yet these themes received less attentionthan did technological changes, trading rela-tions, social customs, and defining historicalevents that are presumed to be important toall Americans. In the chapters on colonialAmerica, for example, the text included such


standard topics as witchcraft in Salem, tradein New England, the Stamp Act, and the rati-fication of the Constitution.

The appreciation of cultural diversity alsocame up at times in classroom projects andholiday celebrations. Most teachers in thesample, at a minimum, assigned a projectrequiring students to trace and discuss theirancestry. Many posted maps with pins repre-senting the ancestral homes of students intheir classrooms. Holidays have become animportant vehicle for celebrating culturaldiversity. Martin Luther King’s birthday andCinquo de Mayo serve as opportunities to dis-cuss the achievements of African Americansand Mexican Americans. Most schools nowcelebrate cultural diversity during theChristmas season as well; the old sentimentsof “peace on earth and goodwill to men”have become an entry way to a new outlook,“goodwill to cultures.” At Halloween, someteachers ask students to bring in ghost storiesfrom their families’ countries of origin. Severalof the schools celebrated a separate“International Day” in which ethnic dress andfood were featured.

Teachers have many reasons for wantingto encourage students to appreciate theirown cultures and those of their classmates.One fifth-grade teacher in District B observed,“I’ve had some Hispanic students [who]would denigrate their own culture . . . whosaw Mexican culture as something they wantto escape from and not understand.” Anothersaid: “It is important to show students not tobe afraid of difference. When I taught sixthgrade, each student did a report on a differ-ent country and prepared some food fromthat country. They may have thought thefood from other countries was strange at first,but trying different things led them to appre-ciate them more.”

Multiculturalism has become so dominantan aspiration in these classrooms that theterm is often applied to stories and lessonswith traditional themes simply because themain characters are girls or members ofminority groups. Some teachers in our sam-ple, for instance, described as “multicultural”both a story about an African American girlwho perseveres, in the face of the resistanceof her peers and teacher, to play Peter Pan in

the class play and a standard assimilationstory about a Chinese girl who feels the ten-sion between her Chinese culture and hernew American life. This mislabeling suggeststhat the multicultural orientation of contem-porary primary schools is indistinguishable inmany ways from the schools’ long-standingcommitments to achievement and assimila-tion. Traditional themes remain important,even if they are sometimes mislabeled byteachers as reflecting commitments to cultur-al diversity.

Routine Classroom Practices

In discussions of classroom socialization, theterm the hidden curriculum has been used todescribe the routine, embedded practices ofclassroom life that shape children’s orienta-tions in ways that are consistent with thedemands of adult life. These practices are athird organizational level in which socializa-tion messages are embedded. This curriculumis said to be hidden because, unlike the sub-ject-matter curriculum, it directs students’attention through invisible means, ratherthan through overt and explicit instruction.Because they are not explicitly stated, thevalue orientations encouraged by the hiddencurriculum must be inferred. Yet there can belittle doubt that orientations to the world areshaped as much or more by daily repetitionas by didactic practices and exhortation (see,e.g., Bourdieu 1979).

The elements of the hidden curriculumemphasized in classic studies by Dreeben(1968) and Jackson (1968) continue to beimportant features of schooling. Children stilllearn the values of individualism and achieve-ment in their daily assignments and frequentevaluations. Children still learn patience fromwaiting in line for lunch and recess or to drinkfrom a water fountain, and they still learn tocope with evaluation by the constant testingthey encounter in the classroom. At the sametime, our observations and discussions withteachers suggest that the hidden curriculumof schooling has expanded. In this section, wecall attention to three increasingly importantroutine features of schooling: (1) tokeneconomies, (2) group projects, and (3) activ-ity centers and rotations.


Token Economies The classrooms we studiedno longer rely exclusively on obedience to theteachers’ authority to gain compliance.Instead, they also rely on symbolic rewardsthat are convertible into material goods, dis-tributed through a token economy, toencourage approved forms of character andconduct. Strikingly, every teacher in our sam-ple but one used such incentive systems,based on token economies, to motivatedesired behavior. In exchange for doing theirwork on time, keeping out of trouble, and fol-lowing class rules, individual students andtable groups were given points, marbles,stickers, or other tokens that they could even-tually trade in for candy, pizza, or class par-ties. Teachers say that these rewards helpthem to recognize every student in theirclassroom “for something” at least severaltimes a month.

Although these token economies directlyreflect the importance of behavioral psychol-ogy as a control strategy, we believe they ulti-mately reflect the significance of materialrewards and the market economy inAmerican society. Several schools made theconnection explicit, by handing out“Greenbucks” or “Scholar Dollars” that couldbe accumulated and exchanged later for mer-chandise. Some teachers explicitly set up agame environment in which the studentswere “paid” for performing well and “paid”the teacher if they broke a rule. At the end ofthe week, the totals were counted, and if any-one reached a certain level, the teacherbrought in ice cream and candy for all.Rewards, said one second-grade teacher, “aresomething they get excited about and [are]something they can share with their family.”

Group Projects Group projects, activity cen-ters, and rotations reflect another new condi-tion of classroom life: The isolated learner in aregimented classroom is no longer the mostcommon presence in school. Group activitiesplayed a significant role in the majority of theclassrooms we visited. During a school week,table groups of four to six students may dis-cuss their journal entries together, help eachother with a difficult exercise, or design andexecute a science or social studies projecttogether. For the average teacher in our sam-

ple, group learning activities accounted fornearly 20 percent of the instructional timeduring a typical school week, higher than theamount of time spent on individual seat work.Indeed, only whole-class instruction(accounting for 25–30 percent of the weeklyinstructional time for the average teacher inour sample) ranked higher in use as aninstructional strategy.

Group activities encourage some studentsto receive the support they need from peers,rather than authorities, and allow other stu-dents to develop leadership skills. Manyteachers see the need to work cooperativelyas being explicitly linked to the work that stu-dents will be doing in later life, and some seecollateral advantages as well. One fifth-gradeteacher in District B said, “I tell them they willhave to do this in the future . . . work with alldifferent kinds of people. . . . I ask them: ‘Howdo you think adults are able to work withtheir peers?’” Another fifth-grade teacherobserved, “A lot of other things are interrelat-ed [with group work], including developingintegrity and appreciation of individual differ-ences.”

Activity Centers These teachers also adoptedinstructional strategies that increased varietyand choice during the school week and asso-ciated increased variety with higher levels ofstudent engagement. “You have to keepthings moving,” said one fifth-grade teacherin District A, “or you are going to lose manyof them.” Activity centers played a role inthree-quarters of the classrooms we studied.These centers are places in the classroom thatstudents can choose to go when they havefinished their assigned work or through whichthey can rotate as part of the normal instruc-tional day. The computer may be one activitycenter; the art table another. A third activitycenter may be set up to ask students to solvea challenging logical puzzle. In the class-rooms that used activity centers, the teachersreported that an average of just over 10 per-cent of the instructional time during the weekwas spent in these centers.

Rotations Some schools also introduced vari-ety into the classroom through rotations.During rotations, students from one class-


room move to the classroom of anotherteacher who is the school’s expert on a par-ticular subject matter—often science, art, ormusic in which specialized talents are at apremium. In our sample, approximately halfthe teachers said that their students partici-pated in rotations, usually for only a smallpart of the instructional week. Even this limit-ed use of rotations is high when compared tothe one-teacher-per-class norms of the past.

Nor were these the only ways in whichthese schools communicated the values ofvariety and change. To provide students withvaried instructional settings, nearly everyteacher in our sample also incorporated workin the library and/or computer lab into his orher weekly schedule. In their reading assign-ments, the teachers also tended to movequickly between genres as a means of increas-ing variety. Language arts textbooks includeda highly varied set of materials, all in relative-ly short snippets. Units might include a shortpoem, a news story, a short story, a folk tale,or a scene from a play to perform, butlengthy works were not in evidence.

Like the routines emphasized by earlyinvestigators of the hidden curriculum, thesenew routine practices—token economies,group projects, activity centers, and rota-tions—encourage distinct orientations to theworld and are consistent with the demands ofcontemporary adult society. Token economiesencourage utilitarian motivations and reflectthe increasing importance of material incen-tives as a form of social control. Group pro-jects encourage comfort with collaborationand reflect the increasing collaborative char-acter of work in many middle-class occupa-tions. Activity centers and rotations encour-age outlooks favorable to variety and choiceand the capacity to move easily betweenmany fast-changing activities. These outlooksare consistent with the fast-paced, multipletask environments that many middle-classadults face in their jobs and with the symbol-ic environment of mass entertainment andmarketing.

Schoolwide Programs

Schoolwide programs are a fourth level ofschool organization in which socialization

messages are embedded. The values associat-ed with the schools’ efforts in this area reflecta management philosophy that encouragesevery student to feel a sense of identificationwith the school and at the same timeattempts to maintain order and minimizeconflict among students.

The schools used a number of means toencourage a sense of inclusiveness throughidentification with the behavioral ideals of theschool. All the schools provided gift certifi-cates (usually at local supermarkets or restau-rants) for students who were nominated bytheir teachers for exemplary conduct. Thesecertificates were distributed at school assem-blies. Six of the eight public school principalssaid that every student in the school would berecognized “for something” at some timeduring the year. All the principals emphasizedthe importance of public recognition forbuilding the self-esteem of students, but itseems likely that creating a sense of identifi-cation with the school is even more impor-tant as a means of promoting the academicgoals of the school and as a way of reducingthe number of potentially alienated students.Half the schools provided additional rewardsfor students who were “caught doing good”by a staff member at any time during the day.These rewards included first-in-line-for-lunchpasses, tickets redeemable for prizes, and“caught-doing-good” pencils. A variety ofcolorful names have been adopted for schoolprograms that reward heroes and heroines ofconduct: “Tigerrifics,” “Lion’s Pride,”“Thumb’s Up,” and the like.

If the ideals of participation, respect, andself-esteem were promoted by programsaimed at maximizing students’ involvementwith the schools’ behavioral ideals, other for-mal programs were used to minimize trouble.All the schools we studied controlled behavioroutside the classroom with sanctions as wellas rewards. These sanctions were based on aformal set of schoolwide rules barring taunt-ing, physical violence, and the presence ofdangerous substances and weapons onschool grounds. All but one of the publicschools had adopted a formal conflict resolu-tion program, such as “Peace Path,”“Peacebuilders,” or “Resolving ConflictCreatively.” In addition, all the schools partic-


ipated in a state-sponsored drug educationprogram, known as DARE (Drug AbuseResistance Education), and all the schoolsoffered “pull-out” counseling programs forstudents who were identified as being trou-bled by family, social adjustment, or behav-ioral problems. The importance of these pro-grams to the schools can be measured bytheir costs. Each of these programs requiredextensive teacher training, and each cost theschools several dollars per student.

The principals said that they felt compelledto offer inclusiveness programs and conflictresolution programs because many studentswere perceived to be unprepared to interactpeacefully in the ordered environment of theschool. One principal in District A said: “Wedo have a problem. Children respect eachother less and less, and parents are too busyto get involved. When they are asked to inter-vene, they say, ‘I don’t have time.’ We’ve hadto pick up the pieces. . . . [The parents] workall day. They’re tired, and they don’t want tohave to deal with discipline.” Another princi-pal said: “Look at some of the parents wehave. They come home at night and say, ‘Ican’t be responsible to feed or take care ofchildren because I’m too stressed.’ Theneglect of parents like these [is] hinderingtheir children. . . . It’s a huge frustration forthe schools and . . . sad for all of us.” Conflictresolution programs are directly related to thebasic organizational interest of the schools inmaintaining an orderly environment. Fromthe principals’ perspective, other availableprograms (such as character education curric-ula) can appear, by contrast, to be unneces-sary “frills.”

Uses of Public Space

Socialization messages can also be embeddedin the uses of public space through visual dis-plays or oral rituals. In the schools we studied,these means were used only infrequently. Thislow level of use may reflect the desire ofschools to avoid public displays of value com-mitments that may offend parents or taxpayerswho are interested primarily in academics orthat may encourage cynicism among students.

Apart from the widespread practice ofposting classroom rules, few walls were

adorned with images and messages that wereconcerned with values. A small number ofclassrooms featured pictures of famousAmericans who were women or members ofminority groups. One room included picturesof athletes and words associated with the val-ues of sports, such as determination, sports-manship, courage, and resilience. In addition,principals at two of the schools said theyoccasionally hung banners on the schoolgrounds that focused on values, such asresponsibility and respect, which were illumi-nated with familiar cartoon characters. Onlyone school included value messages on thepencils, pins, cups, and T-shirts it sold to stu-dents and parents for fund-raising purposes.This school decorated pins with “PRIDEPaws,” with “PRIDE” standing for “personalresponsibility in daily efforts.” This slogan wasthe school’s emblem; it appeared on theschool’s awards and was, according to theprincipal, “talked about all the time.” Twoother principals said that they had includedsuch messages in the past. Instead ofattempting to instill adult values, some of theschools appealed to peer values. T-shirts forone school, for instance, were decorated withthe motto: “Where the cool go to school.”

The few oral and verbal rituals connectedto socialization tended to encourage defer-ence to authority more than any other behav-ior or value. Students at all the schools wererequired, for example, to be quiet duringdaily announcements by the principals overthe public address system. Students stood atattention for daily flag pledges, and manyteachers used ritual means of maintainingquiet, such as sounding a bell or raising anindex finger. One fifth-grade teacher inDistrict A called out the word “Salami” (shortfor “Stop and Look at Me”) when he wantedstudents to pay attention to him. Only a fewclassrooms and schools engaged in activeefforts to build a value consensus throughverbal rituals. Two schools used a chant thatthe students were asked to repeat on occa-sion in classes and assemblies. One of thesechants was called the “Jag Code” (for theschool’s jaguar mascot): “I am respectful, Iam prepared to learn, I take responsibility.”The other was, “You can do it if you put yourmind to it.”


The schools’ relative restraint in using pub-lic space to promote values may encouragethe sense among some critics that schools aredoing little in the area of socialization. Uses ofpublic space, after all, are highly visible tooutsiders. But this view overlooks the volumeand range of socialization messages that arefound in every other arena of classroom andschool life.

INFLUENCES ON SCHOOL SOCIALIZATION MESSAGES

In this section, we present an analysis of thesources of the socialization messages wefound in these 64 classrooms. This analysisemphasizes three themes. The first themeconcerns the centrality of the underlyingorganizational interests of schools. The sec-ond theme concerns the ways in which socialforces can influence the schools’ repertoire ofsocialization messages. In particular, ouranalysis suggests two ways in which societalvalues may enter the school: through socialmovement activism institutionalized by thestate or through the changing expectationsof students and their parents based onchanges in the organization of adult middle-class lives. The third theme concerns theorganizational shaping of these environmen-tal influences. When new values enter theschool, they are, we believe, in every caserefracted through the prism of the schools’underlying organizational interests.

The Centrality of the Schools’Organizational Interests

The organizational interests of schools areshaped by their purposes and the major chal-lenges that schools face. Schools are produc-tion-oriented bureaucracies whose clienteleare not yet mature and who represent a mixof backgrounds and personality types. Theseimmature and heterogeneous students mustwork in group settings where distractionsloom large. The schools have had long-stand-ing interests in maintaining order and mini-mizing trouble, derived both from their pro-duction orientation and from the immaturity

of their clientele. The schools’ emphasis onenergetic and persistent hard work followsfrom the underlying purpose of schooling—the transmission of school knowledge in afashion as efficient and effective as these con-ditions of instruction allow.

In recent years, schools have developednew interests. Clearly, schools were not alwaysinterested in celebrating the contributions ofevery single student to the classroom andschool community. Indeed, in the past, disin-terested and marginal students were activelydiscouraged from continuing with theirschooling (Tyack 1974; Tyack and Hansot1982). In all likelihood, as students spend moreyears in school, schools experience greaterincentives to encourage the commitment of allstudents. In addition, the philosophy of pro-gressive education (which arose, not inciden-tally, at a time when secondary schooling wasbecoming the norm) helped to convince edu-cators that the interest of students must becaptured, rather than commandeered. Thisphilosophy has led to an increasing emphasison finding ways to avoid boredom in the class-room. Schools also developed interests, overthe course of recent generations, in creating asense of identification between all studentsand the school community. In part, such iden-tifications help to reduce alienation and there-fore the potential for trouble. In part, they mayalso be valued as a means of improving theachievement orientation of socially or academ-ically marginal students.

Many of the socialization messagesexpressed most frequently in our study reflectthis set of historically developed organization-al interests. The classroom interaction dataare well explained by the schools’ long-stand-ing priorities on the maximization of orderand industriousness. Schoolwide conflict res-olution programs reinforce these values whileresponding to a perceived decrease inparental discipline. The emphases on varietyand choice we found in classroom practicesreflect the newer priorities of schools in cap-turing the interest of all students. Theemphases in schoolwide programs on respectfor others, participation, and building self-esteem reflect the schools’ interest in encour-aging identifications between students andthe school community.


Sources of Societal Influence

Not all the findings of the study, however, canbe accounted for by an emphasis on the cen-trality of the schools’ underlying organization-al priorities. This is particularly true of many ofthe behavioral priorities and values we foundin both the subject-matter curriculum and the“new hidden curriculum” of the schools westudied. To explain these findings, it is neces-sary to turn attention away from the organiza-tional interests of the schools to examine theways in which values originating outside theschools are incorporated by the schools.

Our analysis suggests that new values enterthe schools in one of two ways: (1) throughthe successful advocacy of social-movementand educational activists supported by gov-ernmental officials and (2) through the chang-ing experiences and expectations of middle-class citizens as mediated by the popularity ofnew pedagogical philosophies. The valuesassociated with multiculturalism are a goodexample of the first means by which new val-ues enter the schools. Many of the valuesassociated with the newer elements of the hid-den curriculum, such as the use of tokeneconomies and group projects, are goodexamples of the second. We use these exam-ples to illustrate the two processes throughwhich we hypothesize that new values andbehavioral priorities are incorporated into theschools.

Process 1: Educational Activism Insti-tutionalized with State Support The back-ground forces encouraging multiculturalismin the 1970s and 1980s are clear. One impor-tant factor is that the non-Hispanic white pro-portion of the population dropped from 90percent to 75 percent between 1950 and1990. In many urban centers, people of colornow make up the majority or the near-major-ity of the population. Another important fac-tor is globalization. East Asian, European, andNorth American firms are tied togetherthrough complex networks of joint owner-ship, joint capitalization, and franchising andlicensing agreements. Financial markets havebecome fully internationalized among thewealthier countries, with changes in onestock exchange affecting the other major

exchanges. Travel and tourism continue togrow as part of the global economy, andother forms of international exchange—fromscholarly conferences to international peace-keeping forces—have also become common-place. Continued global integration meansthe growth of trade and exchange in otherregions of the world (see, e.g., Brint 1998).

These forces of demographic change andglobalization created conditions favorable tomulticultural, rather than monocultural, out-looks. However, to be successful, social move-ments must mobilize and become institution-alized. Multiculturalism was, in its early days,very much the child of the civil rights andfeminist movements. Traditions of activismand generational conflict, which were carriedover into the educational arena, played a crit-ical role in its rise. As Gates (1992:19), the lit-erary scholar and a participant in these con-flicts, wrote: “Ours was the generation thattook over buildings in the late 1960s anddemanded black and women’s studies pro-grams and now . . . has come back to chal-lenge the traditional [curriculum].”

It is important to emphasize that educa-tional movements are rarely successful unlessthey eventually receive the support of thestate. In the case of multiculturalism, institu-tionalization occurred both informally andunder the aegis of the state. By the late1980s, many U.S. states (beginning withCalifornia in 1987) added principles in theircurricular guidelines that required multicul-tural and gender-fair perspectives. By themid-1990s, a near-majority of states hadadopted such guidelines (Rosenfelt 1994).

Multiculturalism is not the only recentsocial movement to become incorporatedinto classroom socialization practices. The“character education” movement, althoughmuch less successful than the multiculturalmovement, has similarly been promoted byeducational activists—indeed, partly as areaction to the schools’ emphasis on diversi-ty—and it, too, has relied on governmentalsupport in those states in which it has beenmost successful (S. Glazer 1996).

Process 2: New Practices Reflecting Changesin Middle-Class Lives If we take as a premisethat in relation to values training, schools are


essentially middle-class institutions, we can seehow new features of the hidden curriculummay be connected to changes in the organiza-tion of middle-class adults’ lives. Whereas theclassic elements of the hidden curriculum pre-pared students for adult lives of individualistachievement and bureaucratic regulation, thenew elements prepare students for a “dual soci-ety” that is organized along market andbureaucratic lines in its work activities andalong entertainment and consumerist lines inits leisure activities. Classroom token economiesare clearly connected to the dominant incen-tives offered by the surrounding market econo-my. Group projects are connected to the col-laborative nature of much contemporary work,particularly in professional and managerialoccupations. And, of course, the enjoyment ofvariety and choice are important features of theconsumer economy.

We hypothesize that new routine practicestypically enter the schools in the followingway: As society changes, children and theirparents develop new expectations. Theschools find it advantageous to address theseexpectations in order to maintain commit-ment. Pedagogical practices that resonatewith these expectations, therefore, have agreater chance of gaining a foothold in theschools than those that do not. Thus, broadsocial changes in the organization of middle-class lives are typically carried into classroomsthrough the popularity of pedagogical move-ments with which they show a close affinity.From this perspective, token economies mayultimately reflect the importance of marketrewards in American life, but they are encour-aged more immediately by the influence ofbehavioral psychology in contemporary edu-cational philosophies.7 Similarly, the rise ofjoint and collaborative activities in adult worklives may be the ultimate condition fromwhich new expectations of the importance ofteamwork arise, but the popularity of “coop-erative learning” philosophies is the immedi-ate source of the schools’ recent emphasis ongroup learning opportunities.

The Organizational Filter

New ideas and values have a chance tobecome popular only if they fit or, at least, do

not significantly threaten the organizationalpriorities of schools. Conflict resolution pro-grams address issues that are close to the fun-damental interests of schools in minimizingtrouble, and they have consequently becomemore popular than many other programs thatare potentially available to schools. Similarly,an emphasis on building self-esteem can helpto make every student feel a part of theschool community, another fundamentalorganizational interest in today’s publicschools. By contrast, the emphasis of conser-vative reformers on traditional values strikes aless resonant chord from the perspective ofthe schools’ main organizational interestsbecause this emphasis does not necessarilylead to the improvement of order, the mini-mization of trouble, or a more inclusive levelof identification with the school community.8

Schools also tend to moderate the force ofsocial activism in line with their interests inorderliness and getting all students to identi-fy with the school. If one considers the rangeof ways in which multiculturalism could havebeen embedded in the schools, it is clear thatit has been institutionalized only in a limitedform. An extensive form of institutionalizationmay involve using multicultural material in allaspects of the curriculum. It may involveadvocacy of the doctrine of cultural relativismor even of the doctrine of European whites asoppressors. (For a study of challenges basedon such alternative forms, see Binder 2000.) Itmay also involve programs to address differ-ences in the learning styles of members of dif-ferent groups. In the classrooms we visited, ithas meant none of these things. Instead, sup-port for multiculturalism (and the underlyingvalue of cultural diversity) has been expressedin one or two class projects a year about eth-nic origins and minority achievers, a handfulof stories and lessons about minority culturesor nonwhite characters, and cross-culturalholiday celebrations.9

In the limited form in which it has beeninstitutionalized, multiculturalism is far from adivisive influence in the schools. Instead, itencourages an outlook of inclusiveness thatfits well with the schools’ desire to encourageall students to identify with the school com-munity. Through multiculturalism, the ethnicand national-origin differences among stu-


dents can be both acknowledged and recon-ciled with two other principles that are fre-quently expressed in contemporary schooldiscourse—“everyone is special in his or herown way” and “underneath our differences,we share many things.”

Under these circumstances, it would besurprising if a significant conflict existed inthe schools between advocates of multicul-tural education and advocates of traditionalvalues. And, in fact, we found virtually no evi-dence of such a “culture war” in our samplepopulation. When we divided the 64 teachersinto three groups—“traditional-values conser-vatives,” “multicultural liberals,” and “com-biners”—on the basis of their responses to allour interview questions, we found slightlymore traditional-values conservatives thanmulticultural liberals, but 80 percent of theteachers fell into the group who were com-fortable combining the two emphases.10

DISCUSSION

In this concluding section, we evaluate theimages of school socialization messages heldby cultural conservatives and critical socialtheorists. We then describe a new way ofthinking about school socialization messagesthat emphasizes not the conflict between tra-ditional virtues and modern values, but themodification and blending of the two. Wealso discuss a problem we observed in theway values are communicated in the schools.This problem has to do with redefinitions ofvalue concepts along lines suggested by theschools’ organizational interests.

The Blending of Old and NewMessages

Our analysis suggests that the advocacy ofmany traditional values has not been lost intoday’s schools. Such traditional virtues ashard work and responsibility continue to beat least as important as modern values ofdiversity, teamwork, variety, and choice.When we asked the teachers in our samplehow they would rank the importance of sevenfrequently mentioned purposes of schooling,for example, they ranked “developing charac-

ter traits like responsibility and hard work”higher on a 10-point scale than any otheractivity of schools, including “developingskills and knowledge in curriculum areas” (seeTable 3). Moreover, demands for orderlinessand work effort clearly continue to dominateteacher-initiated interaction with students inclassroom instruction.

At the same time, it is fair to say that notall traditional virtues remain equally impor-tant in today’s schools. Those who havelamented the decline in the teaching of val-ues in American schools have usually beenconcerned with three sets of values that oncefound a prominent place in school readersand everyday instruction in the schools: (1)Judeo-Christian ethical values, which includedhonesty, fairness, kindness, considerateness,and concern for the less fortunate; (2) civicvalues, which included patriotism, bravery,law-abidingness, and participation in com-munity and civic life; and (3) entrepreneurialvalues, which included industriousness, thewise use of time and resources, reliability,planning for the future, responsibility, and thecapacity for self-directed activity. This clusterof values has been described as reflecting thesignificance of Protestant, republican, andentrepreneurial influences in the nation-build-ing efforts of elites in 19th-century America(Meyer, Tyack, Nagel, and Gordon 1979;Tyack and Hansot 1982).

Assuming that this characterization is cor-rect, the findings of this study suggest thatcertain virtues that have been historicallyassociated with the entrepreneurial ethos—hard work, responsibility, reliability, self-con-trol, individualism, and self-direction—remainimportant in today’s schools, but that Judeo-Christian ethical virtues and republican civicvirtues have declined in importance. Thesetrends may reflect, as some have argued, thedeclining influence of the dominant statusgroup of Protestant-republican nationbuilders on the ideas of school administratorsand the rising influence of bureaucraticauthority (Tyack and Hansot 1982). Thedecline of republican civic virtues may alsoreflect, to some degree, the movement froma “heroic” to a “prosaic” stage of nationalismin the United States and other advanced soci-eties (Kamens 1992).


Although it is clear that teachers are activein maintaining order and work discipline intheir classrooms, we are nevertheless skepti-cal of the portraits of the classroom “discipli-nary regime” offered by some critical socialtheorists who have been influenced by thework of Foucault (1965, 1977). By concen-trating exclusively on classroom restrictionsand work demands, these critics miss boththe indulgent qualities of today’s classroomsand the range of other values conveyed inthe schools. In the classrooms we studied,teachers maintained control with a lighttouch more often than not, and they wereextremely sensitive to the role that schoolingcan play in damaging students’ self-esteem.The modern primary school classroom, withits many activities, group projects, constantchange, and frequent celebrations, can bedescribed as a regimented space only by rig-orously limiting attention to one part of thewhole story.

What, then, would be a more accurate char-acterization? In the minds of most teachers,new values do not replace or compete witholder values. For this reason, the dominantsocialization ideology of the schools should be

characterized neither as “traditional” nor as“modern” but, rather, as a blend of the two. Itcan be accurately described as “pluralist neo-traditionalism”—pluralist because it embracescultural differences, traditionalist because itendorses a number of traditional virtues, butneotraditionalist because some traditionalvirtues have lost prominence (see Table 4). Theroutine practices of classrooms similarly show ablending of the old and the new. The oldworld of bureaucratic organization and indi-vidual achievement clearly finds a place inthese classrooms—universalistic standards,specialized competencies, and individualachievement are as important as ever. Yet newemphases on material rewards for conformity,group work, choice, and variety are also evi-dent.

Our analysis shows further that differentsocialization messages are conveyed at differ-ent levels of classroom and school organiza-tion. Messages originating in the organiza-tional priorities of the school are expressedprimarily through teacher-initiated interac-tions, through the classroom rules framingthese interactions, and through schoolwideprograms. These messages emphasize order-

Table 3. Teachers’ Ratings of Selected School Priorities, by Level of Importance, on a 10-Point Scale (percentage; N = 64)

Rating

10 8–9 7 or BelowCharacteristic (High) (Low)

Developing character traits like hard work and responsibility 77 18 5

Developing knowledge and skillsin curricular areas 63 31 6

Developing children’s self-esteem 59 33 8

Helping children to learn to appreciate other people’s cultures 50 31 19

Helping children to expressthemselves well in written work 44 50 6

Helping children to expressthemselves orally 36 52 12

Developing children’s interests innonacademic curricular andextracurricular activities 11 47 42


liness, hard work, respect for others, andactive participation. They reflect organiza-tional priorities that have to do with themaintenance of order, the minimization oftrouble, the encouragement of work effort,and the promotion of a sense of identificationwith the school by all students. Overlaid onthese organizational priorities are value mes-sages originating in the broader society thatare expressed primarily through the subject-matter curriculum and through the routinepractices of everyday classroom life. Thesemessages combine emphases on some tradi-tional virtues, such as persistence in the faceof adversity and personal responsibility, withsuch modern values as appreciation of cultur-al diversity and delight in variety and choice.For new societal values to be accepted by the

schools, they must be consistent with the fun-damental organizational priorities of theschools. Curricular emphases on culturaldiversity are, for example, only one way topromote the schools’ interest in inclusiveness,but they are consistent with these interestsand can therefore be incorporated, providedthat they do not threaten other fundamentalpriorities.

The Organizational Redefinition of Value Concepts

If there are problems with the socializationmessages conveyed in contemporary school-ing, these problems have little to do, webelieve, with the decline of traditional moral

Table 4. Elements of “Pluralist Neo-traditionalism”

Pluralism Neo- Traditionalism

New interest in cultural Diminished Values Continued emphasis on awareness in a diverse society Judeo-Christian ethics orderliness

New emphasis on the ability to Civic-nationalist values Continued emphasis on“get along with” people unlike hard work, industriousnessoneself

Transmuted ValuesRespect: from Continued emphasis on

New emphasis on ability to kindness, politeness responsibilitycooperate with others on joint to zones of projects noninterference Continued emphasis on

the wise use of time and resources

Self-esteem: frombased primarily onaccomplishments Continued emphasis onto based primarily self-discipline, self-controlon support fromadults

New Means of ControlCognitive direction,rather than praise and criticism

Token economy systemsas supplements to personalcontrol by teachers


messages or with a contest between tradi-tional virtues and modern values. Instead, wewould highlight an entirely different problem,one that is consistent with the organizationalanalysis we have proposed here. Becauseschools address behavior and values in waysthat are strongly influenced by their organiza-tional priorities, many distortions are possiblein their interpretation and use of value con-cepts. In our study, we saw a number ofexamples of such distortions. Among themost significant examples were the schools’uses of the concepts of citizenship, self-esteem, and respect. We believe that societalunderstandings of these concepts have beeninfluenced—not always positively—by theredefinitions given to them in the school envi-ronment. Using the concepts of citizenship,self-esteem, and respect, we present illustra-tions of what we mean by the schools’ redef-inition of value concepts and indicate why wethink it is a problem.

Virtually every teacher we interviewed saidthat schools should be teaching good citizen-ship. When we pressed the teachers to discussthe meaning of citizenship, however, fewerthan 15 percent mentioned the active side ofcitizenship—voicing views on public issuesand participating in political life. Many moreteachers gave school-based definitions of citi-zenship that emphasized “acting responsibly”and “getting along with others.” Other fre-quent definitions of citizenship referred to“working hard” and “showing respect forothers.” Thus, the definitions of citizenshipthat most of the teachers gave were closelyrelated to the schools’ interests in maintain-ing order and work effort and minimizingtrouble. Several teachers made this connec-tion explicit: “It’s important for public schoolsto develop respectful . . . hardworking citi-zens,” said one fifth-grade teacher in DistrictA.“[At this school], students who are good . .. respectful citizens are given ‘Good Bear’tickets.” More troubling still were the 11teachers who emphasized the most passiveforms of citizenship: following rules; respect-ing authority; and believing in the laws, thegovernment, and the Constitution. Thus, onesecond-grade teacher in District A said, “Yes,it’s important for schools to help studentsbecome good citizens. Schools need to teach

rules and that you have to follow the rules. . .. Schools [follow] guidelines. Students needto follow guidelines.”

The most common school definitions ofcitizenship contrast sharply—and, in our view,inappropriately—with accepted definitions ofcitizenship in democratic political theory.These latter definitions emphasize attentive-ness to public affairs and active participationin community and political life, includingprotest, when necessary, in addition to thespecific obligations citizens owe to the state.

The great majority of teachers we inter-viewed thought that the development of chil-dren’s self-esteem was an essential purpose ofschooling (see also Meyer 1987). It is clearthat most teachers no longer believe that self-esteem comes exclusively from meeting thechallenges of the external environment. Nor,however, do they fully adopt the therapeuticmodel of self-esteem so often ridiculed by cul-tural conservatives—the view that self-esteemdevelops solely from regular attention to chil-dren’s feelings, combined with strong anduncritical support from adults. Instead, teach-ers indicate some confusion about the relativeimportance of validating accomplishments;many think that meeting challenges is impor-tant to self-esteem but less important thanfeeling the support of others. Thus, at anextreme, a fifth-grade teacher in District Bsaid, “When I concentrate on doing math, Idon’t get as far as when I concentrate ondoing self-esteem and then doing math.”

Again, we believe that the schools’ inter-ests have led to a subtle redefinition of animportant concept. Schools have an interestin developing commitment among their stu-dents. As one consequence of this interest,many teachers now attempt to recognizeevery student “for something” at least a fewtimes a month, and many principals attemptto recognize every student “for something”at least once during the year. Confidence-building activities and recognition “for some-thing” may help to build a sense of commit-ment to the classroom community and theschool, but they are less likely to help stu-dents build a durable sense of self-confidencethan a mix of support and the successfulaccomplishment of challenging tasks.

Perhaps more than any other concept,


respect has become the dominant ethicaltouchstone in contemporary schooling. It isused constantly by school authorities todescribe how students are expected tobehave toward one another. Only a fewteachers, however, continue to emphasizeconsiderateness, the just appreciation of thequalities of others or other ceremonial aspectsof respect. One second-grade teacher inDistrict B who did said, “I would like them toact kindly to one another, and I remind themwhat are appropriate things to say to a per-son, like ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’. . .Consideration is very important, and it is oneof the easiest traits to model.”

Instead, for most teachers respect is theexpectation that students will not taunt orbother others, will keep their hands to them-selves, and will defer to authority. In thissense, the meaning of respect has also beenredefined by the schools’ organizational pri-orities; it has become another means of mini-mizing trouble and maintaining order. A sec-ond-grade teacher in District B told us, forexample, that “the issue of respect comes upcontinuously” in her class: “Students will bephysical with each other, touching, kicking,hitting, taking up others’ personal space.”Because the term respect suggests qualities ofconsiderateness and the just appreciation ofothers, its use allows the schools to attach anaura of thoughtful regard to their underlyinginterest in avoiding conflict. Terms like civillyminimal attention, zones of noninterference,and deference to authority would be moreaccurate than respect to describe the actualethical expectations of many of today’sschools.

CONCLUSION

The major contribution of this article hasbeen to provide a framework for understand-ing the volume and content of socializationmessages expressed in today’s schools. Thisframework specifies five levels of classroomand school organization in which socializationmessages are embedded. It links the behav-ioral ideals expressed at two of these levels—teacher-initiated interactions in the classroomand schoolwide programs—to the schools’

interests in maintaining orderliness and workeffort, minimizing trouble, and encouragingstudents to identify with the school. It linksthe values expressed at two other levels—theformal curriculum and the routine practices ofeveryday classroom life—to a blending of oldand new cultural influences. The frameworkspecifies two ways in which new values canenter the schools—through the influence ofsocial movements that are institutionalizedwith governmental support or through theadoption of pedagogical philosophies thatare consistent with changes in adult middle-class life experiences. This framework allowsfor a more comprehensive approach to thestudy of school socialization messages thanhas been possible thus far. At the same time,the specific findings reported here need to bevalidated on national or additional regionalsamples of classrooms and schools.

The second contribution of this article hasbeen to raise questions about the images ofschool socialization found in the writings ofcultural conservatives and critical social theo-rists. These two sets of critics focus on chan-nels of socialization that best support theirpositions—the formal curriculum, in the caseof cultural conservatives, and teacher-initiat-ed interaction, in the case of critical socialtheorists. We find their conclusions one-sidedeven in relation to the channels they examineand, above all, incomplete because of theirlimited focus. The final contribution of thisarticle is to draw attention to a problem ofsocialization in today’s schools: the tendencyof school authorities to define concepts, suchas citizenship, self-esteem, and respect, to fitthe organizational priorities of the school atthe expense of older and more precise under-standings of the terms.

NOTES

1. Reviewing these studies, the education-al historian Tyack (1999:79) speculated that“the national [identifying symbolism] hasbeen enlarged rather than abandoned.” Bythis, he meant that new values, such as theappreciation of cultural diversity, have beenadded to traditional socializing messagesemphasizing values like hard work and


responsibility. But Tyack observed that theevidence was not yet in on the content andform of moral education in contemporaryschooling.

2. These studies have an affinity with thework of an earlier generation of reformerswho criticized the authoritarian tendencies ofschool socialization practices (see, e.g.,Freidenberg 1959; Goodman 1960; Neill1960). However, they are more concernedwith power than with the issue that motivat-ed earlier critics: the potential of schools tolimit human potential.

3. Although we are confident of the rank-order differences we found, three limitationsof the coding procedures should be noted.First, during observation pretests, we wereunable to achieve complete interrater reliabil-ity. Messages that were coded by one raterwere not always heard by another, and in afew cases, messages were coded differentlyby different coders. Second, because ourobservation periods focused on periods ofwhole-class instruction, they are not entirelyrepresentative of interaction during the entireday. Less than a third of the total class timewas spent in whole-class instruction in mostof the classrooms we studied. Finally, it isimportant to distinguish between the fre-quency and dramatic value of socializationmessages. Some important socializationevents are dramatic but are so rare that wewere unlikely to catch them. For example, aclass resolution of a cheating controversy maymake an impression, but it may happen onlyonce a year. Frequency has a certain weight,but so may the comparatively rare dramaticevent.

4. The high-SES schools as a group weresomewhat more likely to emphasize characterand hard work than were the other schools.In one analysis, we grouped the two highest-SES schools in District B with the two privateschools and compared them to the otherschools in the sample. The teachers in thehigh-SES schools were significantly more like-ly (p < .05) to rank the teaching of charactertraits as a very important purpose of schoolsand to urge students to work harder in class-room interactions (p < .10). They were morelikely, but not quite at a statistically significantlevel, to say that issues of responsibility came

up frequently in class. In addition, teachers inDistrict B, the predominantly middle-class dis-trict, showed a greater tendency to empha-size the “modern virtues” of diversity andindividual uniqueness (p < .10). We interpretthis finding as reflecting the teachers’ desireto counter the possibility of insularity in mid-dle-class communities and their greater com-mitment to encouraging the individual char-acteristics of students.

In District A, by contrast, more basic issueswere at stake. In this predominantly working-class district, some teachers said that theyrewarded students for washing in the morn-ing, eating their breakfast, and brushing theirteeth. Because of the insecurity of the envi-ronment, the teachers in District A were morelikely to warn against following the crowd inpotentially dangerous activities. They werealso more likely (though not by a statisticallysignificant margin) to encourage students totake pride in their own group’s culture.

Differences related to age were moreapparent than were differences related toSES. It is not surprising that quite a bit moresocialization work went into teaching secondgraders than fifth graders. The second-gradeteachers were more likely to work on the con-fidence of their students, to help them avoidtrouble, and to encourage them to develop asense of responsibility. In addition, they weremore likely to rank the development of self-esteem (p < .05) and skills in oral expression(p < .10) high as important purposes ofschooling. These responses indicate thatmany second-grade teachers are concernedthat their students do not learn habits of pas-sivity that will be difficult to break in lateryears. The second-grade teachers were alsomore likely than the fifth-grade teachers tosay that issues of following the crowd (p <.05) and responsibility (p < .05) came up fre-quently.

5. One school stood out as a clear exceptionto this generalization, however. We were struckby the amount of attention given to traditionalmoral education in the leading private schoolwe visited. This school is self-consciously mod-eled along the lines of the “St. Grottelsex”boarding schools in New England. As in theseschools, the teaching of values is an explicit,well-spelled-out, and highly institutionalized


element of the school’s mission and structure(Cookson and Persell 1985). The school’s mis-sion statement includes the following passage:“[E]ven greater than our concern for academicshas been our determination to do a very old-fashioned thing, to build character in our chil-dren—to stress honesty, courtesy, responsibility,and a concern for others.”

Our respondents described every teacherat the school as “highly aware” of this aspectof the school’s mission. The school guaran-teed this awareness most visibly through itsrequired chapel talks. Each week a particularvirtue (such as sportsmanship, punctuality,compassion, or honesty) took a turn as thetopic of the week. On each day of the week,a student from one of the upper-grade class-rooms gave a talk on that week’s highlightedvirtue. None of the public schools we visitedremotely resembled this elite private school,where traditional moral instruction was thor-oughly interwoven with the life of the school,most visibly in the daily chapel talks given bythe upper-grade students.

6. The schools’ interest in order and effortparallel those of employers and presumablycontribute to the development of a disci-plined labor force, as many historians andsocial scientists have emphasized (see, e.g.,Bowles and Gintis 1976; Callahan 1962;Giroux 1981).

7. Other social factors, such as the excep-tional diversity of the population, may alsoplay a role in the popularity of tokeneconomies in southern California primaryschools. Pure normative control may be moredifficult to sustain in the face of high levels ofcultural diversity.

8. The most popular of the “character edu-cation” programs, Michael Josephson’s “char-acter counts” curriculum, had been adopted,according to the Josephson Institute’s esti-mate, in some 500–600 communities by themid-1990s (Healy 1996), well under 1 per-cent of the public schools in the country.

9. It is interesting that not one of theteachers in our sample expressed views con-sistent with the idea that all cultures are ofexactly equal importance—a strong form ofcultural relativism that some conservative crit-ics consider to be prevalent in the schools.

10. The interviews included a number of

questions addressing both sides of the valuesquestion. Several questions asked teachers todiscuss their views of multicultural curriculaand appreciation of cultural diversity as ateaching goal. Another question asked teach-ers to rate the importance of building chil-dren’s self-esteem on a scale of 1 to 10. Otherquestions asked teachers to rate the impor-tance they attached to traditional values, suchas responsibility and hard work, and howoften they addressed issues like honesty, fair-ness, and respect for others in class. Whenteachers gave responses indicating a positiveorientation toward both “modern” and “tra-ditional” values, we classified them as com-biners. When teachers indicated oppositionto one set or the other, we classified them aseither traditional-values conservatives or mul-ticultural liberals. The teachers in these twolatter categories tended to be critical of theperspective of those on the other side. Forexample, one traditional-values conservativesaid, “Teachers get down on teachers like mebecause our focus is the curriculum. I’ve seenteachers focus so much on self-esteem andbuilding self-esteem . . . that they lose [thesubject matter materials] that should betaught.” One multicultural liberal, a fifth-grade teacher in District B, said, “We should-n’t be saying to students, ‘We want you tobecome Americans’ [because] being anAmerican is many different things. . . . Youhave to be proud of who you are. . . . Peoplesay they don’t want to be judged because ofrace or ethnicity, but they are.”

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Steven Brint, Ph.D., is Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside. Hismain fields of interest are education, professions, political sociology, and theory. He is currently con-ducting a National Science Foundation-supported study of continuity and change in American col-leges and universities, 1970–2000.

Mary F. Contreras, MA, is a graduate student, Department of Sociology, University of California,Riverside. Her main fields of interest are public policy, education, and gender. She is a consultant fora women’s rights advocacy organization in Washington, DC.

Michael T. Matthews, MA, is a graduate student/researcher, Department of Sociology, Universityof California, Riverside. His main fields of interest are applied sociology, program evaluation, crimeprevention, and urban sociology. He is conducting a federally funded evaluation of family preser-vation and family support programs in Riverside County, California.

The authors thank the California Educational Research Consortium for funding to support this study.They also thank Joyce Epstein, Richard Ingersoll, Corinne McKamey, Douglas Mitchell, John Modell,and Rodney Ogawa for comments that improved the quality of the article and Elizabeth Hansotand David Tyack for intellectual support at an early stage of the study. Address all correspondenceto Dr. Steven Brint, Department of Sociology, University of California, Riverside, Watkins Hall 2144,Riverside, CA 92521; e-mail: [email protected].

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