ABSTRACT
Cassie’s words rehearse a number of important issues in relation to the contemporary education field, in particular, the ways in which current educational policy is exacerbating inequalities of ‘race’ and social class (see also Gewirtz et al., 1995; Vincent, 1996). While Cassie does not mention gender, this book has argued that there are no ungendered class and ‘race’ relations and has described through the accounts of 33 mothers the myriad ways in which gender, ‘race’ and social class are intertwined in home-school relationships. There is an irony when collective action is almost always associated with the working classes (Hoggart, 1957; Seabrook, 1982), that effective class action within the educational field has always been the province of the middle-classes. I would argue that the individualistic and self-interested activities of the privileged in society add up to a specific form of collective class action. Within the educational field contemporary collective middle-class action has led to increasing class and racial segregation both between and within schools, from pressure for streaming, on the presumption that their children will be allocated to top sets (Reay and Ball, 1997; Gewirtz et al., 1995), to the avoidance of schools
with a sizeable cohort of black and/or white working-class pupils who might hinder their own child’s learning (Vincent, 1992; Bagley, 1996).
