Arthur B. Shostak

Education and the Family

Historically, schools have depended on families for children (input) and for general guidance in sociability and educational tasks. Families likewise have depended on schools to help separate the generations, to aid in socialization, and to help educate those in and outside the school system. At present local-state educational relations influence a familys choice of residence, obscure traditional demarcations between the school and the family, compel family attention to pupil conduct in and outside of school, and tax family financial resources heavily. Federal pressures on the family relate to the integration of the races and the gradual establishment of educational national standards. Problems are explored and various new reforms suggested.

The Nature of Work: Sociological Perspectives.

The nature of work in America is changing in important ways. Blue-collar jobs are being eliminated because of increased competition from countries where wages are lower, while a greater economic role is being assumend by professional, technical, and clerical workers involved in developing complex technologies, providing services, and processing information. All this affects the values and expectations of those who work as well as their relationships to one another and to society at large. This book discusses this recent transformation. Among the provocative issues raised are - precisely what alienation from work means, and what non-alienated forms of work might be like, what happens within the family when both husband and wife contribute to the familys income, how work values are changing, and whether the primacy of work in peoples lives has begun to wane, why American society has failed to develop a full employment policy in the past, how the economy might be redirected to reduce unemployment, whether work sharing (in which available hours of work are divided among a labor force) is feasible in America, and what the future will be like for workers in advanced industrial societies.