ABSTRACT
Studies of innovative schools raise similar questions about the power of the school to transform the students' response to schooling and hence to prevent a school counter-culture developing. The most detailed description in an innovative secondary school of the perceptions and behaviours of student sub-groups and their relationships to the wider environment is presented in the study of Metro High School in Chicago. B. Bernstein, in an influential article entitled Open schools, open society', speculated on the implications of 'open schools' for adolescent peer groups. He suggested that in open schools staff and students were likely to experience a sense of loss of structure and with this problems of boundary, continuity, order and ambivalence were likely to arise. Gibbons's vivid description of an open classroom in a New England high school points to a situation very similar to that suggested by Bernstein and highlights some of the unintended consequences for the student in the open school.
