ABSTRACT
The family is under-studied in all discussions of schooling, and this chapter seeks to open up some of the many important windows into the crucial family–school relationship. It discusses with ethnographic evidence the positive qualities of the family such as love and security, its politics of gender and class, and its negative practices of verbal and physical abuse. It discusses the role of modernity in making schools unable to understand these practices, and finally suggests that schools could function better if they did understand them.
