SCHOOL AS A SITE FOR THE PRODUCTION OF PERSONS.

Analysis of classroom discourse shows that the classroom must be seen as a site of cultural production; children are transformed as they are introduced to a new subject position-that of "student." Children are not passive objects of this work; they actively adopt this new position and on occasion they, equally actively, breach the classroom order. We argue that a splitting is produced- a division between child as member-of-family and child as student-in-classroom. As the year goes by, breaches of the order become less frequent, as new cultural mediators (reading, writing, arithmetic) crystallize this division in the person of each child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]