ABSTRACT
Schools are held together by intersecting moral, political, and social orders. What occurs inside their walls must be viewed as a product of what the participants in this arena bring to it, be they children, parents, instructors, administrators, psychologists, social workers, counselors, or politicians. Schools are best seen not as educational settings, but as places where fate, morality and personal careers are created and shaped. Schools are moral institutions. They have assumed the responsibility of shaping children into right and proper participants in American society, pursuing with equal vigor the abstract goals of that society. The movement of an infant to the status of child is a socially constructed event that for most middle-class Americans is seen as desirable, inevitable, irreversible, permanent, long term in effect, and accomplished in the presence of "experts" and significant others such as teachers, parents, peers, and siblings.
