Children’s consciousness reflects their social milieu, always at odds with school curricula

Evidence

But the child’s consciousness is not something “individual” (still less individuated), it reflects the sector of civil society in which the child participates, and the social relations which are formed within his family, his neighbourhood, his village, etc. The individual consciousness of the overwhelming majority of children reflects social and cultural relations which are different from and antagonistic to those which are represented in the school curricula: thus the “certain” of an advanced culture becomes “true” in the framework of a fossilised and anachronistic culture. There is no unity between school and life, and so there is no automatic unity between instruction and education. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 353

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the wider Gramscian motif of civil society vs. state/hegemony — the family and neighbourhood transmit culture in competition with formal schooling.
• DEFINE: Core definition: consciousness is socially constituted, not individual — a foundational claim for the colonial-psychology and racialized-selfhood toolkit.