Search

In most societies, individuals perform in several roles associated with several institutions. The rewards for quality of performance may be given on different bases in the different situations. For example, rewards in the economic sphere may be in money and within the family in affection. However, in some societies, as in our own, one type of role (and the associated institutions) may become so important that its values “invade” other roles and institutions. As a result, the evaluations of performance proper in the dominant institutions tend to be substituted for evaluations proper in others. The results may be strains on individuals and on the over-all goal achievement of the society.

Two case histories of efforts at educational evaluation—the Pennsylvania Evaluation of Quality Education and the Educational Testing Service Longitudinal Study of Head Start Programs—are considered here to illustrate a number of the major problems facing the field of evaluation. These include the perils of intuitionist “holism” and the matching dangers of psychometric trivialization; the strain between the hyper-enthusiasm of the politics of educational reform and the inherent restraint of scientific evidence regarding alternatives. A third case study of an attempt to institue Advanced Placement Tests in Art studies, designed to legitimate art as a “hard subject,” suggests a range of possible negative consequences that arise from attempting to introduce structured evaluation too early and too uniformly in an unstructured and variegated field. The results of a two-year effort at devising a model for measuring and comparing the effectivencess of educational systems are reported, indicating significant but instructive failure. A number of the major lessons learned during that effort are recited. indicating, overall, the importance of treating evaluation as a transactive process that must be weaned through varius evolutionary stages into full productivity.

new clothing and foods to be eaten to participation in ceremonial activity. This pattern of giving the child wide freedom in personal choices of social action is in accordance with the adult social deference pattern idea that consent of a junior is required by a senior in actions affecting the junior person; this same idea is the basic rationale of the adults for the treatment of the child as a distinct social person. Consideration of the child as a person does not vary as he matures, it is essentially the same through the whole of the process of socialization. As a consequence of this pattern, children are thrown almost entirely on their own judgments as to proper action in specific social situations. The choices made are accepted by adults without comment until after puberty, when the child is supposed to know "what people do." These six patterns may be regarded as the main components of the Papago socialization process. Together, they impart to this process its characteristic uniqueness and represent the structure of the culturally derived ideas that constitute the major orientation points for adults in their elicitation of desired social behavior in the maturing child. This structure is felt to be the most likely locus for further research, for it appears to be the broad outline within which the factors of causality between the process of socialization and patterns of adult behavior probably will be found to be operative. At the present level of research no conclusions concerning causality can be offered. However, it can be pointed out that the Papago socialization process, in marked contrast to those of many other societies, is unencumbered by many deliberate attempts to use overt and specific techniques to lead children to exhibit behavior that is held by this group to be customary and acceptable.13

HE process of getting to be better-off than one used to be does not ordinarily make one sit and reflectively balance what he may have lost against the advantages gained. For, if being reasonably well-off is a novel experience-as is implied when we talk of mobility it may take a long time for the novelty to wear off. One begins to spend time and energy in cultivating the new habits of consumption and the new modes of living appropriate to his new position. And, perhaps one's most ardent wish is that no one should rock the boat, or raise questions about other dimensions of life on which this experience of mobility may be having an impact. But this is what I propose to do here, briefly, and, in large part, impressionistically, since while much attention has been given to measuring mobility and to comparing the mobility rates of various groups in various societies,' relatively little attention has been paid to the range of consequences generated.

It is certain, however, that there are some tensions and strains in the social structure. These have been largely ignored in the present paper, since the going society is characteristically stable. A forthcoming paper, however, will examine in some detail the role of changing bases of land tenure as a source of actual discontent at present, and as a probable source of later social change of a significant degree.'

There are scattered through these three excellent papers a number of important observations regarding human purposeful action. These give us considerable incentive for continuing our efforts to excite human will, to awaken interest, and to energize action. For, in each of the cases considered, it is quite clear that certain important and substantial results desired by participants were achieved, no matter what other intentions may have failed of achievement, or what serendipitous costs and concerns were simultaneously generated.

The disparity between the ideals of equality and the facts of inequality is a dominant fact in our lives today—in the United States and throughout the world. This is not to say that everywhere there is uniform endorsement of the ideal of equality, or that the actual inequalities are everywhere the same. Rather, legal and moral claims of entitlement to unequal portions of the good things of life can no longer be publicly advanced without showing that one has “earned” that right through some unequal contribution to the community.

EARLIER notions of the relation between prejudice and discrimination held them to be closely interdependent. Discrimination, it was often assumed, was practiced by the prejudiced person and could not be eliminated except as prejudice was first removed.' More recent research and theory have been very persuasive, however, in the suggestion that there exists between the attitude of prejudice and the action of discrimination a gap in which a variety of facilitating or inhibiting factors can be interposed. In short, between private feeling and public action there is room for the play of other factors which significantly influence the extent to which feeling will be translated into matching action or will be repressed on behalf of other values. Law, custom, conscience and informal community restraints are the types of factors which can and have been interposed.2 Even the most ardent advocates of legal action will admit, however, that it is questionable how enduring or stable are purely legal restraints in preventing the translation of prejudice into discrimination. Unless deeper commitments oppose prejudices, one must be seriously concerned.3 Yet we also know that prejudice will not easily, if ever, yield to the blandishments of rational evidence. Nor is emotional re-education a feasible public alternative. We are therefore led to seek other factors which may be invoked to help counterbalance the impulses and drives generated by emotionally-rooted prejudices, and which may effectively modify behavior without necessarily altering the prejudices themselves. If these factors are to become instruments of public policy, they must be able to be developed reasonably quickly and at relatively low cost. A clue is given to us by the studies of the impact of formal education upon behavior in a variety of contexts. For the literature is rich with suggestions that as formal education increases there tend to occur noticeable shifts from: (a) nationalism to internationalism, in political point of view; (b) traditionalism to secularism, in general social philosophy; (c) common sense to science, as acceptable evidence; (d) punishment to reform, in penological theory; (e) violence and direct action to law, as agents of policy; (f) rigidity to permissiveness, in child rearing; (g) patriarchy to democracy, in spouse relationships; (h) anesthesia to creativity, in patterns of recreation. A common feature of these changes is that they imply the development of an awareness by the individual that there are: (a) other places than his own locality; (b) other times than the immediate present; (c) persons other than himself and his immediate primary group; and (d) other values he cherishes as ingredients of other aspects of his self. In brief, the individual who experiences these changes has enlarged his perspectives on time, place, person and values. This enlargement, the literature suggests, occurs somehow as a result of pro1 For a thorough review of the major viewpoints, see G. W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1954. For more specialized surveys of related problems, see J. S. Brunner and R. Tagiuri, "The Perception of People" in Gardner Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 634-654, Cambridge, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1954; and J. Harding, B. Kutner, H. Proshansky and I. Chein, "Prejudice and Ethnic Relations," ibid., pp. 1021-1061. 2 For analysis of the "vicious circle" and the effectiveness of interpositions at various points, see, for example, R. K. Merton, "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy," Chapter VII, in his Social Theory and Social Structure, Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1949; and R. M. MacIver's The More Perfect Union, New York: Macmillan, 1948. 3 The best full-length analysis of the role of law in ethnic relations is Morroe Berger's Equality by Statute, New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. See also his excellent article, "Desegregation, Law and Social Science," Commentary, 23 (May, 1957), pp. 471-477; and his Racial Equality and the Law, Paris: UNESCO, 1954.

r NHE SIGNIFI CANCE of social status and social mobility as variables in the analysis of social action is by now taken for granted. This is true even though there is considerable unevenness in how these variables are defined and measured, and in the ways and degrees to which the effects of these variables are evidenced. These variables take on added importance when their implications for social integration and anomie are considered. Status refers to position in a social order, and mobility to changes in such positions. Differential positions tend frequently to receive differential evaluation. Therefore, one of the most important effects to be expected is the degree to which persons with diffierent statusand mobility-profiles feel differently valued by their social order, and act as if they were differently integrated into its norms. These effects probably are most noticeable when insecurity, anxiety, and a genera] sensitivity to questions of status are widespread, as is so often the case in an open class system.l Social changes which threaten status arrangements ought therefore to be viewed with different degrees of alarm, and resistance to such changes should emerge in proportion to the degree of threat which is experienced. Desegregation, as it refers to the promised amelioration of the positions of Negroes in our society, is one such major change. Expectably, reactions to desegregation vary in degree and quality of resistance. In this paper we shall examine the extent to which diffierences in attitudes towards desegregation are related to differences in status and mobility . The data to be reported come from a study conducted in Guilford County, North Carolina, in the fall of I 956. An area-probability sample of 287 White adult (over I8) members of the labour force was interviewed. The principal aim of the study was to discover the lines along which diffierences in readiness and resistance to desegregation were distributed. Toward this end a number of sociological background

T HE SITUATION I wish to report here concerns the pueblo of San Luis Jilotepeque, a small, relatively isolated community in the interior of Guatemala, about go miles from Guatemala City, inhabited, at the time of my studies there, by about 3500 people of whom some i ioo were Ladinos, or people of presumptive Spanish descent, and 2400 of whom were Indians (or mixed-Indian and Ladino) of Maya-Quiche descent.1 Intrinsically, the community is no more nor less significant or interesting than any other community which might be chosen at random. It does have considerable sociological significance of a sort, however, for it represents one of those "Pango-Pango" situations, of which some anthropologists are so fond, because it can be cited as a local exception to some generally prevailing hypotheses. For instance, it is generally agreed that here is a situation of caste-relations between people of different genetic and cultural origins where there is a minimum of conflict. Moreover, the superordinate caste, the Ladinos, are in a distinct numerical minority.