The Sociological Imagination

Chapter One: The Promise

C. Wright Mills (1959)
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within
their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often
quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by
the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up
scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain
spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats
which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of
continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and
the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a
worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person
is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new
heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a
store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without
understanding both.

Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and
institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups
and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between
the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually
know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of
history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential
to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world.
They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural
transformations that usually lie behind them.

Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many people been so totally exposed at so fast a
pace to such earthquakes of change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic changes
as have the men and women of other societies is due to historical facts that are now quickly
becoming 'merely history.' The history that now affects every individual is world history. Within
this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankind is
transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful.
Political colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism installed. Revolutions
occur; people feel the intimate grip of new kinds of authority. Totalitarian societies rise, and are
smashed to bits - or succeed fabulously. After two centuries of ascendancy, capitalism is shown
up as only one way to make society into an industrial apparatus. After two centuries of hope,
even formal democracy is restricted to a quite small portion of mankind. Everywhere in the
underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life are broken up and vague expectations become urgent
demands. Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority and of violence
become total in scope and bureaucratic in form. Humanity itself now lies before us, the super-
nation at either pole concentrating its most coordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation
of World War Three.

The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of people to orient themselves in
accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, people often
sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are
ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary people feel they cannot
cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot
understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That - in defense of selfhood - they
become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private individuals? Is it any wonder that
they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap?

It is not only information that they need - in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their
attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that
they need - although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy.

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use
information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in
the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to
contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to
expect of what may be called the sociological imagination.

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in
terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It
enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often
become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern
society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are
formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit
troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.

The first fruit of this imagination - and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it - is
the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by
locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming
aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in
many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of humans capacities for supreme
effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of
reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of 'human nature' are frighteningly
broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in
some society; that he lives out a biography, and lives it out within some historical sequence. By
the fact of this living, he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the
course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between
the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is
the mark of the classic social analyst. It is characteristic of Herbert Spencer - turgid, polysyllabic,
comprehensive; of E. A. Ross - graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and Emile
Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim. It is the quality of all that is intellectually
excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen's brilliant and ironic insight, to Joseph
Schumpeter's many-sided constructions of reality; it is the basis of the psychological sweep of
W. E. H. Lecky no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber. And it is the signal of
what is best in contemporary studies of people and society.

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their
intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific
problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social
reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their
work have consistently asked three sorts of questions:

(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components,
and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order?
Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?

(2) Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is
changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole?
How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical
period in which it moves? And this period - what are its essential features? How does it differ
from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history-making?

(3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what
varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and
repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of `human nature' are revealed in the conduct
and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for 'human
nature' of each and every feature of the society we are examining?

Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family, a prison, a
creed - these are the kinds of questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the
intellectual pivots of classic studies of individuals in society - and they are the questions
inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is
the capacity to shift from one perspective to another - from the political to the psychological;
from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the
world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil
industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal
and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self - and to see the
relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and
historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which she has her quality
and her being.

That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men and women now
hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves
as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part,
contemporary humanity's self-conscious view of itself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent
stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power
of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By
its use people whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if
suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar.
Correctly or incorrectly, they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves with
adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older decisions that
once appeared sound now seem to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity
for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a
transvaluation of values: in a word, by their reflection and by their sensibility, they realize the
cultural meaning of the social sciences.

Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between
'the personal troubles of milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure.' This distinction is an
essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science.

Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her
immediate relations with others; they have to do with one's self and with those limited areas of
social life of which one is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the
resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the
scope of one's immediate milieu - the social setting that is directly open to her personal
experience and to some extent her willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished
by an individual are felt by her to be threatened.

Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the
range of her inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the
institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap
and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public
matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about
what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without
focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it
cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary
people. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it
involves what Marxists call 'contradictions' or 'antagonisms.'

In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one is unemployed,
that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the individual,
his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15
million people are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within
the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has
collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require
us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal
situation and character of a scatter of individuals.

Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to
die in it with honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the higher safety of the
military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war's termination. In short, according to one's
values, to find a set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one's death in it
meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of people
it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family and religious
institutions, with the unorganized irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.

Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but
when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts,
this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the
family and other institutions that bear upon them.

Or consider the metropolis - the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of the great city.
For many members of the upperclass the personal solution to 'the problem of the city' is to have
an apartment with private garage under it in the heart of the city and forty miles out, a house by
Henry Hill, garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres of private land. In these two controlled
environments - with a small staff at each end and a private helicopter connection - most people
could solve many of the problems of personal milieux caused by the facts of the city. But all this,
however splendid, does not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses. What
should be done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up into scattered units, combining
residence and work? Refurbish it as it stands? Or, after evacuation, dynamite it and build new
cities according to new plans in new places? What should those plans be? And who is to decide
and to accomplish whatever choice is made? These are structural issues; to confront them and to
solve them requires us to consider political and economic issues that affect innumerable milieux.

In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment

becomes incapable of personal solution. In so far as war is inherent in the nation-state system
and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in her restricted milieu
will be powerless - with or without psychiatric aid - to solve the troubles this system or lack of
system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little
slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory
marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped
megalopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped
society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth.

What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural
changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to
look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the
institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with
one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be
capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to
possess the sociological imagination.
 Part What is Sociology?
1
Sociology is an engrossing subject because it These ideas are echoed by Zygmunt
concerns our own lives as human beings. All Bauman (Reading 3). The focus of his discus-
humans are social – we could not develop as sion, however, is the similarities and differ-
children, or exist as adults, without having ences between sociology and common-sense
social ties to others. Society is thus the very understandings of social life. Sociology, he
condition of human existence. At the same agrees with Mills, teaches us to see our own
time, as the opening reading in the book individual experiences in relation to wider
emphasizes, we all actively shape the society social systems, as well as to broad patterns
in which we live. As sociologists, we seek to of social change. As such, it is a distinctive
understand both how, as individuals, all of way of thinking about the social world. Study-
us are influenced by the wider society, and ing human social activity, Bauman says, is
at the same time how we actively structure different from analysing objects or events in
that society in our own actions. More than the natural world. We are all in some sense
most other intellectual endeavours, sociology knowledgeable and skilful in respect of our
presumes the use of disciplined imagination. participation in day-to-day social activity.
Imagination, because the sociologist must Sociological knowledge builds upon the prac-
distance her- or himself from the here and tical forms of knowing by means of which
now in order to grasp how societies have we organize our everyday lives. Sociological
changed in the past and what potential trans- concepts, however, need to be more clearly
formations lie in store; discipline, because the formulated and precise than those of ordin-
creative ability of the imagination has to be ary language.
restrained by conceptual and empirical rigour. Sociological investigation ranges over much
C. Wright Mills’s discussion of the sociolog- broader arenas, in time as well as in space,
ical imagination (Reading 2) has long been than the immediate settings of interaction
the classic discussion of these issues. We can- with which we are most familiar in the
not understand ourselves as individuals, Mills daily round. Moreover, sociologists focus at-
emphasizes, unless we grasp the involvement tention upon unintended and unanticipated
of our own biography with the historical de- consequences of human activity, whereas
velopment of social institutions. On the other in ordinary activities we concern ourselves
hand, we cannot comprehend the nature of mainly with the intentions and emotions of
those institutions unless we understand how other people. As Mills also stresses, sociolo-
they are organized in and through individual gical thought must take an imaginative leap
action. It is the business of sociology to ana- beyond the familiar, and the sociologist must
lyse the social orders which constrain our be- be prepared to look behind the routine activ-
haviour, but at the same time to acknowledge ities in which much of our mundane life is
that we actively make our own history. enmeshed.
HH
1 The Scope of Sociology
Anthony Giddens

Sociology is a subject with a curiously mixed lashing-out at all that most of the population hold
reputation. On the one hand, it is associated by to be good and proper ways of behaviour. But I
many people with the fomenting of rebellion, a do want to defend the view that sociology, under-
stimulus to revolt. Even though they may have stood in the manner in which I shall describe it,
only a vague notion of what topics are studied in necessarily has a subversive quality. Its subversive
sociology, they somehow associate sociology with or critical character, however [. . .], does not carry
subversion, with the shrill demands of unkempt with it (or should not do so) the implication that
student militants. On the other hand, quite a dif- it is an intellectually disreputable enterprise. On
ferent view of the subject is often entertained – the contrary, it is exactly because sociology deals
perhaps more commonly than the first – by indi- with problems of such pressing interest to us
viduals who have had some direct acquaintance all (or should do so), problems which are the
with it in schools and universities. This is that in objects of major controversies and conflicts in
fact it is rather a dull and uninstructive enterprise, society itself, that it has this character. However
which far from propelling its students towards kempt or otherwise student radicals, or any
the barricades is more likely to bore them to other radicals, may be, there do exist broad con-
death with platitudes. Sociology, in this guise, nections between the impulses that stir them to
assumes the dry mantle of a science, but not one action and a sociological awareness. This is not
that proves as enlightening as the natural sciences [. . .] because sociologists directly preach revolt;
upon which its practitioners wish to model it. it is because the study of sociology, appropriately
I think that those who have taken the second understood, [. . .] demonstrates how fundamental
reaction to sociology have a good deal of right are the social questions that have to be faced in
on their side. Sociology has been conceived of by today’s world. Everyone is to some extent aware
many of its proponents – even the bulk of them – of these questions, but the study of sociology
in such a way that commonplace assertions are helps bring them into much sharper focus. Soci-
disguised in a pseudo-scientific language. The ology cannot remain a purely academic subject,
conception that sociology belongs to the natural if ‘academic’ means a disinterested and remote
sciences, and hence should slavishly try to copy scholarly pursuit, followed solely within the
their procedures and objectives, is a mistaken one. enclosed walls of the university.
Its lay critics, in some considerable degree at least, Sociology is not a subject that comes neatly
are quite correct to be sceptical of the attainments gift-wrapped, making no demands except that its
of sociology thus presented. contents be unpacked. Like all the social sciences
My intention in this [discussion] will be to – under which label one can also include, among
associate sociology with the first type of view other disciplines, anthropology, economics and
rather than the second. By this I do not mean history – sociology is an inherently controversial
to connect sociology with a sort of irrational endeavour. That is to say, it is characterized by
4 ANTHONY GIDDENS

continuing disputes about its very nature. But first is the French revolution of 1789, both a
this is not a weakness, although it has seemed specific set of events and a symbol of political
such to many of those who call themselves pro- transformations in our era. For the 1789 revolu-
fessional ‘sociologists’, and also to many others tion was quite different from rebellions of previ-
on the outside, who are distressed that there are ous times. Peasants had sometimes rebelled against
numerous vying conceptions of how the subject- their feudal masters, for example, but generally
matter of sociology should be approached or in an attempt to remove specific individuals
analysed. Those who are upset by the persistent from power, or to secure reductions in prices or
character of sociological debates, and a frequent taxes. In the French revolution (to which we can
lack of consensus about how to resolve them, bracket, with some reservations, the anti-colonial
usually feel that this is a sign of the immaturity revolution in North America in 1776) for the
of the subject. They want sociology to be like a first time in history there took place the overall
natural science, and to generate a similar ap- dissolution of a social order by a movement
paratus of universal laws to those which they see guided by purely secular ideals – universal liberty
natural science as having discovered and validated. and equality. If the ideals of the revolutionaries
But [. . .] it is a mistake to suppose that soci- have scarcely been fully realized even now, they
ology should be modelled too closely on the created a climate of political change that has
natural sciences, or to imagine that a natural proved one of the dynamic forces of contem-
science of society is either feasible or desirable. porary history. There are few states in the world
To say this, I should emphasize, does not mean today that are not proclaimed by their rulers to
that the methods and objectives of the natural be ‘democracies’, whatever their actual political
sciences are wholly irrelevant to the study of complexion may be. This is something altogether
human social behaviour. Sociology deals with a novel in human history. It is true that there
factually observable subject-matter, depends upon have been other republics, most especially those
empirical research, and involves attempts to formu- of Classical Greece and Rome. But these were
late theories and generalizations that will make themselves rare instances; and in each case those
sense of facts. But human beings are not the who formed the ‘citizens’ were a minority of the
same as material objects in nature; studying our population, the majority of whom were slaves or
own behaviour is necessarily entirely different in others without the prerogatives of the select
some very important ways from studying natural groups of citizenry.
phenomena. The second ‘great revolution’ was the so-called
The development of sociology, and its current ‘industrial revolution’, usually traced to Britain in
concerns, have to be grasped in the context of the late eighteenth century, and spreading in the
changes that have created the modern world. We nineteenth century throughout Western Europe
live in an age of massive social transformation. and the United States. The industrial revolution
In the space of only something like two centuries is sometimes presented merely as a set of technical
a sweeping set of social changes, which have innovations: especially the harnessing of steam
hastened rather than lessened their pace today, power to manufacturing production and the intro-
have occurred. These changes, emanating origin- duction of novel forms of machinery activated
ally from Western Europe, are now global in their by such sources of power. But these technical
impact. They have all but totally dissolved the inventions were only part of a very much broader
forms of social organization in which humankind set of social and economic changes. The most
had lived for thousands of years of its previous important of these was the migration of the mass
history. Their core is to be found in what some of the labour force from the land into the con-
have described as the ‘two great revolutions’ of stantly expanding sectors of industrial work, a pro-
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The cess which also eventually led to the widespread
 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 5

mechanization of agrarian production. This same language, as a loose synonym for ‘group’ or
process promoted an expansion of cities upon a ‘collectivity’ – as when, say, a prison or hospital
scale again previously unwitnessed in history. [. . .] is referred to as an ‘institution’.
Sociology came into being as those caught up These considerations help to indicate how
in the initial series of changes brought about by ‘society’ should be understood, but we cannot
the ‘two great revolutions’ in Europe sought to leave matters there. As an object of study, ‘society’
understand the conditions of their emergence, is shared by sociology and the other social sciences.
and their likely consequences. Of course, no field The distinctive feature of sociology lies in its
of study can be exactly pinpointed in terms of its overriding concern with those forms of society
origins. We can quite readily trace direct continuit- that have emerged in the wake of the ‘two great
ies from writers in the middle of the eighteenth revolutions’. Such forms of society include those
century through to later periods of social thought. that are industrially advanced – the economically
The climate of ideas involved in the formation of developed countries of the West, Japan and East-
sociology in some part, in fact, helped give rise to ern Europe – but also in the twentieth century a
the twin processes of revolution. range of other societies stretched across the world.
How should ‘sociology’ be defined? Let me [. . .]
begin with a banality. Sociology is concerned with In the light of these remarks, a definition can
the study of human societies. Now the notion of be offered of the subject as follows. Sociology is a
society can be formulated in only a very general social science, having as its main focus the study
way. For under the general category of ‘societies’ of the social institutions brought into being by the
we want to include not only the industrialized industrial transformations of the past two or three
countries, but large agrarian imperial states (such centuries. It is important to stress that there are
as the Roman Empire, or traditional China), and, no precisely defined divisions between sociology
at the other end of the scale, small tribal com- and other fields of intellectual endeavour in the
munities that may comprise only a tiny number social sciences. Neither is it desirable that there
of individuals. should be. Some questions of social theory, to
A society is a cluster, or system, of institution- do with how human behaviour and institutions
alized modes of conduct. To speak of ‘institu- should be conceptualized, are the shared concern
tionalized’ forms of social conduct is to refer to of the social sciences as a whole. The different
modes of belief and behaviour that occur and ‘areas’ of human behaviour that are covered by
recur – or, as the terminology of modern social the various social sciences form an intellectual
theory would have it, are socially reproduced – division of labour which can be justified in only
across long spans of time and space. Language is a very general way. Anthropology, for example,
an excellent example of such a form of institu- is concerned [. . .] with the ‘simpler’ societies:
tionalized activity, or institution, since it is so tribal societies, chiefdoms and agrarian states.
fundamental to social life. All of us speak lan- But either these have been dissolved altogether
guages which none of us, as individuals, created, by the profound social changes that have swept
although we all use language creatively. But many through the world, or they are in the process of
other aspects of social life may be institutional- becoming incorporated within modern industrial
ized: that is, become commonly adopted prac- states. The subject-matter of economics, to take
tices which persist in recognizably similar form another instance, is the production and distribu-
across the generations. Hence we can speak of tion of material goods. However, economic insti-
economic institutions, political institutions and tutions are plainly always connected with other
so on. Such a use of the concept ‘institution’, it institutions in social systems, which both influ-
should be pointed out, differs from the way in ence and are influenced by them. Finally, history,
which the term is often employed in ordinary as the study of the continual distancing of past
6 ANTHONY GIDDENS

and present, is the source material of the whole because societies only exist in so far as they
of the social sciences. are created and re-created in our own actions
[. . .] Although this type of standpoint has been as human beings. In social theory, we cannot
very pervasive in sociology, it is one I reject. To treat human activities as though they were
speak of sociology, and of other subjects like determined by causes in the same way as nat-
anthropology or economics, as ‘social sciences’ is ural events are. We have to grasp what I would
to stress that they involve the systematic study of call the double involvement of individuals and
an empirical subject-matter. The terminology is institutions: we create society at the same time
not confusing so long as we see that sociology as we are created by it. [. . .]
and other social sciences differ from the natural 2 It follows from this that the practical implica-
sciences in two essential respects. tions of sociology are not directly parallel to
the technological uses of science, and cannot
1 We cannot approach society, or ‘social facts’,
be.
as we do objects or events in the natural world,
schools and societies

Second Edition

steven brint

stanford social sciences

An imprint of Stanford University Press
Stanford, California 2006
 5 schools and socialization

The early nineteenth-century American school reformer Horace Mann observed that it is
easier to create a republic than to create republicans (Mann, quoted in Cremin 1957:14).
By this, Mann meant that the self-restraint and virtuous conduct that make representative
government possible do not necessarily come naturally and must therefore be created by so-
ciety’s institutions, particularly by its schools. Mann’s observation suggests the important
role schools have long played in the socialization of children.
Sociologists use the term socialization to describe the efforts of the carriers of a soci-
ety’s dominant ways of life to shape the values and conduct of others who are less integrated
into those ways of life. In schools, the teaching and administrative staff is the principal agent
of socialization and students the socialized. (However, students can also try to socialize
adults into the ways of student society—and some adults do end up adapting, at least in
limited ways.)
The effort of school authorities to socialize students is undoubtedly one of the major ac-
tivities of schooling, and it might be the schools’ most important activity. Think how often
students’ attention and behavior is organized in school around the schools’ ideas about ac-
ceptable conduct. Every time a teacher says, “I need your attention,” she is implicitly so-
cializing students to be responsive to authority. Every time she hands back a paper with a
smile or a frown, she is socializing students to value work well done in the eyes of the school.
The early sociologist Emile Durkheim ([1923] 1961) thought that the most important func-
tion of schooling in modern societies would be to develop habits of conduct. He argued that
the schools should be organized to encourage students to build strong self-discipline, a ca-
pacity for attachment to groups, and sufficient autonomy for independence and creativity.
Of these, Durkheim placed particular emphasis on self-discipline: “Indeed, what is most es-
sential in character is the aptitude to exercise self-control, the faculty of restraint . . . that en-
ables us to contain our passions and desires and to call them to order” (9). He thought the
self-discipline required by study would be particularly important in democratic societies
“because the conventional barriers which forcibly curbed desires and ambitions” in previ-
ous societies “have partly fallen away” (42).
 schools and socialization 133

Schools undoubtedly play a secondary role to families in socializing children. The more
impersonal institutions of society cannot duplicate the powerful mix of emotional intimacy
and consistent attentiveness typical of family life. Families create the capacity for trust and
self-control out of which healthy egos develop. Even so, schools are organized to form per-
sonalities for a public world in which intimacy and attentiveness are not always in generous
supply. Schools specialize in the creation of people who can adapt to impersonal work en-
vironments and who can pursue their interests with people who are neither kin nor close
friends. Without lengthy exposure to the socializing environments of the school, most chil-
dren would not be as well prepared as they are for adult life.
This chapter begins by describing the three types of socialization that take place in
schools (behavioral, moral, and cultural) and then sketches the historical development of
the schools’ socializing role. The remainder of the chapter analyzes two distinct sites of so-
cialization in contemporary schools: the classroom and the playground. By the playground,
I mean all school spaces outside the classroom: the corridors, playgrounds, lunchrooms,
and extracurricular activity rooms. Classrooms are the spaces in which lessons of industry
and work-related achievement are principally taught. Playgrounds are the spaces in which
friendships and coalitions are formed and broken, status hierarchies are expressed and chal-
lenged, and children learn to balance self-assertion and self-control in informal social life.
If teachers are the primary agents of socialization in the classroom setting, the most popu-
lar boys and girls are the primary agents of socialization in these other school spaces.

three dimensions of socialization

It is best to think of socialization as involving three dimensions: (1) efforts to shape behav-
ior, (2) efforts to shape moral values, and (3) efforts to shape cultural styles. The differences
in these dimensions become clearer when we consider how students who conform primar-
ily on one of these dimensions are characterized. Students are described as “well disci-
plined” by authorities if they conform behaviorally, “good” if they are seen to conform mor-
ally, and “well adjusted” if they conform culturally.

1. Behavioral conformity. Training for behavioral conformity involves activities related

to the body, its mechanical actions, and its instruments and adornments. In schools
with strict disciplinary environments, students may, for example, be required to sit
erect with their eyes on the teacher, to raise their hands before talking, to stay in
their seats unless they are excused, to have their pencils sharpened at all times, and
to have their textbooks with them in class. They may be subject to explicit dress and
grooming codes. If students are punished for failing to comply with these require-
ments, the school is attempting to use its powers of control to socialize for behav-
ioral conformity. Conduct is behavior regulated over a long period of time.
2. Moral conformity. Training for moral conformity involves activities related to the
production of an internalized sense of “right action.” Judgments of the goodness
and badness of conduct are central in this domain, and they are typically based on
the staff ’s advocacy of abstract virtues and values. Teachers may talk about the im-
 134 schools and socialization

portance of such virtues as honesty, tolerance, courage, hard work, or fairness. They
may also assign reading materials that illustrate the consequences of not being
guided by these moral virtues. At higher levels, more complex moral issues may be
raised, involving the collision of two “goods” or finer judgments of others’ actions.
Clearly, training for behavioral and moral conformity overlap in practice. Most
schools expect a movement from external discipline based on behavioral control to
self-discipline in conformity with moral values. Nevertheless, it is possible to have a
high level of behavioral conformity without much in the way of moral conformity,
as the occasional cheating and sexual harassment scandals in military academies
demonstrate.
3. Cultural conformity. Training for cultural conformity, or acculturation, is more a
matter of learning approved styles and outlooks. In the better Parisian secondary
schools, for example, students are expected to express themselves vividly, with
memorable phrases and sharp wit (Bourdieu 1988). If a student makes a very witty
remark in class, the teacher will smile in appreciation or attempt an equally witty
riposte. By contrast, in secondary school in a Central European or Scandinavian
republic, it may be more important for students to demonstrate conspicuous
thoughtfulness: to probe beneath the surface appearances and to ask questions
that get to the heart of a difficult problem. These styles and outlooks reflect the
cultural logic of a particular group or time or place. It is, for example, reasonable
to expect that centers of learning in cosmopolitan capitals like Paris will reflect the
quick pace and brilliant surfaces of urban life, whereas those in relatively isolated
regions show a gravity that frequently appears unduly stiff and reserved to urban
sophisticates. Students of acculturation tend to be cultural relativists; they try to
understand the social logic that produces distinctive cultural styles, but they do
not usually think that cultural styles and outlooks have universal validity in every
environment.

Even when schools emphasize all three types of conformity, they may be more success-
ful in one area than others. For example, military cadets are required to conform to an enor-
mous number of behavioral rules. If they don’t salute in a crisp fashion, they can be sent
back to barracks. If their boots don’t show a “spit shine,” they can be forced to clean out la-
trines. Because well-executed response to orders is vitally important (ultimately for survival
and victory) in the military, behavioral conformity is a top priority. By contrast, faculty in
art schools may expect students to take pride in thumbing their noses at behavioral and
moral conventions, as the famous battle cry of bohemia, “épater les bourgeois” (literally, to
shock or flabbergast the middle class) demands. But acculturation is unavoidable even in
this nonconformist environment. To be accepted by other nonconventional people, would-
be bohemians must conform to the expressive style and outlooks typical of their group.
They may need to be able to talk knowledgeably about obscure poets or musicians and to
shift smoothly between attitudes of enthusiasm for the offbeat and world weariness in the
face of the familiar. A would-be bohemian who does not act in these ways is not well-suited
for bohemian life.
 schools and socialization 135

Discussions of the role of schools in socialization are often muddled by the failure to
keep these three dimensions distinct. Many contemporary conservative critics, for example,
suggest that schools are failing in the area of socialization because they have stopped em-
phasizing moral virtues. In the introduction to his best-selling book, The Book of Virtues
(1993), former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett wrote:

Where do we go to find the material that will help our children in [the] task [of developing
moral literacy]? The simple answer is we have a wealth of material to draw on—materials
that virtually all schools and homes and churches once taught to students for the sake of
shaping character. That many no longer do so is something this book hopes to change. (11)

Although Secretary Bennett raises an important issue in this passage, he is highlighting one
dimension of socialization while playing down the other two.
Schools need to develop a certain minimum level of behavioral conformity, and they
cannot help but acculturate students in some way. Nor have they abandoned the field of
moral instruction as completely as Secretary Bennett and other critics contend.1 However,
as we will see, both the specific socialization messages and the techniques used to socialize
schoolchildren have changed greatly over time.

socialization in comparative and historical perspective

School socialization environments can be described as fitting one of four major ideal types:

• The village/communal pattern is based on relatively lax behavioral control, rela-

tively low levels of explicit moral training, and accommodation to the rhythms of
village life.
• The industrializing pattern is based on very high levels of behavioral control, high
levels of training for moral conformity, and acculturation primarily to the world of
mechanical production.
• The bureau-corporate/mass consumption pattern is based on impersonal control
through rules and routines, relatively lower levels of moral discussion and training,
and many more choices in classroom and extracurricular life. Students are accultur-
ated to a world of bureaucratic organization and mass consumption.
• The elite pattern has existed at the upper reaches of all societies, but the specific
forms of elite socialization have varied greatly from society to society because of dif-
ferences in the outlooks of the groups decisive in the formation of the schools, the
geographic location of the schools, and other factors.

As societies change, so do the dominant patterns of socialization in schools. The first

transformation is from the relatively free-flowing village/communal pattern to an industrial
pattern characterized by very stringent demands for behavioral control and moral con-
formity. Some of the latter schools are evident in industrialized countries today. In these
schools, students are closely monitored for behavioral conformity and are expected to fol-
low a large number of detailed rules. The environment is more highly moralized, and work
 136 schools and socialization

Table 5.1
School socializing environments
dimensions of socialization

Environment Behavioral Moral Cultural

Village/communal Relatively lax Relatively weak emphasis Accommodation to rhythms

of village life
Industrializing Strong explicit Strong explicit emphasis Preparation for world of in-
emphasis dustrial production and
nation building
Bureau-corporate/ Embedded in rules Relatively weak emphasis Preparation for impersonal
mass and practices and more pluralistic organizational life, cultural
consumption pluralism, and consumerism
Elite Largely implicit (based Relatively strong emphasis Preparation for world of
on behavior modeling) and highly ritualized power and status

assignments are typically based on rote memorization, filling in answers on rather un-
demanding worksheets (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Anyon 1980; Cookson and Persell 1985).
Today, the majority of schools in the wealthier societies have made a second transforma-
tion: from the industrial to the bureau-corporate/mass consumption pattern. Some of these
changes are the result of conscious emulation of the leading organizations in society; some
an unconscious reflection of changing expectations in the larger society.
Table 5.1 compares these four socialization environments.
It is important to avoid overly sweeping generalizations about how uniformly schools in
any society fit this typology. First, cultural understandings of childhood often have an inde-
pendent influence on how societies organize their school socialization practices. Some so-
cieties, such as contemporary Japan, draw a strict separation between the years of innocence
and the years of responsibility. Early childhood is seen as a period of experimentation in
which children require indulgence and unconditional support. They are not expected to
conform to a highly disciplined style of life until later childhood (Stevenson and Stigler
1992). These views have been common historically in many European countries as well
(Cubberly 1922). Second, the socializing environment in primary and secondary schools
always differs somewhat. The personal authority of teachers over students is much more
typical of primary schooling than of secondary schooling today. Choices are far greater in
secondary schools. Therefore, the bureau-corporate/mass consumption pattern is more ap-
parent at the secondary school level.
Within countries, the dominant socialization pattern does not necessarily sweep away
the others. In some cases, a mix of elements may be present. Laurence Wylie (1974) de-
scribes a village school in the south of France in the 1950s that seems to mix elements of the
village/communal and industrializing patterns. A favored child is allowed to wander unim-
peded from classroom to classroom. Each teacher gives him a hug. The teachers do not have
the same expectations for every child and are tolerant of those who are not succeeding. At
the same time, the teachers maintain, and the parents insist on, a rather strict climate of au-
thority in the classroom with severe punishments in the few cases of lying or stealing (Wylie
1974, chap. 4). The rule is: “Children must never dispute the word of the teacher.”
One other qualification is necessary: the circumstances of the local economy or the so-
cial class composition of the school may influence socialization patterns. In the United
 schools and socialization 137

States, the bureau-corporate/mass consumption pattern now predominates in most middle-

and upper-middle-class communities. But the other three socialization environments can
also be found in some locations. The elite pattern continues, of course, in private day and
boarding schools (and even in advanced placement tracks of some suburban public
schools). The village/communal pattern can still be found in some of the poorest rural ar-
eas of the country; for example, among Mexican farm workers in the Central Valley of Cali-
fornia or in the poorest sections of the Mississippi delta. The industrializing pattern can still
be found in some urban working-class schools.
Parents tend to be strong proponents of class-conditioned socialization. Upper-middle-
class parents expect more self-directed and creative schoolwork for their children, in large
part because their own occupational careers require self-direction; working-class parents
often demand tough discipline and strict compliance with the teacher’s direction, in large
part because they have found compliance at work to be a fundamental expectation of their
employers (Kohn 1972; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Lareau 1987). Schools both reflect and re-
inforce these parental expectations.

The First Transformation: From Village to Factory

The least developed countries are those in which the routines of public life are also least en-
trenched, and where the intimate cultures of family and village still take precedence. The
classroom environment in such countries tends to be relatively informal, and expectations
for attendance, attentiveness, or performance cannot be easily enforced. Individual trans-
gressions, such as poor academic performance and spotty attendance, are readily forgiven.
Not too much is expected of teachers, either. A good example comes from Nancy Horn-
berger’s (1987) fieldwork in rural Peru: “Over the seven day period, out of 50.5 hours spent
at school by the children 30.5 hours were [spent out of the classroom] as follows: 16.5 hours
in recreation periods, 4.5 hours in sports competitions, 3.5 hours waiting during adult
meetings, 3.5 hours in which teachers were absent during school, and 2.5 hours in line-up
activities” (211). She adds that a fifth of the classroom time consisted of housecleaning ac-
tivities, such as sweeping up the classroom.
At somewhat higher levels of economic development, the classroom climate changes.
Few countries have managed to achieve sustained economic growth without the “industri-
alization of schoolchildren.” The informal ways of the village are replaced by values con-
nected to readiness and exertion at industrial work. The value of strict obedience to au-
thority is communicated to students through classroom discipline, and classroom life is
consequently harsh. Many countries provide a warm and nurturing environment for early
primary schooling, with rugs and overstuffed furniture easing the transition from home to
school. Regimentation takes over in the later grades. In some countries, such as Germany in
the later nineteenth century, the influence of factory-style discipline was heightened in the
upper primary grades and secondary schools by a nationalist ideology that stressed prepa-
ration for war (Ringer 1979, chap. 2).
Not all countries leapt into the modern era on the heels of industrialized schools. In
slow-industrializing countries, the era of mass schooling preceded industrialization. In
these countries, socialization took a different path at first. In the early 1800s, the Swiss-
 138 schools and socialization

German reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi argued that all children could develop their
intellectual and moral capacities, if schools encouraged them to do so in a less regimented
environment. He introduced methods of teaching in parts of modern Switzerland and Ger-
many that aimed to inspire children’s interest in learning, rather than to fill their heads with
mechanical drill. This effort to adapt schooling to the natural interests and development of
children dovetailed in these countries with the state’s interest in separating formal school-
ing from religious control and connecting children to a new model of “modern” personal-
ity and national purpose.
The English, by contrast, developed mass schooling after rather than before industrial-
ization. The industrialization of schooling also goes to the greatest lengths in England. At
the same time that Pestalozzian ideas were adopted in the German-speaking world, the En-
glish were beginning experiments with the harsh “Lancasterian system.” The system is
named after Joseph Lancaster, who developed a plan in which one teacher, assisted by sev-
eral of the brighter pupils, could teach from 200 to 1,000 students in one school. The pupils
were sorted into rows, and each row was assigned to a monitor. The teacher first taught
these monitors a lesson from a printed card, and each monitor took his row to a “station”
at the wall of the room and proceeded to teach the other children what he had learned. The
Lancasterian schools were organized in a largely mechanical fashion. The Manuals of In-
struction gave complete directions for the organization and management of monitorial
schools, the details of recitation work, use of apparatus, order, position of pupils at their
work, and classification being minutely laid down (Cubberly 1922:341). The schools were
very popular between 1810 and 1830 in England and other early industrializing countries,
but fell out of fashion by 1840. The low expense of Lancasterian schools could not com-
pensate for their inability to sustain the interest of hundreds of children at a time.
In many eastern cities in the United States, the first free schools were of this type, and in-
deed Lancaster spent most of the last 20 years of his life organizing schools in the United
States (Cubberly 1922:360). In many locales, schooling in the United States remained
highly repressive, even after the popularity of the monitorial system waned. No doubt Pu-
ritan asceticism, aligned with industrial work discipline, influenced the unusual severity of
schooling in the United States. Children were relentlessly schooled to be obedient, regular,
and precise in their habits. Classrooms were organized not so much to stimulate the in-
tellect as to create well-disciplined workers. The phrase “toeing the line” still had a literal
meaning. Joseph Rice (1893) visited hundreds of urban classrooms in the eastern United
States to collect data for his book on the public high school at the turn of the century. In one
school described by Rice, during recitation periods (periods in which students demon-
strated that they had memorized a text), children were expected to stand on the line, per-
fectly motionless, their bodies erect, their knees and feet together, the tips of their shoes
touching the edge of a board in the floor. The teachers, according to Rice, paid as much at-
tention to the state of their toes and knees as to the words coming out of their mouths:
“‘How can you learn anything’ asked one teacher, ‘with your knees and toes out of or-
der?’” (98).
Disciplinary practices varied, of course, but they were generally strict. At Philadelphia’s
Central High School, two evaluations were taken every hour— one for scholarship, the
 schools and socialization 139

other for conduct. Demerits for disciplinary infractions (such as laziness or insubordina-
tion) were deducted from the student’s grade point average at the end of term, influencing
class rank and chances for promotion. In 1853, the principal of Philadelphia’s Central High
School described this system of discipline:

The whole machinery of the school, like an extended piece of net-work, is thrown over and
around [the student], and made to bear upon him, not with any great amount of force at
any one time or place, but with a restraining influence just sufficient, and always and every
where present. Some of the most hopeless cases of idleness and insubordination that I
have ever known have been found to yield to this species of treatment. (quoted in Labaree
1988:18)

Teachers, too, were tightly controlled. In smaller communities, in particular, female

teachers were told what they could wear, where they could travel, how late they could be out,
and whose company they could keep. In many places, they were prevented from marrying
or joining early feminist organizations. Men had more leeway in most communities. Nev-
ertheless, rules such as the following from one southern California school were not un-
common: “Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls,
or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, in-
tegrity, and honesty” (Oak Glen School 1873).
Nineteenth-century classrooms were also more highly moralized places than they are to-
day. The schools taught a bundle of virtues that reflect three primary moral traditions: the
Judeo-Christian moral code of honesty, decency, tolerance, love of goodness, and kindness;
the Protestant work ethic of industry, enterprise, planning, and frugality; and the republican-
nationalist “civil religion” of patriotism, bravery in battle, love of freedom, respect for the
rule of law and the Constitution, and responsible participation in the institutions of politi-
cal society.
The explicit moral teachings of the schools reflect the schools’ historical interaction with
three waves of “nation-building” ideas. The first and second of these waves occurred more
or less simultaneously. From the eighteenth-century beginnings of mass schooling in Eu-
rope, children were taught to be good and patriotic subjects and also to follow the moral
norms of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Bendix 1968). A third wave of ideas followed the
advance of capitalist industrialization in the early nineteenth century. It encouraged thrift,
sobriety, and hard work. The waves of social change brought on by the rise of the nation-
state and industrialization left similar imprints in the socializing objectives and practices of
schools throughout the world.
In the United States, most children in the mid- and late nineteenth century learned to
read from the McGuffey Readers where “the rules were always clear: Never Drink, Never
Smoke, Work Hard, Tell the Truth, Obey Authority, Trust Providence” (Tyack and Hansot
1982:27). Like a church with its Bible, the rural school with its McGuffey Readers was to be
a small “incubator of virtue” (ibid.:4). Leading educational historians have argued that such
rules were based on a tight interweaving of the “absolutist morality of the evangelical move-
ment,” the faith in “civic virtue” of eighteenth-century republicanism, and “entrepreneur-
ial economic values.” The common school supported capitalism by rationalizing wealth or
 140 schools and socialization

poverty as the result of individual effort or indolence, and by making the political economy
seem to be not a matter of choice but of providential design (ibid.:24). These schools were
the natural seedbeds both for hard-driving entrepreneurs and their hardworking and ab-
stemious laborers.
The same emphasis on behavioral conformity and stern morality found in nineteenth-
century American schooling can be found today in industrializing parts of the developing
world. Consider the following, rather extreme description of disciplinary practices in mod-
ernizing Lebanon: Those who received failing grades were asked to line up in the front of
the room. The teacher took a long, thin wooden stick and slapped the first boy’s open palms.
Others were slapped across the face, on the hand, or across the body with the wooden stick.
Once the punishment was meted out, the teacher began explaining the answers to the quiz
in his seemingly relaxed, friendly manner (Howard 1970:129). Here, too, the interests of
developing states in organizing self-discipline combine with religious injunctions to pro-
duce a climate of strict behavioral expectations and strong moralization.
“Well-adjusted” students in these authoritarian systems are, at least publicly, not very
willing to criticize the harshness of their teachers. One boy explained why teachers hit: “He
hits us because his conscience will hurt him when he doesn’t help us to discover the good
path. Truly, the teacher is a candle that melts and melts to light the road of virtue, love, and
goodness. He is the messenger of civilization” (ibid.:130).

The Second Transformation: From Factory to Office and Shopping Mall

In later stages of capitalist development, the industrializing pattern gives way to what I have
called the bureau-corporate/mass consumption pattern. This second transformation is at
the heart of Americans’ school experience today, particularly in secondary schools. A num-
ber of forces came together following World War I to produce the new pattern, which was
less obtrusive in behavioral control (depending more on rules than personal admonitions),
less highly moralized, and less single-minded in concerns with production. Instead of
preparing students for factory work, schools began preparing them for work in bureaucra-
cies and for a consumer-oriented life of choice and variety. These forces arrived somewhat
later in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world than they did in the United States.
The Progressive Era’s (1896 –1918) emphasis on administrative solutions to social prob-
lems played the midwife in this transformation. The triumph of “scientific managers”
moved the schools out of the hands of people who were obsessed with personally rooting
out evil and put them into the hands of people who favored structural forms of control.
With the right rules and organizational practices, educators like George Strayer and Ellwood
Cubberly believed, it would be unnecessary to install a miniature tyranny in each classroom.
Authoritarian methods were, in any event, coming under criticism by developmental psy-
chologists, who saw them as creating a regime of fear in the classroom rather than an envi-
ronment conducive to active exploration and learning.
At about the same time, schools came to be seen as institutions responsible more for the
development of mental abilities than for the development of character. Secondary schools
had always been more purely cognitive in orientation, but conflicts over what constitutes
 schools and socialization 141

“good character” in a country newly self-conscious of its multiethnic population led both
primary and secondary schools to tread more gingerly on moral topics than they once had.
If the movement toward a more student-oriented ethos began in social engineering and
the desire to avoid controversy, it ended in full-fledged consumerism. First, schools were
seen as a place to have fun as well as to work. Later, they were seen as places to choose among
subject matter alternatives rather than to conform to standardized curricula.
Toward consumerism. As early as the 1920s in the United States, profiles in popular mag-
azines of “heroes of production” (i.e., business, scientific, and political leaders) were giving
way to profiles of “heroes of consumption” (sports and entertainment celebrities) (Lowen-
thal 1957, chap. 4). At the same time, football became popular and began attracting in-
creasing numbers of students to college (Riesman and Denney 1951). Sports and later other
extracurricular activities (band, glee club, drama, and others) became a focal point for high
school students in the 1920s and 1930s. Arthur Powell and his colleagues (1985) quote one
high school principal of the period observing the difference in interest generated by ex-
tracurricular activities and regular instruction: Extracurricular activity “pulsates with life
and purpose,” the principal noted, whereas the formal curriculum “owes its existence to a
coercive regime, loosely connected and highly artificial” (257).
In the curriculum, social engineering justified as consumerism began in the early 1900s.
Educators were determined to “meet the needs” of secondary school students who would
not be attending college by providing more practical coursework. Under the influence of a
“life adjustment” philosophy popularized after World War I, this emphasis on student in-
terests gradually branched out to incorporate students in academic and general education
tracks. Courses were provided to students to prepare them for balancing a checkbook, dat-
ing, driving, and raising children. After a swing back toward academic rigor in the Sputnik
era, consumerism flowered again in the late 1960s and 1970s. The U.S. Department of Ed-
ucation counted thousands of course titles on high school campuses at the end of the 1970s,
with the vast number in relatively undemanding “general education” programs, such as
movie making, health education, and driver’s education (Angus and Mirel 1995).
At the height of the era of student consumerism in the late 1970s, three social scientists,
Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen, studied a dozen American high schools
and published their findings in The Shopping Mall High School (1985). How different their
portrait is from the factory-like regimes described by Joseph Rice and others only a century
earlier: “Most educators are proud of the mall-like features of high schools. ‘The nice thing
about [our] school,’ a teacher explained, ‘is that students can do their own thing. They can
be involved in music, fine arts, athletics, sitting out on the south lawn and nobody puts them
down for it.’” For Powell and his colleagues, the “shopping mall high school” was based on
three distinctive features:

• Variety. The schools offered a wide variety of consumer opportunities, from curric-
ular opportunities like fine arts to extracurricular opportunities like sports to non-
curricular opportunities for socializing with friends.
• Choice. The schools placed choice in the hands of the consumer. The customer had
real power not only to decide what to take and where to go but also how much ef-
 142 schools and socialization

fort to expend. Many schools, Powell and his associates found, allowed “negotiated
treaties” between students and teachers rather than strict requirements handed
down from above. If teachers agreed to keep requirements at an achievable mini-
mum, students agreed to comply with the course requirements and to remain civilly
attentive. The specific nature of the agreements were open to implicit or, in some
cases, explicit bargaining.
• Neutrality. The schools were neutral about the choices students made. One choice
was more or less as good as another (Powell et al. 1985:11).

Powell and his colleagues exaggerated the all-encompassing character of the movement
toward consumerism, perhaps to bring out the changes in socialization practices as dra-
matically as possible. The term they coined, “shopping mall high schools,” is, therefore,
quite misleading: the socialization pattern found in today’s schools includes socialization
both for a world of consumer choice and bureaucratic regulation. Consider the ways orga-
nizational abilities are emphasized in the schools: students make appointments, manage
time, fit things into their schedules, and are urged to plan and to keep themselves on track.
Nor can it be convincingly argued that production pressures are ignored quite as much as
the image of the shopping mall suggests. Teachers assign homework and expect it to be in
on time. Bells ring and corridors clear. Tests, papers, and grades remain an obsession—
even more so in recent decades given the schools’ heavy emphasis on “accountability.”
Preparation for work life in a highly organized and competitive society thus remains at the
center of the school’s socialization mission, along with preparation for a life of variety and
choice in the consumer marketplace.
Evidence from other industrial societies. The same transformation from the factory-like
regimen of the nineteenth-century school to the bureau-corporate/mass consumption
model of today can be seen throughout the industrialized world. However, in Europe this
transformation began only well after World War II, when secondary schooling became for
the first time a form of mass rather than class education, and it is only now beginning to de-
velop in the industrialized societies of East Asia.
In the United States, the new environment was created by administrators looking for
ways of appealing to the interests of new students while adjusting to the modern world of
corporate organization. In Europe, students themselves demanded change, often against
the resistance of academically oriented administrators. Student demands for more choice
and variety in schooling became popular slogans during the student uprisings of the late
1960s. These demands built both on the large numbers of students moving on to higher
grades and the greater affluence of the industrialized world in the second postwar genera-
tion. Student protest led to significant curricular change (Boudon 1979).
The changes could be seen even at Wylie’s (1974) village school in southern France.
When he revisited the village in the 1970s, Wylie was amazed that “the belief in hierarchy
has given way to a concern for each individual’s will, a mutual respect, a tolerance of differ-
ences that I would never have thought possible. In most families, there is acceptance [of the
young people’s new independence], though tinged perhaps with nostalgia . . .” (382 –3).
In East Asia, the changes came even later, but they have now arrived in full force. Merry
White (1993) described Japanese secondary school students as grumbling about the rules
 schools and socialization 143

that regulate school life, concerned with the choices they are offered, and very interested in
exploring cultural styles associated with “independence.” Socializing and consumerism are
as much at the center of Japanese adolescence as are the academic expectations of the
schools. The schools have not compromised much to take these new realities into account,
but they may very well be forced to do so in the future.
The new bureau-corporate/mass consumption socialization pattern may be an Ameri-
can original, but it has gained strength in all advanced societies, because it corresponds to
the impersonal bureaucratic regulation, pressure for cultural pluralism, and mass con-
sumption priorities of early twenty-first-century life.

Socialization in Elite Preparatory Schools

Elite schools provide training for students identified by school authorities as
potential leaders of the future. At one time, wealthy parents, and particularly
birth into a socially prominent family, would have been the major qualification
for admissions. Since the 1960s, academic qualifications have become a more
important factor. Academic promise has become increasingly important, be-
cause elite colleges and universities now seek to enroll classes with more uni-
formly excellent academic records. This has made the private schools a refuge
for many academically gifted children, who might fail to thrive in public
schools. Even so, because elite preparatory schools can cost as much as $30,000
per year and scholarships are rare, family economic standing remains a very
important influence on who applies for admission to an elite preparatory
school and, therefore, on who is admitted.
One of the great advantages of elite schooling lies in the area of training for
the representation of power in face-to-face interaction. Through modeling the
behavior of fellow students, children at private preparatory schools can acquire
a refined sense of the accepted manner in which power is expressed in a de-
mocracy: good spirits and an easy manner with obvious social inferiors; an
aloof attitude (which can be aggressively enforced, if necessary, through snubs
and smirks) toward social inferiors who encroach too closely; and true frank-
ness only with recognized social equals.
In addition to a rigorous academic curriculum, emphases on near-universal
participation in sports and performing arts remain common at elite prepara-
tory schools, because exceptionally competent and compelling public perfor-
mance remains an important aspect of the expression and enactment of power
and status in society. The powerful must be capable of performing with aplomb
in public.
Otherwise, approved cultural styles in elite preparatory schools differ and
reflect the idealized values and lifestyles of the primary stratum to which the
school caters (or, in the case of very traditional schools, the stratum to which it
catered at the time of its founding).
In the United States, private day and boarding schools were founded, for the
most part, in the late nineteenth century for the children of the old, prominent
families. They were founded as a way of maintaining social distance from par-
venus, the large numbers of new rich who had risen during the Gilded Age. These
schools, located in rural areas of New England, inculcated the values of Ameri-
 144 schools and socialization

can patricians: a very high level of self-control; taboos on discussions of wealth;

a constant admonition to be involved in service activities for the public good; an
efficient, businesslike approach to assignments; the expectation that knowledge
is to be used rather than simply memorized; and a sense of earned entitlement
to the privileges and power of high social status (Cookson and Persell 1985).
By contrast, British “public schools” (the equivalent of American private
boarding schools) reflected the imprint of the colonial administration of the
British Empire, with its emphasis on sports as a proving ground for the
battlefield, chapel as an essential feature of a world-transforming Christian
mission, and earnest effort in the classroom. In the most prestigious of the pub-
lic schools, such as Eton, student styles also showed the imprint of the dandy-
ism of the English aristocracy (McConnell 1985).
In Germany, the values of the Bildungsburgertum —the educated upper mid-
dle class—strongly shaped German elite secondary education following the uni-
versity reforms of the early 1800s (Ringer 1969). This class sharply distinguished
itself from the business-oriented upper middle class by emphasizing internal
cultivation and external civility. It was highly intellectual and sought to distin-
guish the “higher court” of cultural values from the self-interested behavior of
everyday commercial life (Ringer 1992). This outlook is typical of the cultivated
professional classes in all early modernizing societies, but the sense of distinc-
tion between cultivation and commerce was carried furthest in Germany, largely
because of the weakness of the German business classes in a country long dom-
inated by the landed aristocracy, the civil service, and the military. Post-World
War II changes have carried German elite secondary education in the direction
of the rest of the industrialized world.
Acculturation in French elite secondary education, by contrast, was shaped
by the powerful mix of Parisian wit and civil service precision, as these became
embedded in the teaching traditions of the grandes écoles founded by Napoleon
for the purpose of forming military, industrial, and administrative leaders for
state service (Suleiman 1978). The grandes écoles, located in and around Paris,
exercised a tremendous influence on the socializing patterns of the French aca-
demic secondary schools, not least of all because the leading stratum of French
secondary school teachers were trained at one of them, the Ecole Normale Su-
périeure. Though carried on with public funds, the elite system has been main-
tained in France as a distinct track in upper secondary education (Bourdieu
1996), just as it has been maintained in the private boarding schools of the
United States and England.

socialization messages in the classroom

Today’s schools continue to buzz with socializing messages in the classroom and on the play-
ground. But some of the most effective means of socialization are not part of the verbal buzz.
Instead, they either frame the boundaries of acceptable behavior or are embedded in the
very fabric of school routines. I will now look in greater detail at the practices of classroom
socialization in contemporary schools and the extent to which these practices are success-
ful in channeling behavior, belief, and students’ orientations along school-approved lines.
 PAULO FREIRE

PEDAGOGY
of the
OPPRESSED ;
• 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION •

Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos

With an Introduction by Donaldo Macedo

•
A continuum
I f N E W YORK • LONDON
 CHAPTER

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any

level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamen­
tally narrative character. This relationship involves a nar­
rating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the
students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of
reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and
petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static,
compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic
completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His
task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration—
contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the
totality that engendered them and could give them significance.
Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alien­
ated, and alienating verbosity.
The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then,
is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times
four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records,
memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four
times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital"
in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem
means for Pard and what Para means for Brazil.
Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to
 72'PAULO FREIRE

memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns

them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the
teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a
teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves
to be filled, the better students they are.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the stu-
dents are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead
of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes de-
posits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.
This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of
action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing,
and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity
to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in
the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away
through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this
(at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the
praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only
through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient,
continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with
the world, and with each other.
In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed
by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom
they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance
onto others, a characteristic of the ideology)of oppression, negates
education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher pre-
sents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by consid-
ering their ignorance absolute, he- justifies his own existence. The
students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept
their ignorance as justifying the teachers existence—but, unlike the
slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.
The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies
in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the
solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the
poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers
and students.
 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ' 7 3

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept.
On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates
the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices,
which mirrOr oppressive society as a whole:

(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
(c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
(d) the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly;
(e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students
comply;
(g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting
through the action of the teacher;
(h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students
(who were not consulted) adapt to it;
(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or
her own professional authority, which she and he sets in oppo­
sition to the freedom of the students;
(j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the
pupils are mere objects.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards
men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at
storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the
critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in
the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they
accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply
to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality
deposited in them.
The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the
students creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the
interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world re­
vealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their "humani-
tarianism" to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost
instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates
 74-PAULO FREIRE

the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality
but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and
one problem to another.
Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in "changing the con-
sciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses
them";1 for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that
situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this
end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in con-
junction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which
the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of "welfare recipients."
They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who devi-
ate from the general configuration of a "good, organized, and just"
society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy
society, which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy"
folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals
need to be "integrated," "incorporated" into the healthy society that
they have "forsaken."
The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are
not people living "outside" society. They have always been
"inside"—inside the structure which made them "beings for others."
The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppres-
sion, but to transform that structure so that they can become "beings
for themselves." Such transformation, of course, would undermine
the oppressors purposes; hence their utilization of the banking con-
cept of education to avoid the threat of student cpnscientizagdo.
The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never
propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal
instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass
to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that, on the
contrary, floger gave green grass to the rabbit. The "humanism" of
the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into
automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be
more fully human.

1. Simone de Beauvoir, La Pensee de Droite, Aujord'hui (Paris); ST, El Pensami-

ento politico de la Derecha (Buenos Aires, 1963), p. 34.
 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED ' 7 5

Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly

(for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who
do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to
perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about
reality. But, sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly
passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt
to domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experi­
ence that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their voca­
tion to become fully human. They may perceive through their
relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing
constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their
ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may per­
ceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to main­
tain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their
liberation.
But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this pos­
sibility to materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide
with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the
quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a
profqund trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this,
they must be partners of the students in their relations with them.
The banking concept does not admit to such partnership—and
necessarily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to ex­
change the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role
of student among students would be to undermine the power of
oppression and serve the cause of liberation.
Implicit in the banking concept is Uie assumption of a dichotomy
between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the
world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator,
not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being
(corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a conscious­
ness: an empty "mind" passively open to the reception of deposits
of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books,
my coffee cup, all the objects before me—as bits of the world which
surround me—would be "inside" me, exactly as I am inside my
 76-PAULO FREIRE

study right now. This view makes no distinction between being ac-
cessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinc-
tion, however, is essential: the objects which surround me are simply
accessible to my consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of
them, but they are not inside me.
It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that
the educator s role is to regulate the way the world "enters into" the
students. The teachers task is to organise a process which already
occurs spontaneously, to "fill" the students by making deposits of
information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge.2
And since people "receive" the world as passive entities, education
should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world.
The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he
is better "fit" for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is
well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests
on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and
how little they question it.
The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which
the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them
of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can
continue to prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education
serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading require-
ments, 3 the methods for evaluating "knowledge," the distance be-
tween the teacher and the taught, the criteria, for promotion:
everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate
thinking.
The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true
security in his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with
others in solidarity. One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely

2. This concept corresponds to what Sartre calls the "digestive" or "nutritive"

concept of education, in which knowledge is "fed" by the teacher to the students
to "fill them out." See Jean-Paul Sartre, "Une idee fundamentale de la phenomeno-
logie de Husserl: L'intentionalite," Situations I (Paris, 1947).
3. For example, some professors specify in their reading lists that a book should
be read from pages 10 to 15—and do this to "help" their students!
 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED • 77

co-exist with one's students. Solidarity requires true communica­

tion, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and
proscribes< communication.
Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning.
The teachers thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of
the students thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students,
nor can she impose her thought on them. Authentic thinking, think­
ing that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory
tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought
has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the
subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.
Because banking education begins with a false understanding of
men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development
of what Fromm calls "biophily," but instead produces its opposite:
"necrophily."

While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional

manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all
that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the
desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach
life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. . . . Mem­
ory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what
counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object—a
flower or a person—only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his
possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses
contact with the world. . . . He loves control, and in the act of
controlling he kills life.4

Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nour­

ished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education,
which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based
on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of conscious­
ness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to
control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the
world, and inhibits their creative power.

4. Fromm, op. cit.y p. 41.

 78-PAULO FREIRE

When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they

find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer. "This
suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human
equilibrium has been disturbed/'5 But the inability to act which
causes people's anguish also causes them to reject their impotence,
by attempting

. . . to restore [their] capacity to act. But can [they], and how?

One way is to submit to and identify with a person or group
having power. By this symbolic participation in another persons
life, [men have] the illusion of acting, when in reality [they] only
submit to and become a part of those who act.6

Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behav­

ior by the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders,
come to feel that they themselves are active and effective. The rebel­
lion they express as they emerge in the historical process is moti­
vated by that desire to act effectively. The dominant elites consider
the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in
the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of
the elites). Thus they can condemn-—logically, from their point of
view—"the violence of a strike by workers and [can] call upon the
state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike."7
Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity
of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by edu­
cators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.
This accusation is not made in the naive hope that the dominant
elites will thereby simply abandon the practice. Its objective is to
call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use
banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they
would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society
inherit these methods from an oppressor society. The revolutionary
society which practices banking education is either misguided or

5. Ibid., p. 31.
6. Ibid.
1. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York, 1960), p. 130.
 PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED - 7 9

mistrusting of people. In either event, it is threatened by the specter

of reaction.
Unfortunately, those who espouse the cause of liberation are
themselves surrounded and influenced by the climate which gener­
ates the banking concept, and often do not perceive its true signifi­
cance or its dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize
this same instrument of alienation in what they consider an effort
to liberate. Indeed, some "revolutionaries" brand as "innocents,"
"dreamers," or even "reactionaries" those who would challenge this
educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating
them. Authentic liberation—the process of humanization—is not
another deposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action
and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to
transform it. Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can
accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty
vessel to be filled, nor the use of banking methods of domination
(propaganda, slogans—deposits) in the name of liberation.
Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking con­
cept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men
as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon
the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-mak­
ing and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings
in their relations with the world. "Problem-posing" education, re­
sponding to the essence of consciousness—intentionality—rejects
communiques and embodies communication. It epitomizes the spe­
cial characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as
intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian
"split"—consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.
Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals
of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable
object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates
the cognitive actors—teacher on the one hand and students on the
other. Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails
at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction to be resolved.
Dialogical relations—indispensable to the capacity of cognitive
 80-PAULO FREIRE

actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object—are

otherwise impossible.
Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical
patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function
as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contra-
diction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the stu-
dents-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-
student with students-teachers. The te&her is no longer merely
the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with
the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They be-
come jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this
process, arguments based on "authority" are no longer valid; in order
to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against
it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People
teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects
which in banking education are "owned" by the teacher.
The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize every-
thing) distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During
the first, he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his les-
sons in his study or his laboratory; during the second, he expounds
to his students about that object. The students are not called upon
to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor
do the students practice any act of cognition, since the object to-
wards which that act should be directed is the property of the
teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection of both
teacher and students. Hence in the name of the "preservation of
culture and knowledge" we have a system which achieves neither
true knowledge nor true culture.
The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of
the teacher-student: she is not "cognitive" at one point and "narra-
tive" at another. She is always "cognitive," whether preparing a proj-
ect or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard
cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of re-
flection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing
educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the
 PEDAGOGY OF THE O P P R E S S E D - 8 1

students. The students—no longer docile listeners—are now critical

co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents
the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers
her earlier considerations as the students express their own. The
role of the problem-posing educator is to create; together with the
students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the
doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos,
Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative
power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of
reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of con-
sciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and
critical intervention in reality.
Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating
to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly
challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they
apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a
total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehen-
sion tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alien-
ated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges,
followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come
to regard themselves as committed.
Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education
as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated,
independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the
world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection con-
siders neither abstract man nor the world without people, but peo-
ple in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness
and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the
world nor follows it.

La conscience et le monde sont donnes d'un meme coup: exte-

rieur par essence a la conscience, le monde est, par essence re-
latif a elle.8

8. Sartre; op. cit., p. 32.

 82 • P A U L O FREIRE

In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing

(based on a codification9) the anthropological concept of culture. In
the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was
completely ignorant said: "Now I see that without man there is no
world." When the educator responded: "Let's say, for the sake of
argument, that all the men on earth were to die, but that the earth
itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the
stars . . , wouldn't all this be a world?" "Oh no," the peasant replied
emphatically. "There would be no one to say: This is a world'."
The peasant wished to express the idea that there would be lack-
ing the consciousness of the world which necessarily implies the
world of consciousness. 7 cannot exist without a non-I. In turn, the
not-I depends on that existence. The world which brings conscious-
ness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness. Hence,
the previously cited affirmation of Sartre: "La conscience et le monde
sont donnes dun meme coup."
As women and men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and
on the world, increase the scope of their perception, they begin to
direct their observations towards previously inconspicuous phe-
nomena:

In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness

[Gewahren], I am turned towards the object, to &e paper, for
instance. I apprehend it as being this here and now; The appre-
hension is a singling out, every object having a background in
experience. Around and about the paper lie books, pencils, ink-
well, and so forth, and these in a certain sense are also "per-
ceived", perceptually there, in the "field of intuition"; but whilst
I was turned towards the paper there was no turning in their
direction, nor any apprehending of them, not even in a second-
ary sense. They appeared and yet were not singled out, were
not posited on their own account. Every perception of a thing
has such a zone of background intuitions or background aware-
ness, if "intuiting" already includes the state of being turned
towards, and this also is a "conscious experience", or more briefly

9. See chapter 3.—Translator's note.