What medium? What message? Smoking education for teenagers

Abstract

It would seem fairly safe to say that an important purpose of schools is to transmit messages; by their very nature they are in an advantageous position to do this. Schools have captive audiences as Dreeben (1970) states, though he is careful to point out that the children may not be in all cases an audience of captives, yet most could be classed as 'victims of institutionalised education' (Gammage 1982). Many secondary teachers particularly may well feel that they have much in common with prison warders for, after all, apart from prisons which have a selective intake, schools are the only institutions where all individuals are compulsorily incarcerated for part of their lives - an estimated 15,000 hours in the United Kingdom. The extent to which schools function in the transmission of messages in the broadest sense has been the subject of much discussion in the last two decades particularly and in spite of the gloomy picture that emerged from the Coleman report (1966) subsequent findings have been much more optimistic. Schools DO make a difference.