Secondary education, social class and the development of abilities.

Abstract

Summary. This paper reports an investigation into the relationship between patterns of abilities and two environmental variables, socio‐economic status, and type of secondary education for 12 and 14‐year‐olds. It was hypothesized that education and social class will interact so that middle‐class children will show no change of pattern of abilities in academic high schools, but in technical high schools will gain most rapidly in spatial and other non‐verbal skills; lower class children will gain in verbal skills in the academic schools and in non‐verbal skills in the technical schools for none of the academic abilities of lower‐class children are fully developed in the out‐of‐school environment. These results are interpreted to mean that the environmental demands in a middle‐class home are such that a high level of development has been reached in all areas and that type of secondary education is, therefore, irrelevant, but the lower‐class home does not demand as full a level of development, particularly in verbal areas, and the type of secondary school can, therefore, markedly influence intellectual development.