AQA A-Level Sociology: Class Differences in Achievement - Pupils' Class Identities & the School

AQA A-Level Sociology: Class Differences in Achievement - Pupils' Class Identities & the School

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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'.

4. '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.

5. 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."

6. 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.