Class and Schooling
Introduction
Social class refers to a set of notion in the social sciences as well as political theory based on ideals of social stratification that groups people in sets of hierarchical social categories of upper class, middle class, and lower class. The term “social class” is generally used to denote “socio-economic class”, which alludes to people of the same social, economic, or educational status such as “the working class (McLaren, 2009). Bourdieu’ theory of cultural reproduction shows how the inequalities in the education system have mediated the connection between the original class membership and the final class membership. As such, the education systems in industrialized countries is generally designed to legitimize class inequalities, where success in the education system is influenced by an individual’s possession of higher-class habitus and cultural capital, meaning that the failure of majority of lower-class students is inevitable (Sullivan, 2002). This is especially the case due to the fact that cultural capital varies from one social class to another, but the contemporary education system has characteristic blanket assumption of possession of cultural capital for all social classes. From the Bourdieurnian point of view, the working class has been historically, and currently is, discursively made up of an unknowing, uncritical, and tasteless mass to which the middle class differs from significantly. In schools and classroom, therefore, children of the working class have been stereotyped by representing them only by what they lack: as failing short of a more sophisticated and richly gifted “real” child (Boutte, 2008). This historical lack of positive attitude towards working class students largely contributes to their educational disqualification and insufficient academic support in schools and the state.
Social class in education system
Generally, social class has substantial effect on the educational opportunities of individuals. According to the positional competition theory for credentials, disadvantaged students would find extremely difficult to compensate for the advantage retained by their professional middle class students through various strategies outlined by Ball (2003). Further, the improvement in academic achievement for disadvantaged students does not often translate to similar improvements in terms of upward social mobility.
Findings of a study by Espring-Anderson (2006) on the intergenerational transmission of class advantage showed that social inheritance has been based educational, social class or occupational criteria in sociology field on the one hand, but measured according to incomes or earning in the economics field on the other. The impact of social class in educational system is also greatly influenced by the level of state support for low-income working families as well as non-working families (Hatton, 1996).
Feinsten (2006) investigated the performance scores in schools examinations of children from different social economic status (SES) backgrounds so as to chart their patterns of performance over time, starting from ages of 22 months upto 118 months. He utilized the six fold 1966 Classification of Occupations of the Registrar General in using SES as noted from parental occupation as an alternate for social class. Feinsten’s main objective was to compare the educational achievements of at the bottom and top of the socio-economic scale. The findings and analysis of the study showed a strong positive correlation between academic achievement and socio-class (Boutte, 2008). The study stressed the need for interventions to redress social inequalities to be started at childhood as opposed to waiting until children attain adulthood. Subsequent researches (Danziger & Waldfogel, 2000; Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997) have also concluded that any later-life skill deficiency correction efforts would not be successful devoid of enough motivational or cognitive resources to support them (Dumais, 2002).
Generally, education for the working classes has historically been about failure i.e. about ‘being found out’ (Reay 2001). While class divisions have traditionally been, and presently remain, more pronounced in England relative to other countries, social class also still remain a major factor of academic success in many Western societies. This effectively challenges the arguments that academic failure is mainly due to factors unrelated to social class of individual students. Elitism has great consequences for education as the authority is vested in the middle classes who not only run the educational system, but the system itself valorized middle- instead of working-class cultural capital (Applebaum, 2004). Regardless of over a century since the introduction of the concept of universal state education, the reality remains that the general patterns of working-class direction within education still remains overly different from their middle class counterparts, despite of what individual working class members are able to negotiate and attain for themselves within the educational field (Reay 2001). Education for a majority of working-class students, through the modern culture of mass credentialism, still remains something ‘to be got through’ as opposed to something ‘to go into.’ The current state of affairs such that the working or low class student is moving from marginalization to another ironic position, in light of the growing consumer culture, in which they are being consumed by the capitalist, privatized education instead of benefiting from it (Reay 2001). As a result, the contemporary educational system still heavily has remnants of past elite prejudices, in which the educational system is crafted in such a manner that the working class education serves the middle-class interests.
The 21st century education system is characterized by a rapidly growing number of low or working classes pursuing education as a form of escape, or a means for fulfilling and maximizing the self or a blend of the two. In fact, the recent shift to politics of recognition from politics of redistribution has led to the acceptance of the growing gap between the poor and the rich as the ‘nature of things’ in many developed and developing countries (Applebaum, 2004). It is now understood to be the prerogative of the middle- and higher classes to earn highest amounts of money and send their children to the best private schools, while the working class or low class have make do with low wages and ill-equipped public schools for their children.
According to Ball &Youdell (2009), privatization is increasingly creeping into the public education systems, with far-reaching impacts for the education of students, equity, and the conditions of teachers as well as other educational personnel. Many of the changes are clandestine in nature, under the pretext title of “educational reform,” or adopted stealthy in the name of “keeping up with the times” (Ball &Youdell, 2009). The increasing privatization or commercialization of public education is reducing education into a service sold out to clients considered from a young age as consumers and targets of markets, as opposed to giving every child the opportunity of developing their full potential as individuals and members of society (Ball &Youdell 2009).
Impact on teaching and learning
Numerous ethnographic studies have been conducted into the aspect of social class as an element in schools and classrooms. The studies have focused on all ages of learner population, different ranges of school setting, all regions of the United States and other countries, as well as varied subgroups across different ethnic, cultural, and racial identities (Panofsky, 2003). In a study by Rist (1970/2000) conducted in an “urban ghetto school” in which the entire administration, teaching and non-teaching staff, and students were black, and 55 per cent of students were of families on economic assistance program. The findings suggested that there was significant distinction of the adults’ treatment of students (McLaren, 2009). The researcher noted that the kindergarten teacher showed favoritism for children dressed in newer and cleaner clothing and who spoke in a dialect closest to middle class standard. This was followed by grouping the children in three groups – high, middle, and low ability. The high group students were material and class identified: dressed in newer, cleaner clothing and exhibiting English dialect closely approximated to the standard (Mills, 2009).
Rist noted that the teacher favored children in the high group by making them leaders of class activities and answerers of questions. This demonstrates Bourdieu’s logic of symbolic violence, revealing the use of economic hierarchy of social relations in the classroom ((Panofsky, 2003). The teacher had developed an economy in the class representing a great hierarchy of privilege in the classroom, where she gave much time and attention to the high group students during instruction. It was also noted that the teacher only delivered negative messages to students whenever she turned her attention to middle and lower groups. Consequently, students in both high and lower groups internalized the norms of privilege and value by treating each other on the basis of a shared set of values (Rowe & Windle, 2012). High group students would mistreat their middle and lower group colleagues, both verbally and physically; middle and lower group students mistreated each other but never the high group students.
Rist attributed the teacher’s behavior to a “normative reference group,” by identifying individual students exhibiting attributes similar to her own academically successful middle-class (Rowe & Windle, 2012). This can be explained by Bourdieu’s concept of social field, habitus and capital: the teacher’s favoritism is for students to her social field, a habitus reflecting relatable economic and cultural capital. The student habitus in this regard include such traits as ones with educated family background; employed parents, living together; high level of verbalization in standard middle class English; potential to be a leader; neat and clean appearance; and active participation in a group (Panofsky, 2003). Such social relations impact on the learning of students in the sense that students from working or low classes demonstration high disaffection from classroom activities through ‘acting out’ in form of verbal or behavioral resistance to school work as well as apathy to work not done.
Taking into consideration the five dimensions of culture developed by Ratner (2000), Rist’s findings demonstrate that lower class children’s lived experience of schools is strikingly different from that of their privileged colleagues in the sense that: (i) teachers engage high class students in more valuable cultural activities that improve the students’ academic learning opportunities; (ii) teachers attach different values to students of different social class via verbal and non-verbal messages in order to assign social value to the subgroup identities ; (iii) teachers show lesser value for the low social class students through such physical conditions as tables and locations by placing the lower-group table furthest from the teacher and chalkboard; (iv) differential classroom psychologies are constructed by the students’ motivational and emotional classroom experiences of desirability vs. rejection; and (iv) the different groups seem to represent differential constructions of agency, where privileged students easily conform to school and teacher values, while their stigmatized low-class colleagues enact both active and passive resistance through disengagement or oppositional behavior (McLaren, 2009). To this, Bourdieu reckons that the contemporary education system is used as the ‘principle institution’ in controlling status and privilege, and educational credentials utilized by individuals and groups to reinforce their social standings of privilege and power (Hatton, 1996).
In the United States, while the Declaration of Independence, makes it clear that all people are created equal, the reality in the education system is that there is no fair and equal treatment of students from different socio-economic classes (Mills, 2009). There remains a large over-representation of working-class students categorized as having special educational needs, especially the over-preponderance of African-Caribbean boys categorized as being with emotional and behavioral difficulties as well as those unfairly subjected to disciplinary exclusion (Connell, 2011). While much effort has been taken to bring about social justice in education, a significant number of children and young people still suffer from marginalization due to their socio-economic status in the society (Ainscow et al, 2006). As such, the realization of more inclusive education systems in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world currently remain one of the major challenges, which is made worse by the fact that inclusion continues to prove a complex and controversial issue together with the little understanding of development of inclusive practices in classrooms and schools.
References
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