Abstract
The study set out to examine parents' evaluations of the school they had attended and the role of these evaluations in the formation of parental attitudes towards education. A group of vocationally educated (N = 343) and a group of academically educated (N = 231) parents were asked to think back to their primary school days and evaluate the functioning of their school; they were also requested to indicate their opinions on a set of attitude statements and to predict their preschool-aged child's future direction in secondary education. The parents' evaluation of their schools averaged at ‘satisfactory’, with the highest grade given to the quality of the instruction and the lowest grades to the giving of encouragement and the capability of taking individual needs into consideration. The school evaluations were organized by the school generation and, in particular, by the educational position of the subject, so that those parents who had gone to the (new) comprehensive school and those who were university-educated gave more positive evaluations of their schools than did those who had gone to the (old) folk school and those who were vocationally educated. The critical educational attitudes corresponding to the educational position of the academically educated parents were enhanced if their evaluation of their own school was negative, whereas the positive educational attitudes corresponding to the educational position of the vocationally educated parents were enhanced if their evaluation of their own school was positive. With the vocationally educated parents, their school evaluation also organized their prediction of their child's secondary education: a positive evaluation raised and a negative evaluation lowered the likelihood of vocational education as the predicted alternative.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Brantlinger, E. (1985a). What low-income parents want from schools: a different view of aspirations. Interchange, 16, 14-28.
Brantlinger, E. (1985b). Low-income parents' opinions about the social class composition of schools. American Journal of Education, 93, 389-408.
Brown, P. (1990). The ‘third wave’: education and the ideology of parentocracy. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 11, 65-84.
Browne-Miller, A. (1995). Intelligence policy. Its impact on college admissions and other social policies. New York: Plenum Press.
Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage.
Croizet, J.-C. & Claire, T. (1998). Extending the concept of stereotypic threat to social class. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 588-595.
Doise, W. (1986). Levels of explanation in social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dweck, C. (1999). Self-theories: their role in motivation, personality and development. Howe: Taylor &Francis.
Fazio, R. & Zanna, M. (1981). Direct experience and attitude-behavior consistency. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 14). New York: Academic Press; pp. 162-202.
Gorman, T. (1998). Social class and parental attitudes toward education. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 27, 10-45.
Havén, H. (1999). Education in Finland. Statistics and Indicators. Helsinki: Statistics Finland.
Kerlinger, F. (1984). Liberalism and conservatism. The nature and structure of social attitudes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Kivinen, O. & Rinne, R. (1992). Higher education and social change in Finland. Education and Society, 10, 41-51.
Kohn, M. (1969). Class and conformity. Belmont: Dorsey.
Komulainen, K. (1999). A course of one's own: the rhetorical self in educational life stories by women. Nordic Journal of Women's Studies, 7, 123-137.
Lareau, A. (1987). Social class differences in family-school relationship: the importance of cultural capital. Sociology of Education, 60, 73-85.
Linnakylä, P. (1996). Quality of school life in the Finnish comprehensive school. A comparative view. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 40, 69-85.
Mehan, H., Villanueva, I., Hubbard, L., & Lintz, A. (1996). Constructing school success. The consequences of untracking low-achieving students. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Munns, G. & McFadden, M. (2000). First change, second change or last change? Resistance and response to education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21, 59-75.
Nordisk skolbarometer (2001). Attituder till skolan år 2000 (TemaNord 2001: 547). Copenhagen: Nordisk Ministerrådet.
Okagaki, L. (2001). Triarchic model of minority children's school achievement. Educational Psychologists, 36, 9-20.
Rosenholtz, S. & Simpson, C. (1984). The formation of ability conceptions: developmental trend or social constructions? Review of Educational Research, 54, 31-63.
Räty, H. & Snellman, L. (1998). Social representations of educability. Social Psychology of Education, 1, 359-367.
Räty, H., Leinonen, T., & Snellman, L. (in press). Parents' educational expectations and their social-psychological patterning. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 46.
Räty, H., Snellman, L., Mantysaari-Hetekorpi, H., & Vornanen, A. (1996). Parents' views on the comprehensive school and its development: a Finnish study. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 40, 203-215.
Sennet, R. & Cobb, J. (1972). The hidden injuries of class. New York: Vintage Books.
Shotter, J. (1990) The social construction of remembering and forgetting. In D. Middleton & D. Edwards (Eds.), Collective remembering. Devon: Sage; pp. 120-138.
Smith, M., Bruner, J., & White, R. (1956). Opinions and personality. New York: Wiley.
Snellman, L. & Räty, H. (1995). Conceptions of intelligence as social representations. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 10, 273-287.
Taylor, D., Lambert, W., & Porter, L. (1998). The occupational stereotypes and expectations for their children held by mothers representing different ethnic communities in Miami. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 28, 1951-1968.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Räty, H. The Significance of Parents' Evaluations of their Own School for their Educational Attitudes. Social Psychology of Education 6, 43–60 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021798713525
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021798713525