The Child at School: Interactions with Peers and Teachers

by Peter Blatchford, Anthony D. Pellegrini

School is an institution through which all children in modern industrial societies must pass, and it also has an important effect on their later lives. The authors present children's social interactive processes as a key dimension of their lives in school. The school provides a mileu for
social interaction with both adults and peers and is important in the child's cognitive development and in their larger development as socially competent beings. This book focuses on children's experience of the two intersecting worlds in school, firstly, the world of peers, both within and outside
the classroom setting, and secondly, the world of teacher-pupil interaction which normally occurs in the classroom. Various theories of child cognitive development are applied to children's school achievement. Additionally, children's social competence in school is examined in terms of their peer
relations as indicated by friendship popularity, adjustment to school and aggression.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2000

Reviews

[Mikey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once again I've chanced upon a book that almost nobody has read. I seem to have a knack for this. At any rate, this is obviously a highly niche text and isn't even current. What piqued my interest was to try and get a window into how teachers were thinking and how education systems were being researched during the time I was in school. My experiences were highly congruent with this text. Namely, that there was (and still is) an inordinate amount of focus placed on social factors and how they influence development more broadly. What I've always struggled to understand though is how with all this emphasis on social development I and so many others had a miserable time at school mostly because of our social relations. The authors glibly breeze over the problem of bullying and how it should be addressed but don't provide any specifics. Something I found key however, is that the authors at one point say that part of social development is "learning to adhere to group norms and maintain gender boundaries." They don't really expand on this, but I feel like this says a lot right there. From what I gathered the mindset seemed to be that bullying is wrong and should be dealt with, but pressures from peers to conform to norms, especially gender norms, are a healthy part of development. So, if a child is being picked on for being different, it's part of a normal process and the child should learn to be less different. The authors don't explicitly state this but the way in which they briefly handled this topic implied that. This is very much in line with my experiences at school. On one hand there's a huge amount of focus on social interaction and overtly vicious bullying is not tolerated. On the other hand, a certain degree of rejection and teasing by peers for being different or not conforming to gender boundaries or other norms is considered part of a healthy process. At any rate, this was a very small part of the book and is simply what I'm surmising as it related to my own experience. As for the rest of the book there was (and I'm sure still is) a disturbingly high amount of focus that is placed on gender and race differences in studies related to children's education. Hilariously, Blatchford and Pellegrini struggle with the fact that boys on average are doing less well in school compared to girls and twist themselves into knots trying to figure out how this could be the case since clearly feminist ideology had infiltrated this field even when this was published. They don't even address the possibility that it has something to do with rampant affirmative action measures and an oversized amount of female only enrichment programs, in addition to the overwhelmingly high amount of female teachers compared to male. Instead they provide one possible explanation as being that men are less valuable in society due to the collapse of the manufacturing industry and that women are doing better because they're finally overthrowing oppressive gender norms. I kid you not. Underneath all the academic jargon the fixation on immutable characteristics and socioeconomic factors is quite ugly. Witnessing how the educational system has gone even further downhill from when this was published it's clear this type of reasoning has only grown in power. What I find to be so counter-intuitive is that the systems which prioritize emotional well being and social development always result in conditions with the least amount of emotional well being and the worst levels of bullying. One thing that certainly has changed from when this was published is that going against norms, specifically gender norms, is now actively encouraged in schools often to ridiculous and inappropriate degrees. It seems odd to me that nobody can seem to just use common sense. We shouldn't allow children to ostracize and be cruel to each other simply because they don't conform to gender or other norms but we also don't need to be teaching young children about alternative gender identities and sexualities before they've even hit puberty (something actually going on in schools at the time I write this review). The field of education seems like it should be so simple but it appears as though it can't shake damaging extremes. Anyway, this book was useful in the sense that it got me to reflect on my own experience and the state of education more generally as clearly evinced by this review. When it comes to the quality of the book itself there's a lot of "this is a complicated issue" and "more research needs to be done" and "we're not sure what to make of this." Which, is fair enough and all of that could be true. However, when the authors fail to even mention the possibility of widespread affirmative action programs being even partly responsible for some of the disparities they are noticing it casts doubt on the reliability of what they are reporting. Not to mention it's also dated. Unless if you have some absurd special interest or if you're doing research on previous perspectives on education research I would not recommend picking this up.