ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1977 we returned to Germany to collect a new sample of responses to the Instrumental Activities Inventory and continue our ethnographic work in the Schonhausener Grundschule and the local community. During the nearly ten years since our first intensive study of the school and the collection of our first IAI sample in 1968, much had happened (G. and L.Spindler 1974). A sweeping educational reform had been implemented at both federal and provincial administrative levels. The effects of this reform had just begun to surface at the Grundschule during our 1968 field study. New reading books for the third and fourth grades had just appeared that stressed modern life, high technology, and the realism of contemporary urban life. They were in sharp contrast to the romanticized stories about life in the country and village that children had been reading for several generations.
