Some Perspectives on the Family as Educator

The family is an arena in which virtually the entire range of human experience can take place.* Warfare, violence, love, tenderness, honesty, deceit, private property, communal sharing, power manipulation, informed consent, formal status hierar­chies, egalitarian decision-making—all can be found within the setting of the fam­ily. And so, also, can a variety of educational encounters, ranging from conscious, systematic instruction to repetitive, moment-to-moment influences at the margins of awareness. Moreover, since almost everyone has had profound experiences within one or more families, judgments of the family are often deeply felt and charged with emotion.

* The formulations reported here have been developed in connection with a project on social networks and educative style going forward under a generous grant from the Spencer Foundation.

The importance of understanding the family is widely recognized by present-day educators, their interest deriving in rather specialized ways from a concern with contemporary social problems. A central focus has been the attempt to de­termine the family's contribution to the outcomes of schooling.¹ Much of this current interest has been associated with the effort to uncover sources of educa­tional failure, particularly those associated with poverty, social disadvantage, or "cultural deprivation." Not surprisingly, a good deal of heated debate has sur­rounded the discussion of these issues. One hears the charge that the sources of failure lie in deficits which children bring with them to school and the counter­charge that the sources of failure lie in the school itself. The "cognitive deficien­cies" of the lower-class home are contrasted with the "hidden curriculum" of the middle-class home. As complex as these issues are in their own right, they are further compounded by issues of women's roles, community control, and the rights of parents in the determination of educational programs.

A good deal of current interest has also been associated with the search for ed­ucational deficits within the home. Particular aspects of family relationships, such as the extent of the mother's verbal fluency or the absence of the father as a role model, have been examined as possible sources of educational deficiencies, espe­cially in the homes of the poor. Indeed, deficits of the lower-class home have sometimes been viewed in extreme terms, with Banfield actually proposing that the solution to the problems of poverty lies in selling the children of the poor to qualified bidders who can offer them a "normal" family environment.² Evalua­tions of middle-class families are often strikingly different from those of lower-class families. Thus, one hears in almost the same breath assertions that welfare mothers should not receive funds that would enable them to stay at home in order to care for their children but that professional women who leave home during the early years of child rearing will inevitably damage their children's psyches.

Granted these controversies, the assumption that the family does exert a signifi­cant impact on the outcome of the child's education has been sufficiently strong in recent years to stimulate a wide variety of intervention programs. Some of these have attempted to modify education within the home, while others have at­tempted to supplement the child's education outside the home or to remove the child from the home at an early age.

Stepping back from these specifically contemporary concerns, one can see that the family is always a setting in which important educational encounters occur. Furthermore, the way in which the educational functions of a society are allo­cated among institutions varies from one time to another. Cremin has referred to the tendency of educational institutions at any given time and place to relate to one another in what he calls "configurations of education."³ Periods of social change often entail fundamental shifts in the character of educational configura­tions and in the relation of the various components to one another. At such times, questions about the allocation of educational functions, among the family and other institutions, are likely to rise to the level of explicit policy concerns. Thus, for example, Dewey argued in The School and Society that because of the move away from the agrarian household, where much of the adult world stood directly revealed before the eyes of the child, the school needed to recreate versions of the adult world to teach what the child had formerly learned in the household.⁴

Beyond the question of the way in which educational functions are divided among the family and other institutions, there is the possibility of extending our knowledge of education in general by examining the richly diversified educational encounters that occur within the family. The problem is to address the family as a setting in which education invariably takes place with questions that are posed in broad and basic terms, and to pursue those questions with methods that enable one to hold emotional reactions and personal values in abeyance when necessary. Ideally, it will be possible to understand the special features of education within the family, while at the same time using this understanding to enlighten and ex­tend our fundamental theory of educational encounters as they occur over the entire range of educative institutions and settings.

the literature on the family as educator

The literature on the family is as rich and diverse as the experience within it. This literature ranges from examinations of minute details of particular facets of the family in specific settings, such as the anthropologist's highly technical studies of kinship terminology,⁵ to broader examinations of the connection between family structures and societal structures, such as the sociologist's more general examina­tions of the impact of social change on family organization.⁶ The literature also ranges widely over regions, climates, and economies, from the anthropological literature on the family in nonliterate societies to the growing contemporary liter­ature on the family in industrial societies.⁷ Moreover, studies of the family in faraway places have had their counterpart in the growing literature on the family among different ethnic, racial, and religious groups within American society.⁸

As might be expected, definitions of the family vary significantly as it is studied in different settings. In societies where the family is embedded in a network of relations with kin and many of the basic social and economic functions of society are organized on the basis of kinship, studies of the family tend not to separate the nuclear family from kin; and indeed within the anthropological literature material on the family can often be found under such varied headings as religion, econ­omy, and politics.

In societies where the nuclear family is viewed as a discrete unit, the focus of attention has ranged from the family as a whole, its ethos, its values, its identity,⁹ to the nature of particular paired relationships, for example, sibling or marital interaction, to specific studies of child-rearing practices.¹⁰ In addition, the organization of the family has been considered with respect to a variety of features such as age grading¹¹ and sex roles.¹² In some instances, attention has been di­rected to relationships within the family, in others, to the family's connections with kin or with other external institutions, and in still others, to the impact on the family of particular intervention systems.¹³

The purposes behind the studies have also varied widely, from those instances in which the formulation of strategies for therapeutic intervention has been the goal,¹⁴ to those in which the analysis of social problems has been the goal,¹⁵ to those in which the extension of scientific knowledge has been the goal, to those in which the deepening of humanistic understanding has been the goal. Inevitably, the purpose has affected the character of the inquiry, the nature of the data, and the mode of presentation.

It is also important to remember that a good deal of valuable material on the family is to be found in literatures that are only partly concerned with the family, for example, studies of the stages of human development such as adolescence.¹⁶ Novels and biographies that deal only in part with the family are another example of related material that should not be ignored.

This wide-ranging literature on the family has been guided by an equally wide variety of frameworks, concepts, and definitions. One recent attempt to set forth some of the more commonly employed approaches includes the structural-func­tional, the institutional, the psychoanalytic, the social psychological, the interac­tional, the religious, the legal, and the economic. Such an enumeration itself raises problems, of course, since these frameworks are neither analytically distinct nor consistent; but it does suggest the diversity of existing approaches to the study of the family.¹⁷

In this wide variety of approaches that has characterized the study of the fami­ly, concepts like socialization, enculturation, and development have been used in ways that inevitably involve questions of education, even when the label "educa­tion" is not explicit.

Socialization, for example, has been defined as "the process by which individuals acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that enable them to participate as more or less effective members of groups and society."¹⁸ Socialization has been further considered as "social learning, not only during childhood, but throughout the life cycle and within each of the various groups and organizational contexts that provide settings for behavior."¹⁹ It has also been seen as including "what people learn," "why they learn it," and "how they learn it."²⁰ Specific mention is sometimes made of teaching within studies of socialization. For example, one field guide for studies of child rearing in various cultures lists "instructing" (including "structuring situations for teaching purposes"; "coaching and demonstrating"; and "training in discrimination of cues") as one category under "techniques of socialization."²¹ From this perspective, socializa­tion and education become virtually interchangeable concepts, although as Getzels points out, there has been a striking discontinuity between the literature on education and the literature on socialization.²²

The concept of enculturation, which has been used to refer to the processes by which the child learns a particular culture, is also closely related to the concept of education and embraces much that might also be described as teaching and learn­ing. Here, however, as Margaret Mead has pointed out, the problem is compli­cated by the fact that enculturation and socialization are often used inter­changeably, although for some enculturation involves "the process of learning a culture in all its uniqueness and particularity," while socialization refers to "the set of species-wide requirements and exactions made on human beings by human societies."²³

Concepts of development also involve questions that have educational dimen­sions. Whether one accepts the notion of a fixed sequence of developmental stages or prefers to conceive of maturational and educational changes over time in less linear sequencing, the idea of individual development over the life cycle is central to understanding the nature of family organization and interaction.²⁴ At the least, the concepts of development and education are closely interrelated, since ques­tions of development concern the nature and limits of teaching and learning.

In searching for concepts that can facilitate examining the ever-changing edu­cational encounters between individuals and their familial environments, the con­cepts of socialization, enculturation, and development all offer potential. Certain approaches that have been particularly concerned with the problem of inter­change between individual and environment are of special significance in this re­gard. Social learning theories, for example, and particularly theories of symbolic interactionism, have concerned themselves with providing a "flexible model for ordering the complex developmental patterns characterizing the child's socializa­tion, by detailing the changing conditions of environmental stimulation in family, school, and peer group settings accompanying this development."²⁵ Even cog­nitive developmental approaches, which have presumed to encompass certain invariant sequences in mental structures, have considered the forms of development at a particular point in time as "the product of the patterning of the interaction between the organism and the environment rather than directly reflecting either innate patterns in the organism or patterns of events ... in the environment."²⁶

Thus, while educational questions have been of continuing significance, at least implicitly, in studies of the family, the literature potentially relevant to familial education is far broader than that which is explicitly categorized under "educa­tion" or even under "family." Therefore, in studying the family as educator one must be prepared to search widely through a considerable range of literature em­ploying a considerable variety of concepts in seeking knowledge that is currently available and in attempting to formulate promising new lines of inquiry.

education within the nuclear family

Although family and kinship are so intertwined in some societies that it becomes difficult to distinguish the nuclear family as a specific object of educational in­quiry, the nuclear family in urban, industrial societies has been the focus of much of the educationally oriented literature on the family. Within this literature, the preponderance of attention has been directed to the education of children by their parents, although this is clearly only one among a variety of relationships that could be examined.

The Education of Children by Parents

While di­verse literatures and concepts offer potential in formulating new lines of inquiry into the family as educator, research does exist that has considered the family with explicit attention to educational questions, particularly the education of children by parents. The research on the education of children by parents has been developed principally in industrialized nations, and some of its features may well reflect the nature of the societies in which the research has been conducted. It has been reported in a literature that is useful in suggesting the extent and form of the family's influence on educational outcomes and in exemplifying a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches.

This literature may be characterized in several ways. For one thing, it has been highly selective in focus. It not only concentrates on the nuclear family but does so in ways that hold in abeyance, or fail to take into explicit account, the influence of kin and others outside the family. This is in marked contrast, for example, to the anthropological literature, where it is often difficult to find descriptions of education by parents that do not at the same time mention other relatives.

With regard to the nuclear family, the literature has tended to focus on specific relations, particularly mother-child interactions, lifting these out of the context of other relations within the family. Fathers have occasionally been considered, as, for example, in studies of the ways in which the father's occupational experience influences his evaluations of his children.²⁷ There has been a good deal of con­troversy—if less research—on the ways in which the father's absence from the home influences educational outcomes. But there has been little direct study of fathers as educators.

This literature has also assumed, either implicitly or explicitly, that parents do exert a powerful and, to some extent, a lasting influence upon their children. Wolf, for example, in looking at what parents actually do in the home as one of the subenvironments presumed to influence general intelligence and academic achievement, has argued that "the home produces the first, and most insistent, influences" on the development of these outcomes.²⁸ Assumptions concerning the decisive impact of early learning are widespread, stemming in part, no doubt, from psychoanalytic thinking. Although there has been a good deal of debate among behavioral scientists concerning the extent to which personality can be modified by later experience, in actual studies of parental influence questions of extent and duration are most often set aside. Moreover, the relation of parental influence to other modifying influences, and the ways in which these are combined over the lifetime of an individual, remain to be investigated.

Where the literature has been concerned with the educational problems of the poor or the "disadvantaged," it has tended to be deficit-oriented. Passow's re­minder notwithstanding, that one should look for "differences," not "defects," in considering the nature of familial education among the "disadvantaged,"²⁹ few studies have inquired into the conditions of optimal growth and development.³⁰ Most often, the emphasis has tended to be negative. Thus, for example, studies have pointed to the lack of verbal facility in lower-class mothers and their failure to phrase statements to their children in terms that include a concept of "why"; to the use of arbitrary authority in the lower-class home and the consequent ab­sence of "praise, positive models and reasoning";³¹ to the employment of physical punishment that "reduces the necessity for cognitive mediation in impulse control";³² to the lack of response to children's questions;³³ and to the absence of "the variety of objects, utensils, pictures, etc., that require labeling and serve as referents for language acquisition in the middle-class home."³⁴

Not surprisingly, in this search for educational deficits stereotypes occasionally intrude. Smith, for example, has pointed to the problems of households in which there is "little or no routine, in which ... parents seldom, if ever, read anything for enjoyment—except to manifest loving care for automobiles, pets, furniture or sports equipment."³⁵ Similarly, Eisenberg has remarked: "They can't watch over their children the way we watch over ours."³⁶ One need not assert the kind of relativism that ends up denying the educational problems associated with poverty and discrimination to point out that at times, particularly when it derives from stereotyped views, the emphasis on deficits may hamper a fuller understanding of the family.

Where the literature has focused on the effects of parental behavior on children, the emphasis has commonly been on cognitive dimensions, especially those pre­sumably associated with attitudes toward schooling and school achievement. Closely related to this emphasis has been a striking concern with outcomes. Fa­milial education has been examined, not with respect to the process as it takes place within the family, but rather in terms of its consequences for the cognitive development and achievement of the child in situations external to the family. Thus, one finds interest in phenomena such as cognitive style, language facility, and the skills associated with the taking of tests.³⁷ Where general personality characteristics are considered, for example, independence, aggressiveness, com­petitiveness, a sense of personal power and control over destiny, or the ability to control impulses, these are seen as related to cognitive achievement.³⁸

Aberle and Naegele have argued that in societies where the parent can neither determine nor predict the child's occupational destiny, the focus of parental con­cern in child rearing is necessarily on broad, general characteristics that are as­sumed to reflect socially desirable abilities (abilities that are assumed to be mea­sured, for example, by school achievement).³⁹ Thus, the focus of research in this area may well be a function of the kind of society in which the research is con­ducted. By way of contrast, the focus of parental concern in other societies may be on specific skills that are visible within the family. Fortes, for example, has de­scribed education among the Tallensi in West Africa, where the worlds of the family and the economy are more closely interconnected and the child's familial education results in specific economic skills. For the Tallensi, Fortes points out, "the social sphere of adult and child is unitary and undivided," with the result that "the child is from the beginning oriented towards the same reality as its parents and has the same physical and social material upon which to direct its cognitive and instinctual endowments."⁴⁰ In such a situation, the outcomes of familial edu­cation need not be examined in terms of the individual's achievement in other institutions but can be seen within the family itself.

Given the pervasiveness of the research interest in cognitive dimensions, it is interesting to note that considerable disagreement has surrounded some of the most frequently examined outcome measures, notably language facility. Thus, while it is widely assumed that "the disadvantaged child manifests greatest re­tardation in the area of language development and verbal functioning,"⁴¹ there has been controversy-over the role of different forms of language. Some investiga­tors have asserted that the "disadvantaged" turn out to be no less skilled verbally than others if their verbal ability is appropriately measured. Indeed, Entwistle has argued that ghetto children may even start school with a greater linguistic sophis­tication than suburban children.⁴² Other investigators have contended that chil­dren who must move from one linguistic structure in the home to another in the school, thereby switching linguistic codes (as happens with "disadvantaged" chil­dren who move from households in which nonstandard English is spoken to schools in which standard English is spoken), are, in fact, exhibiting a special form of linguistic sophistication.⁴³ Thus, while various measures of language facility and communication style have been central to considerations of the outcomes of familial education, there is anything but agreement about the ways in which these outcomes are associated with the family's social class position.

A cognitive emphasis has also been present in studies of parental behavior. Thus, a good deal of attention has been directed to the mother's language facility, the ways in which she converses with the child (or fails to do so), and the informa­tion strategies she conveys to the child.⁴⁴ Wolf, for example, has looked at such features as parental aspirations for the child's education, the parent's own aspira­tions, parental concern for academic achievement, the social pressure in the home for academic achievement, rewards accorded academic accomplishment, parental knowledge of the educational progress of the child, preparation and planning for the attainment of educational goals, parental emphasis on correctness of language usage, opportunities for enlarging vocabulary, and other variables that relate closely to intellectual development and school achievement.⁴⁵ Other investigators have examined dimensions of parental behavior that are at a less cognitive level, for example, maternal nurturance and support in the preschool years, familial warmth and closeness, types of discipline, attitudes toward authority, and the authority structure of the home, but they have done so with the presumption that these dimensions are linked to the child's cognitive development.⁴⁶

One significant characteristic of the literature on the education of children by parents—particularly when outcomes in institutions other than the family are under examination—has been a certain vagueness about the processes by which parental behaviors are linked to educational effects; the process is often implicit and assumed rather than explicit and observed. For one thing, the assumption in many instances is of a one-way influence from parent to child rather than a two-way interaction. The mother, for example, is seen as conveying to the child her image of the school as a distant and formidable institution, and the child in turn is seen as accepting this image. The mother's attitude toward the school and the teacher is presumably one of the "cognitive elements in maternal behavior,"⁴⁷ and the transmission of this attitude from mother to child is presumably the result of direct teaching—Hess and Shipman see it as an aspect of what they have called

"first-day techniques."⁴⁸ The acceptance of this attitude by the child presumably results in the child's passivity in school reflected in the child's view of it as a place in which "one must obey the teacher and follow the rules rather than have oppor­tunity for interaction and learning"⁴⁹—a view that "has indeed been taught by the mother."⁵⁰

In addition, the level of specificity in discussions of linkages between parental behavior and educational outcomes has varied markedly. Wolf, for example, has proposed two quite different (although closely related) sets of home influences, one that is presumed to influence school achievement, the other that is presumed to influence general intelligence.⁵¹ In contrast, other formulations are less specific. In some, the linkage mechanism is seen as a form of modeling or imitation, as in language learning where the child is assumed to develop language patterns similar to those of the mother. In others, processes underlying such modeling or imitation are proposed, for example, the way in which language becomes an expression of status within the family and its relation to the authority structure of the house­hold.⁵² Still other formulations see the linkage as occurring through certain more general personality orientations. In one study, for example, it is believed that a warm and nurturant relationship between the parent and the child is the source of educational achievement, the implication being that a positive parental environ­ment is the source of self-confidence and that self-confidence in turn leads to achievement.⁵³ Yet, another study has advanced the contrary view that an un­satisfactory parental relationship may be the stimulus for achievement.⁵⁴ Both formulations imply that the processes of linkage occur through the ways in which the parent's relation to the child is internalized by the child as part of his or her need system or self-image.

Along with the level of specificity, the element of time has also varied markedly. Thus, in some cases preschool nurturance behavior on the part of the mother is linked with the child's subsequent school achievement, or the family authority structure is linked with the probability that the child will continue on to second­ary school.⁵⁵ In other cases, the time link is much more immediate, with coach­ing and interest in the child's school work presumably having a direct and almost immediate effect upon school achievement.⁵⁶ In still other cases, the time link is vague, as in studies where the extent of parental approval for the child's mastery of tasks is assumed to be significant for the child's achievement orientation, leav­ing open the question of how immediate or long lasting the effect may be.⁵⁷

The approach to measurement has also varied significantly in discussions of linkages between parental behavior and educational outcomes. In some instances, measures of achievement are quite direct, drawing upon school tests or number of years of schooling.⁵⁸ In others, by contrast, outcomes are for all intents and pur­poses derived by implication from parental behavior, and descriptions of what parents do are interwoven with descriptions of the presumed effects on the child. Thus, to take but one example, Strodtbeck, in describing the disciplinary strat­egies of ghetto mothers, remarks that "they reward and punish their children immediately and their children are rarely required to delay gratification," and this "failure to discipline in terms of language symbols" by implication reduces the necessity for cognitive mediation in impulse control.⁵⁹ Moreover, although there have been some notable instances of replication,⁶⁰ similar dimensions have been examined in ways that are sufficiently different from one study to another so that the results are not readily cumulative.

Of special importance is the fact that indices of parental behavior have often been used in highly generalized form. Social class and ethnicity, for example, are assumed to influence parental behavior. Thus, the problems of the impoverished mother in contending with the confusions and dangers of the slum environment are assumed to be the source of such behaviors as a disregard for the child's questions and a more general failure to converse with the child. And a link is then made—most often by implication—between these behaviors and educational out­comes. Boocock, in reviewing the literature on social class and school achieve­ment, has concluded that "the weight of evidence . . . has clearly indicated that the social characteristics of the child's family affect his chances of success at school."⁶¹ Yet the processes by which social class connects with school success, and with success in general, have remained a matter of controversy. One question concerns the influence of the home as compared with the influence of the school. Even with­in the home, it is far from clear how social class and ethnicity actually influence parental behavior, and indeed a number of widely held assumptions are undergo­ing reexamination. Thus, Wolf has argued the need to scrutinize specific environments and subenvironments within the home with a view to determining "what parents do in their interactions with their children rather than what parents are in terms of status level of father's occupation, type of dwelling, source of income, and so forth."⁶² Similarly, Kahl has pointed to the importance within the same social class of differences in parental aspirations for children,⁶³ and Erlanger has questioned the common assumption that working-class parents tend to stress physical punishment while middle-class parents stress psychological punish­ment.⁶⁴ In short, even if the link between social class and school achievement stands up under reexamination, the processes by which social class influences parental behavior and parental behavior produces educational outcomes in chil­dren remain to be understood.

Finally, it is especially significant that the same parental behaviors have been found to produce different outcomes in different situations. Thus, Maccoby re­ports that particular kinds of maternal behavior have been found to relate different­ly to school achievement and intelligence for boys and girls.⁶⁵ This points not only to the need for a fuller understanding of the processes of education within the family but also to the need to see familial education in the context of multiple and ever-changing relationships within the family.

The Education of Parents by Children

It is more difficult to characterize the literature on the education of parents by children, since it is sparse and therefore best described in terms of the dimensions it sug­gests for further study.

As with the literature on the education of children by parents, the literature on the education of parents by children has been selective in focus and has tended to assume a one-way influence from child to parent rather than a two-way interac­tion. Some studies, for example, have explored the effects of child bearing and child rearing on marital satisfaction, concluding in some instances that the effects are positive and in other instances that the effects are negative.⁶⁶ Another study has used cross-cultural data to examine the effect of having children upon the self-evaluations of men and women.⁶⁷ Still other studies have considered the particular effects that handicapped children have on the self-esteem of their parents.⁶⁸

Granted the generalization about one-way influence, however, there are a num­ber of exceptions in which the need to examine interaction between parent and child as a two-way process has been noted on theoretical grounds or has been the basis for specific observations. The theoretical need to reinterpret the direction of effects in studies of socialization has been stated,⁶⁹ and consistent with this argu­ment is the more general research on adult socialization that sees education as a lifelong process, suggesting by implication that parents, although older and more experienced than their children, continue to learn from their children as they enter new parental roles.⁷⁰ Recently, in studies of mother-child attachment, the con­tinued and mutual adaptations of mother and infant have been a theme, and detailed observations have been undertaken of the ways in which the child acts as a shaper of the parent's behavior.⁷¹ Moreover, earlier assumptions about the parent's causal role in the genesis of special psychological conditions, such as schizophrenia, are now being challenged and modified in light of considerations of the child's contribution to the parent's behavior.⁷²

One focus in the literature on the education of parents by children has been on structure, both family structure and more general social structure. Thus, the effects of family size, particularly in the case of large families and families of the disadvantaged, on the child-rearing practices of parents have received attention.⁷³ On another scale, questions have been raised about the connection between stabil­ity and change in broader social structure and education within the family. Thus, Mead has argued that the speed of social change in a society influences the way in which one generation relates to another educationally. In what she calls a "post-figurative society," the experience of children differs so markedly from that of their elders that the elders become in a sense immigrants to a new world and must learn from their children about how to live in that world.⁷⁴ A similar point has been made about the children of the so-called television generation, who have tastes and styles of thought that they present vividly to their parents.⁷⁵ Mead's point about temporal migration is also consistent with historical work on geo­graphic migration, in which the special roles of children as linguistic interpreters and more general interpreters of the new culture to their parents have been por­trayed by a number of scholars, illustrating clearly the possibility of the child serving as educator.⁷⁶

However sparse it may be, the literature on the education of parents by children differs strikingly in the questions it poses from the literature on the education of children by parents. Significantly, the question of outcomes as related to school achievement is not central, suggesting the possibility of other kinds of outcome considerations. The literature also offers suggestions concerning the content and process of familial education. Parents, for example, learn about children, about child development, about teaching and learning, and about strategies of schooling from their children, from their children's activities, and from their children's as­sociations with others. In this sense, contact with the life of a child opens up a new vision of the world, and the full range of the child's activities becomes a potential source of education for the parent. Similarly, the experience of adjustment and readjustment to changes in the child, given the child's comparatively rapid rate of maturation, is another potential source of education for the parent. The fact that interaction with the child inevitably requires continuous shifts on the part of the parent serves as a pressure for continuous learning; and indeed, as portrayals of the immigrant experience suggest, there is much to be discovered about the condi­tions under which the parent may be defined as a learner without losing status or dignity and about the value of face-saving procedures for averting potential em­barrassment. Thus, the literature on the education of parents by children, al­though sparse, suggests not only the need to examine two-way interactions but also the significance of structural factors and processes that have been given com­paratively little attention in the literature on the education of children by parents.

The Education of Siblings by Siblings

Even the most cursory examination of relationships among siblings indicates that they ex­ert profound educational influences on one another. Experience with siblings is virtually universal; even only children often have spouses with siblings or end up as parents of more than one child. If for no other reason than the fact that they are likely to spend a good deal of time in each other's company, siblings un­doubtedly influence one another significantly. Yet much of the research on child rearing and parental influence on children either omits considerations of siblings altogether, or holds sibling composition "constant," or gives it minor attention. In effect there has been little study of the process by which siblings influence each other. Here, as elsewhere, the literature is sparse, generally noncumulative, and narrowly selective in focus.

As with the literature on the education of children by parents, there has been a good deal of emphasis on outcomes. True, certain studies have examined par­ticular features of the process of sibling interaction, for example, the power tactics siblings use with one another,⁷⁷ but in general there has been little concern with day-by-day interactions. Rather, the focus has been on various types of sibling constellation and their bearing on personality characteristics. Thus, for example, Brim's reanalysis of Koch's classic study dealt with the relationship between sib­ling composition and sex role identity,⁷⁸ and more recently Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg have examined the relationships between an individual's position within a sibling constellation and various personality traits associated with mas­culinity and femininity.⁷⁹ The strategic complexities of this line of research be­come apparent when one considers the numerous possible permutations and com­binations of age, sex, and birth order; indeed, an examination of the full range of possibilities is virtually unmanageable, with the result that Sutton-Smith and oth­ers have tended to focus on particular constellations.

As with the literature on the education of children by parents, the research on siblings has also been characterized by a negative emphasis. Probably stimulated in part by psychoanalytic theory—and as an extension of the oedipal triangle— siblings have been seen as rivaling one another for the affection of the parent of the opposite sex. The emphasis on sibling rivalry, doubtless reflecting the continu­ing influence of Levy's classic studies,⁸⁰ has all too often eclipsed other features of sibling relationships.

Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the literature on siblings is the extent to which it is suggestive of questions for future research on familial education. Actually, the studies to date have shown little explicit concern with educa­tion, except for those that have examined the relation between ordinal position (birth order) and personality traits assumed to be associated with educational achievement.⁸¹ But the potential is great. For one thing, the literature on ordinal position suggests that siblings may well mediate parental behavior and attitudes within the family. Thus, the individual's sibling position may influence the amount of verbal exchange with parents as well as the extent and character of various forms of guidance from parents. Then, too, siblings may well serve as models and sources of evaluation for one another. Although there has been little or no re­search on the guidance or instruction given by siblings to each other, Irish has contended that siblings may serve not only as role models for one another but also as challengers and stimulators,⁸² while others have suggested that siblings often use one another in the working out of self-definitions.⁸³ In addition, there are indications in the literature that the size and composition of the sibling group may well create different contexts for socialization from one family to another and that within the same family parents may develop different aspirations for different siblings, depending on sex and ordinal position.⁸⁴ Once again, the educational importance of distinctions and differences among siblings is suggested.

Especially useful are indications in the literature of the ways in which siblings, like peers, may have direct educational influence on one another. It has been suggested, for example, that siblings spend many hours together and share a wide range of activities. Since contacts within the nuclear family tend to be intimate and inclusive, sibling interaction tends to be marked by frankness, informality, cohesiveness, intensity, and extensity. Siblings offer one another a sense of social reality and afford experiences in resolving interpersonal conflict. They involve one another in day-by-day issues of rights, responsibilities, and justice, and provide at the same time a "school of mirrors."⁸⁵ Beyond this, it has also been suggested that siblings may educate one another in ways quite different from parents. Thus, Irish has pointed out that "sometimes siblings are more effective teachers than adults, particularly if youthful skills are involved. Siblings may often understand child­hood problems and new situations better, in some ways, than do the parents."⁸⁶ By implication this suggests that siblings may also engage in educational functions vis-a-vis the school, in setting examples for one another with academic work as well as with the many interpersonal problems of the school community. When one connects these suggestions with cross-cultural data, the possibilities for study are further extended, for example, by the observation that in many societies young children have consistent roles as caretakers of other children (not only siblings but also cousins). In addition, there are indications that sibling roles with respect to education may well last throughout the life cycle, although they obviously change from one stage to another. Research on kinship structure, for example, has suggested that sibling solidarity is a characteristic of bilateral kin­ship systems (those in which ties are traced through both the father and the moth­er) and that in such systems siblings may continue to have extensive significance for each other throughout life.⁸⁷ Studies of kinship in urban industrial societies have also pointed to the continuity of sibling ties into adulthood.⁸⁸

My own research, parenthetically, is providing evidence of the importance that siblings have in educating one another, although the ways in which the education proceeds are so much a part of the fabric of daily existence that they are some­times difficult to discern. It is clear from interview data that parents are able to describe not only the variety of ways in which siblings contribute to one another's education but also the ways in which children in the same family differ in their approaches to education—I have referred to these approaches as "educative styles"⁸⁹—and the effects that these different approaches have as siblings interact with one another.

Thus, as one moves from the examination of one set of relationships within the family to another, it becomes increasingly clear that an understanding of educa­tion within the family requires a perspective that is more inclusive than any par­ticular dyad or even triad. Differences among siblings in the same family, moreov­er, serve as an especially useful reminder of the need for contextual qualifications in assertions and assumptions about the causal effect of particular kinds of paren­tal behavior on children. Statements about the ways in which parents affect their children should stand the test of accounting for different reactions of different children in the same family. All too often in the literature such qualifications have been absent.

The Education of Parents by Parents     

Despite the common caveat that the activities of parents should not be examined in a vacuum and despite the fact that marital relationships have been the subject of research as well as a central, concern of many who approach the family from a therapeutic standpoint, the literature that explicitly examines the education of parents by one another is virtually nonexistent; and the effects of marital relationships on the ways in which parents educate their children have also received little explicit attention. Research on the education of children by parents has been largely pre­occupied with the mother, and even those investigators who have noted this pre­occupation have tended to examine the influence of marital relations on parent-child relations in terms of special instances in which the father is absent, for exam­ple, parents without partners or the one-parent family.⁹⁰ An interesting exception is Billingsley's examination of the sources of significant achievement in black fam­ilies, in which he points to the strength of family ties and the importance of fathers as models, giving numerous examples of prominent fathers who have served as influential role models for successful children.⁹¹

As with studies of siblings, the most interesting characteristic of the literature that does exist on parents as educators of one another—and here especially the literature that is explicitly concerned with education is so slender that it is neces­sary to search out educational implications in broader literatures—is the sugges­tions it offers for future inquiry. Some of the research suggests, for example, that parental solidarity (the extent to which parents support one another) is likely to be of significance for the education of children within the family, and in this connection research on the division of labor between husband and wife is impor­tant.⁹² The complementarity of individual needs has been investigated by Winch, starting with its influence on mate selection,⁹³ and the complementarity of psy­chological needs has been further studied with respect to the division of subroles within the family. Maternal and paternal roles have been seen as embodying sub-roles, such as those of nurturer, disciplinarian, socializer, occupational model, or companion in leisure, and these subroles in turn have been seen as allocated in ways that reflect the psychological needs of husband and wife along such dimen­sions as nurturance, receptiveness, dominance, or submissiveness.⁹⁴ Although this literature has not explicitly dealt with education, it suggests, for example, that the mother's performance of educative roles may vary considerably in terms of her definition of her role vis-a-vis that of the father (and vice versa), and that specific educative functions, such as coaching or assistance with homework, may be di­vided in a variety of ways depending on the responsibilities and competencies of the mother and the father. Here particularly, the growing literature on recent changes in women's roles and "alternative" forms of the family as well as studies of dual-career families suggest that the variety of possible forms of allocation of responsibilities may indeed be broad.⁹⁵ When these considerations with respect to the allocation of roles are placed in cross-cultural perspective, the implications for education become even clearer. Vogel's vivid description of the intense involve­ment of the mother in the Japanese "salary" man's family in assisting the child to prepare for the "infernal examination system" is but one example of possible variations in educational roles within the family.⁹⁶

Research on marital and parental roles also suggests possible factors to consid­er in attempting to understand the ways in which parents educate one another. Here, the fact that family roles change over time is exceedingly significant. Thus, studies of aging and retirement, and what Cumming has called the process of "disengagement" in the later years, have noted the significant shifts that occur during the course of adulthood in definitions of self and of meaningful activities.⁹⁷ When these changes of self-definition are seen in connection with the processes of socialization and anticipatory socialization, their educational importance be­comes clear.⁹⁸

Research on various forms of intermarriage is also suggestive of the ways in which parents adapt to and mediate each other's cultural traditions. In effect, all marriages bring together individuals of different backgrounds (even when broad social and cultural differences are minimal) and hence involve mutual adaptations of different experiential traditions. Therefore, it is inevitable that parents will not only influence one another in their roles as parents but also teach one another out of experiences in other familial and social settings.

Finally, studies of marital roles also suggest certain outcome considerations that are quite different from those that predominate in studies of the education of children by parents, namely, that family roles themselves may be seen as outcomes of education. The demographic literature, for example, indicates that the wife's education is an important variable in influencing both family size and family re­lationships.⁹⁹ More broadly, Aberle and Naegele have argued that fathers' oc­cupational roles influence the ways in which they evaluate their children, and by extension, one might anticipate the same with respect to mothers' occupational roles, and, in fact, external parental roles in general. Thus, encounters outside the family are a vehicle through which parents learn from one another and, in turn, teach their children.

This brief review of the literature on education within the nuclear family reflects the fact that explicit attention to educational questions has been more developed in some areas than in others. Thus, with respect to certain relationships, particu­larly the education of parents by parents and the education of parents by children, it has been necessary in this review to ferret out illustrative educational implica­tions from broader literatures, while with respect to others, particularly the edu­cation of children by parents, the coverage has been confined to material that is explicitly phrased in educational terms. Given that in all of these areas wider literatures, such as those on socialization, enculturation, and development, are interwoven with educational questions, only a few of the possible implications of the wider literatures have been exemplified, and not with equal emphasis in all areas. But hopefully the illustrations will be sufficient to indicate the possibilities for further study.

One may summarize this review of the literature on education by pointing out that the loci and the effects of familial education may be examined from a variety of perspectives, all of which are potentially of considerable significance. Parents educate children, children educate parents, siblings educate siblings, and parents educate parents. Moreover, each of these interactions may mediate the influence of any of the others. Parental education is mediated by siblings and by their interrelationships with one another; siblings in turn both teach their parents and influence the ways in which their parents behave as educators. Even if one cannot examine the totality of familial education at a given time, some sense of the con­textual complexity is necessary for an understanding of educational interactions within any particular dyad.

the boundaries of the family

Just as it is necessary to understand specific dyads in the context of other re­lationships internal to the family, it is also necessary to understand the nuclear family of husband, wife, and children in the context of other relationships ex­ternal to the family. When one considers the boundaries of the family, even brief­ly, the need for such examination becomes clear since wide variations can be found in definitions of the family and in its composition. First, household compo­sition varies enormously from society to society and from segment to segment in the same society, and in addition, the unit that is defined as the family also varies enormously. Indeed, some anthropologists have argued that the nuclear family may not exist as a recognizable social unit in certain societies.¹⁰⁰ In our own society, separation, divorce, remarriage, and adoption all may mean that social and biological definitions of the family do not coincide. Moreover, the unit that is socially defined as the family may or may not correspond to the unit that is de­fined as the household. Finally, when time perspectives are introduced, there are still further variations within the family unit, since the group defined as the family shifts constantly throughout the life cycle. These variations are additionally com­pounded by the changes that occur over time in the network of extended kin through birth, death, and marriage. Thus, one cannot assume that "the family" has anything like a common definition.¹⁰¹

In addition to variations in household composition and in definitions of the family, there are significant variations in the ways in which kin outside the house­hold influence it. Research on kinship has shown that relatives outside the nuclear family may exert significant influences, even in urban, industrial societies in which the nuclear family is presumably "isolated" from contacts with kin.¹⁰² Grandpar­ents, for example, not only can and do play a vital role in the education of their grandchildren, they may also play a role in defining the ways in which parents perform their own educative functions.¹⁰³ Thus, the wife's mother may offer sub­stantial and insistent advice on child rearing and household decision-making,¹⁰⁴ Beyond this, there are networks that include still other kin. As Brim has argued, "each parent's behavior is embedded in social situations involving the other par­ent, the relatives, the community, and others. The parent is not isolated. Other members of the society have the legitimate authority to exercise control over parents' role performance, to make certain that the values prescribed for the role are sought and the appropriate means are utilized. . . . The close relative such as the parent's parent, not to speak of other relatives such as sisters or brothers, or one's neighbors, are authorized to seek informally to influence the parent so as to conform to the values of the society."¹⁰⁵

When one views these phenomena cross-culturally, the distinction between the nuclear and the extended family is often hard to maintain in examining the educa­tional pursuits of the family. Thus, in reviewing descriptions of education in the anthropological literature, it is difficult to find statements about parents that do not at the same time include other relatives. Firth, for example, in portraying education in Tikopia, mentions the mother's brother, the grandfather, the father's brother, and cousins, indicating that all may be present at the same time and all may define themselves as having educational obligations toward the child.¹⁰⁶ Coming closer to home, Billingsley, in portraying education among black families in Marion, Alabama, points not only to the role of fathers but also of kin and others in the community in creating the kind of intellectual atmosphere that fos­ters academic and professional achievement.¹⁰⁷

In sum, in order to understand the ways in which the family functions as educa­tor, it is necessary to consider not only parents and siblings as they interact with one another but also kin and others outside the nuclear family. Thus, the family needs to be seen in the context of numerous significant external relations.

models of the family as an educative system

The complexity of possible family constellations inside and outside the household and the multiplicity of intertwined influences that inevitably enter into any thoughtful consideration of familial education soon begin to boggle the mind. Examining one set of paired relationships within the nuclear family is clearly too simple; but moving from one dyad to another in the hope of covering all possible combinations ends up an unmanageable task—one that those concerned with the consequences of sibling interaction have plainly backed away from. Thus, the need is apparent to reexamine the kinds of models that have been implicit or explicit in studies of family interaction, in the hope of discovering approaches that offer new promise of guiding fruitful educational research.

At the least, models of the family as educator need to meet the criterion that I have referred to as "contextual rigor," that is, the rigor that derives from placing the analysis of specific relationships in the context of other significant relation­ships and influences and in the process considering cross-pressures that stem both from within the family and from without. Contextual rigor does not imply study­ing everything all the time, but it does imply a broad conceptual framework that can be systematically scanned for significant influences. The scanning will not nec­essarily produce identical influences in every instance—grandparents or cousins, for example, may or may not be important educative influences in particular fam­ilies—but the framework for analysis should suggest a fairly extensive range of possibilities, so that external influences will not be overlooked and internal influ­ences overemphasized.

If the family is to be understood as part of a wider social context, then it is no longer possible to view the family as a closed system. Rather, it must be conceived as a system open to a multitude of external influences. This point became clear some years ago to researchers concerned with family therapy. The initial argu­ment was that the individual could not be understood in isolation, hence, the need to diagnose and treat families. But it soon became clear that families too could not be understood in isolation; families too could most usefully be seen as open rather than as closed systems.¹⁰⁸

In addition, even if one can clearly specify an empirical unit defined as the family, the unit is not necessarily the most meaningful theoretical unit for all purposes. Thus, when one considers the time family members spend inside and outside the household, it is immediately clear that to assume the family is the source of all significant influences is fallacious. In effect, the theoretical unit that is meaningful for a particular analysis is a function of the purpose of that analysis. If one is attempting to understand an individual's behavior outside the home (how­ever one regards the determining effects of the early years), there is sufficient reason to anticipate that external influences, such as peer relations, will be signifi­cant in understanding the behavior. Thus, if one wishes to explain school achieve­ment, it is clearly fruitful to look for certain sources of that achievement in the home, but it is even more fruitful to do so in a way that considers how influences of the home, the school, and other contexts are continuously combined.

As Goode and others have pointed out, the accepted subunits of a science change with the degree of sophistication of the science. In some instances, the initial commonsense subunits, such as the family, which is, after all, a phe­nomenon of everyday experience, may cease to be regarded as serious units for analysis as the science advances. "When we deal with the family as one sub­system, we may simply be trying to relate the wrong variables to one another."¹⁰⁹ Since the experience of the individual cuts across numerous social groupings, family, peers, schoolmates, occupational associates, etc., and is undoubtedly in­fluenced by all of these, it is important to have a model for analysis of the family that is open to the inclusion of numerous significant influences, a model that incorporates the family's external context. If one would focus on the individual, then a model is needed that permits a charting of the individual's lifespace and an exploration of the ways in which the individual combines experiences from var­ious realms.

Because of the variability of the family as a social unit, in terms of both the composition of the particular household unit and the definition of what consti­tutes the family, one cannot presume that in studying something called the family one is studying a constant phenomenon. It is unreasonable, therefore, to presume that the experience in one unit called the family is necessarily similar in significant ways to the experience in other units called the family. Any such similarity (or lack of it) must itself be made a matter for investigation.

These arguments have profound theoretical consequences. They imply that re­search on the family or on dimensions of the family in terms of a model of "vari­ables" may well be inappropriate. As Blumer has pointed out in a classic critique, variable analysis is an appropriate procedure only for those realms of social life that are "not mediated by an interpretive process" or in which "stabilized patterns of interpretation" prevail.¹¹⁰ Too often, however, investigators assume stabilized patterns where they do not exist. Thus, measuring the educational consequences of being an eldest child makes little sense when such measurement assumes, without investigation, that the definition of being eldest is comparable from one family to another or from one social group to another. The significance of being eldest may vary enormously from one social setting to another, for example, in relation to patterns of inheritance. Similarly, analyses of sex roles sometimes fail to take into account differences in definition from one social circumstance to another, assum­ing rather that being male or female has identical meanings in all situations. In short, one needs to base analyses of the family as educator on concepts that take into account the processes by which family interactions are defined by their par­ticipants and by significant others outside the family.

A fruitful model of the family as educator should facilitate an understanding of these interpretive processes, encouraging sensitivity to the multiplicity of mean­ings that any event may have for different individuals within a particular family and to the shift in meanings that can occur from one moment to another. It should also make room for the continuous changes in character and composition that derive from maturational and personal changes in family membership, and it should not assume that the family itself is a constant entity. Individuals clearly differ in their susceptibility to change and the ways in which they initiate and react to change.¹¹¹ Even if one believes that basic personality characteristics remain fairly constant over time, it can scarcely be argued that no change is possible. Thus, the measurement of a mother-child relationship at one moment in time cannot be assumed to represent the relationship at another moment in time. Even in a case where the mother is comparatively insulated from change in her style of mothering, the same personal characteristics of the mother may have very differ­ent consequences for the child at different ages. The mother who controls and organizes her child's environment with detailed attention may have one effect when the child is an infant and a very different effect when the child is a teenager. Thus, no model of the family can effectively guide research that does not take into account the shifting character of interactions throughout the life cycle.

concepts of education within the family

If educational encounters within the arena of the family are to be studied in ways that will contribute more generally to an understanding of the nature and pro­cesses of education, the questions investigators bring to such study must be en­lightened by a thoughtful consideration of educational theory, so that wooden and oversimplified conceptions of teaching and learning and of one-to-one cause-effect connections can be laid aside. As Cremin has remarked: "What is taught is not always what is desired, and vice versa; what is taught is not always what is learned, and vice versa. Moreover, there are almost always unintended consequences in education; indeed, they are frequently more significant than the in­tended consequences. Hence, educational transactions are often marked by pro­found irony."¹¹² The lesson is basic, but much of the family literature to date, even where the concept of the unconscious is usefully employed, has ignored the lesson.

It is also necessary in scrutinizing educational encounters within the family to assume a perspective that takes multiple levels of experience into account. Even if one considers education to be a deliberate effort—an effort that is the focus of aware attention—experiences at the margins of consciousness or at the level of peripheral awareness (which are not the same as the unconscious) remain part of the educative process. Much of the activity within the family is of a repetitive, moment-to-moment nature. Such interaction is very different from even the most immediate recollection of it, since even short-term memory is highly selective.¹¹³ Yet, to understand those moments of intentionality and awareness that one might wish to regard as educational—those moments when events that go on at the margins of awareness are lifted into focal attention—it is essential to have a framework that sets those deliberate moments in the context of multiple levels of awareness, so that the investigator can examine those realms in which the explicit shades off into the indistinct, the intentional into the incidental, and the focal into the peripheral. Research on educational encounters within the family, even when it focuses on those moments of education in which intentionality is readily appar­ent, must also include experiences that pass into and out of awareness on a fleet­ing, moment-to-moment basis. In fact, the insistence upon a framework that embraces multiple levels of awareness constitutes one important element of con­textual rigor.

One can also fruitfully extend the range of possible outcomes that are assumed to result from familial education. As has been indicated, the literature to date, at least that which has dealt with the American situation, has tended to focus fairly narrowly on specific types of educational outcome, notably school achievement. Even where the concern of the investigator has broadened to include more general personality characteristics as outcomes, such as independence or assertiveness, these too have been seen in terms of their relation to the ability to function in the student role, as measured, for example, by achievement on school tests. Apart from the questions one might raise about success in schooling as the sole measure of educational outcomes, it is clear that the conception of the outcomes of familial education can fruitfully be enlarged. If one defines education as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, at­titudes, values, skills, and sensibilities,¹¹⁴ numerous suggestions come to mind. Knowledge, for example, may be viewed from the family's point of view rather than the school's, with private or specialized knowledge, such as information about ethnic customs or languages not used in the school, taking on particular importance. Attitudes and values can be associated with religious beliefs, which are often deliberately excluded from the school curriculum. An almost limitless list of skills can become relevant, depending on the traditions, the interests, and the concerns of particular families. Some of these skills, for example, the ability to organize materials in space or activities in time, may have useful carry-over into schooling, while others, for example, the ability to clean fish in a family of fisher­men, will assume their value whether or not they carry over into schooling.

Even in analyses of familial education primarily concerned with outcomes, the loci of these outcomes can be broadened and viewed from a variety of perspec­tives. Thus, most educational outcomes have been examined from the vantage point of children. Yet outcomes can also be examined from the vantage point of parents, or even of grandparents and other relatives. It is also possible to extend the concept of outcome itself to include the individual's more general approaches to education. I have suggested elsewhere, in formulating the concept of "educative style,"¹¹⁵ a number of components of such general approaches that might usefully be considered as outcomes of familial education: the manner of criticizing and appraising; the mode of integrating experiences over time; the level and rate of activity; the ways of combining and segregating particular tasks; the character of response to cues from others; the ways of appraising and synthesizing knowledge, values, and attitudes of others; the mode of scanning and searching for informa­tion; the approaches to embarrassment in learning situations—the list is illustra­tive rather than exhaustive. I have also pointed to the ways in which components of educative style interact as an individual engages in, moves through, and com­bines diverse educative experiences over a lifetime.

Finally, as the idea of educative style suggests, the concept of outcomes can be usefully extended to include not only the immediate effects of education at a particular moment, but also the "ripple effects" or chain of reactions to a given outcome.¹¹⁶ Thus, one experience of success may serve to trigger additional ex­periences of success. From such a perspective the concept of outcome begins to merge with the concept of process.

the processes of education within the family

One result of the emphasis on outcomes in the recent literature on familial educa­tion has been a relative inattention to moment-to-moment processes of education within the family and to the more general processes by which the family mediates educational experiences elsewhere. In this respect, differences in fundamental conceptions of human nature have distinct importance. If one regards personality as basically fixed during the first years of life, then the need to search beyond early experience—both within and outside the family—is substantially reduced. If, on the other hand, one regards personality as subject to continuing modification over time, then it becomes necessary to look at education as it occurs throughout life. Beyond this, it is important to examine the processes by which the individual combines educational experiences that occur in different arenas. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the emphasis in the literature on the family and other systems varies with the stage of the individual's life cycle. For the very young, the family is seen as the central arena of education; for older children, the focus shifts to the school; for adults, the focus shifts to the occupation. Yet as the life cycle progresses, the fact that multiple arenas of education coexist may be as significant as the fact that the focus shifts from one arena to another; and even if the several arenas do not have equal importance at all times, their interrelationships require careful examination, both in their own right and with respect to the ways in which various aspects of education are combined in the life of the individual.

If education is conceived as a lifelong process, then the process itself bears scrutiny. Even if one can show correlations between indices of education inside the home and indices of educational achievement outside the home, the indices themselves remain summary statements, or what Blumer has called "truncated" factors;"⁷ to establish the relationships leaves open the question of the processes by which the relationships come to be. Moreover, where "intervening variables" have, in fact, been examined, they have themselves often been treated as outcomes rather than as processes of connection. Thus, to cite one example, the charac­teristic of independence is commonly seen as a result of parental behavior that in turn positively affects school achievement; but the process by which independence actually links with school achievement is left vague. In the absence of information about the process itself, about the context in which the variables being measured by the index arise, the ways in which one variable influences another are, in the words of Blumer, "both concealed and misrepresented by the statement of the relationship between the two variables."¹¹⁸ Thus, a shift in the focus of inquiry is needed, to what Blumer has referred to as the "complexes of activity" and the "processes of interaction in which human group life has its being,"¹¹⁹ or alter­natively, to what Dewey once called "working adaptations of personal capacities with environing forces."¹²⁰

We have seen the strategic difficulties of attempting to understand educational encounters within the family by examining the outcomes of particular paired re­lationships, for example, the influence of parents on children or of children on parents. It is quite possible, however, to examine educational activities as they occur on a moment-to-moment basis across a variety of relationships, focusing on the processes of interaction and on the patterns these processes assume over time and at different times. The approach has been used in a number of "natural his­tory" investigations of social phenomena, of which Jackson's studies of classroom interaction are a noteworthy example.¹²¹ The potential value of the approach with respect to an understanding of education within the family would seem consider­able, as perhaps the following few illustrations will indicate.

Language Interaction Within the Family

Lan­guage interaction offers one example of the promise of a process oriented analysis of familial education. Actually, much of the recent research on outcomes with respect to the educational functions of the family has dealt with language usage and language development. Virtually every child in our society learns a language before entering school, and although many influences mediate the process, for example, television, that language is acquired largely within the household. The situation is a natural for outcome analysis. The characteristics of the parents' language, such as their proficiency, their enunciation, or their grammar, can be measured independent of family interaction; those measures can be correlated with measures of the children's school achievement; and both the variable mea­sures and the correlations can in turn be considered in light of indices of racial, ethnic, and social class background (though there has been considerable disagree­ment over the findings in this last area).

Yet some of the recent research on the language usage of adults and children illustrates the possibilities of focusing more directly on the processes of family interaction as they relate to language interchange. Gleason, for example, has de­scribed the ways in which very young children engage in "code switching," or modifying the modes of their talk with adults, peers, and infants. The phenome­non seems to reflect the fact that adults themselves shift their verbal styles when talking with infants and with younger children (indeed, they sometimes fail to move sufficiently far from "baby talk" when conversing with toddlers and thereby incur resentment).¹²² The ability of the child to switch codes appears to develop with age. Thus, Gleason points out that "infants are selective about whom they talk to at all. Four-year olds may whine at their mothers, engage in intricate verbal play with their peers, and reserve their narrative, discursive tales for their grown-up friends. By the time they are eight, children have added ... the polite­ness routines of formal adult speech, baby-talk style, and the ability to talk toyounger children in the language of socialization."¹²³ In similar fashion, Schneider and Homans have noted the intricacy with which kinship terms of reference and address are varied in different situations, depending on the individuals who are present during the conversation.¹²⁴ Thus, the term for one's father may shift from "my father" to "your son" to "our father," depending on the company. Through a recent study of conversational rhythms, Jaffe and Feldstein have also pointed to the significance of language interaction, examining the processes by which the "switch" from speaking to listening roles takes place.¹²⁵ These subtle and intricate modes by which adults and children shift their language usage, depending on the particular relationships and functions involved in given conversations, highlight the value of scrutinizing the processes of language usage within the family rather than merely assessing linguistic outcomes in individuals and the relation of those outcomes to academic achievement.

In addition to switching, there is also the fascinating area of questioning and answering behavior. An elaborate complex of linguistic and social codes (codes that vary significantly from one society and setting to another) surrounds the ways in which questions are asked and answered—one might think of it in the way Sapir described the process by which gestures are recognized, namely, as an elaborate and secret code "written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all "126 Even a glance at current research on the "grammar of questioning" sug­gests the extraordinary intricacy of the questioning process and its importance in understanding social and educational relationships.¹²⁷ Indeed, how questions are asked and answered and the ways in which answers are sought and then ap­praised, for example, the amount of questioning that is seen as acceptable and the extent of embellishment or simplicity that is seen as appropriate in an answer, may be considered highly significant components of educative interaction in the family.

The observation that children as young as the age of four have already learned to "switch codes" when talking with individuals in different roles suggests that they have also learned a rich repertoire of questioning and answering behaviors, a repertoire so subtle that (as Sapir's description of gesture suggests) it cannot be acquired by explicit instruction alone.¹²⁸ Since much of this learning undoubtedly takes place in the home—indeed, the mother's response to the child's questions has been noted as a significant variable in some of the educationally oriented research on the family—and since the school is also concerned with questioning and answering, an examination of these processes holds promise not only for an understanding of education within the family but also for insight into the re­lationship between familial and school education.

The Organization of Activity in Space and Time

The processes by which space and time are dealt with in the home offer an­other example of the possibilities of a process oriented analysis of familial educa­tion. Spatial organization has been seen as a basic dimension of social interaction, and cultural and situational variations in the definition of personal space (or the distances that people maintain from one another), in the kinds of comfort and discomfort occasioned by different spatial arrangements, and in the ways in which the organization of space itself conditions social interaction have been ob­served.¹²⁹ Some recent investigations have used videotaping in the home as a de­vice for obtaining data on the relations between spatial organization and familial interaction.¹³⁰ There is little doubt from the reports of these investigations that behavior with reference to space, ranging from the distances observed in personal interaction to the modes of arranging objects in relation to space (the "messy" playroom versus the "neat" playroom), represents an important realm of familial education, one that occurs at least partially at the margins of awareness.

The element of time enters into the family's activities in a variety of ways, most of which are of considerable educational significance. First, the family's activities are organized in time, and this organization offers a clear example of an interac­tive process. Some of the recent research on outcomes has suggested the impor­tance of such variables as "proper" scheduling and time management in the home for the child's success in school, treating scheduling and time management as if they were dimensions of parental (or more often maternal) behavior. Yet as any­one can attest who has waited for others in the family who are late (or who has been hurried by others who see themselves as prompt), scheduling is clearly a matter of interaction, a process by which family members coordinate, modify, and pace their activities in relation to one another.

The family's organization of activity in time involves numerous levels of in­dividual and interactive timing. Some recent research, for example, that of Chap­pie, has indicated the possibility that individuals differ in fundamental biological activity levels and that various biological rhythms and time clocks are combined and fitted together in social interaction. The extent to which "synchrony" results or fails to result in the coordination of activity levels varies considerably from one relationship to another.¹³¹ Awareness of and response to differences in individual activity levels are reflected in the fact that children are often evaluated in terms that refer to the pacing of their behavior, for example, "lethargic" or "highstrung" or "hyperactive." At least one recent study has examined the ways in which chil­dren's behavior contributes to the coordination of their own activity with that of their parents.¹³² When individual activity rates are combined within the family, differences in amount and pacing of activity can also be observed at the level of the family as a unit, where some families appear to carry out extraordinary amounts of activity in a given time period, while others by contrast appear to lead slow-moving lives.

Finally, there are concepts about time and orientation in time that can be con­sidered to affect the nature of planning and organizing with reference to the fu­ture. Like scheduling, planning has been noted as a variable in familial organiza­tion that relates to the child's success in school.¹³³ But the process by which time definitions are acquired is itself a significant aspect of education. Here, cultures have been shown to differ markedly in their emphasis on past, present, and future, and indeed a recent commentary on the experience and organization of time by Cottle and Klineberg points to the connection between anticipation of the future and forms of fantasy.¹³⁴

As with behavior relating to space, behavior relating to time represents an im­portant area of familial education, again one that occurs at least partially at the margins of awareness. It can also be examined at multiple levels. Golden, for example, has gathered a fascinating set of videotapes that demonstrate similarities in rates of interaction across three generations of a family from the northern United States and three generations of a family from the southern United States, along with the adaptations that occurred when a man from one of the families married a woman from the other.¹³⁵ At a related level, studies that have concerned themselves with the "micro" analysis of social interaction suggest the fruitfulness of examining time as an element in particular verbal interchanges within the fami­ly, for example, the matter of what constitutes an interruption, what constitutes a pause, and what constitutes a legitimate invitation for entry into a discussion.¹³⁶ In such analysis the process of managing time merges with the process of language, in ways that have considerable educational significance. At still another level, timing may be examined in the organization of explicit learning activities in the home, such as homework, or self-study, or preparation for tests. Since pro­cesses of timing, such as delaying gratification and "taking turns," have been seen as significant in the school,¹³⁷ this emphasizes, once again, the numerous possibili­ties of insights not only into the role of the family as educator but also into the educational relationships between family and school.

Memory as an Interactive Process

The social triggering of memory and its reinforcement by others provide a further example of an educational process that can be systematically investigated within the fami­ly. Individuals differ greatly in their modes of remembering, and the differences enter significantly into family interaction. Memory itself can be seen as a social process that is not only influenced by the icons and symbols present in the social settings but also triggered and reinforced by other individuals. As such, it affords an intriguing illustration of familial interaction of the sort that frequently tran­scends particular dyadic relationships.

In observations of family discussions at mealtime, for instance, one notes that several members of a family may join in fitting diverse bits and pieces into a conversational mosaic. This process was exemplified in a recent interview during the course of my own research in which a mother, two daughters, and a young son in a Puerto Rican family were discussing the problems of gangs in their neigh­borhood. While the mother and the older daughter were talking, the son moved in and out of the conversation, contributing additional information that was appar­ently not known or not initially remembered by the mother or the daughter. (The interview, incidentally, was with a family in which neither parent had completed a high school education, indicating that the process of memory triggering and re­inforcement is by no means confined to those who are highly educated.)

It is quite possible that families sometimes develop a division of labor in the realm of memory. This may occur with respect to subject matter as well as types of remembering. Thus, a wife with a factual memory may recall dates and places of family events, while the husband recalls visual images or the things people said. In family discussions or especially in the telling of family stories, one can often ob­serve the various members requesting assistance in filling in details or in em­bellishing particular themes.

The role of family stories and myths in relation to the social process of memory bears special attention. Myths, of course, are not necessarily false (Leach defines a myth as a story considered to be divinely true by those who believe it but a fairy tale by those who do not).¹³⁸ Nor, indeed, are they necessarily true. But true or false they undoubtedly have educational substance and influence in their own right. Even gossip and critical stories about the experiences of family members and others can provide opportunities for formulating and clarifying values. In short, then, family discussions can be viewed as a highly important process by which family members transmit, evoke, and acquire knowledge, values, and at­titudes via one another. Myths and legends as told and retold within a family convey the knowledge, values, and attitudes in a special (and often unique) form, at the same time that they offer explanations as to why particular viewpoints are held.

It is probable that childhood memories represent some melding of what might be called direct personal recollection and recurring stories of events as remem­bered by others. One may even argue that memory includes a category of "nonremembered" or "semiremembered" events—events embedded in family myth and lore that are from time to time recalled or returned to the center of awareness in discussions within the family. The social process by which memory is thus re­affirmed and reinforced by others is essential in the phenomenon of individual recall (as well as modes of relating to others in recall), and an examination of the process will doubtless shed considerable light on the more general dynamics of education within the family.

The Processes of Evaluating and Labeling

Yet another realm of interaction within the family that illustrates the potential of a process oriented approach is the way in which family members evaluate and label one another. Evaluation is unquestionably part of the individual's experience from birth to death; even a day-old baby may be described as cuddly or tense. Moreover, virtually every aspect of social life is subject to evaluation. Everyone evaluates others and is in turn evaluated by others. Evaluations are summarized by labels that become part of a complex imagery. Some evaluations are fleeting, others are assigned greater importance and reinforced over time, coming to have lasting significance. The process of evaluation may be raised to the level of an explicit and formal statement, as, for example, in a parent's discussion with a child about a teacher's appraisal of the child's schoolwork; but it may also pro­ceed in more subtle and continuous ways, by indirection, by innuendo, and via nonverbal communication. Teasing, name-calling, and other forms of joking are examples of less formal interactions that commonly embody elements of eval­uation.

The family may be considered a primary reference group with respect to evalua­tion, in that its members, even where the continuity of household arrangements is brief, know each other over considerable spans of time and observe and appraise each other's abilities in a variety of spheres. Moreover, familial evaluations are likely to be subjective and laden with emotion, and they are apt to be recurrent.

Evaluation in its very nature takes place with reference to values and beliefs. Here the importance of differing beliefs and experiences on the part of different family members becomes critical. Whatever the content of the evaluation, the processes by which it is made and the effects it has on both the individual making it and the individual being evaluated (as well as others who know of it) are of crucial importance in understanding the family as educator. The impact that evaluative labels may have has been indicated in studies of the ways in which particular family members may be categorized, labeled, and even scapegoated by others,¹³⁹ and by the research of Hobbs and his colleagues showing how labels deriving from outside agencies, especially labels of children with special problems, are experienced and mediated within the family.¹⁴⁰

The process by which individuals are evaluated by others undoubtedly has sig­nificance for their concepts of themselves. This is not to argue that any one-to-one correspondence prevails between self-image and images held by significant oth­ers—often this would be impossible because significant others hold divergent views of the individual. But it does imply that the continuous process of evalua­tion warrants serious attention, particularly attention to the ways in which the individual undergoes and responds to consistent and discrepant evaluations.

One of the basic features of interaction within the family is that all aspects of life are subject to what Heider has called "naive wisdom,"¹⁴¹ or what anthropolo­gists have sometimes referred to as "folk wisdom." There is invariably an immense body of lore in the common domain about how to rear children, the nature of child development, the nature of abilities, and the ways in which ability manifests itself. This body of lore has doubtless been infiltrated by psychological, sociologi­cal, and anthropological concepts in recent years, but it exists (and always has existed) independent of the behavioral sciences and needs to be considered in its own right.

One area in which the family's naive wisdom will be of special significance to the student of familial education is the family's beliefs and assumptions concern­ing the existence and sequence of developmental stages. Quite apart from whether the investigator accepts Piaget's, Erikson's, or Spock's formulations, or indeed none of them, what the members of the family being studied believe requires systematic scrutiny; for, paraphrasing Merton's statement of the so-called Thom­as Theorem, if family members define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.¹⁴² The fact is that children's development is continually evaluated by parents and other adults in the family with respect to assumptions about age-appropriate achievement. Children also continually appraise each other in terms of concepts of appropriate behavior for given age levels (the subtle awareness that children have of developmental stages is indicated by the research on code-switch­ing in language). In families with several children concepts of appropriate behav­ior are undoubtedly affected over time by memories, often blurred, of what the older children did at particular age levels. In sum, the ways in which the family sees any particular child, behaves with respect to that child, and conceives of that child's future are inevitably set against a backdrop of developmental notions.

One interesting and important aspect of sibling relationships involves the ways in which siblings evaluate one another. Thus, it has been suggested that siblings, particularly when close in age, may evaluate each other's behavior in terms that differ markedly from those employed by parents. Evaluations among siblings, once again, are part of a continuing process of moment-to-moment interaction within the family. One can, for example, observe that children talk to each other about school in a way that sometime verges on the scandalous, having a backstage quality¹⁴³ that differs substantially from the way they talk with their parents about school.

The process of evaluation is also conditioned by values concerning evaluation itself. Parents doubtless have ideas about what constitutes legitimate and illegit­imate criticism on the part of one sibling of another, as well as ideas about ways of fostering or diminishing competition among siblings (encouraging intrafamilial sports, for example, versus selecting different instruments for music lessons in the family to avoid invidious comparisons). Children, too, have their own ideas about what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate criticism, which can readily be de­tected by observing their conflicts and differences of opinion, as well as their moments of protective solidarity.

The process by which family members evaluate and appraise evaluation offers a fascinating realm for further research of educational significance. Not only does the process of evaluation have continuing influence as the various members of a family develop concepts of their own abilities and attributes, but the evaluation of evaluations becomes a vehicle by which family members learn to learn, that is, learn about the process of criticism itself and develop strategies for accepting or discounting the views of others. Thus, in a painfully vivid portrayal, Coles de­scribes the ways in which children of migrant farm workers learn to appraise the evaluations that those in outside institutions, for example, hospitals, make of them as these affect their life chances.¹⁴⁴

There is a close relationship between evaluations and the social process of trig­gering memory. Parents relive their own experiences through their children, andthis is important not only in its own right but also as part of the process of appraisal. Vicariously reliving one's own ambitions and failed ambitions through one's children has sometimes been seen as an instance of pathology within the family. Yet reliving and reenacting previous experience is not necessarily patho­logical. It is part of the basic process by which parents formulate aspirations for their children. Examination of interview materials readily reveals that family dis­cussions move continuously back and forth between past, present, and future, interweaving time periods, basing evaluations of the present on past experiences and, at the same time, seeing the present in terms of future aspirations.

Examination of the processes of evaluation in the family becomes an especially useful vehicle for getting at the ways in which interpretations of the world proceed (or, in the terms of Berger and Luckmann, the ways in which "social constructions of reality" are developed and applied).¹⁴⁵ Although such interpretations of reality may become fixed and stable, it is especially important in comprehending the subtleties of educational interaction within the family to see interpretation as "a formative and creative process in its own right."¹⁴⁶ Interpretation constructs meanings which are not yet determined, shifts meanings where differences in sit­uations require it, and transforms meanings where social change has transformed situations. Particularly in an era in which social change has become pervasive, it is an exceedingly important area of interaction in which to "ferret out lines of defini­tion and networks of moving relation."¹⁴⁷

Finally, since families consist of numerous individuals in moving and multiple associations, each with differing—although sometimes overlapping—values, per­spectives, and interpretations of the world, there is much to be gained from an approach to the family as educator that leaves ample room for a multiplicity of meanings. Some of the more psychoanalytically oriented family therapy litera­ture, for example, has tended to search for an "underlying" or "dynamic" or "true" meaning in family interaction, one that is discernible to the analyst but not neces­sarily to the participants. While such an approach may have its therapeutic uses, any prejudgment of the meaning of family interaction can preclude an under­standing of the richness and diversity of educational encounters within the family. In studying the processes by which family members interact with respect to broad­er interpretations of reality, the full range of shadings and variations can be of considerable significance to the investigator.

The Process of Educational Mediation

In all of the processes that have been discussed thus far as illustrative of a process oriented approach to the family as educator, mediation may be considered an element. Parents evaluate not only their children but also their children's friends, and they thereby mediate peer influences. Parents may attempt to influence the family's selection of television programs, and they also react to the content of programs, thereby mediating the influence of television. Siblings mediate each other's ex­periences in school, both through a continuing process of mutual evaluation and through the direct conveying of information and expectations. Children in turn mediate their parents' knowledge of child development, and grandparents me­diate images of the past and the future.

Mediation includes the variety of processes whereby family members translate and interpret educational experiences for one another. The parent, for example, may reappraise the teacher's interpretation of a particular historical event, sug­gesting alternative points of view. The husband may attempt to place the wife's experience in a particular job in a broader or different perspective. One sibling may criticize another for his gullibility with respect to television commercials. Or one sibling may discount the appraisal another has received from a particular teacher, contending that the teacher is "an easy grader" or "always says things like that." Report cards, physicians' and social workers' recommendations, evalua­tions of job performance—all are cast into the crucible of family discussion and become subject to its transformation. Whatever the motivations involved in any particular instance of mediation—and the question of motivation must not be equated with interactional consequences¹⁴⁸—the process of educational interpre­tation and translation remains to be understood in its own right.

The process of educational mediation includes deliberate and explicit coaching that has the function of adding to or assisting (and inevitably also interpreting) educational experiences elsewhere; but it also includes the variety of concurrent processes that are always the backdrop of deliberate instruction. The process en­compasses not only response to and interpretation of educational events that originate elsewhere but also the triggering and setting off of new educational en­counters within the family. Here, incidentally, the way in which siblings stimulate and set the stage for one another in a continuous round of activities offers a fruitful area for examination.

Deliberate and systematic instruction within the family needs to be understood in the context of this continuing whirlpool of interaction that takes place on a recurrent and repetitive basis, in the context of events that have momentary im­pact as well as events of lasting significance. The process of evaluation needs to be understood in the same context. Any family is subject to a continuous barrage of evaluations of its members from external individuals and agencies.

At times there is a tendency for these evaluations to be attributed more sig­nificance than intended by the evaluator (they are "over-read"), particularly when the evaluator is assumed to have professional competence to make the evaluation. In such instances special pressures are placed on the family in appraising the evaluation. Even when evaluations are not attributed undue significance, the process by which family members mediate in the selection, acceptance, transforma­tion, and rejection of evaluations is exceedingly important. Ultimately, it will affect in one way or another both the self-images and the world views of those who are involved.

These several processes that have been suggested as exemplary of a process oriented approach to the study of the family as educator are by no means ex­haustive, although each is profoundly important in its own right. Each brings together the influences of different individuals within the family, but each at the same time can be studied as a process, for example, in terms of its step-by-step sequencing, without necessarily focusing on its outcomes from the perspective of a particular individual. Moreover, each involves interactions that are significant for what Bateson has referred to as "deutero-learning" or learning to learn.¹⁴⁹ Thus, learning how to ask questions, learning how to organize activities in time, learning how to appraise external evaluations—all involve learning to learn, and all thereby become doubly important for an understanding of education, even if they are not explicitly seen by participants as educational and even if they do not necessarily involve "teaching" or "learning."

A concluding note on values and contexts

The methodological issues in research on the family as educator take on added significance when one considers the ambience in which the research proceeds. The family has always been an exceedingly difficult subject for inquiry, in part because it is so much an aspect of everyone's experience that it becomes difficult to avoid projecting one's own values, beliefs, and attitudes onto the experience of others. As Levy has pointed out, "down through the years no organization has been the focus of greater moralizing or musing."¹⁵⁰ The moralizing and musing have no doubt been associated with the numerous instances in which the values of investi­gators unwittingly intruded themselves into their formulations. Maccoby has il­lustrated the problem by pointing to the ways in which projections of beliefs concerning sex differences can color hypotheses about verbal differences between boys and girls.¹⁵¹ The moralizing and musing have also been associated with the fact that study of the family has sometimes been held in dubious repute as an area of serious scholarship. Even experienced and determined family researchers have despaired at times when reviewing the literature of their subject; in this area, as Levy has remarked, "in the scientific realm ... we seem to have taken leave of our senses in handling this whole field."¹⁵² Interestingly, where the tendency to moral­ize about the family is reduced by social and cultural distance, as in anthropological studies of kinship, research on the family has more readily taken its proper place as an enterprise of serious scholarship.

Associated with the tendencies to moralize and to project one's own values is the tendency to view the family in terms of simplified notions of cause and effect. Particularly when the family is studied with the goal of finding solutions to social problems, the tendency to overstate the impact of family relationships is much in evidence. There is the search for deficits in the home that by implication places heavy responsibility on those who fail to perform their family roles in just the right way, and there is the search for the elixir of motherhood—the formula that will strike just the right balance between the twin perils of maternal overprotec-tion and maternal neglect. Underlying such search is the assumption that specific behaviors (particularly on the part of the mother) produce wide-ranging conse­quences and that these consequences can be modified by "correction" of the specific behaviors, even without other changes in the family or in the social environment.

The tendency to moralize is also reflected in an overly solemn and grim em­phasis in the research itself. The therapeutically oriented literature, for example, while necessarily concerned with problems and pathologies, has virtually ignored the lighter side of family experience, the fun and exhilaration that can occur even in difficult circumstances. Even the recent search for "strengths" in the family has at times been heavy-handed. Humor has often been taken as a clue to hidden pathology rather than as a basis for integration and solidarity, while ritual has been viewed as a form of obsession rather than a pleasurable activity associated with sentiments of continuity. Not surprisingly, the same grimness has marked the educationally oriented literature, where one notes a somber preoccupation with absent fathers and insufficiently verbal mothers.

One need not get caught up in platitudinous romanticism about the family to suggest that any fruitful program of research on the family as educator must embody a fuller and more balanced approach, one that ranges over the entire gamut of familial experience. There are serious difficulties with the contemporary family, to be sure. There is need for alternative arrangements under certain condi­tions; there is widespread demand for reformulation of female and male roles; and there are the persistent problems of poverty and the unspeakable conditions it creates for people of all ages in families throughout the world. These problems need to be addressed and attacked with determination. But a narrowly conceived, subtly moralistic approach to familial experience is not likely to result in the broad understanding required for effective intervention.

Precisely because of the difficulty of examining the family without intruding premature external judgments, the argument for a contextual approach to the study of the family as educator becomes the more compelling. To lift specific seg­ments or dimensions of experience out of the context of the interpretations and meanings that surround them is to increase the risk of unwittingly imposing ill-fitting external evaluations. The need is for methods that will facilitate the study of the family and its members in contexts sufficiently complex and subtle to take into account multiple levels of meaning and experience both within and out­side the family.

Finally, the approach to the family as educator needs to take full account of the continuous process of change and development within the family, both for adults and children. Dewey often remarked that the goal of education is growth and that the process of growth has no end beyond itself, and furthermore, that the ideal of growth results in the conception of education as a constant reorganiz­ing and reconstructing of experience.¹⁵³ His ideas apply as surely to the family as to the school. To understand the processes of education and growth within the family, one must focus directly upon those processes, with full scientific precision.

ENDNOTES

 1   James S. Coleman et al. Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern­ment Printing Office, 1966; A.M. Halsey, ed. Educational Priority: E.P.A. Problems and Policies, Vol. I. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1967; Torsten Husen. Social Background and Educational Career: Research Perspectives on Equality of Educational Opportunity. Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1972; Ronald Davie, Neville But­ler, and Harvey Goldstein. From Birth to Seven: The Second Report of the National Child Development Study. London: National Children's Bureau, 1972; also related is the work of the Plowden Commission. Lady Bridget Plowden. Children and their Primary Schools: A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education, Vols. 1 and 2. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1967; and Christopher Jencks et al. Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. New York: Basic Books, 1972. This interest in the family is re­flected in a recent issue of Theory Into Practice, for which Ira J. Gordon served as guest editor, devoted to consideration of the educational functions of the family, Vol. 11, No. 3,1972.

2   Edward C. Banfield. The Unheavenly City. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970, pp. 229-231. See also "Babies for Sale," The New York Times, October 13, 1970. For a discussion of these and related issues, see Hope Jensen Leichter, "The School and Parents," in Dwight W. Alien and Eli Seifman, eds. The Teacher's Handbook. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1971.

3   Lawrence A. Cremin, "Notes Toward a Theory of Education," Notes on Education, No. 1, June 1973, pp. 4-5, Institute of Philosophy and Politics of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.

4   John Dewey. The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899.

5   One set of examples of kinship studies may be seen in Paul Bohannan and John Middleton, eds. Kinship and Social Organization. New York: Natural History Press, 1968.

6   Cf. William J. Goode. World Revolution in Family Patterns. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963; Marion J. Levy, Jr. The Family Revolution in Modern China. Cambridge, Mass.: Har­vard University Press, 1949; Peter Marris. Family and Social Change in an African City: A Study of Rehousing in Lagos. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961; Neil J. Smelser. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry, 1770-1840. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959; and David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denny. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950.

7   Examples of the literature on the family in industrialized societies may be found in Bruno Bettelheim. The Children of the Dream: Communal Child-Rearing and American Education. New York: Macmillan, 1969; Urie Bronfenbrenner. Two Worlds of Childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970; Aileen D. Ross. The Hindu Family in its Urban Setting. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961; Melford E. Spiro. Children of the Kibbutz: A Study of Child Training and Personality. New York: Schocken Books, 1965; Yonina Talmond. Family and Community in the Kibbutz. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972; and Ezra F. Vogel. Japan's New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Other studies of the family in contemporary societies are exemplified by Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball. Family and Community in Ireland. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1961; David Landy. Tropical Child­hood: Cultural Transmission and Learning in a Rural Puerto Rican Village. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959; and Oscar Lewis. The Children of Sanchez: Autobiog­raphy of a Mexican Family. New York: Random House, 1961.

8   Cf. Andrew Billingsley. Black Families in White America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968; Herbert J. Gans. The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Ameri­cans. New York: Free Press, 1962; Robert B. Hill. The Strengths of Black Families. New York: Emerson Hall, 1971; Francis A.J. lanni. A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972; Joseph Lopreato. Italian Ameri­cans. New York: Random House, 1970; Oscar Lewis. La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York. New York: Random House, 1965; Solomon Poll. The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg. New York: Free Press, 1962; Lee Rainwater, "Cruci­ble of Identity: The Negro Lower-Class Family," Daedalus, Winter 1966, pp. 172-216; Lee Rainwater. Behind Ghetto Walls. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1970; and John H. Scanzoni. The Black Family in Modem Society. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1971.

9   An example of the search for family identity is contained in Nathan W. Ackerman. The Psycho-dynamics of Family Life: The Diagnosis and Treatment of Family Relationships. New York: Basic Books, 1958.

10   The substantial literature on child-rearing practices is contained in numerous reviews, texts, and analyses. For a review of studies of child rearing from the perspective of culture and personality, see George A. De Vos, "Cultural Psychology: Comparative Studies of Human Behavior," in Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson, eds. The Handbook of Social Psychology, 2nd ed., Vol. 4. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969, pp. 323-417; also Alex Inkeles and Daniel J. Levinson, "National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Sociocultural Systems," ibid., pp. 418-506. For examples of the literature on child development, some of which deals with child-rearing in the family, see Martin L. Hoffman and Lois Wladis Hoffman. Review of Child De­velopment Research, Vol. I. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1964; and Lois Wladis Hoffman and Martin L. Hoffman. Review of Child Development Research, Vol. II. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1966; of special interest is John A. Clausen, "Family Structure, So­cialization, and Personality," ibid., pp. 1-53. The numerous texts and reviews of socialization contain material on child-rearing practices, for example, John A. Clausen, ed. Socialization and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968; also David A. Goslin, ed. Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969; also Philip Mayer, ed. Socialization: The Approach from Social Anthropology. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970. Another discus­sion of socialization is contained in Thomas Rhys Williams. Introduction to Socialization: Hu­man Culture Transmitted. Saint Louis, Mo.: Mosby, 1972. Classical child-rearing research is represented by Robert R. Sears, Eleanor E. Maccoby, and Harry Levin. Patterns of Child Rear­ing. Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1957; another classic study is Urie Bronfenbrenner, "Social­ization and Social Class Through Time and Space," in E.E. Maccoby et al., eds. Readings in Social Psychology, 3rd ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1958, pp. 400-425. Some well-known com­munity studies have included child-rearing practices, for example, R.G. Barker and H.F. Wright. Midwest and its Children. Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1954. Comparative studies are represented by John W.M. Whiting and Irvin L. Child. Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953; also Beatrice B. Whit­ing, ed. Six Cultures: Studies of Child Rearing. New York: John Wiley, 1963. For a recent discussion of theoretical issues in such research, see Robert LeVine. Culture, Behavior and Personality. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1973. Theoretical discussions of the family that are related to questions of socialization are represented by Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales. Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955; also Robert F. Winch. Identification and Its Familial Determinants. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962. In instances where a significant article or monograph is readily available in a standard anthology, I have cited the anthology instead of the original periodical reference.

11    Bronfenbrenner, Two Worlds of Childhood, op. cit.

12   Eleanor E. Maccoby, ed. The Development of Sex Differences. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni­versity Press, 1966.

13   Studies of kinship in urban, industrial societies are represented by Elizabeth Bott. Family and Social Network. London: Tavistock Publications, 1957; Raymond Firth, ed. Two Studies of Kinship in London, London School of Economics, Monographs on Social Anthropology 15. London: Athlone Press, 1956; Raymond Firth, Jane Hubert, and Anthony Forge. Families and Their Relatives: Kinship in a Middle-class Sector of London: An Anthropological Study. New York: Humanities Press, 1970; Peter Marris. Widows and Their Families. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958; J.M. Mogey. Family and Neighborhood: Two Studies in Oxford. London: Oxford University Press, 1956; David M. Schneider. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968; Peter Townsend. The Family Life of Old People. An Inquiry in East London. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957. A study that examines kinship in relation to an intervention system is Hope Jensen Leichter and William E. Mitchell. Kinship and Casework. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1967; studies that have examined the family in relation to other intervention systems are represented by Ira Gordon. Parent Involvement in Compensatory Education. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968; and Eugene Litwak and Henry J. Meyer. School, Family, and Neighborhood: The Theory and Practice of School-Com­munity Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.

14   Ackerman, op. cit.; also Salvador Minuchin et al. Families of the Slums: An Exploration of Their Structure and Treatment. New York: Basic Books, 1967; J. Haley. Strategies of Psycho­therapy. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1963; T. Lidz. The Family and Human Adaptations. New York: International Universities Press, 1963; and Salvador Minuchin. Families and Family Therapy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974; also related are social science studies of the family concerned with problems of mental health, for example, Jules Henry. Pathways to Madness. New York: Vintage Books, 1972; and John Bowlby. Maternal Care and Mental Health. Geneva: World Health Organization, 1952; also Jerome K. Myers and Bertram H. Roberts. Family and Class Dynamics in Mental Illness. New York: John Wiley, 1959. Re­lated readings may be found in Samuel Liebman, ed. Emotional Forces in the Family. Phila­delphia, Pa.: J.B. Lippincott, 1959.

15   For example, Robert Coles. Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear. New York: Dell Publishing, 1964; Robert Coles. Uprooted Children: The Early Life of Migrant Farm Workers. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970; Louis Kriesberg. Mothers in Poverty: A Study of Fatherless Families. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1970; F. Ivan Nye. Family Relation­ships and Delinquent Behavior. New York: John Wiley, 1958; Lee Rainwater. And The Poor

Get Children: Sex, Contraception, and Family Planning in the Working Class. Chicago: Quad­rangle Books, 1960; and Alva Myrdal. Nation .and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1941.

16   James S. Coleman. The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and its Impact on Education. New York: Free Press, 1961; James S. Coleman. Adolescents and the Schools. New York: Basic Books, 1965; also related are the Report of the Panel on Youth of the President's Science Advisory Committee. Youth: Transition to Adulthood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974; Erik H. Erikson. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968; also related are Erik Erikson. Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton, 1950; and Kenneth Keniston. The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965.

17   F. Ivan Nye and Felix M. Berado, eds. Emerging Conceptual Frameworks in Family Analysis. New York: Macmillan, 1966.

18   Orville G. Brim, Jr., quoted in "Introduction," in Goslin, op. cit., p. 2. See also Orville G. Brim, Jr., "Socialization Through the Life Cycle," in Orville G. Brim, Jr. and Stanton Wheeler. Socialization After Childhood: Two Essays. New York: John Wiley, 1966, p. 3.

19   David A. Goslin, "Introduction," op. cit., p. 2.

20   Ibid., p. 2.

21   John W.M. Whiting, Irvin L. Child, and William W. Lambert et al. Field Guide for a Study of Socialization, Vol. I. New York: John Wiley, 1966, p. 41.

22   J.W. Getzels, "Socialization and Education: A Note on Discontinuities," in this issue of TC Record.

23   Margaret Mead, "Socialization and Enculturation," in "Papers in  Honor of Melville J. Herskovits," Current Anthropology, Vol. 4, No. 2, April 1963, p. 187.

24   For a discussion of various theories of development, see Alfred L. Baldwin. Theories of Child Development. New York: John Wiley, 1967.

25   Jacob L. Gewirtz, "Mechanisms of Social Learning: Some Roles of Stimulation and Behavior in Early Human Development," in Goslin, op. cit., p. 60.

26   Lawrence Kohlberg, "Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive Developmental Approach to Social­ization," ibid., p. 350.

27   David F. Aberle and Kaspar D. Naegele, "Middle-Class Fathers' Occupational Role and At­titudes Toward Children," in Norman W. Bell and Ezra F. Vogel, eds. A Modem Introduction to the Family. New York: Free Press, 1968, pp. 188-198.

28   Richard Wolf, "The Measurement of Environments," in Invitational Conference on Testing Problems. Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, October 31,1964, p. 96.

29   A. Harry Passow, "Early Childhood and Compensatory Education," in A. Harry Passow, ed. Reaching the Disadvantaged Learner. New York: Teachers College Press, 1970, p. 38.

30   An exception is the work of Burton White. His search for "the laws of optimal development" has been reported in Burton White, "Growing Up Competent: How Families Make the Difference," Carnegie Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 33, Summer 1973; see also Burton White et al. Experience and Environment: Major Influences on the Development of the Young Child, Vol. I. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

31    Fred L. Strodtbeck, "The Hidden Curriculum in the Middle-Class Home," in A. Harry Passow, Miriam Goldberg, and Abraham J. Tannenbaum. Education of the Disadvantaged. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967, p. 258.

32   Ibid.

33   J. McVicker Hunt, "The Psychological Basis for Using Pre-school Enrichment as an Antidote for Cultural Deprivation," in ibid., p. 203.

34   David P. Ausubel, "How Reversible are the Cognitive and Motivational Effects of Cultural Deprivation? Implications for Teaching the Culturally Deprived Child," Urban Education, Vol. 1, Summer 1964, pp. 23-24.

35   Mildred Beatty Smith, "School and Home: Focus on Achievement," in A. Harry Passow, ed. Developing Programs for the Educationally Disadvantaged. New York: Teachers College Press, 1968, p. 92.

36   Leon Eisenberg, "Strengths of the Inner City," in Passow, Goldberg, and Tannenbaum, op. cit., p. 81.

37   Robert D. Hess and Virginia C. Shipman, "Maternal Attitudes Toward the School and the Role of Pupil: Some Social Class Comparisons," in Passow, ed., Developing Programs for the Edu­cationally Disadvantaged, op. cit., pp. 111-129.

38   For example, Virginia Crandall et al., "Maternal Reactions and the Development of Indepen­dence and Achievement Behavior in Young Children," Child Development, Vol. 31, 1960, pp. 243-251; Virginia Crandall, "Achievement Behavior in Young Children," Young Children, Vol. 20, 1964, pp. 77-90; E.A. Haggard, "Socialization, Personality and Achievement in Gifted Children," School Review, Winter 1957, pp. 318-414; Hess and Shipman, op. cit.; Susan S. Stodolsky and Gerald Lesser, "Learning Patterns in the Disadvantaged," Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 37, 1967, pp. 546-593; Strodtbeck, op. cit.; and Fred L. Strodtbeck, "Family In­teraction, Values, and Achievement," in D.C. McClelland et al., eds. Talent and Society. Prince-ton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1958. do. 135-194.

39   Aberle and Naegele, op. cit.

40   Meyer Fortes, "Social and Psychological Aspects of Education in Taleland," in John Middle-ton, ed. From Child to Adult: Studies in the Anthropology of Education. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1970, pp. 18-19.

41    Passow, "Early Childhood and Compensatory Education," op. cit., p. 38.

42   Doris R. Entwistle, "Semantic Systems of Children: Some Assessments of Social Class and Eth­nic Differences," in F. Williams, ed. Language and Poverty: Perspectives on a Theme. Chicago: Markham, 1970, pp. 123-139.

43   Cf. Joan C. Baratz and Roger W. Shuy, eds. Teaching Black Children to Read. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969; also Frank Riessman, "Are the Deprived Non-Verbal?" in Frank Riessman, Jerome Cohen, and Arthur Pearl, eds. Mental Health of the Poor: New Treatment Approaches for Low Income People. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1964. The widely cited work of Basil Bernstein presents a contrasting formulation, cf. Basil Bernstein, "Social Structure, Language, and Learning," in Passow, Goldberg, and Tannenbaum, eds., op. cit., pp. 225-244; also Basil Bernstein, "Some Sociological Determinants of Perception," British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 9, 1958, pp. 159-174; and Basil Bernstein, "Language and Social Class," British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 11, 1960, pp. 271-276.

44   Hess and Shipman, op. cit.

45   Wolf, op. cit., pp. 97-98.

46   Cf. Crandall, op. cit.; Haggard, op. cit.; Hess and Shipman, op. cit.; also B.C. Rosen, "The Achievement Syndrome: A Psychocultural Dimension of Social Stratification," American So­ciological Review, Vol. 21, 1956, pp. 203-211; B.C. Rosen and R. D'Andrade, "The Psycho-social Origin of Achievement Motivation," Sociometry, Vol. 22, 1959, pp. 185-217; B.C. Rosen, "Family Structure and Achievement Motivation," American Sociological Review, Vol. 26, 1961, pp. 574-585; and Strodtbeck, "The Hidden Curriculum in the Middle-Class Home," op. cit.

47   R.D. Hess and Virginia Shipman, "Cognitive Elements in Maternal Behavior," presented at the First Annual Symposium on Child Psychology, Minnesota, May 20, 1966.

48   Hess and Shipman, "Maternal Attitudes Toward the School and the Role of Pupil: Some Social Class Comparisons," op. cit., p. 127.

49   Ibid.

50   Ibid., p. 128.

51    Wolf,op.cit.

52   Strodtbeck, "The Hidden Curriculum in the Middle-Class Home," op. cit.

53   Rosen and D'Andrade, op. cit.

54   Strodtbeck, "Family Interaction, Values, and Achievement," op. cit.

55   Glen H. Elder, "Family Structure and Educational Attainment," American Sociological Re­view, Vol. 30,1965, pp. 81-96.

56   R.H. Dave, "The Identification and Measurement of Environmental Process Variables that are Related to Educational Achievement," unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chi­cago, Illinois, 1963.

57   Crandall, "Achievement Behavior in Young Children," op. cit., is one of many examples in which the duration of the effect of parental behavior is left open, although in this instance a time dimension is recognized in the idea that for some children parental approval becomes unneces­sary for achievement behavior "later" if it is received when the child is very young.

58   Cf. Wolf, op. cit.; also Elder, op. cit.

59   Strodtbeck, "The Hidden Curriculum in the Middle-Class Home," op. cit., p. 258.

60   Wolf's study has been replicated by Elizabeth Sharpeless and Miriam Goldberg, "The Relation­ship of Family Process Variables to Achievement and Intellectual Ability in a New York City Population," 1974, mimeographed.

61    Sarane Spence Boocock. An Introduction to the Sociology of Learning. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972, p. 56.

62   Wolf, op. dr., p. 95.

63   J.A. Kahl, "Educational and Occupational Aspirations of 'Common Man' Boys," Harvard Edu­cational Review, Vol. 23,1953, pp. 186-203.

64   Howard S. Erlanger, "Social Class and Corporal Punishment in Childrearing: A Reassessment," American Sociological Review, Vol. 39,1974, pp. 68-85.

65   Eleanor E. Maccoby, "Sex Differences in Intellectual Functioning," in Maccoby, The Develop­ment of Sex Differences, op. cit., pp. 36-38.

66   R.C. Blood and D.M. Wolfe. Husbands and Wives. New York: Free Press, 1960; B.C. Rollins and H. Feldman, "Marital Satisfaction Over the Family Life Cycle," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 32, 1970, pp. 20-27; A.M. Rose, "Factors Associated with Life Satisfactions of Middle-class, Middle-aged Persons," Marriage and Family Living, Vol. 17, 1955, pp. 15-19; and J.R. Udry. The Social Context of Marriage. Philadelphia, Pa.: J.B. Lippincott, 1966.

67   R.W. Bortner, Claudia J. Bohn, and David F. Hultsch, "A Cross-Cultural Study of the Effects of Children on Parental Assessment of Past, Present, and Future," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 36, No. 2, May 1974, pp. 370-378.

68   S. Cummings, H. Baley, and J. Rie, "Effects of the Child's Deficiency on the Mothers of Mental­ly Retarded, Chronically Ill, and Neurotic Children," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol. 36,1966, pp. 595-608.

69   R.Q. Bell, "A Reinterpretation of the Direction of Effects in Studies of Socialization," Psycho­logical Review, Vol. 75, 1968, pp. 81-95; R.Q. Bell, "Stimulus Control of Parent or Caretaker Behavior by Offspring," Developmental Psychology, Vol. 4, 1971, pp. 63-72; L.V. Harper, "The Young as a Source of Stimuli Controlling Caretaker Behavior," Developmental Psychology, Vol. 4, 1971, pp. 73-88; J.D. Osofsky and E.J. O'Connell, "Parent-child Interaction: Daughters' Effects on Mothers' and Fathers' Behavior," Developmental Psychology, Vol. 7, 1972, pp. 157-168; and Marian R. Yarrow, Carolyn Z. Waxier, and Phyllis M. Scott, "Child Effects on Adult Behavior," Developmental Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1971, pp. 300-311.

70   Orville G. Brim, Jr. and Stanton Wheeler. Socialization After Childhood: Two Essays. New York: John Wiley, 1966.

71   The current research of Kenneth Kaye on early adaptation of mother-infant systems is especially interesting.

72   For discussion and review of research in this area, see Elliot G. Mishler and Nancy E. Waxier, "Family Interaction Processes and Schizophrenia: A Review of Current Theories," International Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 2, No. 4, July 1966, pp. 375-413; also Nancy E. Waxier and Elliot G. Mishler, "Experimental Studies of Families," Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 5, 1970, pp. 249-304. Joan Huser Liem, "Effects of Verbal Communications of Parents and Children: A Comparison of Normal and Schizophrenic Families," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 42, No. 3, 1974, pp. 438-450 is also relevant in clarifying the distinction between an "etiological" and a "responsive" view of parents' behavior in relation to children.

73   James H.S. Bossard and Eleanor Stoker Boll. The Large Family System. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956.

74   Margaret Mead. Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1970; also related is Margaret Mead. New Lives for Old: Cultural Trans­formation—Manus, 1928-1953. New York: William Morrow, 1956.

75   This point may be found in Mead, Culture and Commitment, op. cit.; the point may also be derived from Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964; for a more specific discussion of the role of television in attempting to use children to influence their parents' economic behavior, see William Melody. Children's Televi­sion: The Economics of Exploitation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973.

76   This point is documented in the classic study of William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, [1918-20], 2 vols. New York: Octagon Books, 1971; see also Oscar Handlin. The Uprooted, 2nd ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973, especially Ch. 9.

77   Brian Sutton-Smith and E.G. Rosenberg. The Sibling. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

78   Orville G. Brim, Jr., "Family Structure and Sex Role Learning by Children: A Further Analysis of Helen Koch's Data," in Bell and Vogel, eds. A Modern Introduction to the Family, op. cit., pp. 526-540.

79   Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg, op. cit.

80   David M. Levy. Studies of Sibling Rivalry. New York: The American Orthopsychiatric Associa­tion, 1937; also David M. Levy. Maternal Overprotection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.

81    Sutton-Smith and Rosenberg, op. cit.

82   Donald P. Irish, "Sibling Interaction: A Neglected Aspect in Family Life Research," in J. Ross Eshleman, ed. Perspectives in Marriage and the Family. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1970, pp. 551-567.

83   Carroll Davis and Mary L. Northway, "Siblings—Rivalry or Relationship?" Bulletin of the Institute for Child Study, Vol. 19, No. 3,1957, pp. 10-13.

84   Bossard and Boll, op. cit.; also Maccoby, The Development of Sex Differences, op. cit.

85   Irish, op. cit., p. 557.

86   Ibid.

87   Elaine Gumming and David M. Schneider, "Sibling Solidarity: A Property of American Kin-ship," American Anthropologist, Vol. 63,1961, pp. 498-507.

88   Leichter and Mitchell, op. cit.

89   Hope Jensen Leichter, "The Concept of Educative Style," Teachers College Record, Vol. 75, No. 2, December 1973, pp. 239-250. I wish to express my appreciation to Susan Voorhees for the continuation of her able assistance with this research and to James C. Deutsch and Barbara Gershey for their participation in the research. I would also like to express my appreciation to Laura Zwilich for her enthusiastic assistance.

90   E.E. Le Masters. Parents in Modern America: A Sociological Analysis. Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1970; an example of research in this area is John W.M. Whiting and R.V. Burton, "The Absent Father and Cross-sex Identity," Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Vol. 7, 1961, pp. 85-95.

91    Billingsley, op. cit.

92   One example of research on the division of labor between husband and wife is Bott, op. cit.

93   Robert F. Winch. Mate-Selection: A Study of Complementary Needs. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958.

94   Robert F. Winch, "Another Look at the Theory of Complementary Needs in Mate-Selection,"        in Robert F. Winch and Louis Wolf Goodman, eds. Selected Studies in Marriage and the Family, 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968, pp. 529-539.

95   For one specific study within the growing literature on alternate forms of the family and varia­tions in family organization, see Rhona and Robert Rapoport. Dual-Career Families. London: Penguin Books, 1971.

96   Vogel, op. cit., especially Ch. HI.

97   Elaine Cumming and William E. Henry. Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement. New York: Basic Books, 1961; also Elaine Cumming, "Further Thoughts on the Theory of Dis­engagement," in Winch and Goodman, eds., op. cit., pp. 416-430.

98   Wayne E. Thompson and Gordon F. Streib, "Meaningful Activity in a Family Context," ibid., pp. 433-448.

99   For one discussion that considers the effects of the mother's education as distinct from the family's social class position, see Melvin L. Kohn, "Social Class and Parental Values," ibid., pp. 349-363; also J. Richard Udry, "Marital Instability by Race, Sex, Education, Occupation, and Income Using 1960 Census Data," ibid., pp. 572-578.

100   Kathleen Gough, "Is the Family Universal?: The Nayar Case," in Norman W. Bell and Ezra F. Vogel, eds., A Modern Introduction to the Family, op. cit.

101    Hope Jensen Leichter, "Boundaries of the Family as an Empirical and Theoretical Unit," in Nathan W. Ackerman, Frances L. Beatman, and Sanford N. Sherman, eds. Exploring the Base for Family Therapy. New York: Family Service Association of America, 1961, pp. 140-144.

102   Leichter and Mitchell, op. cit.; also see footnote 13 for other studies of kinship in urban and industrial societies. -

103   Margaret Mead, "Grandparents as Educators," in this issue of TC Record.

104   Leichter and Mitchell, op. cit.

105   Orville G. Brim, Jr. Education for Child Rearing. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1959, p. 68.

106   Raymond Firth, "Education in Tikopia," in John Middleton, ed. From Child to Adult: Studies in the Anthropology of Education, op. cit., pp. 75-90.

107   Billingsley, op. cit.

108   Leichter, "Boundaries of the Family as an Empirical and Theoretical System," op. cit.; for a general discussion of these issues, see Yehudi A. Cohen, "Social Boundary Systems," Current Anthropology, Vol. 10,1969, pp. 103-125.

109   William J. Goode, "Sociology of the Family," in Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leon­ard S. Cottrell, Jr., eds. Sociology Today. New York: Basic Books, 1959, p. 185.

110 Herbert Blumer, "Sociological Analysis and the 'Variable,'" in Jerome G. Manis and Bernard N. Metzler. Symbolic Interaction: A Reader in Social Psychology, 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972, pp. 101-102.

111 For one discussion of individual differences in the process of change, see Herbert Spiegel, "An Operational Perspective on Concepts of Change, Self and Identity," The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1962, pp. 1-4.

112   Lawrence A. Cremin, "Notes Toward a Theory of Education," Notes on Education, No. 1, Spring 1973, p. 5, Institute of Philosophy and Politics of Education, Teachers College, Colum­bia University.

113   The selectivity in short-term memory of educational experiences within the family has been vividly demonstrated in my own research interviews.

114   Lawrence A. Cremin, "Further Notes Toward a Theory of Education," Notes on Education, No. 4, March 1974, p. 1, Institute of Philosophy and Politics of Education, Teachers College, Co­lumbia University.

115   Leichter, "The Concept of Educative Style," op. cit.

116 This concept of the "ripple effect" has been applied to examination of the therapeutic process by Herbert Spiegel and Louis Linn, "The 'Ripple Effect' Following Adjunct Hypnosis in Analytic Psychotherapy," American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 126, No. 1, 1969, pp. 53-58.

117   Blumer, op. dr., p. 99.

118   Ibid., p. 101.

119   Ibid. Although coming from a different tradition, Blumer's statement is consistent with Wolfs argument for studying what parents actually do in their interactions with children; he, too, is concerned with problems arising from overgeneralized measures.

120   John Dewey. Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Henry Holt, 1922, p. 16.

121    Philip W. Jackson. Life in Classrooms. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968.

122   Jean Berko Gleason, "Code Switching in Children's Language," in Timothy E. Moore, ed. Cog­nitive Development and the Acquisition of Language. New York: Academic Press, 1973, pp. 159-167.

123   Ibid.,p.l67.

124   David M. Schneider and George C. Homans, "Kinship Terminology and the American Kinship System," American Anthropologist, Vol. 57, 1955, pp. 1194-1208.

125   Joseph Jaffe and Stanley Feldstein. Rhythms of Dialogue. New York: Academic Press, 1970.

126   Edward Sapir, "The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society," in Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality by David G. Mandelbaum, ed. Berkeley. University of California Press, 1949,p. 556.

127   Lindsey Churchill, "The Grammar of Questioning," unpublished paper, Ph.D. program, De­partment of Sociology, City University of New York Graduate Center and University Center, New York, 1972.

128   Gleason, op. cit.; also Sapir, op. cit.

129   Edward T. Hall. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966; also Robert Sommer. Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

130   This research is exemplified by the recent work of Adam Kendon, particularly the materials presented at the 1973 meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

131    Eliot D. Chappie. Culture and Biological Man: Explorations in Behavioral Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

132   Daniel N. Stern, "A Micro-Analysis of Mother-Infant Interaction: Behavior Regulating Social Contact Between a Mother and her 3 1/2-Month Old Twins," The Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1971, pp. 501-516.

133    Wolf.op.cit.

134   Thomas J. Cottle and Stephen L. Klineberg. The Present of Things Future: Explorations of Time in Human Experience. New York: Free Press, 1974.

135   Videotapes developed by June Golden.

136   One example of the "micro" level of analysis of interaction may be seen in Paul Byers, "From Biological Rhythm to Cultural Pattern: A Study of Minimal Units," unpublished Ph.D. dis­sertation, Columbia University, New York, 1972.

137   Jackson, op. cit.

138   Edmund Leach. Claude Levi-Strauss. New York: Viking Press, 1970, p. 54.

139   Ezra F. Vogel and Norman W. Bell, "The Child as the Family Scapegoat," in Norman W. Bell and Ezra F. Vogel, eds. A Modern Introduction to the Family, rev. ed. New York: Free Press, 1968, pp. 412-427.

140   The research of Hobbs and his colleagues is of particular interest in this connection; Nicholas Hobbs, "Summary: The Project on Classification of Exceptional Children," unpublished mimeographed document, October 28,1972.

141    Fritz Heider. Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: John Wiley, 1958.

142   Robert K. Merton. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press, 1968 ed.; also for another discussion Robert K. Merton, "Social Knowledge and Public Policy: Sociological Per­spectives on Four Presidential Commissions," Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1974, mimeographed, especially p. 19. The other side of the argument, namely, that something that is not believed to be true can nevertheless have consequences, does not take away from the importance of knowing about belief systems.

143   Concepts that point to the ways in which presentations of self are modified in different social situations can be found in the work of Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.

144   Coles, Uprooted Children, op. cit.

145   Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966.

146   Blumer, op. cit., p. 98.

147   Ibid., p. 101.

148   Merton's classic distinction between intention and consequence is relevant here. See Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, op. cit.

149   Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.

150   Marion J. Levy, Jr., "Some Hypotheses About the Family," Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Vol. I, No. 1,1970, p. 119.

151    Maccoby, "Sex Differences in Intellectual Functioning," op. cit., p. 41.

152   Levy, op. cit., p. 119.

153   John Dewey. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan, 1916, pp. 59-60,89.