Abstract
Although strong in significance, Critical Realism for Marxist Sociology of Education is not a ‘heavy read’. Indeed, it was a struggle to put it down. It is focused, coherent, carefully structured, clearly exemplified and systematic in its presentation of challenging ideas.
Just as critical realism’s founding figure, Roy Bhaskar, described his role as philosophical ‘underlabourer’ to more substantive scientific knowledge-building, Banfield exercises a similar role with regard to educational sociology. He uses critical realism to discuss some classic texts, but the book also provides tools and stimulus for readers to engage critically with a wider range of educational mis/understandings and blind alleys. The tone itself is penetratingly critical but always respectful, facilitating intellectual engagement.
The early chapters lay the foundations through clear explanations of theory and by locating key theoretical developments in the context of a broader social and political history. Chapter 1 outlines Marx’s key concepts. Within fewer than 20 pages, Banfield explains seminal but often misunderstood ideas such as base/superstructure (and the dangers of an overdeterministic view), labour power, the role of the state and capital as ‘accumulated labour’.
Critical realism is built on the recognition that appearances can be misleading, so we need to search for deep underlying forces, structures and mechanisms. In other words, ‘what you see is what you get’ rarely applies. Thus, Adam Smith’s overwhelming concentration on commodity circulation is revealed by Marx as ‘only the appearance of things’ (22) ; labour and its relation to capital, rather than the processes of trade, has the greatest explanatory power for history, economics and other fields.
Chapter 2 provides a historical account of Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser, all of whom sought to overcome a degenerate Marxism which had reduced class conflict to parliamentary reformism, and history to economic determinism. Their various attitudes to Hegelian dialectics are explained, along with key ideas such as totality (Lukács), hegemony (Gramsci) and interpellation (Althusser). The relevance of ‘ideological state apparatus’ to education is discussed in its richness but without ignoring Althusser’s shortcomings: ‘Althusser’s structuralism sidelined human agency’ (52).
Chapter 3, following a brief and rather one-sided account of the New Left, explains the importance of the ‘new sociology of education’ (particularly Michael Young), Schooling in Capitalist America (Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis) and Learning to Labour (Paul Willis). The first challenged assumptions that the curriculum is a neutral collection of knowledge and the second examined the reproductive role of education, whilst the third restored agency even to the victims of capitalist schooling. This and later chapters draw on Apple’s work as a lens for critique, whilst also raising helpful criticisms of Apple’s work itself.
It is chapter 4 which begins a serious application of critical realism to education. Firstly, we are introduced to Bhaskar’s account of three layers to reality: the empirical or phenomenal (our experiences – what we see), the actual (events – what happens) and the real (the underlying causes, forces, structures or ‘mechanisms’). To take a simple example, the underlying laws of physics do not always actualise in the open systems of the world, so scientists create experiments to artificially engineer closure in order to reveal these deep forces. A second major argument is that the world is stratified, including the underlying causes, not only events. Multiple mechanisms come together as ‘conjunctures’ and co-determine the actualisation of events.
Everything becomes more complex in the social world, but similar principles apply. Realism or materialism as a philosophy demands an acceptance that objects persist even when we do not see them and that forces might not actualise. Even though people may be ‘unaware of the injurious effects of class relations’ until they lose their job, this does not mean that capitalism was previously absent (90). Bhaskar recognises social forces as causal though not always operative/actualised. Avoiding determinism, he also gives a causal status to human intention (following Aristotle’s concept of ‘final causes’ – in other words, our reasons for doing something).
Chapter 5 develops this reasoning further, insisting on Marx’s view that ‘the material is “predominant”, i.e. not functionally determinant’ (111). Thus, ‘superstructural mechanisms, at various times and in various circumstances, can be more important, vis-a-vis base-structures, in determining and explaining capitalist life’ (112). As Banfield explains, although social science has no easy parallel to natural scientific experiments, looking at life in the longer term, or analysing crises, makes underlying mechanisms visible: ‘For example, in times of drought or economic downturn the contradictions between commodity production and ecological sustainability may be actualised’ (125). Other ways of developing a deeper understanding include various kinds of ‘abstraction’, but also ‘perspectival shifts’ or change of vantage points. This implicitly provides a good argument against discarding standpoint theory as relativist.
Within this broader argument, Bowles and Gintis are exposed as economically too deterministic, with the absence of agency resulting in a conservative message of social stability. Conversely, Apple’s pursuit of a non-deterministic argument which seeks to balance class, race and gender oppressions is shown to underestimate class as a deeply causal structure.
Chapter 6 discusses Paul Willis and his assertion of the agency of a group of working-class boys at school. Here, Banfield insists that resistance which lacks a developed or developing consciousness is futile – it falls short as agency. At one level, the ‘lads’ instinctively see through the games which teachers play, including false promises of social mobility, but they become victims of their own instinctive resistance. A ‘physicalist culture of masculinity that is typically sexist, racist and violent’ does not equate to class consciousness. Willis is accused of romanticising ‘the lads’, and implicitly underestimating the requirements for real resistance and change.
A discussion follows of Steven Lukes’ understanding of power, the dangers of a Foucauldian model which places power everywhere – and nowhere – and the shortcomings of Giddens’ concept of structuration. All of these are carefully compared with a critical realist view. This leads (drawing on Archer) to the key idea that agency-structure is no simple dialectic of reciprocity. While it is true that there are no structures without people, this does not mean that the structures consist simply of ‘these people here present’. Individuals, groups and social classes are confronted with the weight of history: structures (and we might include discourses) are deeply sedimented but are constantly reproduced (or resisted) by human societies.
Beyond these specifics, the book provides a tool kit for a wider reflection on educational sociology – not as ready-made answers, but rather as a set of lenses to sharpen understanding and critique. There is only space here to outline a few simple thoughts.
Firstly, critical realism views scientific experiments as a deliberate manipulation of reality in order to actualise and isolate forces which might otherwise not be readable. Deep errors result when social scientific researchers assume that experiments are a transparent reflection or that data equates with explanation. This is precisely the epistemological error of behaviourism: experiments in conditioning are assumed to be straightforward descriptions of human learning, as caged animals stand proxy for human children.
When Bernstein designed an experiment to substantiate his ‘restricted code’, children were asked to describe what they saw in a cartoon story. Because the working-class children (or, specifically, unskilled and semi-skilled manual workers) tended to use pronouns rather than nouns, they were presumed incapable of distal, abstract or generalising explanation. Critics, scrutinising the experimental procedure itself, soon realised that the pictures were visible to the children all the time, so pronouns (‘he chased them down the street’) were entirely appropriate; the ‘middle-class’ pupils used nouns redundantly, due to their sociocultural understanding that the researchers might expect a more elevated register.
In addition to immanent critique, Bernstein’s ‘restricted code’ was subjected to an external political challenge based on an understanding of the agency of class. Harold Rosen pointed to the rich history of resistance among particular working-class communities, arguing that working-class families have a far more extended frame of reference and discursive range than Bernstein’s ‘restricted code’ assumed. 1 Their speech was not limited to what happened in the experiment, nor was their understanding of the world limited to their own backyard. Seriously damaging conclusions were reached by attempting to read off their range of understanding from syntactic frequencies.
More broadly, educational sociology has been dominated by ‘common-sense’ empirical understandings of class in terms of types of work (manual/clerical) or lifestyle, neglecting Marx’s foregrounding of the contradictions between employers and workers. Within education, there are limits to the analytic power of the working/middle-class binary when that allows the global ruling class to escape from view.
Considering a different issue, educational statistics frequently manifests a kind of Humean refusal to look beneath the surface – as if the aggregation of empirical data could substitute for causation. The word ‘explain’ is used spuriously in many correlational studies. We can see this avoidance in the Educational Endowment Foundation Toolkit, which silences the causal discussion to be found in the source research reports. Averaging ‘effect sizes’ often produces misleading and useless conclusions, since the deeper causes of different effects are left unexamined.
This has consequences for much quantitative work on poverty and education, which lacks a sense of complexity and ontological stratification. Simple categories are used because the data is easily obtained (for example, free school meals, areas of multiple deprivation) and the ways in which different forces might interact to produce dis/advantages are not thought through. Despite the supposed sophistications of multivariate analysis, parents’ educational levels, cultural assets in extended families and neighbourhoods, and the school curriculum stay inside the black box. Critical realism, by contrast, demands a stratified account of poverty’s dependence on class, and of how class as a social force actualises as educational differences; the relations cannot be understood without a sense of agency or dialectics.
Such brief and simple illustrations cannot hope to do justice to Grant Banfield’s illuminating study. It is a book which stimulates critical theorising, and to which I will often return.