Schooled by the Classroom

Abstract

That schools tend to reproduce patterns of social stratification is a classic theme in the sociology of education (e.g., Becker 1961; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977); that they do so in a recondite rather than forthright manner is the central premise of the literature on the hidden curriculum reviewed in the introduction to this volume. Several of those writing on hidden curricula have remarked on the importance of the physical environment (Apple 1993; Muzzin, chapter eight this volume). This chapter builds on these observations and fills a gap in the literature by closely analyzing and comparing the built environments of two professional schools at the University of California, Berkeley: the Boalt Hall School of Law and the School of Social Welfare. Both were ranked among the top ten schools in their respective fields by U.S. News and World Report “Best Graduate Schools” (1998). In the course of my research at the two professional schools, I undertook more than four hundred hours of participant observation, focusing in part on the schools’ settings-documenting them photographically and observing students’ reactions to them. In this chapter, the goal is to describe how the physical set and setting function to convey socialization messages, with an eye toward understanding how the schools (re)produce race, class, gender, and other hierarchies.