Teachers talk about a time when a student stops moving around and just stares. It doesn’t happen very often, and it’s usually done quietly. Not on their phone. Not at that time. At an idea. It doesn’t happen as often as people think, and when it does, it’s usually because of something in the lesson that related to the student’s real life. It’s not a worksheet. Not a test-prep area. A thought that helped understand things better.
More and more, that moment is happening in sociology. Specifically, the kind of sociology that explains why school is the way it is—why some kids already think they’re smart and others already think they’re not—and who gets called on and stuck in which class. Some teens might not find this material easy to read like a textbook. It sounds like a reason why.
One good example is the idea of the “hidden curriculum.” It sounds like academic speak at first glance. The idea behind it is something that every student knows but has never been given a name for: schools teach more than just reading and math. They teach being on time, respecting authority, and competing with others. These goals haven’t been made public. They’re built into the way the day works. Students can’t take it back once they see it. Teachers will tell you that’s how you can tell if an idea is real.
Functional theory looks at this issue in a different way. It says that these ingrained lessons are there for a reason, and that learning shared norms is part of what keeps a society together. In this view, schools are more than just places to learn how to get a job. They’re like factories that make citizens who know the rules of the road without anyone noticing. That might be comforting or scary for you depending on which side of those rules you grew up on.
The uncomfortable follow-up is conflict theory. Tracking, which puts students into academic paths based on how quickly they can learn, tends to be based on race and class in ways that are hard to explain by ability alone. Study after study has shown this for many years. Those who are white and from the middle class are more likely to move up. It’s more likely that students of color and students from low-income families will be moved down. Students usually do well where they were put once they are put there. The score is affected by the track. That’s not a crazy claim. There is a lot of evidence for it. Most of the time, it’s not talked about much in high school.
There is a range of feelings related to the Pygmalion Effect, from unsettling to really hard to look at directly. The first study, which was done by Rosenthal and Jacobson in the 1960s, showed that teachers treated some students differently when they were told (falsely) that those students were high achievers. More patience, more care, and more attention. Those kids learned more. It wasn’t because they were smarter. Because people thought they were smarter. When you read that study, you get the sense that you’re looking at something that explains a lot of what kids go through and that most people would rather not think about too much.
It’s interesting that when students are first shown this material, they often get it right away. She knew something wasn’t right when she was quietly put in the general course while her friend was put in the honors course. She didn’t need a sociology professor to tell her. She needed the right words to say what she already knew. That is what these ideas say. Not really a revelation. It’s more like confirming something with footnotes.
The issue is getting to it. It’s not likely that these ideas will be taught in a serious way in high school. Sociology is often taught only as an elective or as an afterthought for one semester to fill in a gap in the schedule. Most of the time, the students who need to learn about how social systems work—and how those systems may already be working on them—are the ones who are least likely to be in a class that does. At the same time, the waiting lists for the few serious sociology electives that are available keep getting longer.
That waiting list might not just be made up of people who are interested. It could be that the students are looking for the course that finally explains why they are in the school they are in.
