School-Related Attitudes in Middle-School Age Students1

Much has been written on American education and various proposals for administrative and curricular changes have been offered to cure its alleged shortcomings (e.g., Committee for Economic Development, 1968; Conant, 1959; Educational Policies Commission, 1961). Interestingly, however, children themselves have been rather consistently left out of the recommendationmaking process. Thus, we find little, if any, information on how pupils themselves perceive the school curriculum and personnel. In the same vein, not much is known of the possible variations in these perceptions as a function of pupil sex, grade, or subgroups (private vs. public schools, normal vs. disturbed children, Orientals vs. Indians, etc.). Coleman (1961) and Tannenbaum (1962), among others, gave some evidence that academic concern does not occupy a central place in the mind of a typical high school student. Even so, it is an interesting question to ask whether he reacts uniformly to every academic subject. Yamamoto and Wiersma (1968) showed with 120 college students in education that there are indeed