Race, Class and Education (RLE Edu L)

Len Barton, Stephen Walker

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415504102
• eBook ISBN: 9781136471322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

One problem which continues to absorb social scientists is the way in which so much social deprivation stems from racial or class status. The discussion in this book is developed in two ways: firstly, careful attention is given to an examination of the way minority groups create and maintain collective identities and action. Secondly, the relationship between this movement and such topics as racism in schools, schooling, unemployment and West Indian involvement in sporting rather than academic activities is analysed, together with the nature of the educational experience of different class and gender groups.

Part One

Race, Resistance and Collective Identities

Introduction

The writers of all the papers which appear in this collection are strongly commited to linking analysis of race relations and education with an exploration of the possibilities and mechanisms of social change. Such a linkage might be established in a variety of ways. However, as was noted in the editorial introduction, a major concern in this book is with how we might move from an analysis of the moments of cultural resistance and collective struggle developed by different individuals and groups who live in multi-racial educational and community settings towards the construction of policies and strategies aimed at reform. Two particular aspects of this question emerge as focal points of debate – discussion about how individuals struggling with established routines and structures identify with others who are similarly motivated, and discussion about how such groups develop a basis and a strategy for resistance. Clearly, both these discussions will involve a consideration of other important issues and questions. It is important to recognise, for example, that in both debates, processes of identification and of resistance are recognised as problematic and this recognition is developed in many of the papers collected here. However, we have arranged the papers in this book in a framework built around these two main focal concerns, not because we think that they represent the only issues of importance in an analysis of race and education but because of the enormous significance they have for the major theme of this volume – the accomplishment of effective social change. The book, then, is divided into two main sections, each of which contain papers which reflect this separation in analytical interest. Each section begins with a major theoretical paper in which the current state of sociological debate about education and cultural reproduction is reviewed. Whilst these reviews encompass considerations which have relevance beyond analysis specifically to do with race and education, by extending our understanding of how cultural reproduction through education is both achieved and resisted, they provide a framework within which the exploration pf particular issues like racism and race relations in education can be set in a location which permits one to see how these concerns relate to wider public and private-social problems.

In this first section of the book a number of interrelated themes are introduced. Perhaps the most important one is the idea that adequate analysis of the conditions which lead to problems like racism in schools, unequal educational opportunity for various ethnic groups and the alienation of pupils who are constantly being reminded of their relative educational failure, is unlikely to be achieved unless more careful attention is paid to a consideration of the two points at which collective struggles have impact upon schooling. Educational systems and practices are not seen here as free-floating, neutral phenomena but as taking their major characteristics from the conditions which emerge through collective struggle. These conditions influence both the forms such systems and practices take and the nature of the responses individuals make to these forms. The idea, then, involves a chaining in analysis; a linking of issues concerning race and racism in school with the cultural conditions of education which are themselves inextricably related to contests between social groups and the outcomes of such struggles.

One of the advantages of this basic approach to analysis is that, by relating cultural response to cultural conditions, the opportunity is created for the development of a less deterministic view of the impact of educational ideologies and processes. This section contains three case studies by Carrington, Tomlinson and Vulliamy, of ways in which cultural responses to different aspects and forms of schooling are made by individuals and groups in such a way as to create observable social circumstances which can not be accounted for through reference to simple reproductionist or determinist theory. This work stands in direct opposition to explanations of the oppression of minority groups which uses a crude control model and it provides evidence of the ways in which subordinate race, class and gender groups in educational contexts can construct sets of practices which in some ways challenge the dominant ideologies of the context and the established routines.

Of course, to challenge over-deterministic theory is not to suggest that schools are not influential in the maintenance and transmission of racist and oppressive ideologies. Rather, it is to argue that how these ideologies are interpreted in the moments they are re-constituted and how they are used by those individuals and groups to whom they are being made available will vary according to the cultural milieu drawn upon by the people involved in this construction and usage. As both Carrington and Tomlinson observe, this will sometimes involve challenges of operational ideologies being made by minority groups in education and it will sometimes involve a process of accommodation by such people. The extent to which influential ideologies constrain action or promote resistance cannot be determined in advance of scrutiny of the empirical conditions of such action and resistance.

This kind of scrutiny will need to be broad in both scope and method. There has been a tendancy in past investigations of issues relating to race and education to focus upon isolatable ideological mechanisms of schooling, like the curriculum, the nature of social relations in school or the pedagogical codes found in classrooms, and to concentrate upon the impact of this single variable upon the formation of cultural identities and of attitudes to race and race relations. These mechanisms exert different kinds of influence but are themselves underrelated – and as Carrington and Tomlinson both show, the development of specific collective identities is an intricate process subject to the impact of a delicate network of different ideological inputs and cultural responses in complex combination.

A careful re-examination of the ways in which messages about race and race relations carried through the process of schooling shape group identity and practice has a further advantage. It allows for a critical comparison to be made between the rhetoric used to support and justify educational and community programmes designed to democratise the form and content of these message systems and the practical effects of such programmes. Tomlinson, for example, in her paper, suggests that whilst rhetoric might suggest that appeal is being made to meritocratic ideals in the educational and career-selection assessment of individuals from different racial groups, nevertheless, the impact of structural inequalities in the educational provision made for these groups (and on, therefore, their collective educational experience), means that, for many, the ideal cannot apply.

Being sensitive to the way in which minority groups form cultural associations around the resistances to educational processes individual members construct forces us beyond mere theoretical speculation about how educational systems work. An awareness of the existence of groups contesting, challenging and transforming prevailing practices inevitably means that, in reflecting upon how we might respond to such social movements, we are compelled to re-examine essential questions about the kind of educational system we want and the kind of society we wish to prepare children for through education. It is out contention that all four papers in this section explore issues of deep significance to such a re-examination.

Movement, Class and Education

Philip Wexler

Introduction

My intention is to understand the relation between movements of oppressed people, class formation and education. Education can work to block the development of collective action. Historically, its effects often have often been quite the opposite; education contributed to the development of collective action and revolt. Despite this history, we are now accustomed to thinking of education in the post-industrial capitalist societies as part of an established order, and particularly as a social institution charged with helping to sustain it. In America, this has been the prevailing view among revisionist historians, radical economists of education, and of a vocal liberal wing of the younger generation of curricularists. The sociologists of education have, of course, had their heads stuck in the mud as usual. They continue their research business of individual status attainment, despite declining rates of academic return.

There are small signs that we are moving away from a preoccupation with the documentation of domination, in and through education. The discourse of liberal curriculum now labels ‘vulgar’, ‘mechanical’, or ‘crude’ any writing on educational, social and cultural reproduction that does not declare such processes contradictory, contested, and even potentially transformative. The discourse follows liberalism also in its participatory extensions; it offers formal equality to the reproduction of gender and less often, of race. The reproduction discourse has its own coterie of critics. Their job is to insist on the importance of the subject, consciousness, and critical thinking.

In a series of recent papers (1981a, 1981b, 1981c) I have specified what I see as limitations of the language and imagery of reproduction. Perhaps this criticism remains unheard because it is stated too obliquely. I am now going to say it more directly and to also indicate why I think it needs to be said.

Critical Overview

Much of the current thinking about social relations, as part of the effort to understand education socially, uses a surface language of Marxism but expresses a static organicist mentality. This organicism is an ideological aspect of the ruling group’s own self-understanding. Conflict is tacked on to a static essentialist core. The conservative implications of this mentality are not vitiated by writing the phrase “class struggle” on it. The problem is that as the liberal curricularists introduce the language of Marxism into wider educational discourse, they are carrying with it an organicist baggage of a backward looking bourgeoisie. This baggage is revealed even in so-called “class analysis”. The language and study of class is undertaken from within a social theory which misrepresents an historical production of social relations as fixed places within an order. No wonder it takes so long and seems so hard to reintroduce social dynamism – with props like “contestation” and “transformation”.

There is the same problem in research: a conservative ideology works beneath the surface of a derived Marxism. Empirical educational studies are now encouraged to support the putatively critical paradigm and to cash in on empiricist academic currency. But the way in which faddish qualitative and ethnographic research is actually performed displays nothing practically critical – only the same abstracted fragmentation and ahistoricism as conventional technicist empiricism.

The theories of educational practice, pedagogy, which grow out of this work, are, beneath their radical veneer, fundamentally opposed to historical materialism. Transformative pedagogies are advocated. But they are abstracted from history, from place, and from the needs and purposes of concrete social groups.

In every domain – theory, research and practice – liberal curricularists unintentionally display the powerful hold of prevailing ways of thinking and the mixed ideological forms in which efforts at making change are represented. This transmission of prevailing modes of thought is not the result of the operation of some abstracted hegemony. Rather, it indicates the critics own lack of social self-understanding. I believe that it is the result of a failure to understand that the current critical discourse in education developed only in relation to successful collective action. The historic cultural basis of a critical approach to education in the United States is in the Black movement, in the Student movement, and increasingly, in the Women’s movement, the Gay movement, the ecology, anti-nuclear and consumer movements. Liberal and critical work in American education that was made possible by historical, collective social action now develops a mode of analysis that does not place collective action at its center.

It is necessary to criticize the organicist structuralism – which alternatively calls itself reproduction theory, contested reproduction, and even simply the new sociology of education – because it moves understanding ever further from analysis of the social present and its possibilities. We will not be able to grasp the meaning of this present if we allow ourselves to be incapacitated by structuralist homilies, decontextualized ethnographies, and so-called liberating pedagogies.

The alternative is to understand how collective historical actors produce social life, and to specify the conditions under which the movements of some of these actors enable the formation of a class. I want to suggest what some of these collective movements are, what they are now doing in the United States, and whether there is some path of development occurring which indicates the possibility of class action capable of forming a central post-industrial class actor. I want to look at the present conjuncture in the United States from the point of view of collective action and to ask what the relation is of education to such action. The theoretical position which makes these questions possible is a general one. The questions themselves are conjucturally specific, as is my brief discussion of educational practice and of the research on high schools which students and I are now doing. But first we need to clear a little ground.

Theory

Reproduction, Class and Critical Thinking

Recent critiques of reproduction imagery in education (Apple, 1981; Giroux, 1981) are accomplishing what Merton (1957) did for functionalism; shedding its fundamentalism in order to preserve its basic logic of analysis. Adding terms like ‘contested reproduction’ or ‘structural autonomy’ doesn’t displace an organicist integrationism that reifies historical action, and enables social analysis to be formulated in a way that naturalizes, as systemically necessary, the practices of ruling groups. Reproduction theory naturalizes the present. It wrongly accepts the ruling groups’ false claims that their practices constitute a natural order. It disprivileges the alternative view of social life as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One – Race, Resistance and Collective Identities
• Part Two – Race, Resistance And Collective Struggle
• Part Three – Race, Class and Education in Britain – A Teaching Bibliography
• Author Index