Abstract
Students in small schools are often confronted with problems which are technically unrelated to the formal socialization goals of the institution. Behind the “kidglove” treatment which many small schools engage in, lies the tendency for “total person evaluation” which often proves stifling and frustrating for students who fail to conform. The “home away from home” character of small schools may be intolerable for students who wish to establish or to maintain some measure of autonomy. Student officers often function as cadres for school administrations. The system possesses attributes which press toward encroachment upon student privacy. Subjective, “personalized” evaluation by administrators may be as punitive to some students as it is charitable to others. From one theoretical perspective, the “goody-goods” are as deviant as the “wild ones.” Specific structural changes in small school systems might increase the correlation between ability and receiving a degree.
This chapter was written by Cynthia Krueger, formerly at the Center of Community and Metropolitan Studies, University of Missouri at St. Louis, and now at the Department of Sociology-Anthropology, Brooklyn College.
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Notes
Gouldner, Alvin W., in Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1954, p. 178, discusses a similar process in the industrial setting. He states: “To put it more sharply, bureaucratic rules seem to be sustained not only because they mitigate some tensions, but also, because they preserve and allow other tensions to persist. If bureaucratic rules are a ‘defense mechanism,’ they not only defend the organization from certain tensions (those coming from close supervision) but they also defend other tensions as well (those conducing the close supervision).” Thus, bureaucratic rules are often a poor substitute for an effective social control system; if the rules solved the problems to which they address themselves, they would assure their own dissolution. In the school setting, establishing a rule prohibiting an action does not eradicate the conditions leading to students’ engaging in that action, much less the conditions leading to the school’s prohibiting it.
Goffman, Erving, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Anchor Books, Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, 1961, p. 180.
Gouldner and Gouldner discuss the “standard of gratificational adequacy, in which we appraise people and their behavior in terms of the enjoyment with which they provide us or the sheer amount of gratification that we experience from them. On the other hand, there is the standard of moral propriety in which we appraise things, people, or actions in terms of the degree to which they conform with our conceptions of the way they ought to or should be.” Gouldner, Alvin W. and Gouldner, Helen P., Modern Sociology, Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., New York, 1963, pp. 569–572.
Some of the effects of the Florence Nightingale heritage have been examined by Whittaker, E. and Olesen, V., The Faces of Florence Nightingale: Functions of the Heroine Legend in an Occupational Sub-Culture, Human Organization, 23, 1964, pp. 123–130.
For a book-length account of different orientations in the nursing field, see Habenstein, Robert W. and Christ, Edwin A., Professionalizer, Traditionalizer, and Utilizer, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, 1955.
Erikson, Kai T., Notes on the Sociology of Deviance, in Becker, Howard S. (Ed.), The Other Side: Perspectives on Deviance, The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1964, p. 14.
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Psathas, G. (1968). Small Schools, Rules and Evaluations. In: The Student Nurse in the Diploma School of Nursing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-40263-4_6
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