The Organization Child: Experience Management in a Nursery School.

This paper proposes a relationship between the structure of education and the major institutional forms of a society. It posits that in a society characterized by a predominance of bureaucratic organizations the criteria for health and maturity in a popular psychological perspective (neo-Freudian ideology) may correspond with the demands of bureaucracy; that the practices of one nursery school in implementing this ideology create bureaucracy-like experiences for the children in it; and that the behavior of the children in tte school reflects their experience of a phenomenologically bureaucratic world. These propositions are based on participant-observation in an American nursery school.