ABSTRACT
Learning to live in a classroom involves, among other things, learning to live in a crowd. In three major ways then—as members of crowds, as potential recipients of praise or reproof, and as pawns of institutional authorities—students are confronted with aspects of reality that at least during their childhood years are relatively confined to the hours spent in classrooms. In elementary classrooms it is usually the teacher who assigns coveted duties, such as serving on the safety patrol, or running the movie projector, or clapping the erasers, or handing out supplies. Evaluations derive from more than one source, the conditions of their communication may vary in several different ways, they may have one or more of several referents, and they may range in quality from intensely positive to intensely negative. The relative impersonality and narrowness of the teacher-student relationship has consequences for the way in which authority is handled in the classroom.
