Teaching, Learning, and Schooling in Social Contexts

The Levels of Social Context

Family, neighbors, friends, associates, colleagues, cliques, gangs, clubs, churches, and fellow group members are social relationships that are organized and predictable by social class and its components. The components of social class are income, education, race, culture, and language, which also determine residence patterns of neighborhoods and even buildings. Social networks tend to maintain and reproduce themselves, absent the introduction of some opposing force.

Schools, internationally, are more alike than different. Most organize students by age; faculty is organized by grades and subject matter; and administration is organized hierarchically. Community members are seldom incorporated into the daily life of the school. Each classroom is largely its own domain, although the school culture's expectations and requirements are transmitted to new teachers by the building principal or senior teachers. Like neighborhood culture, school culture tends to maintain, reproduce, and repeat itself.

In small towns, teachers and students are typically from the same social contexts. In urban settings, teachers may be assigned to schools far from their own neighborhoods, where their students are from different social classes, races, ethnic groups, language groups, and cultures. Teachers are largely drawn from social classes that can afford professional education, where their social networks are also formed.

Internationally, classroom social contexts are similar. Students make up the audience; the teacher is performer. Classroom norms are in the range of 90% teacher talk and 10% talk by a small number of verbal, assertive, and competent students. The teacher organizes classroom activities, provides information and instructions, and gives textbook assignments. Individual students are responsible for examinations, in-class work, and homework. Teachers are responsible for enforcing orderly behavior.

Students bring into the school all the habits, values, and social expectations learned in their communities. Even the youngest students already have complex friendships and cliques established in neighborhood and family. Under enforced desegregation, students arrive at school socially organized by their neighborhoods of residence. Students groups reflect the social class, culture, and language sorting of their families and communities. Whenever students have choices (for recess, lunch, assemblies, classrooms, before and after school) members of these “crowds” and cliques draw near to each other to engage in joint activity.

The effect of these typical social contexts of education is perpetuation of the status quo. Social class and ethnicity continue their strong statistical [Page 2141]association with academic achievement, contributing to the intergenerational transmission of poverty. No matter how diverse its population is, the school perpetuates the community's social sorting. Busing students for desegregation—intended as an opposing force—results merely in resegregation in the school cafeterias and all other free-time spaces.

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