This book draws together eight chapters on education and social class written by leading scholars based in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Republic of Ireland. The different chapters are based on a range of conceptual and empirical research, and focus on how class-related inequalities are enacted in schools, universities and the various locations in which vocational education and training is carried out. The authors draw on a range of traditions and use the ideas and arguments of a variety of critical thinkers. These range from Plato and Aristotle to Gramsci and Althusser , Pierre Bourdieu , and Raymond Boudon to Avery Gordon and Valerie Walkerdine . Taken together, the different chapters represent a varied and wide-ranging critique of the classed nature of education but certain key themes run throughout the text. These deal with various objective and subjective dimensions of social class and include patterns of educational participation and non-participation; the interface between class, gender and other forms of difference; and debates about the relationship between education, work and the economy more broadly. Or, as Dave Hill points out in his chapter, the different ways in which social class affects where we live; the type of school we attend; the qualifications we are likely to get, and the jobs we obtain; how we are treated by teachers, careers advisers, employers and others in authority; and various other dimensions of our lives.
This concluding chapter locates the classed nature of education within a critical socio-historical framework, and reflects on some of the conundrums facing young people as they attempt to navigate the vicissitudes education and work. It also considers a number of strategies which may begin to ameliorate the multiple disadvantages facing working-class youth, or at least prevent their situation from worsening. These relate, on one hand, to the subjective practices of education as well as the more systemic matters which also shape young people’s experiences of learning. We also deal with broader, structural questions about the relationship between education, work and social class more generally. Whilst lived experience is deeply important, we need to recognise that the social, economic and political context in which learning takes place can both intensify and exacerbate inequality or else go some way towards promoting equity and social justice.
Education and Social Class: Continuity and Change
Much political discourse in ‘advanced’ Western nations presents education as performing numerous positive functions for the individual, the economy and society more broadly. Typically, these include boosting national competitiveness and economic growth, ‘up-skilling’ the workforce, promoting social cohesion and driving social mobility. Education can be a progressive force and many working-class children, adults and young people have, over time, benefited socially, culturally and materially from various forms of education and training—not only in formal settings like schools, colleges and universities but also through trade union and adult education, in early-years settings, or via the numerous spheres of informal education through which learning also takes place. We should, however, also remember that education, at least for the working classes, has always been bound up with social control as much as emancipation (Lawton 1975).
The notion that those from different social backgrounds are more or less suited to particular forms of learning can, as Terry Hyland reminds us in his chapter on craftwork, be traced back to Ancient Greece and the relative value of different ‘Forms’ of education proposed in Plato ’s Republic. Such divisions have traditionally characterised Western education systems and, in England, the ruling classes have attended exclusive fee-paying schools since the Middle Ages. For most of the population though, formal education, where it has existed at all, has been provided mainly by religious and voluntary groups—a trend which has also been encouraged more recently through the introduction of academies and the free school movement (Ball 2012). Notions of education for democracy and the social good had nevertheless become popular by the nineteenth century, at least in some quarters—although events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the 1867 Paris International Exposition also illustrated the inadequacies of laissez-faire in fighting increasing economic and military competition from Europe and further afield. Introducing the English 1870 Education Act, W. E. Forster claimed that:
Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity… uneducated labourers are for the most part, unskilled labourers, and if we leave our workfolk any longer unskilled they will become overmatched in the competition of the world. (Forster 1870)
Forster’s words resonate with contemporary discourses about skill, globalisation , the knowledge economy and so forth but the social upheavals of industrialisation and urbanisation, and the rise of Chartism and other working-class movements, also led to a belief that formal schooling would help make the lower orders both more civilised and compliant. Adam Smith, for example, saw education as a means through which the working classes would become:
[M]ore respectable…more capable of seeing through the interested complaints of faction and sedition… less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the means of government. (Smith 1785, p. 305)
Eventually the provision of mass schooling became unavoidable but this brought to the fore questions about how, where and for what purpose(s) working-class children were to be educated (McCulloch 1998; Brown 1987). Either way, state involvement initially related mainly to elementary education; state secondary schools continued to charge fees until after the end of World War II and no coherent system of technical and vocational education existed in England until the middle of the twentieth century. Whilst the mechanics institutes can be traced back to the Victorian era, provision was patchy and uneven, and many of England’s major industrial centres were still without any adequate vocational education as late as the 1930s (Bailey 1987). The universities meanwhile remained exclusive institutions, catering essentially for the privileged few, at least until the 1960s.
Most orthodox analyses present the 1944 Education Act as an integral part of the social settlement between labour and capital which took place after the end of World War II (Gewirtz and Ozga 1990; Batteson 1999). Undoubtedly, the 1944 Act introduced some significant reforms, including the replacement of elementary schools with a new system of primary and secondary education, and the abolition of fees for all state-run schools . It also raised the school-leaving age to 15, recommended new arrangements for special education and nursery provision, and triggered a great expansion of post-compulsory education across England and Wales. The Act has, however, also been criticised for its role in maintaining the existing social order (see Simon 1990). Both Church-controlled education and the public schools were, for example, left untouched despite considerable public support for the abolition of fee-paying schools and the exclusion of religious bodies from state-funded education. Meanwhile, the tripartite system of secondary schooling introduced by the 1944 Education Act arguably did more to maintain social divisions than reduce them. It is important to remember that leading figures within the Conservative Party were among the Act’s most enthusiastic supporters and arguably they, in conjunction with a privileged civil service elite , were able to ensure continued selection and other socially-divisive practices (Chitty 1989).
The institutional structure of grammar , technical and secondary modern schools was also predicated largely on the assumption that children could be classified according to aptitude and ability, and the notion that different categories of pupils required different forms of schooling which would, in turn, best suit their character and intellect. Criticisms of the tripartite system are, of course, well known—not least its discrimination against working-class children and the central part it played in the reproduction of class-based inequalities in education and society more broadly (Batteson 1999). The flawed nature of the 11-plus examination upon which pupils’ educational future was decided—and, by extension, their working lives thereafter—is also widely recognised. Though presented as an objective measurement of intelligence, the 11-plus was in fact heavily loaded in favour of the middle classes, and systematically biased against girls who had to achieve a higher mark to pass the examination—arrangements justified by a discourse of fairness and objectivity as well as ancient beliefs about the existence of different kinds of minds able to function more or less well at different levels of cognition (Humphries 1981, p. 48).
Cherry-picking ‘bright’ working-class pupils to go to grammar school was, however, championed as a way of increasing social mobility, and no doubt many such children rose above the status of their parents. This, of course, ignores the alienation and disillusion felt by many working-class...