education social class

• Material dep

  Poor housing- overcrowding: less room for studying & disturbed sleep due to shared bedrooms. Impaired development due to lack of safe space for play & exploration. Mould & unsanitary conditions

  EG: poor housing increases the risk of severe ill health and disability by up to 25% during childhood and early adulthood
• Material dep

  Diet & health: Lack of vitamins & minerals = poor nutrition. This can weaken the immune systems and lower the energy levels of students. Can lead to more absences & difficulty concentrating. This is shown by how working class children are more at risk of being diagnosed with ADHD /symptoms
• material dep

  Financial support & the cost of education: The lack of items, such as books & calculators, can impair achievement as students lack the appropriate stationairy necessary for learning.

  WC students have a fear of debt therefore theyre less likely to enter higher education
• Poverty is closely linked to educational underachievement. EG 90% of failing schools are located in deprived areas.
• Cultural deprivation theory/explanation: Many WC families fail to socialise their children adequately as they dont pass on the MC values that equip children for success. Therefore they underachieve as they dont posses the cultural capital ( Bourdieu ) of which the education system is based on.
• Cultural dep:

  Parents education: Studies showed WC parents place less value on education and so took less interest & gave less encouragement to their childrens education. Therefore their children had lower motivavtion and lower achievement.
• Cultural dep

  Whereas parents with higher educational qualifications (The MC) are more aware of whats needed to assist their childrens educational progress. They engage more in behaviours such as reading to their children, teaching them numbers & songs, helping them with their homework, painting ect. These activities are beneficial to a childs educational & cognitive development.
• Cultural dep:

  Bernstien restricted code: WC are disadvantaged by their langauge 'code' they spoke in. This is because elaborated code (predominantly spoken by the MC) is the language used by teachers, exams & textbooks. Additionally, elaborated code is a more effective tool for analysing and reasoning: essential skills in education.

  
  

  Criticised: Exaggerating & oversimplifing differences between WC and MC speech patterns
• cultural dep

  WC attitudes, such as immediate gratification (seeking immediate pleasures from actions) and fatalism (accepting ascribed status). These values discourage ambition and willingness to invest time and effort into gaining qualifications. EG immediate gratification contrasts with revising for exams.
• Criticisms of cultral dep

  1. Victim blaming: Ignores inequalities built into the education system and rather blames WC pupils for their underachievement instead.
  2. WC culture is not inferior, just different.
• Bourdieu: Cultural captial.

  The attitudes and values of the MC which gives an advantage to those who possess it. MC children gain cultural capital through socialisation. In this, they develop the intellectual interests & understanding of what the education system requires for success.

  Schools value & rewards this cultural capital, while WC pupils 'get the message' and respond by early leaving/ not trying.
• Cultural capital

  and so MC children are more equipped to meet the demands of the schools curriculum and gain qualifications. Wealthier parents are able to use their economic captial to send their children to private schools and paying for extra tuition.
• Cultural capital

  + Questionnaire showed that pupils with the greatest cultural capital (those who had read complex fiction and watched serious TV documentaries) were more likely to be successful at GCSE
• Internal

  Interactionalist Becker labelling theory: Teachets attach labels to students based on stereotypes. Found teachers judged pupils based on how closely they fit the image of the 'ideal pupil' (white, female, middle-class). labels can be positive or negative - can result in a Self Fufilling Prophecy.
• SFP:

  Rosenthal & Jacobson: A study in a californian primary school randomly picked 20% of the pupils and labelled them as 'spurters'. Upon returning a year later, they found that almost half of these spurters had made significant progress.

  Therefore, those who are given a negative label may internalise it and develop a negative self concept, seeing themselves as failures and as a result underachieve.
• Internal:

  Streaming: Process of seperating children into different ability groups called 'streams'. Because of teachers low expectations for WC pupils, theyre likely to put them in lower streams , which are difficult to move out from.

  Pupils in lower streams are then entered for lower tier GCSEs. This then denies them the knowledge & opportunity required to gain good grades. This then further widens the class gap in educational achievement.
• Internal:

  Gillborn & Youdell: A-C economy. Schools perform an educational triage, seperating students into hopeless cases, those who need help to pass, and those who will pass anyway. Therefore teachers will neglect the lower streams (hopeless cases) and focus their time, effort, & resources into the higher streams that they deem as having potential to boost their league table position ( a link to markestisation)
• Internal

  Pupil subcultures: groups of pupils who share similar values & behaviour patterns. Developed through differentiation & polarisation
• Pro school subculture: largely middle class & committed to the values of the school. They gain status through academic success

  Anti-school subcultures: Those placed in lower streams (tend to be WC) suffer from low self-esteem because the school undermined them by placing them in a position of inferior status. As a result, they look for alternative ways of gaining status amongst their peers. EG through cheeking teachers, not doing homework, smoking, ect.

  However, joining an anti-school subculture is likely to lead to a SFP of educational failure
• Labelling criticisms:

  1. Labelling theory is deterministic. Assumes negatively labelled pupils have no choice but to fufil the prophecy and will inevitably fail.
  2. Marxists: Labelling ignores the wider structures of the power within which labelling takes place. Labelling tends to blame teachers but fails to explain why they label.
• Internal:

  Bourdieu: Habitus: the learned ways of thinking, being, and acting that are shared by a particular social class.
• Internal:

  Schools have a MC habitus, and so pupils who have been primarily socialised into this MC habitus gain 'symbolic capital' (status) are recongised by the school and are deemed to have worth and value.

  Conversely, the school devalues the WC habitus, deeming them as inferior.

  Bourdieu coins this withholding of symbolic capital as 'symbolic violence'.
• Internal:

  Symbolic violence leads to many WC pupils to seek alternative ways of creating self worth, status, and value. This is done through WC pupils investing heavily in styles and branded clothing such as Nike.

  Archer coins this as 'Nike Identities'. The right appearance earns symbolic capital and approval from peer groups.
• However 'Nike identities' leads to conflict with the schools dress code. Teachers opposing these street styles reflects the schools MC habitus.

  Additonally, conflicts between schools habitus and WC pupil identities may also lead to self exclusion. EG study of South London girls eligable for elite schools such as Oxbridge often felt reluctant to apply as they felt Oxbridge 'wasnt for the likes of them'.
• These studies show that to understand class differences in education, internal and external factors cannot be looked at in isolation as they are often closely linked.

  EG poverty (an external factor) may lead to bullying and stigmatisation of peer groups (internal) which could lead to absences and failure.