ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author offers an interpretation of recent and emergent tendencies in self and educational processes in American society. The context in which he sets the empirical narrative is, of course, the larger historical society. However, the author's understanding of the dynamics of that context is not in terms of familiar theories of society—whether Functionalist, Rational Choice, Marxist or Frankfurt critical theory, or current theories of reflexive modernization. The author’s empirical studies of social class-differentiated American high schools reported in Becoming Somebody describe the emptying and fragmentation of different aspects of the social core of the teenaged self. The socially differentiated self processes in school are encompassed in a larger, common process of a historically specific type of institutional rationalization of American schooling. Body education is already a simultaneous sign of defeat, but also of a stirring of a counter-force: energy.
