Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Miscellenous Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Miscellenous Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
- List of figures and tables
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: a personal reflection
- one Why can’t education compensate for society?
- two The history of class in education
- three Working-class educational experiences
- four Class in the classroom
- five Social mobility: a problematic solution
- six The middle and upper classes: getting the ‘best’ for your own child
- seven Class feeling: troubling the soul and preying on the psyche
- eight Conclusion
- Epilogue: thinking through class
- Notes
- References
- Index
one - Why can’t education compensate for society?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2023
- Frontmatter
- Miscellenous Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Miscellenous Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
- List of figures and tables
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: a personal reflection
- one Why can’t education compensate for society?
- two The history of class in education
- three Working-class educational experiences
- four Class in the classroom
- five Social mobility: a problematic solution
- six The middle and upper classes: getting the ‘best’ for your own child
- seven Class feeling: troubling the soul and preying on the psyche
- eight Conclusion
- Epilogue: thinking through class
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In 1970 Basil Bernstein wrote that ‘education cannot compensate for society’. This chapter argues that the main reason why is that we have an educational system that is enmeshed in, and increasingly driven by, the economy, rather than one that is capable of redressing economic inequalities. It is a system that both mirrors and reproduces the hierarchical class relationships in wider society. The chapter will draw on statistical data, showing, for example, the percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) going to wages versus profits. It explores the relationships between the economy and education, with a focus on processes of privatisation and growing business influences, and asks how the working classes are constructed within a new, neoliberal status quo that valorises exchange value over use value and economistic ends over educational ones. It also looks back to the more optimistic period in which Jackson and Marsden were writing and compares and contrasts two very different economies and societies, alongside images and representations of the working classes both then and now.
In Education and the Working Class Jackson and Marsden argued:
The educational system we need is one which accepts and develops the best qualities of working class living and brings these to meet our central culture. Such a system must partly be grown out of common living, not merely imposed on it. But before this can begin, we must put completely aside any earlier attempts to select and reject in order to rear an elite.
We are no nearer now to putting aside earlier attempts to select and reject in order to rear an elite than we were in the 1960s. In fact, in a period when the elite appear to be unassailable, it all seems even more difficult. Rather, our current political elite is engaged in a restructuring of the educational system, a retraditionalising of the curriculum and the reintroduction of policies, including the reintroduction of grammar schools, that work to mark out the working classes as educational losers.
A growing devaluation of the working classes in English society
This is not an easy time to write about the working classes, although perhaps there never was an easy time.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- MiseducationInequality, Education and the Working Classes, pp. 11 - 28Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2017