And when I moved on because I became more of the person that I truly am,
other people didn’t like it because in a certain sense I used to conform in some
ways and it used to make me angry because it wasn’t really me. ”
Interviewer: “ Which people? ”
Jasmine: “ Because they couldn’t manipulate me any more. It was friends. And I
decided that the way I wanted to live my life through moving on was totally
different and I didn’t dismiss unkindly the people around me. Ijust needed a
different sort of person around me, a different sort of person around me, a
different sort of support system and nurturing and different mentors because I’d
moved on a bit. ”
For these networking individuals, education has differing functions in structuring their
social lives. However, although individuals support each other within social networks
and this is important for individual well-being, social relationships of this type do not
necessarily extend towards the community in a wider sense.
9.1.2 Values
We encouraged respondents to talk freely about how learning had impacted upon their
values in general, before asking more specific questions concerning those values
particularly pertinent to the formation of social capital: tolerance and trust. Only one
respondent refused to answer any questions on values, stating that “I can’t stand
political issues”, and that she would leave any course that expected her to discuss
these.
In this section, we mainly concentrate on the ways in which learning influences values
related to tolerance, understanding and respect for others. The distinction between
tolerance, understanding and respect is important as tolerance alone implies a rather
minimal activity in terms of accepting certain infringements of one’s rights.
Understanding and respect imply that individuals have understood and even adopted
others’ perspectives and perhaps actively engaged with individuals from other
communities. These activities are instrumental in promoting ‘bridging’ social capital
between groups. Tolerance of other ethnic groups was an emergent benefit of learning
but so too was tolerance in terms of categories of social class, gender, sexuality,
nationality, religion and often stigmatised groups such as young single mothers or
asylum-seekers.
We identified four broad mechanisms by which learning influenced tolerant values:
social mix and communication, role models, subject effects and resistance.
Social mix and communication
A mix of pupils or students from different backgrounds on a course appears to be a
necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the development of tolerant attitudes.
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