Education as Environmental Socialization: Classroom Spatial Patterns and the Transmission of Sociocultural Norms

Abstract

Public schools are important agents for the transmission of broad social norms and cultural values. Within the anthropological study of educational systems, prevailing approaches to processes of socialization in public school classrooms predominately focus on cognition and behavior. This article argues for a materialist and ecological approach to the study of school socialization. Based on the analysis of floor maps from the midwestern elementary school called Deerfield, it is suggested that customary classroom furniture forms and their spatial arrangements are a hidden curriculum of sociocultural information and exhibit latent socialization functions. A school socialization theory put forth by Robert Dreeben (1967, 1968) illustrates to what norms and values students are being environmentally conditioned. The conclusion is that in the general process of socialization, the social and cultural information to be transmitted often is the property of material environments and environmental spaces as well as the more discernible property of person.