Not so Easy: Lessons in Body Management for Children in an Elite Elementary School

• In Event: 3581 - Section on Sociology of Children and Youth Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Culture and Interaction

Abstract

Researchers have shown how class shapes the experiences of children at home, school, and beyond. Middle-class children are socialized to develop cultural skills and dispositions – an interactional ease – valued by institutional gatekeepers that facilitate access to elite structural locations and networks, thereby contributing to social reproduction. But the specifics of this socialization process have often been brushed over. Children appear to readily absorb these classed lessons via osmosis. I argue that the learning of ease is not always so easy. I use 12 months of ethnographic observations at an elite, private elementary school, supplemented by 26 interviews with parents and students. With this data, I focus on one embodiment, specifically three forms of “physical comportment” – greetings, bodily refinement, and voice – that are highly classed (Bourdieu 1984). Despite the school’s relaxed and informal atmosphere, the children receive deliberate, repeated lessons – both explicit and implicit – in these forms of physical comportment, seemingly leading the children’s behavior to gradually align with school standards. As such, I show that class socialization often requires more than osmosis for skills and dispositions to be transmitted from adults to children.

Author

• Peter Francis Harvey, University of Pennsylvania