ABSTRACT

This book’s main aim is to reassert the centrality of social class, as gendered and racialized, in an explanation of the maintenance of educational differences and the reproduction of social inequality. Over the past twenty years social inequalities have increasingly become something many of us take for granted, rather than something we feel responsible for. The myth of meritocracy normalizes inequalities, converting them into individual rather than collective responsibilities. Furthermore, meritocracy sustains fictions of equal access and homogeneous provision, denying differences that count. Behind the bland rhetoric of difference as diversity lie differences that add up to social advantage for some and subtract into social disadvantage for others. Certainly there is no fair distribution of reward for the time, commitment and energy expended by the mothers in this study in support of their children’s education. Time, commitment and energy all count for more if they are underpinned by material and cultural resources.