ABSTRACT
This extract has been taken from an analysis of primary schools as social institutions — an analysis written in the first half of the 1960s and informed by a structural-functional approach to the sociology of education. Through discussion of the primary school in terms of social structure, social function and control, and social change, Blyth placed it in relation to the education system and to the wider social structure. Here, he suggests that the primary school discharges four basic roles — instruction, socialization, classification and welfare — to which he adds a fifth, and less clear dimension, that is, the creation of a distinctive, semi-autonomous identity. In discussing the five roles, he draws on his analysis of traditions within primary education, which is featured elsewhere in the source book (pp. 5-8). Though the theoretical perspective adopted here is no longer fashionable, the sociological description offered provides a useful and still recognizable view of the primary school as an institution.
