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Class, Codes And Control #3
Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 3: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions
Basil Bernstein rarely had a good press in the forty-odd years in which he presented his developing theories to the public. Early admiration for his sociolinguistic 'discoveries' - of codes which regulate, at a deep-structural level, family beliefs and behaviours and relationships, as well as surface utterances - turned quite quickly into a suspicion that his description of social class difference amounted to a declaration of working class deficit. Although Bernstein's writings, particularly in the 1990s, became opaque to the point of seeming to be purposefully obscurantist, they have always been enlivened by clear, pithy and punchy statements which left no room for ambiguity about the case he was making. The struggle to achieve an education system which would offer genuinely equal opportunities to children from all class and cultural backgrounds continued to underpin the writing and teaching of his later years.
- GenresEducationPsychology
167 pages, Hardcover
First published May 28, 1975
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January 4, 2019
Original Review from 2011: If you are thinking of reading this I would really suggest you skip the introduction and come back to it after you have read the various papers. This is because the introduction doesn’t actual introduce any of the main concepts discussed in the papers – rather it assumes you already understand some of his ideas and dichotomies – and you just won’t until you’ve read the essays. It may just be that I don’t know enough Durkheim, but I almost gave up on the book at the end of the introduction – and that would have been a great pity, as this is a book with lots of fascinating ideas.
A lot of this made me think of Aristotle’s ethics – you know, take an idea, like how do I live a good life, and then show all of the extremes that life can take and then show the negative impact being, say, too brave or too emotionally incontinent can have on your life. This guy is a great categoriser. And this book brings together a series of papers he wrote over a decade or so showing the development of his thinking around the sociology of education.
The first premise of this thinking, I guess, is that education can be divided into three great territories, which can each interact and influence the others, those being curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. As he says himself, “Curriculum defines what counts as valid knowledge, pedagogy defines what counts as a valid transmission of knowledge, and evaluation defines what counts as a valid realisation of this knowledge on the part of the taught.” (Or perhaps more simply: what to teach, how to teach it and how to test it has been learnt)
We can understand curriculum as time at school being divided into units and those units of time being given various contents. The amount of time dedicated to the various contents shows the value we as a society place on those various curriculum elements. And this is where he becomes interesting. You can either divide up the time at school so that the units have very fixed boundaries – This is a mathematics class, we count here, but we don't do stories, you draw in art and you sing in music – or those boundaries can be much more permeable and blurred. Education can be closed (what he calls Collection mode – from the perspective of the student where their role is to ‘collect’ lots of information about the subject) and therefore the facts and skills that need to be learnt and the pace at which these have to be acquired is set either by the teacher or more likely by some external body of ‘experts’. The other option is for education to be open – what he calls the integration mode. Now, this is much harder to define. It is not just that it is harder to say at any given time if you are learning English or Maths under such a curriculum, but that the learning is more gauged toward the pace of the learner and also the interest of the learner. You may think that Bernstein is some kind of wishy-washy lefty, and therefore is going to prefer this second style of curriculum over the closed one – but that would be an over-simplification of his view. In fact, he points out how both of these relate to a certain kind of class interests and that both of these class interests are fundamentally middle class interests – old and new middle class.
This book is very strongly influenced by Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society – a book I am now going to have to find time to read. I think it is also strongly influenced by The Lonely Crowd. It is reasonable to characterise our society as a class based one. Classes with power are going to want to reproduce themselves and one way to achieve that reproduction is through the education system – this is hardly a new idea or one that could be all that surprising. Now, the education system can ensure social continuity in a number of ways. One way is for the education system to be part of a propaganda system – Capitalism is good, everything else is bad, only lazy people are unemployed, you belong, they don’t belong and so on. Another way is by creating relations between people and other people and between people and knowledge that then makes it difficult for people to even imagine there might be alternatives. That is, the structure of the education system can imply the structure of the society it seeks to reproduce, automatically giving it legitimacy.
The problem is that the Lonely Crowd says that there has been a shift in the role of the middle classes in society (or at least, part of the middle class) – a shift from the middle class as exemplified by the kinds of people who were 19th century entrepreneurs – aggressively individual and ‘self-made’ men, people who defined their ‘identity’ by their being different from those around them. This was a necessary stage for people to pass through, but in many ways the last century saw the rise and rise of yet another breed of middle class person (person rather than individual) – those who didn’t produce ‘stuff’ so much as they would build ‘relationships’, these were the ‘symbolic manipulators’, the new middle class. These people were less ‘individual’ and more ‘personal’ – they were less assured of how the world was going to progress, less sure of what their kids would need to know to be successful in the future and so their education and their attitude to the world could not be nearly as fixed as the old middle class had assumed. The implications of this for education are many and varied.
Bernstein helps to explain this shift by explaining how a curriculum can be defined (remembering that curriculum is but one part of a three part and integrated system along with pedagogy and evaluation). You can either have very strong boundaries between subjects which, as these play out, lead to strong distinctions between people in a highly hierarchical structure (with maths/science near the top leading to careers in professions like medicine or law and with ‘good with his hands’ somewhere near the bottom). That is, a highly differentiated education system leads to a highly class divided society. The boundaries between the subjects in school quickly become boundaries between people – boundaries that say who can and who cannot do certain things, who can and who cannot ask certain questions, who is and who is not a certain kind of person. This form of education tends to be assessed using standardised tests. Learning is about ‘transmission of knowledge’ and the rate at which this transmission occurs is fixed so that the student either keeps up or falls by the wayside. And this keeping up or falling away is what defines the kind of person you will be.
The opposite of this is an integrated approach to education, one which seeks to break down these barriers between subjects and thereby between people. The focus may well be more on the child and what the child is ready to learn – but what is interesting here is not that this kind of education is simply more student centred, because in some ways it simply isn’t. What this education really is concerned with is a much more general view of what education means – to be able to work this view needs a guiding concept to direct how teachers teach. It is not about just ‘leaving it all up to the teacher’ – in fact, generally the silo approach to education described above gives the teacher much more independence – as long as they get their students ready for the test, how they do that is pretty much up to them. In the integrated model everything must point towards where the student needs to go – there needs to be an organising principle to education and all ‘teaching’ needs to be in response to that educating principle.
This is a remarkably difficult idea to understand – and so Bernstein discusses it by developing a very visual metaphor of four toilets. I’m not sure we really need all four of the toilets to understand his point. Let’s say you go into a toilet and it is painted stark white. The toilet seat is down, the door has a lock on it (which it is very much expected you will use once you enter), the toilet paper is hidden in a container-type-thing with just an edge of the paper showing, there is a Spartan sink with a single bar of soap, a full length mirror (although, not directed at you as you sit on the toilet) and perhaps even a sign on the door reminding gentlemen to please ensure they correct their dress before leaving. On top of the cistern is an aerosol air freshener (as someone I read said recently: flowers on vocals and strings, shit on bass and drum) and beside the bowl there is a toilet brush. The message system here is all very clear. Do not draw attention to the fact that you have been in here. What you do while you are in here is very much your own business, but you are expected to leave the room exactly as you found it. Your performance is easy to assess – and it is completely defined by the strict boundaries the very architecture of the room suggests, the most obvious boundaries being between what happens inside and outside this room.
Another toilet may be one in which the toilet paper is on top of the cistern, the toilet seat may be either up or down depending on the sex and purpose the last person using the toilet put it to, there may be books and crossword puzzles within handy reach and various postcards or other images and drawings may be displayed on the walls. There may not be a lock on the door and people may speak to you while you are using the toilet. Sounds and smells may not need to be covered up or worried over. The boundaries between inside and outside are challenged here. Bernstein’s point is that in this second toilet we tend to think of everything being freer and more easy going – but let’s say you decide to put a new postcard you have found on one of the walls or you decide to put a new book on the shelf. You may find that the person that owns the toilet objects to the new book as being inappropriate reading matter for the toilet, or that the picture would have added would have looked better higher up the wall.
In the first toilet there is a clear organising principle, one that is explicit and obvious. However, despite appearances, in the second toilet there is also an organising principle, it is just that it isn’t explicit and this can then mean that trying to ensure your performance matches the expectations of those assessing you is going to be all the more difficult. The ‘new middle class’, the symbolic manipulators, the people who are more likely to choose to move away from the strictures of the ‘collection mode of education’ towards ‘integration’ are integrating towards a certain schema, a certain underlying idea, and whilst the point of this is to move away from the previously highly differentiated class system, success here is also predicated on ‘knowing the code’, but this time it is an implicit code, rather than an explicit one.
There were many interesting ideas in this book. The role of ritual in education is only one example. The way that education is about both learning facts and data, but also about learning to become a certain kind of person: a dichotomy he defines as the instrumental as opposed to the expressive purposes of education. If you are happy with the means and ends of both the instrumental and expressive purposes of the school you attend then you will conform to the school, but to not identify with either the means or end of either of these twin objectives means to be alienated, detached or estranged from the education process. That disengagement is much more likely if you are working class and do not understand either the means or the ends – or of embracing the ends while rejecting the means, for example, and this inevitably leads to problems. I found the scheme he develops here very useful.
The other idea I found particularly interesting was another that was developed around an image that proved to be particularly potent – that of a young boy doing an exam and covering his work as he proceeded using both arms as shields so no one could see. Think about that for a moment. Bernstein refers to it as an example of knowledge as private property. It is hard to argue with him. We live in a society where private property is the essence and foundation – so should we be surprised when we are confronted by such an image of someone protecting what is theirs from those who would steal their valuable possessions? Education moves us more and more away from groups and makes us more and more isolated individuals. Why is it that that is such an important lesson to learn? But the definition of educational success is educational independence – a nice sounding way of saying educational isolation.
But as someone who spends lots of time writing descriptions of what I feel I’ve learnt from books in as clear a way as I can – the image of a child hiding their work, of viewing what they know as their own private property, really is a terribly sad vision. I had never thought of it like this before, but I will struggle to not think of it this way in the future – and so I’d better stop now before I start singing Billy Bragg songs.
New review from 2019 in the comments below...
A lot of this made me think of Aristotle’s ethics – you know, take an idea, like how do I live a good life, and then show all of the extremes that life can take and then show the negative impact being, say, too brave or too emotionally incontinent can have on your life. This guy is a great categoriser. And this book brings together a series of papers he wrote over a decade or so showing the development of his thinking around the sociology of education.
The first premise of this thinking, I guess, is that education can be divided into three great territories, which can each interact and influence the others, those being curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. As he says himself, “Curriculum defines what counts as valid knowledge, pedagogy defines what counts as a valid transmission of knowledge, and evaluation defines what counts as a valid realisation of this knowledge on the part of the taught.” (Or perhaps more simply: what to teach, how to teach it and how to test it has been learnt)
We can understand curriculum as time at school being divided into units and those units of time being given various contents. The amount of time dedicated to the various contents shows the value we as a society place on those various curriculum elements. And this is where he becomes interesting. You can either divide up the time at school so that the units have very fixed boundaries – This is a mathematics class, we count here, but we don't do stories, you draw in art and you sing in music – or those boundaries can be much more permeable and blurred. Education can be closed (what he calls Collection mode – from the perspective of the student where their role is to ‘collect’ lots of information about the subject) and therefore the facts and skills that need to be learnt and the pace at which these have to be acquired is set either by the teacher or more likely by some external body of ‘experts’. The other option is for education to be open – what he calls the integration mode. Now, this is much harder to define. It is not just that it is harder to say at any given time if you are learning English or Maths under such a curriculum, but that the learning is more gauged toward the pace of the learner and also the interest of the learner. You may think that Bernstein is some kind of wishy-washy lefty, and therefore is going to prefer this second style of curriculum over the closed one – but that would be an over-simplification of his view. In fact, he points out how both of these relate to a certain kind of class interests and that both of these class interests are fundamentally middle class interests – old and new middle class.
This book is very strongly influenced by Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society – a book I am now going to have to find time to read. I think it is also strongly influenced by The Lonely Crowd. It is reasonable to characterise our society as a class based one. Classes with power are going to want to reproduce themselves and one way to achieve that reproduction is through the education system – this is hardly a new idea or one that could be all that surprising. Now, the education system can ensure social continuity in a number of ways. One way is for the education system to be part of a propaganda system – Capitalism is good, everything else is bad, only lazy people are unemployed, you belong, they don’t belong and so on. Another way is by creating relations between people and other people and between people and knowledge that then makes it difficult for people to even imagine there might be alternatives. That is, the structure of the education system can imply the structure of the society it seeks to reproduce, automatically giving it legitimacy.
The problem is that the Lonely Crowd says that there has been a shift in the role of the middle classes in society (or at least, part of the middle class) – a shift from the middle class as exemplified by the kinds of people who were 19th century entrepreneurs – aggressively individual and ‘self-made’ men, people who defined their ‘identity’ by their being different from those around them. This was a necessary stage for people to pass through, but in many ways the last century saw the rise and rise of yet another breed of middle class person (person rather than individual) – those who didn’t produce ‘stuff’ so much as they would build ‘relationships’, these were the ‘symbolic manipulators’, the new middle class. These people were less ‘individual’ and more ‘personal’ – they were less assured of how the world was going to progress, less sure of what their kids would need to know to be successful in the future and so their education and their attitude to the world could not be nearly as fixed as the old middle class had assumed. The implications of this for education are many and varied.
Bernstein helps to explain this shift by explaining how a curriculum can be defined (remembering that curriculum is but one part of a three part and integrated system along with pedagogy and evaluation). You can either have very strong boundaries between subjects which, as these play out, lead to strong distinctions between people in a highly hierarchical structure (with maths/science near the top leading to careers in professions like medicine or law and with ‘good with his hands’ somewhere near the bottom). That is, a highly differentiated education system leads to a highly class divided society. The boundaries between the subjects in school quickly become boundaries between people – boundaries that say who can and who cannot do certain things, who can and who cannot ask certain questions, who is and who is not a certain kind of person. This form of education tends to be assessed using standardised tests. Learning is about ‘transmission of knowledge’ and the rate at which this transmission occurs is fixed so that the student either keeps up or falls by the wayside. And this keeping up or falling away is what defines the kind of person you will be.
The opposite of this is an integrated approach to education, one which seeks to break down these barriers between subjects and thereby between people. The focus may well be more on the child and what the child is ready to learn – but what is interesting here is not that this kind of education is simply more student centred, because in some ways it simply isn’t. What this education really is concerned with is a much more general view of what education means – to be able to work this view needs a guiding concept to direct how teachers teach. It is not about just ‘leaving it all up to the teacher’ – in fact, generally the silo approach to education described above gives the teacher much more independence – as long as they get their students ready for the test, how they do that is pretty much up to them. In the integrated model everything must point towards where the student needs to go – there needs to be an organising principle to education and all ‘teaching’ needs to be in response to that educating principle.
This is a remarkably difficult idea to understand – and so Bernstein discusses it by developing a very visual metaphor of four toilets. I’m not sure we really need all four of the toilets to understand his point. Let’s say you go into a toilet and it is painted stark white. The toilet seat is down, the door has a lock on it (which it is very much expected you will use once you enter), the toilet paper is hidden in a container-type-thing with just an edge of the paper showing, there is a Spartan sink with a single bar of soap, a full length mirror (although, not directed at you as you sit on the toilet) and perhaps even a sign on the door reminding gentlemen to please ensure they correct their dress before leaving. On top of the cistern is an aerosol air freshener (as someone I read said recently: flowers on vocals and strings, shit on bass and drum) and beside the bowl there is a toilet brush. The message system here is all very clear. Do not draw attention to the fact that you have been in here. What you do while you are in here is very much your own business, but you are expected to leave the room exactly as you found it. Your performance is easy to assess – and it is completely defined by the strict boundaries the very architecture of the room suggests, the most obvious boundaries being between what happens inside and outside this room.
Another toilet may be one in which the toilet paper is on top of the cistern, the toilet seat may be either up or down depending on the sex and purpose the last person using the toilet put it to, there may be books and crossword puzzles within handy reach and various postcards or other images and drawings may be displayed on the walls. There may not be a lock on the door and people may speak to you while you are using the toilet. Sounds and smells may not need to be covered up or worried over. The boundaries between inside and outside are challenged here. Bernstein’s point is that in this second toilet we tend to think of everything being freer and more easy going – but let’s say you decide to put a new postcard you have found on one of the walls or you decide to put a new book on the shelf. You may find that the person that owns the toilet objects to the new book as being inappropriate reading matter for the toilet, or that the picture would have added would have looked better higher up the wall.
In the first toilet there is a clear organising principle, one that is explicit and obvious. However, despite appearances, in the second toilet there is also an organising principle, it is just that it isn’t explicit and this can then mean that trying to ensure your performance matches the expectations of those assessing you is going to be all the more difficult. The ‘new middle class’, the symbolic manipulators, the people who are more likely to choose to move away from the strictures of the ‘collection mode of education’ towards ‘integration’ are integrating towards a certain schema, a certain underlying idea, and whilst the point of this is to move away from the previously highly differentiated class system, success here is also predicated on ‘knowing the code’, but this time it is an implicit code, rather than an explicit one.
There were many interesting ideas in this book. The role of ritual in education is only one example. The way that education is about both learning facts and data, but also about learning to become a certain kind of person: a dichotomy he defines as the instrumental as opposed to the expressive purposes of education. If you are happy with the means and ends of both the instrumental and expressive purposes of the school you attend then you will conform to the school, but to not identify with either the means or end of either of these twin objectives means to be alienated, detached or estranged from the education process. That disengagement is much more likely if you are working class and do not understand either the means or the ends – or of embracing the ends while rejecting the means, for example, and this inevitably leads to problems. I found the scheme he develops here very useful.
The other idea I found particularly interesting was another that was developed around an image that proved to be particularly potent – that of a young boy doing an exam and covering his work as he proceeded using both arms as shields so no one could see. Think about that for a moment. Bernstein refers to it as an example of knowledge as private property. It is hard to argue with him. We live in a society where private property is the essence and foundation – so should we be surprised when we are confronted by such an image of someone protecting what is theirs from those who would steal their valuable possessions? Education moves us more and more away from groups and makes us more and more isolated individuals. Why is it that that is such an important lesson to learn? But the definition of educational success is educational independence – a nice sounding way of saying educational isolation.
But as someone who spends lots of time writing descriptions of what I feel I’ve learnt from books in as clear a way as I can – the image of a child hiding their work, of viewing what they know as their own private property, really is a terribly sad vision. I had never thought of it like this before, but I will struggle to not think of it this way in the future – and so I’d better stop now before I start singing Billy Bragg songs.
New review from 2019 in the comments below...
September 5, 2011
For anyone interested in the sociology of education, of the "achievement gap," or any of the policy discussions about teachers, teaching and schools, this book would be a crucial addition to one's library. It's not as uncommon now to talk about students' language and to what degree they posess cultural capital, but I think when this was first published (early 70s?), Bernstein was one of the first to write about how students' social/economic classes and their language "codes" determined their experiences in schooling. Although it is a theoretical book, I could apply many of the ideas Bernstein presented to my early years teaching. It enabled me to interpret a number of different classroom episodes that I would have missed, or misinterpreted, completely. It's been a while since I've read this, so it's probably time for a re-read.
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