The Effects of Social Stratification

Social class is not just a label a community attaches to people. It has far-reaching social consequences and a deep effect on the personality of individuals. Many forces shape a person’s character, including their beliefs, ideals, ways of thinking, and social outlook, but among the most important are the forces tied to the social position a person occupies.

What social position shapes

A person’s social position quietly steers much of their life. It tends to shape:

1. Who their friends and associates will be.
2. The kind of job they will hold.
3. Where they will live in the community.
4. The kind of family they are likely to marry into.

Each of these, in turn, has a deep influence on the individual’s beliefs, their aspirations, their loyalties, and the way they perceive the social events happening around them. Social position is not destiny, but it sets strong tendencies that reach into how a person sees the world.

Flashcard

What does a person's social position tend to shape?

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Answer

Their friends, their work, where they live, and who they marry

Each of these deeply influences the person’s beliefs, aspirations, loyalties, and how they perceive social events. Position sets strong tendencies, reaching into how a person sees the world.

Class and the upbringing of children

The class a child is born into tends to shape how they are reared. The source describes broad tendencies, not fixed rules, and they are worth reading as patterns rather than verdicts on any family.

Middle-class families, on this account, tended to control their children’s activities more closely and to allow them less free time. Holding beliefs in individual initiative and the value of property, they tended to teach children to respect property, to seek social recognition and financial advantage, and to value respect for law and order, cleanliness, and success in school.

Lower-class families tended to make fewer demands and to allow children a larger measure of independence. Children were more likely to stay out late, to work for a wage earlier, and to grow up with less emphasis on respect for property and law, and with less pressure toward the high ambitions the middle class encouraged.

Each class forms an outlook

The conclusion the source draws is that each social class tends to create personality patterns peculiar to it. An individual takes on elements of the special pattern of culture that characterises their social class, and tends to see the world from the standpoint of that class.

There is a further step. A class becomes class conscious when its members begin to think and plan deliberately in terms of class interests. Whether or not that happens, each social class generates a particular social outlook that is imbibed by nearly every individual born into it. A learner, then, brings a class outlook into the classroom, absorbed long before any teacher meets them.

Flashcard

What does the source conclude about each social class and outlook?

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Answer

Each class tends to form a personality pattern and social outlook of its own

An individual takes on the cultural pattern of their class and sees the world from its standpoint. A learner brings this class outlook into the classroom, absorbed before any teacher meets them.