ABSTRACT
This chapter elucidates that school system which impinge on the classroom situation and focuses somewhat more specifically on the social and cultural themes of a single school. It notes that classrooms do not exist in a social, cultural, or political vacuum. The chapter analyzes that racial composition of the city, its influence on the schools and faculty, the locus of decision making in the system, and its participants. It describes that pervasive racial separation of blacks and whites from one another is to give some context for the discussion of events inside individual schools and classes. The chapter also focuses on the social or cultural themes discernable that appear directly to reinforce notions of the inevitability that some children become winners and others losers. The teachers' periodic discussions of methods of controlling the children and the necessity for doing so reinforced their belief that the children were extermely violence-prone.
