Reviews for Class, Culture and Education

The average rating for Class, Culture and Education based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-04 00:00:00 Morgan Ruoss I’m not completely sure why I read this book – I spotted it and just started, really. But I’m glad I did, because although I have very strong criticisms of a lot of what is said here, he really has forced me to think about a lot of things I’d more or less taken for granted. The main point of this is to question whether or not there is such a thing as a ‘common culture’ to which everyone should be exposed, regardless of their social class, and if not, then how should the different social classes be properly educated? If there is a ‘working class culture’ should schools teach that? The answer he comes to is that there is a working class culture, it is mostly one that is degraded and so the task of education ought to be to educate people out of such depravation. This is particularly true today (and by today, remember this book was first written in the 1970s) when technological advances mean that the kinds of monotonous jobs created by the industrial revolution are disappearing and being replaced by jobs, he assumes, that require more intelligence. A large part of this book quotes people saying that the problem with education, particularly that of the working class, has rarely been a supply issue, but rather a demand one. The working class are assumed to have lacked the will or desire to become more educated, other than for a very select, and numerically insignificant group. Although there is an extensive discussion of this view, the author’s own view is probably that people will seek more education when it might lead somewhere they want (or are likely) to go. Interestingly, as has become clear across the post-industrial world, the shift to longer and more education has happened perhaps even quicker than this book could have anticipated. One of the interesting myths that have developed around ‘the future’ of work is that we will move away from Marx’s problem with ‘the alienation of labour’ and then people will be presented with jobs that are, in their form and content, closer to leisure – and this book presents much the same idea, and therefore comes to pretty much the same conclusion that such changes in social life make it essential that more people receive a middle class education to go with what will be their likely middle class lifestyles. However, despite us continuing to be told this is the way of the future, this isn’t really how things have worked out in the present. Instead, there has been a large division in the labour force that ranks people according to the ease with which employers can replace of skills people have. If you have easy to replace skills you are likely to work part time or casually – something decided purely by the needs of business – you are likely to have no say in the organisation you work for and are likely to be literally excluded from staff meetings and organisational activities (democracy under capitalism has generally stopped at the workplace door), and you are likely to work for a wage that is at or possibly even slightly below subsistence (there’ll be a review of Radical Possibilities coming soon that goes through all of this). Only those with hard to replace skills are treated well, listened to in the workplace and, as Bauman points out, given the right to work in jobs that could possibly be confused with leisure. The point of this book, though, is to try to trouble the ideas of class and culture – so, what trouble does it provide? Well, one of the most interesting things that he says here is that most of us put up a binary between working class and middle class – with virtually all of us saying we are middle class. Now, this doesn’t really fit with, say, Marx’s definition of classes – he saw the main point of capitalism as its ability to collapse the huge variety of classes society was composed of into basically two great classes – the ruling class that owned the means of production and the working classes that had no other option but to sell their labour in order to live. By this definition most people who call themselves ‘middle class’ are clearly ‘working class’. But the author’s point is really interesting here – that what we are really dealing with is a category error. If you talk about the ‘middle class’ then the other categories you ought to be talking about are the upper and lower classes, not the working class. And if you are talking about the working class, then the other class you should be talking about is the leisured class, or the propertied class. The problem is that we all think we know what we mean when we say, ‘oh, I’m not working class, I’m more middle class’ – but we are so vague about these categories and they are, in fact, virtually categorically exclusive, that just about anyone can come up with a reason why they are in the middle somehow or other. Why does this matter? Well, because it is pretty clear that social class does play a substantial role in deciding how well or otherwise people will go at school. Also, people are happy enough to say that education is mostly ‘middle class’ – and even to say that this fact is part of the reason why the working class do not do so well at school. But if we don’t really know what the middle classes and what the working classes are, then clearly this becomes a problem in itself. He doesn’t do this, but I think the way out of this problem isn’t to ignore the problem – often a good strategy when all else fails, but rather to see classes as ‘relational’. That is, that classes are not defined by what individuals have in common (that is, that makes them part of one category) but also by what makes them different from other classes and how these different groups relate to each other. But having said that (and sort of given away the answer, in a sense, an answer, though, that he never presents), I think it is still important to run through some of his other problems which are mostly due to his seeing classes as more or less ‘fixed categories’. One of the things he spends a lot of time discussing is the idea that the working class literally has a separate ‘culture’ and that some people say this culture isn’t ‘degraded’ but rather full and rich, and as such should be taught to working class kids in preference to the middle class culture schools actually teach. He counters this by quoting Engels (aka Marx’s mate) and his Condition of the Working Class in England. It is pretty clear that Engels saw much of working class existence as anything but edifying – endless work, not enough food, bodies crippled and minds addled by alcohol – part of the point of the revolution was to liberate these people from the horrors of the lives they were leading that could hardly be called ‘lives’. The other interesting part of this book is where he says that it has become increasingly common to say that the thing that differentiates the working from the middle class is ‘delayed gratification’. This is actually quite a nasty thing to say. As he points out, it would be somewhat hard for a young poor black kid in the US to know what it is that a rich white kid had ever ‘given up’. And when you live from hand-to-mouth it is a bit hard to delay your gratification, when all you have are ‘necessities’. But interestingly he criticises the idea of the working class being devoid of a concept of ‘delayed gratification’ by talking of working class culture having given us cooperatives, trade unions and friendly societies – all of which could very well be defined as exemplars of the notion of ‘delayed gratification’. Like I said, I’m not sure I really agree with all of this, but he has forced me to think about class and culture and what education ought to try to do in relation to both. So, some quotes: To claim that something is self-evident implies that justification is not required: it may also conceal the fact that reasons for making such a claim are not easy to come by. 2 In any event, dead heats are a rarity in the real world and those involving an entire field of competitors are probably unknown. And when we cash this sporting metaphor in terms of the requirements of any society, the notion of a dead heat would be socially and economically dysfunctional. 10 Equality of academic achievement could only be secured by depressing the rate of learning of some children (mostly middle-class children) to that of the backward child. 14-15 We may be deluded in believing that intelligence is measurable but we generate continuous and acrimonious debate by thinking that it is. But, as Wilson reminds us, it seems self-evident that we are all equal as moral beings and we rarely attempt to rate the population in hierarchies of moral or emotional merit. 19 If there is unequal learning in a classroom, the limiting factors are largely from the side of demand, not from a scarcity in the supply of knowledge 22 in economic terminology, the supply of education seems far in excess of demand. 23 Accepting the Benthamite principle that 'society should be organized so as to provide the greatest good of the greatest number', and linking this with the economic principle of diminishing returns, he argues that the sum of human happiness is likely to be increased by a more equal distribution of wealth, but not by equal provision of education. 25 People who know a lot generally value additional knowledge and skills more than those who know very little. 26 schools have the economic value of enabling parents to go out to work without worrying unduly what their children are up to 26 The school, some critics argue, is a middle-class institution. But although this is assumed to have a wealth of implication for educational practice, its meaning is rarely concretized in a way which would make it a useful conceptual tool. 32 If this socio-technological analysis of post-industrial society is valid, then it does seem that there is strong support for the view that schools ought to minister to the middle-class way of life. 41 From both sides of the Atlantic there is evidence that at least one-half of teacher trainees come from working-class families. This fact should caution circumspection when we allege that schools fail because middle-class teachers are unable to understand the language of working-class children. 46 it is plausible that teachers with working-class backgrounds only fail to understand working-class speech, manners, values and attitudes in the sense of failing to understand why anyone should want to hold on to a life-style which they take to be manifestly inferior. 47 The attempt to include both middle- and working-class in a single class system rests upon a category mistake, since 'middle' has primarily a social significance, whilst the reference of 'working' is economic. Thus, middle-class and working-class 'are not true alternatives. The alternatives to "middle" are "lower" and "upper"; the alternative to "working" is "independent" or "propertied". 49 The notion that schools transmit middle-class values relates partly to curriculum content, and partly to the disciplinary ethos of the school which has come to be known as 'the hidden curriculum'. 51 Especially in the North-American context from which Corwin writes, it would seem puzzling to the lower-class child to know what exactly it is that the middle-class child is sacrificing in the present and, by contrast, what luxuries of consumption he himself currently enjoys at the expense of his own future. 59 The poor live so close to subsistence, to life's brutal imperatives, that they must choose the present. 60 Working-class education implies that there is a type of education appropriate to the working class, different from that which is relevant to other classes. 63 It is difficult to see how any advocacy of radical social change could be legitimized except by reference to the fact of cultural deprivation or the inadequacy of a particular way of life when assessed against some conception of the good life or the good society. 84 Engels probably became a socialist when walking the streets of Manchester in the early 1840s, and throughout his account of The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 he emphasized the utter demoralization of the workers and their families: the worker was 'deprived of his humanity', having become 'a soulless factor of production', a mere machine. 84 Only the conclusion that the working classes were culturally deprived can make sense of Marxism, 86 though it is also usually taken for granted that whilst the foolish cannot understand the wisdom of the wise, the contrary is not the case. 136 A common culture, then, is seen as a debased culture, inevitably at odds with culture conceived as 'the best' of which human creativity and ingenuity is capable. 136 It is a frequent criticism of the school curriculum that it is a misconceived attempt to transmit a diluted form of the high culture. 147 Even 'backward' children attain levels of literacy and numeracy far higher than is required by a good deal of industrial work. Much industrial activity is counter-educational: it is a graveyard of literacy and skill. 163 Although in educational history Vocational has often referred specifically to craft or manual training, in Western culture the word also has reference to an attitude of mind, and the sort of moral commitment a man brings to his work. 179

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-11 00:00:00 ROBERT BANNERMAN Loving portrait of the staid, private world of the south-east England city from the 1920s to 40s. Sharp portrayals of his mother, Kate the nanny, his eccentric cousins and Mr. Evans and his watercolours. Charming and funny writer.