# Culture, Socialisation and Education

Sociology I · Foundations and the Great Themes · https://tryals.app/learn/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education

## Becoming a Member

**Culture** is the complex of knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, laws, and customs acquired by a person in society.

It divides into two main forms:
- **material culture**: physical objects and artefacts.
- **non-material culture**: ideas, beliefs, and rules.

Rules come in grades:
- **folkways**: ordinary conventions whose breach brings mild disapproval.
- **mores**: essential rules whose breach brings serious sanction.

A **value** is a general standard of what is desirable. A **norm** is a specific rule of conduct. Values explain why we act; norms tell us what to do.

Sociologists distinguish two attitudes towards other cultures:
- **Ethnocentrism**: judging another culture by the standards of one's own.
- **Cultural relativism**: understanding a practice within its own context as a method, not a moral claim.

## Socialisation and Schooling

**Socialisation** is the process of acquiring this culture:
- **Primary** socialisation occurs in early childhood within the family.
- **Secondary** socialisation continues through schools, peer groups, and the media.

**Charles Horton Cooley** described the **looking-glass** self: we imagine how others judge our appearance and react to that judgement.

**George Herbert Mead** (*Mind, Self and Society*) traced how the self develops:
- **play** stage: the child takes one role at a time.
- **game** stage: the child coordinates several roles at once.
- **generalised other**: the child internalises the standpoint of the whole community.

**Berger and Luckmann** argued that society produces humanity just as humans produce society.

**Education** connects these themes, though theories disagree on what schools do:

| Account | What schools do | Key text |
|---|---|---|
| Functionalist | Select on ability and teach universal standards | Parsons, 1959 |
| Correspondence | Reproduce workplace relations | Bowles and Gintis, 1976 |
| Cultural reproduction | Reward inherited cultural privilege | Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970 |
| Resistance | Provoke refusal that still reproduces class | Willis, 1977 |

Willis's *Learning to Labour* showed that working-class pupils resisted schooling. Yet their counter-culture led them directly into manual jobs.

> **Common pitfall:** treating socialisation as a stamping machine that creates passive conformists. Dennis Wrong challenged this oversocialised view in 1961. Real people still display deviance and innovation.

## Practice questions

10 of this lesson's 15 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Dennis Wrong argued in 1961 that sociology had produced an oversocialised conception of the human being. What was the substance of his objection?

A. Primary socialisation in early childhood completely fixes adult character before any secondary institutions intervene.
B. Human behaviour is primarily governed by biological instincts rather than learned norms gained via social interaction.
C. If socialisation worked as claimed, deviance, innovation and inner conflict would be inexplicable, yet plainly exist.
D. Modern formal education has entirely displaced the family as the sole mechanism for transmitting core cultural values.

**Answer:** C. If socialisation worked as claimed, deviance, innovation and inner conflict would be inexplicable, yet plainly exist.

**Why:** His target was a theory so successful at explaining compliance that it left no room for the obvious. People break rules, invent new ones, and are divided against themselves; a concept that treats internalisation as complete cannot account for any of that. He wanted socialisation kept as a partial process meeting a resisting person.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/dennis-wrong-argued-in-1961-that-sociology-had-produced-an

### 2. Which claims about cultural relativism are consistent with how sociologists use the term?

A. It follows from it that no cultural practice may ever be criticised
B. It requires a practice to be described in the context that gives it meaning before it is judged
C. It is a rule about the order of operations in research, not a claim that all practices are equally good
D. It was developed partly as a corrective to judging other societies by the standards of one’s own

**Answer:** B. It requires a practice to be described in the context that gives it meaning before it is judged; C. It is a rule about the order of operations in research, not a claim that all practices are equally good; D. It was developed partly as a corrective to judging other societies by the standards of one’s own

**Why:** Relativism as a method says: understand first. The moral version, that understanding forecloses judgement, does not follow, and few working anthropologists or sociologists hold it. The distinction matters practically, because the moral reading is what makes the method look indefensible to outsiders and gets it abandoned along with its usefulness.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/which-claims-about-cultural-relativism-are-consistent-with-how

### 3. Complete the account of Mead’s development of the self.

**Answer:** Mead described a **play** stage in which a child takes one role at a time, followed by a **game** stage in which several roles must be coordinated at once. Internalising the standpoint of the community as a whole produces what he called the **generalised** other. The self as seen from that standpoint he called the "me", and the spontaneous response to it the "**I**".

**Why:** The move from the play stage to the game stage is the move from one perspective to a system of them, and it is why Mead thought organised games matter developmentally. A child playing shortstop must hold in mind what every other position expects, which is a rehearsal for holding in mind what a whole society expects.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/complete-the-account-of-meads-development-of-the-self

### 4. Arrange the stages of Mead’s account of how a self develops, earliest first.

**Answer:**

1. The infant imitates the gestures of others without grasping their meaning
2. The child takes one significant role at a time in play
3. The child coordinates several roles at once in an organised game
4. The standpoint of the community as a whole is internalised
5. Conduct is regulated by an internalised community perspective, answered by a spontaneous self

**Why:** The sequence explains something a list of terms does not: why Mead thought the self is social all the way down. There is no pre-social self that later learns to deal with others; the capacity to take one’s own conduct as an object arises only by first taking the standpoint of someone else, and then of everyone.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/arrange-the-stages-of-meads-account-of-how-a-self-develops-earliest

### 5. Match each account of education to what it claims schools actually do.

**Answer:**

- Parsons → Select pupils on achievement and instil universalistic standards
- Bowles and Gintis → Mirror the authority relations of the workplace in the classroom
- Bourdieu and Passeron → Reward a cultural inheritance the school itself never taught
- Willis → Are refused by pupils whose refusal delivers them to manual work

**Why:** The fourth entry is what makes the set worth learning together. Willis’s lads were not deceived; they correctly judged that school credentials would do little for people like them, and acted on that judgement in a way that guaranteed the outcome. Reproduction through clear-sightedness is a harder problem than reproduction through ignorance.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/match-each-account-of-education-to-what-it-claims-schools-actually-do

### 6. In which year did Bourdieu and Passeron publish La Reproduction, their account of how schooling converts inherited culture into credentials?

**Answer:** 1970

**Why:** **1970.** The pairing with *Les Héritiers* (1964) matters: the earlier book documented the class composition of French students, and the later one supplied the mechanism, that schools test a cultural competence acquired at home and treat the result as natural ability.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/in-which-year-did-bourdieu-and-passeron-publish-la-reproduction

### 7. Berger and Luckmann claim that society produces humanity just as humans produce society. What does this dialectic imply for how we view individual agency alongside socialisation?

A. Agency and socialisation cancel each other out in mature social systems
B. Socialisation remains an incomplete process that allows for innovation
C. Institutions fully dictate identity once secondary socialisation begins
D. Every socialised action merely reflects the demands of the wider group

**Answer:** B. Socialisation remains an incomplete process that allows for innovation

**Why:** Treating socialisation as a total stamp ignores that society is continuously remade by human action; individual deviance and innovation persist because actors are not passive products of structural determinism.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/berger-and-luckmann-claim-that-society-produces-humanity-just-as

### 8. Sort each experience by whether it belongs to primary or to secondary socialisation.

**Answer:**

- Primary socialisation: Acquiring a first language from those who raise you, Learning that some feelings may be shown and others hidden
- Secondary socialisation: Learning the unwritten rules of a first workplace, Adapting to the conventions of a profession during training, Taking on the vocabulary and loyalties of a peer group at fifteen

**Why:** Berger and Luckmann’s reason for the distinction is that the two processes work differently. Primary socialisation has no competition and enormous emotional weight, so what it installs feels like reality itself; secondary socialisation always arrives at a person who already has a world, which is why it can be resisted, compartmentalised or dropped on leaving the job.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/sort-each-experience-by-whether-it-belongs-to-primary-or-to-secondary

### 9. Willis found that his working-class "lads" saw through the school’s promises rather than being taken in by them, and ended up in manual work all the same. Why does that finding complicate the reproduction theories of Bowles and Gintis or of Bourdieu?

A. They assume pupils absorb bourgeois culture; Willis found no primary socialisation.
B. They explain reproduction by school imposition; Willis via pupils' own refusal.
C. Willis showed pupil resistance brings upward mobility, not class reproduction.
D. They argue schools fail to reproduce class; Willis showed they eliminate divisions.

**Answer:** B. They explain reproduction by school imposition; Willis via pupils' own refusal.

**Why:** Both models locate the mechanism in the institution acting on the pupil. Willis relocates it: the lads’ counter-school culture was their own creation, built on an accurate reading of their prospects, and it delivered the outcome the models predict by an entirely different route. Any adequate account has to make room for lucid actors producing their own subordination.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/willis-found-that-his-working-class-lads-saw-through-the-schools

### 10. Arrange these works on culture, socialisation and education, earliest first.

**Answer:**

1. Tylor gives his definition of culture
2. Sumner publishes Folkways
3. Mead’s Mind, Self and Society appears
4. Berger and Luckmann publish The Social Construction of Reality
5. Bowles and Gintis publish Schooling in Capitalist America
6. Willis publishes Learning to Labour

**Why:** The century between Tylor and Willis is a steady narrowing of the question. Tylor asks what culture is, Mead how a person acquires one, Berger and Luckmann how it is sustained as reality, and the last two how a specific institution distributes it unequally, each step trading generality for the ability to be shown wrong by evidence.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/sociology-i/culture-socialisation-and-education/arrange-these-works-on-culture-socialisation-and-education-earliest