EDUCATION AND THE MIDDLE CLASSES: AGAINST REDUCTIONISM IN EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND RESEARCH

ABSTRACT:

This paper critiques what it sees as a tendency on the part of certain social researchers to engage in moralistic critiques of middle-class parents, especially in relation to the choices and actions of such parents within educational quasi-markets. It proceeds to a linked critique of the influence within education of certain aspects of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, with particular reference to the concepts of symbolic violence and the depiction of cultural meanings as arbitrary. It is argued that both these developments involve unhelpful and unjustified forms of reductionism that could have the effect of alienating middle-class support for a range of broadly progressive political endeavours within and beyond education.

Keywords:

• cultural class analysis
• moralism
• cultural arbitrary
• symbolic violence
• élites

Notes

1 It is worth remarking here, however, that Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth-Gernsheim Beck's focus on individualisation as a key aspect of reflexive modernisation (2002) is paralleled by repeated warnings that social inequality in many advanced nations has been widening in recent decades and that this is creating new kinds of problems, not least for many middle-class employees who, for example, may experience the effects of redundancy and long-term unemployment, relatively unsupported by class-status networks, and who may as a result increasingly internalise their own failure in psychologically damaging ways.

2 Rob Moore has lucidly summarised some of the key sources of uncertainty in this area: The first is that, as Noden (2000) points out, notions of attainment and segregation are not simple: they do not have single meanings. They might be defined in different but equally valid ways in different cases for different purposes. Secondly, different measures might be better suited to different cases and purposes. Consequently, it is a mistake to expect any simple, single measure of differences. Thirdly, given the importance that Ball et al. (1997) and others are giving to the significance of local factors, it is highly possible that different things are happening in different places for locally contingent reasons. … Fourthly, it would be wrong to assume that such factors remain unchanged over time. (2004a, pp. 115–116)

3 Moore relates this to the partially unsatisfactory account offered by Bourdieu of intra-class differences in educational achievement, such as the basis upon which small minorities of ‘more highly selected’ working-class students manage, against the odds, to succeed at various levels of education (see 2004b, pp. 453–455). There is, unfortunately, no space to rehearse this discussion here.

4 For some, of course, it has at its core, worship and religious faith– but that raises issues too complex to be considered here.

5 Crouch has identified a range of specific issues where new forms of disenchantment and exploitation affect people across a wide range of class locations. These include considerations such as the following:

•	‘... much of the work in the new service sector brings its own degradations. In particular work in the rapidly growing personal services sector frequently involves a subordination of the person to employers and customers that has reintroduced many humiliating features of the old world of domestic service’;
•	‘for large numbers of employees, working hours have been rising’ and ‘since both men and women now work within the formal economy, there is less overall time for leisure and family life’;
•	there is increasingly a perceived ‘frenzied need to do well educationally in order to keep one's nose in front of an occupational race which is increasing both its rewards to winners and its punishments to losers.’ (Crouch, 2003, p. 66)