The Process of Education and Formation

Abstract

Abstract The educational processes in both schools we studied have the character of a contest. Students arrive imbued with the ideas, habits, and values of the very religious and social cultures that the school seeks to reshape. They encounter the school’s dominant message and its variations, in explicit statements by pivotal figures, in the affect and behavior of those figures, and in the norms and activities of institutional life. They test the central message; they try it on; they resist and oppose it; they experiment with the variant possibilities. Both schools provide considerable freedom and opportunity for this struggle, and both also ratify what is usually the result: a compromise. Most students’ views, values and, it appears, habits are reshaped by the ideas and behaviors the school promotes, but students do not entirely surrender the commitments, opinions, and tastes that they came with. Their goals, outlook, language, and manners when they leave are a melding often painfully forged in intense engagements with each other and with those who represent the school-of what they brought with them and what the school has insistently set before them.