Against Schooling, A Conscious ‘Choice’

“The working class is the only group in capitalism that does not have to believe in Capitalist legitimations as a condition of its own survival” – Paul Willis

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The “Natural” Drive Towards “Upward” Mobility, A mere assumption :
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{ An invitation to social construction
By Kenneth J. Gergen

… As Willis proposes, it is all too easy to look at economic betterment as a natural drive: everyone wants to make more money. And with this assumption in place it is typical to see the working class as oppressed, as people who have no choice but to remain in the lower economic ranks of society. However, through extensive field work in schools and the work-place, Willis challenges time common beliefs. As he Ends, working class boys join together to construct a world in which they are different from and better than the upper classes…. This dispositions also permeate the boys’ classroom behaviour. Willis describes: [they] specialize in a caged resentment ….

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Class Identity, Resistance, Working Class By Choice
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{ Learning to labor: how working class kids get working class jobs
By Paul E. Willis

• The difficult thing to explain about how middle class kids get middle class jobs is why others let them. The difficult thing to explain about how working class kids get working class jobs is why they let themselves.
• ‘failed’ working class kids do not simply take up the falling curve of work where the least successful middle class, or the most successful working class kids, leave off. Instead of assuming a continuous shallowing line of ability in the occupational/class structure we must conceive of radical breaks represented by the interface of cultural forms. We shall be looking at the way in which the working class cultural pattern of ‘failure’ is quite different and discontinuous from the other patterns…. this class culture is not a neutral pattern, a mental category, a set of variables impinging on the school from the outside. It comprises experiences, relationships, and ensembles of systematic types of relationship which not only set particular ‘choices’ and ‘decisions’ at particular times, but also structure, really and experientially, how these ‘choices’ come about and are defined in the first place.
• Labour power is the human capacity to work on nature with the use of tools to produce things for the satisfaction of needs and the reproduction of life. Labouring is not a universal transhistorical changeless human activity. It takes on specific forms and meanings in different kinds of societies. The processes through which labour power comes to be subjectively understood and objectively applied and their interrelationships is of profound significance for the type of society which is produced and the particular nature and formation of its classes. These processes help to construct both the identities of particular subjects and also distinctive class forms at the cultural and symbolic level as well as at the economic and structural level.
• Class identity is not truly reproduced until it has properly passed through the individual and the group, until it has been recreated in the context of what appears to be personal and collective volition. The point at which people live, not borrow, their class destiny is when what is given is re-formed, strengthened and applied to new purposes. Labour power is an important pivot of all this because it is the main mode of active connection with the world: the way par excellence of articulating the innermost self with external reality. It is in fact the dialectic of the self to the self through the concrete world….
• The specific milieu, I argue, in which a certain subjective sense manual labour power, and an objective decision to apply it to manual work, is produced is the working class counter-school culture. It is here where working class themes are mediated to individuals and groups in their own determinate context and where working class kids creatively develop, transform and finally reproduce aspects of the larger culture in their own praxis in such a way as to finally direct them to certain kinds of work.
• it is their own culture which most effectively prepares some working class lads for the manual giving of their labour power we may say that there is an element of self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in Western capitalism. However, this damnation is experienced, paradoxically, as true learning, affirmation, appropriation, and as a form of resistance.
• there is an objective basis for these subjective feelings and cultural processes. They involve a partial penetration ‘of the really determining conditions of existence of the working class which are definitely superior to those official versions of their reality which are proffered through the school and various state agencies.
• the processes of self-induction into the labour process constitute an aspect of the regeneration of working class culture in general, and an important example of how this culture is related in complex ways to regulative state institutions. They have an important function in the overall reproduction of the social totality and especially in relation to reproducing the social conditions for a certain kind of production.

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Class In Classrooms

( THE ZOMBIE STALKING ENGLISH SCHOOLS:
SOCIAL CLASS AND EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY
by DIANE REAY, University of Cambridge

• inequalities of social stratification not only persist but are growing
• in a social context of growing inequalities there is a need to reinvigorate class analysis,
• until we address social class as a central issue within education then social class will remain the troublesome un-dead of the English education system
• The education gap between rich and poor children has grown
• mobility in Britain had been steadily declining over the past decade
• One area of education where there is a pronounced movement to alleviate social class injustices is widening access and participation. Yet in this area, lack of informed knowledge of the problem plus a failure to tackle the injustices where they arise, much further down in the schooling system, has meant that the vast majority of gains have gone to the middle not the working classes (Callender, 2004; Reay et al ., 2005)…. As Blanden et al.(2005, p. 231) conclude from their longitudinal study of HE expansion, widening participation has disproportionately benefited children from middle-class families.
• Andy Green (1990) in his survey of the rise of education systems in England, France and the USA singles out England as the most explicit example of the use of schooling by a dominant class to secure hegemony over subordinate groups.
• Adam Smith …. For Smith, as well as for the vast majority of politicians and intellectuals of the day, the schooling of the working classes was always to be subordinate and inferior to that of the bourgeoisie; a palliative designed to contain and pacify rather than to educate and liberate.
• ‘the provision of education for working-class children was thought of by and large instrumentally, rather than as likely to contribute to the life possibilities of the children themselves’ (Miller, 1992, p. 2)
• the English state schooling system was set up in the late nineteenth century the intention of the dominant classes was still to police and control the working classes rather than to educate them (Arnot, 1983; Green, 1990; Plummer, 2000).
• historically the working classes have been constructed as the inferior‘other’within education …. all the evidence seems to indicate that the contemporary education system retains powerful remnants of past elite prejudices. We still have an education system in which working class education is made to serve middle-class interests.
• Within the educational system almost all the authority remains vested in the middle classes. Not only do they run the system, the system itself is one which valorises middle rather than working class cultural capital (Ball, 2003).
• the socio-economic background of students had a high impact on student performance …. The reasons are of course partly economic: it is still a question of the level of material and cultural resources that families can bring to their engagement with schooling. But there is also an issue of representation and othering that both feeds into and is fed by social and economic inequalities.
• This pathologisation of the working classes has a long history…. The lack of positive images of the working class contribute to them being educationally disqualified and inadequately supported academically.
• meritocracy remains a powerful myth that helps hold the social hierarchy in place.
• the current move towards capitalist privatised education …. far from being meritocratic and geared towards rewarding working-class talents, skills and abilities are a continuation of the historical processes of containment and pacification
• One consequence is that Bourdieu and Champagne’s ‘outcasts on the inside’ are characterised by an enduring ambivalence
  about education.
• educational processes are simultaneously classed processes in which relations of teaching and learning too often position working class pupils as inadequate learners with inadequate cultural backgrounds, …. As Skeggs (2004, p. 187) argues in relation to the working classes, these students are literally fixed in space both in order to be identifiable and governable but also so that their more privileged peers can monopolise mobility.
• a repeated theme of alienation, disaffection and dis-engagement in the working class, and in particular the working class, male students’accounts that resonated powerfully with Paul Willis’(1977) research.
• until it begins to discover the central role class plays in education social class will remain‘the hereditary curse of English education’(Tawney, 1931).

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階級構造の再生産と教育機構

{ 階級・階層構造の社会的再生産と正当化
小内透

… もっとも明確な地位形成手段の獲得システムは，社会的再生産機構としての教育機構である。教育機構そのものは，社会化機能と同時に選抜機能をもっている。社会化機能は社会の文佑伝達機能であり，選抜機能は諸個人の社会的地位を形成する機能に他ならない。そのため，教育機構のあり方への効果的な対応が地位形成手段獲得のもっとも効果的な方法のーっとなる。いうまでもなしそれは学歴獲得競争としての受験競争への参画に他ならない。

… その場合，多くの人が望む学歴に到達しつる者と，そうでない者の差をもたらすものとして，ブルデューが言う意味での各種の資本が大きな規定力をもっている。ブルデューは，社会空間における諸個人の相対的位置=階級的位置を決定する要因として，経済資本，文化
資本，社会関係資本を中心とした各種の資本をあげているo 経済資本とは，財産と収入を意味し，文化資本は，書物・絵画・道具・機械のような客体化された形態，知識・教養・語言・技能・趣味・感性などの身体化された形態(ハビトゥス)，学歴や資格として把握できる制度化された形態から成り立っている。そして，他人との社会的なつながり，つまりコネが社会関係資本に相当する。これらの資本の組み合わせが，結果として諸個人の社会空間上の位置を決定することになる。 だが，同時に各種の資本は自らの子どもが学歴を獲得する競争の中で，その結果を左右する大きな条件となる。

経済資本の違いは，他方で，学歴獲得のためにより積極的に投資しうる能力があるか否かのをもたらす。

文化資本の場合も，経済資本と同様 …. 学校文化と親和性の高いハビトゥスをもつか否かによって，学歴獲得競争の結果は大きく異なることがありうるからである。学校文化に親和性の高いハピトゥスをもっ者は，そうでない者よりも，教育内容を理解しやすいし，学習に対する志向性も高い場合が多い。

社会関係資本は，学歴を獲得しようとする本人にとって，一つのモデルを提供する場合がありうる。高学歴を呂指す子どもにとって，高学麗の毅が重要なモデルになることが少なくない。たとえ，両親が学歴が低く階級・階層的に恵まれない立場にあったとしても，自らがよく知っている者が高学歴で高い階級・賠層的地位についている時，それが一つのモデルとなり，学塵獲得競争への意欲が高まるケースもある。

こうした各種資本は，学援獲得だけでなく，出世競争・市場競争の場合にも無視できない機能を果たしうる。。。。出世競争・市場競争で必要となる実力を形成する上で上司・顧客・商売上の付き合い関係が少なからぬ意味をもつ。

… 世代的再生産の問題も，これらの議論と深〈関連している。機会の平等が保障され，表向き，開放的な競争社会が実現しているにもかかわらず，特定の階級・階層の子どもが再び 同様な社会的地位につきやすいという現実の問題に他ならないからである。その際，こうした結果を生み出す原因や条件は，様々に議論されてきた。ジェンセンやへアンステインのようにIQ遺伝説を主張する者もいれば，ブやルデューやパーンスティンのように，学校の文化と階級的に異なる家庭の文化との対応関係によって世代的再生産のメカニズムを解こうとしてきた者もいる。日本の研究者のように，経済的な要因に強く目を向ける者もいる。親や教師の階級的偏見に満ちたまなざしによって，階級的不平等が再生産されるとする考え方もある。さらに，ウィリスのように，異なる文化をもつ階級の教育に対する志向性の違いによって階級的な立場の世代的再生産が貫徹されるという考え方も生まれた。

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REF:
教育と不平等の社会理論―再生産論をこえて
小内　透【著】

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Social Reproduction in Classrooms

{ Social Reproduction in Classrooms and Schools, by James Collins

Social reproduction theory argues that schools are not institutions of equal opportunity but mechanisms for perpetuating social inequalities. This review discusses the emergence and development of social reproduction analyses of education and examines three main perspectives on reproduction: economic, cultural, and linguistic.

The basic reproductionist argument was that schools were not exceptional institutions promoting equality of opportunity; instead they reinforced the inequalities of social structure and cultural order found in a given country.

Although the reproductive thesis is simple to state in academic terms, it has been and continues to be quite unpalatable to many of those who work in schools or educational systems more generally (Rothstein 2004). This is probably because it presents a direct challenge to meritocratic assumptions and seems to dash egalitarian aspirations.

… the basic thesis that schooling as a system rations kinds of knowledge to class and ethnically-stratified student populations has been empirically confirmed by a number of studies (Anyon 1981, 1997; Carnoy & Levin 1985; Oakes 1985).

… A federally commissioned study in the 1960s sought to determine the influence of schools in educational attainment and occupational outcomes. It found that differences among schools mattered much less than assumed and that family socioeconomic status was the strongest influence on a child’s educational achievement and life chances (Coleman 1966). More than four decades later, that generalization still holds (Jencks & Phillips 1998, Kingston 2000, U.S. Dep. Educ. 2001); furthermore, this pattern is found in most nations (Lemke 2002). This is a sobering feature of our world, and efforts to understand such enduring social and educational inequality have occupied a wide range of scholars.

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Education Pram Race Perpetuates Existing Social Stratification

• Why Kindergarten-Admission Tests Are Worthless — New York Magazine

  The Junior Meritocracy Should a child’s fate be sealed by an exam he takes at the age of 4? Why kindergarten-admission tests are worthless, at best.

  • a mock version of an intelligence test commonly known to New York parents as the ERB. Almost every prestigious private elementary school in the city requires that prospective kindergartners take it.
  • The beauty of a meritocracy is that it is not, at least in theory, a closed system. With the right amount of pluck and hard work, a person should be able to become whoever he or she is supposed to be. Only in an aristocracy is a child’s fate determined before it is born
  • Yet in New York, it turns out that an awful lot is still determined by a child’s 5th birthday. Nearly every selective elementary school in the city, whether it’s public or private, requires standardized exams for kindergarten admission, some giving them so much weight they won’t even consider applicants who score below the top 3 percent
  • if a child manages to vault over it, and in turn gets into one of these selective schools, it can set him or her on a successful glide path for life.
  • Many of these lucky graduates wouldn’t have been able to go to these Ivy League feeders to begin with, if they hadn’t aced an exam just before kindergarten. And of course these advantages reverberate into the world beyond
  • Given the stakes, it’s hardly a surprise that New Yorkers with means and aspirations for their children would go to great lengths to help them
  • what’s surprising is that a single test, taken at the age of 4, can have so much power in deciding a child’s fate in the first place. The fact is, 4 is far too young an age to reach any conclusions about the prospects of a child’s mind. Even administrators who use these exams—indeed, especially the administrators who use these exams—say they’re practically worthless as predictors of future intelligence.

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