CONCEPTS OF SOCIALISATION

What is socialisation?

Infants are new to any culture. They must be transformed by their parents, teachers,
and others into cultural and social beings. The general process of acquiring culture is
referred to as socialisation.

So students, what do you think that happens during socialisation?During socialisation,

we learn the language of the culture we are born into as well as the roles we are to play
in life.For example, girls learn how to be daughters, sisters, friends, wives, and mothers.
In addition, they learn about the occupational roles that their society has in store for
them.

Socialisation is a learning process that begins shortly after birth. Early childhood is the
period of the most intense and the most important stage of socialisation.It is then that
we acquire language and learn the fundamentals of our culture. It is also a stage when
much of our personality takes shape. However, we continue to be socialised throughout
our lives.

As we grow, our responsibilities vary according to the societal needs.Looking around

the world, we see that different cultures use different techniques to socialise our
children.

There are two broad types of teaching methods-formal and informal.

Formal education is what primarily happens in a classroom.It is usually structured,
controlled, and directed primarily by adult teachers who are professional “knower’s.” In
contrast, informal education can occur anywhere.It involves imitation of what others do
and say as well as experimentation and repetitive practice of basic skills.

Three stages of socialization

Talcott Parsons saw socialisation as the process through which, individuals developed
and internalised a sense of norms and values.Parsons theorised that there were three
stages of socialisation, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary. The first level of socialisation
comes at the primary level where a child is developing personality, characteristics,
beliefs and values based on their upbringing.

A child will adopt attitudes and beliefs based on their family and their parents. Primary
socialisation occurs in the family / home.Parents generally have a goal or an
expectation of the way they want their child to develop.Even seemingly small actions of
parents can have major impacts on the socialisation of their children.

For example, what would you do if your baby cried continuously but was not ill, hungry,
or in need of a diaper change?Would you hold your baby, rock back and forth, walk
around, or sing gently until the crying stops, even if it took hours.
The answer that you give very likely depends on your culture. The traditional Navajo
Indian response usually was to remove the baby from social contact until the crying
stopped.After making sure that the baby was not ill or in physical distress, he or she
would be taken outside of the small single room house and left in a safe place until the
crying stopped.Then the baby would be brought indoors again to join the family.As a
result, Navajo babies raised in this way are usually very quiet. They learn early that
making noise causes them to be removed from social contact.In most Indian families
today, we would hold our baby in this situation until the crying stopped.

The lesson that we may be giving is that crying results in social contact.Is this wrong? It
may not be wrong but it is a different socialisation technique.

The secondary socialisation level occurs when an individual is learning about what is
acceptable and what is not acceptable.It usually occurs on a small group level to
teenagers and young adults.This level of socialisation enables ones to become more
aware of what the larger society expects from them.

The tertiary level of socialisation occurs when an individual has integrated into the world
and begins to gain new ideas and values of socialisation.After one has gone through
these stages of development, an individual may go through a re-socialisation process,
and this happens in different stages through life, for example; people retire or become
unemployed etc.

Parsons noted that each stage of socialisation had its’ own way of helping an individual
internalize social norms and values.A Parsons concept of socialisation is a fusion of
personality development and functionalism.

Nature or Nurture?

This debate within psychology is concerned with the extent to which particular aspects
of behaviour are a product of either inherited (i.e. genetic) or acquired (i.e. learned)
characteristics.

Nature is that which is inherited / genetic.

Nurture refers to all environmental influences after conception, i.e. experience.

It has long been known that certain physical characteristics are biologically determined
by genetic inheritance.

Colour of eyes, straight or curly hair, pigmentation of the skin and certain diseases are
all a function of the genes we inherit.These facts have led many to speculate as to
whether psychological characteristics such as behavioural tendencies, personality
attributes and mental abilities are also “wired in” before we are even born.
Those who adopt an extreme heredity position are known as nativists. Their basic
assumption is that the characteristics of the human species as a whole are a product of
evolution and that individual difference are due to each person’s unique genetic code.

At the other end of the spectrum are the environmentalists – also known as empiricists.
Their basic assumption is that at birth the human mind is a tabula rasa (a blank slate)
and that it is gradually “filled” as a result of experience (e.g. behaviourism).From this
point of view psychological characteristics and behavioural differences that emerge
through infancy and childhood are the result of learning.It is how you are brought up
(nurture) that governs the psychologically significant aspects of child development and
the concept of maturation applies only to the biological aspect.

So, when an infant forms an attachment it is responding to the love and attention it has
received, language comes from imitating the speech of others and cognitive
development depends on the degree of stimulation in the environment and, more
broadly, on the civilization within which the child is reared.

In practice hardly anyone today accepts either of the extreme positions. There are
simply too many “facts” on both sides of the argument which are in consistent with an
“all or nothing” view.So instead of asking whether child development is down to nature
or nurture the question has been reformulated as “How much?”

That is to say, given that heredity and environment both influence the person we
become, which is the more important? This question was first framed by Francis Galton
in the late 19th century.However in recent years there has been a growing realization
that the question of “how much” behaviour is due to heredity and “how much” to
environment may itself be the wrong question.

Take intelligence as an example. Like almost all types of human behaviour it is a

complex, many-sided phenomenon which reveals itself in a great variety of ways.The
“how much” question assumes that the variables can all be expressed as a number and
that the issue can be resolved in a quantitative manner. The reality is that nature and
culture interact in a host of qualitatively different ways.

Scientists today have realized that there is no neat and simple way of answering these
qualitatively different ways of human behaviour.Hence socialisation becomes an
important part of the nature/nurture study an of prime importance to educators.

A brief look at the experts in the field of child development and behaviour management.
Urie BronfenbrennerHe believes that the interactions between a child and its family are
the main focus of human development.This perspective assumes that the functioning of
children and families can be enhanced by strengthening the quality and quantity of
relationships, for example relationship within families, among friends, within
neighborhoods, at schools and within communities.
Bronfenbrenner stressed the importance of interactions among systems. Systems are
situations or contexts within which individuals live their lives.Bronfenbrenner believes
that systems can positively or negatively influence families and children.

For this reason, communities and social institutions need to work to develop
connections between the systems so that there are more positive influences on families
and individuals.

Jean Piaget is a cognitive developmental theorist.He suggested that individuals are

active participants in their own development, constructing knowledge to make sense of
their own experience. He believed that all living species have ways of adapting to their
environment.

Humans are the most adaptable of all. They adapt by using their intelligence, by the
active process of gaining understanding of their environment.The peak of development
in his model is the capacity for very complex logical reasoning. His model of the
development of thinking recognises the developmental nature of learning.It implies that
we must respect the individual’s capacity to make sense of the world in his or her own
way.It includes recognising the importance of allowing children to discover for them
important logical knowledge related to their particular stage of development.

Piaget’s theory had four stages:

1. Sensory-motor stage
2. Pre-operational stage
3. Concrete operational stage
4. Formal operational stage

Erik Erikson

Erik Erikson is a psychoanalytical theorist. His theory suggests that we develop through
a predetermined unfolding of our personalities in eight stages. In each stage a central
problem is posed, where a struggle is fought between positives or negatives e.g. basic
trust vs basic mistrust.

Our progress through each stage is partly determined by our success or otherwise in
the previous stages.Erikson proposed that the effects of these conflicts continue
through later stages of development, although he doesn’t believe that traumatic
experiences occurring in childhood necessarily lead to trouble.Good experiences in later
stages can make up for bad ones at an earlier stage.

Erikson’s theory has eight stages:

1. Basic trust vs. Basic mistrust
2. Autonomy vs. Shame
3. Initiative vs. Guilt
4. Industry vs. Inferiority
5. Ego-identity vs. Role confusion
 6. Intimacy vs. Isolation
7. Generatively vs. Stagnation
8. Ego-integrity vs. Despair.

Erikson’s theory implies that there is a heavy responsibility on parents and teachers to
ensure that the child does not become maladjusted, for example, by not being
overprotective or allowing too much freedom.

Acculturation in the context of development and socialization

Students, we are living today in a globalised world where children and adults face many
new influences that were not part of the life of earlier generations.This process of
learning new behaviours that come from other cultures is called acculturation.

If we think of development as a systematic and organized process involving changes

that is successive in character and takes place throughout one’s life. We can see that
acculturation is also a similar process in today’s society for people all over the world.
Thus, change is one issue common to both acculturation and development.

Developmental changes serve to make an individual more adaptive in his or her eco-
system.Both acculturation and development serve the function of adaptation.

Acculturation studies tend to state individual changes either as a Coping mechanism

brought about by an encounter with an unfamiliar cultural context; or as a need on the
part of an individual to learn specific cultural skills so as to thrive and survive in a given
cultural context.

Acculturation therefore basically entails learning to deal with a new cultural situation.
Developmental studies on the other hand normally conceptualize individual changes as
arising from either one or two processes, namely biological and maturational processes,
and environmental learning.

As can be seen, while acculturation is basically conceived of as a learning henomenon,

development entails both learning and maturation.However, biology and maturation are
also central to acculturation. In the absence of acculturation, all individuals undergo
development, involving biological and maturational changes and the learning of
behaviours that are culturally sanctioned through the interactions that take place in the
social environment.

This latter form of development is termed enculturation and socialisation.Human

development is personally constructed within a specific socio-cultural context.

Different people, social and ideological institutions may guide and give direction to the
development, but they cannot determine exactly how the individual deals with and
internalize its experiences.
In this sense we may say that each human represents an individual culture that is
expressed through its behaviour.One issue where we claim present theories have not
sufficiently attended to is, the failure to distinguish between developmental and
acculturation changes.

Throughout the life-span acculturation and developmental processes invariably occur

simultaneously, and in close interaction with each other, making it difficult to identify
their independent roles.This problem is compounded by the fact that cross-cultural
psychologists while concerned with acculturation fail to bring developmental issues into
their framework.

At the same time mainstream psychologists concerned with development, fail to bring
acculturation into their theories. Failure to attend to these issues may limit our theorizing
of the adaptation of children and adolescents to changing needs of a global society.

Larger social issues

Students, homeschooling – i.e., children being taught at home by parents, is a big

movement in western countries and is a movement fast becoming more and more
popular in India.

Let us look at some issues of socialisation that are raised by people who advocate
homeschooling as ideal for children.To an educationalist the term socialisation can
mean either the process of teaching a child those rules and customs which govern the
way a society works or it can mean a child’s access to peer contact.

The two issues are linked since it is believed that children learn customs and rules by
social contact.The issue of socialization is most often stated as a concern that if children
are removed from school and educated in the home they will miss out on the necessary
socialisation skills gained at school. Students, let us now examine some of these
arguments.

Initially it is assumed that school is in some sense a model for the “real” adult world of
work and recreation. In reality schools are an almost unique institution in
society.Nowhere else do you find an homogenous group of individuals of the exact
same age, grouped together to complete the same task, each often working in isolation
to the others in the group, with one person (the only one of a different age present) in
control of the process.It is also wrongly believed that children need many others of the
same age around them.

This raises the question why? Why should it be wise to remove children from society,
place them in an environment with little input from adults and call it socialisation?It
seems to me that many of the problems, stresses and anxieties that particularly teenage
children suffer from stem from the lack of social contact they have with other members
of society who have already gone through the many transitions and transformations that
they are experiencing.
The lack of input from adults in the lives of schooled teenage children is as shocking as
it is unnatural.Many people who believe in homeschooling believe that school gives our
young people a distorted view of life.It removes children from the realities of society and
places them in the hands mostly of other children.

Those few adults they do encounter to become authoritative sources of knowledge and
reduce all children into passive receivers of whatever the adult choose to pass on. This
is seen by some as not natural or real?In no other setting are people organised so
strictly by age and ability (not to mention gender, race, neighbourhood etc.).They are
presented with facts they are required to learn which may or may not be of any interest
or utility and then they are periodically tested for their take-up of said facts.

The social skills learned in such a place are of little use to them in other settings.Most
home educated children spend a considerable amount of time using the resources they
find in their community.This more open approach provides home-educated children with
the interpersonal skills necessary for them to make the most of such encounters.Thus
acquiring skills more closely related to those they will need as adults.

Conclusion

Students, in conclusion let us examine the questions – why is socialisation important to

educators?Socialisation is important because we are social animals. If a person cannot
interact and socialise with those around him or her, life will be extremely difficult.

Not knowing the rules of behaviour for one’s society and culture can create a lot of
problems.

For example in our culture smiling is a sign of friendliness and is considered polite, but
in other cultures smiling at someone might be considered rude or a sign of weakness.

The socialisation process of modern schooling is often cited as the most important gain
of students from the schooling process.We have seen above some of the arguments for
and against this process.With important scientific developments that are being made to
substantiate the nature/nurture debate especially in the area of genetics, many of the
assumptions of modern education like that tabula rasa concept, or the mind of a child is
a blank slate concept are being challenged by modern science.

Educators need to know about these developments in order to make sure that future
educational models are developed in line with the developments of modern science and
in the interest of the child and society.

For one reason or another, some children do not develop social skills as easily as
others.This is a fact that is observed by all teachers, and similar to the fact that not all
children learn as easily as some children.
Thus learning about socialisation is important for teachers in order to be able to support
their students in acquiring the right socialisation, where they will be able to maximise
their talents and potential and become assets to their families, community and society at
large.