Cultural deprivation

• Underachievement


  As the result of inadequate socialisation in the home
• Intellectual and linguistic skills


  • Lack of intellectual stimulation and enriching experience
  • Lack of reasoning or problem-solving skills
  • Language spoken by low-income black American families is inadequate for educational success (ungrammatical, disjointed, incapable of expressing abstract ideas)
  • Children who do not speak English at home are held back
• Official statistics show that children with English as the first language were only 3.2 points ahead of those without English as their first language in 2010
• Indian pupils do very well, despite not having English as their home language
• Attitudes and values


  • Lack of motivation in many black children
  • Socialisation into a subculture that instils a fatalistic 'live for the day' attitude that does not value education
• Family structure and parental support


  • Many black families are headed by lone mothers, depriving children of adequate care and a male role model
  • High rates of lone parenthood and lack of positive male role models lead to underachievement of some minorities
  • Black Caribbean culture is less cohesive and less resistant to racism, leading to low self-esteem and underachievement
• Sewell's view


  • It is not the absence of fathers as role models that leads to black boys underachieving, but the lack of father nurturing or 'tough love'
  • Black boys turn to street gangs, which present a media-inspired role model of anti-school black masculinity
  • Academic successful black boys face pressure from peers who view them as 'selling out to the white establishment'
  • Black students do worse than their Asian counterparts due to cultural differences in socialisation and attitudes towards education
• Critical race theories argue that it is not peer pressure, but institutional racism within the educational system itself that systematically produces the failure of many black boys
• Asian families


  • Have a supportive family structure and an 'Asian work ethic' with high value placed on education
  • Adult authority in Asian families is similar to the model that operates in schools, leading to more respectful behaviour towards adults and greater parental support for school policies
• White working-class families


  • Have lower levels of aspiration and achievement, potentially due to a lack of parental support
  • Teachers report poor levels of behaviour and discipline in working-class schools, despite the fact that children receive free school meals
  • White working-class parents are more likely to have negative attitudes towards education, compared to ethnic minority parents who see education as a way to get ahead in society
  • Street culture in white working-class areas can be brutal, making it hard for students to succeed in school
• Compensatory education


  Aims to compensate children from 'culturally deprived' backgrounds
• Critics of cultural deprivation theory argue that it ignores the positive effects of ethnicity on achievement, and that black underachievement is due to racism rather than lack of self-esteem
• Critics see cultural deprivation theory as a 'victim-blaming' explanation, and suggest alternatives such as multicultural education and anti-racist education