Introduction
Iām so sorry, that Iām not what you want me to be.With summer hair and jeans like Autumn leaves,I bet youād never even dream like me.Without a care, and dreams that seem to please,I bet youāve never even lived like me.
Iām not sorry for what I am,And I have no regrets on what I used to be tonight.Iām not sorry and I have no regrets at all (Mick, aged 16)
I begin this book with song lyrics written by a 16-year-old working-class boy from Belfast. He gave them to me the day after I interviewed him about how he sees himself within school and beyond the school gate, during which he spoke at length about the complexities involved in reconciling his background with educational success. The lyrics are written to be sung by a female member of his band and are addressed to her mother. They are about a young woman āescapingā her family background and oscillating between a state of regret for not being what her mother wants her to be and a state of defianceānot being sorry for what she is. The words tell a painful story of disconnection from family, of dreams that are outside of family expectations. The sentiments of the lyrics are echoed in the story of the young man who wrote them and will be further explored in subsequent chapters. They resonate with me and my history of growing up in a working-class family, and my experience of sadly being pulled away from my working-class culture through becoming educationally successful. I remember all too painfully how I had to write my school notes myself because my mother couldnāt spell, nor construct grammatically correct sentences, and also used a curious and random mix of capitals and lowercase letters. She was embarrassed by her poor literacy and asked me to write the notes. More importantly, she impressed on me the value of a good education. āDonāt be like meā, she would say, and those words would stab at my heart because I knew that she meant more than just getting educational qualifications. She wanted my life to not be hers, not simply to be better than hers. There is something very dark about a parent telling their child that their life and their way of being are not to be valued. The vast majority of educated people will never know how that feelsāthe heart-wrenching sorrow of being ripped and torn. The ambivalence and pain associated with losing part of oneās identity is the central theme of this book, which focuses on working-class teenage boys as they negotiate academic success. Through exploring the tensions involved in these processes I pay particular attention to the ways in which working-class identity is reconciled and irreconciled with success. This is a study of successful teenage boys from one locality in Belfast. The boys attend either the local grammar or local secondary school, which are located in close proximity to one another. The book draws upon data gathered from a nine-month ethnography of boys from one neighbourhood, attending the two schools. The data collection was within the schools, but I have drawn on their lives beyond the school gates (Ingram 2011). Working-class boys, success, locality, and institution are the key elements of this book, which shows, contrary to popular belief, that some working-class boys are engaged with education, are motivated to succeed, and have high aspirations. However, the structures of schooling in a society where working-classness is seen as feckless, tasteless, and cultureless make the processes of becoming successful more challenging than they need be. The book shows that the reconciliation of success and identity plays out differently for individual working-class boys, and that schools have an important role to play in this negotiation.
The book provides one of the first detailed accounts of successful working-class teenage boys and their sense of identity (see also Wardās (2015a) thoughtful study of young menās adaption to deindustrialisation in the Welsh Valleys, which touches on issues of success and masculinity) and seeks to develop new ways of understanding how educational success and identity are negotiated when the demands of the locality and the demands of the school are not aligned. In particular, I am interested in the connection or disconnection between the influences of home/neighbourhood and the influences of school in shaping identity. Moreover, I am interested in the differing ways in which the two schools affect the dispositions of the boys therein. Working-class boys are often presented in homogeneous terms, but this study explores heterogeneity in ways of being a working-class boy. In doing so, an alternative perspective on working-class masculinity is presented that challenges essentialising perceptions of young men as pathological. Using an overall Bourdieusian theoretical framework I seek to understand the complexities of being educationally successful and working class. I work with Bourdieuās overall theory of human action, but am particularly guided by his concepts of habitus, field, and capital. Specifically, I work with the idea that habitus forms within a multiplicity of fields, and explore the ramifications of the alignment or misalignment of the schemes of perception that these fields promote and produce. For some boys this involves difficulty in reconciling conflicting schemes of perception from different fields, and this can instigate a āhabitus tugā (or pull on identity) (Ingram 2011), with concomitant emotional implications. In order to explain the processes involved in the internalisation of plural schemes of perception, I have developed a four-way typology that considers differences in the impact of this conflict. In doing so, this study contributes to an understanding of the psycho-social implications of educational success for working-class boys, an area which has had little attention. The methodological approach is integral to gaining this understanding and I have developed a methodological approach for working sensitively with young men and eliciting in-depth responses through the use of visual methods. The research questions were as follows:
- What is the role of locality in the construction of working-class boysā identities?
- How do academically successful working-class boys negotiate educational success and reconcile this with their working-class identity?
- How do schools interact with working-class boys and affect this negotiation and reconciliation?
- How do schools come to internalise certain dispositions towards their pupils through their structures and ways of organisation?
As the research focuses on those working-class boys who are achieving highly within school, the chapter will consider the complexities of reconciling identity with educational success. This literature, for the large part, is made up of reflections from once-working-class academics discussing their own experiences. There are some notable exceptions of empirical research with young people attempting to achieve highly within the education system and these important studies are discussed. Issues relating to class identification and class definitions are also explored. The chapter highlights key areas that have not had enough attention within research relating to working-class boys and schooling; namely, how working-class boys negotiate educational success and reconcile this with identity. It ends with detail on the structure of the rest of the book.
Being Educationally Successful and Working Class
There is a tension between becoming educationally successful and being working class. This tension is not explicit in much educational literature, but has been more recently explicated through āonce-working-class feminist academicsā reflections on their own stories of managing being both educationally successful and working class (Mahony and Zmroczek 1997). While this literature is both illuminating and thought provoking, it highlights for me the lack of attention this subject has been given generally. Most of the literature within this area focuses on female perspectives, and little is known about how working-class boys negotiate this tension, as well as the potential emotional toll it may take. Studies that have dealt specifically with the experiences of working-class boys have not engaged with the emotional experience of being working class (a notable exception is Diane Reayās āShaunās Storyā (2002), which focuses on the case of a single boy). Nevertheless, there is a lot to be gained from considering the reflections of working-class female academics:
I have long experienced myself being read through the grid of elitist values ā a powerful complex of ideologies and cultural practices which splits cleverness ā¦ from working-classness. (Hey 1997, p. 142)
This quotation by Valery Hey calls forth the question of whether it is possible to be working class and clever, or more accurately: is it possible to be perceived as working class and perceived as being clever? A growing body of literature, often reflecting on the experiences of once-working-class academics, suggests that working-class identity is not easily reconciled with educational success (see, e.g., Reay 1997; Maguire 1997; Reinfelder 1997; Hey 1997; Skeggs 1997b; Ingram and Abrahams 2016). For these, and other academics, their success within the education system has depended on a revalourisation of cultural identity (see, e.g., Morley 1997; Hey 2006), and success has come with great emotional cost through a sacrificing of oneās working-class identity (Reay 2001; Walkerdine et al. 2001; Skeggs 1997b). The reflections of these academics support the argument that through the education system, working-class children are subjected to a lack of recognition of their cultural identity and can come under pressure to conform to middle-class attitudes and dispositions through experiencing what is āappropriateā in terms of language, behaviour, and taste (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Ingram 2009) and through f...