ABSTRACT
As the English public schools have shown, group care is not only a means of providing for the disadvantaged; it also can be the making of an elitist establishment intended to convey a mode of life, an ideology in conditions that exclude the distractions and infringements of the outside world. Some have argued that the very isolation needed to give the environment its effectiveness is conducive to deterioration of personal functioning. One environment subjected to such criticism is the Catholic seminary. Keefe's data, gathered in an attempt to respond to this criticism, contain little evidence to support the contention that group life is deleterious to the maturation process of the seminarians despite the generally negative outcome expectations that American society holds for settings of this type. In Chapters 13 and 15 Soviet and Israeli settings are described and positively evaluated, but these settings, unlike the seminary, had functioned in a generally accepting social environment. As extensions of collectivist societies the prophecy for them was success. Not so for the seminary. The seminary data acquire particular significance because they show the possibility of developing an atmosphere within a small societal subsegment that supports group care and shields it from the harmful consequences of pervasive negative expectations.
