It is clear from all these data that the interests of teenagers are not focused around studies, and that scholastic achievement is at most of minor importance in giving status or prestige to an adolescent in the eyes of other adolescents.

As an example, one of the schools I have been studying is too small to compete effectively in most sports, but participates with vigor each year in the state music contests.

It is one thing to take as a given that approximately 70 percent of an entering high school freshman class will not attend college, but to assign a particular child to a curriculum designed for that 70 percent closes off for that child the opportunity to attend college.

If we refuse to accept as inevitable the irresponsibility and educational unconcern of the adolescent culture, then this poses a serious challenge.

Children from a given family background, when put in schools of different social compositions, will achieve at quite different levels.

A child's learning is a function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher.

Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards.