Identity, Neoliberalism and Aspiration

Educating white working-class boys

Garth Stahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317685586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In recent years there has been growing concern over the pervasive disparities in academic achievement that are highly influenced by ethnicity, class and gender. Specifically, within the neoliberal policy rhetoric, there has been concern over underachievement of working-class young males, specifically white working-class boys. The historic persistence of this pattern, and the ominous implication of these trends on the long-term life chances of white working-class boys, has led to a growing chorus that something must be done to intervene.

This book provides an in-depth sociological study exploring the subjectivities within the neoliberal ideology of the school environment, in order to expand our understanding of white working-class disengagement with education. The chapters discuss how white working-class boys in three educational sites enact social and learner identities, focusing on the practices of 'meaning-making' and 'identity work' that the boys experienced, and the disjunctures and commonalities between them. The book presents an analysis of the varying tensions influencing the identity of each boy and the consequences of these pressures on their engagement with education.

Drawing on Bourdieu's theoretical tools and a model of egalitarian habitus, Identity, Neoliberalism and Aspiration: Educating white working-class boys will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the field of sociology of education, and those from related disciplines studying class and gender.

Part I

1 Working-class student educational experience An amalgamation of factors

DOI: 10.4324/9781315774824-1

Social well-being depends upon cohesion and solidarity. It implies the existence, not merely of opportunities to ascend, but of a high level of general culture, and a strong sense of common interests, and a diffusion throughout society of a conviction that civilization is not the business of an elite alone, but a common enterprise which is the concern of all. And individual happiness does not only require that men [sic] should be free to rise to new positions of comfort and distinction; it also requires that they should be able to lead a life of dignity and culture, whether they rise or not.

(Tawney, 1964: 108)

Considering the extreme disadvantages many students start with, education remains a place where the working-class often feel ‘powerlessness and educational worthlessness’ (Reay, 2009: 25). Consequently, a significant percentage, mainly boys, ‘perceive troublesome, oppositional and resistant behaviour within school as a social good’ (Reay, 2009: 27), a necessary exercise in identity construction, and an outlet that elevates their status in their all-powerful peer group. Gilbert and Gilbert (1998: 21) argue ‘schools are forced to spend considerable time, energy and resources on managing “bad boys”, and on developing programmes and strategies to handle disruptive behaviour – especially for working-class boys’. ¹ We must consider how behaviour is ‘implicated (promoted, legitimated, recursively generated, etc.) through the structure and dynamics of school practices themselves, with their emphasis on competition and individualism’ (Wilkins, 2011: 8). The interplay between social and learner identities, which can become fixed and fluid depending on field and capitals, requires the foundation of group affirmation. Boys’ social constructions of masculinity remain extremely fragile and in constant flux (Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2003).

The interconnectedness between behaviour, identity and attainment starts very early in a child’s schooling (Renold, 2001), as does the reductive educational (and deeply classed) processes of categorisation and labelling. From the moment a boy, specifically a working-class boy, enters a school, he is shaped according to his gender, as many ‘teachers consistently rate girls higher than boys in deportment, and much of their contact with boys tends to be negative and disciplinary’ (Entwisle et al., 2007: 115). More specifically, primary school boys, ‘are up to eight times more likely to be identified as having special educational needs than their female classmates’ (Bleach, 2000: 5–6). Prior to schooling, research has shown that parents also treat elementary school children of the two sexes differently and expect them to behave differently in school (Entwisle et al., 2007: 115). Childrearing is a process heavily influenced by class (Lareau, 2003) and gender (Nichols et al., 2009; Siraj-Blatchford, 2010). White working-class boys, who exist in a complex web of constraints and hierarchies within schools, acquire working-class behaviours in their primary socialisation (Evans, 2006) that greatly impacts upon the learner and social identities they negotiate in the primary classroom (Hey et al., 1998; Renold, 2001; Swain, 2004, 2006). Their initial socialisation within the family structure can position some working-class boys for failure, as when they enter school they often encounter middle-class teachers ² who consider their behaviour to be problematic (Lareau, 2003). This can often lead to underperformance, and working-class boys have been documented to show signs of ‘disaffection’ as early as the age of seven (Noble, 2000). Finn (1989: 131) asserts, ‘It is essential that non-participation be recognized in the earliest grade possible and that some form of institutional engagement be provided’. Unfortunately, current educational institutions are largely staffed by teachers and administrators untrained in sociology and psychology (Reay, 2006: 302). Educators today may falsely ‘confuse working-class powerlessness with apathy’ (Anyon, 2008: 206) in the quest for all-powerful exam results, which leads to pedagogic practices that may fix certain behaviours and identities.

Statistically, white working-class boys continue to under-perform academically and, in terms of aspiration, it has been documented that ‘white young people have lower educational aspirations than most other ethnic groups. Similarly, the educational attainment of white boys is failing to improve at the rates of most other ethnic groups’ (Communities and Local Government/Department for Children, 2008: 8). Poor whites are the UK’s lowest educational underachiever with 31% of white British children entitled to free school meals gaining ‘five good GCSEs in 2012, fewer than poor children from any other ethnic group’ (Economist, 2014, para. 6). As evidenced by the Parliamentary hearing on the Underperformance of White Working Class Children in February 2014 (Select Committee on Education, 2014), the phenomenon continues to be a subject of concern and controversial debate. White working-class underachievement was also noted widely in the Office for Standards in Education [OFSTED], Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED, 2014) annual report for the 2012–2013 academic year, where a poverty of low expectations was linked to ‘stubbornly low outcomes that show little sign of improvement’ (p. 1). Within discussions of white working-class boys, working-class families are often pathologised and blamed for their ‘failure’ to act responsibly in regards to their education, but such discussions conceal massive structural inequalities and barriers (see Gewirtz, 2001). ³ Rachel Brooks (2002) argues that, since the late 1990s, although widening participation remains a central plank in the UK government’s higher education policy, ⁴ its impact to date in terms of equity appears negligible. Or, as Brown (2013: 682) asserts, ‘The result is a “fallacy of fairness” as policies to increase educational standards, including the student premium, or widened access to higher education, have little impact on “relative” mobility’.

The ‘crisis of masculinity' debate, post-industrialisation and neoliberalism

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many scholars (Fine et al., 1997; Mac an Ghaill, 1994, 1996, 2000; Nayak, 2003a, 2003c, 2006; Weis, 2004) cited the massive societal shifts in economic and gender relations that have resulted in fragmented rites of passage (employment, marriage). Such fragmentation has placed the working-class male in a position of confusion commonly called the ‘crisis of masculinity’ (Faludi, 1999). ⁵ evolving from the moral panic concerning boys’ ‘underachievement’ (Griffin, 2000; Smith, 2003) and, more specifically, underachieving working-class males (Epstein, 1998), debate over ‘failing boys’ has focused on the complexities associated with the so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’ (Faludi, 1999) and boys ‘underachievement’ in schooling (cf. Pittman, 1993; Raphael Reed, 1998). A highly charged context of backlash politics has shaped a particular gender agenda, and in this miscellany we see arguments concerning boys (as a homogenised group) portrayed as victims of discrimination both in schooling and in wider society (Weaver-Hightower, 2003).

As the so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’ (Faludi, 1999) occurs beyond the classroom, there have also been major pedagogic shifts inside the classroom; school processes have become increasingly neoliberal (league tables, exam boards, a rise in accountability), which exacerbates differences and influences how the learner identities are formed (Francis, 2006; Wilkins 2011). In his analysis of the ‘boy turn’ in education, Weaver-Hightower (2003) argues that there have been four main strands to the ongoing debate on boys’ education: popular-rhetorical, theoretically oriented, practice oriented, and the feminist and pro-feminist. Weaver-Hightower contend that a significant prompt for the ‘boy turn’ has been ‘increasing neoliberal education reforms and the rise of the New Right – the conservative restoration since the 1980s’, which is particularly true in England, where neoliberal reforms ‘produced an educational choice structure in which schools compete with one another for students’ (p. 476). Epstein et al. (1999) identified separate discourses used in the popular and academic press to explain boys’ educational underperformance: ‘poor boys’, ‘boys will be boys’, ‘at-risk boys’ and ‘problem boys’. While these discourses have framed key debates in gender theory concerning boys, the neoliberal policy drivers ensure that working-class boys are individualised and held accountable for their failure (Francis, 2006: 191). Furthermore, such neoliberal discourses, while denying the existence of any real class distinctions, limit the discursive space in which various forms of working-class masculinity are acceptable.

Griffin (2000: 170) argues that the ‘language of crisis, alarm and urgency’ is typically followed by a list of school-based remedies that have been posed by policy-makers to counteract male ‘underachievement’ (for critiques see Skelton, 2003; Weaver-Hightower, 2008). ⁶ There have been a plethora of policy responses to this perceived ‘crisis’ but very few take into account the ‘very significant ways in which the social construction of gender impacts significantly on curriculum, pedagogical practices and relations with and between students in schools’ (Lingard et al., 2009: 9–10). In the policy discourses surrounding boys and schooling, there are ‘constant slippages’ that reaffirm what are ‘natural predispositions or learning behaviours and orientations for both boys and girls’ [emphasis in original] (Mills et al., 2007: 15). Drawing on biological essentialist notions and Gardner’s multiple intelligences, certain common tropes such as kinaesthetic learning, devaluing inter/intrapersonal skills, preferring explicit/relevant teaching and requiring male role models to learn often tend to dominate. Such strategies fail to acknowledge the culture of masculinity as well as environments and discourses from which boys draw their identity. These initiatives risk homogenising working-class boys into one cohesive group when we must recognise their heterogeneity and diversity in values, attitudes and behaviour and how each are influenced heavily by their school and social contexts.

Our current generation of white working-class boys are poorly equipped with their ‘parochial’ social perspectives (Nayak, 2006: 82) to cope with the reality of post-industrialism with its new shifting geographies of power, wherein they themselves are arguably becoming an anachronism. In Britain, ‘the importance of work, of a job, and a wage are well-known features of working-class masculinity’ (Arnot, 1985: 44), and this foundation is endangered in austere times. Winlow (2001: 38), reminiscing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Appendices
• Index