THE OPPRESSIVE SYNERGY BETWEEN SCHOOL AND FAMILY

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"?