The Child’s Construction of the Social Order of the Classroom

Abstract

During the course of the school day, the student is informed both verbally and non-verbally how an ideal student should respond to the problems and dilemmas of school life. Many children—at least in the early school years— do react to these pressures by presenting at least a countenance of conformity to their teacher’s expectations. However if a steady eye and ear is focussed on individual children, it may be that even the ultra conformists will appear to have adopted their conformity as part of a strategy of “playing it safe”. From present evidence, far from being captives of the teacher, pupils of 9 or 10 years of age do not seem to have accepted nor internalized all of their teacher’s instructions, goals and values. My first clear encounter with this phenomenon came in the course of a study of pupil’s elementary mathematical knowledge. I found there (and since have rediscovered it in numerous forms) that children use original strategies for resolving academic work-problems which clearly do not reflect the way they were “taught” to handle these problems (Osser,1978)