Divided School

Peter Woods

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136465093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this ethnographic study of a secondary school in the UK, the author presents an incisive account of school life from the various points of view of the pupils, teachers and parents. He describes and analyses major areas of experience and methods of adapting to school for both the children and their teachers; school experience is shown to be widely varying from boredom, despair and humiliation, to gaiety, exultation and comradeship some of it officially and some of it unofficially sponsored. The description reveals a number of marked and interpenetrating divisions within schools: between teachers and pupils, parents and teachers, parents and children and between pupils themselves. These divisions are explored, analysed and related both to institutional factors and to factors outside the school. The study suggests how these factors influence pupil and teacher strategies, and hence how the details of school life relates to wider society.

Chapter 1

Theoretical approach

It is standard practice to locate one's research within the general field, and to identify one's approach in relation to others. This is the aim of this chapter, expanding on some of the points in the Introduction. In addition I give an overview of the contents of the rest of the book.

Previous work on the school

Sociological interest in school processes has increased in recent years. In the 1950s attention was directed almost exclusively to input-output factors, namely the relationship between variables associated with social class and education achievement.¹ What came in between — the manner of achievement and non-achievement and what else went on in schools besides — was not examined at that stage. School processes were largely taken for granted, teachers regarded as co-research workers and school aims commonly understood and accepted.

During the 1960s a number of people in different areas and from different traditions began to focus on classroom activities. The reformist zeal of the 1950s, after all, seemed insufficiently productive in practical outcomes, both here and in the USA, and this failure, together with the pressure of other socio-political events which had implications for the education system, brought a change in focus.² One had to account, for example, for the failure of the reformist drive. Deschoolers and free-schoolers were among the first to make an impact, and in subjecting the educative process itself to critical scrutiny indulged in what formerly might have been regarded as heresy.³ However, they pointed to vast new areas for study in the area of what has been termed ‘the hidden curriculum’. This kind of work received a legitimizing academic imprint towards the end of the 1960s with the work in America of Smith and Geoffrey, and Jackson, which derived from certain anthropological traditions,⁴ and in Britain of Hargreaves and Lacey which was certainly reformist, but different from previous studies.⁵ The difference, especially with Jackson and Hargreaves, lay in providing a vivid sense of touching the realities of the situation, which escaped more formal studies of the school.⁶

The broad areas these new studies came to focus on were, for example, distortions of the manifest curriculum, teacher and pupil strategies, the ‘unalterable framework of the system’, or they were concerned to create an evocation of life in an institutional setting. At the same time as these perspectives were being imported into Britain from the States, interest grew in a long-standing American tradition, that of classroom interaction analysis.⁷ Systematic observation however, in which the researcher acts as analyst, preconstructs his categories and uses quantitative measures, meant that researchers had to ignore much of the action, as well as actors’ meanings and intentions, and the general cultural milieu of the situation. However, sociologists entering the field in Britain in the early 1970s began to mix in more ethnographic techniques such as non-participant observation and retaining schedules for demographic and other quantifiable data.⁸

At the same time, interest in the school and the classroom grew from another quarter, the sociology of knowledge, inspired by the publication of Knowledge and Control in 1971 and the Open University Course, ‘School and Society’.⁹ To the ‘new’ sociologists, the sociology of education was inseparable from the sociology of knowledge. For an outline, students are often referred to an article by Gorbutt:¹⁰

… Within the perspective it proposes, society is conceived of in broad terms as being socially constructed, sustained and changed through the ongoing interaction of man. The relationship between man and society is a dialectical one and is essentially dynamic … Man constantly makes his world in that he is continually faced with the problem of constructing his social reality, of making sense of the world. The meaning of men and things within his environment must be actively interpreted and negotiated …

The only way of operationalizing this approach was by moving into schools and classrooms and using close or ‘participant’ observation. Thus, for example, Keddie studied the processes by which pupils were categorized in a comprehensive school, by ‘considering two aspects of classroom knowledge; what knowledge teachers have of pupils, and what counts as knowledge to be made available and evaluated in the classroom’.¹¹ Beck studied the techniques of transfer into a secondary school and accompanied a group of children around the school all day, observing, making field notes, tape-recording and interviewing.¹² Vulliamy examined the consequences of a lack of fit between teachers’ and pupils’ criteria of relevance with regard to school music.¹³ The shift of focus is well illustrated by an American study by Estelle Fuchs, where she reports how one teacher initially attributed children's failures to her own inadequacy, but was persuaded by colleagues that the real cause lay in the pupils’ home background.¹⁴ The important element, Fuchs claims, is teacher belief, rather than the background itself. Nash's study comes to a similar conclusion.¹⁵

It was not long, however, before such studies were meeting the criticism that¹⁶

such a narrow focus for empirical research … tends to assign, if by implication only, an implausible degree of autonomy to teachers. The reorientation of sociological studies of education has seemed to stress that definitions of legitimate knowledge are not absolute, and that the activities of classroom teachers are not irrelevant to the ways that these definitions are sustained. In doing so, it has sometimes even seemed to place teachers at the centre of the process whereby conceptions of school knowledge (and, by implication, aspects of the social structure) are legitimated and changed.

Such work had another possible implication, following on from this supposed attribution of autonomy to teachers. In the 1950s they were implicitly accorded the status of co-research workers; reformist attention focused firmly on indices of social class, and had its logical practical fulfilment in the compensatory programmes following the Plow-den Report.¹⁷ When attention turned to the school during the 1960s, and teacher activities in particular, some described it as a ‘teacher-bashing’, or ‘blame the teacher’ phase. Since the ‘new sociology’ was concerned with how man actively made his world and constructed his meaning, the teacher became a popular subject for study. In the enthusiastic rush to redress the balance upset by previous omissions, all manner of ‘sins’, ‘errors’, ‘inconsistencies’ and ‘contradictions’ were revealed in teacher behaviour. Though this often may not have been the intent, the implications for some of this kind of work, focusing on teacher action, for so long ignored by sociologists, were that teachers were responsible since these were matters of consciousness and presumably could be changed by an act of will.¹⁸ Inevitably, perhaps with the enthusiastic indulgence in these new theoretical perspectives and new areas of investigation, the rectifying of the old imbalance carried the dangers of a new distortion, as indicated in the Whitty quotation above. For teachers are not free agents, and it is not entirely a matter of consciousness. This is a major criticism that might be levelled at Deviance in Classrooms, by Hargreaves, Hester and Mellor.¹⁹ In conducting their study at the level of teacher consciousness, for example on how they typify pupils (revealed by depth interview), they do not take into account factors external to the school which constrain teacher behaviour, which .might affect how they actually typify pupils in the situation. It might be claimed that their analysis is valid regardless, and that it is made available both for further refinement or adaptation and for explanations on a wider level. That would be another task.

Another recent work on the school, however, in reaction to such ‘idealist’ work, claims that it is impossible to understand school processes without reference to external factors, and indeed that ‘the sociology of the school’ or ‘of the classroom’ is impossible.²⁰ For Sharp and Green the quest is not just to describe teacher action and portray inconsistencies and dichotomies, but to investigate what problems for the teacher these are viable solutions to. This takes these authors out of the classroom and into the wider structure of social relationships.

Their central thesis is that the rise of progressivism in our schools is a function of its greater effectiveness for social control. They claim to illustrate how, despite the ideology of child-centred progressivism, social stratification is reproduced in the classroom, and children's identities are socially structured. These are explained in terms of ‘common features in the material and social environment of the teachers which cannot merely be intended away in consciousness, and which structure the activities of each and produce similar patterns in the social structuring of pupil identities’.²¹ They emphasize the constraints of the situation within which teacher action is generated, and their analysis of the implications of this and its relationship with teacher ideology and operational consciousness is a considerable advance. However, there are problems with their account. For in removing the focus so forcefully once more to structure, much autonomy and many decision-making powers are denied the actor, who is portrayed as the unwitting victim of external forces. School processes are interpreted in terms of social structure and this marks, perhaps, a changing emphasis.

But the interpretation of those processes and the way in which they are conceived remain firmly with the authors. The point of departure from the field of research, from interviews and observation, is too stark and too sudden. The phenomenological approach Sharp and Green criticize so strongly can, in turn, level the criticism at them that they neglect situational realities and local contexts. The ‘meaning’ attributed to an action or utterance can vary according to actor's or speaker's definition of the situation. If we do not know the latter, we cannot assume the former. In Sharp and Green's case there is every indication that there was a gulf of difference in interpretation between teachers and researchers. They state that ‘we employ a concept of false consciousness and implicitly highlight in critical fashion the falsity, where it is substantively incorrect, and naivety, where it is superficial, of the actor's consciousness’,²² without, however, examining the teachers’ frames of reference when producing the supposed ‘falsity’ and ‘naivety’.

This is without doubt a serious and difficult problem epitomized in these two books, all too briefly discussed here.²³ On the one hand, Hargreaves and his colleagues are very much concerned with exact and faithful representation of the situation and inmates’ definitions, but in their preoccupation with that, ignore other factors bearing on that situation which might help us contextualize them. On the other, Sharp and Green, acknowledging the valuable but limited aid such theoretical and methodological approaches can afford, and capitalizing on it to some extent, centre their analysis of what goes on in school in social structure, but at the same cost at the interactionist level. I make no claims to having resolved this problem, but simply make the point that my approach in this respect is predominantly interactionist, though I am concerned to explore some of the connections with the wider social structure where they seemed particularly relevant.²⁴

A similar problem — of mismatch between inmates’ definitions and researchers’ understandings of them — has been evident with work done on pupils and their reactions to school. With the new approaches which stressed the individual's constructions it might have been expected that attention should turn to pupils also, with emphasis on their own point of view. Apart from Hargreaves's and Lacey's pioneering work, however, there have been few such studies, and the reports of them have been largely confined to the academic journals. These show a variety of approaches to ‘the pupil's own point of view’, some of them still encased within official frameworks. The range extends from inferences derived from preconstructed categories²⁵ through ‘naturally-elicited’ constructs based on the personality theory of George Kelly²⁶ and symbolic interactionist studies relying on observation techniques but strong researcher analysis,²⁷ to phenomenological and ethnomethodological studies which seek to preserve the ‘integrity’ of the situation still further.²⁸

Methodologically there are vast differences among these offerings, but some common ground might be discovered. We learn that Hargreaves's and Lacey's polarization of pupils’ subcultures within the school into ‘academic’ and ‘delinquescent’ is too rigid,²⁹ and that there is not necessarily an anti-school group.³⁰ Pupils are overwhelmingly utilitarian unless they are not doing examinations, when they might have expressive interests.³¹ Teachers do not always act as they say they do or will.³² Pupils like good order, warm friendly relations, teachers who ‘explain’ and are interesting, and dislike weak, unfair, unfriendly, boring teachers.³³ Pupils have their own rules, which teachers would do well to know about.³⁴ However, there are problems in relating these studies together. It is well known that pre-constructing categories delimits the area of investigation and channels responses. The channel such studies sail up may be a minor tributary in the pupils’ scheme of things. While not entirely invalidated, they can mislead out of context. Smithers, for example (following Morton-Williams), infers too much about the meaning pupils attach to his ‘expressive’ items, having assumed already, of course, that school ‘objectives’ generally are of importance to them. School-leavers may well value ‘social’ or ‘expressive’ goals more than ‘stayers’, but they may not be the school's social goals. Quine goes some way toward acknowledging this. He found nearly all his sample seeing school as a means to an end, thus frustrating the hopes of the champions of ROSLA who had emphasized the social benefits of the extra year. However, he does say that some appeared not to understand the question asking them about how school might aid their leisure, maturity and citizenship; while that on vocational ends was relatively clear cut. Quine also found most of his pupils saying they liked school, and ‘this acceptance of the school regime was stronger in the bottom sets or streams.’ We are given no indication of why they liked school, and if this differed at all among the...