Can the influence on personality development of a school on the characteristics of community and individual existence be detected from the nuclear episodes of students' life histories and their school histories?

Abstract

The educational impact of upbringing or schooling is more difficult to grasp than the "added value" of its knowledge transfer role. Our paper, however, seems to provide a way of measuring the personality-changing impact of school. The aim of the present research paper is to show how school stories and other important life history episodes can be used to implicitly provide information about one of the "added values" of school, its impact on personal development. Our study draws life story episodes from semi-structured qualitative interviews with former pupils of two schools of a Roman Catholic order in Hungary. From an analysis of these episodes after fitting them into McAdams' life history model, we infer the role of the school in the life history of the individual, its personality-changing effects on the mirror of the individual (agency) and communal (communion) existence with Bakan’s terms. In the paper we describe the coding process in detail using one interview participant’s three life stories, then we show the results of the coding applied for other alumnae’s life and school stories.