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Reviews 151 production and transmission of values there. They were also keepers of stories about change and continuity in family life, and stories they could tell about mothers in particular (but other women kin as well) were assimilated by them as gauges of their own ethnic identity and modernity. Ethnogenesis in people's own words is "choosing," and these women assiduously "chose," they hoped, the "best of both worlds." In practice, most of the choosing transmitted in the stories was done on the "Greek" side of the equation, so that some practices were kept in domestic routines or rituals; but more were banished as "superstitious," "old-fashioned," or "not practical." But women have even more to do with ethnogenesis. Moskos astutely observes that scholars know little about "the mechanisms of ethnic imprinting" (p. 64). Mixed marriages, as he mentions, are fascinating data for such a study. But they would be revealing data for much more, namely for understanding ethnogenesis, read ethnicity itself. They are key instances in which cultural differences are noted and discounted, assessed, weighted—and magnified or minimized, altered, invented, or reproduced. And here again much of this production was women's work. Wives, mothers, and sisters were negotiators of large things and small in such dramas; and women also signified change or stability and their import in stories about mixed marriages that became part of family legend. Curiously, Moskos in the appendix does not note a need for research on women. But if, as he argues, "Greek Americans must be placed in the broader context of the ethnic experience in the United States" (p. 146), then examination of women's cultural work of "choosing " between "Greek" and "other" is one place where decentering of canons might begin. Phyllis Pease Chock Catholic University Ioannis E. Pirgiotakis, Κοινωνικοποίηση και εκπαιδευτικÎ-Ï‚ ανισότητες. Athens: Grigoris. 1989. Pp. 190. Dr. 1290. In the debate over educational inequalities, the question of the factors that determine children's educational achievement is fundamental . Pirgiotakis' book addresses this issue and maintains the thesis that socialization processes at home determine the extent of educational success. 152 Reviews The book contains four parts. In Part 1 Pirgiotakis examines the notion of socialization and the significance of the relationship between parents and children for children's development. In Part 2 he considers the effects of different socialization patterns on academic achievement. In Part 3 he cites Greek, German, American and British research that attest to the significance of family background for educational success. His main points are succinctly expressed in the conclusion (Part 4). Pirgiotakis' book will be accessible to its intended audience (teachers , students and parents). Caution is required, however, with regard to the coverage of the subject-matter and the attainment of the posited goal, that is, to offer an interdisciplinary perspective on the factors that lead to educational inequalities. It usually takes more than simple statements in the preface (p. 7) for a book to achieve interdisciplinary scope. To have actually implemented his aim, Pirgiotakis' psychological and educational orientation should have been supplemented by work on socialization carried out within the ethnography of communication and interactional sociolinguistics. The main argument developed in the book is that reference to family socialization processes is necessary to explain the different results obtained by children in intelligence tests (pp. 89—96), their varying control of "appropriate" language in schools (pp. 105-123) and their varying degree of motivation (pp. 123—135). Institutionaireform alone is thought to be ineffective. Behind Pirgiotakis' discussion of these topics, however, lies a linear model of children's development which is predicated on a strict dichotomization between middle- and working-class children's abilities and fails to capture the socio-culturally diverse ways of acquiring knowledge. As formal means of measuring the values of the class which controls selection processes within society, intelligence tests disregard the fact that performance in them is very much related to the life patterns of particular communities. In a similar sense, language as a socially situated cultural form reflects the values held by social groups. Although Pirgiotakis mentions the field of sociolinguistics (p. 123), he has failed to incorporate many of its insights, which would have led him to examine critically the methodological basis of...

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