Zusammenfassung der Ressource
AQA A-Level Sociology: Class Differences in Achievement - Pupils' Class Identities & the School
- Sociologists are interested in how
pupils' class identities formed outside
school interact with the school and it's
values to produce educational success
and failure.
- Louise Archer et al (2010) focus on the
interaction between working-class pupils'
identities and school, and how this produces
underachievement.
- Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus
- Habitus refers to the 'dispositions' or
learned, taken-for-granted ways of
thinking, being and acting that are shared
by a particular social class.
- It includes their tastes and preferences about
lifestyles and consumption, their outlook on
life and their expectations of what is normal or
realistic for 'people like us'.
- A group's habitus is formed as a response to its
position in the class structure.
- Although one class' habitus is not
intrinsically better than another's, the
middle-class has the power to define its
habitus as superior and to impose it on the
education system.
- As a result, the school puts a
higher value on middle-class
tastes, preferences and so on.
- Because the school has a
middle-class habitus, this gives
middle-class pupils an advantage,
while working-class culture is
regarded as inferior.
- Symbolic Capital & Symbolic Violence
- Because schools have a middle-class
habitus, pupils who have been
socialised at home into middle-class
tastes and preferences gain 'symbolic
capital' or status and recognition from
the school and are deemed to have
worth or value.
- By contrast, the school devalues the
working-class habitus, so that
working-class pupils' tastes are deemed
tasteless and worthless.
- Bourdieu calls this
withholding of symbolic
capital 'symbolic violence'.
- By defining the
working-class and their
tastes and lifestyles as
inferior, symbolic violence
reproduces the class
structure and keeps the
lower class in their place.
- Therefore, there is a clash between
working-class pupils' habitus and
the schools' middle-class habitus.
- Consequently,
working-class students may
experience the world of
education as alien and
unnatural.
- Louise Archer found that
working-class pupils felt that
to be educationally
successful, they would have
to change how they talked
and presented themselves.
- Thus, for working-class students, educational
success is often experienced as a process of
'losing yourself'. They felt unable to access
middle-class spaces such as university and
professional careers.
- These middle-class spaces are
seen as 'not for the likes of us'.
- 'Nike' identities
- Many pupils were conscious that society and
school looked down on them. This symbolic
violence led them to seek alternative ways of
creating self-worth, status and value.
- They did this by constructing meaningful
class identities for themselves by investing
in 'styles', especially through consuming
branded clothing such as 'Nike'.
- Style performances were heavily policed
by peer groups and not conforming was
'social suicide'. The right appearance
earned symbolic capital and approval
from peer groups.
- However, it led to conflict with the
school's dress code. Reflecting the
school's middle-class habitus, teachers
opposed 'street' styles as showing 'bad
taste' or as a threat.
- Pupils who adopted street styles also
risked being labelled as rebels.
- Archer argues that the schools'
middle-class habitus stigmatises
working-class pupils' identities
- The pupils' performances of
style are a struggle for
recognition: while the
middle-class see their Nike
identities as tasteless, to the
young people they are a means
of generating symbolic capital
and self-worth.
- According to Archer et al, working-class pupils'
investment in Nike identities is not only a cause
of their educational marginalisation by the
school; it also expresses their positive preference
for a particular lifestyle.
- Consequently,
working-class pupils may
choose self-elimination or
self-exclusion from
education.
- Nike styles also play a part in
working-class pupils' rejection
of higher education, which
they saw as both unrealistic
and undesirable.
- It was undesirable
because they would have
to live on a student loan
and this would make it
hard to afford their street
styles that gave them their
identity.
- Working-class identity and educational success
- Nicola Ingram (2009) did a study of
two groups of working-class Catholic
boys from the same deprived
neighbourhood.
- One group had passed their 11+ and had
gone to grammar schools, while the other
group had failed and gone to a local
secondary school.
- The grammar school had a strong
middle-class habitus of high
expectations and academic
achievement, while the secondary
school had a habitus of low
expectations.
- Ingram found that having a working-class identity
was inseparable from belonging to a working-class
locality. The neighbourhood's dense networks of
family and friends were a key part of the boys'
habitus. It gave them an intense feeling of belonging.
- The boys experienced a great pressure to fit
it and this was particularly a problem for
the grammar school boys, who experienced
a tension between the habitus of their
working-class neighbourhood and that of
the middle-class school.
- One boy was ridiculed by his peers for
coming to school in a tracksuit on
non-uniform day. By opting to fit in with his
neighbourhood habitus by wearing a
tracksuit, he was made to feel worthless by
the schools' middle-class habitus.
- Ingram states that the choice is
between 'unworthiness at school
for wearing certain clothes and
worthlessness at home for not'.
- The boy being ridiculed is an example of symbolic
violence, in which pupils are forced to abandon
their 'worthless' (according to the school)
working-class identity if they want to succeed.
- Meg Maguire (1997) notes that when
she went to grammar school, "the
working-class cultural capital of my
childhood counted for nothing in this
new setting."
- Class identity and self-exclusion
- Despite the class inequalities in
education, many more working-class
young people now go on to
university.
- However, the clash between
working-class identity and the
habitus of higher education is a
barrier to success.
- This is partly due to a process of self-exclusion.
- Sarah Evans (2009) studied a group of 21
working-class girls studying for A-Levels and
found that they were reluctant to apply to elite
universities such as Oxford and Cambridge.
- The few that did apply felt a sense of hidden barriers and of not fitting in.
- Sarah Evans also found that the girls had a strong
attachment to their locality. Only four of the 21 intended
to move away from home to study.
- Bourdieu (1984) states that many
working-class people think of places like
Oxbridge as being 'not for the likes of us'.
- This feeling comes from their habitus, which
includes beliefs about what opportunities
really exist for them and whether they would
fit in.
- Such thinking becomes a part of their
identity and leads working-class students to
exclude themselves from elite universities.
- Reay et al (2005) point out that
self-exclusion from elite or distant
universities narrows the options of
many working-class pupils and
limits their success.