Education, Inequality and Social Class

Expansion and Stratification in Educational Opportunity

Ron Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351393751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Education, Inequality and Social Class provides a comprehensive discussion of the empirical evidence for persistent inequality in educational attainment. It explores the most important theoretical perspectives that have been developed to understand class-based inequality and frame further research. With clear explanations of essential concepts, this book draws on empirical data from the UK and other countries to illustrate the nature and scale of inequalities according to social background, discussing the interactions of class-based inequalities with those according to race and gender.

The book relates aspects of inequality to the features of educational systems, showing how policy choices impact on the life chances of children from different class backgrounds. The relationship between education and social mobility is also explored, using the concepts of social closure, positionality and social congestion. The book also provides detailed discussions of the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein, two important theorists whose contributions have generated thriving research traditions much used in contemporary educational research.

Education, Inequality and Social Class will be essential reading for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students engaged in the study of education, childhood studies and sociology. It will also be of great interest to academics, researchers and teachers in training.

1

INTRODUCTION

Inequality is a central theme in the sociology of education, and the relationship between educational attainment and social origins is the subject of an extensive academic literature. However, inequality of educational opportunity also raises important questions of justice and value; it is a political issue as well as an intellectual challenge. Radicals such as Thomas Paine proclaimed education as a human right over 200 years ago, and in his essay Education [1815], the philosopher James Mill argued that ‘all the difference which exists between classes or bodies of [people] is the effect of education’ (Burston 1969, p. 52). Nevertheless, progress towards universal education left many forms of inequality largely unchanged. Even in Western liberal democracies, where writers such as John Dewey (1930) expressed the view of mass education as a precondition for legitimate government, educational opportunities beyond the elementary stage were often bitterly contested. As Andy Green points out in his book Education and State Formation:

Whilst radical reformers preached human freedom and intellectual development, dominant education ideologies … were often more concerned with social control, moral conformity and political acquiescence than human emancipation.

(Green 2013, p. 39)

Such attitudes have not been entirely left behind, and in twenty-first century England, debates on grammar school education and curriculum change reflect the struggles over educational opportunity of earlier generations. By contrast, liberal theories of education emphasize rationality, progress and universal values, positioning educational practices based on social closure and control as a relic of the past. In the form of these theories that has dominated political thinking on education for many years, liberal principles are related to the increasing complexity of modern society. Education is held to be an essential factor in the social division of labour, allocating people to occupations according to their aptitude and skills. From this point of view, economic efficiency depends on utilizing the abilities of the whole population, making educational opportunity an economic as well as a moral imperative. Consequently, we should expect to see inequalities in education decline significantly over time. However, there is substantial evidence that this is not the case, and a more accurate picture is that the focus of inequality has shifted from gross disparities in access to more subtle differences, affecting the kind of education people receive and the qualifications they obtain. For sociologists who adopt a relational view of society,¹ educational inequality is not simply a malfunction of economic rationality: it is a consequence of wider social inequalities as well as a crucial factor in their reproduction between generations. These authors unpick the claim that education is a meritocratic system rewarding only ability and effort. As Jerome Karabel (2005, p. 550) writes in his study of admissions to elite American universities, ‘those who are able to define “merit” will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources – cultural, economic and social – will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious’.

Social class lies at the heart of persistent inequality. If we wish to understand the distribution of educational attainment in contemporary post-industrial societies, we need to recognize that these are class societies in which, as Basil Bernstein expresses it, class is ‘the fundamental dominant cultural category’ (Bernstein 1977a, p. 175). Although class is always mediated by race and gender, and the way in which it is lived has changed profoundly over the last century, it continues to structure the resources, experiences and subjectivities of the population.² Class influences many aspects of people’s lives, including their income, health and educational attainment. Imogen Tyler (2015) writes that ‘conditions of deepening economic and social inequalities urgently require class analysis if we are to comprehend the forms of exploitation that underpin the decomposition (and recomposition) of class relations under neo-liberal conditions’ (p. 497). Inequalities may be symbolic as well as material, contributing to the ‘hidden injuries’ of class described by Sennett and Cobb (1972). In her study of working-class grammar school boys, Nicola Ingram (2011) questions whether it is possible to be perceived as working class and clever, noting that the development of working-class children can be hampered by pervasive assumptions of cultural and academic deficiency. In this kind of analysis, educational inequality is not merely a reflection of processes and struggles occurring elsewhere: education is a crucible of class, a place where class is made, both in moulding individual consciousness and in reproducing the class structure itself. This suggests that liberal theories tell only part of the story of education. Other stories can be told: for example the verdict delivered by Diane Reay in her book Miseducation:

The working classes have never had a fair chance in education … and they definitely do not have one in a 21st-century England that is scarred by growing inequalities. The rhetoric of equality, fairness and freedom in education has intensified … but it has done so against a back-drop of ever-increasing inequalities, the entrenchment of neoliberalism and class domination.

(Reay 2017, p. 185)

This book has two main aims: to examine the empirical evidence on social class inequalities in education and to discuss how these inequalities, and their persistence through periods of massive educational expansion, have been theorized. In its first aim, the book follows in the political arithmetic tradition (Heath 2000) of highlighting social injustice with quantitative evidence – a tradition which, in the sociology of education, dates back to the studies of access to secondary education by Gray and Moshinsky (1935) and Floud et al. (1956). Perhaps more importantly, it examines the concepts which underlie these and later studies, and enable researchers to translate questions relating to educational inequality into concrete hypotheses. Specific examples are drawn largely from the United Kingdom, but the book locates these examples within a broader context of international comparative studies. In its second aim, the book discusses the place of class – and related concepts, such as status – in accounts of educational inequality and stratification. The work of Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein and Raymond Boudon is discussed in detail – three thinkers who provide contrasting but complementary theorizations of class in education. The book also discusses a number of issues arising from Marxist educational theory. Although Marxism is now rather unfashionable in the sociology of education, these issues – such as the ideological role of education and the question of the relative autonomy of educational systems – are essential to an appreciation of contemporary debates.

The remainder of this chapter provides a backdrop to the main themes of the book. It begins with a general discussion of the concept of social justice, in which the possibility that both educational and wider social inequalities may in some sense be legitimate is critically examined. This discussion is followed by an outline of recent trends in educational expansion, both internationally and in the United Kingdom, which highlights the lack of a necessary connection with greater equality in education. The chapter then introduces the liberal theory of industrialism, a theory of declining educational inequality which has acquired a canonical status amongst policymakers and is frequently used as a touchstone by academic researchers. This liberal theory is then contrasted with recent patterns of change in the economy and employment, a reminder that inequalities of wealth and working conditions remain significant. In its final section, the chapter provides an outline of the structure of the book.

Social justice, opportunity and education

It is natural to begin with an obvious but not at all straightforward question: why should we care about educational inequality? Modern societies demand a range of educational outputs so that difference in education is inevitable and even desirable (Bynner and Joshi 2002). An educational system is expected to produce a distribution of attainment, with individual differences in dimensions such as type of institution attended, subjects studied and qualifications achieved. In this sense, we are all better off than if everyone received exactly the same education. However, it is more problematic if educational difference is associated with excessive inequality across the whole population, systematic inequality between social groups or both. At the population level, inequality in attainment may be so great that some children receive an education below the level required for them to function effectively in society, placing them in a state of absolute educational disadvantage (Bruckauf and Chzen 2016). Alternatively, relative educational disadvantage may be widespread (Thomas et al. 2001; Ferreira and Gignoux 2011), allowing basic forms of social participation but affecting the ability to compete in labour markets. Inequalities of this kind may lead to concern about their implications for individual well-being and social cohesion, even if they were felt to be justified by factors such as ability or effort.

Disadvantage in education, whether absolute or relative, is unlikely to be distributed equally across all social groups. Inequality of educational opportunity (IEO) refers to a systematic association between educational outcomes and certain social characteristics – usually corresponding to an ascribed status, such as class, race or gender, but potentially including other circumstances over which the individual has no control. Once again, this situation may cause concern, perhaps because it is considered to be unfair that a person’s background should determine their chances of receiving a good education. However, whether inequalities are individualized or systematically associated with social characteristics, the point is that different people might not agree, either in their attitude towards educational inequality or on the underlying grounds for this attitude. Moreover, inequalities in education correlate with the distribution of other material and cultural goods, raising the question of whether any form of inequality can be tolerated. A discussion of educational inequality must therefore be located within broader debates on social justice.

Meanings of social justice

Ethical and moral norms are not absolute. In pre-industrial Europe, inequality was regarded as part of the natural order, and what we would now describe as a conception of social justice was tied closely to the maintenance and reproduction of this order. By the eighteenth century, the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment and the growth of individualism began to shift this conception, introducing the idea that people should have a rational share in the political, cultural and economic life of society. However, the basis of this rationality has always been highly contested, and how social justice should be conceived remains a challenging philosophical problem. For some authors, this is a question of how the benefits of society are shared out. As John Rawls (1999, p. 8) puts it, ‘A conception of social justice … is to be regarded as providing in the first instance a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed’. Social justice may also be conceived in terms of how people are treated and the structure of social relationships more generally (Winter 2018). Other versions of social justice focus on participation rather than distribution. For example, Bell (2016, p. 3) defines the goal of social justice as ‘full and equitable participation of people from all social identity groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs’. However, distributive, relational and participatory justice cannot easily be separated and are connected in various ways by underlying relations of class, gender and race.

An uncompromising view of social justice is that it entails equality of outcome, the removal of any significant differences in people’s conditions of existence. A slightly weaker position is that some inequality of treatment or resource allocation may be justified by need: people should receive what is required for them to live a fully human life. These understandings of social justice are captured by the famous Marxist doctrine ‘From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs’.³ In an attenuated form, needs-based justice underlies the idea of alleviating relative as well as absolute poverty or, in a specifically educational context, the Pupil Premium funding in England (Gorard 2015). Rawls (1999, p. 86) expresses this idea in a principle stating that undeserved inequalities call for redress: ‘society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favourable social positions. The idea is to redress the bias of contingencies in the direction of equality’. Given that class is defined in terms of inequalities in power and condition, equating social justice with equality of outcome implies that there can be no socially just class system. However, other conceptions of social justice are possible and have been used to legitimize the class structure in various ways. In their book Against the Odds, Marshall et al. (1997) identify four principles which attempt to reconcile inequality of outcome with social justice. These are based on desert (or merit), legal entitlement, functional benefit to society and equal opportunity. The argument from desert proposes that those who are more able, work harder or have other valued attributes should be rewarded accordingly. Critics of desert point not only to the difficulty of identifying morally relevant attributes but also to the arbitrariness of their distribution. Is it not a matter of chance that I have a particular musical ability or that I was able to afford its development? Apparently intrinsic qualities can always be questioned in this way, and Rawls (1999) argues that it is simply not possible to ‘deserve’ one’s place in the distribution of natural endowments.

The argument from legal entitlement is less circular but less obviously a basis for any claim to social justice. It asserts simply that I have a right to what is legally mine, whether I deserve it or not. From this perspective, inherited wealth, tax avoidance and purchasing private education for one’s children are consistent with social justice. It is rights that are important, not merit, leading to the somewhat paradoxical situation that social justice becomes entangled with the coercive power of the state. However, a further possible justification for the unequal distribution of wealth lies in the argument of functional inequality: if an unequal society is more efficient and better able to care for its more vulnerable members than an equal one, then such inequality is acceptable. Rawls (1999) expresses this in terms of his difference principle: equality of outcome is preferable unless inequality makes all social groups better off. However, functional inequality raises questions of how much inequality is acceptable for how little benefit and the extent to which equality may be an end in itself.

In an attempt to transcend competing interpretations of social justice, David Miller (1999) proposes a contextual approach in which justice is related to different modes of human relationship. In communities with a high degree of solidarity between their members, need would constitute the main principle of justice, whereas in associations based on the achievement of specific goals justice would be based on merit. In society as a political entity, encompassing diverse needs, interests and abilities, Miller regards equality of status as the appropriate understanding of justice. The difficulty with a contextual theory of justice is that in actual relational systems, rather than the ideal types through which Miller develops his argument, several features may combine and conflict. In education, for example, different understandings of its aims and purpose entail different principles of justice: ‘The instrumental perspective points towards differential treatment of children according to ability and performance; whereas if we start by considering children and adolescents as future citizens, we will want them to share a common experience’ (Miller 1999, p. 38). As Gorard (2015) points out, contextual justice in education implies different, competing interpretations in which the treatment of students and the distribution of knowledge and resources are all at stake. Although it illuminates some aspects of the judgements involved, contextual justice simply pushes debates over inequality one step back rather than resolving them.

Equal opportunity

Equality of opportunity is often proposed as a way of reconciling inequality with fairness, although it is also advocated on the grounds of maximizing the talent available to society. It is necessary to distinguish between formal equality of opportunity, which refers to an absence of explicit barriers to achievement, such as legal or cultural prohibitions, and substantive equality of opportunity, which can be expressed in terms of life chances for different social groups.⁴ As a principle of social justice, equal opportunity in this sense requires that, whilst the rewards of different social positions may vary, the chan...