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Making the Familiar Strange: A new look at inequality in education

Some time during my third or fourth year at teacher training college, around 1977– 1978, in the days when most if not all Cert.Ed. students took courses in the sociology, psychology, history and philosophy of education, I had to write an assessed essay entitled: ‘ “Education cannot compensate for society”: Discuss’. This title was taken from an article Basil Bernstein wrote for a 1970 edition of New Society. In the following years, talking with friends and colleagues from similar educational backgrounds, I realise what a gift that title was to sociology of Ed. lecturers, since most of us were set something based on it! Back in the 60s and 70s, sociology of education (at least for teacher trainees) was focused on social class (see Coffey, 2001). Looking through the books which formed the basis of my sociology library and that I used for my essay, texts like Jackson and Marsden’s (1962) Education and the Working Classes, Bernstein’s (1971) Class, Codes and Control, Hargreaves’ (1967) Social Relations in a Secondary School, Lacey’s (1970) Hightown Grammar, Young’s (1971) Knowledge and Control, Karabel and Halsey’s (1978) Power and Ideology in Society, Eggleston’s (1974) Contemporary Research in the Sociology of Education, and the Open University (1971) reader. School and Society, I can find little reference to other social influences on educational experience. There is, of course, some mention of differences in the aptitude, interests and abilities of girls and boys, and links are made between ‘race’ and IQ, but, with notable exceptions (e.g. Bowles and Gintis), these were usually, primarily attributed to biological factors. In some respects there was simplicity in both the description and analysis of the ‘problem’ of differences and inequalities in the educational careers and achievements of working and middle class children. ‘Compensatory’ programmes in diverse guises and with various foci were advocated and put into practice. These approaches were premised, and placed the emphasis, on deficit—as Bernstein pointed out in his afore-