New Era or Old Times: class, gender and education
Gaby Weiner
South Bank University[1]
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference
(September 11-14 1997: University of York)
Abstract
This paper argues that past debates concerning class influences on education in the UKwere inadequate because theydisregarded girls' and women's values and life patterns. New analytic frameworks involving a synthesis of gender, class and other social formations, areneeded in order to develop understanding about how changing patterns of wealth and poverty and/or recent British educational reforms, have affected student learning and life-chances; and therefore how inequalities may be challenged.It draws on a range of sources including a recent study of the impact of recent British education policy changes on gender relations in schools.
There has been a rhetoric of 'classlessness' and 'sex equality' in recent UK academic and media debates concerning education, although with the advent of New Labour, social justice issues appear to have a slightly higher policy profile. Inequality is seen to be the consequence of differences in individual ability and aspiration rather than structural disadvantage, and because girls are achieving better results than boys in some examinations, sex equality in education is deemed to have been achieved. Such notions, however, mask both the strengthening grip that the British middle-classes have on educational advantage and privilege; and the continued exclusion of women from areas of education and employment, and, in particular, at the most senior levels of politics, industry and commerce.
This paper explores some of the issues in this apparent conundrum, and is structured as follows: discussion of the development of class analysis of education in the UK, and women in the British welfare state; feminist perspectives on class; education policy developments concerning gender; the nature of recent British educational reforms; changing gender patterns in British schools; and new class and gender formations in education.
Class analysis of education in the UK
Most UK debates about the impact of social class on education draw on the nineteenth-century theories of Marx and Weber; that is, that class should be viewed in relation to ownership (or lack of ownership) of capital and the means of production and according to the range of capacities of different male social class groupings arising from their ability to manipulate the employment market as property owners, intellectuals, administrators and managers, and members of the working class. In Britain, a person's social class is still officially represented by the status of the male head of household. However such notions of class have recently been rendered problematic in the UK by a number of factors: changes in the labour market and in the family: shifts in perception of class membership; critiques of feminist theorists who have challenged the logocentrism of previous analyses (Lather, 1992); and new class/gender formations emerging within education in the 1980s and 1990s.
Ainley (1993) suggests that under the post-war Labour administration of 1945-51, the British class system remained largely intact. In the case of education, rather than the development of a unified system of state schooling, a tripartite secondary system (grammar, central/technical, secondary-modern) was proposed mirroring the three traditional divisions of male labour (brain, non-manual, manual). In practice, state secondary schooling became bipartite as most of the planned central/technical schools failed to materialise. Tripartism was produced, nevertheless, through the combination of private and public schooling viz. private (called 'public' or independent) schools for the gentry, grammar schools for the middling classes and secondary moderns for working class children. By the 1950s and 1960s inequalities in the social distribution of educational opportunity became the main target of a generation of British social scientists (eg Glass, 1954; Halsey, 1957). They convinced the 1960s Labour administration that grammar schools were attracting a disproportionately high number of children from middle class homes and therefore disadvantaging working class children. As a consequence, the neighbourhood comprehensive school was adopted as the most effective model of educational equality, even if under the slogan 'grammar schools for all'. Despite these shifts towards more egalitarian schooling, however, the early 1960s saw class barriers remaining intact at the level of higher education with the proportion of working-class children entering universities actually decreasing (Ainley 1993). By the end of the 1970s, partly as a consequence of the ending of the post-war boom period and an increasing concern for value-for-money in education, a debate began to develop about the extent to which policies aimed at increased equality might be at odds with those aimed at economic growth and individual aspiration.
This was taken a step further when Margaret Thatcher's New Right administration came into power in 1979 with the explicit intention of rolling back the British welfare state. In the context of education, this meant challenging the policy changes instituted in the 1960s and 1970s by placing the needs of industry and the economy (rather than the child, see Plowden, 1967) at the heart of the education process. This culminated in a period of education reform from 1988 to 1994 which sought to restore the tripartite system of educational privilege through a mix of policy strategies: the promotion of diversification in schooling (eg the creation of semi-private forms of schooling), marketisation (eg competition between schools for pupils) and deregulation; expansion and restructuring of further and higher education; and increased powers of the central state to the detriment of locally elected education authorities (LEAs).
At the same time, the three long-term British twentieth century industrial tendencies identified by Hobsbawm (1969) - the relative decline of industry, decrease of manual work within each industry, and the decline in manual work overall - continued to have an impact on employment patterns. As part-time and contract employment was increasingly introduced, guaranteed male employment (sometimes termed 'a job for life') became less available, and women entered the labour market in increasing numbers though, often in low paid and low status jobs. Job insecurity relating to labour force flexibility and the need to market individual skills began to replace job security linked to public service and/or long-term loyalty to company or employer. Also the added dimension of post-war racial divisions in schooling and employment rendered discussions of the impact of class even more complex, since young blacks, simultaneously, began to reject their inner-city schooling yet aspire to better paid and higher status jobs than those of their parents' generation. Furthermore, technological innovation and the restructuring of industry demanded more highly skilled workers and fewer semi- and unskilled workers thus obscuring traditional mental/manual and clean/dirty polarities (Ainley, 1993; Hutton 1996).
In the 1980s, then, fundamental changes in the workforce due to cyclical recession, long term structural decline of British industry and displacement arising from the technological and electronic revolutions resulted in a further blurring of traditional class boundaries. While conservative administrations of the 1980s and 1990s sought, mostly covertly, to buttress traditional class affiliations through changes in education policy, these attempts were subverted by labour market restructuring, technological changes and because of raised student and parental aspiration, all of which rendered the interpretation of class patterns as highly problematic.
Yet some old class divisions clearly continued to exist and even intensify. For example, following deregulation in public service provision and the lowering of the welfare safety-net, there was evidence of a downturn in the conditions of the poorest in British society. It was thus claimed that 'malnutrition is devastating the poor on a scale not seen since the Thirties' and that welfare provision established at the beginning of the twentieth century was under attack (Mills, 1996). Hutton laid the responsibility for this at the door of Conservative government policy rather than due to the requirements of commerce or industry.
Economic efficiency is believed to arise only from individual responses to market signals; the relationship between social cohesion and wealth generation is consistently denied. But the urge to market every aspect of the way we live in the name of efficiency has eroded the fabric of our social life, which in its turn has weakened the economy. (Hutton, 1996: 192)
The need for an empire-less Britain to develop new structures and strategies (inside and outside education) in order to survive the turbulent waters of the 'free' global market, has thus apparently most sharply affected the poorest in British society. As a recent commentator suggests:
The outlook on the breadline remains bleak. Few economists believe full employment is a viable option. The growing wealth divide had undermined the 'trickle down' theories of free marketeers. The poverty lobby claims that the welfare state safety net is being unravelled by a government anxious to keep taxes low (Mills, 1996:18).
Given, then, the undoubted existence of class difference yet the complexity of identifying specific class structures and experiences, how can we develop understanding of the impact of social class on British education? How can it be accommodated with inequalities involving gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality and so on?
Class and Identity
Class is not just an economic position as Mahony and Zmroczek point out. 'Class experience is deeply rooted, retained and carried through life rather than left behind (or below)', as some individuals find themselves in a different social class from that into which they were born (Mahony and Zmroczek, 1997:4). So individuals may well move across social class divisions (either materially or consciously or both) several times during a lifetime as earning and consumption patterns change. The nature of social class iIdentity is also important in this context.
In their study of black and white, working and middle-class young Londoners, Phoenix and Tizard (1996) found that the discourse of class is used to distinguish between 'us' and 'them'. Because of the rhetoric of 'classlessness' in British culture and the apparent reification of middle-class patterns of consumption, Phoenix and Tizard (1996:439) found also that working-class youth appears particularly confused:
social class was more likely to constitute a conscious identity position for middle class than for working class young people. Young people from the working classes often called themselves 'middle class' and were more likely than their middle-class peers to ask what we meant by social class. Yet, social class was part of their identities. One way in which social class appeared to be symbolically experienced was through the comparison of the consumption of different social classes.
Clearly, previous ways in which class consciousness has been understood needs to be reworked in the context of 1990s Britain.
Gender, the welfare state and changing employment patterns
At the end of World War II, government policy assumed that women would return from employment in the field and factory to their 'natural' roles in the family (Dean 1991); hence women's work (paid or unpaid) was excluded from contemporary debates about labour force shifts and patterns. Thus, while the creation of the British welfare state was premised on a concern to redistribute social privilege and benefits more equally, assumptions concerning women proved to be highly conservative. According to Coppock, Haydn and Richter (1995:12):
For the sake of rebuilding the war-stricken nation, women's primary role was defined in British social policy as that of homemaker and childrearer. The Beveridge Report (1942) relied on the reassertion of traditional sex roles.
Thus the structure of the welfare state and indeed, the school day, assumed that women worked primarily in the home and were dependant economically on their husbands' wage. The Beveridge Report which became the blueprint for the British welfare state contained certain assumptions based, in part, on empirical evidence of the number of married women dependants between 1918 and 1939, but also, to some extent, on its chairman's personal narrowed perspectives on marriage and family life (Lewis, 1983).
What this meant in terms of education was that in the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, equality issues were viewed wholly in terms of social class. Implicitly, ideas about the naturalness of gender differences were maintained and reproduced through schooling (Coppock et al, 1995), emphasised, for example, by the widespread incorporation within teacher training of Bowlby's theories of maternal deprivation and Parson's functionalist perspectives on distinctive sex roles (Bowlby, 1953; Parsons, 1952).
Subsequently, and ironically perhaps, the welfare state itself was to have a major impact on women's lives, as did changes in social and cultural assumptions arising from the impact of second-wave feminism (eg Friedan, 1963; Greer, 1970; Rowbotham, 1973), other aspects of 1960s political progressivism and later demands of the deregulated market. These dramatically changed work patterns, as women's proportion of overall waged labour increased and that of males, decreased. Hermes (1987) suggests that the growth of the welfare state transferred women's dependency from men in the private sphere to the state in the public sphere. Women thus developed a triple status: as citizens with political rights; as clients and consumers of welfare; and as employees in the state sector. This triple status both released women from their traditional relationship with men, and required newly negotiated terms with both men and the state.
If this scenario characterises public and private relationships in the 1970s and 1980s, it could be argued that those of the 1990s remain unstable. As economic restructuring and unemployment continue, and work patterns of women and men converge, men are also having to engage more with the private sphere of the family, and to renegotiate their relationship to women, the labour market and public sphere. Indeed, Hochschild (1996) suggests that for some people, family life cultures and work cultures are reversing. She suggests that, for many women, the model of the family as a secure haven is outdated, and it is the family that now provides increasing sources of anxiety and insecurity. For example, in her study of American workers, one interviewee, a factory shift operator and remarried mother of two describes her daily re-entry into home life:
I walk in the door and the minute I turn the key in the lock my oldest daughter is there. Granted she needs somebody to talk to about her day. The baby is still up...My husband is in the other room hollering to my daughter...They all come at me at once. (Hochschild, 1996:23)
Quarrels, unwashed dishes and demand of her family are contrasted unfavourably to her experience of work 'I usually come to work early just to get away from the house' (ibid). In the same study, women suggested that while work was not necessarily a haven either, it was sometimes more stable and reassuring than the family.
Work was not always 'there for you', but increasingly, 'home', as they had know it, wasn't either. As one woman recounted, 'One day my husband came home and told me, 'I've fallen in love with a woman at work....I want a divorce'. (Hochschild, 1996:25)
The outcomes, then, of such changes in the welfare state and in work and family patterns, provide some glimpses into why young men and women may be altering previously held assumptions about their life-destinations and career trajectories as is suggested later in this paper.
Feminist perspectives on class
Debates concerning social class inequalities in education and how to address them are no longer at the top of the educational agenda as in the 1950s and 1960s, largely because of the complexities of social shifts as already described. Additionally, by the early 1980s, the complexities of the impact of gender, racial divisions, sexuality and disability on educational experience and performance were seen to displace previous concepts of class, rendering them highly problematic.
Recent renewed interest in issues of social class is the consequence not only of changed labour market patterns and evidence of increasing poverty, but also from an increasing number of feminists who come from working class backgrounds (eg Mahony and Zmroczek, 1997; Reay, 1996). According to Walkerdine (1996:355), they are 'beginning to write experientially about class and to understand it as a significant issue for the understanding of culture, feminine subjectivity and identity'.
As we have already seen, in previous decades it was mainly male sociologists on the political left, who studied working class communities and/or rural or manufacturing working class experience (all of which have largely disappeared from Britain in the 1980s as a consequence of Thatcherite policy). Feminists had similar concerns but with the added interest of exploring both the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism, and the impact of social class on women's experience. For example, Mitchell (1971) referred to the importance of changes in: production - women's place in the labour market; reproduction - sexual divisions within the family; sexuality - in the views of women as primarily sexual beings and sex-objects; and socialisation - in the way in which the young were reared and educated. (Mitchell, 1971).