Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik.
- Date:
- [1974]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik. Source: Wellcome Collection.
53/584 page 25
![Some Paradoxes Connected with Risk and Vulnerability 25 The problem, however, goes beyond the school, and nothing can evolve if the community does not feel concerned, as Comer [9] points out, and beyond the immediate community there is the larger political question: To what extent should the school play a compensatory role in equalizing social inequalities? Unless something of this is done, the situation will continue to exact its price in juvenile delinquency, in the production of mediocre and incompetent adults, and in psychosomatic and mental disorder. What, then, are the sociocultural factors that put the child at risk for school failure? On intelligence tests in which verbal ability plays an important role, the testable intelligence of these children is inferior (which, of course, does not exclude the presence of superior intelligences among them), but even when they are on an equal intellectual level there is less chance for it to be turned to scholarly account. This undoubtedly has something to do with language development, as Bernstein [3] has shown. In a working-class milieu, the child is spoken to only in the context of actions to be performed, and there is very little occasion for the use of narrative language or metalanguage. This attitude with regard to language, the absence of linguistic play, of parent-child playfulness, and of interest in cultural objects is a facet of what de Lauwe [12] calls working-class preoccupation behavior—^job insecurity, reduced time at home, uncomfortable and overcrowded housing conditions, and so forth. The child's upbringing and the care he receives in infancy depend on these same detrimental living conditions. The lower the socioeconomic level, the more frequently are infants hospitalized for illness and the greater the need to place children in residential homes and other institutions. When the level of intelligence that has been recorded at 6 years is found to fall in later childhood, frequent milieu changes in the first 6 years of life are common [7]. Even if one maintains that intelligence, at least in its operational form—concrete thinking—is partly independent of language (Piaget's thesis is that operational thinking is rooted in action and not in language), those environmental conditions that stimulate the development of language are frequently found to be, at the same time, stimulating the development of concrete operational thinking, and this is even more strongly the case with abstract thinking.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18021876_0054.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
