progressive education versus the working classes

Progressive Education versus the Working Classes

B E R N I C E M A R T I N

I

Our education system is full of paradoxes and contradictions. Many people have commented recently on the way in which educational progress produces a radically anti-intellectual ethos in the universities. Increasingly I have come to suspect too that current reforms in school structure, curricula and teaching methods are not merely not assisting their main intended beneficiaries, the working classes, but may well be hampering them further. At one level there is uncertainty about whether comprehensive schools are either increasing working class mobility through education1 or enabling children from different social classes to mix any more freely and equally than they did under the tripartite system.2 At another level there is the casual observation which any parent with school-age children can hardly avoid, that methods of teaching which aim at letting each child move at his own pace give middle class children an ever greater advantage over their working class contemporaries since the involvement of parents in teaching basic skills and providing intellectual stimulation can be the crucial determinant of the child’s ‘natural pace’.3 A related point is obliquely suggested in a recent report on L.E.A. expenditure on school The director of the Educational Publishers’ Council in commenting on the report remarked that while ‘discovery’ methods call for more not less books many education authorities were conspicuously under- spending on books, perhaps because they were devoting so much of their budget to prestige building project^.^ The delinquent authorities are predominantly in old urban working class areas. Here the working class child can have adequate access to books neither at home nor in school.

I1

There is cause for concern too about the paradoxical effects of popularised sociology as it filters at second, third and fourth hand through the system of teacher training. The now incontrovertible link between social class and educational achievement gets across at a simple level to most teachers, but oversimplification can seriously distort anything as subtle and complex as Basil Bernstein’s ideas on speech codes6 which are perhaps the most important observations in the Sociology of Education for many years. The effect of pop

298 Critical Quarterly sociology can too often be to alert the teacher to the importance of social class in the educational process without providing any agreed or coherent programme for incorporating the observation into classroom technique.

Indeed what emerges at ground level is a number of mutually contradictory analyses and panaceas. Thus: (a) Research has shown that working class children cannot be assisted in school because their home background determines their level of success. (b) Middle class children have all the cultural advantages, therefore a middle class child who is not doing well in school must be either psycho- logically disturbed or genuinely stupid. In either case the result is a ‘do nothing’ philosophy on the part of the teacher although the psycho-social sympathies which go with the respective views can have importantly different impact in the classroom. Or again : (a) The working classes are culturally deprived and therefore need compensatory education. (b) The working classes are not culturally deprived but are having their own inherently valuable culture attacked and debased by exposure to the hostile middle class values of the school : they should therefore be given learning materials based on their own speech code and social experience. These two viewpoints are not only contradictory, but neither has a satisfactory solution to offer. The former (a) may well involve breaking the influence of the working class family on its children almost from the cradle where the learning process begins-a degree of violence to working class liberty not yet perpetrated by the British state. The latter (b) in its tenderness for working class culture could easily have the effect of imprisoning working class children ever more firmly in their restricted code and denying them either intellectual exploration or social mobility. *

One could multiply such contradictions. The teaching materials deriving from such varied presuppositions must often misfire when they stray into the hands of uncomprehending or hostile teachers. Thus I found recently in a predominantly working class suburban primary school that Leila Berg’s ‘Nippers’ books which are deli- berately based on the speech and social world of urban working class children, were being reserved as exotic light literature for the brightest children after they had worked their way through ‘Janet and John’ and the standard volumes of folk tales and myths. The example is trivial but the net effect of such contradictions must often be confusion and a demoralising loss of nerve about the objectives of education among both teachers and pupils.

* I am irresistibly reminded here of a conversation between a university teacher and a student from a College of Education who was applying to read a Sociology degree.

Candidate: The school forces middle class values on the working classes. Interviewer: (with intended irony) You mean Beethoven and Shakespeare? Candidate: Yes.

Progressive Education versus the Working Classes ZYY

I11 Random observation of this tragiccomic confusion is one thing,

but explaining it is an altogether harder proposition. It was encoun- tering the ideas of Mary Douglas in her book Natural Symbols which for me fused general disquiet and apparently unconnected observations. In that book, together with her previous volume Purity and Dungera, Professor Douglas provides a set of intellectual tools which enable one to make fresh sense of a great many social phenomena, not least current fashions in educational change. Professor Douglas is mainly concerned with variations in religious ritual and modes of symbolic expression and the different patterns of social relations in which they are embedded. This may seem irrelevant to the matter with which this paper began and indeed it may be necessary to digress rather widely before coming back to education. However, it is no accident that Professor Douglas derived her ideas not only from her own discipline of anthropology but from extended reflection on Professor Bernstein’s work. She describes ‘Natural Symbols’ as ‘an essay in applying Bernstein’s approach to the analysis of ritualye. All that I hope to do is to complete the circle.

Mrs. Douglas’s starting point is Bernstein’s distinction between elaborated and restricted codes of speech, the former flexible, rich in syntactic alternatives, enabling fine and precise distinctions of meaning to be drawn, the latter narrower in its range of syntactic alternatives, more rigidly organised, more stylised. Each speech code as Bernstein has demonstrated is developed out of an appropriate family structure and mode of family control. The restricted code is associated with a family system in which roles are clearly defined by age, sex and kin relation, and in which the young child is controlled by defining actions as appropriate or inappropriate to ascribed role categories. This Bernstein calls the ‘positional’ family. The elaborated code is associated with the ‘personal’ family, where roles are not so rigidly ascribed and where control depends on the employment of abstract principles and on sensitising the child to other people’s feelings and to the consequences of his actions. Both Douglas and Bernstein stress the inter-dependence of the social matrix and the appropriate speech code which grows within it.

All forms of symbolism can be similarly treated, argues Professor Douglas. In particular ritual can be seen as a form of restricted code, symbolizing and reinforcing a pattern of social belonging. She is particularly concerned to explain the anti-ritual tendencies in modern societies and rightly dissatisfied with facile explanations in terms of secularisation and intellectual progress. Certain simple societies are strikingly similar to the modern western world in their apparent lack of concern for religion and metaphysics, in their lack of ritual and in their pragmatic, prosaic, utilitarian approach to life. An examination of these ‘secular primitives’ provides an invaluable

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extra category for the analysis of social relationships. There are two principles on which they may be organised, group and grid. The idea of group is familiar and Durkheimiam: it is ‘the experience of a bounded social unit’.lO The new category, grid, refers to ‘rules which relate one person to others on an ego-centred basis’.l1 They are not mutually exclusive principles of patterning, but may be combined together in any degree or found separately, while some milieux may be so unstructured that virtually nothing of either principle is employed.

Each combination has its corresponding symbolic system. Where ‘group’ is found alone, that is where social experience is dominated by membership of a bounded, definable unit which is itself internally undifferentiated, then the symbolism of the human body will be heavily emphasised. The ‘inside’ will be represented as good but vulnerable, and the ‘outside’ as a threatening source of evil. The orifices will be jealously guarded. This is a system in which ritual, often centring on the imagery of bodily pollution and purification, will be a powerful element in social life: the symbols will, in pure Durkheimian fashion be condensed and economic reflections and celebrations of the state of the social body.

Where grid alone is strong a man will not feel himself bounded and defined by group loyalties but by a set of rules which relate him to other individuals with whom he conducts transactions of various kinds. This is an individualistic and competitive system in which the successful manipulate the rules to their own advantage. The symbolism of the grid pattern is much more diverse than that of the group pattern, and hardly employs the metaphor of the body. It does not produce condensed common rituals and indeed is anti- ritualist, although it may coin certain symbolic modes of expressing individualism. Its language, however, is prosaic and its values materialistic. In short, whereas a milieu based on a group structure typically uses language and symbolic expression resembling Bern- stein’s ‘restricted’ code, one based on the grid pattern typically uses something more like an ‘elaborated’ code.

Where grid and group occur together a man will experience both the boundedness of belonging and an internal differentiation which gives him a variety of ego-centred but reciprocal relationships with other members of the group. This is the classic model used by anthropologists and functionalists to represent the ‘normal’ form of social structure. The combination of group and grid produces rituals of identification and rituals of differentiation both of which can use the imagery of the body. Although group alone tends to regard the body fearfully, as in constant danger of corruption and pollution by alien forces, when combined with grid patterning the result is a positive valuation of the body. The language appropriate to this situation will include elements of the elaborated code but not to the exclusion of the restricted codes which signal group membership- ritual, metaphor, etc.

Progressive Education versus the Working Classes 30 1

At the point of minimal social patterning where neither group nor grid is effectively present, social categories are hardly defined at all and relationships are shifting and unreliable. ‘Social’ action has no meaning : inner experience alone counts. Self-exploration may create symbols and metaphors but these will barely communicate themselves to others: private dreams not public rituals are the norm. This milieu then is radically anti-ritualist although in fact its mode of expression is a restricted code just as much as ritual is. Zero structuring can occur in a number of ways. The socially marginal and the drop-out will often be found near zero point. Moreover large scale grid patterning such as is coming to dominate modern urban society can result in a social experience for the failures of the system in which fragmentation, isolation, rootlessness and depersonalisation are the main elements. The failure feels himself controlled by abstract principles and distant organisations : he becomes object rather than human being. This experience, suggests Mrs. Douglas, is a potent source of anti-ritualism in our society. Being treated as an ‘undifferentiated and insignificant mass’ has its appropriate expression in ‘inarticulate and undifferentiated syrnbols’l2 and in addition tends to be the seed-bed of all sorts of millenial movements frequently involving considerable violence. In addition to the hapless failures there are certain other life styles in our society which come close to zero structuring. One example is the inter- stitial points of the life cycle where family and social constraints are at their minimum-the adolescent and early adult, and in particular the student population. There are also important segments of the intellectual and artistic middle classes who fall into this pattern, and in particular manipulators of the mass media. They can professionally ‘distance’ themselves from most structures of group belonging and operate on an essentially individual basis. Ironically their raison d’btre is to create and distribute modern man’s symbols.

IV

Perhaps at this point we can revert to education. My argument is that all the current trends in the organisation and content of education in schools (and incidentally in higher education as well) constitute an actual and symbolic attack upon the principles of group structuring and most of them on the grid pattern also. They sym- bolise and celebrate the dissolution of boundaries (group) and distinctions (grid). Their result is to alter the old social structure of the school (varied combinations of group and grid) to something which at best can offer only a competitive and depersonalised grid pattern and at its worst must lead to near-zero structuring with all the attendant dangers of either total social irrelevance or violent millenialism. This is doubly disastrous if one considers the effect on working class children who tend to have a more structured and

302 Critical Quarterly bounded pattern of social relationships in their family and neighbourhood than most middle class children. Progressive education will therefore disorient and disable the group it was most intended to benefit.

The point is perhaps best made by contracting the stereotypical fiatures of the traditional school of the recent past and those of the progressive school. The traditional school is closest to the state and direct grant grammar school although the secondary modern shared most of the same features: the progressive school is closer to an advanced modern comprehensive. One needs to remember through- out that the school is a social system in its own right13 and is the other important source of social patterning in addition to the family for all children. After all, for a minimum of eleven of his most formative years every child spends about half his waking life in a school.

The traditional school defines its boundaries both literally and symbolically, thus expressing and reinforcing the group pattern. It is educationally selective and often a one-sex establishment. Boundaries of this kind are dissolved by the co-educational, non-selective progressive school. The most striking symbolic expression of group boundedness in the traditional school is compulsory uniform. This defines the group in the most clear and immediate way possible. Standard clothing, standard skirt length, standard trouser width are laid down. This is the typical group imagery of body control. Rules curbing any tendency to ‘shagginess’ (to use Professor Douglas’s word) are often found alongside the insistence on uniform-make-up, jewellery, loose or long hair may be forbidden. Immaculate physical appearance and immaculately correct behaviour, especially in public places. protect the identity and reputation of the group vis-i-vis out-groups and defend it from pollution. The very common rule against eating in the streets is a particularly interesting symbol in view of Professor Douglas’s analysis of the importance of ingestion in the purity and pollution language of groups.” By contrast uniform and all its associated rules are frowned on in the progressive system and control of children outside the school building is seldom attempted : they are individuals not representatives of a social body in and to the outside world.

The traditional school uses formal rules, unambiguous and administered by authority, to define the limits of acceptable behaviour in the group. Expulsion is the ultimate sanction. The progressive school minimises rules and tends to make those which remain informal and largely self-administered. Again the definition of the boundaries of the social body is devalued.

The group rituals which are important in the traditional school are all superceded in the progressive school. The daily Assembly with its invariable pattern gives way to irregular and experimental assemblies (often of a secular kind) which are conducted by and for

Progressive Education i’ersus the Working Classes 303 varying segments of the school but seldom for the whole school at once. The traditional school seeks occasions for the display of its symbols of group belonging-the school crest and motto, the school song, the traditional hymn for the first and last days of term, the Founders’ Day hymn and oration and so on. The progressive school avoids all these. In particular it dislikes Speech Day, the yearly occasion on which the traditional school affirms its group identity. If Speech Day is replaced by anything it is likely to be by methods of consulting parents on an individual basis about their children.

School sports are another notable focus of group belonging in the traditional school. The greatest achievement in games is to play for a school team, to represent the group to the world. In the progressive school team games are increasingly replaced or supplemented by opportunities for the child to explore a range of new and usually individualistic sports-squash, golf, horse-riding, ten pin bowling, archery, fencing: enthusiasm for the school team is not a notable feature.

The House system is an important item of internal structure in the traditional school. It provides differentiation and competition but still on a group basis. The progressive school rejects the House system as false and contrived, as not a real gemeinschaft and therefore not worth having. It is as well that Cleisthenes had no such scruples about ‘artificial’ groupings when he reformed the Athenian constitution.

As with Houses, so with other methods of internal structuring. The traditional school divides its pupils first by age and then by educational streaming. The progressive school blurs its internal structure in a number of ways. It usually divides pupils on an age basis-though some progressive primary schools using the ‘family group’ method have abolished even this divisive criterion-but it additionally inter-weaves a number of other methods of sub- dividing children say, into forms, perhaps by random or alphabetical selection, or by ‘sets’ for subjects or groups of subjects. In some cases the element of educational streaming is avoided even in the process of ‘setting’. The extreme effect can be to produce a network of shifting and unstable groupings of pupils each for separate purposes and to prevent the emergence of any continuing structure of belonging.

Similar patterns reveal themselves if one considers the use of space in the school building. In the traditional school space is organised by clear definitions of boundary and purpose. Rooms are labelled and equipped for particular purposes-the geography room, the physics laboratory, the form room etc. Desks are fixed in place, usually in straight rows. Seating plans for lessons and meals are fixed and only altered at specific points in the year, perhaps termly. Sometimes the seating reflects the pattern of educational achievement.

304 Critical Quarterly Each child has his own clearly marked set of books and equipment. In the progressive school there is minimal fixing of room purpose or indeed of room boundaries since screens and partitions are used to make spatial units as flexible as possible. Instead of fixed decks there are irregular clusters of chairs, tables and surfaces. In some progressive primary schools there is even a deliberate provision of fewer chairs, pencils and so on than there are children in a class on the grounds that the class should never be found doing any one activity in concert. Euipment is communal and there is much more and a greater variety of it.15

These reflections on the two approaches to space and equipment suggest a new interpretation of the current crusade against Victorian school buildings.16 The reformers who want to raze all Victorian schools and replace them by pre-fabricated modern blocks have always been something of a puzzle to me. The middle classes after all have no difficulty in modernising and damp-proofing the Victorian houses which they buy so avidly and at such high prices for their domestic use. So what is so different about those solid, red-brick schools? Could it be that the trouble is not that they are not purpose- built but that they are too much purpose built? Their spatial arrange- ments are simply not conducive to the progressive mode.

V

The structure of authority shows similar contrasts to the two methods of school organisation. The traditional school has a formal hierarchy based on gradations of prestige and function which are a combination of ascribed and achieved status-senior staff/junior staff; prefect/ordinary pupil, etc. These distinctions of role and authority are reflected in symbolic ways. Modes of address between any two levels of the hierarchy are relatively formal involving the use of surnames and titles and the range of subjects likely to occur in conversation across the status boundaries is limited. Spatial relationships express the same thing. The senior staff and/or prefect will perhaps be found on the platform in assembly. The teacher's desk is habitually at the front of the class and he will face the class to teach. The hierarchy is visually signalled in other ways, too. Teachers and pupils dress differently with teachers sometimes wearing academic robes. Prefects, House Captains, form leaders, Games Captains have emblems of office which they habitually wear. None of this remains in the progressive school. Instead of clear authority distinctions and fixed codes of behaviour collective decisions are taken by School Councils of staff and pupils together.* The prefect

+Some schools include parents, cleaners, school meals supervisors, caretakers etc. in these Councils too. Of course one effect of this is often to so trivialise discussion that real decisions have to be taken elsewhere. Then there are only two levels in the hierarchy-the Head and the Rest.

~ ~~~ ~ ~

Progressive Education versus the Working Classes 305 system is not used. Modes of address are typically informal: everyone uses first names and even shortened pet names to signal equality. There are no distinctive offices and therefore no badges of office. The teacher often has no special desk and typically spends the lesson moving informally from one pupil to another. In short there is a total resistance to the institution of authority on the basis of role differentiation whether ascribed or achieved.

The same dichotomy is found in the two approaches to the method and content of teaching. The traditional school provides near- uniform packages of subjects for each form-at most one may find the B form doing Geography instead of Latin and the Sixth form divided into Arts and Science. In the progressive school a much wider range of subjects is available and individual children make up their unique packages from what is on offer. Sixth formers are encouraged to spread across Arts, Science and Social Science if they so wish. There need be no attempt to relate the units in the package in any coherent way, so that what is intended as cross-disciplinary flexibility may become no more than the indiscriminate collection of discrete items. (The Course Unit system is the analogue of this in universities.) Again in the traditional school subjects are clearly demarcated (boundaries plus differentiation). Subject boundaries are in process of dissolution in the progressive school. New collective nouns are minted-‘Creative Studies’, a combination of woodwork, needlework, housecraft, technical drawing, metalwork etc. in which boys and girls all learn to cook, make jewellery, manipulate new materials and so on: ‘Humane Studies’ in which Art, History, English, Geography, French etc. are all combined, perhaps to pursue a theme such as ‘the home’ or ‘war’, or perhaps to follow ‘the patch method’ which is an apparently random sequence of subject matter designed to provide variety and stimulation without any detectable and therefore inhibiting structure.

The traditional school organises the time-table of work minutely for each child, including homework time. The progressive school uses much more open-ended and unstandardised methods in which the child must allocate work time for himself-the Project method is a favourite way of setting work. A standard homework timetable is avoided and indeed the idea of homework is often frowned on on the grounds that when a child is ‘ready’ to learn he will spontaneously explore areas of interest for himself. * Unfortunately many children are never ‘ready’ in this sense, especially those whose parents provide no pattern of intellectual pursuits.

*The same progressive assumption lies behind a recent suggestion that compulsory education should be abolished either entirely or for the over-10’s: Children Have Rights. no. 6: Compulsory Attendance Children’s Committee, National Council for Civil Liberties 1971. This looks absurdly like a traiisrnigration of the soul of laissez-faire capitalism from the economic to the educational world.

306 Critical Quarterly Techniques of marking work show the same contrast. The tradi-

tional teacher marks all work according to a public and uniform standard. The progressive teacher only makes individual comments on each child’s work and resists the establishment of a uniform or ‘objective’ grading and therefore of comparability between individuals or over time.

Ritual and rules are crucial elements in the teaching technique of the traditional school. Children collectively recite tables, the books of the Bible, French irregular verbs, Latin declensions, the chronology of English monarchs, chemistry formulae, geometrical proofs and so on. The rules-say of grammar, or essay construction, or scientific practice-are the starting point of a subject. Learning is based on structure and form, on employing and refining the rules and principles which derive from the experience of previous genera- tions. The intention is to give the child transferable skills. The teaching methods of the progressive school aim at eliminating ‘empty’ ritual and rules. The child is encouraged to explore, t o discover for himself, to respond intuitively to the idea of number, t o sense principles not rules of grammar, mathematics and so forth. Each child must respond freshly to every experience and create anew for himself: linear thinking is no thinking: inherited, second-hand knowledge is no knowledge: each child his own Galileo and his own Shakespeare. Unfortunately the effect of the progressive stress on immediacy of response is to produce a plethora of non-transferable experiences, the result of which can all too often be to embed the child permanently in a limited context rather than enabling him to be genuinely creative.

VI There is not space here to illustrate all this from every subject.

I shall take just a few examples. The traditional method of teaching a child to read begins from the letters and explains how to build words from them, so that the child is forced to detect the structure of each word in the very process of reading it. One of the most favoured methods of the progressive primary school is to ask the child to ‘respond’ to whole words and phrases without knowing how they are constructed from smaller units. (Ironically this involves rote learning, a process in general much disapproved by progressive teachers). Or take handwriting: the firm, round hand taught by the traditional school, and which one can still see in fifty-year-olds today, gives way in the progressive school to an unstandardised caligraphy, a semi-cursive script which all too often runs into indecipherability before the child is halfway through secondary school. It is not corrected, just as spelling is not corrected, for fear of curbing the child’s individuality and creative impulses.

The approach to foreign languages shows the same contrast.

Progressive Education versus the Working Classes 307 Traditional methods begin with rules of pronunciation and grammar -understand the structure first and apply it afterwards. They are heavily dependent on writing and on group recitation to fix the uniformities carefully in the child’s mind. Progressive methods rely on listening and speaking. The underlying structure of the language is imbibed rather than learnt, and writing comes late and reluctantly. While the use of predominantly oral methods might be expected to produce rituals of group recitation in fact this is usually prevented. Either the class as a whole passively absorbs material from a film or the individual child communes privately with a tape recorder in a language laboratory.

History as traditionally taught emphasises chronology and sequence-how one thing follows from another both causally and in time. Progressive history teaching is more likely to operate by themes than by simple chronology. Projects on ‘Revolutions’ or ‘Systems of transport’ can lead to the collection of items of informa- tion connected together only by the fact of illustrating the blanket term of the title and without giving the child any necessary grasp of causal or sequential schema.

The same sort of thing occurs in Religious Education. The traditional term for it, ‘Scripture’ is telling in itself. Where the traditional school inculcates a textual and historical knowledge of Christianity, or at the very least of Christian morality, the progressive school either explores Comparative Religion or encourages the Project Method. This can either take ‘human value’ themes such as ‘violence’ or ‘the person’ or it can run into essentially secular irrelevances such as ‘Noah and boating’. In any case boundaries and certainties are abandoned.

The traditional approach to literature is to analyse a work according to its form, content, style and structure and encourage critical as well as appreciative comment. The progressive approach is essentially through the feelings. ‘What impact does this have on you?’ rather than ‘What were the writer’s intentions and did he execute them successfully ?’ Where the traditional approach locates a work in its historical context the progressive approach is more inclined to treat its material for its present relevance. Hence the number of English lessons which turn into debates on youth, abortion, drugs, war, sex and so on. Indeed some of the indifferent contemporary poetry studied by fifth forms has little to recommend it except its topicality.

This is all reproduced even more strikingly in drama. The traditional approach is to study and perform classical plays or to write one’s own. The progressive approach is to improvise dramatic happenings which may involve dance, mime and so on but which seldom betray spontaneity so far as to require a written script. Movement, colour and noise are prized above articulate language. Sensory, not cerebral impact is the objective: the criteria of film and

308 Critical Quarterly television in fact. Similarly with Music, Where the traditional method is to learn and analyse, say fugue form, the progressive teacher asks for immediate, unanalysed response to sound of the most catholic variety. Where the traditional school has its selected choir and orchestra, in the progressive school all children are encouraged to produce spontaneous agglomerations of sound, often from random objects rather than specialist and therefore restricting ‘musical’ instruments.

These contrasts are perhaps less extreme in science subjects since science does not respond so conveniently to destructuring and to learning through indiscriminate emotional response, at least from the secondary school level onwards, One very important side-effect of this is to accentuate the gap between the two cultures.* But even in science some elements of the progressive trend can be found, for example in the tendency to arrange laboratories so that each child can get on with his individual project, or the intention in the Nuffield Science schemes that learning should begin from the exploration of principles rather than the recitation of formulae. Even here the change is really from rote learning to a method which good teachers have always used in Arts subjects.

In the traditional system academic success is a major but not exclusive objective. Pure grid competitiveness is held in check by principles of group solidarity. Thus academically outstanding pupils are rewarded by prizes and public honours, but this is always presented as a source of glory for the school as a whole. The Head’s speech on these occasions typically contains eloquent reference to the merit of those who ‘do their best’ and to the satisfactions which can come from being a useful member of the school and the society even if high academic honours elude one. Real failure in this system is explained either by laziness (i.e. lack of internalised control) or by wrong categorisation (‘You would be happier in a less demanding school/form’). Where progressive methods are most developed there is a tendency to mistrust categorisation per se, and therefore to dislike examinations and grading of all kinds. The uniqueness and incomparability of each child’s achievement is stressed. Either no one gets prizes or everyone does. Failure in so far as such a concept can exist in the progressive system, is a failure in self-expression and is attributed not to too little but too much control-environmental pressures and internal repressions. By a curious paradox the nonexistence of failure implies the non-existence of a sense of progress: no standards, no movement.

- *And perhaps to explain why universities and polytechnics have such difficulty in filling their vacant places in science and technology. Note too that science and technology are precisely the areas into which successful (structured?) working class boys go. See for e.g. K. Kelsall et al ‘The Social Origins of Scientists’ in Universities’ Quarterly, Summer 1971.

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VII Perhaps we are now in a position to summarise the two models of

the traditional and the progressive school. The traditional school defines and expresses the group principle by its actual and symbolic insistence on boundaries of all kinds and on the rituals of belonging. It also marks out its internal structures very clearly by providing unambiguous social roles and a symbolic and intellectual differentiation. It employs Bernstein’s elaborated code of speech but com- bines it with verbal symbolism and acted ritual embodying the group principle. The progressive school by contrast aims at the total elimination of boundaries and restrictions, that is, the group element. It opposes ‘empty’ ritual as vehemently as any Puritan iconoclast. As far as possible it attempts to eliminate permanent role distinctions whether of the ascribed or achieved variety, that is the principle of clear internal structuring. Its logical end is the zero point of structuring by neither grid nor group. Its intellectual mode is pure, individual inwardness. Its speech code is likely to descend into inarticulate subjectivity where ejaculation replaces syntax and where categories are anathema-feeling not meaning ; generalized expres- siveness not clear content. Indeed speech as such becomes a less appropriate form of expression than movement, touch and sight.“ It may well foster creativity in the plastic arts but ephemeral and subjective qualities are so prized that even here its achievements are likely to run away into the sand. It is emphatically not a code fitted for intellectual discourse : that, as Professor Douglas notes requires the elaborated code of speech where the subjectivist mode is just another variety of restricted code.*

_ _ _ ~ _ _ _ _ _ *Of course the universities, being middle class institutions, have already been seriously infected by de-structuring and subjectivist elements. These find expression in student protest movements, reforms of syllabuses, degree structures, assessment methods and importantly in intellectual fashions within subjects. (Phenomenology and ethno-methodology are two examples of the latter in Sociology). Enough has been and is being written elsewhere on all this to warrant by-passing the discussion here. However it may be worth noting two points in passing: the university was always a more fluid structure of social relationships than the school, partly because it reflects the life-style of its teaching members and partly that of the unrooted and unstructured phase of the life cycle in which the student finds himself. In the past the university could afford its moderate fluidity both because relationships were essentially personalised and therefore structures could be indicated by quite subtle cues, and also because it was usually possible to rely on the student having infermlised habits of structuring during his school years. The trend to dissolve structures is likely to present the student from a working class background with even greater difficulties of adjustment to university life than he had in the recent past. What was previously a difficulty in picking up the cultural signals of structuring now becomes a difficulty in adjusting to the nonexistence of structure in an ever more impersonal setting.

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VIII This is the dangerous direction in which all the educational

reforms of our era are moving: I have persistently had to check myself from writing ‘was’ instead of ‘is’ in my delineation of the traditional school.

Moreover the progressive school is in constant danger of sub- verting itself from within. It requires dedicated and enthusiastic teachers to operate it; otherwise total and aimless anarchy can too easily replace the self-indulgent but often fascinating exploration of subjective responses. What happens if the teacher’s ‘authentic’ response to the class is lack of interest? If he fails to stimulate them to curiosity or creativity in any direction? And after all many teachers find themselves in the profession faute de mieux. It only requires a natural dislike of effort or lack of conviction about progressive objectives among moderately conformist teachers, or poor teacher morale in an institution, for internal disintegration to set in. When this happens neither teachers nor pupils put any effort into anything and the whole school drifts in bored and disgruntled irritation with everything. The characteristic problems of such schools are apparently motiveless vandalism and above all truancy- not so much truancyfrom as truancy within the school. No one can or will bother to locate children for certain at any one point in the school day and classes dwindle. This has been graphically described as ‘the collapsed secondary school’. The progressivist mode both has its inherent tendencies to disintegration, so accelerating the rate of collapse deriving from poor morale, and provides a battery of excuses to the puzzled parents. Progressiveness is often the linguistic mystification of failure.

To be sure the traditional school has its own dangers. It can embody and articulate the group principle so weakly and uncon- incingly that grid-structured competitiveness comes to dominate the system. Then there is a severe risk of alienating the relatively unsuccessful. Colin Lacey’s valuable analysis of a boys’ grammar school illustrates exactly this.ls The anti-school subculture which he describes is strikingly similar to the incipient millenialism which Mrs Douglas warns us about at the bottom of grid systems. The opposite asymmetry of too much group and too little grid can also occur, most strikingly in the public school system. An externally bounded group, internally differentiated only by an ascribed role structure, facing an alien outer world19, is a pattern liable to per- petuate the class Clitism of the in-group. There is no space for a digression on this theme here but perhaps one might note in passing that the fear of the body and the preoccupation with the symbolism of physical pollution might be plausibly illustrated from the abun- dant literature on the public school, especially in attitudes to sexuality and sport.

This is perhaps the appropriate point to come back to the topic of

Progressive Education versus the Working Classes 3 I 1

social class and educational attainment. The traditional school has not been conspicuously successful in fostering working class educational achievement. There is a variety of reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that working class children from predominantly ‘positional’ families with a restricted speech code have difficulty in adjusting themselves to the elaborated code and the related social patterning of the school. Yet a significant minority of working class children have always risen through this system. We do not yet have more than minor clues about the precise dialectic between structure and flexibility in their home background which enables such children to operate so successfully in school.1s But one element in their success may well be the familiar elements of group structuring and the ritual and formal elements in the learning process*. Maybe this is the other truth behind Ralph Turner’s characterisation of the English educational system as one of ‘sponsored’ mobility (grid tempered by strong group features) by contrast with the American system of ‘contest’ mobility (pure competitive grid).*O

IX

So how will the progressive trends in education affect the social class structure? Will they, as so many innovators hope, improve the lot of the working class child or are they really just another reflection of Clite values and social patterns? Certainly middle class family patterns are moving closer to the severing of group roots and the elimination of ascribed role differences, although I suspect that the commercial middle classes are much less far down this particular slope than the professional and artistic middle classes. But in general middle class children are increasingly predisposed to respond in kind to zero structuring in schools, and we are rushing them ever faster towards the mode of pure subjectivism. Working class children, on the other hand, typically experience a more structured pattern of family relationships, more rooted in group belonging and more based on ascriptive roles. It is true that isolating and destructuring elements are beginning to affect working class families too- geographical mobility, smaller families, the attenuation of neigh- hood and extended kinship ties, modification of the traditionally rigid demarcation of roles between husband and wife, parent and child and so forth. Nevertheless the working class child is more likely than the middle class child to grow up with a restricted code of speech and symbolism rooted in a group-oriented social pattern. The irony then is that all the progressive reforms, expressly designed to tease out his true potential, are in fact radically inimical to the

*The most striking feature of the much praised American T.V. programme ‘Sesame Street’ which aims to bring literacy to ghetto children is its strong ritual and repetitive elements: in fact it is little more than the British primary school methods of the 1920’s and ’30’s updated by media technology.

3 12 Critical Quarterly pattern of relationships and responses to which his family experience predisposes him.

X

Here I think I must admit to some cheating in my models of the two types of school before I can approach the final paradox. The items in the progressive mode in fact can have two rather different conclusions. I would maintain that the logic of most of the reforms, especially those in the content and method of teaching is ulrirnately zero structure and the subjective mode. Yet many of the changes, especially those affecting the organisation of the school, though totally hostile to the group principle, can be employed to multiply differentiations i n an ever more complex grid pattern. The effect is to isolate each child and to require him to select from and manipulate a plethora of unstated rules in order to achieve personal success in a competitive grid system. Here one can get differentiation without over-arching structure and an intellectual vocabulary rich in distinctions and definitions but poor in metaphor, symbol and the emotive term-the language of the office in fact.* Individually chosen packages of subjects with no necessary internal connections, ‘objective testing’ techniques and the use of teaching machines are examples of essentially grid developments.

In this connection it should be noted that the public examination system has helped to prevent a complete shift in schools to the unstructured, subjectivist key, though it has to some extent encouraged the increase in grid elements of individualism and differentiation. Formal exams still call for a modicum of structuring and discipline, they employ criteria of relevance and as yet have not dissolved subject boundaries. The progressive trend is still held in check therefore by the requirements of entry to higher education and middle class employment.21 Consider the curious fact that subjectivist reforms have gone much further in C.S.E. than in ‘0’ and ‘A’ level. It is C.S.E. which examines ‘creative writing’ instead of critical commentary, which uses the Project method instead of the timed essay and which employs the child’s own teachers not anony- mous outsiders to assess performance. And of course the working class ‘failures’ who take 110 public examinations can be exposed to the subjectivist mode all along the line.

What all this amounts to is that the achieving children (mostly middle class) find themselves operating in an increasingly complex and impersonal grid system of differentiation without over-all structure. The unsuccessful children (largely working class) find themselves the undifferentiated mass at the bottom of a competitive grid system, floundering in a situation of zero structuring.

*And unfortunately the language of the holy office if our liturgical innovators have their way.

Progressive Education versus the Working Classes 3 13 Notice where the items of the zero structured pattern are most well developed-in progressive primary schools where children do not need to be prepared for selective secondary school entry, in the upper- middle class progressive schools of the private sector, and in the bottom streams of the large comprehensive school: A. S. Neil1 and Michael Duane.22 In short, we reserve the purest expression of unstructured subjectivism and ephemeral creativity for the dtracine middle classes at one social extreme and the working class ‘failures’ at the other. The former will wallow in it while the latter will be submerged by it. Professor Douglas’s warning about the millenial potential of such situations should not be ignored. After all, from quite a different angle Michael Young saw the possibility of the Revolution of the Failures in a meritocratic (i.e. grid) system some while

It might be instructive to reflect briefly on the distinctive visual emblems of the working-class drop-out. The skinhead is close- cropped, not shaggy. He is employing the typical symbolism of group membership-body control. He takes refuge in exaggerating the prejudices, speech and dress of his class, and he attacks the alien out group whether it is hippies or coloured immigrants. The disoriented and alienated child who has any kind of group structure to fall back into is likely to react in just such a way. We would do well to remember this in relation to immigrant sub-cultures in Britain. There is not space to elaborate the theme here but it should be noted that most of the immigrants, except perhaps the West Indians, have a tight family structure and rigidly ascriptive role pattern which is extremely ill fitted to take the progressive mode.24 The process of exposing them to yet another source of culture shock is hardly calculated to soften the social divisions in our society.

For children of all social classes there is likely to be one further predictable consequence-that the absence of any other form of structuring in school will put them at the mercy of their peers. The rituals of peer group culture, of youth culture, are precisely those ‘inarticulate, undifferentiated symbols’ to which Mary Douglas calls attention as the symbolism of the ‘insignificant mass’.25 Not only youth culture in general but every special set of local and regional prejudices and philistinisms will be imposed on the child by this process. It can hardly be an accident that the organisations-the word makes the point itself-which used to structure the leisure time of the adolescent-scouts,2s guides, boys’ brigade, etc.-are giving way before the onslaughts of the coffee bar and discotheque with their fleeting and tangential contrasts and their unstructured expressivism. What better pre-conditions for drug culture could one imagine? There are some hints about the coercive influence of peer group culture in both Lacey’P and Hargraves’s% analyses of the school as a social system. For example Lacey describes the ritual necessity for any child, however successful and co-operative, to be

3 14 Critical Quarterly seen to express anti-school behaviour on some occasions in order to establish that he is not really different from his peers. After all, the greatest crime against peer group culture is to be different, to be independent. So much for the possibilities of genuine self-awareness or incisive critical thought!

XI It is difficult indeed to see how any child in a radically unstruc-

tured milieu can achieve a sense of being an autonomous person, having a firm centre and contours which mark him off from the otherness of the rest. If everyone is a random mass of uninhibited impulses then everyone drifts helplessly around the undifferentiated mass ego without ever arriving at selfhood.* The problem of becoming human is not confined to the failures of the system and their middle-class analogues. The successful manipulator of a pure grid system may have a severe human price to play-in unalloyed materialism, a stultification of the imaginative faculties and most of all in depersonalisation and fragmentation. He succeeds by treating others as objects rather than persons and by correspondingly becoming a mere manipulator, an operator of a system. He can put down no roots because he must forever be pulled around on the treadmill of instrumental contacts.

XI1

If this is all that educational progress has to offer, why one might ask did it ever occur at all? Were its proponents just ignorant about its long-term consequences, or was this what they intended? Or is it all simply an irreversible and inevitable result of changes in the general patterning of relationships in our society? It might be objected that the latter is the view one ought to take following the

*This raises a problem for social work and psychotherapy. The tools of these professions are essentially derived from Freudian ideas and involve two increasingly disastrous features: (a) a focus on the individual irrespective of social context and (b) the assumption that the root problem is over-rigid control -a tight, restricted ego and repressive superego. This is glaringly inappropriate when the characteristic problem is that of the undefined ego not the repressed id. The contemporary question is not ‘how can I face the real me? but rather ‘who am I ? have I ony distinctive identity at all?’ The encouragement to self-exploration is largely unnecessary and simply reinforces the tendency among victims of total de-structuring to turn life into one long, self-indulgent T group. Ironically but not accidentally there appears a convenient vocabulary and ideology justifying the drift to aimless subjectivity and reversing the labels niad:sane, goodibad etc. The net effect of the fashionable Laingian approach is to draw attention to social structures only in order to anathematise them. All one needs is a bit of neo-Marxism adding the magic word ‘bourgeois’ to ‘structures’ and we have a recipe for the endless aggravation of the fundamental problem by the very professions whose raison d’etre it is to solve it.


reasoning of Professors Bernstein and Douglas. But consider Mrs Douglas’s plea on behalf of her ‘Bog Irish’ whose social identity is threatened when an ‘enlightened’ church abolishes the mandatory Friday fast. This is a precisely analogous impoverishment deriving from the removal of the ritual and symbolic expression of group structure. In this case, just as with educational change, what one needs to examine if one wishes to explain the inception as distinct from the results of change is the social patterning and symbolic mode of the innovators and administrators of change not just those of the recipients. Mrs. Douglas’s problem is the factors which pre- dispose the clergy to ‘progressive’ programmes of change. In the present case what we mainly need to examine is the teaching profession.*

It would be tempting but perhaps over-simple to argue that teaching is simply a marginal profession. To compensate for its status ambiguity it over-invests in the idea of change in order to prove that like any other profession it has techniques and a body of knowledge which are always being refined and improved. This kind of response is particularly likely in the Colleges and even some Institutes of Education, both of which tend to be the poor relations of the main university disciplines. The last thing that the specialist in Education can afford is to be caught purveying the older received wisdom. He must be constantly discovering new truths which through nothing more cogent than the mere passage of time must auto- matically become invalid. Thus syllabuses, teaching methods, methods of assessment must constantly produce novelty and above all impact. One side effect of this is to create a further vested interest in the perpetual round of educational change. Progress is no doubt very good for the publishers, manufacturers and distributors of the ever more expensive and diverse educational equipment which each new educational fashion requires.?

XI11

However, the full explanation of the apparently inexorable progressive trend is likely to involve other processes too. Teachers probably fall into several types-‘subjectivist’ innovators, ‘grid’ or ‘contest’ innovators, moderate conformists, and opponents, active and passive, of one of both types of innovation. The pattern of social relationships for each type is likely to be consonant with the

“This is a deliberate neglect of political processes at local and national level which is a complex subject in its own right and mainly concerns only selectivity versus the comprehensive principle.

?Teachers sometimes notice the waste involved in all this. A primary school teacher recently pointed out to me the bulky, expensive and ‘arty’ packaging of certain science kits and the costly and unnecessary repetition of items such as sets of test tubes in each of a sequence of boxes.

3 16 Critical Qzrarterly approach to educational reform. The subjectivist innovators will almost certainly have the most unstructured social patterning and will be well represented among teachers from traditional middle class families and among the staff of Colleges of Education whose life style can be relatively free from roots in a local community and other such constraining group structures. The successful and secure can always afford the luxury of despising the heartless competitiveness by which the underprivileged climb the ladder. The other category likely to support the subjectivist innovators are the young, newly-qualified teachers. Something of the unrooted and uncon- strained patterning of the student phase of the life cycle will linger until the exigencies of founding a family and making a place in a local community make themselves felt. Many women teachers leave the profession at precisely this point after two or three years of attempting to operate the progressive ideas acquired in training. This army of (largely passive) young innovators is constantly replenished by new hordes of equally temporary recruits. They constitute a formidable proportion of the profession and their rapid turn-over means that the children whose experience derives from them are a disproportionately large number. Since the newest teacher usually gets the worst class, the working class ‘failures’ are likely in this way too to be over-exposed to the subjectivist, unstructured mode.

The most important group of ‘grid’ or ‘contest’ innovators is likely to consist of successful teachers-Heads and Deputies in particular-who themselves enjoy achieved status within the profession, and who moreover are in a position to reorganise schools on lines which eliminate ascribed roles and emphasise competition. * I would expect many of these to be of working class origin and to be geographically as well as socially mobile-in fact to have a life pattern which displays differentiation without permanent communal or traditional group roots. One should recall here the fact that school-teaching is a traditional avenue of mobility for the working classes29, and that mobility can very often produce a generalised mistrust of ascriptive criteria which can operate in a grid or contest direction. On the other hand it is equally true that a heavy recruit- ment into the profession from the upper working classes results in a life style for a substantial segment of teachers which can only be called lower-middle class structured, time-tabled, repetitive, predictable. Such teachers will hardly find their natural expression in subjectivist innovation.

On the whole, except for the elite of the teaching profession- those whose letters are published in The Times and who are invited to contribute to Black Papers-the traditionalist teachers do not

*Hence perhaps, the tendency for schools or rather Heads to see themselves as in public competition with each other over the adoption of progressive ideas.


fight a concerted rearguard action against progressive change. Attempts to salvage the group element in school structure are doomed to fashionable condemnation because the vocabulary and symbolism involved is contaminated by its historical, though by no means necessary, link with Clitist presuppositions. * Half the trouble for the traditionalist teacher is that he has no adequate vocabulary to oppose to that of the progressives. How can one defend traditionalist elements when every move is certain to be labelled ‘authoritarian’, ‘repressive’, ‘Victorian’ by the leaders of opinion? He can only say ‘I may be old-fashioned but . . ,’ not realising perhaps that the apparatus of pejorative labels and the psychological presuppositions of his tormentors are currently being subjected to vigorous criticism. All that the ‘out of date’ teacher can do is to compromise and subvert quietly and often without realising it. Here one finds the teachers who have their classes whispering tables if the school Establishment disapproves of ritual methods, and the teachers who expend enormous ingenuity on re-structuring subject combinations, re-streaming the unstreamed on a new and covert basis-and so on. But subversion cannot salvage many elements of group structure and symbolism. All it can do is to convert attempts to dissolve boundaries into new and ever more coinplex networks of differentiation. Thus the flood of pure formlessness is precariously held by a dam of competitive, depersonalising grid structure.

XIV I can only end by gloomily contemplating with Professor Douglas

the impoverishment and danger inherent in any social system from which the principle of group has been entirely eliminated and in which grid or zero structuring are the only available options. It must be clear that this is an absurd situation. A minority in the profession wants the changes, an even smaller minority of the pupils has a life style really consonant with the progressive mode, and it must cripple the children it was apparently designed to help. And yet it is steadily engulfing all our schools. If we really want to promote intellectual hippiedom at one social extreme and alienated millenialisrn at the other, this is the way to go about it. If ours is a different utopia then we must cherish such remnants of the group principle as are left to

*In this sense the one politically hot issue of recent decades, educational selectivity, has been a vast red herring deflecting attention from equally crucial issues which, because they could be plausibly presented as the exclusive province of educational experts, have for too long been exempt from public scrutiny. It is not the comprehensive principle per se which causes problems but its unnecessary association with more destructive de-structuring items of the progressive package. Selectivity is not the only and perhaps not even the most effective principle on which to base boundary and structure: the genuine neighbourhood school, especially if it were not too large, might be the most natural unit of belonging.

3 18 Critical Quarterly

us and create new expressions of it. Without wanting to see rows of children doing ‘drill’ or standing woodenly to attention before the Union Jack, surely some measures could be devised to protect the person from the random impulses of his own, and other people’s psyche, and from the immediate and ephemeral fashions which are its consequence.

I .

2.

3.

4.

5 . 6.

FOOTNOTES

The sources are legion which one might cite to illustrate the virtually static proportion of working class children in higher education. An interesting recent report argues additionally that the British percentage is probably lower than that of most European countries: Statistical Supplement to the 8th Report of the Universities’ Central Council on Admissions, 1971, Introduction by F. Thistlethwaite.

The fear that the comprehensive (then known as the multilateral) school might do less well by working class children than the grammar school was an important factor in the reluctance of many Labour controlled L.E.A.’s to abandon the tripartite system in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s in defiance of yearly resolutions of the Labour Party Conference. See. for e.g. my own unpublished research report: B. Thompson, ‘Some local determinants of secondary education policy’, 1960, Department of Sociology, University of Sheffield . See for example Julienne Ford Social Class and the Comprehensive School London 1969. This is an interesting piece of research deriving from progressive or radical preoccupations but producing findings which have been extensively used to support traditionalist arguments, as for example in the Black Papers. A recent article in New Society argued that most studies purporting to show that parentheacher co-operation in itself would improve a child’s educational performance were mostly covert measures of the influence of social class. Compensatory programmes of parent involvement are only effective in so far as they enable parents to acquire skills and vocabulary which are essentially middle class. ‘Does Parent Involvement Matter? Henry Acland, New Sociefy 16 September 1971. Asimilar point is argued in a recent article by an American psychologist, Michael Wallach ‘Keeping the Working Classes Down’ Times Ed. Supp. 5th Nov. 1971. Professor Wallach points out that the disjunction between the intellectual objectives of informal or progressive primary schools and the academic skills required in secondary and higher education disadvantages working class children as their parents cannot supplement the teaching of the school the way middle class parents do. Books in School: the Individual Child London 1971, published jointly by the National Book League and the Association of Education Committees. Report in The Times 14 September 1971. See for e.g. ‘A Public Language-some Sociological Implications of a linguistic form’ B. Bernstein, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. X, 1959. ‘Language and Social Class’ B. Bernstein, British Journal of Sociology. ‘A Socio-Linguistic Approach to Social Learning’, Vol. XI, 1960, B. Bernstein in Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences Ed. J. Gould, London, 1965. Since completing this article my attention has been drawn to Prof. Bernstein’s latest volume of essays, Knowledge and Control, London 1971. The essay in this volume ‘On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge’ discusses many of the issues raised here and presents a valuable

Progressive Education versus the Working Classes 3 19 theoretical perspective through which to examine some of the consequences and paradoxes of current educational trends.

7. Mary Douglas Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, London 1970.

8. Mary Douglas Purity and Danger, London 1966. 9. Douglas 1970 p. 21.

10. & 11. Douglas 1970Prefacep. viii. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

Douglas 1970 p. 148. It is interesting that two recent and valuable analyses of the school as a social system grew out of an essentially anthropological approach to the subject. David Hargraves Special Relations in a Secondary School, London 1967; Colin Lacey Hightown Grammar: the School as a social system, Manchester 1970. Douglas 1966 passim. See note 4 ‘Books in School’. This report notes the steady decrease in the proportion of educational expenditure on books as against equipment etc. Allowing for inflation and the increase in the numbers of children in school it is estimated that real expenditure on books is static in primary schools and declining in secondary schools.

See p. 1 above. See for e.g. George Steiner Languageand Silence, Faber 1967. Lacey 1970. Thus for example John Wakeford estimated that allowing for all the circumstances the academic record of the public schools was less good than might be expected and notably poorer than that of the direct grant grammar schools. John Wakeford The Cloistered Elite: A Sociological Analysis of the English Public Boarding School, London 1969. In a T.V. discussion between Wakeford and some public school masters the latter were very far from finding the point a self-evident condemnation of the public school system.

The productive balance between structure and flexibility, fixed patterns and manipulable fluidities, the unspoken and the articulated is probably very fine. Moreover there are undoubtly many different patterns within the working classes. The essentially unstructured environment of the child from, say, a large problem family in a slum environment, where parental responses are random, where cues as to expectations are conflicting or entirely absent, and where role structure is uncertain, is a quite different pattern from the group rooted and role bound working class family where expectations are perfectly clear but ritualized rather than articulately verbalized. The odd clues we have about the characteristics of the families of mobile working class children point in apparently contradictory directions. The fact that these are uncharacteristically small families hints at control and planning: the fact that one parent, often the mother, is frequently ‘hidden’ middle class or downwardly mobile may indicate some elements of ambiguity or conflict in the role structure within the nuclear or extended family.

R. H. Turner ‘Sponsored and Contest Mobility in the School System’ American Sociological Review, Vol. XXV, no. 5.

Professor Wallach (op. cit. see Note 3) also comments that progressive teaching in secondary schools is reserved for the (largely working class) academic dullards who are thus regarded as just ‘big babies’ only fit for infant school methods.

320 Critical Quarterly For an account of the educational philosophy and practice of Neill and

Duane see respectively: A. S. Neill Slonnrerhill, London 1968. L. Berg Risinghill: the dearh of a Comprehensive, London 1960

For a good account of the English Progressive School Movement, and especially of its cultural background see Robert Skidelsky English Progres- she Schools, London 1961. Pioneers of the movement were very well aware of the need to develop group structures particularly in boarding schools and drcw extensively on classical Greek models. The popularised versions of these ideas however exchange the ideal of the Greek polis for something closer to the notion of a free market cconomy with the child as consumer.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

Michael Young The Rise offhe Meritocracy 1870-2033, London 1958. A recent research report showed for example that Pakistani children have

particular difficulties with progressive methods of teaching. Thesis by Sister Oliver Brady S.M. of La Sainte Union College of Education reported in Span, publication of the Southampton Community Relations Council, Sunimer 1971. On pure Weberian grounds one might expect these Asian representatives of the Protestant Ethic to be particularly likely to do well in schools, given an appropriate environment. Douglas 1970 p. 148. Cf. J. Sinclair, 'A Sociological Study of the Boy Scout Movement' M.A. Edinburgh 1967. Lacey 1970. Hargreaves 1967. The point is well documented in Asher Tropp The Schoolreacher-s, London 1957.

Vorticism and the English Avant - G a rde 1910-1 91 5 W C WEES Drawing on a wide range of contemporary newspaper reports and interviews with survivors of the time, as well as on standard books and articles, this book provides the first full account of Vorticism in its historical-cultural context. The study is particularly interesting on the advent of Futurism in England, on which there is much new material. About €6.00 net

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