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Making the Difference by Connell
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First published March 1, 1982
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About the author
Raewyn W. Connell
45 books96 followersRaewyn Connell (also known as R.W. Connell and Robert W. Connell) is an Australian sociologist. She gained prominence as an intellectual of the Australian New Left. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney and known for the concept of hegemonic masculinity and southern theory.
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January 20, 2014
The fundamental question that this book, based on a remarkable research project, seeks to address is 'how is educational inequality reproduced and if we wanted to make a more equitable education system, what would that involve?' The research was conducted in Australia in the late 1970s and focused on not only a diverse range of kids at school, but also conducted interviews with their parents, teachers, school principals and even some friends. The idea that frames this research was that education isn’t a simple thing – but a network of relationships that manifest in different ways across the school system. In some cases these relationships make success at school remarkably more likely – in other cases it makes success very much more difficult.
One of the facts about education that is virtually impossible to ignore is that postcodes impact on school success. If, as Teese and Polesel point out in Undemocratic Schooling: Equity and Quality in Mass Secondary Education in Australia, you plot all schools according to their success in various subjects over time, the graph you end up with is remarkably consistent a hierarchical curriculum produces a hierarchical education system. Now, this is something that ought to require an explanation. If we had a fair and equal education system this graph would be far less predictable and far less consistent over years. I’m not saying there is never any change in the ordering of success in this ranking – but in the state were I live, if MacRob didn’t come at the top of the rankings (say in the top five) then something would be seriously wrong with the world. The reasons for this are not completely simple, but in large measure they are because the school system itself is organised to reproduce precisely these inequalities.
It does this in a number of ways. One is that in Australia there are a large number of private schools – supported by government funding, but able to charge fees which act as a barrier to keep out students that would drag down performance. Unlike other countries that lavish private schools with government funds, these schools have no obligations at all to receive students from families unable to afford the excessive fees required. Decades of government policy from both sides of our political system has produced a two-tiered system where private schools are often grossly overfunded and state schools struggle to meet basic needs – and not just educational needs, but even the basic physical needs of their students such as warm classrooms.
The curriculum is a comprehensive one, and one that is regulated by exams – although this book was written long before tests as NAPLAN had been introduced, even when there were just final year exams – that most children were not even going to take – this alone was enough to regulate the whole of the school curriculum.
Education has increasingly become what these authors dreaded – a system of individualised competition judged on the basis of the ability of students to assimilate (until the exam date anyway) increasingly abstract knowledge. This form of assessment is skewed towards what the authors refer to as ruling-class families. These families have the resources to buy in additional educational support if needed, they already have the habits and life situation likely to assist in focusing on abstract and generally meaningless information (anyone remember doing logarithms at school?) And their schools are premised on the notion that competition is the world’s highest good. As the authors point out, private schools create networks for ruling-class families. But working-class schools are run by bureaucracies and staffed by middle-class teachers who often misread student resistance to a literally meaningless curriculum as bad upbringing.
The horror of this is that working-class parents tend to have been failed by the very education system they seek to endorse – one based on excessive discipline inculcating boring and abstract knowledge. However, they have had a lifetime of looking about them at those who did get a ‘proper’ education – how they have better jobs and better lives – and so they blame themselves for their failure at school. They want their kids to succeed where they failed – and that all too often means wanting more discipline and a more abstract curriculum for their kids – that is, precisely what failed them as students. This kind of misrecognition is utterly fascinating. It is a consequence of what Beck refers to as the atomisation of people – how we have been forced to confront societal problems with only our life-biographies to protect us.
What is clear from this research is that parents of all social classes want what is best for their kids and that they all see education as a very important part of that. However, far too often what education is reduced down to is the transmission of knowledge from teachers to students. In this form of education everyone is at the same starting line when they begin school. All that is needed is to keep shovelling the same stuff at them at a constant rate and testing every other year to see they have learnt what has been shovelled at them, and then everyone will have had an equal opportunity of getting a good education. But, as the authors point out, equal opportunity of this kind actually does much to perpetuate inequalities.
And it isn’t all that clear why everyone ought to end up at the same point. Our society needs people doing a range of different jobs. As is pointed out in Educating Australia: Government, Economy and Citizen Since 1960, the number of jobs that require post-secondary education have not really increased. Yet we have responded to the employment crisis in capitalism by increasing the length of time everyone spends in education and then complaining about the quality of the education system when people still can’t find jobs when they finish school.
However, these changes, particularly around mass secondary education, have caused ruling-class schools to also need to change. But ruling-class schools are much better placed to meet these changes. Firstly, these changes are directly in the interests of the clients they serve. As such entering into increased competition from earlier and earlier ages fits quite well with their lifestyle. But a lot of working-class social habits are based on collective action and support – ideas which are fundamentally opposed to the Hobbesian war of each against all promoted by our late modern capitalist societies.
This book is not presenting an argument for a lesser education for working-class kids. What it is saying is that education needs to be considered much more broadly than around academic test scores. We need to have a closer look at what we value in education and what it is we are actually teaching our kids. If the answer is – as it has been – that we are teaching a large proportion of working-class people that they are effectively failures, if our education system is designed to traumatise large numbers of these people – then we are clearly doing something terribly wrong. If you can take a family that wants their kids to learn and put them in a situation that convinces them that their kids are too stupid to learn – then maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with what we are doing.
You couldn’t do this research today – although it is needed now more than ever before. This book is a classic of Australian educational research for a very good reason. Here are some quotes:
Depression memories saw education as a protection against unemployment. With full employment, massive immigration and economic expansion in the 1950s, it was more a case of getting left behind if you didn’t join in. Page 19
The pressure on schooling increased as the credibility of its knowledge declined. In the economic recession of the late 1970s, the two trends combined with youth unemployment to produce a breakdown in the relationship between school and labour market. 22
A cult of statistics developed in educational research, as elsewhere, at the expense of understanding. This was useful when the task was to map inequalities, disastrous when the problem was to explain them. 26
The reproduction paradigm wrought a revolution in theory, but has had rather thin effects on practice. 28
We argued that to understand the educational situation of a teenager thoroughly, it was necessary to get to know all the significant people in it: her family, her friends, her teachers, as well as herself. 30
There is also a class pattern of involvement and exclusion. Working-class parents who drop out of involvement with their kids’ schooling after the transition to high school have rarely lost interest: it is simply that the school is organised in a way that makes that interest difficult to put into practice. As the research went on, we became very familiar with stories told us by parents of the ways they have been frozen out: promises of action not followed up, phone calls not returned, principals retreating behind bureaucratic rules, insinuations of ignorance and uncouthness, and so on. 53
Most secondary teachers effectively know nothing about their pupils’ families. 55
Yet that schooling, as we have seen, failed them. Why aren’t they looking for alternatives? By and large they are – but alternatives as they seem them, not as academics (or even teachers) do. Education is still defined as the transmission of an accepted body of knowledge, in every context they know about. The parent who is bitterly regretful in retrospect about having dropped out of school at thirteen, is still very likely to blame him or herself, not the school as an institution. ‘The alternative’, then, is not something different in quality but more of the same – maybe four or five years more – to supply the knowledge that the last generation missed out on. Thus, in a good many families, a strong push from the parents for the kids to stay on regardless of the trouble they run into. 60
The events in which these people are caught up will only make sense if we abandon the habit of thinking about troublemaking as a kind of irrational, pathological syndrome, that is, as a kind of person, and start thinking of it as a particular relationship, a form of resistance to conventional schooling. All of these four teenagers in fact told us, quite clearly and reasonably, what they were up to and why. Each has a case to argue against schooling. 84
Yet these girls, too, face very hard choices – between the femininity modelled by their mothers and that of the ‘career women’, and between the social practices of their families and an unknown which lies beyond Matriculation and tertiary education. For the majority of girls in these schools, the future looks rather more familiar: early leaving, a job, early marriage, and full-time motherhood. 99
(This is a view almost universally held by the kids we talked to. Contrary to what is supposed by some critics of progressive methods, teachers cannot buy popularity by abandoning ‘discipline’.) 102
First, teaching is an emotionally-dangerous occupation. To the extent that teachers’ authority is something which they construct in isolation and out of their own resources, it is a part and extension of themselves. To the extent students resist, challenge or subvert their authority, so do they threaten them, personally. 103
Many other working-class parents also contrast the slackness of the present day with the firm discipline, and enforced respect for adults, they experienced as children themselves. Ruling-class parents often raised the issue of discipline as a key reason for their preference for private schools. 108
The crucial features of academic knowledge are hierarchically-organised bodies of academic knowledge appropriated by individual competition. The formal examinations that traditionally have gone with it, and have been the subject of long debate, are less central then the organisation of content and learning. These have massive effects even for kids who will never face a certifying exam. 120
The response has been almost entirely negative, and much of the criticism comes from ‘good’ students who regard it a waste of time.
‘Then you have subjects like music. That should be an elective, ‘cause Music’s not going to help me get a job for a dentist, is it?’
Neither, as it happens, is English, or Social Studies or French or Geography – except so far as the school and certification system make these necessary steps to becoming a dentist eventually. 120
It is striking how this kind of transaction confirms working-class parents’ exclusion from the school; by transforming a disagreement over pedagogy … into a sign of the parent’s educational incompetence…. 131
Our basic argument is that there is a fundamental difference here between working-class and ruling-class education. We summarize it in this formula: the ruling-class and its schools are articulated mainly through a market, while the working-class and its schools are articulated mainly through a bureaucracy. 133
The point of our examples is this: the market provides a mechanism by which schools can change in response to changes in the ruling class. There is nothing automatic or simply functional about this. For one thing the pressures from the market are diverse and sometimes contradictory (when, for example, girls’ schools are expected to produce both marriageable femininity and high-powered academic competitors). 137
The mistake is in thinking of people as passive or mere markers of a geometrical spot, and in thinking of the places they occupy as points on a scale or boxes in a pile. As we have seen, the connections between individuals and a class is, in fact, an active relation to complex processes. That relation is only partly captured by the question: ‘In which class is this person?’ It is more fully grasped by asking: ‘Into which class relations does this person enter?’ 145
All of this seems to obey rules: drawing lines, knotting networks, defining ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. The ruling-class school creates ruling-class solidarity. 151
Their intervention in this sphere of life is profoundly divisive, in two ways.
First, by pushing kids away from parents. The derisive attitude towards older people implicit in a lot of the youth media content precisely cuts the kids off from the knowledge, traditions, and wisdom of their parents. There is a rupture in working-class experience being produced here. It is far from absolute, but it is real.
Second, by separating girls from boys. Commercial youth culture is not only sexual; it is profoundly, viciously sexist. 165
In Chapter Two, discussing parents’ experiences in their own schooling, we saw how often these were alienating and intimidating. Working-class people are often injured, insulted and disempowered by their experience with schools. This is not a pleasant thing for educators to have to recognise, but it is a basic fact of the situation and has to be reckoned with. 166
Competition is always divisive, always opposed to the sense of solidarity, of common fate, and the need for collective response, that is basic to the self-organisation of oppressed or exploited groups. 172
But it’s intervention has a lot to do with a hierarchy constructed among different kinds of masculinity and femininity; and, at the same time, the relations that are constructed between boys and girls. 175
Four main types of answer have been given to the question ‘what causes educational inequality?’: answers stressing differences between individuals; the characteristics of schools and families; the relationships between home and school, and the class lifestyles; and the place of schooling in the social structure. 184
A true appreciation of individuality pushes one towards, not away from, a reckoning with social context. 185
There are, we would suggest, severe difficulties with this (Bourdieu’s) account of the matter. It practically obliterates the person who is actually the main constructor of the home/school relationship. The student is treated merely as the bearer of cultural capital, a bundle of abilities, knowledges and attitudes furnished by the parents. On our evidence, this is wrong. What children actually bring to school is their relationship to their parents’ educational experiences and strategies; and the relationship may involve rejection, ambivalence, misunderstanding or selection, as much as endorsement or duplication. 188
Our material suggests that these relationships have developed in ways that give different social groups radically different capacities to fashion educational arrangements that are favourable to them. As we saw in Chapter Four, the connection of the ruling-class with its clientele is principally through a network and market, while in the case of the working-class school the key institutions are state compulsion and a centralised bureaucracy. Ruling-class educational aspirations are thus able to construct a form of schooling that is organic to the class, while working-class educational aspirations meet a process of cultural intervention that is inevitably disruptive. 190
From the point of view of the student and her family, what ‘equal opportunity’ means is the opportunity to seek individual promotion in the school system, in economic and social life. The material from our working-class schools shows vividly what this already means: streaming and creaming in the organisation of the school; discrediting of parents’ knowledge and judgements, teacher-student relationships that rarely involve real trust. A heavier stress on equality of opportunity could be expected to intensify these effects, not mitigate them. 195
Perhaps the most corrosive effect was that while it became necessary to have consumed more and more schooling to get a job, most jobs actually needed less school knowledge to do. 197
The problem is, as we have seen, that the attempt to get most kids to swallow academic knowledge produces insurmountable problems of motivation and control. Not only because of the abstractness of the content, but also as a consequence of the formal authority relations of its teaching. 199
First, it is important that state school teachers should come to see themselves for what they really are: the teachers of the working-class. Not the only ones (given the Catholic system), and not all of them (given the state schools in ruling-class suburbs). By and large, however, that is what they are, and long will be. Until teachers recognise it, and indeed take pride in it, the real character of the problems they face will remain obscure. 207
In making such choice, we would argue, educators should look to the deepest roots of their trade. Education has fundamental connections with the idea of human emancipation, though it is constantly in danger of being captured for other interests. In a society disfigured by class exploitation, sexual and racial oppression, and in chronic danger of war and environmental destruction, the only education worth its name is one that forms people capable of taking part in their own liberation. 208
One of the facts about education that is virtually impossible to ignore is that postcodes impact on school success. If, as Teese and Polesel point out in Undemocratic Schooling: Equity and Quality in Mass Secondary Education in Australia, you plot all schools according to their success in various subjects over time, the graph you end up with is remarkably consistent a hierarchical curriculum produces a hierarchical education system. Now, this is something that ought to require an explanation. If we had a fair and equal education system this graph would be far less predictable and far less consistent over years. I’m not saying there is never any change in the ordering of success in this ranking – but in the state were I live, if MacRob didn’t come at the top of the rankings (say in the top five) then something would be seriously wrong with the world. The reasons for this are not completely simple, but in large measure they are because the school system itself is organised to reproduce precisely these inequalities.
It does this in a number of ways. One is that in Australia there are a large number of private schools – supported by government funding, but able to charge fees which act as a barrier to keep out students that would drag down performance. Unlike other countries that lavish private schools with government funds, these schools have no obligations at all to receive students from families unable to afford the excessive fees required. Decades of government policy from both sides of our political system has produced a two-tiered system where private schools are often grossly overfunded and state schools struggle to meet basic needs – and not just educational needs, but even the basic physical needs of their students such as warm classrooms.
The curriculum is a comprehensive one, and one that is regulated by exams – although this book was written long before tests as NAPLAN had been introduced, even when there were just final year exams – that most children were not even going to take – this alone was enough to regulate the whole of the school curriculum.
Education has increasingly become what these authors dreaded – a system of individualised competition judged on the basis of the ability of students to assimilate (until the exam date anyway) increasingly abstract knowledge. This form of assessment is skewed towards what the authors refer to as ruling-class families. These families have the resources to buy in additional educational support if needed, they already have the habits and life situation likely to assist in focusing on abstract and generally meaningless information (anyone remember doing logarithms at school?) And their schools are premised on the notion that competition is the world’s highest good. As the authors point out, private schools create networks for ruling-class families. But working-class schools are run by bureaucracies and staffed by middle-class teachers who often misread student resistance to a literally meaningless curriculum as bad upbringing.
The horror of this is that working-class parents tend to have been failed by the very education system they seek to endorse – one based on excessive discipline inculcating boring and abstract knowledge. However, they have had a lifetime of looking about them at those who did get a ‘proper’ education – how they have better jobs and better lives – and so they blame themselves for their failure at school. They want their kids to succeed where they failed – and that all too often means wanting more discipline and a more abstract curriculum for their kids – that is, precisely what failed them as students. This kind of misrecognition is utterly fascinating. It is a consequence of what Beck refers to as the atomisation of people – how we have been forced to confront societal problems with only our life-biographies to protect us.
What is clear from this research is that parents of all social classes want what is best for their kids and that they all see education as a very important part of that. However, far too often what education is reduced down to is the transmission of knowledge from teachers to students. In this form of education everyone is at the same starting line when they begin school. All that is needed is to keep shovelling the same stuff at them at a constant rate and testing every other year to see they have learnt what has been shovelled at them, and then everyone will have had an equal opportunity of getting a good education. But, as the authors point out, equal opportunity of this kind actually does much to perpetuate inequalities.
And it isn’t all that clear why everyone ought to end up at the same point. Our society needs people doing a range of different jobs. As is pointed out in Educating Australia: Government, Economy and Citizen Since 1960, the number of jobs that require post-secondary education have not really increased. Yet we have responded to the employment crisis in capitalism by increasing the length of time everyone spends in education and then complaining about the quality of the education system when people still can’t find jobs when they finish school.
However, these changes, particularly around mass secondary education, have caused ruling-class schools to also need to change. But ruling-class schools are much better placed to meet these changes. Firstly, these changes are directly in the interests of the clients they serve. As such entering into increased competition from earlier and earlier ages fits quite well with their lifestyle. But a lot of working-class social habits are based on collective action and support – ideas which are fundamentally opposed to the Hobbesian war of each against all promoted by our late modern capitalist societies.
This book is not presenting an argument for a lesser education for working-class kids. What it is saying is that education needs to be considered much more broadly than around academic test scores. We need to have a closer look at what we value in education and what it is we are actually teaching our kids. If the answer is – as it has been – that we are teaching a large proportion of working-class people that they are effectively failures, if our education system is designed to traumatise large numbers of these people – then we are clearly doing something terribly wrong. If you can take a family that wants their kids to learn and put them in a situation that convinces them that their kids are too stupid to learn – then maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with what we are doing.
You couldn’t do this research today – although it is needed now more than ever before. This book is a classic of Australian educational research for a very good reason. Here are some quotes:
Depression memories saw education as a protection against unemployment. With full employment, massive immigration and economic expansion in the 1950s, it was more a case of getting left behind if you didn’t join in. Page 19
The pressure on schooling increased as the credibility of its knowledge declined. In the economic recession of the late 1970s, the two trends combined with youth unemployment to produce a breakdown in the relationship between school and labour market. 22
A cult of statistics developed in educational research, as elsewhere, at the expense of understanding. This was useful when the task was to map inequalities, disastrous when the problem was to explain them. 26
The reproduction paradigm wrought a revolution in theory, but has had rather thin effects on practice. 28
We argued that to understand the educational situation of a teenager thoroughly, it was necessary to get to know all the significant people in it: her family, her friends, her teachers, as well as herself. 30
There is also a class pattern of involvement and exclusion. Working-class parents who drop out of involvement with their kids’ schooling after the transition to high school have rarely lost interest: it is simply that the school is organised in a way that makes that interest difficult to put into practice. As the research went on, we became very familiar with stories told us by parents of the ways they have been frozen out: promises of action not followed up, phone calls not returned, principals retreating behind bureaucratic rules, insinuations of ignorance and uncouthness, and so on. 53
Most secondary teachers effectively know nothing about their pupils’ families. 55
Yet that schooling, as we have seen, failed them. Why aren’t they looking for alternatives? By and large they are – but alternatives as they seem them, not as academics (or even teachers) do. Education is still defined as the transmission of an accepted body of knowledge, in every context they know about. The parent who is bitterly regretful in retrospect about having dropped out of school at thirteen, is still very likely to blame him or herself, not the school as an institution. ‘The alternative’, then, is not something different in quality but more of the same – maybe four or five years more – to supply the knowledge that the last generation missed out on. Thus, in a good many families, a strong push from the parents for the kids to stay on regardless of the trouble they run into. 60
The events in which these people are caught up will only make sense if we abandon the habit of thinking about troublemaking as a kind of irrational, pathological syndrome, that is, as a kind of person, and start thinking of it as a particular relationship, a form of resistance to conventional schooling. All of these four teenagers in fact told us, quite clearly and reasonably, what they were up to and why. Each has a case to argue against schooling. 84
Yet these girls, too, face very hard choices – between the femininity modelled by their mothers and that of the ‘career women’, and between the social practices of their families and an unknown which lies beyond Matriculation and tertiary education. For the majority of girls in these schools, the future looks rather more familiar: early leaving, a job, early marriage, and full-time motherhood. 99
(This is a view almost universally held by the kids we talked to. Contrary to what is supposed by some critics of progressive methods, teachers cannot buy popularity by abandoning ‘discipline’.) 102
First, teaching is an emotionally-dangerous occupation. To the extent that teachers’ authority is something which they construct in isolation and out of their own resources, it is a part and extension of themselves. To the extent students resist, challenge or subvert their authority, so do they threaten them, personally. 103
Many other working-class parents also contrast the slackness of the present day with the firm discipline, and enforced respect for adults, they experienced as children themselves. Ruling-class parents often raised the issue of discipline as a key reason for their preference for private schools. 108
The crucial features of academic knowledge are hierarchically-organised bodies of academic knowledge appropriated by individual competition. The formal examinations that traditionally have gone with it, and have been the subject of long debate, are less central then the organisation of content and learning. These have massive effects even for kids who will never face a certifying exam. 120
The response has been almost entirely negative, and much of the criticism comes from ‘good’ students who regard it a waste of time.
‘Then you have subjects like music. That should be an elective, ‘cause Music’s not going to help me get a job for a dentist, is it?’
Neither, as it happens, is English, or Social Studies or French or Geography – except so far as the school and certification system make these necessary steps to becoming a dentist eventually. 120
It is striking how this kind of transaction confirms working-class parents’ exclusion from the school; by transforming a disagreement over pedagogy … into a sign of the parent’s educational incompetence…. 131
Our basic argument is that there is a fundamental difference here between working-class and ruling-class education. We summarize it in this formula: the ruling-class and its schools are articulated mainly through a market, while the working-class and its schools are articulated mainly through a bureaucracy. 133
The point of our examples is this: the market provides a mechanism by which schools can change in response to changes in the ruling class. There is nothing automatic or simply functional about this. For one thing the pressures from the market are diverse and sometimes contradictory (when, for example, girls’ schools are expected to produce both marriageable femininity and high-powered academic competitors). 137
The mistake is in thinking of people as passive or mere markers of a geometrical spot, and in thinking of the places they occupy as points on a scale or boxes in a pile. As we have seen, the connections between individuals and a class is, in fact, an active relation to complex processes. That relation is only partly captured by the question: ‘In which class is this person?’ It is more fully grasped by asking: ‘Into which class relations does this person enter?’ 145
All of this seems to obey rules: drawing lines, knotting networks, defining ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. The ruling-class school creates ruling-class solidarity. 151
Their intervention in this sphere of life is profoundly divisive, in two ways.
First, by pushing kids away from parents. The derisive attitude towards older people implicit in a lot of the youth media content precisely cuts the kids off from the knowledge, traditions, and wisdom of their parents. There is a rupture in working-class experience being produced here. It is far from absolute, but it is real.
Second, by separating girls from boys. Commercial youth culture is not only sexual; it is profoundly, viciously sexist. 165
In Chapter Two, discussing parents’ experiences in their own schooling, we saw how often these were alienating and intimidating. Working-class people are often injured, insulted and disempowered by their experience with schools. This is not a pleasant thing for educators to have to recognise, but it is a basic fact of the situation and has to be reckoned with. 166
Competition is always divisive, always opposed to the sense of solidarity, of common fate, and the need for collective response, that is basic to the self-organisation of oppressed or exploited groups. 172
But it’s intervention has a lot to do with a hierarchy constructed among different kinds of masculinity and femininity; and, at the same time, the relations that are constructed between boys and girls. 175
Four main types of answer have been given to the question ‘what causes educational inequality?’: answers stressing differences between individuals; the characteristics of schools and families; the relationships between home and school, and the class lifestyles; and the place of schooling in the social structure. 184
A true appreciation of individuality pushes one towards, not away from, a reckoning with social context. 185
There are, we would suggest, severe difficulties with this (Bourdieu’s) account of the matter. It practically obliterates the person who is actually the main constructor of the home/school relationship. The student is treated merely as the bearer of cultural capital, a bundle of abilities, knowledges and attitudes furnished by the parents. On our evidence, this is wrong. What children actually bring to school is their relationship to their parents’ educational experiences and strategies; and the relationship may involve rejection, ambivalence, misunderstanding or selection, as much as endorsement or duplication. 188
Our material suggests that these relationships have developed in ways that give different social groups radically different capacities to fashion educational arrangements that are favourable to them. As we saw in Chapter Four, the connection of the ruling-class with its clientele is principally through a network and market, while in the case of the working-class school the key institutions are state compulsion and a centralised bureaucracy. Ruling-class educational aspirations are thus able to construct a form of schooling that is organic to the class, while working-class educational aspirations meet a process of cultural intervention that is inevitably disruptive. 190
From the point of view of the student and her family, what ‘equal opportunity’ means is the opportunity to seek individual promotion in the school system, in economic and social life. The material from our working-class schools shows vividly what this already means: streaming and creaming in the organisation of the school; discrediting of parents’ knowledge and judgements, teacher-student relationships that rarely involve real trust. A heavier stress on equality of opportunity could be expected to intensify these effects, not mitigate them. 195
Perhaps the most corrosive effect was that while it became necessary to have consumed more and more schooling to get a job, most jobs actually needed less school knowledge to do. 197
The problem is, as we have seen, that the attempt to get most kids to swallow academic knowledge produces insurmountable problems of motivation and control. Not only because of the abstractness of the content, but also as a consequence of the formal authority relations of its teaching. 199
First, it is important that state school teachers should come to see themselves for what they really are: the teachers of the working-class. Not the only ones (given the Catholic system), and not all of them (given the state schools in ruling-class suburbs). By and large, however, that is what they are, and long will be. Until teachers recognise it, and indeed take pride in it, the real character of the problems they face will remain obscure. 207
In making such choice, we would argue, educators should look to the deepest roots of their trade. Education has fundamental connections with the idea of human emancipation, though it is constantly in danger of being captured for other interests. In a society disfigured by class exploitation, sexual and racial oppression, and in chronic danger of war and environmental destruction, the only education worth its name is one that forms people capable of taking part in their own liberation. 208
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