THE OPPRESSIVE SYNERGY BETWEEN SCHOOL AND FAMILY

Authors

  • Edgar Z. Friedenberg Dalhousie University

Abstract

A number of other articles in this issue are alert to what they hope will be a productive synergy, one that must evolve between home, school, and other institutions if the concept of "mainstreaming" is to succeed in practice. Delivered in another context, Friedenberg's remarks on a synergy that already operates between home and school to compel conformity in the young, as an element of essential political and economic function within our total culture, have a peculiarly daunting signiflcance. Such a cultural mechanism seems irreversible, and "there are no nice cultures;" nearly all children are handicapped by being born into families that, far from offering resistance on their behalf, collaborate in their oppression. Can conscious efforts like mainstreaming really break this cycle, help children to understand themselves and where and who they are in the world, and increase the number of those exceptional families which provide society with a "small but crucial source of heroes in times of crisis"?

Author Biography

Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Dalhousie University

Edgar Z. Friedenberg has been Professor of Education at Dalhousie University since coming to Canada nine years ago. He is the author of The Vanishing Adolescent, Coming of Age in America, Laing, and most recently, The Disposal of Liberty and Other Industrial Wastes; and has just finished a book on Deference to Authority: the Case of Canada, to be published in 1980.

Downloads

Published

1979-09-01

How to Cite

Friedenberg, E. Z. (1979). THE OPPRESSIVE SYNERGY BETWEEN SCHOOL AND FAMILY. McGill Journal of Education / Revue Des Sciences De l’éducation De McGill, 14(003). Retrieved from https://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/7294

Issue

Section

Articles