Читать книгу Our Social World - Kathleen Odell Korgen - Страница 167

Our education level, our occupation, the house we live in, what we choose to do in our leisure time, the foods we eat, and our religious and political beliefs are just a few aspects of our lives affected by socialization. Applying what we know from sociological research, the evidence strongly suggests that socialization varies by social class (as seen in the example about Japanese children earlier) (Yamamoto 2015).Social class refers to the wealth, power, and prestige rankings that individuals hold in society (Paxton and Pearce 2009). Meso-level patterns of distribution of resources, based, in part, on the economic opportunities created by state and national policies, affect who we become.

Upper-middle-class and middle-class parents in the United States usually have above-average education and managerial or professional jobs. They tend to pass on to their children the skills and values necessary to succeed in the subculture of their social class. Subcultures, you will recall, operate at the meso level of the social system. Subcultural values such as autonomy, creativity, self-direction (the ability to make decisions and take initiative), responsibility, curiosity, and consideration of others are especially important for middle-class success and are part of middle-class subculture (Kohn 1989). If the child misbehaves, for example, middle-class parents typically analyze the child’s reasons for misbehaving, and punishment is related to these reasons. Sanctions often involve instilling guilt and denying privileges.

Working-class parents tend to pass on to children their cultural values of respect for authority and conformity to rules, lessons that will be useful if the children also have blue-collar jobs (Kohn 1989). Immediate punishment with no questions asked if a rule is violated functions to prepare children for positions in which obedience to rules is important to success. Children are expected to be neat, clean, well-mannered, honest, and obedient students and workers (MacLeod 2008). Socialization experiences for boys and girls are also often different, following traditional gender-role expectations of the working-class subculture.

▲ This parent passes on a love for the piano to his young son. Because of the social class of this father, his son is likely to receive many messages about creativity, curiosity, and self-direction.

© Getty/Jeff Randall

Members of each class, as you can see, socialize their children to be successful in their social class and to meet expectations for adults of that class. Schools, like families, participate in this process and socialize children to adapt to the settings in which they grow up and are likely to live. Children’s social class position on entering school, in turn, affects the socialization experiences they have in school (Ballantine, Hammack, and Stuber 2017). The result is the reproduction of class, as young people are socialized into the social class of their parents.

Social class, however, is only one of many influencing agents of socialization. As we saw in Black Men and Public Space (p. 100), race and ethnicity are important factors in socialization, as is gender. We discuss gender socialization in more detail in Chapter 9, but note here that race, class, and gender act as structural constraints on many members of the population, as they receive different messages about who they are and how they should behave. Therefore, it is important to recognize the interplay of these variables in people’s lives.