Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein

Brian Davies, Ana Morais, Johan Muller, Brian Davies, Ana Morais, Johan Muller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415339827
• eBook ISBN: 9781134299287
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Basil Bernstein is arguably one of the most important educational theorists of the late 20th century. Whilst most academics and students in sociology of education know of Bernstein, few can claim to fully understand the scope and power of his work, which simply cannot be matched by any of his contemporaries. This book, written by a team of international contributors, offers an insight into the richness and depth of his theories. It demonstrates the growing recognition of the value of Bernstein's work to understanding unfolding developments in education systems around the world today. The volume is divided into four sections: * Section 1 considers the work of the theorists that Bernstein worked 'through' and 'with', from Durkheim and Marx to Bourdieu and Foucault * Section 2 focuses on teaching and learning in school contexts and draw on current issues like boy's underachievement, citizenship, system reform and language learning in varied cultural contexts * Section 3 applies Bernstein's theories to teacher education * Section 4 focuses on international and higher education This comprehensive text will show the international academic community in education and sociology - as well as students on education, sociology, sociolinguistic and social pyschology degrees - how to read and use Bernstein.

1 Introduction

The possibilities of Basil Bernstein

Johan Muller

The irony of all theorizing is its propensity to generate, not an understanding, but a not-yet-understood.

(Michael Oakshott)

The provision of a general education to all has never been a satisfactory business. On the one hand, it has expanded ‘meteorically’ (Maton, Chapter 15, this volume) to the furthermost reaches of the world, so that there are virtually no communities left which it does not touch in one way or another. But the touch of the education machine is inexorably uneven. This continues to be the case within and between communities and between countries. Saying so was not popular in Basil Bernstein’s time, and Brian Davies (2001: 3) records Bernstein’s irritation at the way his particular account of this educational imponderable was ‘steadfastly misread’ over at least a decade, probably longer. Not much has changed and the messenger is still regularly blamed for somehow becoming an obstacle to egalitarian reform by pointing out the persistence of structural educational inequality. However unjust, one upshot of this misunderstanding is a standing challenge to educators in general, including Bernsteinians, to display good faith by moving beyond an analytic of inequality to what Philip Wexler (1984: 406) once called (somewhat derisively, let it be said) a ‘put-up or shut-up sociology’.

The response has predictably been ambiguous. To begin with, Bernstein’s own inclinations in this regard are a matter of interpretation. For a large group of sympathetic readers of his work, perhaps for the majority, Bernstein was ‘an analyst of power rather than a prescriber of policy’ (Davies 2001: 1) and saying so was the end of it. That is surely right, but it begs a following question: Does this mean that Bernsteinian sociology has no politics? This is a preposterous question, perhaps, for those who see Bernstein’s work as driven by a sense of social justice and outrage at the continuing deformation of life chances by the pedagogic device. But where precisely lies the politics, non-believers recurringly ask? There are three kinds of answer to the question, at least, in Bernstein’s late work.

The most explicit, and probably the least satisfactory, is provided in the Introduction to Bernstein (1996), where he lays down an educational programme for effective democracy: ‘we will need to ensure’, he says in unaccustomed prescriptive mode, ‘that we have institutionalized three interrelated rights’ (Bernstein 1996: 6), or pedagogic democratic rights. These are the right to enhancement (which includes crucially the ‘right to the means of critical understanding and to new possibilities’ (ibid.)), to inclusion and to participation. These rights, he goes on to say, are regularly limited and democracy as we know it will depend upon good reasons, or some compensation, if the victims are not to lose confidence in it. This is a sombre thought, but while it does speak to Bernstein’s deep sense of social justice, it does not provide anything that could be called a path forward. Part of the difficulty is that those most in need of redress will be those whose right to enhancement has been curtailed and who will, by definition, have been deprived of access to ‘critical understanding’ and, more crucially, to a means for generating ‘new possibilities’.

The second sense of politics in Bernstein’s work is politics as a motor that propels his own analytical enterprise. No matter how justified the political impulse may be, though, this propulsion must soon submit to the priority of the work itself, if that work is to have any force. Bernstein says as much in his interview with Joseph Solomon (Bernstein 2000: 210): ‘For me the political implications, although the initial motivation, are secondary to the long process of understanding and describing.’ With this formulation, Bernstein not so much debunks politics as cuts pious good intentions down to size. Political impulse is important, then, but it cannot match the work in providing grounds for action. Indeed, on its own, it can be positively – that is, ideologically and rhetorically – misleading. Here is the third sense of politics in Bernstein. The real potency of the analytical enterprise resides, for him, with the analytical or descriptive power of the theory, because from this power emerge possibilities for political choice and action. This is a strong and important claim and it deserves close attention. Here is how Bernstein continues in the interview with Joseph Solomon (ibid.):

The theory attempts to show both the limiting power of forms of regulation and their possibilities, so that we are better able to choose the forms we create rather than the forms to be created for us. Effective choice, effective challenge requires this understanding and failure is often the result of rhetorical solution or ideologically driven aspiration [emphasis added].

What we have here is the makings of a political theory of action based on theory. Its principal features are threefold. First, there is the imperative to understand the wellsprings of social order. Second, we need the capacity to understand features of a possible social reality or arrangement that transcends the present arrangement; that is, an arrangement that is both virtual and exists in a (more desirable) possible future. Third, it is only from this means of generating possible futures that a sure basis can be provided for arriving at ‘effective choice, effective challenge’; that is, propitious political action. It is worth commenting that it is just this ‘idealizing’ feature of the sacred which Durkheim identified in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim 1915: 133) as the ‘motor force for cultural change’ (Muller 2000: 78). In this, as in most things, Bernstein remains the exemplary Durkheimian.

It is worth pausing here. Theory, for Bernstein, has at least a two-pronged role. The first is to grasp the real, as it is, so to speak, an already formidable task due to the inescapability of the discursive gap at the heart of pedagogic discourse, a theme explored by Davis in Chapter 4 of this volume. But the real itself is to be understood not in a static sense but in a dynamic one; every actually existing real nurtures within it a series of logical alternative possible futures. This second, pre-eminent role of theory is to grasp the real as the realization of only one of a series of logical possibilities. That is, the task is always not only to map an existing state of affairs but to understand that state as an actualized possibility, with determinate features of variation, alongside other virtual possible worlds with equally determinate features of variation. It is these possible worlds, when delineated, which offer themselves up for political choice and action.

There are two points to note about the theoretical generation of possible worlds. The first is that, as a fact of their virtual existence, they are empirically blank. Their place in the matrix is an empty set. We cannot know what they look like, by definition, although we can make guesses, by extrapolation from the predictable regularities of the already provisionally confirmed parts of the theory. Some researchers are bolder in their guesses than others, as we will see below. The cautious ones have a point. Not only do we not know what a future pedagogic regime might actually look like or produce, we have to expect that its outcomes are at least as likely to be malign as they are to be benign. Not all parts of the theoretical matrix may yet be visible and we may not have at our conceptual disposal the entire array of levers of the regulatory apparatus. But that is just to confirm that in analytical work, as in politics, there are no absolute guarantees and to stress, as Bernstein did constantly, that theory without empirical illustration or confirmation is but half the job done (Moore and Muller 2002). Much of the best work in the Bernsteinian tradition involves either constructing analytical projections or assessing them empirically and confirming or modifying the theory. In the most general sense, one could say that this is what this volume and the chapters it contains are all about: the principled and systematic investigation of educational possibilities. Insofar as they place themselves somehow in the tracks of Bernstein, they display, collectively, an investigation, modification and augmentation of Bernstein’s possibilities.

A more overt political stance is discernible in some of Bernstein’s later work, where he worries in a more explicit way about the intensification of state control, as well as about ‘the fundamental changes in the management of order in contemporary societies’ (Bernstein 2001a: 31). By this he means that the state increasingly inserts economic managerial agents and their criteria into the symbolic field. This leads to the ‘economizing’ or ‘tech-nologizing’ of the culture of education, as well as to the rise in prominence of the ‘socially empty’ notion of ‘trainability’ and its principal carrier, a generic sub-mode of performance pedagogy. Left to itself, Bernstein foresees the increasing state supervision of the distribution of knowledge via the imprimatur of the economic field, leading to the second ‘totally pedagogised society’, the first having been mediaeval Christendom. In the opening chapter to this volume, Tyler fleshes out some dystopian features of the ‘totally pedagogised society’ mark II.

Is the advent of the second ‘totally pedagogised society’ necessarily grounds for pessimism? The answer depends on which Bernstein one favours. It is certainly hard to avoid noticing the shift in Bernstein’s language, from a formal lexicon, to the incorporation of terms like ‘economic’ and ‘market’ into his typological characterizations of pedagogic models and identities in his later work (see e.g. Bernstein 2000: 56, 67). When questioned on this in the video conference at the first Basil Bernstein Symposium, Bernstein makes clear his objection to the contemporary dominance of a regionalized, market-based, performance pedagogy: ‘my opposition to what is going on, it’s because pedagogy is simply seen as a technology’ (Morais et al. 2001: 380). And why is that a problem? Because by submerging regulative discourse (‘technologising of the pedagogic’ (ibid.)), pedagogy loses any sense of a moral trajectory, of any grounding in a social base and becomes, hence, ‘socially empty’ (Bernstein 2001b: 366).

Much depends on what one takes this to imply. Should we take it to mean that the ‘totally pedagogised society’ will brainwash us all into morally bereft instrumental robots? Does Bernstein presage a new totalitarian dystopia? There are three sets of grounds for doubting this. First, recall that the first totally pedagogized society ruled by the Catholic Church marked the triumph of the Trivium, the production of introjected identities, of similar-to relations of mechanical solidarity, of the regulative. If anything, here was a pedagogic regime that overdosed on the inner, so to speak, so the totalling threat lies not solely with the form or mode, but with its reach. Does this mean then that the threat lies with a new, insidious form of state control which snuffs out all bases for resistance? On this point Bernstein follows Castells (1997) in predicting that, on the contrary, we will see a ‘cultural resurgence of the rituals of inwardness in new social forms’ (Bernstein 2000: 77), a ‘revival of forms of the sacred’ (ibid.: 78), that is, a set of new local identities external to the market-driven official pedagogic discourse. These new forms are not, of course, all benign, but the point remains; the Orwellian blight is not imminent: ‘There appears to be a reversal of the Durkheimian sites of the sacred and the profane, and a rusting of Weber’s iron cage of dismal prophesy’ (ibid.).

The third ground for doubting the imminent robotification of society is perhaps the most compelling. Bernstein has often urged educators to turn their analytical gaze away from ideological critique of the external lineaments of pedagogy to the conditions for its effectiveness: ‘we have to ask ourselves when it is effective, what are the conditions that have made it effective’ (in Morais et al. 2001: 380). On this Bernstein is clear. The condition of success of ‘trainability’, of constant, flexible retraining, is the prior acquisition of a specialized identity, of a prior grounding in a social base, of a prior regulative and discursive introjection resting on a particular social order (Bernstein 2000: 59; Bernstein 2001a: 366). The insidious effect of ‘trainability’ is that it renders invisible (or inaudible) the requirement of prior identity induction into a moral and discursive order that is overwhelmingly still provided at home and school for the middle class and almost solely at school for the old and new poor. We may say that the perniciousness of ‘trainability’ lies in its camouflage of the renewed importance of the school for the production of specialized identities and in the false, because unattainable, allure that attaches itself to the promise of ‘trainability’ as a consequence. Breier (Chapter 14, this volume) provides a telling case study of a ‘trainability’ initiative in Labour Law, and the incomprehension and bitterness produced by its inevitable failure to redeem its promise to underqualified trade unionists.

Two kinds of political concern emerge from this analysis. The first is a concern with the depredations of the new market-oriented ‘performance culture’ (Bernstein 2000: 62, fn.2); the second is a concern with producing specialized identities for disadvantaged learners. These concerns are, of course, not mutually exclusive, as a number of contributions to this volume demonstrate. Nevertheless, they do push in different directions, and the form of combination of concerns is consequently interestingly different. This can best be seen by considering Bernstein’s macro-distinction between the two pedagogic types of invisible/competence and visible/performance pedagogy, each with two subtypes (Bernstein 1990: 72, 213). The grid is reproduced by Bourne (Chapter 5, this volume). See also Tyler (Chapter 2) for a modified version of the grid). For those leaning towards the first concern, the performance type and its attendant emphases (visible pedagogy, transmission, instructional discourse) is to be resisted in favour, usually, of what Bernstein called ‘the liberal/progressive position’ (Bernstein 2000: 62, fn.2), which is a competence type and its attendant emphases (invisible pedagogy, acquisition and the acquirer, regulative discourse). A mainstay of this position is Vygotsky, as Bernstein points out: ‘The shift to Vygotskyism enabled the survival of the liberal/progressive position in the new performance culture’ (ibid.). It is no accident therefore that Vygotsky is referenced by almost half of the contributions to this volume (Hasan, Bourne, Morais et al., Rose, Daniels et al., and Neves et al.).

For those interested primarily in the production of specialized identities, the issue is to adumbrate the lineaments of a ‘radical visible pedagogy’ (Bourne), or at least a pedagogy with ‘more visible elements’ (Lubienski). In this sense then, the first concern pushes towards a solution leaning towards the invisible end of the spectrum; the second towards the visible end.

It will come as no surprise that researchers attempting to balance the two sets of concerns, often from different viewpoints, are constructing, imagining, theorizing and empirically validating a new, possible pedagogic object, a form of mixed pedagogy that can, in Morais, Neves and Pires’ confident prediction, ‘overcome the effect of children’s social background’. This mixed form will have crucial dimensions that must be visible; that is, strongly classified or framed (the foremost contender currently being the explicitness of evaluation criteria), as well as crucial ones that are most effective when weakly classified and framed. That there is already a great deal of convergence, though far from perfect, across the continents (Portugal, South Africa, the UK, Australia and the USA in work represented here) is testimony to the robustness of the theory and the empirical work increasingly backing it up.

New empirical challenges are likely to emerge as the mixed model takes shape with greater detail and nuance. One is how best to capture what Morais and Pires call the ‘what’ of learning, and not just the ‘how’ of the pedagogy, since evidence of its importance is now hard to ignore. Another is how best to study and code pedagogical dynamics, particularly the framing relations which establish the temporality of the pedagogy; how, for example, can we capture variable pacing, which may at times be strictly policed and then relaxed, with no guarantee that the policing/relaxing cycle will be fully visible in any one or a sample of lessons. Such challenges are best faced by a community of scholars rather than singly and the strong focus in this volume on reporting not only substantive results but also methodology should provide the impetus for far greater cross-national collaboration and learning than has been the case up until now.

As Davies (2001: 7) remarked in the Introduction to the previous volume, there is very little homogeneity in the productive range of enquiries pursued loosely in the emerging Bernsteinian tradition. While it is true that all the contributions to this volume focus in different ways on pedagogic discourse, not all of them focus on classroom pedagogy. Two deal with teacher education pedagogic discourse, opening up a hitherto under-researched area; one deals with craft pedagogy; and two deal with higher education, particularly with non-traditional students and their travails in the academy.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The Possibilities of Basil Bernstein
• Section 1: Bernstein’s Relations
• Section 2: Learning In School Contexts
• Section 3: Aspects of Teacher Education
• Section 4: Knowledge and Differentiation In Vocational and Higher Education