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Education And The Middle Class
It is often assumed that for middle class and academically able children, schooling is a straightforward process that leads to academic success, higher education and entry into middle class occupations. However, this fascinating book shows these relationships to be complex and often uncertain. Based on the biographies of 350 young men and women who might have been considered 'destined for success' at the start of their secondary schooling, the book maps out the educational pathways they took. It analyses their subsequent achievements and entry into employment and compares them with their parents, with one another, and with their generation. Identifying patterns in the data, it also explores examples of extraordinary success and failure, and various forms of interrupted and disrupted careers. As well as documenting a compelling human story, the findings have important implications for current policy debates about academic selection, access to elite universities, and the limits of meritocracy.
- GenresEducation
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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November 8, 2015
This was interesting because it isn’t really quite about the middle class, at least, not what gets called the middle class here in Australia, but what I would probably call the upper middle class and about their relationship to education. This relationship is generally assumed to be pretty unproblematic. The Seven Up series is my go-to example around all this. In that a group of kids from the upper class talk about their educational futures – these are kids aged seven. This involves them naming each of the schools they will attend in the sequence from the time the program was recorded right up to the college in Oxford or Cambridge they believed they would be attending. The filmmakers then come back every seven years and follow everyone’s progress. When the boys are in their mid-twenties, hardly to anyone’s surprise, these children have grown to fulfil the educational journeys that they had themselves detailed so well as children, that is, as children hardly old enough to know what these journeys could possibly mean.
What is interesting here is that the journeys they take through the elite end of the education system appears to just happen, and this is one of the things that these young people say when they are in their mid-to-late twenties that they believe is quite unfair about the program. Yes, sure, they were able to say at seven pretty well what their educational career (and even work career in most cases) would look like – but that didn’t make it inevitable. They got through this, not just by showing up, but on the basis of very hard work. None of which is shown in the series – just some spoilt rich kids talking about how advantaged they are and then going on to prove it. It is hardly surprising they felt they had been unfairly characterised by the show.
I’m not going to say this view of the situation held by these boys isn’t true. You don’t get to be a top lawyer or to get into an Oxbridge university by doing no work at all. I have no doubt that these boys worked damn hard to get where they ended up. But the point is that it is much more likely that you will achieve such an outcome if you are from a certain class than it is if you are from many other social classes – and this is true and can be verified by just looking at the statistics detailing the demographic profiles of the young people who attend these universities.
This is what Bourdieu refers to as the intersection of cultural, social and academic capital, something that certain classes have in spades and that provides them with largely unseen, but still undeniable, advantages. All of which is manifest in these people’s habitus – their habits and dispositions – and that therefore allow them to be, as Bourdieu says, like a fish in water.
But – the point of this book is to look at some of the complications that go with being a fish in water. And it does this by literally following young people from the middle classes (and as I said, people I would say are from the upper middle class) for years and in seeing just how they go on their individual journeys through school.
And the point is that not all of these young people have a simple time on their path through school. This is true even though the expectation of everyone they know and associate with is that they will go to university and also do well. In fact, part of the problem that this book identifies with people from these classes is that the expectations placed on them are so high that sometimes this in itself causes many of these students to crash and burn. Rather than guaranteeing success, it, in fact, puts so much pressure on the kids that they find themselves failing terribly. Or rather, and this was particularly interesting, because the level of achievement in the schools that these kids attend is so high, that what would look like unequivocal success in any other school, looks comparatively like failure here. And some of the kids live with this sense of having failed for years and years after they have left school. Gladwell talks about much the same thing in his latest book – the David and Goliath one – although I have less problem with the thesis here than I did when Gladwell used it.
A lot of this was framed as almost being in contradiction with Bourdieu’s arguments – but really, it wasn’t at all. These kids are from advantaged homes and these advantages remained for them, even if and when they felt they had ‘failed’ and even if their pathway through school was more tortuous than the straight line that had been predicted for them. The thing is that the middle class – even the middle class that goes to ‘good’ private schools in Britain – isn’t even close to being a single entity. Different sections of this class have different relationships to education, and so they enter school with different levels of educational capital that they can draw on. There are families (say, the children of lawyers and doctors) where there has always been a very strong and clear need for these families to have a close and clear relationship with the education system. The credentialing aspect of education has long allowed these professions to restrict access to only those with the educational capital to succeed – so, this section of the middle class is likely to be hyper-vigilant concerning the education of their children and have the past experience of educational success to make sure their efforts aren’t wasted. Academic success, then, is not something that these families are likely to leave to fate.
But other sections of the middle class are not nearly as closely related to the education system – at least, up until comparatively recently, working in business did not require the kinds of educational credentials that becoming a lawyer did. As such, these families may not necessarily have as tightly bound a relationship with the education system as other sections of the middle class have had by necessity. The thing is that we have witnessed a huge shift in the need for credentials throughout our society – and this has lead the middle classes in particular to strive to stake out the ground to ensure they have access to the best educations as a way to reproduce their social position for their own children – and this is particularly true in terms of access to the most exclusive private schools which in turn often lead to the most exclusive university places. However, since not all middle class families have equal levels of educational capital to draw on, gaining access to these places is highly differentiated.
That said, what I found particularly interesting was the difference between the genders discussed here. One of the things Bourdieu does speak at length about is the need for education to appear effortless, and that therefore the most highly rewarded kind of academic success (and here particularly for males) is one where the success comes ‘naturally’ but also in abundance. How true this is in reality is always hard to say, of course, but the point is that the culture in many of the boys’ schools lived is one where the boys that are most liked by their peers are not the boys defined as ‘swots’, but rather the ones that virtually shrug off the need to study. Those that spend their time playing sports or generally frigging around, but who then go on to do well, if not too well, at school anyway. This might, after all, all just be but another kind of display – where these boys actually do lots of study behind closed doors – but that doesn’t make the display any less culturally important. And again, it is the boys who are without large amounts of educational capital that are likely to pay the highest price for not understanding this as display rather than reality, as they are the ones most likely to live the myth to its full and dreadful consequences and to then believe their own lack of capacity (as shown in their failing grades) as being due to themselves as being inadequate as shown by their not succeeding effortlessly as the other boys do.
The girls were more likely to be obsessed with academic success at all costs and to display this obsession in excessive study routines – often presenting their obsessive focus on academic success as badges of honour. As such, girls generally did better than boys at school – but often this all comes at remarkably cost to themselves – both to their physical and psychological wellbeing. Anorexia is only mentioned in passing here, but the association between high achieving academic girls and the kind of self-denying control that is associated with this sort of success and what is necessary if one is to ‘succeed’ at anorexia has been documented in lots of research.
There is a part of me that wants to say ‘no shit, Sherlock’ about this research, but I do think there is more to it than a simple stating of the obvious. There are no guarantees in life, the credentialing function of education is becoming much more intense – so, that it is having an impact on even the top reaches of the middle classes and on their passage through the education system is hardly surprising. But, no matter how good a theory is ‘in theory’, people’s lives are messy, complex and contradictory. The smartest kid with the best family background that involves the most academic of social habituses can still fail badly. People move down – as well as up – the social ladder. Stuff someone’s arm full of drugs or give them an untimely illness, kill one of their parents, or do one of a very, very long list of other problems along the way and the straightest of lines can become quickly over-crowded with twists and turns.
Also, a lot of academic habitus, ironically enough, comes from parents – rather than the good school that you go to, and so going to a good school can in some ways, for some people without the right habitus, be more of a hindrance than a help. It is remarkable how frequently the kids here went to a very good school, but ended up in a crap university as they were more or less left to themselves to decide where to go next or even what to do. Or where the thought of going to an elite university was skipped as they didn’t think they would fit in with the upper class people they would be forced to mix with there. The choice of university course for these kids often involved them picking something they did particularly well in at high school and applying to do that at university. Give a kid an ‘A’ in geography and they might just end up doing geography in university – no matter where that might lead them in terms of their own interest of likely career path. One of the things Bourdieu says somewhere is that the higher your social class, the less likely you are to ask your teacher for advice on what you are going to be doing next. As the kids I spoke about from the Seven Up series at the start of this make clear, if you are from a high enough social class a lot of these decisions are likely to have been made for you long before you were born. Still, life is full of complexities and people aren’t automatons – they sometimes rebel against clear pathways that to all intents and purposes seem to lead to clear success.
This book shows how messy lives are, even the lives of those we generally think of as being marked out for success.
What is interesting here is that the journeys they take through the elite end of the education system appears to just happen, and this is one of the things that these young people say when they are in their mid-to-late twenties that they believe is quite unfair about the program. Yes, sure, they were able to say at seven pretty well what their educational career (and even work career in most cases) would look like – but that didn’t make it inevitable. They got through this, not just by showing up, but on the basis of very hard work. None of which is shown in the series – just some spoilt rich kids talking about how advantaged they are and then going on to prove it. It is hardly surprising they felt they had been unfairly characterised by the show.
I’m not going to say this view of the situation held by these boys isn’t true. You don’t get to be a top lawyer or to get into an Oxbridge university by doing no work at all. I have no doubt that these boys worked damn hard to get where they ended up. But the point is that it is much more likely that you will achieve such an outcome if you are from a certain class than it is if you are from many other social classes – and this is true and can be verified by just looking at the statistics detailing the demographic profiles of the young people who attend these universities.
This is what Bourdieu refers to as the intersection of cultural, social and academic capital, something that certain classes have in spades and that provides them with largely unseen, but still undeniable, advantages. All of which is manifest in these people’s habitus – their habits and dispositions – and that therefore allow them to be, as Bourdieu says, like a fish in water.
But – the point of this book is to look at some of the complications that go with being a fish in water. And it does this by literally following young people from the middle classes (and as I said, people I would say are from the upper middle class) for years and in seeing just how they go on their individual journeys through school.
And the point is that not all of these young people have a simple time on their path through school. This is true even though the expectation of everyone they know and associate with is that they will go to university and also do well. In fact, part of the problem that this book identifies with people from these classes is that the expectations placed on them are so high that sometimes this in itself causes many of these students to crash and burn. Rather than guaranteeing success, it, in fact, puts so much pressure on the kids that they find themselves failing terribly. Or rather, and this was particularly interesting, because the level of achievement in the schools that these kids attend is so high, that what would look like unequivocal success in any other school, looks comparatively like failure here. And some of the kids live with this sense of having failed for years and years after they have left school. Gladwell talks about much the same thing in his latest book – the David and Goliath one – although I have less problem with the thesis here than I did when Gladwell used it.
A lot of this was framed as almost being in contradiction with Bourdieu’s arguments – but really, it wasn’t at all. These kids are from advantaged homes and these advantages remained for them, even if and when they felt they had ‘failed’ and even if their pathway through school was more tortuous than the straight line that had been predicted for them. The thing is that the middle class – even the middle class that goes to ‘good’ private schools in Britain – isn’t even close to being a single entity. Different sections of this class have different relationships to education, and so they enter school with different levels of educational capital that they can draw on. There are families (say, the children of lawyers and doctors) where there has always been a very strong and clear need for these families to have a close and clear relationship with the education system. The credentialing aspect of education has long allowed these professions to restrict access to only those with the educational capital to succeed – so, this section of the middle class is likely to be hyper-vigilant concerning the education of their children and have the past experience of educational success to make sure their efforts aren’t wasted. Academic success, then, is not something that these families are likely to leave to fate.
But other sections of the middle class are not nearly as closely related to the education system – at least, up until comparatively recently, working in business did not require the kinds of educational credentials that becoming a lawyer did. As such, these families may not necessarily have as tightly bound a relationship with the education system as other sections of the middle class have had by necessity. The thing is that we have witnessed a huge shift in the need for credentials throughout our society – and this has lead the middle classes in particular to strive to stake out the ground to ensure they have access to the best educations as a way to reproduce their social position for their own children – and this is particularly true in terms of access to the most exclusive private schools which in turn often lead to the most exclusive university places. However, since not all middle class families have equal levels of educational capital to draw on, gaining access to these places is highly differentiated.
That said, what I found particularly interesting was the difference between the genders discussed here. One of the things Bourdieu does speak at length about is the need for education to appear effortless, and that therefore the most highly rewarded kind of academic success (and here particularly for males) is one where the success comes ‘naturally’ but also in abundance. How true this is in reality is always hard to say, of course, but the point is that the culture in many of the boys’ schools lived is one where the boys that are most liked by their peers are not the boys defined as ‘swots’, but rather the ones that virtually shrug off the need to study. Those that spend their time playing sports or generally frigging around, but who then go on to do well, if not too well, at school anyway. This might, after all, all just be but another kind of display – where these boys actually do lots of study behind closed doors – but that doesn’t make the display any less culturally important. And again, it is the boys who are without large amounts of educational capital that are likely to pay the highest price for not understanding this as display rather than reality, as they are the ones most likely to live the myth to its full and dreadful consequences and to then believe their own lack of capacity (as shown in their failing grades) as being due to themselves as being inadequate as shown by their not succeeding effortlessly as the other boys do.
The girls were more likely to be obsessed with academic success at all costs and to display this obsession in excessive study routines – often presenting their obsessive focus on academic success as badges of honour. As such, girls generally did better than boys at school – but often this all comes at remarkably cost to themselves – both to their physical and psychological wellbeing. Anorexia is only mentioned in passing here, but the association between high achieving academic girls and the kind of self-denying control that is associated with this sort of success and what is necessary if one is to ‘succeed’ at anorexia has been documented in lots of research.
There is a part of me that wants to say ‘no shit, Sherlock’ about this research, but I do think there is more to it than a simple stating of the obvious. There are no guarantees in life, the credentialing function of education is becoming much more intense – so, that it is having an impact on even the top reaches of the middle classes and on their passage through the education system is hardly surprising. But, no matter how good a theory is ‘in theory’, people’s lives are messy, complex and contradictory. The smartest kid with the best family background that involves the most academic of social habituses can still fail badly. People move down – as well as up – the social ladder. Stuff someone’s arm full of drugs or give them an untimely illness, kill one of their parents, or do one of a very, very long list of other problems along the way and the straightest of lines can become quickly over-crowded with twists and turns.
Also, a lot of academic habitus, ironically enough, comes from parents – rather than the good school that you go to, and so going to a good school can in some ways, for some people without the right habitus, be more of a hindrance than a help. It is remarkable how frequently the kids here went to a very good school, but ended up in a crap university as they were more or less left to themselves to decide where to go next or even what to do. Or where the thought of going to an elite university was skipped as they didn’t think they would fit in with the upper class people they would be forced to mix with there. The choice of university course for these kids often involved them picking something they did particularly well in at high school and applying to do that at university. Give a kid an ‘A’ in geography and they might just end up doing geography in university – no matter where that might lead them in terms of their own interest of likely career path. One of the things Bourdieu says somewhere is that the higher your social class, the less likely you are to ask your teacher for advice on what you are going to be doing next. As the kids I spoke about from the Seven Up series at the start of this make clear, if you are from a high enough social class a lot of these decisions are likely to have been made for you long before you were born. Still, life is full of complexities and people aren’t automatons – they sometimes rebel against clear pathways that to all intents and purposes seem to lead to clear success.
This book shows how messy lives are, even the lives of those we generally think of as being marked out for success.
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