ABSTRACT
Socialization is one of the main roles or functions of the primary school according to Blyth’s analysis summarized in the first extract of this section (pp. 185-7). The material reproduced below is written within the same structural-functional framework and examines how children’s socialization into the school’s structure, norms and values is achieved. According to the Newsoms, ‘school is the contact which crystallizes the child’s transformation into a social creature, which formalizes his experience of the peer group and of outside authority, and which presents a new set of demands which may be totally alien to the expectations of home but which are too powerful for the child to reject altogether’. The passage describes how infant children adjust to the dynamic social structure of the primary school (helped by the infant teacher as a key mediator of their experience), how they develop very considerable knowledge of how teachers, fellow pupils and schools operate, and how they acquire an evolving social status. The material for this analysis is derived from the Newsom’s large-scale longitudinal study of child-rearing in Nottingham and complements the authors’ parallel study of the home environment of 7-year-olds (Newsom, J. and E., 1976, Seven Year Old in the Home Environment, Allen and Unwin). For a contrasting interpretation of socialization into school, at least as far as lower working-class children are concerned, see the first extract by Bernstein later in this section (pp. 220-3), and that by Sharp and Green (pp. 251-4).
