Social Class and the Comprehensive School

Dr Julienne Ford, Julienne Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415177726
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134684496
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on the great wealth of knowledge and experience of educational practitioners and theorists, the volumes in The Sociology of Education set of the International Library of Sociology explore the very important relationship between education and society. These books became standard texts for actual and intending teachers. Drawing upon comparative material from Israel, France and Germany, titles in this set also discuss the key questions of girls' and special needs education, and the psychology of education.

1
Justice and the Comprehensive Ideal

Among parents and teachers, as well as Labour Party idealists and educationalists, discontent with the tripartite organization of secondary education in England and Wales is very evident. But criticism of the present system of selection does not stem so much from a rejection of the general principle whereby rewards, material and symbolic, are unequally distributed in society, as from a distaste for the current bases of discrimination. Thus, as Pedley puts it, ‘The Englishman of the 1960s does not believe in equality. What he wants is equal opportunity to be unequal.’¹ On closer examination, however, even the argument for equality of opportunity is seen to be a cover for a yet more limited plea. For, as Benn and Peters have noted, the cry for equality of opportunity refers in practice to the desire to accord individuals the same opportunities ‘only in the sense that they are all entitled to be treated alike until relevant grounds are established for treating them differently’.² In the English situation relevant grounds are almost invariably considered in the context of ability. Thus we can see the main body of current criticism of the tripartite system of education, in sociological as well as political and administrative circles, as stemming from the view that selection should be based on the sole criterion of ‘ability’³ and that this cannot be adequately ascertained by an examination at Eleven-Plus.⁴

Now it should be made clear immediately that this is always an ideological position, a bid to remove an injustice, a statement that discrimination is being made on irrelevant grounds and that this should be replaced by efficient selection on relevant and reasonable criteria.⁵ Sometimes the ideological flavour of such a criticism is disguised in a variant of the functionalist view. For example, Floud and Halsey⁶ argue that ‘the efficient division of the working population requires both that there should be the right numbers of workers in each occupation and that the qualities of workers in each occupation should be as appropriate as possible—in short that “ability” and “opportunity” should be matched as closely as possible.’⁷ They claim that under the present system this requirement is not being met adequately, and that a closer adherence to this ideal could be attained by comprehensive reorganization. Yet on closer inspection this argument is not entirely convincing. Floud and Halsey may consider the present system to be unjust, but they have not demonstrated that it is inefficient.

Consider, for example, the situation where the proportion of individuals with abilities relevant to high status jobs exceeds the number of those jobs. In this case, so long as all those who actually attain high status jobs do have the requisite abilities, ‘the efficient division of the working population’ is effected—but some individuals with the ‘ability’ to become brain surgeons have to be content with sweeping roads. Furthermore, the actual brain surgeons could have been selected from the universe of potential brain surgeons on entirely ascriptive, that is ‘unreasonable’, grounds; but the requirements of efficiency in the division of labour would not be threatened so long as they could actually function adequately as brain surgeons. There is no reason to assume that roadsweepers of brainsurgeon capacity would be inefficient at sweeping roads. Nor does it salvage the argument to introduce the idea of ‘wastage of ability’; for, while the supply of skills or potential skills in the population exceeds the demand for such skills which is generated by the occupational structure, there will always be ‘wastage of ability’ regardless of the mode of selection through education.⁸

So, rather than wasting intellectual effort in attempts to rationalize ideological commitments and to present the conclusions from normative assumptions as though they were derived from value-neutral deductions, it is clearly more economic to state these value assumptions in explicit form.⁹ Let us recognize that, in our discussions of the processes of educational and occupational selection, it is justice which is at issue, not efficiency. There is no fear that by formulating the argument in these terms we are relegating it to idealists and politicians; such a discussion does not lie outside the province of sociology, for our ideas about justice in general, and our mobility ideolo-gies in particular, are important aspects of our culture which themselves merit study.

There are two opposed approaches to the study of justice among sociologists: one empirical, the other moral. The empirical position is exemplified in the work of Homans.¹⁰ For Homans’ norms of justice are determined by the empirical conditions of exchange in social relationships; ‘what is determines what always ought to be.’¹¹ Thus what a man expects, what he considers just, is determined by his actual experience: he comes to learn that generally it happens that rewards are proportional to costs: ‘if one man is “better” than another in his investments, he should also be “better” than the other in the value of the contribution he makes and in the reward he gets for it.’¹² Thus an empirical expectation, a conception of probability, gives rise to a normative expectation, a conception of what ought to be done.¹³ This can be expressed by the more general Aristotelian notion that ‘if (a man) is better on one count, he ought to be better on both: his rankings on the two counts should be in line with one another’.¹⁴ On the empirical view, then, justice is a matter of expectations and the sense of injustice is aroused when expectations are defeated.¹⁵ Runciman ¹⁶

The empirical approach has been attacked by Runciman16 who, drawing on Benn and Peters,¹⁷ stresses that just differentials in rewards are based, not on any differences in status or investment, but on relevant differences. Runciman’s personal sense of justice is outraged by the denial of reward to an individual in one of Homans’ examples¹⁸ on grounds he does not see to be relevant. ‘By normal standards of justice,’ says Runciman, ‘this is transparently unfair.’¹⁹ But what are ‘normal’ standards of justice? Clearly, if we understand ‘normal’ in the statistical rather than the clinical sense, there is the possibility that what other people consider to be just, what is normal to a particular culture or subculture, is ‘transparently unfair’ to Runciman. Of course the bases of discrimination must be relevant in some sense to the discrimination in question before a difference in reward is described as just. But what are the criteria of relevance? Runciman seems to consider that there are absolute criteria which must be obvious to all reasonable men. Yet even if we were to accept this philosophically intuitionist position²⁰ we would still be left with the task of explaining what actually happens in the world. For these purposes Runciman’s personal conception of what kinds of differences between human beings are relevant bases of differential reward is of no interest; we are asking, rather, what criteria of differentiation are popularly held to be relevant to differences in reward. Thus the moral conception of justice is antipathetic to sociological explanation since conceptions of what the standards of justice ought to be are irrelevant to an understanding of the views of justice which people in fact hold.

Curiously Runciman’s own Relative Deprivation and Social Justice²¹ provides a most enlightening explanation of the way in which popular conceptions of justice actually change based on the very idea of status inconsistency which is so central to the Homansian approach to justice. Basically his argument is that ‘objective’ inequalities in life-chances of all kinds—the sorts of situations which liberal sociologists might describe as ‘transparently unfair’—are not themselves sufficient to produce a sense of injustice in the deprived individuals. The intervening variable is the notion of relative deprivation.²² Relative deprivation arises when individuals perceive inequalities between their positive reference groups and their membership groups.²³ For example, when individuals are placed in marginal positions,²⁴ one attribute or status making them eligible for membership in a more highly valued group in which they are not wholly accepted while other attributes assign them more firmly to a less highly valued group, they will feel relatively deprived. The debilities ascribed to them because of their membership of the less highly valued group will now come to be defined as intolerable and unjust. Thus in societies where there is a high degree of status crystallization,²⁵ where individuals’ rankings on the various hierarchies of prestige, power, wealth, race and so on tend to be highly correlated, relative deprivation, and hence the sense of injustice, will tend to be low. On the other hand in societies undergoing more rapid social change, where mobility between statuses is greater and where consequently there is a low degree of status crystallization, there will tend to be groups and individuals who are continually redefining traditional conceptions of justice, and rejecting as unfair what was formerly accepted as right.

We have seen that our ideas about equality of educational opportunity are aspects of our more general cultural conceptions about justice, and that changing ideas of justice in society can be explained with reference to the ideas of status crystallization and relative deprivation. We are now in a position to examine changing conceptions of justice in the sphere of education in terms of this explanatory framework.

Changing attitudes to education can be seen as changing ideas of what are just bases for educational discrimination. The sense of injustice arises because the sorts of differences between individuals which have been determining their educational opportunity are now seen as irrelevant. Thus the charter of the Butler Act of 1944 was to neutralize the impact of wealth on educational attainment as wealth came to be an unacceptable determinant of educational success. However the Act did not remove, nor was it designed to remove, differentials in educational opportunity, for educational chances were now to be determined by measured intelligence, and since this attribute was considered to be relevant to educational success, this new discrimination was seen to be just.

Now, while it is true that there has been some disquiet deriving from the suspicion that the Eleven-Plus test is not an accurate measure of innate intelligence,²⁶ it is generally agreed that this test is the best instrument yet devised to measure ‘intelligence’ and that alternative attempts at selection for secondary school, such as teachers’ recommendations are less ‘fair’.²⁷ How is it then that people have come to define the present system of educational selection as unjust? Their sense of injustice stems from a redefinition of ‘intelligence-as-measured-by-Eleven-Plus-tests’ as an irrelevant basis of discrimination. And their argument is that a new and just differentiation should be on the basis of ‘real ability’ rather than measured intelligence.²⁸

The explanation of this changing conception of educational justice must be sought in the conditions which gave rise to a sense of relative deprivation among those not favoured by the tripartite system. It is the working class which is, and always has been, most educationally deprived.²⁹ But, as we have seen, deprivation is not in itself sufficient to produce the sense of relative deprivation. Since the ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• THE SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Justice and the Comprehensive Ideal
• 2: The Development of Talent
• 3: Ability and Opportunity
• 4: Thinking about Work
• 5: Making Friends at School
• 6: Consciousness of Class
• 7: Towards Utopia?
• 8: Epilogue
• APPENDIX I Notes on the Operationalization of the Typology of Class Ideologies
• APPENDIX II Questionnaire
• Bibliography