Answer:
In Canada, children from elementary to high school levels spend about seven hours a day at school for about 200 days of the year. These 1400 hours in the school setting per year do not include extracurricular activities and school preparatory work, like homework. From an early age until adulthood, school is a place where children spend a large portion of their days—and, indeed, their lives. Prior to attending school, children’s main source of socialization comes from their families.
Socialization refers to the ongoing process of learning the expected behaviours, values, norms, and social skills of individuals who occupy particular roles in society. Agents of socialization are the social structures in which socialization occurs. Major agents of socialization include the family and school, but also the media, peer groups, and other major social institutions such as religion and the legal system. Furthermore, socialization can be divided into two types: primary socialization and secondary socialization. Primary socialization occurs within the family and is where children first learn their own individual identity, acquire language, and develop cognitive skills. Within the family, children are socialized into particular ways of thinking about morals, cultural values, and social roles. Of course, the socialization that results from primary socialization rests heavily upon the social class, ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds and attitudes of the family.
Secondary socialization refers to the social learning that children undergo when they enter other social institutions, like school. Characteristics of the school, teachers, and the peer group all influence the socialization of children within school settings. The family still remains an important part of children’s socialization, even when they enter into school. Children, however, will now have other significant people in their lives from whom they will learn the skills of social interaction. In Chapter 2, Mead’s theory of development of the self was discussed. The development of the generalized other, where a child learns to adopt the attitudes of the wider society, occurs in secondary socialization.
The school setting is where the learning of the new role as a student occurs. When children start school, for example, they are socialized to obey authority (i.e., the teacher) and in how to be a student. The overall socialization of children, as theorized by Bronfenbrenner (see Chapter 2), is dispersed into various realms which focus on the different sites of social context that children experience in their lives. Families and schools are major contributors to socialization, but there are other systems of socialization within ecological systems theory. The child interacts with many features of his or her environment which all contribute to the child’s social development. And the grand outcome of socialization is also theorized to be the result of how all the systems interact with one another. In this chapter, however, the main focus is on how schools contribute to the socialization of children.
A major objective of socialization in the school setting is to make a child socially competent. A child must develop skills that allow him or her to function socially, emotionally, and intellectually within the school environment. Within the school setting, social competence is achieved when students embrace and achieve socially sanctioned goals. These goals (e.g., learning to share, participating in lessons, working in groups), when embraced, also serve to integrate the child into social groups at school. Social approval is obtained when children accept the sanctioned goals of the school setting and they are rewarded and reinforced on a consistent basis through social acceptance by teachers and other students (Wentzel and Looney 2006).
