Comparatively little research in western education has focused upon the way in which ritual and ceremonial practices achieve their effects in the socialization process. This paper, in analyzing two private secondary school rituals, essays a partial answer to two questions: Why do private schools appear to be so much more successful than state schools in committing their clientele to the advancement of the school project and in socializing students into acceptance of and support for the culture of the school? And what is the socializing role of ritual practice in such schools? SOCIALIZATION, RITUAL, SCHOOL CULTURE, SCHOOL ETHNOGRAPHY, SOCIAL CLASS. Schools, or, more correctly, the teachers and administrators within them, have educational projects: policies, plans, goals, and organizational means of achieving them. Such projects vary from one society to another and, as I will endeavor to show, within specific societies from one community to another. But within western society at least, it is clear that all schools, with whatever degree of intensity, explicitness, and self-consciousness, engage a project that has three major elements: instruction, selection, and socialization. This paper focuses upon the socialization project of the school. Like selection, and unlike instruction, socialization is a largely covert operation, dealing with the inculcation of culturally defined ways of perceiving the world and acting within it. It is concerned with the ideas, often amorphous and conflicting and rarely critically examined, that make up the world view of a particular social group. As such, it is a process, unlike the straightforwardly instructional, that is little scrutinized or discussed by school practitioners and their clients, and much taken for granted. The socialization project has two aspects. It is concerned, on the one hand, with the organization of attitudes and behaviors within the cultural milieu of the school: authority relations, the establishment of priorities, degrees of formality, modes of address, rules regarding conduct, the judgment of performance, the ordering of interpersonal relations, and so on. On the other hand, teachers, at the behest of the wider community served by the schools, are involved in the promulgation of a broader set of values and attitudes than those which have relevance only to the bounded everyday life of the school. These include ideas of truth, justice, liberty, the moral and philosophical ideals underpinning the secular state, and the proper mode of

In this paper we present a critique of two models of multicultural education which currently appear to dominate thinking about the nature and causes of inequality of opportunity and outcome in Australian schools (see, e.g., Galbally, 1978; de Lacey, 1974;Grassby, 1979). These are the compensatory meritocratic model, which emphasises equal access to schooling and contested social mobility through an education which is substantially the same for all children and assumes unidimensional standards of 'excellence'; and the liberal-multicultural model, which proposes parity of esteem for the varied outcomes of many different types of schooling and is founded in the notion of, we suggest, a plural, rather than a multicultural, society. That is to say, a plural society is one in which the differential power of various cultural groups is not considered open to question or to radical change; a multicultural society is one in which the members of any cultural group are not prohibited from obtaining access to power because of their membership of a particular cultural group.On the basis of the critique presented we propose a third model which recognises both similarities and differences among schoolchildren, and overcomes the major weaknesses of the compensatory meritocratic model in taking cognisance of the humanitarian problem of cultural substitution (that is, pedagogical practice which leads to the denigration of one set of culture-specific pupil attitudes, values and beliefs about schooling and the encouragement of the adoption of another), and of the liberal-multicultural model in clarifying the importance, for education, of power structures in the wider society.It is important to acknowledge, as a starting point, that schools and teachers, in isolation from other social institutions (e.g., the economy, the family, religion, political forces) are not able to effect the major societal changes which are demanded by the goals of multiculturalism which, for the purposes of this paper we take to be the provision of equal access to the means of obtaining political, economic and social power regardless of ethnic background. This is particularly true of the modification of attitudes in children, attitudes which are developed and sustained by a wide variety of influences, of which the school is only one (and, possibly, a relatively insignificant one). Accordingly, we confine our comments to those aspects of teaching and teacher education which deal with the impact of cognitive factors rather than

The argument of this paper is grounded in the contention that the traditional city/bush, urban/rural distinctions made of Australian society represent a false dichotomy. Rather, it is suggested that this distinction serves an ideological purpose in opposing, for example, rural and urban workers, rural and urban owners/managers etc. The rhetoric and the reality of Australian cultural mythologies is analysed with the aim of demonstrating the ways in which images of Australia and Australians are exemplified and enacted in the daily life of country towns. To this end, the paper offers an examination of (a) mass media and (b) some 'urban' aspects of the rural economy, particularly the control of rural industries by urban and transnational interests.

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