Educational and occupational aspirations of mill and town school children in a southern community

Abstract

Mill and town school children of a southern Piedmont community are compared in their educational and occupational aspirations and expectations. Results indicate that the lower-class mill children have relatively high aspirations and expectations and so share in the American dream of getting ahead. However, the mill-village setting mitigates against fulfilling the dream. A MAJORITY of the sociological studies of the relationship between social class and level of aspiration agree on two major points: (1) the lower the social class, the lower the level of aspiration:' and (2) the lower the social class, the less favorable the social milieu in encouraging high aspiration and in preparing for attainment.2 There is less agreement, however, on possible interpretations of these generalizations as posed by the following question: Do lower class children have lower levels of aspiration because they do not share the American * A revision of a paper read before the twenty-third annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, April 7, 1960. 1 Examples of recent studies illustrating this are: LaMar T. Empey, Class and Occupational Ambition: A Comparison of Absolute and Relative Measure, American Sociological Review, 21 (December 1956), pp. 703-709; Archie 0. Haller and W. H Sewell, Farm Residence and Levels of Educational and Occupational Aspiration, American Journal of Sociology, 62 (January 1957), pp. 407-411; R. A. Mulligan, Socio-Economic Badkground and College Enrollment, American Sociological Review, 16 (April 1951), pp. 188-196; Bernard C. Rosen, Race Ethnicity, and the Achievement Syndrone, American Sociological Review, 24 (February 1959), pp. 47-60; W. H. Sewell, A. 0. Haller, and M. A. Straus, Status and Educational and Occupational Aspiration, American Sociological Review, 22 (February 1957), pp. 67-73; Alan R. Wilson, Residential Segregation of Social Classes and Aspirations of High School Boys, American Sociological Review, 24 (December 1959), pp. 836-845. 2 Studies emphasizing this include: Ely Chinoy, Tradition of Opporutnity and the Aspirations of Automobile Workers, American Journal of Sociology 57 (March 1952), pp. 453-456; Allison Davis, Social Class Influs A. B. Hollingshead, Elmtown's Youth (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1949); H. H. Hyman, Value Systems of Different Classes, in Reinhard Bendix and S. M. Lipset (eds.) Class, Statcus and Power (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1953), pp. 426-442; Genevieve Knupfer, Portrait of the Underdog, in Bendix and Lipset, op. cit., pp. 255-263; Jackson Toby, Orientation to Education as a Factor in School Maladjustment of Lower-Class Children, Social Forces, 35 (March 1957), pp. 259266; W. L. Warner, R. J. Havighurst, and M. B. Loeb, Who Shall Be Editcated? (New York: Harpers, 1944). A cross-cultural study in this area is one by Mary E. Goodman, Values, Attitudes, and Social Concepts of Japanese and American Children, American Anthropologist, 59 (December 1957), pp. 979-999. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.33 on Sat, 26 Nov 2016 04:19:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms