ABSTRACT
There are two main directions from which this summary can be questioned. Are the lower working-class children like this? And are schools like this? The school end of this discontinuity of experience is described with infuriating vagueness. Justifiably enough, the main efforts of the SRU [the Sociological Research Unit] went into the intensive investigation of family roles and relationships. The orientation of the lower working-class child was towards ‘closed’ roles and particularistic meanings. Schools, however, ‘are predicated upon an elaborated code and its system of social relationships’ (1973, p. 212; also 1970, p. 117). Does this mean all schools, at all age levels, in all degrees of selectivity, in all varieties of expressive or instrumental orientation? There is an interesting contrast between the ‘global’ assumptions about schools in Bernstein’s writing on language, and the carefully differentiated analysis to be found in his writing on organization and curriculum (Bernstein 1967; 1971). If disbelief is suspended, the idealization takes the following shape. In formal education, principles and operations are made verbally explicit. They are freed from their immediate context, and from the implicit background knowledge made available by a shared cultural identity. Such universalistic meanings can be self-consciously examined, the grounds for them scrutinized. Though at some risk of insecurity and even alienation, alternative realities can be contemplated. Meanings are therefore provisional, open to change. They can arise only from relationships that are themselves open to change-which are personal and achieved, not positional and ascribed. Entering such an environment, the lower working-class child steps into a symbolic system which provides few links with his life outside (Bernstein 1970, p. 120). Yet all this would not be true of the highly ritualized hierarchical school; or the ‘closed’ school; or the school where what counted as knowledge was strongly ‘classified’ and ‘framed’. Selecting some ‘traditional’ characteristics of schools (such as are described in Bernstein’s own writing), it could be argued that meanings are too often ‘given’ as part of a natural order which cannot be questioned; that children are too rarely encouraged actively to enquire, experiment, and ‘create their own world on their own terms in their own way’; that the boundary
between teacher and learner is too clear, the latter having too little discretion; and that the individual child is so submerged in the pupil role that meanings relate not to him but to the category in which he is fitted. The counter-argument is as tendentious and over-generalized as the original target. But when Bernstein describes, in relation to the critical contexts of socialization, the underlying system of communication which is regulated through a restricted code, it is tempting to see some schools as fitting that picture without undue distortion. In so far as they do, their lower working-class pupils should, in Bernstein’s own terms, feel perfectly at home. An underlying restricted code is found where communication is ‘realized through forms of speech where meanings are implicit, principles infrequently elaborated, qualified or explored, infrequently related to the specific experience of the child or the specific requirements of the local context, where alternative possibilities are infrequently offered, where questioning is less encouraged’ (in Gahagan and Gahagan 1970, p. 116). If some schools resemble this description, then extending their working-class pupils’ range of control over language (crudely, ‘teaching them’ an elaborated code) will require new roles, functions and communicative tasks more demanding than the traditional classroom routines. Otherwise there will be too much continuity between home and school experience of language. That suggestion must be tentative because we know so little about the forms and functions of classroom language, and about how the sociolinguistic rules relevant to them are learned and applied.
