Education, Class Language and Ideology (RLE Edu L)

Noelle Bisseret

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136470837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book presents an analysis of the 'essentialist ideology', which is inherent to class-based societies. The author argues that essentialist ideology is efficient through its unconscious component and is imposed on everyone. It guides school selection and imposes on each class a language specific in its reference to concrete domination relations. It even unbalances the scientific objectivity of researchers in the social sciences, not only among those who abide by the theory of natural aptitudes, but also among its sharpest critics, such as Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu and J C Passeron, whose work is considered in this book.

1 Essentialist ideology. Its origins
and its scientific form, the theory of
natural aptitudes

According to a generally adopted system of interpretation, success or failure at school would be a manifestation of constitutional and hereditary intellectual aptitudes. This way of thinking is a part of Western culture; it arose at the end of the eighteenth century and took on a scientific language in the nineteenth century. When one tries to pinpoint the historical conditions in which this system, explanatory of social inequalities, appeared and survived, one sees that it goes along with the formation of class society structures in which the economic dimension is given primacy. The notion of aptitude is then disclosed as an element in an ideological system where social groups are perceived as static sets condemned to a natural destiny; they are not defined by the power relations that historically constituted them as antagonistic groups.

A comparison between the changes in meaning and use of that concept, and major events indicating overall changes in the economic, social, and political structures (as well as concomitant transformations of the educational system), evidences the growing importance of the word ‘aptitude’ from the eighteenth century onwards, when it was one with the concepts of ‘merit’ and ‘individual responsibility’ which are elements of the egalitarian ideology. While continuing to occupy a central position in the egalitarian ideology, the word changed its function radically in the wake of the French Revolution. Finally, it served as a justification of the unchanged social inequalities and concomitant educational inequalities, the latter being the result of the former and carrying them on at the same time. Since the new society and the educational institutions were held to be egalitarian, the root of these disparities could only be a ‘natural’ one. This justificatory ideology was progressively aided by scientific discoveries (anthropometry, first half of the nineteenth century; biology, second half of the nineteenth century; social sciences, end of the nineteenth century) which this ideology perpetually sought to re-interpret in the light of its own logic, and the approach of which it sometimes influenced.

In this sense, the present attempt at analysis of the concept of ‘aptitude’ is of an epistemological nature. In fact, the word ‘aptitude’ has already been studied, in view of conceptualization in a special branch of psychology, differential psychology, which having adopted this common-sense notion endeavours to define it scientifically. Scientific objectivity requires first and foremost a breaking away from certain forms of irrational thought, and second, a transmutation of ideological practice into theoretical practice.¹ However, the concept of aptitude is actually non-existent in most psychological theories which propose to set up a scientific corpus; only some research trends, founded on empirical practices (educational and vocational selection), call upon this concept; their approach is based on social demand whose interests are extra-scientific. Scientific investigation in this field is based on the explicit or implicit understanding that selection is necessary where there is social division of labour or social hierarchy, these being considered to be invariants, either absolutely or here and now. With its ideological preconceptions, this empirical practice is likely to come up with equally ideological findings instead of a corpus of scientific knowledge. The history of the term ‘aptitude’, its appropriation by one branch of psychology and its increasingly frequent use in educational reform projects as well as in current speech, will enable us to understand how this word has become the basic support and vehicle of an ideology that dates back to the nineteenth century and is still effective.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the word ‘aptitude’ designated a contingent reality

A legal term when it made its appearance in the fifteenth century,² ‘aptitude’ was synonymous with ‘the quality of being fit for a position, or ability to come into a legacy’; hence this definition implied the idea of institution. Thereafter, it was taken up by philosophy, which introduced a new meaning, viz. a ‘natural disposition to something’. Here the definition of aptitude implied Nature.³ Now, Nature, which the society of the Ancien Régime held to be ordered by the will of God, was at that time the set of laws created by the Maker, and which governed both matter and mind according to a pre-established harmony. It is by divine decree that ‘wood is more apt to be consumed by fire than stone’ (Furetière, Trévoux), that somebody can have ‘an aptitude for everything beautiful and good’ (Richelet, Trévoux). Physical and mental deficiencies were the result of sin, of violation of a divine prohibition, but they were not irreversible, since they depended on divine grace, for ‘miracles produce effects over and above the forces of Nature, and are not a result of natural laws’ (Furetière). However, the gift of God, aptitude, conferred no superiority of rank.⁴ Effectual power was linked to birth: man is born ‘powerful’ or ‘miserable’ and remains so all his life, by the Will of God; the ‘quality’ or ‘condition’ did not depend at all on mental or physical aptitudes. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, the use of the word ‘aptitude’ was rare in everyday language; it was a pendantic world, according to most of the seventeenth-century dictionaries, a ‘barbarism’ to Father Bouhours, arbiter of the Court's conventional language; in the eighteenth century, it was ranked by Abbé Prévost among the ‘French words whose meaning is not familiar to everybody’; at the same period, Trévoux's dictionary mentions that it ‘has a fragrance of Latin’.

The term came into use in the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, at a time when the references to ‘Nature’ no longer implied the former theocentric conception. Though the aristocracy continued to exercise its power by virtue of divine right, those whom it looked down upon for being employed were getting an increasingly powerful grip on Nature: they invented the steam engine, discovered electricity, exploited the mines of Anzin, of Le Creusot, mechanized the production of textiles and metals, instigated the establishment of the first Grandes Ecoles: Ponts-et-Chaussées and Mines. The relation between man and the world was changed by this progressive control over Nature: man no longer expected God to intervene in the course of events by miracles. The material and human world was governed by its own laws to be discovered by Science. Naturalists endeavoured to re-integrate man into the continuum of the physical universe and the living species; they were, therefore, led to classify him by distinctive physical characteristics, and to investigate these differences; some like Lamarck altogether discarded the fixist view in which the order of things had been set once and for all by the Will of God. Similarly, the attention paid to psychical features, in other words to abilities, tended to become a search for laws. Gall probed into the intelligence of various species by ascending the scale of animals up to man, and tried to determine relevant areas in the brain corresponding to each ability.⁵ Since, in the eighteenth century, man had become the central point of reference, his mental and physical particularities were hence investigated in a relativist perspective. Differences between human groups or individuals were found to be contingent and relative to the physical or social environment. This scientific activity, this control over the world, and the new form which this self-investigation of man took on during that period, was particular to a social class which was becoming increasingly self-conscious. By eliminating God, it wanted to master its destiny. The bourgeoisie wielded economic, though not political, power.⁶ That is why it challenged the prevalent social order, in which position was determined by birth. It related the inequalities of destiny to social institutions and claimed political power on the strength of individual merit.

The definitions of the word ‘aptitude’ at that period reflect this change in social relations. On the one hand, the meaning of the word was specified in reference to actual human activities: ‘One is said to have, or not to have, a great aptitude for mathematics, poetry, painting, etc.’ (Abbé Féraud); on the other hand, although aptitude was still defined as a ‘natural disposition’, this definition no longer reflected the initial meaning: Abbé Féraud illustrated it with the saying: ‘Nurture transcends Nature’ (‘Nourriture passe nature’); ‘education has greater power over us than even Nature; habits create a second nature; they have as much (and even sometimes more) power over us than our natural inclinations.’ Thus an individual owed his aptitude to perform certain tasks to the random fact of being born in a given environment. This explains the passionate interest in the new pedagogical tendencies of the day; Itard endeavoured to apply concretely Rousseau's and Condorcet's ideas, and to show that past experience does not determine the psychical frame of an individual once and for all; he applied himself to proving that the idiocy of the Wild Boy of Aveyron was reversible and not definitive.

At the outbreak of the Revolution, the facts seemed to confirm the conviction that social organization was in the hands of man and not God or Nature, for it had been possible to overthrow the social order which the nobles had set up to their benefit. The Law was empowered to found a new social order, by offering to everybody without discrimination the theoretical possibility of physical, intellectual, and moral development to the greatest benefit of a society which, after getting rid of its inequalities, would be able to achieve enormous progress. When, in response to a precise wish formulated for the first time in 1762, the Constituante proclaimed the principle of a ‘public education common to all citizens, and free with respect to those parts of education which are indispensable for all men’, it was founding its greatest hopes of equalization of opportunities on educational institutions. After Condorcet's and Talleyrand's reform projects, the écoles primaires d’état (state primary schools) were set up by the decree of 21 October 1793. A little later, Lakanal established the écoles centrales (technical universities) and the écoles normales; the Grandes Ecoles were being reorganized, and others founded, such as the École Polytechnique. All these educational institutions were called upon to advance the sciences and to enable each individual to fulfil to the best of his capacities the social functions called for by progress.

One of these essential functions was precisely that of educating the people. Since the most urgent task was to achieve national unity by rallying people round a common language, there was a great need for finding ‘able’ teachers, i.e. people who knew the local idiom or dialect and were able to teach French and the new metric system. So one spoke of selection for entrance into the écoles normales in terms of pedagogical aptitudes. There was a general demand for teachers with ‘talent’, ‘dispositions’, ‘abilities’ and ‘aptitudes’, as transpires from the ‘Lettres à Grégoire’,⁷ and the projects of popular societies.⁸ Aptitude, formerly a gift of God, was now considered to be an eminently changeable result of environment and education; moreover, it was invested with a new value by which certain social functions could be claimed, and yet everybody was proclaimed to have equal rights, whatever his functions. One no longer talked of the ‘lower people’, or of the ‘lower classes’, but already of the ‘People’, and of the ‘working class’.⁹ The word ‘worker’ was losing its pejorative connotation. Whereas in the seventeenth century a ‘worker’ was ‘somebody of abject condition’ (P. Bouhours), in the eighteenth century the word was considered ‘vulgar’ (bas dans le propre) (Abbé Féraud); but after the Revolution in 1801 de Wailly¹⁰ offered a neutral definition of the word, viz. somebody ‘who works with his hands’: a sign of certain changes in the human relations. The bourgeoisie, which had called on the people whom it wanted to instruct in order to strip the nobles of their privileges, strongly believed that, while correcting the intolerable inequalities to its advantage, it was rebuilding an egalitarian society. But in fact, concerned with its own interest, it set up to its profit another social hierarchy which engendered new inequalities: political inequalities, since the so-called universal suffrage excluded women and servants; economic inequalities, since it established the regime of private property; educational inequalities, since according to Condorcet ‘secondary schools are established for children whose parents can devote a larger number of years to their education.’¹¹ Now, although inequalities prevailed, the principle of equality nevertheless gained universal recognition. Instead of birth and divine right, notions of equality, merit, aptitude, competence and individual responsibility rallied round a comprehensive ideology, to which the ‘People’ adhered as well.

The first half of the nineteenth century: ‘aptitude’ becomes an essential hereditary feature: birth of a new ideology justifying social inequalities

After many difficulties which the country, ravaged by civil strife and foreign wars, had to cope with, the bourgeoisie succeeded in taking political power; the year 1830 opened up the era of the ‘bourgeois conquerors’.¹² Thanks to the war and the Napoleonic blockade, the French economy was able, on the one hand, to absorb the mass of unemployed manpower, and, on the other, to reinforce its position opposite that of the English by taking advantage of a Continental market, as it was opened up by the Napoleonic conquest. During the Restoration and under the July Monarchy, a new boost was given to the economy: the metal industry grew in the Massif Central, in the East and in the North, textile concerns emerged, roads and railways were built, and allegorical figures of Industry and Commerce were to decorate palaces and newspaper headings. The manpower which had become available by the end of the wars was immediately taken up by the many sectors of a rapidly expanding economy. A new social hierarchy emerged. As a class the aristocracy vanished; the Tiers-Etat broke up into two classes: the ruling bourgeoisie and the proletariat, to which the former, to all intents and purposes, refused voting rights on account of property-linked suffrage (suffrage censitaire), i.e. suffrage linked to wealth. Although the proletariat, frustrated in its revolutionary hopes, continued to call for real equality, and, as is witnessed by Proudhon's ideas, started to hammer out its own ideology, the bourgeoisie, which had benefited from the overthrow of the former order, envisaged equality only with reference to members of its own class. It believed that the natural course of events would gradually settle any social problems which the State did not want to tackle. Whereas it claimed State assistance to its advantage (to finance the construction of railways to be run by private enterprise), it categorically refused such assistance to workers in the name of the imperatives of economic progress, and in the name of individual liberty.

The claims of clubs and popular societies for a generalized primary education were gradually silenced. Primary education, neglected by Napoleon, was reorganized and provided with a budget for the first time in 1833; but it was denominational, neither free, nor compulsory, and for boys only.¹³ The interest of reformers focused on secondary education reserved for children of rich families. The issue which over the whole nineteenth century animated debates and oriented successive reforms was whether to teach humanities or science. A strong demand from private industry had to be coped with, hence the foundation, in 1829, of the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, and the expansion around 1832 of the first vocational training institutions (écoles d'arts et métiers). In the face of traditionalists, the innovators, mindful of the country's economic development, started to use the justificatory principle of the diversity of aptitudes. In 1852, Fortoul referred to this in his reform project which aimed at setting up two secondary options, one literary, the other scientific. However, all this concerned only the ideological debate which divided the same social class — the bourgeoisie — about what type of person to train in order to form an ‘élite’ for a society which was undergoing a radical transform...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Essentialist ideology. Its origins and its scientific form, the theory of natural aptitudes
• 2 The ideology at work in everyday speech. The rationalization of school choices
• 3 Language and class identity. The mark of dominant ideology
• 4 From the theory of differences in aptitudes to the theory of differences in linguistic ‘codes’
• 5 Shortcomings in the theory of the ‘unequal distribution of linguistic capital’
• Conclusion