Understanding the Primary School

A Sociological Analysis

David Hartley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315407043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

In this study, first published in 1985, the author explores the construction of educational ideologies and assesses to what extent they are put into practice by the teachers. He examines the 'politics' of education within the school; the extent to which the head teacher, as the bureaucratic authority in the school, seeks to impose his or her own views and the degree to which teachers see themselves as possessing professional autonomy. The study also pays attention to status differentiation within the education of the working class and explores the educational consequences of ethnic and gender status group membership. This title will be of interest to sociology and education.

CHAPTER 1

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOL

The sociology of the primary school, as opposed to the sociology of primary education, is quite recent. It was not until the 1960s that sociologists entered schools and classrooms. The reason for this stems largely from the fact that educational sociologists had previously been concerned with education as an institution of society. Their concern with the inputs and outputs of education, guided by structural functionalism, had caused them to ignore the process of schooling itself. However, after 1971 attention turned to the classroom and to the teacher-pupil relationship. New theory guided this endeavour and new methodologies were employed, mainly of an inferential, qualitative kind. Whilst this ‘new’ sociology of the primary school and classroom took hold, it did not wholly predominate. Of late there has been some sign of a resurgence of interest in structural accounts of the school, though not from a functionalist perspective. That is to say, there has been some misgiving about the mere description of the teacher-pupil classroom relationship, interesting though it is. What is required, so this argument goes, is a structuralist explanation of observed classroom events. There is a need, therefore, to ask not just the ‘how’ question of classroom life, but the ‘why’ question as well. There is a need to reconcile the microsociological with the macrosociological. In this chapter I shall give a brief account of these theoretical ‘shifts’ which have informed the sociology of primary schools and this exercise will serve as the basis for the statement of the theory which will guide the study at hand.¹

Structural Functionalism and Primary Education

The essence of the functionalist explanation is that society may be thought of as a machine, or as a biological organism, wherein the component institutions, such as education, the economy and the family, act in concert with a view to realising society’s needs (Parsons, 1951). Within these component social institutions there are component organizations, each of which contributes to the overall effectiveness of each institution. And, within individual institutions, there are arrangements of social roles which incumbents fill in the manner prescribed. What enables society to cohere is an assumed and expected consensus of purpose among all role incumbents in all institutions. It was this functionalist paradigm which held sway during the immediate post-war period until about 1971. Its emphasis was very much upon the relationship among social institutions and not upon the relationships among individuals with in organizations. This is well illustrated if the title of the best-known anthology within educational sociology within Britain in this period is considered: Education, Economy and Society (Floud and Anderson, 1961).

Within it the reader is informed that its purpose will be to study the ‘links’ among education and other social institutions, of which the economy is paramount:

In modern society, the major link of education to social structure is through the economy and this is a linkage of both stimulus and response. (Floud and Halsey, 1962: 12)

In contributing to the realization of society’s needs, educational organizations were required to fill a dual purpose: to socialize and, on the basis of a fair competition, to select. In Parsonian terms, schools must satisfy ‘expressive’ and ‘instrumental’ needs, the former corresponding to the socialization purpose, the latter to the function of teaching technical skills and of selection (Parsons, 1961).

It is this second function, especially that of selection, which most concerned researchers in primary education during the 1950s and 1960s. The nub of the matter was that primary education was not as ‘meritocratic’ as had been predicted by functionalist theory. That is to say, many ‘talented’ pupils in primary schools were being ‘missed’, their talents ‘wasted’. Teachers had been unable to identify correctly the talent of many pupils, many of whom were working class and many of whom ‘underachieved’. Instead of ‘talent’ being the predictor of educational achievement, ‘social class’ factors seemed the more sensitive indicators.² Despite the good intentions of the 1944 Education Act:

Widespread social amelioration since World War II has not removed persistent class and ethnic inequalities in the distribution of ability (potential) and attainment (performance).
(Floud and Halsey, 1961: 7)

This conclusion pointed up two ‘dysfunctions’ in the social system. Firstly, it implied that the working class family, as a social agency, was being somewhat deficient in its pre-school socialization patterns. Working class children had not been socialised in a manner desired by the education system. Secondly, this ‘underachievement’ by talented working class pupils meant a ‘wastage’ of talent that the economy could ill afford to lose during a period of technological advancement and change.

The first of these ‘dysfunctions’ was assumed to be the cause of the second. That is, if the school could somehow make up the cultural deficiencies of the talented working class child, then he would not underachieve and the economy would not be deprived of his skills. Thus it was that the government sponsored a number of ameliorative and interventionist ‘action’ research programmes to ‘compensate’ for the dysfunctional outcomes of working class families. With the establishment of ‘educational priority areas’, not educational priority individuals, as in America, it was hoped that working class underachievement would end. But it did not and the E.P.A. programme has largely been regarded as unsuccessful (Shipman, 1980) although Halsey still avers the policy of positive discrimination, albeit on a more grand scale (Halsey, 1980). The other corrective practice aimed at ameliorating social class differences – the comprehensive school – has also not fulfilled its purpose (Ford, 1969; Gray, McPherson and Raffe, 1983). The failure, therefore, of these largely organisational arrangements prompted attention to be focussed on the classroom itself, and it did so informed by the ‘new’ approach provided in M.F.D. Young’s (1971) anthology Knowledge and Control which, despite early criticism (Shipman, 1973), undermind functionalism’s claim to be the dominant paradigm.

The ‘new’ Sociology of the Primary School

The sociological study of the school before 1970 had been virtually ignored. Only Waller’s (1932) classic and the pioneer works of Becker (1953), Lacey (1970), Hargreaves (1967) and King (1969) were available. There were other studies of the clasroom but these tended to be drawn from social psychology and were used in a diagnostic manner by teacher training institutions to improve the classroom management techniques of student teachers. Perhaps the best known work in this respect is that by Flanders (1970). The approach taken was to describe and to record the incidence of particular, pre-specified categories of event. No attention was paid to their context or to their meaning (although Kounin’s (1970) work began to move away from mere description). Description, not explanation, was the convention.³ Even Jackson’s (1968) perceptive study Life in Classrooms which highlighted the patience, toleration and boredom required of pupils was not rooted in any explicit theoretical perspective, and his work with Henrietta Lahaderne (Jackson and Lahaderne, 1967) again employs the use of prestructured behavioural categories through which the flow of classroom life was filtered. What was needed was a theory which would not simply ‘atomise’ classroom life, but which would contextualise and interpret it. That theory was available in the work of Schutz and his disciples, to which we now turn.

A theory of society should be able to explain how and why society coheres. In the strict sense, structural functionalism is not an explanatory theory; it is a model, based on the metaphors of machine or biological organism. Whilst this model may account for social consensus, it does not allow for social conflict. Nor does it explain how society has become the way it seems to be – the ‘theory’ lacks an historical component. More importantly, for our purposes here, it has little to say about the individual, preferring to regard individuals as mere incumbents who passively act out their prescribed roles. If, for example, we take a school as a component organisation within education, from a functionalist perspective we can simply ‘read off’ the actions of pupils and teachers from the official descriptions of the formal roles which they fill. There is a need to ask the question, ‘How do they, as individuals, interpret that role’, or, at a deeper level, ‘Why do we have or need pupils and teachers in classrooms in the first place?’ Thus the need for schools is assumed and it is also assumed that pupils and teachers will not deviate from their roles. Such a perspective, therefore, ignores the discretion of individuals and their ability and willingness to respond passively to society, as given.

This was not the view of Berger and Luckmann (1966) and their symbolic interactionist approach. For them society is both a social construction and a constraint upon the individual. It is a social construction in that men subjectively make sense of the objective world and may come to share or impose their definitions of it upon others. It is a constraint because, over a period of time, the initial social construction may come to take on a fixed, reified form which is perceived to be beyond the power of men to change – the social construction becomes ‘objectified’. But although this kind of constraint may occur, it need not occur. That is, society can be remade if sufficient numbers agree upon the reconstruction and have the power to make their endeavour prevail in the face of convention. However, for most symbolic interactionists, the socially constructed structure does place limits upon the individual in that it provides a framework, a set of parameters, within which the individual can make mental space for himself and within which he may negotiate with others (Rose, 1962). Much of the classroom-based ‘new’ sociology of education adopts this framework. Put another way, symbolic interactionist studies of the school take it for granted that schools, classrooms, teachers and pupils are ‘given’. Although this framework had evolved historically, it is so entrenched and ‘objectified’ that its existence is rarely questioned. It is within that framework that the ‘new’ sociology of the classroom operates: it considers how teachers and pupils interpret their roles; it considers what their ‘perspectives’ of the school are; it allows for the practice of negotiation of order, knowledge and assessment within the classroom; it considers the authority of the teacher in the face of the power of the pupil.

Before we consider some specific studies of the primary school it is necessary to dwell briefly upon a theoretical concomitant of symbolic interactionism known as social phenomenology (Schutz, 1967).⁴ We need to do so because phenomenology provides insights into a crucial aspect of classroom research: how we understand each other. That is, the classroom researcher is required to impute the meanings which those whom he observes assign to their actions. It is not sufficient to observe classroom actions at face value – we need to look behind the surface phenomenon of the action and impute the reason why it was performed.

This process whereby we come to understand each other, which Schutz calls ‘intersubjectivity’, need not conern us too much here (it will be developed later). Suffice it to say that ‘motivational’ understanding of the classroom participants by the observer requires a methodology quite distinct from the heavily statistical one employed by functionalists. It is said to be a ‘soft’ methodology which lacks the ‘rigour’ of ‘hard’ data which can be analysed using ‘robust’ statistical tests. It requires the observer to empathise with the observed and to infer the latter’s meanings, which may be subsequently checked through face-to-face interview. It may require the observer to enlist the views of others, pupils for example, who witnessed the same event. It may require the inspection of documents such as pupil record cards and written work, both of which may throw light upon first-hand observations. All this is with a view to interpreting the complexities of the process of schooling. It is to go beyond official statements of what is said to happen in classrooms and to find out what does happen, as defined by the observer.

‘New’ sociological studies of the primary school are relatively few, despite the great interest which the ‘new’ sociology generated at the theoretical and methodological levels. At the risk of inviting accusations of incorrectly categorising these classroom-based studies, I shall suggest four by no means mutually exclusive categories into which these studies may fall. Firstly, there are those of an anthropological nature which do not admit to any theoretical perspective; secondly, there are those which emphasise the negotiation of pupil identities within the classroom and which are informed by a symbolic interactionism akin to that which underpins the work of Strauss et al (1964) in hospital settings; thirdly, are those microsociological studies informed by ethnomethodology; fourthly, are those which seek to explain classroom meanings and identities within a wider structural framework (Sharp and Green, 1975).

Among the most well-known anthropological studies of the primary school are those by Rist at Attucks School in St. Louis (Rist, 1970; 1973) and at Brush School in Oregon (Rist, 1978).⁵ In the first school, Rist observed the children from their first day in kindergarten until Christmas in the second grade, although little observation was undertaken during the second year of the study. One of the most interesting aspects of his study was his approach to ‘working his way in’ to the school, to becoming accepted (not an easy task: he was the only white person in the school). His careful attention to the preservation of confidentiality, to not being too distant, and to putting himself mentally in the place of the teacher being observed greatly contributed to the richness of his insights into the all-too-ready typifications which the infant teacher makes on the basis of a brief experience of the perceived social characteristics of her pupils. Rist’s later study of a programme in Oregon whereby black working class pupils were bussed into a white, middle class area school looks behind the well-intentioned motives of a school which wants to help but can only do so by having the black children assimilated into its normal regime, one which they cannot relate to. The black children had to sink or swim academically: most sank into oblivion, ignored by a teacher bent on pushing the highly motivated white children. Although Rist’s studies do not admit to a particular sociological approach, there is much evidence generated within them supportive of a Weberian conflict model incorporating class and status analyses of school and society.

Central to symbolic interactionism is the notion that actors can assign meaning to institutional structures. They are not passive in the face of those structures, as functionalism implies. On occasions, meanings assigned to the ‘same’ circumstances may differ. The element of power then comes into play as a way of resolving different definitions of the situation. A classroom is a good example of an institutional setting where different groups can assign different and competing interpretations of it.⁶ Sociological studies of these settings have yielded evidence on the process whereby the typification of pupil identities arises out of negotiations. For example, Martin’s (1975) study of Canadian elementary schools actually typifies pupils on the basis of their imputed willingness to negotiate with the teacher. Three ideal types are generated: ‘non-negotiable’ pupils; ‘intermittently negotiable’ pupils and ‘continuously negotiable’ pupils. Symbolic interactionist studies also focus upon the teacher, permitting the researcher to observe teachers teaching and to impute their ideologies. These individual teacher ideologies may then be categorized. In this way it is possible to indicate that the ideology of the teacher is not always reducible to that of the institutional head of the organisation (Sharp and Green, 1975). Or it may be possible to point up the ideological and practical dilemmas which beset teachers. Berlak and Berlak (1981), for example, have generated three sets of dilemmas to allow them to make sense of the observations which they made of teachers in English primary schools.

A third element of the ‘new’ sociology of the primary school arises from a further theoretical strand within the interpretive paradigm, namely ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). The main difference between symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology is that the latter eschews the notion of permanent social structures. Everything is in process, or on-going. The normative structure is continuously re-normed. The social order has no independent existence apart from its ‘members’. The nature of reality is never fixed and nothing should be taken for granted. ‘Social structures are social accomplishments’ (Mehan, 1978:36). What is of concern to ethnomethodologists is the process whereby actors produce a shared reality no matter how ephemeral it might be. The observation of this process is best undertaken by placing individuals in an ‘absurd’ situation (Lyman and Scott, 1970); that is, a situation which makes no sense to those who are part of it as when, say, a classroom full of pupils is expecting a lesson on trigonometry but in comes a ‘teacher’ in a kilt and playing the bagpipes. The ethnomethodologist, therefore, seeks to ‘unsituate’, people, rendering their initial definition of the situation absurd. He then watches them re-build meaning or reconstruct reality (McHugh, 1968). Ethnomethodological studies of the classroom are, therefore, necessarily focussing upon very small social gatherings and the most well-known are those by Cicourel et al (1974), which are largely given over to revealing the hidden subjective considerations which affect the ‘objective’ assessment of pupils’ performance.

These three approaches within the ‘new’ sociology of the primary school have provoked a number of criticisms: they have been seen as ‘trendy’, as revealing an ignorance of the ‘founding fathers’ (Szreter, 1975); they have been seen as too subjective, by-passing the canons of validity and reliability; as too ...