Urban education, the middle classes and their dilemmas of school choice

Abstract

This article explores a framework for an ethics of choice in urban education. It outlines the educational ambitions and ambivalences of a group of middle class families in one locality. The research on which we draw involved interviews with 28 middle class parents in the London Borough of Hackney and is part of a comparative study of urban middle class parents conducted in collaboration with the Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politique, Paris. Our analysis of the tensions and dilemmas faced by this group of parents deploys an approach derived from the work of American philosopher Thomas Nagel. What we see playing across and through these interviews are the interests and abstractions of a particular fraction of metropolitan middle class families. That is, a reflexive engagement with the social in terms of responsibility to the public good and the needs of ‘others’ who matter as much as they do (the impersonal standpoint) is interwoven with the needs of specific children and the family in relation to imagined futures (the personal standpoint).