Mothering for Schooling

Alison Griffith, Dorothy Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135929756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Griffith and Smith explore the innumerable, hidden, seemingly mundane tasks like getting kids ready for school, helping with homework, or serving on the PTA can all have profound effects on what occurs within school. Based on longitudinal interviews with mothers of school-age children, this book exposes the effects mothers' work has on educational systems as a whole and the ways in which inequalities of educational opportunities are reproduced.

1
WOMEN AND THE MAKING OF THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS

This chapter situates our experiences of being single parents, our research, and our data analysis in a historical trajectory of mothering for schooling. Over time, middle-class women have come to play a distinctive part in reproducing their own middle-class status for their children through the public school systems of North America. Middle-class women’s work as mothers has contributed largely invisible resources of thought, energy, and involvement to the elementary schools their children attend. Although women in lower-income groups are supportive and active in their children’s upbringing and schooling, their work as mothers is done with fewer economic resources and smaller amounts of school-oriented time than those of most middle-class women. As we will see in later chapters, and as the literature on families and schools has shown, a middle-class family work organization is presumed by schools. Where mothers’ work does not, or cannot, participate fully in this social relation, the family-school’s reproduction of a middle class is jeopardized. We take up the problem of inequality in schooling as being produced partly in that relation, not external to it.

In this chapter, we argue that a characteristic form of middle-class family organization has emerged in which the male partner occupies a professional or managerial type of occupational position. In this social location, he is able to earn enough to enable his wife to stay home and to commit herself in various ways to her children’s health, socialization, and to supplementary educational work supporting their schools. Unlike the research and thinking on schooling and inequality (discussed in the Introduction and below), our analysis does not explore how a middle class is reproduced in terms of the contributions families make to the achievement of individual children. Rather, we follow Ann Manicom’s (1988, 1995) analysis that argues that low- versus middle- or high-income neighborhoods create different conditions of work for teachers in the classroom. Different social conditions of parenting are consequential for the school and how it can function—an effect that has far-reaching implications for all the children in the school. Manicom’s reasoning is straightforward: teachers in primary schools in low-income areas have to put classroom time into educational work, or work supplementary to schooling such as teaching children how to put the yellow paint brush back in the yellow paint pot, teaching the characteristic routines of classroom learning, and providing breakfast snacks. These are tasks that, typically, can be taken for granted in middle- and high-income areas. The time that goes into these tasks is withdrawn from the required curriculum. Hence, the required curriculum has to be delivered at a lower level in low-income areas than it is where extensive supplementary educational work is done at home.

In this chapter, we address the issue of inequality through schooling in general and put forward an account of the historical trajectory of the middle classes that has established a distinctive gender organization of the family through which class position links one generation to the next. Underpinning our argument is an insistence on a conception of class as coordinated economically and socially through the daily activities of people.

The studies that examine the relationship between class, family and schooling (e.g., Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Coleman et al., 1968, 1993) establish a relationship between class position and schooling outcomes. Theoretically divergent approaches, such as Lareau’s (1987) or Henderson’s (1996), stress the specifics of the activities families do or might do that make a difference to their children’s school achievement. Most studies of families and schools recommend a closer relationship, especially for minority and working-class families whose children have traditionally been less successful at school. With few exceptions (e.g., Baker & Stevenson, 1996; Hrabowski, Maton, & Grief, 1998; Winters, 1993), gender distinctions are blurred through the use of the term parental involvement.

Regardless of theoretical perspective, such studies agree on the importance of the family’s contribution to their children’s schooling:

The evidence is beyond dispute. When schools work together with families to support learning, children tend to succeed not just in school, but throughout life. In fact, the most accurate predictor of a student’s achievement in school is not income or social status, but the extent to which that student’s family is able to provide the following forms of support:

1. Create a home environment that encourages learning;
2. Express high, but not unrealistic, expectations for their children’s achievement and future careers;
3. Become involved in their children’s education at school and in the community. (Henderson, 1996, p. 1)

Notable among studies of the relationship between families and schools is Annette Lareau’s (1987, 1989, 1999, 2000, 2003) focus on the family activities through which cultural capital is invested in children's schooling. The original concept of cultural capital, as formulated by Bourdieu (1977), dispensed with the active presence of parents resulting in the formulation of an almost mechanical relation between the system of economic production and its class structure on the one hand and the educational system on the other. Educational researchers such as Lareau have transformed this mechanistic formulation into one that argues for a more active conception of cultural capital. She notes that children whose families introduce them to a culture that is in tune with the class-based assumptions of school pedagogy and curriculum are more successful than those whose families do not. She examines parental involvement in the school, and accounts for differences in family involvement in children’s schooling largely in terms of cultural differences between the middle and working classes. She notes that the interactions between families and schools are much more intensive in middle-class families than in working-class families, and argues that the intensive relationship coordinated by middle-class families with schools is one through which cultural capital is organized and invested.

In general, in the literature on families and schools, class differences are treated as already given and examined as they determine, or at least shape, the outcomes of schooling for children. The direction of determination goes from class to family to school achievement, or, in the case of the Bourdieu–Passeron model adapted by Lareau, from class to family to class culture to school achievement.

We have taken up the concept of class differently. We insist on the existence of class as active in forms of social organization. So too are we adamant about people’s presence as subjects and agents who are active in those forms. We do not conceive of it positionally, whether these positions are defined by income or occupational status. Positional concepts of class run into problems once issues of gender are raised. Joan Acker (1980) originally raised the issues of gender and class many years ago; she showed that women have little presence in the studies of class and family. Deriving class position from an occupational position or from a position in a statistically constructed representation of the distribution of income levels in a society means deriving the class position or status of dependents (generally women, and invariably, children) from that of the principal earner. Thus, how class position is replicated is not recognized as a definite product of people’s actions and inventions. Children’s achievement in school, and hence their differential access to middle-class occupations, is treated as an effect of class mediated by family or culture or both. The approach we put forward below problematizes these effects. We want to discover the actual social organization and relations in which people are active and, most particularly, to bring into view the distinctive gender organization that is inseparable from the making and remaking of inequality through the public school system.

In exploring this problem, we have adopted an understanding of class from Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s (1987) study of the emergence of the middle classes (or bourgeoisie) in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though Davidoff and Hall work historically and without an explicit sociological framework, their study explicates the complex and dynamic development of a social organization that tied the emerging capitalist enterprise of that time into a new form of home and family and the relationships of men and women. In their remarkable study, we see the progressive differentiation of home and home economy from that of the enterprise and the constitution of a distinct domestic sphere as men and women reorganize their ways of living. Though clearly these changes are linked to changes in the development of the institutions of a capitalist economy and feed back into them, it is not possible to say just where class starts and something else (family or gender) begins. Women and men never become merely mediating terms linking a pregiven economic structure to forms of family. They are subjects and agents.

We translate Davidoff and Hall’s historical treatment into social organization and social relations to give a presence, not only to the agency and activity of the men who are at work in earning the living of family members, but also to the agency of women whose work in home and family has been, and remains, so significant in the intergenerational continuities of class. Our concepts of social organization and social relations are used to locate the ways in which people’s activities are coordinated, whether the forms of coordination are direct and local, or whether they are mediated by objectified relations determined by money and commodities and/or by objectifying texts. The concept of social relation is particularly useful in enabling us to start with people as they are actually located in their daily lives, and to explore how action and experience is tied into the institutional forms through which their activities are coordinated with those of others they may never see or know.

THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY OF MOTHERING AND SCHOOLING

The historical trajectory linking families and schools that we are describing in this book has been laid out over the hundred-or-so years of the public school system in North America. The distinctive organization of the paid work-family-household-schooling social relation in the middle classes has produced an engine of inequality giving a credentialed, predominantly white, middle-class privileged access to positions in the ruling institutions.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries in North America and other developed countries, rapid innovations were being made that permanently transformed the way in which the social is organized at the level of the society at large (Beniger, 1986). These innovations were formative of the ruling relations in North America where the sheer vastness of distances and the difficulties of communication inhibited the emergence of the strong, centralized form of government characteristic of European nations. Developments in the bureaucratization of the state, familiar in Weber (1978), were accompanied by radical innovations in the management of business enterprises and in the new form of the corporation, separating ownership and control and moving away from the identification of business with individual owners and managers (Chandler, 1977; Noble, 1979; Roy, 1997).

During the same period, there was a major movement for rationalization and reform in city government in the United States (Schiesl, 1977, p. 2). Professional city managers modeled on the management of corporations (Schiesl, 1977, p. 173) were introduced. There was a rapid expansion of educational institutions, both of the public school system and of institutions of higher learning (Darville, 1995; Veblen, 1968). Training for teachers was increasingly emphasized, and school curriculum became more standardized. Professional training in universities and colleges enabled individuals to exercise standardized competencies in multiple local sites. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, professions in general came into new prominence as a method of guaranteeing training, credentials, and standards of practice in the dispersed settings of professional practice (Larson, 1977; Noble, 1977), a development of special importance in the geography of North America.

In these developments there emerged a distinctive mode of organizing society independent of particular individuals and particular local settings and relationships; Dorothy has called this complex the ruling relations (Smith, 1999). Although discrete institutional forms such as corporations, mass media, government bureaucracy, and so on can be identified, the relations of ruling have become increasingly embedded in common technologies of communication and regulation, control, management, and the like. They are mediated by texts and textual technologies (e.g., print, film, radio, television, computers). The ruling relations are social forms in which consciousness and agency become objectified and independent of particular people. They have become a medium in which people act and experience and include the phenomena that we know from Michel Foucault’s work as discourse—those distinctive genres of speech and writing, consciously developed and systematically taught, that constitute subjects and order the text-based realities of the ruling relations. They are, it must be stressed, media of action and not merely of regulation and control.

The translocal character of the ruling relations relied, and continues to rely, on formalized credentials guaranteeing competencies of a specific kind—competencies that can be seen as generated independently of any particularized relationships, for example, such as those between teacher and student, craftsman and apprentice (Noble, 1977). These new forms of social organization and relations created an ever-increasing demand for people with the kinds of skills in literacy and numeracy that depend on schooling rather than learning within the particularized relationships of apprenticeship or familial settings.

Specialists appeared in technical fields, in sales, company and personnel management who had prepared for their jobs in specific courses of study at trade schools or colleges. Written communication increased within the firm; the number of office departments increased and with them, the number of white collar workers. Manual and nonmanual jobs, and thus blue and white collar functions, became more rigidly separated. . . . Great firms internalized many functions which had previously been performed by independent market-related institutions, for example, in sales, law, and research. (Kocka, 1980, pp. 43–44)

Kocka emphasizes the coordination of educational change with the changed demands for the staffing of management positions and of the increasingly technical character of managerial work. Such demands were not, of course, restricted to management. The translocal standardization of government administration, the professions, and education, as well as the transformation of higher education (Veblen, 1968) into the site not only of training but also of the building of the knowledge bases of the ruling relations, displaced the forms of knowledge and skills learned in the workplace under the tutelage of the skilled and experienced. The emerging ruling relations required standardization and interchangeability of knowledge and skills, no matter which educational institution an individual was trained at or where he or she might go to work. They required workers who were in touch with ongoing developments in science and technology in their field. The educational system at all levels became a central piece in the production of people to staff the rapid development of these new forms of organizing society. Changed demands on education were associated with other changes in the complex of the ruling relations; these demands intensified as these relations were technologically developed and rationalized. As they became increasingly comprehensive, they increasingly displaced autochthonous local forms of social organization.

The emergence, spread, and ever-increasing scope of the ruling relations thus involved corresponding changes of the educational system to elementary, secondary and postsecondary levels (Collins, 1979). An educated labor force, not simply educated elites, was needed. By the late nineteenth century the tax basis for general public education had been established in both the United States and Canada (Beck, 1965), and by the early twentieth century, school attendance had become compulsory (Beck, 1965, p. 89). It has been argued that the development of the United States school system was in large part driven by the perceived need to homogenize the language and culture of heterogeneous immigration (Collins, 1979; Gouldner, 1979). Schools were organized to create, for at least a segment of the population, a generalized level of skills and cultural background oriented to the emerging relations of ruling (compare Gouldner, 1979, p. 13), and to prepare young men for further education at the postsecondary level establishing their credentials for career-based occupations. Similarly, Bruce Curtis (1992) suggests that the establishment of the Canadian public school system is integral to state formation in Canada.

A NEW MIDDLE CLASS

The emergence and expansion of the ruling relations was the basis for the emergence of an educationally specialized class of professionals, managers, and white-collar workers who both staffed these new forms of organization and were and are active in their expansion. At the turn of the twentieth century, a new middle class emerges, distinct from the middle class of family-based enterprise characteristic of earlier North America. The new middle class is defined occupationally, that is, as earning a living through participation in the ruling relations, whether as independent professionals or, typically, as earning a salary rather than a wage, a form of employment in which pay is not related to the part played in the production of commodities.¹ Mills describes this change as follows:

In the early nineteenth century, although there are no exact figures, probably four-fifths of the occupied population were selfemployed enterprisers; by 1870, only about one third, and in 1940, only about one fifth, were still in this old middle class. Many of the remaining four fifths of the people who now earn a living do so by working for the 2 percent or 3 percent of the population who now own 40 percent or 50 percent of the private property in the United States. Among these workers are the members of the new middle class, white-collar people on salary. For them, as for wage workers, America has become a nation of employees for whom independent property is out of range. Labor markets, not control of property, determine their chances to receive income, exercise power, enjoy prestige, learn and use skills. (Mills, 1951, p. 63)

Mills (1951) includes a simple table noting changes in the percentage of the labor force of the old and new middle classes from 1870 to 1940. In 1870, the old middle class were 33% and the new middle class only 6%. By 1940 a substantial shift is visible. The old middle class are only 20% whereas the new middle class are 25% of the labor force (p. 63).

The conception of a new middle class locates the same general change in the organization of social differentiation that has been identified as the emergence of a New Class by writers such as Alvin Gouldner (1979) and Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich (1979). These writers see a New Class, identified by Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich with "salaried mental workers" (1979, p. 14) or by Gouldner as the intelligentsia, becoming ascendant after the Second World War. Nicos Poulantzas (1975), while preserving the overriding dual class opposition of capitalist and worker as the primary contradiction in society, traces in his concept of the new petty bourgeoisie the same empirical region as C. Wright Mills.²

The new middle class emerging at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century in North America has grown and expanded with the growth and expansion of the forms of organization that are mediated by technologies of the text.³ Both women and men have been, and are, active in the creation, elaboration, and transformations of institutions that were, to varying degrees, an accession to new forms of power. As forms of power, these new institutions were simultaneously limited and facilitated by the processes through which capital was becoming reorganized. The invention of the corporation as a form of organizing capitalist enterprise⁴ enabled capital to take forms independent of particular local settings and particular individual owners. It created opportunities as well as pressures for the development of new institutional forms. The middle classes of the twentieth century were present and active in the invention and elaboration of institutions that transformed them from the nineteenth-century patterns of familybased small business basis (Mills, 1951; Ryan, 1981) to dependence on the various forms of the ruling relations (Campbell & Manicom, 1996; Smith, 1999). The radical changes in forms of management have been attributed by Graham Lowe (1987) to “the rise of a new professional class of managers whose quest for efficiency wrought far-reaching rationalizations in work processes” (p. 25). The innovations that have transformed the institutional order of the society in general have largely originated with, or been developed by, members of the new middle classes. This is no less true of the ways in which women as mothers have contributed to the making and development of the public school system. The w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Women and the Making of the New Middle Class
• 2: The Mothering Discourse
• 3: Time, Scheduling, and Coordinating the Uncoordinated
• 4: Complementary Educational Work
• 5: Complementary Educational Work: Employed Mothers and Fathers
• 6: Uptown and Downtown in Maltby: School and Board Perspectives
• 7: Inequality and Educational Change
• Endnotes
• Bibliography