ABSTRACT
The structure, values, and orientations of the pupil world have received much attention from sociologists and the research into schools as organizations supports the significance accorded to the pupils’ informal social system. The goals of the informal system are never explicit. They compensate for the deficiencies the informal social order sees implicit in the pursuit of formal goals. The informal social system can be functional, promoting loyalty or contentment, or disruptive. The formal social system can be supportive of many of the values of the informal social system; this is particularly true in progressive schools and in many junior schools. There is a very clear stress on certain expressive goals, such as the development of personality at its own rate without external pressures, and normative controls are used to achieve these goals. The strong informal pupil system adopts these normative controls, with the result that the expressive elements of the ethos are rigidly enforced by the pupils’ informal social system.
