ABSTRACT
This chapter comes to grips with only a small part of the problem of prejudice and the schools. It focuses on the development of patterns of prejudice among teenagers in junior and senior high school—an age, as it seemed to us, when the attitudes that young people will carry into adulthood become stabilized, and also—in American culture—a period of potential youthful idealism when young people should be particularly responsive to democratic influences—if such influences are to he had. The family, the church, and the school—these are the major institutions of society for the socialization of the young, for inducting them into their roles as participants in a social order that is also a moral order. In secular times of accelerating social change, both family and church have suffered attrition in their traditional functions. Families are hardly more accessible to concerted influence than the individual citizens of whom they are composed.
