Chapter 6: Teacher to Parents: Education as Compassion and Power

As Weber suggests, children grow up in a world of adults and take in their actions, emotions, words, and values. For each child this world of adults is both complex and contextual—all that she experiences at home, in the community, at school, and via media, from birth onward. School and home are always different environments in the child’s world, even when the two reflect similar values and beliefs. On many occasions, as the story above implies, these worlds are quite different and in conflict with each other.

In their research, Allais and McKay (1995) find that two different agents play central roles in human socialization: primary socialization, which includes the family and home, and secondary socialization, which is provided by schools, peer groups, and media. The child never takes in this world passively; her socialization is a “joining in,” an active process of response, interaction, and expression—copying, questioning, creating, and denying. This activity begins in the first hours of life, and the child brings a unique frame of reference, the result of this contextual world, into the school she enters. This frame of reference influences the way she approaches every school task, even those construed as academic in nature (Taylor, 1993). As the above story points out, schools’ and teachers’ values may differ from and even clash with those of a child’s home. Nonetheless, the world of home enters the school through the activity of its students.