Education and Social Control

A Study in Progressive Primary Education

Rachel Sharp, Anthony Green, Jacqueline Lewis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351808859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1975, this book offers a critique of some of the 'new perspectives' in the sociology of education. This is achieved through a case study of a progressive child centred school.

The book suggests that a liberal approach to education fails to appreciate how thoroughly a complex, stratified industrial society penetrates the school. It argues that the practice of 'progressive' education may be a modern form of conservativism and an effective form of social control both in the narrow sense of achieving classroom discipline and in the wider sense of contributing to the promotion of a static social order. It cautions against naïve utopian solutions which see the freedom and self-development of the child as an individualized process, unrelated to a social context which may undermine the ideals of freedom and spontaneous self-development.

In addition to offering a study of the implementation of the 'open' approach to child development and pedagogy, the book can also be read as a piece of critical sociology, intended to make the reader look again at the way in which problems have been generated and solutions proposed within sociology and education.

1

Sociology and the classroom

The theoretical perspective in this study has developed against a background of what some might define as a paradigmatic crisis in the sociology of education. Kuhn (1962) defines a paradigmatic crisis within science as a situation when the prevailing consensus within the community of scientists begins to break down, when normal science is no longer capable of solving the sorts of problems which scientists consider important, when established conceptual frameworks and methodological procedures become the subject of critical scrutiny. Whilst Kuhn fails to provide an adequate account of the genesis of such a paradigmatic crisis, nevertheless his description of the phenomenon seems highly applicable to the present situation in the sociology of education.

The sociology of education has emerged as a sub-area of specialization in sociology, relatively unaffected by major controversies within its parent discipline. To some extent this is explicable in terms of the institutional framework within which the study of education proceeded. Developing in specialized university institutes and schools of education relatively isolated from established academic departments of history, philosophy and psychology and more recently sociology and economics, the study of education has tended to be preoccupied with the policy concerns of the practising educator and sometimes insulated from the wider theoretical controversies which go on within its contributory disciplines.

This trend has been reflected in the development of the sociology of education as an academic discipline, the problems of the specialization reflecting more the current preoccupations of the policy maker than the generic problems within mainstream sociology. To some extent this has been facilitated by the failure of mainstream sociologists to consider the study of education as of major sociological importance. Unlike their intellectual founding fathers, particularly Durkheim, modern sociologists have often relegated the study of education to a lower status area, not worthy of systematic study. As a result, the prevailing traditions in the sociology of education, structural functionalism on the one hand, and positivistic empiricism on the other, have not received the same sort of critical scrutiny that such perspectives have been exposed to within mainstream sociology.

The structural functionalist approach, using a holistic model of the social system, has tended to analyse educational structures and processes in terms of their contribution to basic system requirements. Major preoccupations have been the analysis of the role of education in socialization, social selection, role allocation, and social control seen from the systems perspective, and predicated on the maintenance of ongoing social equilibrium. As many critics have pointed out, such an approach frequently operates with an over-integrated view of society unduly emphasizing those aspects which are deemed to be the functional requirements of the social system. These accord with established interests in the social structure which may be in direct opposition to the interests of other groups in the system (Lockwood, 1964; Gouldner, 1959; Gouldner, 1971). Moreover a tendency to use an over-integrated view of structure may go hand in hand with an over-socialized concept of man. In this view man is conceived as an atomistic unit responding to reified system requirements. This dehumanizes and fails to give credence to the role of man as an active subject in the historical process (Wrong, 1961; Turner, 1962).

On the other hand, however, the empiricist tradition has engaged in a series of ‘fact finding’ and ‘head counting’ missions, producing a great deal of statistical information about, for example, differential class chances for educational attainment, but offering little by way of explicit theoretical or conceptual breakthroughs for interpreting such data. This tradition, where it is not guided by either an explicit or an implicit theory, reveals the inherent weaknesses of an inductive approach to theorization. However, many of these empiricist studies are guided by structural functionalism which influences the formulation of the problems to be studied and the areas within which solutions can be sought. An underlying value consensus is assumed and structural malintegration, whilst it is not ignored, is treated as a temporary, disequilibriating factor rather than as a central feature of a stratified society. Methodologically, this tradition tends to engage in positivistic ‘fact finding’ procedures with arbitrarily imposed categories for differentiating data. It fails to do justice to the complexity of social reality, which cannot be ‘grasped’ by merely reducing sociologically significant characteristics of men to their external and ‘objective’ indicators.

Against this background, however, a new perspective is emerging (Cicourel, 1973; Garfinkel, 1967; Filmer, 1972; Keddie, 1971; Esland, 1971; Young, 1971). It is difficult at the moment to give a ‘name’ to this new tradition since there are a number of strands and subcategories, variously called symbolic interactionism, phenomenological sociology or ethnomethodology, whose proponents would be anxious to argue for the distinctiveness of their perspective. Nevertheless, without wishing to engage in essentialist debates over nomenclature, what seems to be held in common by all of them are, first, their common heritage in German Idealism, developed in social science in the work of G.H. Mead, M. Weber and A. Schutz, and second, their substantive concern with the problem of subjective meaning as basic for an understanding of the social world. For the sake of brevity we will call the approach ‘sociological’ although recognizing that we run the risk of over-generalizing.

The present authors are, however, critical of this new perspective which, they suspect, may be developing as a new orthodoxy within the sociology of education. This orthodoxy is premised upon an uncritical acceptance of certain idealist assumptions about the nature of man and society which they regard as misleading.

It is proposed, in this chapter, to illustrate the present state of paradigmatic uncertainty within the sociology of education by critically analysing various approaches which have been taken towards a particular substantive area of study relevant to the authors’ own main interests; the area of classroom interaction. In this chapter, whilst attempting to give some brief overview, we will trace the development of what, we have suggested, may well be emerging as the new dominant perspective. In the following chapter we will proceed to make some broader observations on these idealist tendencies within the discipline and, in so doing, explain our own perspective.

The literature which relates to our interests in both sociology and social psychology is immense and wide ranging in its substantive concerns although quite narrow in its theoretical and methodological pre-occupations. The substantive issue in which we are primarily interested concerns the relationship between the construction of pupil identities and the practice of the teacher within the context of social structure in the classroom, school and the wider society. Much of the research which relates to these issues is social-psychological rather than sociological. Without becoming involved in boundary disputes in this area of the ‘knowledge industry’ of education or claiming to offer an exhaustive overview, we wish, nevertheless, in this brief appraisal of some examples of work in this field to highlight the limitations of such approaches.

An important feature of the relevant literature illustrating the general tendency in educational theory mentioned previously is its explicit or implicit problem of policy orientation (Seeley, 1966) particularly with respect to the ‘good teacher’ and the ‘good classroom’ situation. Frequently this work is set within a structural functional model (Parsons, 1959; Getzels and Thelen, 1960; Dreeben, 1967; Young and Beardsley, 1968), at the intra and extra classroom levels; such a model largely takes for granted and contributes towards the dominant institutional arrangements of education and underplays the possible structural determinants of these processes.

Moreover, the dominant epistemological stance revealed in the American literature and in the growing British work on classroom interaction is that of positivism and empiricism. These themes can be found, for example, in all the most important textbooks or readers in both America and Britain which claim to provide an overview of the substantive area (Gage, 1963, 1968; Morrison and McIntyre, 1972; Yee, 1971). These views are especially illustrated in texts where methodological innovations such as the use of video tapes for collecting data are advocated or used (Adams and Biddle, 1970). The main problem of these researchers appears to be the accurate recording of ‘facts’ rather than the prior issue of clarifying the conceptual schemes operating behind the collection and recording of these ‘facts’. Although improvements in the technology of classroom research are of central importance, it is accepted by us as axiomatic that what is crucial to the knowledge so produced and eventually fed back into the common sense of educational practitioners is the way these ‘facts’ are ordered and interpreted. Thus the theme of this chapter is not so much to chart the accomplishments of the available research showing just what substantive issues have been researched (e.g. Withall, 1960; Boocock, 1966) and illustrating the appropriate variables, but to look at the conceptual frameworks within which these ‘findings’ are generated. With this in mind, there follows a brief review of some major stances taken to social interaction in the social structuring of the classroom and the school.

Getzels and Thelen (1960) present an almost classically Parsonian perspective on classroom interaction illustrating the dominance of the structural-functionalist tradition in the sociology of education. Thus

within this framework, then, the class may be conceived as a social system with characteristic institutions, roles and expectations of behaviour. The class as a social system is related to the school as a social system, which in turn is related to the community as a social system and so on. Ideally, the goal behaviours of one system are ‘geared into’ the goal behaviours of the other related social systems.¹ Within the class itself, goal behaviour is achieved through the integration of institutions, the definition of goals and the setting of expectations for the performance of relevant tasks. In performing the role behaviours expected of him, the teacher ‘teaches’, in performing the role behaviours expected of him, the pupil ‘learns’.

This is their setting of the ‘sociological’ or ‘nomothetic’ level of analysis; that is to say, social structure is a normative phenomenon, and sociology is firmly rooted in normative analysis. They contrast this level of analytic abstraction with the ‘individual’, that is to say with the ‘psychological’ or ideographic levels when examining any specific role performance. Thus it becomes necessary to look at both role expectations and need dispositions when attempting to understand the behaviour and interaction of ‘specific role incumbents’.

This approach takes as its main concern the intersection of society and personality both as it is problematic for the explanation of social behaviour and as the focus where different levels of analysis need to be distinguished. It is unable to conceive of conflict and lack of integration as a consequence of social structural phenomena, of, for example, divergent interests generated between groups and individuals as they compete for scarce resources. Conflict arises merely as a result of a lack of integration between personality and the normative order, that is, malsocialization. Within this kind of approach society consists of a unified order, according to a dominant value system and it is inconceivable that major tensions, or indeed any tensions can be the result of anything other than personal recalcitrance against this dominant hegemony. Thus its view of socialization tends to be one of a passive actor being socialized into a consensual institutional framework rather than one which allows the actor to participate in his own conceptual construction of the world and his own fate as a project. This latter view is central to the interactionist approach to action and social structure which is often proposed as an alternative to structural functionalism (Blumer, 1962; Bolton, 1963) and which has greatly influenced social phenomenology. The latter will be considered in greater detail in the next chapter.

The behavioural image of man and social structures which is exemplified by much of the literature in the sociology of the school and classroom interaction is grounded in the positivistic projects of control and prediction. Here the social system is either seen as a ‘pattern of stimuli’ which schedule or trigger off the responses of organisms which have been socialized to react in given ways to certain given stimuli, or as a transcendent supra-individual system in equilibrium. In the Parsonian model there is a tendency to combine the two (Parsons, 1951). From the symbolic interactionist and social phenomenological perspective the critique of these positions centres on the view of human conduct as behaviour, i.e. as consisting as purely of responses to external environmental or internalized stimuli. Whilst accepting part of the thrust of this criticism and thus of the image of man implied, we would suggest questions also need to be posed regarding the equation of social structures with normative factors. Structural factors other than the merely symbolic may be features in interaction. It is crucial to consider the ways in which elements of the interactive situation may well not be acknowledged or understood by the actors involved but that such factors nevertheless structure the opportunities for action in ways which are more complex than has sometimes been thought.

When considering the generation of pupils’ identities, for example, the pupil’s opportunity structure for acquiring any particular identity relates not merely to the teacher’s working conceptual categories in her or his consciousness, but also to facets of the structure of classroom organization which has to be understood in relationship to a range of extra-classroom as well as intra-classroom pressures which may be or may not be appreciated by the teacher or the pupils. It is important to attempt to understand classroom social structure as the product of both symbolic context and material circumstances. The latter factors tend to be underestimated both in structural functionalism and in social interactionism and social phenomenology. We will discuss this below.

Most work on classroom interaction takes on an empiricist position towards theory building, clearly illustrated in the opening remarks by Withall (1960) to a long review of the literature. Though apparently accepting Lewin’s dictum of a need for theory—’there is nothing so practical as a good theory’—he proceeds to set this within the context of Jahoda’s (1958) attitude to the concept ‘mental health’, namely, that a multiple criterion approach is needed to

better understand, control and predict variables in these global phenomena … all encompassing and relatively meaningless concepts have to be broken down into manageable, discrete, describable operations of behaviour … this necessitates specifying, describing and quantifying the behaviours of teachers and learners under defined and described conditions.

Here we have, briefly presented, the whole gamut of a positivistic orientation rooted in a fundamental atheoretical empiricism.

However, not all classroom research has been atheoretical. The extensive body of research which stems from the original studies of Lewin, Lippet and White (1939) on the ‘climate’ or ‘atmosphere’ of social groups is certainly guided by a theory. Nevertheless, we question the adequacy of the guiding theoretical perspective for the empirical work which ensued. ‘Climate’ refers to the dominant attitudes prevailing in a pupil group towards their teacher and is generally conceptualized dichotomously as either democratic or authoritarian. However, the main orientation of the research problems has been that of assessing the extent and direction of learning, productivity and morale associated with these types of leadership and control. This type of research typifies the social engineering orientation of much positivistic research in American social science and though purporting to be concerned with group dynamics, it rests heavily on individualistic premises.² Moreover, the adoption of a concept of leadership grounded in personality and exchange theory (with its reductivist assumptions) does not go far enough in generating adequate theories to explain classroom phenomena and accounts in part for the inconclusiveness of these researches and the failure, in their own terms, to provide useful information for pedagogy (Anderson, 1959). It is doubtless true that in several ways the teacher is the classroom ‘leader’. However, the empirical realization of this leadership in the classroom is not unproblematic but is influenced by features, both internal and external, which situate the leader’s actions. Thus in the extra-classroom context account must be taken of the colleague vocabulary and rhetoric which constitute important aspects of the ideological concerns in the political structure of the school. As a sociological phenomenon, leadership at this level cannot merely be explained by the analysis of the leader’s personality. The effective leader cannot be understood as a rational ‘economic man’ abstracted from his situation, choosing the technically most efficient means to achieve his desired goals. Rather, effective leadership must be analysed in terms of the total pattern of the material and ideological environment which socially structure, in this case, the teacher’s opportunities to perform and to lead and selectively influence modes of classroom control. Thus rationality encompasses both aspects of individual choice and action, and aspects of the actor’s situation. In the narrowly defined classroom context, the practices of the teacher are not merely a function of her personality. However ‘democratic’ she may be, as indicated by her response to questionnaires, or through recording the main aspects of her spoken control, or her descriptions of her classroom organization and teaching methods, it is possible to chart social structural features which have come to influence specific styles of leadership. These are historically generated not merely as a consequence of past social interaction in the classroom but in the wider patterning of social relationships in the social structure of which she is a part.

At both levels the social psychological basis of these researches gives rise to blind spots which a broader theoretical orientation might go some way towards illuminating. Thus much work in group dynamics on leadership overlooks the implication that it is concerned with power but ignore conflicts, as well as the generation and manifestation of power and its legitimating ideologies in the contexts studied. We do not overlook the fact that much of this work has shown that leadership is specific to context rather than merely to personality, and has thus moved somewhat away from the earlier personality or ‘great man’ approach. Nevertheless, in the work on teaching and classroom leadership this is seldom acknowledged, possibly because, given the age and obvious social inferiority of their clients, teachers seem to have overwhelming power. This has dulled sensitivity to the wider sociological basis of their power and the constraints upon it. These matters will be brought to the reader’s attention in our own study.

This discussion leads us to the consideration of another and quite closely related body of research which will be briefly reviewed to illustrate some further issues in and weaknesses of research in this area: Kounin’s work (1958, 1961a, 1961b, 1970) on the ‘ripple effect’. The general intention of this programme of research was to delineate what it is that teachers do that makes a difference to children’s behaviour. Whilst the social climate studies attend to classroom culture and so are oriented in some respects to ideological features of these situations, the work under discussion tends to remain relatively behaviourist. Attempts are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Sociology and the classroom
• 2 Theoretical considerations
• 3 Mapledene Lane: the school and its environment
• 4 The school ethos
• 5 The teacher’s perspectives
• 6 Social stratification in the classroom: an ideal type
• 7 Social stratification in the classroom: dimensions of variability
• 8 The social structuring of pupils’ identities: some examples
• 9 The child centred ethos as an accounting system
• 10 The parents
• 11 Summary and conclusion
• Appendix: a note on methodology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index