1. From Grading and Freedom of Choice to Ranking and Segregation in an American High School.
- Author
-
Varenne, Herve
- Abstract
An attempt is made to understand the structural and transformational inter-relationships between processes of classification, segmentation, ranking, and segregation in a suburban high school from a cultural point of view. The first of three sections of the paper reviews the acceptance among social scientists in the last decades of the belief that America is not a totally equalitarian society but is stratified into a certain number of classes and of the belief that all men are equal, both contradicted by actual ranking, segregating and stratification processes. Specific examples of segregative and stratifying behaviors were studied in a New York high school. The school appears to have socio-economic and demographic homogeneity, but ways used by teachers to characterize students are noted. Two general sets of acts, those which the school as an institution is entitled to react to and these which lie outside of its jurisdiction, are grouped and diagrammed. To the first set belong matters of scholastic performance and discipline; to the second, matters of socio-biological descent and individual personality. It is argued that what appears to be social class must be considered to be the product of processes which are not organized on class principles and that it is the very democratic ideal which, in certain situations, produces states of being which contradict some aspects of that same ideal. (Author/KSM)
- Published
- 1973