School Capital and Outcomes

Abstract

What are the experiences in schools that influence a child’s life chances? After having examined the structural characteristics of schools I now turn to explore children’s perceptions of their schools to provide a more complete answer to the question. The impact that a teacher may have on a child’s eventual career is reflected in a reminiscence by the writer Jean Rhys. She grew up in Dominica and recalls:

I thought of poetry as an examination subject. The way we were taught in our literature class didn’t alter this opinion. Parse and analyse the following. Point out the grammatical mistakes in the following. (p. 58) Then, like a bolt from the blue, came Mother Sacred Heart, a new nun from England who took the literature class. She had a very beautiful voice and read aloud to us. She introduced us to Shelley and I soon stopped thinking of Shakespeare and company as examination subjects. I was able to make my own discoveries, even my own enthusiasms. [She] may have been an unruly nun but she was certainly a splendid teacher. I date all my love of words, especially beautiful words, to her lessons. (Rhys, 1979, p. 60)