Breaking down the question
The quotation is the whole task. It asserts that we are not passive recipients of socialisation but active participants in it, and the direction is simply to explain that claim through Mead's framework. The examiner is testing whether you understand Mead's distinctive break from earlier, more deterministic accounts of socialisation.
The word to seize on is active. Functionalist and behaviourist models tend to treat the individual as clay moulded by society — norms are transmitted, the child absorbs them. Mead's account is different: the self that is being socialised is itself an agent that interprets, responds and even resists. To explain the quotation well you must show the mechanism by which the individual participates in shaping their own self, not merely assert that they do.
At 20 marks the answer needs the full apparatus — the social genesis of the self, role-taking, the interplay of the "I" and the "me", the play and game stages, and the generalised other — but always bent back towards the question's theme of active participation. A pure descriptive summary of Mead that never returns to the word active would miss the demand.
How to approach it
Open by locating Mead within symbolic interactionism and stating his central claim: the self is not innate but emerges through social interaction, and yet the individual is an active party to that emergence, not its passive object.
Then build the argument in stages. Explain role-taking as the basic capacity through which the child comes to see itself from the standpoint of others. Introduce the distinction between the "I" and the "me", stressing that the spontaneous, creative "I" is precisely where the individual's active contribution lies. Trace the play and game stages, and culminate in the generalised other. Throughout, keep drawing the thread back — at each step, show how the person is interpreting and responding rather than simply absorbing. Our Mead notes set out the framework in fuller detail.
Conclude by drawing the two sides together: socialisation is a social process, yet because the self is reflexive and the "I" is always capable of novel response, the individual genuinely co-produces their own self.
Model answer
George Herbert Mead argued that the self is not something a person is born with but something that develops through social experience and communication using significant symbols, above all language. The self has the peculiar capacity to be an object to itself — to reflect on itself from the outside — and this reflexivity arises only in society. In this sense the self is a social product. But Mead's account is emphatically not one of passive moulding, and the quotation captures exactly why.
The engine of development is role-taking: the ability to put oneself in the place of another and to view oneself from that standpoint. This is already an active, interpretive achievement. The child must read gestures, infer meanings and imaginatively occupy another's position — it is doing something, not merely having something done to it. Within the self Mead distinguished two phases that make the point sharper still. The "me" is the organised set of attitudes of others that the individual has internalised — the socialised self, the self as object. The "I" is the spontaneous, creative and unpredictable response of the individual to a situation — the acting subject. Conduct is a continual conversation between the two. Crucially, the "I" is never fully determined by the "me": it can respond to social expectations in fresh, unforeseen ways, and it is here that the individual's active role in their own socialisation is located.
Mead traced the self's growth through stages. In the preparatory phase the infant merely imitates. In the play stage the child takes the role of particular others one at a time — playing at being a parent, a teacher, a doctor — and so learns to see itself through specific individuals' eyes, though its self is still fragmentary. In the game stage the child must take the roles of many others at once and grasp how they interlock; Mead's illustration is the team game, in which a player must anticipate every other position simultaneously and coordinate accordingly. This capacity matures into the generalised other, the organised attitude of the whole community internalised by the individual, by which a person judges their own conduct against shared standards.
At every one of these stages the individual is an interpreter, not a receptacle. Taking a role, coordinating with the generalised other, and above all responding through the "I" are activities the person performs. The socialised "me" supplies the material of social expectation, but the "I" continually acts upon and can revise it. This is why Mead can say we play a key role in our own socialisation: society enters the individual, but the individual, being reflexive and spontaneous, actively participates in constructing the self that results. Socialisation is thus a two-way, lifelong and creative process rather than a one-way imprint.
Examiner's perspective
Because the quotation stresses the active self, the examiner is looking for that emphasis to organise the whole answer. Scripts that reproduce Mead's stages competently but never explain why they make the individual an agent — rather than a well-programmed product — answer a different, easier question and are marked accordingly.
The strongest answers make the "I" do the argumentative work, showing it as the seat of spontaneity and novel response, and treating role-taking and the game stage as active accomplishments. A conclusion that reconciles the social genesis of the self with the individual's genuine participation — society and individual as mutually constituting rather than opposed — demonstrates the conceptual command that earns top marks at this level.