One very important agent of childhood socialization is the school. Of course, the official purpose of school is to transfer subject knowledge and teach life skills, such as following directions and meeting deadlines. But, students don’t just learn from the academic curriculum prepared by teachers and school administrators. In school, we also learn social skills through our interactions with teachers, staff, and other students. For example, we learn the importance of obeying authority and that to be successful, we must learn to be quiet, to wait, and sometimes to act interested even when we’re not.

Peers are extremely important when it comes to socialization. In adolescence, peers take on an importance that can outweigh any other single influence. Peer pressure, whether overt or subtle, has a powerful effect. Peer pressure can be negative (e.g., encouraging a teenager to smoke) or positive (e.g., getting on the all-A honour roll at school).

Mass media is a powerful socializing agent today, more than ever before due to its ubiquity. There are messages that we receive from the media without being aware that we are integrating those messages into our psychic (e.g., males should be aggressive, females should dress revealingly, etc.) we should endeavour to filter what we inject into our psychic.