Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ROBERT
DREEBEN
Harvard University
While it may or may not be true that the most important changes in the learner are those
which may be described as cognitive, i.e., knowledge, problem-solving, higher mental proc
esses, etc., it is true that these are the types of changes in students which most teachers do
seek to bring about. These are the changes in learners which most teachers attempt to gauge
in their own tests of progress and in their final examinations. These, also, are the changes in
the learners which are emphasized in the materials of instruction, in the interaction between
teachers and learners, and in the reward system which the teachers and the schools employ.
There is a brief treatment of the characteristics of learning environments but with primary
emphasis on teaching techniques in George G. Stern, "Measuring Non-cognitive Variables
in Research on Teaching," (Ibid., pp. 425-433).
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214
where they are expected to act as if they were conforming to these norms
whether they actually accept them at a particular time or not. Through such
participation, it is my belief, pupils will in time know their content,7 accept
them as binding upon themselves, and act in accordance with them in ap
propriate situations. How schooling contributes to the acquisition of these
norms will be discussed in the following pages.
In speaking of independence, achievement, universalism, and specificity
as norms, I mean that individuals accept the obligations, respectively: to
act by themselves (unless collaborative effort is called for) and accept per
sonal responsibility and accountability for their conduct and its conse
quences (independence); to perform tasks actively and master the environ
ment according to standards of excellence (achievement); and to acknowl
edge the right of others to treat them as members of categories often based
on a few discrete characteristics rather than on the full constellation of them
representing the whole person (universalism and specificity).
In one sense, full adult status, at least for men, requires occupational em
ployment; and one of the outcomes of schooling is employability. The abil
ity to hold a job involves not only adequate physical capacities but the ap
propriate psychological skills to cope with the demands of work. The re
quirements of job-holding are multifarious; most occupations, for example,
require among other things that individuals assume personal responsibility
for the completion and quality of their work and individual accountability
for its shortcomings and that they perform their tasks to the best of their
ability. Public life, however, extends beyond occupational employment. Al
though people work in their occupational capacities and in association with
others (as clients, patients, customers, parishioners, students, and so on in
their occupational capacities), they also have non-occupational identities
as voters, communicants, petitioners, depositors, applicants, and creditors, to
name a few, in which people are classified similarly as members of the same
category based on a small number of specific characteristics irrespective of
how they differ in other respects.
"The prime social characteristic of modern industrial enterprise," Goode
observes, "is that the individual is ideally given a job on the basis of his abil
ity to fulfill its demands, and that this achievement is evaluated universal
istically; the same standards apply to all who hold the same job." 8 Societies
in which industrial enterprise is the primary form of economic organization
tend to have occupational systems characteristically organized around normative
7
I do not imply that accepting a norm as binding upon oneself implies the ability to
formulate its underlying general principle verbally.
8
William J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: Free Press of
Glencoe, 1963), p. 11.
2l6
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from the household will not be honored in the classroom, that however alien
they may seem, the tasks that school presents must be confronted and will
hopefully come to represent new sources of gratification. T o effect such
changes, the school must have more resources than grades and goodwill in
its kit of sanctions.
Resources available for sanctioning derive initially from two structural
characteristics of classrooms: the visibility of pupils and their homogeneity
of age. Classrooms are public places in that their membership is collective
and visible. Many activities are carried on out loud and in front of every
body (reports, recitations, replies to questions, discussions, praise, chastise
ment, laughter); pupils perform publicly and are judged openly by the
teacher and by other members of the class.11
The similarity of pupils in age is important for at least three reasons. First,
age represents an index (even if inexact) of developmental maturity, and
by implication, of capacity;12 and even though children of the same age vary
greatly in what they can do, age is still used as a common shorthand to gauge
the assignment of tasks, responsibilities, privileges, and the like. Second, it
provides classrooms with a built-in standard for comparison, a fixed point
indicative of the level of those capacities directly relevant to the activities
in which pupils are engaged. Each pupil, then, can be compared and com
pare himself with all others because the comparisons can be anchored to the
standard. Third, it allows each pupil the experience of finding himself in
the same boat with others in terms of the characteristics of their social sur
roundings and in the way they are treated by teachers.
Since many classroom activities are in effect judged in public, the pupil
is bombarded with messages telling him how well he has done andwith a
short inferential leaphow good he is. If he doesn't take the teacher's word
for it, he need only look at the performance of others of the same age and in
the same circumstances. The school, in effect, plays on his self-respect. Each
pupil is exposed and vulnerable to the judgments of adults in authority and
of his equalsthose who resemble him in many respects.13 If the child at
11
Formal grades, both for assigned work and for general evaluation of performance over
several months' time, are customarily given in some degree of privacy; once pupils receive
them, whatever confidentiality the teacher maintains in assigning grades usually tends to be
short-lived. Pupils themselves turn private into public knowledge, and parents have been
known to do the same.
12
Perhaps the social expectations for and beliefs about the capacities of similar-aged
children arc narrower than their actual capacities (however these are measured). If so, age
is an exaggeratedly "good" index of equal capacity even if the "goodness" represents a selffulfilling prophesy. There is some controversy about the usefulness of the term "capacity"
among psychometricians, but for present purposes, it is beside the point since people often
think in terms of children's capacities and act accordingly.
13
"Remember that you are as good as any manand also that you are no better. . . . [But]
the man who is as good as his neighbors is in a tough spot when he confronts all of his neighbors
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they adopt those patterns as the right ways to actthat is, they value them.14
The Learning of Social Norms
The social properties of schools are such that pupils, by coping with the se
quence of classroom tasks and situations, are more likely to learn the prin
ciplessocial normsof independence, achievement, universalism, and spec
ificity than if they had remained full-time members of the household.
Independence. Pupils learn to acknowledge that there are tasks to be done
by them alone and to do them that way. Along with this self-imposed obliga
tion goes the idea that others have a legitimate right to expect such inde
pendent behavior under certain circumstances.15 Independence has a widely
acknowledged though not unequivocal meaning. In using it here I refer to a
cluster of meanings: doing things on one's own, being self-reliant, accepting
personal responsibility for one's behavior, acting self-sufficiently;16 and to a
way of approaching tasks in whose accomplishment under different circumstances one can rightfully expect the help of others. The pupil, when in
school, is separated from family members who have customarily provided
help, support, and sustenancepersons on whom he has long been depend
ent.
A constellation of classroom characteristics and both teacher- and pupil
actions shape experiences in which the norm of independence is learned.
14
For empirical confirmation of the fact that experience in the performance of particular
tasks can produce changes in preferences, beliefs, and most importantly in values (norms)
and their generalization from one situation to another without verbal instruction in the
content of those outcomes, see Paul E. Breer and Edwin A. Locke, Task Experience as a
Source of Attitudes (Homewood: Dorsey Press, 1965), especially chapter 6. A statement of
the argument of how the actual performance of a task can effect changes in normshow
it should be performedis beyond the scope of this paper.
15
My emphasis here differs from Parsons' in that he views independence primarily as a
personal resource: ". . . It may be said that the most important single predispositional factor
with which the child enters the school is his level of independence" (Parsons, op. cit., p. 300).
Although independence is very likely such a predispositionwhether it is the most impor
tant single one is mootit is part of the school's agenda to further the development of
independence to a point beyond the level at which family resources become inadequate to
do so.
16
Winterbottom, for example, lumps independence and mastery together; the indices she
uses to measure them involve ostensibly distinct phenomena in that the mastery items refer
to tendencies toward activity rather than independence. Marian R. Winterbottom, " T h e Rela
tion of Need for Achievement to Learning Experiences in Independence and Mastery," in
John T. Atkinson (ed.), Motives in Fantasy, Action, and Society (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van
Nostrand Co., 1958), pp. 453-78. As a definitional guideline for this discussion, I have followed
the usage of Bernard C. Rosen and Roy D'Andrade, " T h e Psychosocial Origins of Achieve
ment Motivation," Sociometry, XXII No. 3, 1959, 186, in their discussion of achievement
training; also, David C. McClelland, A. Rindlisbacher, and Richard DeCharms, "Religious
and Other Sources of Parental Attitudes toward Independence Training," in David C.
McClelland (ed.), Studies in Motivation (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1955),
pp. 389-97.
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In addition to the fact that school children are removed from persons with
whom they have already formed strong relationships of dependency, the
sheer size of a classroom assemblage limits each pupil's claim to personal
contact with the teacher, and more so at the secondary levels than at the ele
mentary. 17 This numerical property of classrooms reduces pupils' opportuni
ties for establishing new relationships of dependency with adults and for
receiving help from them.
Parents expect their children to act independently in many situations but
teachers are more systematic in expecting pupils to adhere to standards of
independence in performing academic tasks. There are at least two addi
tional aspects of classroom operation, however, that bear directly on learn
ing the norm of independence: rules about cheating and formal testing. First,
as to cheating. The word itself is condemnatory in its reference to illegal
and immoral acts. Most commonly, attention turns to how much cheating
occurs, who cheats, and why. But these questions are of no concern here
(though obviously they are elsewhere). My interest is in a different prob
lem: to what types of conduct is the pejorative "cheating" assigned?
In school, cheating usually refers to acts in which two or more parties par
ticipate when the unaided action of only one is expected and pertains pri
marily to instructional activities. Illegal and immoral acts such as stealing
and vandalism, whether carried out by individuals or groups, are not con
sidered cheating because they have no direct connection with the central
academic core of school activities. Nor is joint participation categorically
proscribed; joint effort is called cooperation or collusion depending upon
the teacher's prior definition of the task.
Cheating takes many forms, most of which involve collective effort. A par
ent and a child may collaborate to produce homework; two pupils may pool
their wisdomor ignorance, as the case may bein the interest of passing an
examination. In both cases, the parties join deliberately; deliberateness,
however, is not essential to the definition. One pupil can copy from another
without the latter knowing; nor need the second party be a person, as in the
case of plagiarism. T h e use of crib notes, perhaps a limiting case, involves
no collusion; it consists, rather, in an illegitimate form of help. These are
the main forms of school cheating of which there are many variations, rou
tine to exotic. Thus, actions called cheating are those closely tied to the instructional
17
Thus, the ratios of children per adult in households are 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 in one-,
two-, four-, and six-child families, respectively, with two parents present; comparatively few
families have more than six children. In classrooms, the ratios of different children per
adult at the elementary and secondary levels are approximately 28.1 and 155.8, respectively;
The American Public School Teacher, 1960-61, Research Monograph 1963-M2, Research
Division, National Education Association, April, 1963, p. 51.
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224
See, for example, Winterbottom, op. cit., pp. 453-78; Rosen and D'Andrade, op. cit.,
pp. 185-218; and Fred L. Strodtbeck, "Family Interaction, Values, and Achievement," in
David C. McClelland et al., Talent and Society (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1958),
PP. 135-91.
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principle of universalism than the lower school levels because pupils within
each track, and therefore of roughly similar capacity, move from classroom
to classroom, in each one receiving instruction in a different subject area
from a different teacher. They discover that over a range of activities they
are treated alike and that relatively uniform demands and criteria of evalua
tion are applied to them. That is to say, by providing instruction from dif
ferent teachers in different subject matter areas and by at the same time ap
plying criteria for judging performance and task difficulty which remain
roughly constant within each track and across subjects, the school makes it
possible for pupils to learn which differences in experience are subordinated
to the principle of categorization. The elementary classroom, oriented more
to instruction in different subjects by a single teacher, does not provide the
necessary variations in persons and subjects for a clear-cut demonstration
of the categorical principle.
Although the idea of categorization is central to the norm of universal
ism, there are additional and derivative aspects of it. One is the crucial dis
tinction, widely relevant in industrial society, between the person and the
social position he occupies. A frequent demand made on individuals is to
treat others and be treated by them according to the identity that their posi
tions confer rather than according to who they are as people. Schooling con
tributes to the capacity to make the distinction (and the obligation to do so)
by making it possible for pupils to discover that different individuals can
occupy a single social position but act in ways that can be discovered as at
tached to the position rather than to the different persons filling it. Even
though all members of a given classroom find themselves in the same cir
cumstances, are about equal in age, and resemble each other, roughly, in so
cial characteristics related to residence, they still differ in many respects
sex, race, ethnicity, and physical characteristics being among the most ob
vious. Their situation, therefore, provides the experience of finding that
common interests and shared circumstances are assigned a priority that sub
merges obvious personal differences. The same contention holds for adults.
Male and female adults are found in both school and family settings; in
school, pupils can discover that an increasingly large number of different
adults of both sexes can occupy the same position, that of "teacher." This
discovery is not as easily made in the family because it is not possible to de
termine definitively whether "parent" represents two positions, one occupied
by a male, the other by a female, or a single position with two occupants
differing in sex.26 The school, in other words, makes it possible for pupils
26
Children are not left completely without clues in this matter since they do have other
adult relatives who can be seen as distinct persons occupying the same position. Yet, families,
even of the extended variety, do not provide the frequent and systematic comparisons char
acteristic of schooling.
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to distinguish between persons and the social positions they occupya capac
ity crucially important in both occupational and political lifeby placing
them in situations where both the similarities between persons in a single
position are made evident and the membership of each position is varied
in its composition.
Regarding the norm of specificity, again the school provides structural ar
rangements more conducive to its acquisition than does the family. First,
since the number of persons and the ratio of non-adults to adults is much
larger in classrooms than in the household, the school provides large social
aggregates in which pupils can form many casual associations (in addition
to their close friendships), in which they invest but a small portion of them
selves. As both the size and heterogeneity of the student body increase at each
successive level, the opportunities for these somewhat fragmented social con
tacts increase and diversify. T h e relative shallowness and transiency of these
relationships increase the likelihood that pupils will have experiences in
which the fullness of their individuality is not involved as it tends to be in
their relationships among kin and close friends.
Second, upon leaving the elementary school and proceeding through the
departmentalized secondary levels, pupils form associations with teachers
who have a progressively narrowing and specialized interest in them. (This
comes about both because of subject matter specialization itself and because
the number of pupils each teacher faces in the course of a day also grows
larger.) Although it is true that children, as they grow older, tend to form
more specific relationships with their parentssymptomatically, this trend
manifests itself in adolescents' complaints of parental invasions of privacy
the resources of the school in providing the social basis for establishing re
lationships in which only narrow segments of personality are invested far
exceed those of the family.
A second facet of universalism is the principle of equity, or fairness (I use
the terms interchangeably). When children compare their lottheir gains
and losses, rewards and punishments, privileges and responsibilitieswith
that of others and express dissatisfaction about their own, they have begun to
think in terms of equity; their punishments are too severe, chores too oner
ous, allowance too small compared, for example, to those of siblings and
friends. Children's comparisons with siblings, who are almost always different
in age, usually prompt parents to resolve the sensed inequities by equaliz
ing age hypothetically. "If you were as young as he, you wouldn't have to shov
el the walk either." "He is only a child and doesn't know any better." The
pained questions to which these statements are replies are familiar enough.
Among children in a family, age is critical in determining what is fair and
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For a general discussion of the concept of "value" and of major American cultural
themes, see Robin M. Williams, Jr., American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960),
pp. 397-470.
32
The hypothetical nature of this discussion should be kept in mind especially since there
has been no empirical demonstration of the relationships between schooling and the accept
ance of norms.
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