ABSTRACT
The teacher,…as well as being the key figure in the child’s introduction to formal learning, also mediates his experience of the school world in which that process of learning takes place; and the school itself serves (for most children) as the earliest model of the complicated patterns of behaviour and social interaction which evolve in the institutional or organizational settings that will continue to be important to a greater or lesser extent as the child grows up…. It is part of the teacher’s role not only to identify herself with the school, but to cause the child to do so too, usually via the transitional stage of himself identifying with her. If the child’s relationship is only with the teacher and not with the school beyond her, she has failed to wean him from the purely personal bond of which the mother was the first model. Eventually the child must familiarize himself with the corporate entity of the school, come to feel that he belongs to it and it to him, and learn in his turn to initiate younger children into its customs and values. In becoming socialized in the school as social institution, children are carried onward by repeatedly experiencing the rhythms and rituals of the school day and the school week, as well as by innumerable encounters with other people who themselves have a known place in the pattern: children from their own class and their own year, children from the ‘babies’
class’ or the ‘top class’, in-between children who are not ‘the big ones’ but yet are bigger than themselves, teachers who are soft and motherly from looking after the little ones, teachers who are bright and brisk from keeping nine-year-olds in order, the head and the deputy head, the school secretary, the dinner-ladies and the caretaker. Through such encounters, in which he may be either participant or observing bystander, the child begins to appraise his own position within the hierarchical age-graded structure of the school as a whole.
