ABSTRACT
This material comes from an investigation of infant teachers’ attitudes towards their pupils’ home backgrounds and their expectations and assessments of individual pupils. In the passage, a summary analysis is provided of replies from infant teachers in middle-class, upper working-class and lower working-class areas. The extract has been chosen to illustrate two areas of interest in the sociology of education, one long-established, and the other more recent. The latter involves the examination of the origins, content and consequences of teachers’ ‘professional knowledge’, including the labels and categories teachers employ which help define reality for them and, in part, for their pupils. The way the infant teachers categorized pupils into those from ‘good’ and ‘poor’ homes is discussed, and the argument is advanced that teachers’ stereotypes of the type of pupil and home they could expect ‘were related to their ideas concerning the relationship of occupational level, social conditions and intellectual ability’. The second area of interest illustrated by the extract is the concern of sociologists to provide explanations for working-class failure in schools. Goodacre’s evidence suggests that, in the case of some of the teachers, their knowledge of children’s social class background influenced their conceptions of pupils’ ability and might have lowered their expectations of what pupils could achieve. Some sociologists certainly argue that a partial explanation of why working-class children underachieve in schools is the result of lowered expectations on the part of their teachers.
