Summary.From the results of a survey of the attitudes and values of 506 boys, aged 14–15 years in grammar and secondary modern schools, no support is given to either of two current hypotheses about home and school as socializing agents: that either the social class of origin or the type of secondary school attended provides the criterion for discerning the sub‐cultures of this population. Nor does anticipatory socialization to the attitudes and values of the individual's expected socio‐economic status occur. The variables used in some of the previous research on adolescent socialization, ‘social class,’ and ‘type of school,’ it is argued, are inappropriate even as summary variables: the differences in attitudes between types of secondary school, for example, are no greater than those between rural and urban schools; and to establish a norm for a particular type of school is to mask the wide variations existing between individual schools, and between streams within a