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The Way Class Works: Readings on School, Family, and the Economy
Since the 1980s, the relationship between social class and education has been overshadowed by scholarship more generally targeting issues of race, gender, and representation. Today, with the global economy deeply immersed in social inequalities, there is pressing need for serious class-based analyses of schooling, family life and social structure. The Way Class Works is a collection of twenty-four groundbreaking essays on the material conditions of social class and the ways in which class is produced "on the ground" in educational institutions and families. Written by the most visible and important scholars in education and the social sciences, these timely essays explore the production of class in and through the economy, family, and school, while simultaneously interrogating and challenging our understandings of social class as linked to race, gender, and nation. With essays by distinguished scholars and questions for further reflection and discussion, The Way Class Works will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars in education, sociology, and beyond.
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First published December 13, 2007
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January 9, 2014
There is far too much to this book to give it a reasonable review – it being a series of papers (an edited collection of papers on social class and how this impacts on schooling). Many of these papers is incredibly thought provoking. A couple of them refer to other research that has ended up in other books I’ve read – so, I’ll just mention those along the way.
I’m only going to mention the articles I found particularly interesting. But they are all good and all worth reading. In fact, I was really impressed with the quality of the articles in this collection.
The first one I want to mention is Chapter 3 – a piece on gated communities and their rise in the US. If there is any phenomenon that should have people worrying about social cohesion this really ought to be it. The less likely you are to see or interact with whole groups of people, the less you are going to care what happens to them and therefore the more distant your life is going to get from theirs. This is shown in this chapter not only in relation to the social class of the other, but also due to their ethnicity. The fact the social other was generally defined as Mexicans – no matter where they actually came from – shows a level of distain for the social other that is becoming a problem and presenting us with ‘compassion deficit’. The chapter even quotes an Australian ad for our first gated community – Sanctuary Cove – which put the matter quite succinctly, “The streets these days are full of cockroaches and most of them are human.” The irony that Sanctuary Cove was built by a criminal who later ran away to Spain to avoid the law isn't mentioned here, but should have been. If there was ever a cockroach... Gated communities are the nice Western version of ethnic cleansing – but I guess eventually, as we have seen a couple of times now with examples of young black people in the US being shot in gated communities – the ethnic cleansing will become increasingly robust with the passage of time.
Chapter 4 is a really interesting discussion on the class and race differences related to teen pregnancy. There is a lovely quote, reminiscent of the argument in The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America, that says that middle class women felt they needed to be mature before having children, whereas working class women often felt they became mature by having children. As a society most of what it means to be an adult depends on being a successful consumer – get a job, buy a house, get a car, own an iPhone. If you do not have any of these you are a failed consumer and therefore not really an adult. For women the alternative route is to have a child – having a child can only be done by an adult, almost by definition. The point is that ‘good girls don’t’ and by good girls we mean the stereotype of the middle class white girl – this being what might be considered society’s gold standard. The title of this – the two-in-oneness of class – refers to the idea that class impacts on people’s subjectivities in interesting ways. Not just from the outside in – society defining and treating you according to your social class – but also from the inside out – you responding to the world according to your social class. The overlap with this and race – with the white pregnant teens disappearing from view (being put on bed rest and having their school work brought to them) was explained as an example of the ‘public negotiation and private loss’ associated with young girls’ bodies. For the white girls ‘beginning to show’ meant slipping to the wrong side of their class. Again, as is pointed out here, girls of colour who become pregnant are generally seen as unredeemable anyway – for white girls there is generally some hope extended, even if never completely believed.
The next chapter documents the end of education – particularly for the working class in America – and the rise of attending school to gain ‘credentials’. We are witnessing the end of critical education, particularly for the working classes, and the rise of educations that must be endured so as to have any hope of entering the labour force. Not because the skills earned through such an education really prepares one for life in the work force, but because without the piece of paper that comes with successfully negotiating this time one has no hope whatsoever.
Chapter 6 is a useful summary of White Middle Class Identities and Urban Schooling – one of the most interesting books I read last year.
One of the things that happens in what Australians like to refer to as Anglophone countries is that while we have remarkably low levels of social mobility this is achieved by means that seek to look entirely fair. However, if you were to draw on a graph all of Australia’s schools and graded them according to the academic success or failure they achieve they would present a fixed curve – one very closely correlated to the socioeconomic status of those attending the school. This remarkably consistent fact – replicable through generations, not just years – would be a mystery needing an explanation if anyone actually believed our system was fair. You know, if academic ability was evenly spread across society and social position was due to merit how could it be possible for the same schools to year after year just happen to get all of the good students? So, how is this miracle of the reproduction of social advantage and disadvantage actually achieved? Chapter 7 does a lovely job in explaining this. The middle classes bring systematic advantages to bear in ensuring positional advantage for their children. A lot of this has to do with the superior social networks the middle classes have. This chapter is a useful introduction to the convertibility of various capitals – social, cultural, financial – into academic success. As Bourdieu says somewhere, the education system dresses up social advantage as individual merit. But it is an interesting relationship here – getting into an Ivy league university requires a number of things – not least some notion that this is possible and worth doing – the fact that the people interviewed in this paper know lots of people who had been there and done that can’t be under-estimated. It is hard to follow a path if you have no idea where it starts, where it ends or if you are even consistently on it. And if there is one thing universities excel at, it is making obscure the pathways available and hiding where they lead.
Chapter 10 looks at new immigrant families to the US and how their previous social position in their own country – Sudan – impacts on their dispositions towards their children’s education. Having a middle class disposition overcomes many of the other ‘disadvantages’ presented to them. The notion of having an entitlement – something working class people and those who have been schooled in being the racial other don’t have – means a much greater likelihood for academic success. This is what elsewhere is referred to as ‘good migrants.
Chapter 11 is really very interesting. One of the things the No Child Left Behind Act in the US was supposedly put in place to achieve was, well, that no child would be left behind. So, how likely is it that it will achieve this? According to this author, it is virtually impossible that there will be any real change brought about by the act. The stratification of educational opportunity in the US won’t change, and the author gives a number of reasons for this (he says six, but I could only count four).
The first, and most obvious, is that the educational opportunity available according to one’s social class has been remarkably fixed over the whole of the 20th Century, so if it is going to change it will require some incredibly radical change first in what we do. You know, doing pretty much the same thing and expecting radical change is a fairly good definition of insanity. The second is that families with resources use those resources to advantage their kids and this makes social inequality persistent. The third is that your home economic resources are a much better gauge for estimating your child’s educational success than the resources available at the school your child attends. So that even if (by some crazy mistake) all schools ended up with the same resources, this still would not be enough to equalise outcomes. Economic inequality is massively increasing in the US and elsewhere – so this would also speak against any narrowing in the achievement gap. The last is that while there is law in the US to at least do something to ensure equality of opportunity on the basis of race (as pathetically inadequate as this has proved to be) or gender (even if now we talk about boys being disadvantaged), there is no corresponding move towards ending discrimination on the basis of economic disadvantage. Therefore, there isn’t really any movement pushing for things to improve.
The interventions that No Child Left Behind trigger if a school is not meeting its obligations include things that have been shown to work in improving student results – however, these are not being implemented in a way that is consistent with the research (for example, additional tuition for failing students is meant to be one-on-one tuition, not more of the same they are already receiving in their under-resourced and over-crowded classrooms). On the basis of all this one really shouldn’t expect the achievement gap to narrow any time soon.
Chapter 12 essentially argues that it would be more cost effective to give young black males a decent education than to continue as the US is currently going in failing these children so that they end up an economic burden on the country - either as unemployed or in prison. This view is premised on the idea that education is a good in and of itself – that if you get a high school diploma you become a certain kind of person. The problem is that education and social class are relational, not fixed. If everyone has a high school diploma then only social failures will only have a high school diploma. There was a time, not terribly long ago, when finishing primary school would have put you in the social elite. This inflation shows no sign slowing. I’m not arguing to not educate black males – but I am saying that if you think this will work as a panacea, I suspect you are fooling yourself.
Chapter 13 is one I am going to have to return to. It is based on the very obvious idea that schools for different social classes teach quite different things – but just how different and why? The author tracked the educations available in five elementary schools servicing different classes in the US. What was most interesting about this was not just the teachers of the working class kids saying - look, I hate to categorise these kids, but they are lazy. No, what was most interesting was the author asking the various kids where knowledge came from and if they could create knowledge themselves. Naturally, there was a gradient in which the further up the social ladder you were the more likely you were to believe knowledge was something you could not only acquire, but change. These kids tended to have been given harder tasks to do – tasks that extended them – and also used harder text books. The working class kids were given a series of facts to learn often piecemeal and often also unrelated. The middle and upper class kids had much richer educational experiences as they were expected to be both interested and engaged. The working class were given the ‘basics’ and so resisted these educational experiences (mostly because they were as boring as bat shit), while those with habits of learning were given experiences much more likely to encourage them to keep going. A kind of virtuous circle.
If the working class kids were presented an education based on facts, the middle class kids were presented with ‘content’. There was stuff they needed to learn if they were to get to college and that stuff was in the book. Education is a process of assimilation of that content. And, naturally enough, this tends to mean that when you ask these kids where knowledge comes from, they tend to think it comes from experts and books.
The upper class kids are quite different. Their teachers seek to present them with experiences from which they can interpret meaning and make up their own minds – what is called in the trade, inquiry based learning. As you can see, this gives quite a different relationship for the students to knowledge. Knowledge is something you can seek out, but you can also change it and forge it anew.
Where the working class kids hesitated when asked where knowledge comes from – basically saying to themselves, what is this idiot on about now? The upper class kids said that it comes from your head. The author says that this means narcissism is the main theme to come out of her observations of these kids – they are extreme individualists who believe they are pretty well the centre of the universe. As their teachers said, they are preparing these kids to think – rather than have the basics beaten into them or having a broad range of ‘content’ made available to them. But rather, how to think and how to find out.
What is particularly interesting in this discussion is that the elite schools provide a much more detailed understanding of the social classes and their histories in the US than do any of the other schools. As such, the elite in the US are schooled in social realities – whereas the working class kids are given a series of more or less unconnected dates and no real information at all about their own history.
Another very interesting chapter was Chapter 20 in which the author discusses the ‘blackening’ of Hmong youth – kids from an ethnic minority from Vietnam. Chapter 21 gives a really lovely introduction to Bernstein and his code theory. The bit that is most important in this chapter is the notion that Bernstein really isn’t talking about a deficit model of educational disadvantage – but rather that schools are sites for reproducing social structures. However, our society is in the midst of substantial change and therefore the role of schools at the moment is also in flux. No one is quite sure that the role of schools ought to be or the kind of society we are moving towards in our post-industrial societies.
The last chapter I want to mention is Chapter 23 by Lyn Yates and Julie McLeod. Julie taught me at Melbourne Uni and Lyn was the discussant in a seminar I gave a paper at recently. But this chapter is an interesting summary of some research they did on a number of schools in Victoria over a seven-year period. It is particularly interesting as it doesn’t just focus on upper class and lower class schools and say – look at that, social differences exist – but rather it also looks at different schools in the middle and how these too have different approaches to schooling and produce quite different students. They also show that school alone doesn’t account for all of the differences in these students, but that student agency also plays a role in the development of student subjectivities. The book on this research is well worth reading – Making Modern Lives: Subjectivity, Schooling, and Social Change.
As you see, there is a wealth of themes touched on in this book – and I’ve barely scratched the surface in this review. I’ve left out quite a few of the chapters, particularly those dealing much more on race and racism. The last chapter of the book is particularly worth reading as it looks at British films and how these are illuminated by understanding race, gender and class issues facing Britain. This is a very useful book, not least as it gives very helpful introductions to key educational sociologists, such as Bourdieu, Bernstein, Weber and Marx, along with other key ideas such as critical theory, critical race theory and intersectionality. Lots to think about here.
I’m only going to mention the articles I found particularly interesting. But they are all good and all worth reading. In fact, I was really impressed with the quality of the articles in this collection.
The first one I want to mention is Chapter 3 – a piece on gated communities and their rise in the US. If there is any phenomenon that should have people worrying about social cohesion this really ought to be it. The less likely you are to see or interact with whole groups of people, the less you are going to care what happens to them and therefore the more distant your life is going to get from theirs. This is shown in this chapter not only in relation to the social class of the other, but also due to their ethnicity. The fact the social other was generally defined as Mexicans – no matter where they actually came from – shows a level of distain for the social other that is becoming a problem and presenting us with ‘compassion deficit’. The chapter even quotes an Australian ad for our first gated community – Sanctuary Cove – which put the matter quite succinctly, “The streets these days are full of cockroaches and most of them are human.” The irony that Sanctuary Cove was built by a criminal who later ran away to Spain to avoid the law isn't mentioned here, but should have been. If there was ever a cockroach... Gated communities are the nice Western version of ethnic cleansing – but I guess eventually, as we have seen a couple of times now with examples of young black people in the US being shot in gated communities – the ethnic cleansing will become increasingly robust with the passage of time.
Chapter 4 is a really interesting discussion on the class and race differences related to teen pregnancy. There is a lovely quote, reminiscent of the argument in The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America, that says that middle class women felt they needed to be mature before having children, whereas working class women often felt they became mature by having children. As a society most of what it means to be an adult depends on being a successful consumer – get a job, buy a house, get a car, own an iPhone. If you do not have any of these you are a failed consumer and therefore not really an adult. For women the alternative route is to have a child – having a child can only be done by an adult, almost by definition. The point is that ‘good girls don’t’ and by good girls we mean the stereotype of the middle class white girl – this being what might be considered society’s gold standard. The title of this – the two-in-oneness of class – refers to the idea that class impacts on people’s subjectivities in interesting ways. Not just from the outside in – society defining and treating you according to your social class – but also from the inside out – you responding to the world according to your social class. The overlap with this and race – with the white pregnant teens disappearing from view (being put on bed rest and having their school work brought to them) was explained as an example of the ‘public negotiation and private loss’ associated with young girls’ bodies. For the white girls ‘beginning to show’ meant slipping to the wrong side of their class. Again, as is pointed out here, girls of colour who become pregnant are generally seen as unredeemable anyway – for white girls there is generally some hope extended, even if never completely believed.
The next chapter documents the end of education – particularly for the working class in America – and the rise of attending school to gain ‘credentials’. We are witnessing the end of critical education, particularly for the working classes, and the rise of educations that must be endured so as to have any hope of entering the labour force. Not because the skills earned through such an education really prepares one for life in the work force, but because without the piece of paper that comes with successfully negotiating this time one has no hope whatsoever.
Chapter 6 is a useful summary of White Middle Class Identities and Urban Schooling – one of the most interesting books I read last year.
One of the things that happens in what Australians like to refer to as Anglophone countries is that while we have remarkably low levels of social mobility this is achieved by means that seek to look entirely fair. However, if you were to draw on a graph all of Australia’s schools and graded them according to the academic success or failure they achieve they would present a fixed curve – one very closely correlated to the socioeconomic status of those attending the school. This remarkably consistent fact – replicable through generations, not just years – would be a mystery needing an explanation if anyone actually believed our system was fair. You know, if academic ability was evenly spread across society and social position was due to merit how could it be possible for the same schools to year after year just happen to get all of the good students? So, how is this miracle of the reproduction of social advantage and disadvantage actually achieved? Chapter 7 does a lovely job in explaining this. The middle classes bring systematic advantages to bear in ensuring positional advantage for their children. A lot of this has to do with the superior social networks the middle classes have. This chapter is a useful introduction to the convertibility of various capitals – social, cultural, financial – into academic success. As Bourdieu says somewhere, the education system dresses up social advantage as individual merit. But it is an interesting relationship here – getting into an Ivy league university requires a number of things – not least some notion that this is possible and worth doing – the fact that the people interviewed in this paper know lots of people who had been there and done that can’t be under-estimated. It is hard to follow a path if you have no idea where it starts, where it ends or if you are even consistently on it. And if there is one thing universities excel at, it is making obscure the pathways available and hiding where they lead.
Chapter 10 looks at new immigrant families to the US and how their previous social position in their own country – Sudan – impacts on their dispositions towards their children’s education. Having a middle class disposition overcomes many of the other ‘disadvantages’ presented to them. The notion of having an entitlement – something working class people and those who have been schooled in being the racial other don’t have – means a much greater likelihood for academic success. This is what elsewhere is referred to as ‘good migrants.
Chapter 11 is really very interesting. One of the things the No Child Left Behind Act in the US was supposedly put in place to achieve was, well, that no child would be left behind. So, how likely is it that it will achieve this? According to this author, it is virtually impossible that there will be any real change brought about by the act. The stratification of educational opportunity in the US won’t change, and the author gives a number of reasons for this (he says six, but I could only count four).
The first, and most obvious, is that the educational opportunity available according to one’s social class has been remarkably fixed over the whole of the 20th Century, so if it is going to change it will require some incredibly radical change first in what we do. You know, doing pretty much the same thing and expecting radical change is a fairly good definition of insanity. The second is that families with resources use those resources to advantage their kids and this makes social inequality persistent. The third is that your home economic resources are a much better gauge for estimating your child’s educational success than the resources available at the school your child attends. So that even if (by some crazy mistake) all schools ended up with the same resources, this still would not be enough to equalise outcomes. Economic inequality is massively increasing in the US and elsewhere – so this would also speak against any narrowing in the achievement gap. The last is that while there is law in the US to at least do something to ensure equality of opportunity on the basis of race (as pathetically inadequate as this has proved to be) or gender (even if now we talk about boys being disadvantaged), there is no corresponding move towards ending discrimination on the basis of economic disadvantage. Therefore, there isn’t really any movement pushing for things to improve.
The interventions that No Child Left Behind trigger if a school is not meeting its obligations include things that have been shown to work in improving student results – however, these are not being implemented in a way that is consistent with the research (for example, additional tuition for failing students is meant to be one-on-one tuition, not more of the same they are already receiving in their under-resourced and over-crowded classrooms). On the basis of all this one really shouldn’t expect the achievement gap to narrow any time soon.
Chapter 12 essentially argues that it would be more cost effective to give young black males a decent education than to continue as the US is currently going in failing these children so that they end up an economic burden on the country - either as unemployed or in prison. This view is premised on the idea that education is a good in and of itself – that if you get a high school diploma you become a certain kind of person. The problem is that education and social class are relational, not fixed. If everyone has a high school diploma then only social failures will only have a high school diploma. There was a time, not terribly long ago, when finishing primary school would have put you in the social elite. This inflation shows no sign slowing. I’m not arguing to not educate black males – but I am saying that if you think this will work as a panacea, I suspect you are fooling yourself.
Chapter 13 is one I am going to have to return to. It is based on the very obvious idea that schools for different social classes teach quite different things – but just how different and why? The author tracked the educations available in five elementary schools servicing different classes in the US. What was most interesting about this was not just the teachers of the working class kids saying - look, I hate to categorise these kids, but they are lazy. No, what was most interesting was the author asking the various kids where knowledge came from and if they could create knowledge themselves. Naturally, there was a gradient in which the further up the social ladder you were the more likely you were to believe knowledge was something you could not only acquire, but change. These kids tended to have been given harder tasks to do – tasks that extended them – and also used harder text books. The working class kids were given a series of facts to learn often piecemeal and often also unrelated. The middle and upper class kids had much richer educational experiences as they were expected to be both interested and engaged. The working class were given the ‘basics’ and so resisted these educational experiences (mostly because they were as boring as bat shit), while those with habits of learning were given experiences much more likely to encourage them to keep going. A kind of virtuous circle.
If the working class kids were presented an education based on facts, the middle class kids were presented with ‘content’. There was stuff they needed to learn if they were to get to college and that stuff was in the book. Education is a process of assimilation of that content. And, naturally enough, this tends to mean that when you ask these kids where knowledge comes from, they tend to think it comes from experts and books.
The upper class kids are quite different. Their teachers seek to present them with experiences from which they can interpret meaning and make up their own minds – what is called in the trade, inquiry based learning. As you can see, this gives quite a different relationship for the students to knowledge. Knowledge is something you can seek out, but you can also change it and forge it anew.
Where the working class kids hesitated when asked where knowledge comes from – basically saying to themselves, what is this idiot on about now? The upper class kids said that it comes from your head. The author says that this means narcissism is the main theme to come out of her observations of these kids – they are extreme individualists who believe they are pretty well the centre of the universe. As their teachers said, they are preparing these kids to think – rather than have the basics beaten into them or having a broad range of ‘content’ made available to them. But rather, how to think and how to find out.
What is particularly interesting in this discussion is that the elite schools provide a much more detailed understanding of the social classes and their histories in the US than do any of the other schools. As such, the elite in the US are schooled in social realities – whereas the working class kids are given a series of more or less unconnected dates and no real information at all about their own history.
Another very interesting chapter was Chapter 20 in which the author discusses the ‘blackening’ of Hmong youth – kids from an ethnic minority from Vietnam. Chapter 21 gives a really lovely introduction to Bernstein and his code theory. The bit that is most important in this chapter is the notion that Bernstein really isn’t talking about a deficit model of educational disadvantage – but rather that schools are sites for reproducing social structures. However, our society is in the midst of substantial change and therefore the role of schools at the moment is also in flux. No one is quite sure that the role of schools ought to be or the kind of society we are moving towards in our post-industrial societies.
The last chapter I want to mention is Chapter 23 by Lyn Yates and Julie McLeod. Julie taught me at Melbourne Uni and Lyn was the discussant in a seminar I gave a paper at recently. But this chapter is an interesting summary of some research they did on a number of schools in Victoria over a seven-year period. It is particularly interesting as it doesn’t just focus on upper class and lower class schools and say – look at that, social differences exist – but rather it also looks at different schools in the middle and how these too have different approaches to schooling and produce quite different students. They also show that school alone doesn’t account for all of the differences in these students, but that student agency also plays a role in the development of student subjectivities. The book on this research is well worth reading – Making Modern Lives: Subjectivity, Schooling, and Social Change.
As you see, there is a wealth of themes touched on in this book – and I’ve barely scratched the surface in this review. I’ve left out quite a few of the chapters, particularly those dealing much more on race and racism. The last chapter of the book is particularly worth reading as it looks at British films and how these are illuminated by understanding race, gender and class issues facing Britain. This is a very useful book, not least as it gives very helpful introductions to key educational sociologists, such as Bourdieu, Bernstein, Weber and Marx, along with other key ideas such as critical theory, critical race theory and intersectionality. Lots to think about here.
October 4, 2011
This is a great companion book to Fertilizers, Pills and Magnetic Strips: The fate of public education in America
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews