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Abstract

Education researchers continue to cite Bernstein’s ‘Education cannot compensate for society’, while Bernstein’s own focus on ‘in-school processes’ was echoed by Michael Gove’s insistence that there are ‘no excuses’ for low working-class achievement in schools. Bernstein’s ideas illuminate the relationship, within education policy, of neo-liberalism to the social democracy Bernstein originally targeted. Moreover, as indicated by the manifesto for the 2017 general election and the subsequent 10-point charter on education, Labour’s focus on a more interventionist approach to the role of the state does not seem to preclude tacit acceptance of a (Govian) knowledge-based curriculum. Given that a constructed aspiration is inseparable from that curriculum, any renewed social democracy might do more to assert the importance of contested knowledge in the UK.

Keywords

Social democracy cultural deprivation compensatory education neo-liberalism aspiration power relations resistance

Introduction: two observations

This article opens with two observations. Firstly, education researchers continue to cite the title of a short article Basil Bernstein (1970) first published in New Society: ‘Education cannot compensate for society’ (Ball, 2010; Demie and McLean, 2015; Gorard, 2010a; Power, 2008; Pring, 2009, 2011; Reay, 2017; Shain, 2016; Smith, 2016; Thompson et al., 2016; Whitty and Anders, 2014; Young, 2011). Consequently, given that the New Society article no more than summarised research available in greater detail elsewhere (Bernstein, 1971a, 1971b), it seems the title alone remains evocative – far more so than those of the source chapters.¹ Further, in this work, Bernstein made clear his rejection of the view that working-class underachievement should be blamed on a child’s home background; in challenging the dominant discourses of cultural deprivation and compensatory education, he argued that the answer to underachievement lay in the organisation of schools. Not least, then, it is significant that Thompson et al. (2016) found that student teachers’ perceptions are still marked by the prejudices Bernstein challenged half a century ago.

Hence the second observation that there are points of contact between Bernstein’s sociology and ongoing UK government policy, as characterised by an aggressive ‘no excuses’ ideology (Gove, 2012; Morgan, 2014, 2015a, 2015b). One might expect Conservative ministers to reject compensatory education as constructed by Labour’s social democracy, but the way Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove in particular expressed himself brought to mind Bernstein’s work at the end of the 1960s. And so, given that Gove (2013a) claimed he had been influenced by Antonio Gramsci, one might ask if, in addition, he ever read Bernstein.

This is an important issue, for a second key feature of the Govian moment has been curriculum reform, particularly the idea of, put simply, ‘teaching knowledge’ (Hirsch, 2016; see also Yandell, 2014; Young, 2011, 2016). The Conservative manifesto for the 2017 UK general election devoted space to ‘an academic knowledge-rich curriculum’ (Conservative Party, 2017: 51). Labour, on the other hand, focused on the school as a workplace and the issue of funding (Labour Party, 2017a: 33–43). As welcome as these commitments might have been, there should also be a response to Gove’s simplistic definition of ‘knowledge’. Labour’s (2017b) 10-point charter opens with reference to ‘the common body of knowledge we share’, so one might infer the Govian moment lives on, even as Labour, in other areas, has begun to challenge prevailing political myths. The ‘no excuses’ rhetoric, then, is inseparable from the assertion of a body of knowledge that can be taken for granted.

Citing Bernstein after New Labour

Peters (2001) and Ball (2003) each tracked the confirmation of neo-liberal policy norms under a Labour government midway through its time in office, and transition from Labour to a Conservative-led coalition government then became the context for explicit references to Bernstein’s New Society title. The determinism that some might find in Bernstein’s title – Pring (2011) described ‘hopefuls’ and ‘sceptics’ – was challenged by Gorard’s (2010a) argument that ‘schools and colleges can be shaped as the kind of wider society we would like, rather than left to represent only the society we have’ (60), and his conclusion (‘they can try to be the precursor of the kind of society that we wish to have’) might been seen as a call for the re-comprehensivisation of education (62). If one might see a failure to commit fully to comprehensive education, this is a point made by Bernstein’s own critique of compensatory education. Elsewhere, as the ‘achievement gap’ persisted, Demie and McLean (2015: 1) cited evidence supporting Bernstein’s view, or the (determinist) view that might be assumed if one has read the New Society title but not the article as a whole; they then brought in the ‘body of research [that] is beginning to show that schools can make a difference, albeit within certain limits’ (perhaps echoing or modifying Gorard’s ‘a bit’). That ‘pupil-level factors’ such as social background are far more important than ‘school factors’ (Demie and McLean, 2015: 1) would appear to corroborate the view expressed in the Bernstein title they have just cited (see also Ball, 2010). However, by then highlighting the ‘strong leadership’ in schools that ‘do not accept poverty as a reason for failure’ (Demie and McLean, 2015: 2), they might be said to adopt the language of neo-liberalism.

Earlier, discussing the failure of compensatory education, Power (2008: 23–25) addressed an issue central to Bernstein’s argument – that of cultural domination, or the way in which schools depend on, and promote, middle-class cultural norms, and an unchallenged cultural domination is key to the maintenance of inequality (Ball, 2010; Reay, 2017; Shain, 2016). If Bernstein, writing at the end of the 1960s, was confronting the dominant paradigm of an interventionist state, his name and work are now invoked in a different time. In an education market, ‘work on children’ (Ball, 2010: 161) is an important part of preparing children, from the earliest age, to be successful; such ‘work’ must necessarily include the role of curricula and what, specifically, is being assessed.

No excuses: from Bernstein to Gove

It follows that, frequently, any discussion of inequality rests on an acceptance of measurable outcomes viewed unproblematically (hence calls to ‘raise standards’). However, in constructing cultural deprivation, compensatory education has always left unquestioned the middle-class values of both school and curriculum, and therefore assessment. For Bernstein (1971b: 192), compensatory education ‘implies that something is lacking in the family, and so in the child’, all of which ‘serves to direct attention away from the internal organisation and the educational context of the school’. He meant ‘delicate overt and covert streaming arrangements [that] neatly lower the expectations and motivations of teachers and taught’ (Bernstein, 1971b: 191), even as the child’s social background was blamed for low aspirations and achievement.

These criticisms of compensatory education and cultural deprivation might now be compared to Gove’s (2012) Brighton College speech, in which he denied that ‘deprivation means destiny … and that we can’t expect children to succeed if they have been born into poverty, disability or disadvantage’. This would be the deterministic reading of ‘Education cannot compensate for society’, one that takes the New Society title out of context – and Gove (2012) insisted that ‘there need be no difference in performance – none whatsoever – between pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from wealthier homes’. Elsewhere, in his foreword to The Importance of Teaching, Gove identified schools as part of the problem, insofar as they might increase the achievement gap (Department for Education, 2010: 6–7). Contextual Value-Added data was rejected on the grounds that it is ‘morally wrong to have an attainment measure which entrenches low aspirations for children because of their background’ (Department for Education, 2010: 68; for a critique of these statistical constructs, see Gorard, 2010b).

On the face of it, Gove (2012) gave those described as ‘pessimists and fatalists’ nowhere to hide, and he might even be said to have borrowed from Bernstein’s sociology. But the assault was twofold, and Gove’s (2011) Cambridge speech had as its target ‘soft qualifications’. To promote a traditional academic curriculum, vocational courses were steadily undermined (Wolf, 2011), an English Baccalaureate was introduced (Department for Education, 2017) and facilitating subjects were constructed (Fazackerley and Chant, 2008; Russell Group, 2016). Gove (2011) began by describing a Gladstone speech from 1879: ‘The public were paid the compliment of assuming they were intellectually curious. They weren’t patronised by being treated as rude mechanicals’. This was the language of The Importance of Teaching. Gove (2011) ‘want[ed] to argue that introducing the young minds of the future to the great minds of the past is our duty’, and he was quite sure that ‘there is such a thing as the best’.

Gove (2012) could say that ‘[w]e live in a profoundly unequal society’ and ‘[f]or those of us who believe in social justice this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible’ – words to be echoed in the 2017 Conservative manifesto’s construction of meritocracy. Nonetheless, his neo-liberalism always made individuals responsible for their own fate (Peters, 2001). This micromanagement of teachers and the pursuit of targets has meant the ‘disappearance’ of teachers and teaching (Biesta, 2012, 2013), but the aspirational student, like Gove’s (2011) agricultural workers, must be ready to embrace high culture, ignoring the temptations on offer from inferior alternatives.

As Bernstein wrote, some time ago

Gove repeatedly claimed that working-class students were held back by the assumptions and actions of education professionals, and both White Papers (Department for Education, 2010, 2016) are full of praise for the right kind of professional – school leader, teacher, sponsor. Nonetheless, he ignored the class cultures that produce an ideal client (Becker, 1952; on labelling in an education market, see Gillborn and Youdell, 2001; Reay, 2015), and this is one reason to include here recent sociological accounts that have cited Bernstein. In doing so, they ‘turn back the clock’ to ask what, if anything, has changed.

In the 1960s, Bernstein responded to contemporary education policy (Bernstein, 1971b; for more recent overviews of compensatory education, see Power, 2008: 20–23; Shain, 2016: 10–13). He addressed the failure of an interventionist social democracy to redress class inequality at a time when research suggested that failure and working-class disaffection were produced and reproduced in school (for example, Hargreaves, 1967; Lacey, 1970). As Bernstein argued:

If children are labelled ‘culturally deprived’ then it follows that the parents are inadequate, the spontaneous realisations of their culture, its images and symbolic representations are of reduced value and significance. Teachers will have lower expectations of the children, which the children will undoubtedly fulfil. (Bernstein, 1971b: 192)

An edited version of this passage, to highlight the juxtaposition of ‘labelled’ and ‘lower expectations’, might find Gove nodding in agreement. The full quotation is a reminder that Conservative ministers have more in common with the theorists of cultural deprivation than they would likely admit, for Gove (2011) hoped to return to ‘an age before structuralism, relativism and postmodernism’ – that is, when ‘the spontaneous realisations of [working-class] culture’ would be considered illegitimate. The successful individual is to be integrated into an academic norm, so one might expect Gove to ignore the following passage, in which Bernstein addresses the construction of ‘valid knowledge’ through research:

research proceeds by assessing criteria of attainment that schools hold, and then measures the competence of different social groups in reaching these criteria. We take one group of children, whom we know beforehand possess attributes favourable to school achievement, and a second group of children, whom we know beforehand lack these attributes. Then we evaluate one group in terms of what it lacks when compared with another. In this way research, unwittingly, underscores the notion of deficit and confirms the status quo of a given organisation, transmission and, in particular, evaluation of knowledge. Research very rarely challenges or exposes the social assumptions underlying what counts as valid knowledge, or what counts as a valid realisation of that knowledge. (Bernstein, 1971b: 193; original emphasis)

For Bernstein, the lack in question was a construct, whatever might come under the heading of ‘cultural deprivation’. For Gove, the lack was curriculum-based, as though only Middlemarch might offer an appropriate intellectual challenge, the two parts of the dumbing-down argument (expectations and the curriculum) brought together. If cultural deprivation and compensatory education have been inseparable for social democracy, then, for Gove, a denial of class differences became inseparable from a denial of contested knowledge. As Gove put it:

I believe man [sic] is born with a thirst for free inquiry and is nearly everywhere held back by chains of low expectation. I am convinced there is an unsatisfied hunger for seriousness and an unfulfilled yearning for the demanding among our citizens. (Gove, 2011)

This passage moves from innate qualities (‘born with a thirst’) to participation in society (‘among our citizens’) without any regard for the nature of that society. Elsewhere in this speech, Gove links ‘good looks’ and ‘great houses’ as advantages to be inherited, as though physical appearance and material wealth are interchangeable attributes, before insisting that ‘all of us are heir to the amazing intellectual achievements of our ancestors’. If Bernstein’s central theme was cultural power, Gove’s speeches were remarkable for flaunting that power while denying its very existence.

Bernstein: writing and rewriting

Bernstein’s critique of cultural deprivation/compensatory education, then, can be used to explore current government policy as, specifically, an attack on low expectations on the part of schools and teachers – an attack that has left unchallenged the cultural values students would supposedly embrace. One might now consider the evolution of Bernstein’s writing from the late 1960s, and Bernstein (1999) begins with his own summary of this development, as contexts gave way to what was transmitted, which then gave way to the formation of discourses. In the 1960s, he was interested in the way speech (language use) was regulated; some 30 years later, he was more concerned with the regulation of knowledge. It is the difference between a time when school knowledge was not questioned and one when, following the introduction of a range of courses deemed vocational rather than academic, the issue of standards had been rendered problematic. Moreover, after 1988, the introduction of a national curriculum drew attention to the contested nature of knowledge; controversies in English (King and Protherough, 1995; Thompson and Davies, 1991; on the way in which neo-liberalism has influenced English, see Jones, 2006) and history (Husbands, 1996; Phillips, 1998; Samuel, 1990) were merely reawakened following Gove’s (2010, 2011) proposals for school history – what Gove (2010) called ‘our island story’ (discussed below).

In the 1960s, then, Bernstein deconstructed compensatory education as the necessary response of social democracy, one that depended on the notion of cultural deprivation. Further, he suggested that research might have contributed to the stigmatisation of working-class culture, acknowledging that his own work, ‘through focusing on the subculture and forms of family socialisation’, might be culpable in this respect: ‘The concept “restricted code” … equated with “linguistic deprivation”, or even with the non-verbal child’ (Bernstein, 1971b: 194). In an account of two groups of five-year-old children telling a story differently, he concluded that, rather than a working-class lack, ‘what we have here are differences in the use of language arising out of a specific context’, and so ‘[i]t would not be difficult to imagine a context where the [working-class] child would produce speech rather like the [middle-class child]’ (Bernstein, 1971b: 195). To illustrate this point about context, the version of this story included in Bernstein (1971a) includes reference to ‘constraints on the middle-class child’s use of language’ when they were unable to respond to the question ‘What is the man saying?’. However, they were able to respond when asked a ‘hypothetical question’ – for example, ‘What do you think he might be saying?’ (Bernstein, 1971a: 180). Liberty to speculate is first implicit (‘What is the man saying?’) but then made explicit (‘What do you think he might be saying?’).

Hence, Bernstein related the elaborated code to universalistic meanings and the restricted code to particularistic meanings; the latter were context-bound. By the time of Bernstein (1999), this discussion of context had seen, firstly, a distinction between vertical and horizontal discourse – that is, between performativity (‘what I know’) and competence (‘what I can do’) – and then, secondly, a distinction between hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures – that is, a distinction between strong and weak grammars. Of particular interest, given the present discussion of education policy’s Govian moment, is the view that vertical discourses correspond to high-status knowledge, where what counts as knowledge can be regulated (Bernstein, 1999: 159); different groups of students will be granted access to different levels of knowledge. Regarding the refusal of contested knowledge, one can see that, in fact, perhaps ironically, Gove (2010, 2011) succeeded only in reducing ‘literature’ or ‘history’ to the status of, as he would see it, an inferior horizontal discourse.

Bernstein (2003, first published in 1975) was later revised as Bernstein (1990). The latter paper, he noted, ‘does not … replace the earlier paper but extends and builds upon it’ (Bernstein, 1990: 88–89), and we can see this reworking as a necessary response to the way in which education had changed but also remained the same. In these papers, Bernstein first addressed the implicit class-based assumptions of school curricula and then developed a better understanding of context. For example, Bernstein (2003: 127) outlines a relationship between school and family, given that ‘[t]he weak classification and the weak framing of the invisible pedagogy potentially makes possible the inclusion of the culture of the family and the community’. It is nonetheless the class culture of middle-class families that offers integration into the classroom, and Bernstein referred to old and new middle classes (120–123). The immediate historical context here was the evolution of social democracy’s mixed economy and, as a consequence, a significant public sector; subsequently, in the revised account, he discussed the significance of an emergent education market (Bernstein, 1990: 85–88).

Evident here is the way the differing experiences of middle-class and working-class learners were described. In Bernstein (2003), visible and invisible pedagogies represent conflicting middle-class concerns ‘between strong and weak classification and frames’ (121). Then, following the transition from primary to secondary school, the middle-class student had been introduced to a visible pedagogy, while the working-class student was still associated with an invisible pedagogy (123). A few pages later, the distinction between middle-class and working-class students is clarified. For the middle-class student, there was ‘socialisation into the textbook’ and therefore a degree of independence from the teacher; for the working-class student, meanwhile, still within an invisible pedagogy, ‘[t]he weakening of classification and frames reduces the significance of the textbook and transforms the impersonal past into a personalised present’ (127). In a primary school, the invisible pedagogy is associated with creativity, allowing self-expression. In a secondary school, however, the invisible pedagogy is associated with the slow learner; by implication working class, this student cannot keep up with the strong pacing of the visible pedagogy, and the work has to be made more accessible and supposedly more relevant in everyday terms. For the working-class learner, then, there is continuity between stages (134).

In Bernstein (2003), the transition to secondary school comes at the end of a 20-page chapter; subsequently, Bernstein (1990) gives greater emphasis to the way in which the invisible pedagogy reinforces and reproduces class differences in the secondary school. The description of visible and invisible pedagogies begins with a distinction made between performativity and competence; an opening discussion of play (Bernstein, 2003: 116–118) has now been replaced by the issue of assessment, clearly of greater significance with a secondary curriculum divided into academic and vocational tracks (Bernstein, 1990: 70–71). Moreover, there is now (Bernstein, 1990: 86) a distinction between autonomous (‘justified by the intrinsic possibilities of knowledge itself’) and dependent (‘justified by their market relevance’) visible pedagogies; this distinction certainly underpins the current obsession with both a core curriculum, as constructed by the English Baccalaureate and facilitating subjects, and the restructuring of an academic/vocational divide.

Thus far, this discussion has illustrated Gove’s preference for strong classification and framing. Subsequently, in a discussion of different kinds of knowledge structure, Bernstein (1999) shows how school curricula confused vertical and horizontal discourses, and one might conclude that this article echoed Bernstein’s (1971a) earlier concern with the limits of reformism. In particular, the final part of Bernstein (1999) directly addresses the classroom and the way in which work is made relevant for the so-called less able. As Bernstein (1999: 169) puts it: ‘segments of horizontal discourse are being inserted in vertical discourse’.

Curriculum: disputed history and the ‘island story’

As outlined above, Bernstein’s work can now be usefully applied to a deconstruction of the curriculum reforms Gove (2010) hoped would restore the primacy of tradition and undermine the validity of so-called alternative qualifications (Wolf, 2011). In the event, attempts to reshape school curricula were, to put it mildly, controversial (Bassey and Wrigley, 2013; Garner, 2013; Gove, 2013b). Gove (2013b) called his academic critics ‘a set of politically motivated individuals who have been actively trying to prevent millions of our poorest children getting the education they need’ – an echo of his earlier complaint that school history ‘denie[d] children the opportunity to hear our island story’. Here, the unproblematic construction of ‘one of the most inspiring stories I know’ was inseparable from its presentation as an ‘opportunity’ (Gove, 2010). Discussion of the proposed new history curriculum then addressed both content (classification) and pacing (framing), revisiting arguments rehearsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In terms outlined in Bernstein (1999), the academic discourse that meets with Gove’s approval is defined by a hierarchical knowledge structure, albeit one that cannot acknowledge the contested nature of knowledge. That history might be seen to be a construct (even if, in practice, methodological issues have been reduced to ‘skills’ designed to detect something called ‘bias’) would give the discipline a horizontal knowledge structure and align it to the non-academic or vocational knowledge associated with a lowering of standards. Local knowledge is made up of ‘competences [that] are segmentally related’, juxtaposed by Bernstein (1999: 160) to the generalising tendencies of vertical discourses, and it is segmentation that draws attention to the contested nature of knowledge – the controversy that attends any claim to know what is and is not important.

This is where a distinction between hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures is important (Bernstein, 1999: 162), for it is the generalisation made possible by hierarchical knowledge structures (166–168) that allowed Gove to effectively render invisible history-as-writing, replacing contested knowledge with ‘our island story’. However, one might add that the debate thus far was both limited and limiting insofar as it has focused on content (‘what happened’) rather than history (that is, written accounts that construct interpretation). For example, in celebrating Gove’s apparent retreat and ‘major improvements’ to the history curriculum, Evans’ (2013) triumphalism depended on a version of events (the Battle of Waterloo, the First World War) that contradicted what had been on offer: ‘History isn’t a myth-making discipline, it’s a myth-busting discipline, and it needs to be taught as such in our schools’. One might agree if this means that school history will address the contested nature of knowledge rather than assumptions about which version is the more correct description of past events. Unfortunately, this 2013 debate had not moved on from a much earlier exchange in the same newspaper (Lawlor, 1989; Samuel, 1989), or the debate in Teaching History, initiated by Jenkins and Brickley (1986).

Curricula and horses to water: neo-liberal subjects and aspiration

If the foregoing controversy recalled the so-called ‘curriculum wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s, it was now inseparable from ongoing constructions of teachers and learners as neo-liberal subjects. Significant here has been the language of aspiration and, since 2010, Conservatives have done nothing that was not pre-echoed by Labour (Wright, 2011), as when Morgan (2015a) was able to claim that the Conservatives had simply ‘built on Andrew Adonis’s fledgling academies programme’ (my emphasis) – one good reason why Bernstein might be referenced so freely as the Labour government ended. Similarly, Labour continued Conservative policies introduced after 1988 (Gewirtz, 2001; Reay, 2008).

In what remains of this article, then, I shall consider the relationship of aspiration to a knowledge curriculum. The Govian moment has seen an attempt to assert hegemonic control over what passes for values and standards in education. Policy has prescribed what schools and teachers should be doing, and also provided an identikit version of the aspirational student, but there has also been an attempt to renew the common-sense view of what education is for. As already indicated, a simple comparison of Conservative and Labour manifestos for the 2017 election shows the extent to which the content of education might be taken for granted.

The neo-liberal subject: teaching or teachers?

For Bernstein (1971b), the in-school relationship between teachers and students was based on labelling and class power – in-school processes were inseparable from the organisation of class society. Currently, education policy sees that relationship as an interaction between free individuals expected to exercise agency and take responsibility for their actions; The Importance of Teaching argued that teachers were henceforth liberated from the ‘straitjacket’ they had complained of (Department for Education, 2010: 16; see also the approach taken by Labour, 2017a). Policy was empowerment (Department for Education, 2010: 28). What Wright (2011: 280) has described as ‘a fantasy’ is, nonetheless, key to the construction of a neo-liberal subject. Schools might call for an inspection to formally recognise improvement (Department for Education, 2010: 70) and the English Baccalaureate would mean ‘special recognition in performance tables to those schools which are helping their pupils to attain this breadth of study’ (44). Successful teachers do not hide behind excuses and are not afraid of a competitive environment.

Put simply, this ideology of engagement has rested on the use of negative reinforcement. Teachers, as professionals, are encouraged to adopt appropriate behaviours for the sake of their careers (Ball, 2003); they are already, by definition, ‘successful’ and, as Wright (2011: 291) indicates, professional status means taking control, being responsible. Successful professionals can motivate themselves; they are aspirational. One assumption underpinning the promotion of Teach First, for example, is that the most successful students will go on to become the most successful teachers (Department for Education, 2012), and Educational Excellence Everywhere boasted that ‘a record 18% of new teachers who started training in 2015 have a first class degree’ (Department for Education, 2016: 25). However, if one does accept that teachers with career planning in mind might be so manipulated, one must wonder if students can be addressed similarly. Students who ‘fail’ (on a daily basis, year after year) are, by definition, not successful, at least not in the terms acceptable to school and government. To suggest they can motivate themselves in the same way as teachers is questionable, their unpredictability the ‘risk’ of education (Biesta, 2016).

The neo-liberal student: what are the ‘rude mechanicals’ doing in class?

Willis (1977: 126) described the ability of working-class boys to see through attempts to win them over – what he called ‘a penetration of the teaching paradigm’ – and that study of resistance/penetration has been replicated many times to corroborate the view that, for many students, school has little or nothing to offer (for example, Mac an Ghaill, 1994; MacDonald and Marsh, 2005). Consequently, one might wonder how a curriculum based on the English Baccalaureate and ‘facilitating subjects’ – a strategy that means any ‘parity of esteem’ is further away than ever – might appeal to those for whom it is meaningless – students who will not respond to negative reinforcement. As Windle (2010: 255) points out, there is an obvious contradiction in that the rhetoric of meritocracy ‘produces alienation, resentment and cynicism’. Becker’s ideal client lives on in the form of the aspirational individual, the boy or girl who can be trusted to embrace the freedoms on offer (Best, 2017). If, as Gove and his successors have repeatedly insisted, social background is irrelevant, once the appropriate opportunities have been provided, and bureaucratic obstacles that hold back teachers and students alike have been removed, success can be ‘characterised as a neutral social category’ (Wilkins, 2012: 768). The successful student ceases to be male or female, belonging to this or that ethnic group, since such classification might smack of determinism. It is significant, then, that the success of (some) female students might be used to deny that class disadvantage should be used as an excuse (Ringrose, 2007).

The discourse of aspiration – as outlined by both Conservative and Labour governments – requires that victims be blamed for their own failure (Best, 2017; Stahl, 2016; Tyler and Bennett, 2015). There is little, in the end, between the assumptions of 1960s compensatory education and current neo-liberal notions of the oddness of those who fail to adopt the preferred aspirational outlook, and the point is well made by recent research with working-class boys in London (Stahl, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016). Exploring ‘narratives of (dis)identification’ (Stahl, 2016), this research might have featured Willis’s lads 40 years on. However, unlike the lads in the 1970s, these boys hoped for skilled rather than unskilled, repetitive work, even if they stopped short of ambitions that would include middle-class work. There is class consciousness here, of a kind: middle-class people were ‘stuck-up’ or ‘up their own arse’ (Stahl, 2012: 15). Manual work was confirmation that working-class people earned the money they were paid: ‘that’s the difference between working class and middle class’ (Stahl, 2012: 14–15). Stahl (2014) described ‘an egalitarian ethos’ and ‘communal values’ (100), with authenticity associated with a ‘loyalty to self’ (101), and any attempt to change would be inauthentic behaviour, as when Charlie says: ‘I’m not two-faced’ (103). In particular, ‘middling’ – that is, ranking somewhere in the middle of the class – might become an acceptable way of avoiding both the stigma of outright failure and the embarrassment of success (108). One can recall the antipathy shown by Willis’s (1977) lads to those they called ‘ear’oles’, yet there might also be ambivalence now, a reluctance to define oneself as working class (Stahl, 2013) that marks a softening, perhaps, of the pride (even anger) expressed by the lads in the 1970s.

Conclusion

So, did Gove ‘read’ Bernstein? He certainly tapped into a sociological tradition that, viewed casually, had focused on faults within schools (Ball, 1995), which then allowed him to oversimplify the debate: background-blaming is where inadequate teachers hide to make excuses. Nonetheless, Bernstein described the emergence of an education market out of social democracy’s failure: they are not simply alternative sets of policies, and education cannot compensate for – that is, paper over the cracks in – a class society precisely because it does not address broader socio-economic inequalities (see the opening discussion in Reay, 2017: 11–27). In short, the success of individual students is inseparable from the failure of most of their peers. Hence, the working-class subject is now either lacking because they fail to make the appropriate effort – where neo-liberalism would insist on negative reinforcement – or said to be overreaching. As Stahl (2014: 106) observes: ‘As a counter-narrative to the neoliberal rhetoric, ordinariness and average-ness are arguably forms of resistance and “sense-making” to the neoliberal achievement ideology’. In this article, the application of Bernstein’s ideas to what I have called a Govian moment and the brief survey of ongoing research have been designed to ask if, rather than simply juxtaposing social democracy and neo-liberalism as alternatives, the role of education could be addressed differently. This is a question that would have to be addressed, sooner or later, by a progressive Labour government. The success of individuals cannot disguise the resilience of class as a means to social reproduction, even when recent governments – Labour as well as Conservative – have all sought to render social class not just invisible, but also a non-discourse (Reay, 2006). Nonetheless, it is evident that class has been redefined for an age when aspiration is discussed ad nauseam, all without any understanding of the way in which many working-class students are still alienated by the perceived need to transform themselves to be successful on someone else’s terms.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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Did Gove read Bernstein? On revisiting ‘Education cannot compensate for society’

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction: two observations

Citing Bernstein after New Labour

No excuses: from Bernstein to Gove

As Bernstein wrote, some time ago

Bernstein: writing and rewriting

Curriculum: disputed history and the ‘island story’

Curricula and horses to water: neo-liberal subjects and aspiration

The neo-liberal subject: teaching or teachers?

The neo-liberal student: what are the ‘rude mechanicals’ doing in class?

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

Note

References