(Illustration by David Plunkert)
Schools are one of the most important places where children learn how to behave in society and where they belong. A new paper by Peter Francis Harvey, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Inequality in America Initiative, examines the ways that two schools, one a private school (“Truman”) serving upper-middle-class children and one a public school (“Brighton”) serving working-class students, transmit different lessons about where their charges fit in the world and what their futures might become.
Harvey took an ethnographic approach to his research, spending three years observing elementary-aged classrooms in the two schools and separately interviewing 101 of the students and their parents and teachers. He was looking for evidence about how schools impose an idea of social station—i.e., “what children are taught about their position and direction in the world,” he writes.
Harvey found that neither of the two schools encouraged their students to see their place in society according to traditional ideas of academic merit. Instead, “children at the upper-middle-class school were taught to see themselves as always-already special because of their internal qualities,” he writes, while “children at the working-class school were taught to see themselves as conditionally good if they adhered to external rules.”
At the upper-middle-class private school that Harvey observed, Truman students imbibing the lesson of their own inherent uniqueness took this idea to its logical conclusion through their classroom behavior. “Routinely, teachers would answer the question of one student, then be asked the same question again (sometimes repeatedly) by other students who had not been listening,” Harvey writes. “Students’ belief in their own uniqueness seemed to crowd out their awareness or interest in others’ contributions.”
Students at Brighton, by contrast, were encouraged to see each other as members of a collective. Teachers cast those who didn’t conform to rules as “bad.” When one girl resisted picking a favorite food during a classroom sharing session, her teacher insisted that she choose just one. The teacher’s “refusal to allow deviation from the rules—one child, one answer—demonstrates Brighton’s collective emphasis,” he writes. “Attempts by students to differentiate themselves from others beyond set limits were publicly labeled by teachers as ‘inappropriate,’ threatening collective buy-in.”
Talent shows offered another window into social station. At Truman, the show lasted for hours and featured dozens of children onstage, including some who were clearly beginners at their chosen skill. “The kids were being taught, ‘You deserve an audience,’ even with little preparation,” Harvey says. Brighton performers, by contrast, had very different expectations. “They prepared, they were anxious, there was something at stake for them,” Harvey says. “It wasn’t expected that they would have an audience automatically.”
These vignettes take on greater importance against the backdrop of larger shifts in how people are judged and sorted in this country. “Societal changes, including increased emphasis on identity in educational institutions’ and employers’ evaluative practices, raise the prospect of similar changes in childhood socialization,” Harvey writes.
Will schools continue to transmit values in the same ways? And what will they teach children about their place in the world? One undercurrent that Harvey found at Truman was the use of lessons on identity and race, and the identity-inflected vocabulary of the American elite, to give students a sense of why they are special. “These kids become fluent in the language of identity and inequality such that they can frame themselves in this language,” he says.
Michela Musto, an assistant professor of sociology at Brown University, noted that Harvey’s ethnographic work with elementary-school children makes the paper unique, because researchers typically study young students by interviewing the adults in their lives or by analyzing their academic records.
“We don’t know nearly enough about how children themselves are producing, reproducing, or challenging inequality in elementary-school classrooms,” she says. “Harvey’s article fills this gap in an important way, by powerfully illustrating how everyday interactions in elementary-school classrooms help shape the different ways young people think of themselves.”
Peter Francis Harvey, “‘Everyone Thinks They’re Special’: How Schools Teach Children Their Social Station,” American Sociological Review, vol. 88, no. 3, 2023.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.