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Building People I: The Strength of Primary Socialization

It is commonly held that the first years of life are crucial to forming an individual, and many scientific disciplines have advanced this idea, especially subfields in psychology and sociology. However, we take this so much for granted that we often forget to mention, if only in passing, the causes of the particular influence wielded by the childhood or even teenage years. Why does this particular period in life, and especially parental education, have such formative power?

In order to explain the strength of primary socialization, sociologists have provided different answers to this question: because children are easily influenced and initial experiences have considerable sway over them (Émile Durkheim, Norbert Elias); because children have a veritable need, at this point in their development, for the influence of those around them so as not, or no longer, to be animals (Norbert Elias); because, at this stage in their lives, socializing influences are imposed upon children who cannot choose their parents or their parents' actions upon them, but also because this constraint operates within an affective context that lends primary socialization its particular tone and effectiveness (Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann); and, finally, because initial experiences become the filters through which individuals go on to perceive the outside world, "selecting" the events, people, and perceptions that do not call into question the person they have become as a result of those initial experiences (Pierre Bourdieu). For all these reasons, the education that individuals receive in childhood can be said to have a profound effect in forming the people they become.

1. Socialization and education

"Socialization" and "education" are not, however, equivalent terms. Socialization is more than just the effect of educational practices, that is to say the actions specifically and explicitly undertaken by parents with a view to raising their children in a particular way, even though studying those actions is essential to its analysis. Socialization also involves implicit processes, and sociological approaches examining it differ according to the degree to which they emphasize its various components and its conscious or unconscious aspects.

1.1 Socialization as education

Some sociologists have foregrounded the fact that children's "education" is at once the core of family socialization and the most visible part of the process. As Durkheim put it at the beginning of the twentieth century, in two often-quoted passages from Education and Sociology: "Between the vague potentialities which constitute man at the moment of birth and the well-defined character that he must become in order to play a useful role in society the distance is, then, considerable. It is this distance that education has to make the child travel" (1956: 84-5). "Education is the influence exercised by adult generations on those that are not yet ready for social life. Its object is to arouse and develop in the child a certain number of physical, intellectual and moral states which are demanded of him by both the political society as a whole and the special milieu for which he is specifically destined" (71).

In these excerpts, Durkheim uses the term "education" to refer to the "actions" undertaken by parents (although he refers to "teachers and parents" indiscriminately and considers the actions of school and family together) with a clear, explicit, and methodical aim: "creating a new being in man," that is to say the "social being" (1956: 126). At first glance, then, it seems that for Durkheim children are constructed entirely as a result of conscious, effective educational practices deployed by adults with this specific aim in mind. Children's "education" and "socialization" are taken to be equivalent processes.

From Durkheim's perspective, the processes in question are oriented in a particular direction: the intention is for the child to take on the "useful role" demanded by "society as a whole" and particularly the "milieu for which he is [.] destined." From this point of view, then, if we extrapolate a little, there are good forms of socialization that prepare children "well" for this role, and others that could be considered "bad."

This normative conception of socialization, determining what qualifies as "good" socialization, can also be found among some of the functionalist sociologists influenced by Durkheim. From their point of view, societies ensure the reproduction of culture and social structure by having children internalize norms and values, first and foremost within the family. For functionalist sociology, such as that of Talcott Parsons, "socialization is critical for the maintenance of both social continuity and social order, as actors learn both to imitate and to identify with others, eventually learning their specific 'role-values and symbol-systems'" (Guhin et al. 2021: 3).

This conception of things also entails identifying the predefined contents of socialization, which can then be said to have "failed" when they are not internalized and to have "succeeded" when they are. Looked at this way, the starting point for the sociological study of socialization is not so much the process itself as the social structure thanks to which we can identify what will, or what should, be internalized. The next stage is then studying the educational process by analyzing the means through which these contents will be taken on board.

1.2 Education as hypnosis

Durkheim uses a striking metaphor to characterize the strength and scope of these "means" and to show that primary socialization shapes children in deep and lasting ways. He argues that the power of educational action can be compared to hypnotic suggestion:

(1) The child is naturally in a state of passivity quite comparable to that in which the hypnotic subject is artificially placed. His mind yet contains only a small number of conceptions able to fight against those which are suggested to him; his will is still rudimentary. Therefore he is very suggestible. For the same reason, he is very susceptible to the force of example, very much inclined to imitation. (2) The ascendancy that the teacher naturally has over his pupil, because of the superiority of his experience and of his culture, will naturally give to his influence the efficacious force that he needs. (1956: 85-6)

With this metaphor, Durkheim outlines an educational situation clearly characterized by the total passivity and lack of consciousness of those being educated, and the equally all-encompassing activity and lucidity of those educating them. Children are almost like blank slates, upon which adults, thanks to their "natural authority," can write whatever content they like, as long as they "wish" to do so. This aspect of Durkheim's analysis may well make us smile given how at odds it is with our current conceptions of childhood and education. It is as though he were talking about indoctrinating children into a cult rather than about educating them, and his text seems to be trapped in an old-fashioned educational model that today seems to us both dangerous and obsolete.

However, our instinctive reaction to distance ourselves from this point of view, and perhaps even consider it with some measure of condescension ("we know better now!"), should not prevent us from perceiving the significance of Durkheim's metaphor. Although the comparison with hypnosis is extreme, it has the advantage of emphasizing a fundamental aspect of the primary socialization process: at no point do children have even the illusion of being able to choose their influences. These are all imposed upon them. As the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann underscore:

[A]lthough the child is not simply passive in the process of his socialization, it is the adults who set the rules of the game. The child can play the game with enthusiasm or with sullen resistance. But, alas, there is no other game around. [.] Since the child has no choice in the selection of his significant others [i.e. the individuals who will be important in his primary socialization], his identification with them is quasi-automatic. For the same reason, his internalization of their particular reality is quasi-inevitable. The child does not internalize the world of his significant others as one of many possible worlds. He internalizes it as the world, the only existent and only conceivable world, the world tout court. (1991: 154)

Berger and Luckmann's game metaphor is certainly more pleasing than Durkheim's hypnosis analogy, but the fundamental process in question (a game that is completely constrained in its very principles) is not so different. When we refuse to see childhood socialization as a long series of constraints, we are perhaps confusing modern educational standards (the "softer" more "democratic" way in which we believe children should be raised today) and the description of what a socialization process actually is, given that its mechanisms are necessarily constraining even when the content is not presented as such....