Revision summary
Mead: the self arises in communication; play and the game build the generalised other. The “I” and the “Me” make socialisation two-sided. Cooley and Goffman support the active looking-glass and performance. Oakley shows gender scripts that are still negotiated. Class, caste, and media limit equal role-taking.
Model answer
Introduction
George Herbert Mead treated the self as a social process, not as a ready soul. Socialisation is not a stamp on clay. The person takes the role of the other, answers, and so helps to make the self that society also makes. That is the key role.
Body
Self as process
- In Mind, Self and Society, the self arises in communication. Gestures become significant symbols when they mean the same to self and other.
- The “I” is the spontaneous response. The “Me” is the organised set of attitudes of others that one assumes.
- Play and the game are stages: first one role, then the organised team. The generalised other is the community’s standpoint.
Why we are not only products
- Charles Horton Cooley’s looking-glass self already made imagination of others’ view central. Mead made it a theory of action.
- The child does not merely copy. She tries roles, fails, and adjusts. Agency sits inside the “I”.
- Erving Goffman later showed performance and saving face. That is still Mead’s active participant, now on a staged encounter.
Socialisation as joint work
- Family, school, and peer group supply the others. The person selects, resists, and recombines those voices.
- Ann Oakley showed gender is taught as work and identity. Girls and boys still negotiate the script, which is Mead’s point against a pure mould.
- Indian illustrations include the bilingual child who switches caste-polite and school-English selves, and NFHS talk on decision-making inside households.
Limits
- Mead underplayed class, caste, and the state as unequal others. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus is heavier than an equal conversation.
- Sigmund Freud’s unconscious is not Mead’s “I”. Structural constraint can drown role-taking.
- Media and algorithms now supply generalised others that no neighbourhood assembled.
Assessment of the sentence
- The sentence is right against a one-way filling of the child.
- It is incomplete if “we” means a free chooser outside institutions.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD OTH[Significant others] --> ME[Me] I[I spontaneous] --> SELF[Self] ME --> SELF GAME[Game generalised other] --> ME SELF --> SOC[Socialisation as joint]
Conclusion
Mead’s claim is that socialisation is role-taking in which the “I” answers the “Me”. We help to write the self that others also write. Oakley and Goffman extend the activity. Class and caste show that not every player holds the same script.
Quick related
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Did Mead deny society’s power?
No. The Me is society inside the person. He denied that the person is only a stamp.
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Is this the same as free will?
The I is emergence in the act, not a philosophical soul outside history.
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