The education of young children: Perspectives on possible futures

Becoming Students and Becoming Ethnographers in a Preschool

“…Children become students as education shapes the "habits, skills, dispositions, and matters which enable them to perform more or less satisfactorily the roles expected in their society" (Brim, cited in Katz, 1979, p. 102). The focus is on societal ideology, created at the macto structural level by mutually influencing historical, political, economic, and environmental factors, which filter down through school and teacher to the individual in the classroom (Bronfenbrenner, 1979;Peters & Klein, 1981) . The student role in the process is passive, or at most interpretive, as children achieve impulse control and conform to societal (and to parallel classroom) rules and norms (Hatch, 1984).…”