EDUCATION

The processes through which an individual is inducted into the culture and knowledge of their society. Education is thus part of the broader process of socialisation. ‘Education’ may be understood to refer to more formally organised processes of socialisation, and in particular those that are regulated by the state. Discussions about education may be seen to cluster about two

main themes. First, there is a philosophical concern with the nature and goals of education and the ways in which education may be improved. Precursors to contemporary debates may be found in the work of the English philosopher John Locke (1964) in the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1991), although philosophical discussion reaches back, in the Western tradition, at least as far as Plato’s Republic (1998). Different approaches to education strongly reflect differing assumptions, not merely about the purpose of education, but more importantly about human nature and about childhood. Thus, for Locke, the child is a blank slate, written on by experience. Good education is crucial to ensuring that the child is exposed to appropriate experiences, and thus to well-grounded knowledge. Locke significantly opposed corporal punishment. Rousseau argued for the essential goodness of the child (in defiance of the Christian doctrine of original sin). Culture corrupts that goodness, so education should ideally allow the goodness to flourish, not least by providing the child with an environment through which they can learn for themselves. With the increase of state involvement in education in the nine-

teenth century and the development of the welfare state in the twentieth, reflection on education becomes increasingly tied to questions of social policy. Here two core concerns may be identified. On the one hand there are questions as to the part that education plays in the organisation of a just and fair society. In particular, this has come to focus on the contribution that education makes to a meritocracy. Education should allow children to discover and develop their talents, regardless of their cultural or economic background. The relationship between justice and education may also be seen in the intimate links that the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey draws between education and democracy (Dewey 1974). On the other hand, education has been identified as a source of

social integration. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, the issue of social integration was largely presented in terms of class difference, and thus of the problem of either finding a culture common

to all, or to find forms of education appropriate to the different classes within society. As late as the 1970s, G.H. Bantock (1975) could defend a differentiation between an education grounded in a high culture for the elite and a ‘folk curriculum’ for the working classes. Such approaches to education typically reflect a distinction between mental and manual labour, presupposing that an ‘academic’ education, grounded in a high culture that is seen to be intrinsically valuable, serves the ruling elite and middle classes. A practically orientated, or vocational, education is tailored to the perceived needs to the working classes. The issue of social integration has become more prominent recently, in a different form, in the face of the increasingly multicultural or pluralistic nature of contemporary societies. Governments’ attempts to articulate and impose some form of ‘core curriculum’ on schools may be seen, in part, to be a response to this phenomenon, alongside desires to teach the skills and attitudes of responsible citizenship. If one side of the debate over education concerns what it ought to

be, then the other side concerns what education is. The two sides are complementary. A social policy can be effective only if one knows how education works, and perhaps more crucially, why it does not. There is thus a long history of sociological studies in education, in no small part concerned with why certain individuals and groups are let down by the educational process. Three broad approaches to the explanation of educational achievement and non-achievement may be identified. Deterministic approaches presuppose that an individual’s educa-

tional achievement depends upon some extrinsic factor, such as their biology or their social background. While biological factors, and not least innate levels of intelligence or talent, should not be ignored, a pure determinism that argues that education can have no effect upon achievement has little empirical support and has limited implications for social policy. Social determinism, more critically, raises doubts about the effectiveness of formal education in the face of other processes of socialisation (Halsey et al. 1980). Second, there is a substantial critical literature that explores the role

of education as an ideological process. Education is seen as giving a false legitimacy to the inequalities of a class society. Louis Althusser (1971) identifies education as part of the ideological state apparatus, following the arguments of earlier Marxists, not least those of Antonio Gramsci. While the concept of ideology, in this context, may be primarily tied to Marxist approaches to education, the broader issue may be understood in terms of a recognition of the

difference between the rhetoric and reality of education, which is to say, between what education officially aspires to achieve and what it actually achieves. The more succinct encapsulation of this difference is expressed in the idea of the ‘hidden curriculum’ (see Bowles and Gintis (1976)). While the ‘overt’ curriculum is the subject matter formally and openly defined as that which pupils should be expected to learn and in which they should become competent, the ‘hidden’ curriculum refers to a gamut of social skills, values and personality traits that serve to integrate the child into society. Crucially, these traits do not bring about a just and homogeneous society. Rather, children learn to accept their place within the class system, and absorb the social competences and attitudes necessary for future occupational positions, for example as factory workers. This approach to education has also been used to explore critically

education’s role in the reproduction of gender (Stanworth 1983) and racial inequalities (Anyon 1980). It has long been argued that teachers have, at times unwittingly, different expectations of male and female pupils, and will assess their work according to different (and gender stereotypical) criteria. Similarly, supposedly integrating national curricula can be seen as promoting the values of a dominant class or ethnic group. The teaching of history provides clear examples, where the histories of minority ethnic groups may be marginalised or excluded, in favour, for example in the United Kingdom, of history that may continue to celebrate the values and achievements associated with an imperial past. Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘cultural capital’ and ‘habitus’ provide

powerful explanatory tools for the analysis of these phenomena (Bourdieu 1977). Schools are seen to promote a certain form of social competence and behaviour. Pupils from specific (and typically more economically privileged) backgrounds will be more familiar with the school’s expectations, precisely because there is a certain homogeneity between the culture and expectations of the home and the school, and will thus more readily fit into the school environment and so prosper. Pupils lacking a cultural capital that values positive attitudes to academic learning, acceptance of authority, linguistic competence and awareness of elite culture, will struggle. A common curriculum, offered to all on the grounds of equality of access, will thus lead to the reproduction of inequality, precisely because pupils with inappropriate cultural capital will be unable to benefit from the very opportunity presented to them. Bernstein (1977, 1996) identifies a similar tension between the

culture of working-class pupils and that of the school by focusing on

language use. He argues that there are two different ways in which a natural language can be used. An utterance made in a ‘restricted code’ is highly context dependent. Interpretation of the meaning of the utterance will be dependent upon knowledge of a taken-for-granted stock of values and ideas, inherent to a particular community. In contrast, an utterance in an ‘elaborated code’ seeks to be independent of any particular context, by explicating the meanings, assumptions and values underpinning it. Basically it is argued that working-class families encourage the learning of language only within a restricted code, while elaborated codes are used in schools, thereby placing working-class pupils at a disadvantage. Approaches to education in terms of ideology can be criticised for

tending to treat the pupil as the passive recipient of education, rather than as an agent who actively engages with education, and at times actively rejects the values and possibilities that it offers. Thus a third, ‘voluntaristic’ approach to education explores this active engagement with the educational process. Thus Giroux (1983), for example, has argued that schools are ‘relatively autonomous’ institutions. Teachers and pupils alike have scope to engage critically with the curriculum, coming to recognise hidden values and the silencing of certain cultural or political positions. Paul Willis (1977) has argued that working-class pupils may explicitly reject the middle-class values that their teachers represent. The issue here is not one of pupils lacking the necessary cultural capital or linguistic skills to perform well at school, but rather an autonomous decision on the pupils’ part to remain within the working-class culture (and occupations) of their families, rather than aspire to the white-collar occupations school promises.