The Hidden Curriculum and School Ethos

The Hidden Curriculum is the unwritten rules, norms and values to which students are expected to conform while in school.

Last Updated on February 10, 2023 by Karl Thompson

The hidden curriculum refers to those norms and values which are taught indirectly and are part and parcel of the organisation and routines of the school. Examples of things taught through the hidden curriculum include punctuality, respect for authority and having a pro-school attitude.

The norms taught through the hidden curriculum come from the school itself (and are similar in many schools) and are seen by those in power (management) as being necessary for a school to function smoothly, and its norms and values are enforced in the day to day running of the school by teachers.

The Hidden Curriculum is normally contrasted to the ‘formal’ curriculum which consists of the formal program of specific subjects and lessons which governments, exam boards and schools designs to promote the educational achievement of students.

The ‘school ethos’ refers to the character, atmosphere, or ‘climate of the school’. It is a phrase that you will hear headmasters use to describe their school to parents and the attitudes expected of pupils. It is a very similar to the concept of the hidden curriculum, as many of the norms that fall into the ‘ethos’ of school are also those which are regarded as taught through the hidden curriculum by sociological observers.

Examples of the hidden curriculum

There are several expected patterns of behaviour which are transmitted through the hidden curriculum, embedded into the day to day running of the school.

  • respecting hierarchy and authority: this is everywhere in school life. We see it in the management hierarchy (headmaster, leadership team, heads of department, teachers), we see it in the prefect system, and we see it in the organisation of the classroom with the teacher’s desk at the front.
  • punctuality: students are expected to be on time at the beginning of the day and to lessons, and this is emphasised constantly by teachers and even alarms signifying the end end of lessons and break times.
  • Wearing a uniform imposes the idea that commitment to the school is more important than individual identity.
  • respect for other pupils’ opinions: equality and diversity has become a much more significant part of of school ethos in recent years, with the respect agenda
  • aspiring to achieve: many school mottos have aspirational content and teachers don’t generally accept a can’t do attitude.
  • having a ‘work ethic’: students are expected to take ownership of their work and be self-motivated, especially once they get to GCSE level.
  • Consent to being surveilled: something more subtle, but students don’t get much privacy where their school life is concerned. From the moment they enter school they are under physical and intellectual surveillance for most of the day.

Whether we use the term ‘hidden curriculum’ or ‘school ethos’ the norms that make these up are typically NOT open for question or debate. They are just expected patterns of behaviour that students are expected to conform to and if they do not conform then punishments follow.

For example, students may not like punctuality or wearing a uniform and they may complain about both of these, but if they do not conform, they will be punished.

The Marxist Perspective on the Hidden Curriculum

The idea of the Hidden Curriculum was was a key idea within the Marxist perspective of education, back in the 1970s.

Bowles and Gintis explicitly mentioned it in their Correspondence Principle when they argued that the norms taught through it got children ready for future exploitation at work.

They argued, for example, that accepting the authority of teachers in school got children ready for accepting the authority of managers later in work. The learning of values was thus part of ideological control.

Contemporary research

Some relatively recent research has a slightly more nuanced take on the messages transmitted through the hidden curriclum.

Cotton, Winter and Bailey (2013) argue that schools place the highest value on efficiency and value for money, which is a reflection of neoliberal marketisation policies since the late 1980s. Children today are exposed to repeated messages about the importance of hard work, individual responsibility and aspiring to achieve in a competitive environment.

In contrast the values of equality and opportunity are not emphasised in schools, they take a back seat to individualistic aspiration.

How important is the Hidden Curriculum?

How relevant is the concept of the ‘Hidden Curriculum’ today?

One slightly tricky thing with the concept of the hidden curriculum is that over the years many of the norms associated with it have in fact become formalised and written down as explicit rules in codes of conduct which students have to sign, meaning they are very VISIBLE.

Good examples of this are rules about punctuality, homework and dress codes.

However such norms are still not part of the formal subject curriculum so you can probably still get away with calling anything that isn’t a subject part of the curriculum which is hidden.

Or maybe we should be referring some of the norms above as part of the ‘curriculum formerly known as hidden’…?

This is one of the reasons why ‘School Ethos’ might be a more relevant concept for today’s schools.

It’s also worth considering that even if there is a hidden curriculum today, it isn’t necessarily the case that students will passively soak it up like Bowles and Gintis suggested, they are just as likely to resist it!

School Ethos

The ‘school ethos’ refers to the character, atmosphere, or ‘climate of the school’. This might include things like:

  • whether there is an emphasis on academic success, and/ or artistic or sporting achievements.
  • whether there is an emphasis on equal opportunities for all students – does the school focus on helping disadvantaged students, for example?
  • whether there is an emphasis on respect for diversity – does the school promote multiculturalism and anti-racism and sexism?
  • Whether the school encourages students to participate in community life.
  • The extent to which there is an entrepreneurial culture and strong ties with local businesses at the school.
  • whether parents are encouraged to get actively involved in the life of the school.
  • The type of learning a school encourages – whether formal, traditional ‘chalk and talk’ learning, or independent learning, for example.

School Ethos: what’s the relevance?

It’s probably most relevant when trying to understand what’s really different about elite education in the very top public schools such as Eton and Harrow.

The ethos of these schools is really that they teach pupils that they are part of the ruling elite. For example Westminster School has pictures of Winston Churchill and other leaders hanging in their assembly rooms – as they are ex-pupils.

These schools also constantly remind pupils that they should be aiming for Oxbridge universities and they give pupils a global outlook, because of all the wealthy international students that attend them.

This means pupils come to the end of their schooling feeling as if they belong among the global elite, feeling as if they have the right to be earning a $50K salary as a starting wage.

In other words, it’s not just about the smaller class sizes, it’s the ethos that makes the difference, it’s the ethos that’s maybe worth £30K a year to the parents!?!

Sign Posting

For more posts on in school factors within education, please see my page on the sociology of education, which follows the AQA’s A-level sociology specification.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

The ‘Postmodern’ Tech Companies Embarking on ‘Modernist’ Projects

Technology Transnationals such as Apple, Google and Facebook have effectively embedded themselves into the lifeworlds of billions of people the world over through weaving their products and services into the fabric of daily life.

While in many ways these tech firms are quintessentially postmodern, there are some ways in which they seem to harken back to the modernist era.

Firstly, some of these tech giants are employing top architects to build massive buildings for them, spectacular symbols of their immense global power. While the design of these buildings is ‘obviously’ (?) postmodern, personally I think the sheer scale, cost, and the ultimate profitability-function of them  screams ‘modernism’.

The building that commands the most attention is the Apple/ Foster circle – so big that it’s said to be visible from space. It’s built on 150 acres, and is designed to cater for 12 000 workers. It’s something like a permanently landed space ship with a garden area in the middle.

Inside this building, you’ll discover a world of whiteness, greenery and silver, with a 100 000 square foot cinema, a cafe that can serve 4000 at once, which has sliding class doors 4 stories high, each weighing nearly 200 tonnes.

There is also a 1000 seat Steve Jobs cinema, surmounted by a 165 ft wide glass cylinder, for Apple’s famous product launches, and with a landscape designed to emulate a national park.

The doorways have perfectly flat thresholds because, according to a construction manager reported by Reuters, ‘if engineers had to adjust their gait when entering the building, they risked distraction from their work’.

Writing in the Financial Times, George Hammond also suggests that Facebook is ‘going back to the 19th Century’, more evidence of the modernist turn these postmodern companies are taking….

Facebook us trying to combat soaring rents in Silicon Valley by building new houses, which marks a revival of the 19th century concept of the ‘company town’: its new Willow Campus includes plans for 15% of the 15000 houses to be made available at below market rates, for example.

Hammond is sceptical about whether such a scheme will work, noting that there was a mixed record of success in the 19th century – Cadbury’s Bournville in Birmingham dramatically improved conditions for workers, but Henry Ford’s Fordlandia in Brazil was a spectacular failure.

Whether these massive-buildings and ‘city projects’ are successful or not, they certainly demonstrate the huge power these companies have alter the physical environment in which we work and live in addition to their power to influence the way we access information.

What next for Corporate Power? 

Sources:

The Week (5 August 2017 and 29 July 2017)

 

How many people are single?

An exploration of some of the problems of official statistics on ‘single people’

Last Updated on August 20, 2021 by Karl Thompson

According to the Office for National Statistics, for the population in England Wales aged 16 and over, as of 2015

  • there are 16 million people aged 16 or over who are ‘single and have never cohabited or married’, equivalent to 34.5% of the adult population.
  • there are 19.8 million people ‘not living as a couple’, equivalent to 39% of the adult population.

The problem with these statistics is that they do not actually tell us how many ‘single’ people there are in England and Wales (let alone the United Kingdom) – at least not if we take the commonly accepted definition of a single person as ‘someone who is unmarried or not involved in a stable sexual relationship’. 

Below I explore why I think there are way less single people in the country than these official statistics suggest…

Single people never cohabited or married 

There are 16 million people who are ‘single and never cohabited or married’, equivalent to 34.5% of the population aged over 16 in England and Wales, at least according to Office for National Statistics, 2015 data.

Single and Married UK
Single people UK

However, while it is interesting to know how many people are ‘single, and have never married or cohabited’, this isn’t the same as the number of people who are actually single, for the following reasons:

  • Firstly, and probably most obviously, this system of categorization does not tell us the proportion of divorced or widowed people who not married but are in relationships, and thus not single. (Some of these will be cohabiting as if married of course, so in ‘highly committed relationships!)
  • Secondly, it doesn’t tell us how many people who are ‘single and never cohabited or married’ are in committed relationships, and hence not actually single.
  • Thirdly, it doesn’t tell us how many ‘married’ people are in empty shell marriages, and thus single in a sense.

NB – the above data came from the Labour Force Survey, which gleans its information about relationship status from a series of interview questions – questions which will in no way tell us how many actual single people there are in the U.K. – this particular question is only really only useful for telling us the number of married people or in a formal civil partnership and cannot tell us very much about the relationship status of the non-married/ civil partnership people.

Families UK

In fairness to LFS, it does go on to ask whether people are ‘cohabiting’, the results for which are shown below…

People ‘not living as a couple’

A second possible way of measuring the number of single people in the country, again taken from ONS Labour Force Survey data,  is to look at ‘living arrangements’ – and here we find that approximately 39% of the population are not living as a couple, while 61% are living as a couple.

Single People UK 2015
how many single people UK

I’d say this is a more valid way of measuring the number of single people in the country because it includes a clear indication that 61% of the population are either married or cohabiting, rather than just the number of people who are ‘married’ like in the first data set. However, it still does not tell us how many single people there are in the country, because some proportion of people not living as a couple will still be in committed relationships, but the data does not tell us this!

We are thus forced to look elsewhere to find out how many actual single people there are in the country….

Other sources of data about ‘single people’

I guess I’ve got to at least mention Facebook….. According to ‘statistics brain‘, 37% of people report their relationship status as single on Facebook.

Facebook relationships

However, this data has validity problems because:

  • I don’t have access to the methodology used, no details are provided.
  • This probably isn’t from the UK.
  • According to this New Statesman article, 40% of 20 somethings are reluctant to report themselves as ‘in a relationship’ on Facebook unless it is an engagement.

This 2017 Statista survey reports that around 27% of the UK population aged 40 to 70 reported that they were single, not currently in a relationship.

single people UK 2017

While I’m inclined to intuit that this is a valid figure, unfortunately I’m not in a position to objectively validate the findings because I ain’t prepared to pay the subscription fee to gain the access required to get the information on sampling techniques (if they even exist in any meaningful sense because this was an online survey!)

Having said that, the above data is broadly backed up by this 2014 YouGov Poll  which reports that 30% of the UK population are single (although the analysis doesn’t go into any detail about this aspect of the poll, limiting itself to how people who are in relationships feel about each other).

Personally I think this 30% figure sounds about right, given that the numbers of single people in their 20s and 30s will probably be higher than those in the their 40s-70s, you’d expect the later percentage to be slightly higher than the Statista results, so it triangulates nicely.

So…. how many people are single in the UK? About 30%. 

Signposting and Related Posts

This topic is usually taught as part of the families and households module in the first year of A-level Sociology, and is part of the ‘family-diversity’ subtopic.

It may seem odd studying single people in a module on the family, but the simply fact is that declining marriage and increasing divorce mean that more people stay single for more of their lives than ever before!

Further Reading…..

This Enduring Love Study might be of interest.

Postscript – Fantasy reporting on the geographic distribution of single people 

Heads up on click-bait lists like this from The Independent which show you the ‘cities with the most single people in’ – here are the results:

The percentages above are for people who are ‘single and never married’, the problem is that most of these are university towns…. where lots of young people live, most of whom will move on to another city once they’ve graduated, and to my mind to get a realistic picture of how ‘committed to single life’ a city’s population is, you’d need to control for age, and how long they intend to stay in that city. It’s sort or ironic, somehow, that geographical instability (most students only intend to reside in their university town temporarily) skews the figures on how many people are not in a stable relationship (i.e. single).

Then of course, as I mentioned above, many of these people will actually be in committed relationships.

Pupil Subcultures

A summary of some sociological studies on pupil subcultures exploring different types of subculture such as pro-school and anti-school subcultures.

Last Updated on February 8, 2023 by Karl Thompson

Pupil subcultures are groups of students who share some values, norms and behaviour, which give them a sense of identify, and provide them with status through peer-group affirmation.

Pupil subcultures take a variety of forms, ranging from pro-school to anti-school subcultures, with a variety of other responses in-between, although it is mainly the anti-school subcultures that have been of interest to sociologists as these are related to educational underachievement, and they are just interesting in themselves!

This post defines anti and pro school subcultures, summarises some of the classic sociological studies on the topic, looks at subcultures in relation to class gender and ethnicity and finally offers some evaluations of how significant they are to an understanding of in-school processes today.

Types of School Subculture

The two main types of school subculture usually identified within the sociology of education are anti-school cultures and pro-school cultures, but there are plenty of more nuanced types of subculture that have been identified by researchers, often based on social class, gender and ethnic backgrounds of pupils.

The anti-school subculture

The anti-school subculture, (sometimes called the counter school culture), consist of groups of students who rebel against the school for various reasons, and develop and alternative set of delinquent values, attitudes and behaviours in opposition to the academic aims, ethos and rules of a school.

In the anti-school subculture, truancy, playing up to teachers, messing about, breaking the rules, avoiding doing school work and generally disrupting the smooth running of the school day become a way of getting back at the system and gaining status among peers.

Counter-school cultures are cultures of resistance, or anti-learning cultures, and participation in can be a means of gaining status among one’s peers – the more deviant an act, the more status you gain.

The classic study of the counter-school culture is Paul Willis’ (1977) ‘Learning to Labour‘ in which he observed 12 working class to find out why they spent all their time messing around in school rather than working.

The Pro-School Subculture

Pro-school subcultures are those which accept the values and ethos of the school and willingly conform to its rules. They tend to be those students in higher sets who aspire to high academic achievement and are prepared to work hard, and work ‘with the teachers’ to achieve these goals.

Pro-school subcultures are typically comprised of children from middle class backgrounds, although not in all cases. Mac An Ghaill (1994) found examples of two different types of pro-school subculture in his participant observation study: The academic achievers who were mainly middle class and pursing success through traditional A-level subjects, and The New Enterprisers who were mainly from working class backgrounds and pursuing success through vocational subjects such as Business Studies.

See below for more details on Mac An Ghaill’s study.

Between Pro and Anti-School Subcultures: A Range of Responses

Peter Woods (1979) suggested that dividing pupil subcultures into simply two poles: pro- and anti-school was too simplistic. Woods also suggested that students don’t easily split into subcultures, instead he suggested that there is a wide variety of responses to school, and pupils can switch between different adaptations as they progress through their school careers:

Peter Woods: Eight ways of adapting to school:

  • Ingratiation – Pupils who are eager to please teachers and have very favourable attitudes towards school. Conformist pro-school.
  • Compliance – Pupils who accept school rules and discipline, and see school as a useful way to gain qualifications, but who don’t have a wholly positive or negative attitude towards school. This is typical of first year students.
  • Opportunism – Pupils who fluctuate between seeking approval of teachers and form their peer groups.
  • Ritualism – Pupils who go through the motions of attending school but withiout great engagement or enthusiasm.
  • Retreatism – Pupils who are indifferent to school values and exam success- messing about in class and daydreaming are common, but such students do not want to challenge the authority of the school.
  • Colonization – Pupils who try to get away with as much as possible. Such students may express hostility to the school but will still try to avoid getting into trouble. More common in the later years of schooling.
  • Intransigence – troublemakers who are indifferent to school and who aren’t that bothered about conformity.
  • Rebellion – the goals of schools are rejected and pupils devote their efforts to achieving deviant goals.

Key studies on subcultures

The sad thing about subcultures in schools is that most of the classic research was done decades ago, possibly reflecting the fact that clearly identifiable subcultures were more likely to exist back then…

Some of the key studies include:

  • Hargreaves (1967) Labelling and Subcultures
  • Lacey (1970) Differentiation and polarisation
  • Willis (1977) Learning to Labour
  • Mirza (1984) Young, Female and Black
  • Mac an Ghail (1994) Masculinities and Schooling
  • Archer (2003) Muslim boys and education
  • Hollingworth and Williams (2009) Chavs, Townies and Charvers.

Below I include summaries of these key studies and links to further information where appropriate. Please see below for the full references.

David Hargreaves: Labelling and Subcultures

David Hargreaves (1967) argued that teacher labelling and streaming resulted in the formation of subcultures as students responded differentially to their positive or negative labels. He studied one secondary school and found that students labelled as ‘troublemakers’ were placed in lower streams, those viewed as having better behaviour were placed in higher streams.

The students placed in the lower streams were viewed as no hopers and had in fact been negatively labelled by the education system twice: once by being put in a failing school (a secondary modern) and then by being put in the lower streams. These students were regarded as ‘worthless louts’ by many teachers.

Faced with the prospect of being unable to achieve in school these students somehow had to maintain their self-worth and construct a sense of identity within the school.

Students who had been labelled as troublemakers tended to seek each other out and formed a non-conformist delinquent subculture in which they gained status through breaking school rules: disrupting lessons, giving cheek to teachers, truanting, not handing in homework.

Two distinct groups in fact emerged in the school according to Hargreaves: the conformists who were the ones who have been labelled positively and put in higher streams, and the non-conformist delinquents described above.

Differentiation and Polarisation

Lacey’s (1970) study of a middle class grammar school found that there were two related processes at work in schools – differentiation and polarization. Most schools generally placed a high value on things such as hard work, good behaviour and exam success, and teacher judge students and rank and categorise them into different groups – streams or sets – according to such criteria. This is what Lacey called differentiation.

One of the consequences of differentiation through streaming, setting and labelling is polarisation. This refers to the way students become divided into two opposing groups, or ‘poles’: those in the top streams who achieve highly, who more or less conform, and therefore achieve high status in the terms of the values and aims of the school, and those in the bottoms sets who are labelled as failures and therefor deprived of status.

Varies studies, such as that by Hargreaves (1967, 1976), Ball (1981) and Abraham (1989), have found that teachers’ perception of students’ academic ability and the process of differentiation and polarisation influenced how students behaved, and led to the formation of pro- and anti-school subcultures.

Paul Willis: Learning to Labour

Paul Willis (1977) conducted in-depth research with 12 working class lads in one comprehensive school in the Midlands who formed what he called a counter school culture.

The lads saw school and academic learning as pointless to their future lives as factory workers. They therefor resented school, and spent their time messing around and resisting any attempt to learn anything. Status was earned within the group by disrupting lessons and doing as little work as possible, in

The ‘lads’ in Willis’ study were very much a traditional, working-class macho subculture, and they defined the typically middle class students who obeyed the school rules as ‘earoles’ because they were always listening to the teacher, they also saw these students as a bit cissy, in contrast to their identification with ‘proper’ masculine working class manual-labour.

This is such a significant study in the the sociology of education that it’s worth a post in its own right, so I recommend having a look at ‘Learning to Labour‘ for a more in-depth look at this classic research study!

Masculinities, sexualities and schooling

Mac An Ghaill (1994) focused more on how gender identities influenced the formation of subcultures and demonstrated that subcultural responses were more complex than just being pro and anti school.

Mac An Ghaill identified at least four distinct subcultures: the macho lads, the academic achievers, the ‘new enterprisers’, and the Real Englishmen.

He also examined the experience of gay students, but it’s not clear whether these students formed a subculture.

He conducted research with year 11 students in a school in a mainly working class comprehensive school in the West Midlands and found that subcultures emerged in response to a range of factors such as:

  • the way the students were organised into sets
  • the curriculum they followed
  • the relationships the pupils had with their teachers
  • Students’ gender identities
  • the students’ position within the class structure
  • the changing labour market

The macho lads

These were the academic failures who had been placed in the bottom sets and they were much like the lads in Willis’ classic study. They saw school as a ‘hostile authority’ and making pointless demands on them. They formed an anti-school culture which was based around acting tough, having a laugh and looking after your mates. Messing around in lessons was also a norm of this subculture.

They viewed academic work as effeminate and were more likely to see physical work as ‘real work’. However unlike the lads in Willis’s study i the 1970s, there were very few manual jobs for the macho lads to go into, all they had to look forward to were substandard Youth Training Schemes and then probably unemployment, which created something of a sense of frustration.

Teachers saw it as one of their jobs to police the macho lads

The academic achievers

These had been put in top sets by teachers and were well regarded by them as they were positive about school, the subjects they were studying.

They were mostly from skilled manual working-class backgrounds and sought to achieve academic success by focusing on traditional academic subjects such as English, maths and the sciences. They were positive about their prospectives of being upwardly socially mobile.

The New Enterprisers

These were typically from working class backgrounds and rejected the traditional academic curriculum, which they saw as a waste of time, but were motivated to study subjects such as business and computing and were able to achieve upward mobility by exploiting school-industry links to their advantage.

The Real Englishmen

These were a small group of middle-class students typically from liberal professional backgrounds who rejected what teachers had to offer, believing their own culture and knowledge to be superior.

They saw the motivations of both the Enterprisers and Achievers as somewhat shallow although they did themselves aspire to going to university and professional careers.

They had something of an aloof attitude to school. Doing well was not something they valued as they saw school as beneath them, yet they needed to be successful in order to prove this, and so were concerned to achieve without making any apparent effort.

Of course they may well have worked hard at home, but it was the appearance of achieving effortlessly that was important.

Gay students

Mac An Ghail was one of the first researchers to take into account the experiences of gay students who found the school heterosexist and homophobic. They also criticised the normalisation of heterosexual relationships and the nuclear family within the school.

Heidi Mirza: Young, Female and Black

Mirza studied 62 black girls and women aged 15-19 in two secondary schools and found that they had positive attitudes towards achieving success in school. However many also thought that some teachers were racist and so formed subcultures based on their ethnicity which valued education but had little respect for the school which was seen as a racist institution.

Race, Masculinity and Schooling: Muslim Boys and Education

Louis Archer (2003) studied Muslim boys in four schools in North West England. She found that they valued aspects of ‘gansta’ masculinity such as being macho, being respected and talking tough.

However they also valued the more traditional masculinity associated with the breadwinner role within the family, and recognised that academic success was the most likely route to a decent job and income.

They also felt that some teachers were racist and that they were victimised by them, but this never manifested itself in an out and out anti-school culture.

Chavs, Charvers and Townies

Hollingworth and Williams (2009) researched the ways in which some working class pupils were labelled as ‘chavs’ by their middle class peers.

The research used interviews with 124 families together, 180 mothers and fathers seperately and 60 students aged between 12 and 25, so some parents and students were reflecting back on their school years.

The students were able to identify distinct subcultures:

  • Hippies or poshies
  • Goths and emos
  • Rockers and gansters
  • Townies, chavs or charvers.

The first three were mostly middle class, but the chav subcultures were invariably working class, but none of the working class students gave themselves those labels, rather they were imposed on them by their middle class peers who were keen to emphasise that they were not part of the chav subculture.

The middle class students looked down on ‘chav culture’ seeing them as immoral, antisocial, lacking self-control, having poor taste and being uninterested in education and thus likely to fail.

Social class, gender and ethnic subcultures

Students often group themselves along social class, gender and ethnic lines, and much research on this topic has focused on the educational significance of working-class subcultures, male subcultures and ethnic minority subcultures especially.

Below I include a summary grid of some of the different studies on subcultures in relation to social class, gender and ethnicity.

(GRID FORTHCOMING!)

Why do pupils form subcultures?

There is significant theoretical debate concerning the formation of pupil subcultures (i.e. the question of where they come from).

The early theorists Hargreaves and Lacey focus on anti-school subcultures and argue these are a ‘response’ to teachers negatively labelling mainly working class boys and placing them in lower streams or sets. Those thus labelled then respond by forming anti-school cultures which reward individuals within them with status for misbehaving in school.

Paul Willis had a more nuanced approach arguing that the lads actively chose to form a counter school culture based on their accurate assessment that they school wasn’t relevant to them because they didn’t need qualifications to get working class jobs, so their counter-school culture was mainly just about passing the time by ‘having a laff’.

Later studies tend to focus on the diversity of subcultures within schools and see different subcultures emerging based on pupil’s class backgrounds, genders and sexualities. For example Mac an Ghail identified three different working class male subcultures alone within one school, two of which were pro-school but in different ways (one middle and one working class) and one of which was anti-school (working class).

The two studies by Mirza and Archer show that subcultures are formed based on ethnicities and perceptions of schools as racist institutions play a part in this, but both ethnic subcultures in these two studies remained generally positive about education.

Finally, Hollingworth and William’s study suggests that the subcultures perceived by middle class students are mainly based around style expect for those from the working class who are seen as ‘chavs’. However those who were labelled as chavs didn’t themselves identity as chavs which raises the question of whether this subculture ever really existed at all!

Tony Sewell has argue that the kind of students who join anti-school subcultures get their anti-school attitude from outside of school, so the subculture cannot simply be a response to processes within school.

Evaluations of Subcultures and subcultural theory

How important are subcultures for an understanding of in-school processes and the experience of education today?

Many of the older studies focussing on anti-school cultures are probably no longer relevant today. Many of the students who would have formed these cultures are probably now educated in Pupil Referral Units.

It is also the case that while they make for an interesting case study, the vast majority of students were never part of such groups, and even less so in today’s contemporary society.

If we fast forward to some of the more recent studies it is clear that some students continue to form subcultures, but along ethnic, gender and class lines, and these are more likely to be less extreme and certainly very unlikely to be anti-school.

If students today are aware of subcultures within their schools these will most likely be mere style subcultures and incidental to the school, with students having a normal attitude to school work.

Signposting

This topic is part of the Education module within A-level sociology

Related posts on in-school factors include:

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

References

Paul Willis (1977) Learning to Labour.

Mac An Ghail (1994) The making of men: Masculinities, sexualities and schooling.

Race, Masculinity and Schooling: Muslim Boys and Education. / Archer, Louise.Buckingham : Open University Press, 2003.

Hollingworth and Williams (2009) Constructions of the working-class ‘Other’ among urban, white, middle-class youth: ‘chavs’, subculture and the valuing of education

Brown: Sociology for AS

Chapman et al: Sociology AQA Year 1 and AS Student Book

Westminster – A Culture of Harassment and Abuse?

The issue of sexual harrassment in Westminster has been in the news this week – here’s a round up of some of the worst cases…

The trade minister, Mark Garnier admitted to having sent a secretary into a sex shop to buy two vibrators (one for his wife and one for a female worker in his constituency office) while he waited outside. It was, he insisted, just ‘good-humored high jinks’. He also admitted to having once called the same woman “sugar-tits” in a bar, but said it was part of an “amusing conversation” about Gavin and Stacey.

Former Cabinet minisiter Stephen Crabb admitted to having “sexted” a 19 year-old he had interviewed (and rejected) for a job.

A labour activist went public with allegations that Labour officials urged her not to report a rape. Bex Bailey sasy she was attacked at a Labour event in 2011, but was discouraged from going to the police.

At lease six Cabinet ministers were rumored to feature a spreadsheet of Tory MPs accused on sexual harassment and misconduct known as the ‘dirty dossier’. The allegations, which have not been verified, range from extramarital affairs to being “handsy in taxis”, and harassing researchers to paying for prostitutes. A Labour-affiliated organisation, Labour Too, has begun compiling similar complaints against MPs on the opposition benches.

Women at Westminister have created a WhatsApp group to warn each other about serial sex pests, while other shave started making off-the-recored allegations to the press. They said that one former Tory minister was famously not afe to share a lift with, and that he was once overheard asking his secretary come “come and feel the length of my dick”.

Stephen Rush, writing in the New Statesman, reminds us that many of these allegations are unproven, moreover, a lot of the behaviour described in the so-called ‘dirty dossier vary from serious harassment to strange yet consensual activities which do not constitute harassment, which muddies the waters about the whole affair.

Sources:

The Week.

Problems with the increasing involvement of technology companies in education

There are four main problems of the increasing role of large technology companies in education, all of which stem from the incompatibility of the values of Silicon Valley Digital Capitalism and Public Education:

  1. The algorithmic approach to education cannot take into account the social and moral complexities of real world education.
  2. The idea of ‘learning through failure’ is incompatible with supporting every child to develop
  3. The focus on individualized entrepreneurialism may be incompatible with ideals of social cohesion, justice and equality of opportunity.
  4. The influence of technology companies in public education undermines the democratic process.

Technology companies education.png

Challenging the Benefits of Commercial Education

Large technology companies and their enthusiasts have made grand claims about both the problems of traditional public education and the potential benefits of disrupting business as usual through digital innovations such as MOOCs.

However, many of the technological disruptions of the last decade have simply failed to deliver positive results – in short, they have promised much but delivered far less.

The tech companies may well blame public education officials for failing to embrace their technologies (and/ or ideologies), however Neil Selwyn argues that tit is more a case of technology companies failing to ‘get’ public education, and the enormous complexities which surround the realities of educating people.

Below I summarize four ways in which the culture of technology firms are incompatible with the culture of public education, as identified by Selwyn (2016)

The problem of viewing education as a ‘computational project’

Innovations such as Coursera, Thiel Fellowships etc. tend to see education as a discrete computational project, that is a set of variables which can be manipulated and programmed so as to avoid any bugs or inefficiencies.

The problem with this ‘reductive approach’ is that education rarely contains variables that can be adjusted or manipulated to achieve optimal cause and effect – in reality, the social complexities of the real-world contexts in which learning takes place cannot easily be included in algorithmic models designed to make learning ‘more efficient’.

Similarly, it is questionable whether a computer can be programmed effectively to answer moral questions about the content of what a student, or students should be learning more generally.

The problem of ‘learning through failure’ 

In the Silicon Valley world of hi-tech start-ups, it is expected that the vast majority will fail, but the handful that survive will go on to be game-changers.

However, this ‘fail fast, fail often’ approach does not necessarily translate well into education, as the start-ups will be gambling with the futures of individual students, schools, or even districts… As Bill Gates reflected on his Foundations forays into education reform… ‘it would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we probably won’t know for a decade’.

This approach clearly does not fit in well with the ‘supporting every learner to succeed’ model advanced by the social democratic ideals of education.

The Problem of Focusing Too much on Individualised Learning 

Silicon Valley idealism is also rooted in a libertarian belief in the values of personal freedoms and the individualization of action, with a skepticism towards ‘experts’ working within traditional institutions (such as education) which are generally seen as inefficient.

Innovations such as the MOOC or Flipped classrooms are examples of educational transformations which have emerged out of this individualist philosophy. Such disruptive technologies can, at one level, be seen as tackling inefficiency in the provision of existing educational provision.

However, such disruptions might undermine a number of the traditional social democratic values inherent in public education, such as those of promoting community cohesion, communal responsibility and the public good, rather than just emphasizing individual gain.

Such innovations may also undermine the ideal of equality of opportunity. Some research suggests that MOOCs for example are primarily accessed by people from privileged backgrounds, who already have degrees (source forthcoming).

Big technology companies might undermine the democratic process

When the executives of companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have something to say about education, education ministers tend to listen. This has led some commentators such as Joel Spring to suggest that such companies operate as ‘shadow education ministries’ – the problem here is that large tech companies are playing a role in shaping our education systems, they profit from it, and yet they have no accountability!

Conclusion

It’s unlikely that technology companies are going to stop trying to disrupt education, and it’s unlikely that our increasingly neoliberal public managers are going to stop them. However, it’s also unlikely that the public are just going to give up on the ideals of social democratic education that easily, and so at some point stakeholders in education are going to have to figure out a way of reconciling the approaches to education advanced by Silicon Valley digital technology firms and those which persist in our public education systems.

Source 

Nick Selwn (2016) Is Technology Good for Education?

The Declining Value of A Degree?

More people are doing degrees, yet they are less likely to give us the skills future employers need, so is it worth doing a degree in the first place? Or are you better off saving £50K?

In this thought-provoking article Zak Slayback argues that the value of a degree has declined for three main reasons:

  • Firstly, he cites the increasing number of people who achieve degrees compared to 50 years ago – Today’s degree, in some ways, is like like the old high school diploma.
  • Secondly, he cites evidence of ‘degree inflation’ in many sectors. For example 25 percent of people employed as insurance clerks have a BA, but twice that percentage of insurance-clerk job ads require one. Among executive secretaries and executive assistants, 19 percent of job-holders have degrees, but 65 percent of job postings mandate them
  • Secondly, despite the increasing number of people with degrees and the increasing requirement to have one to get your foot in the door, almost 40% of U.S. employers report difficulties in finding graduates with the right skills, which means (somewhat ironically) that many of the above degrees are useless in actually preparing people for work.

Slayback argues (pretty convincingly I think) that a degree is no longer sufficient to guarantee you a job; he also suggests that it may not actually be worth doing one (and in terms of getting you ready for work, I think he’s right, but not necessarily so in terms of the intrinsic worth of the uni experience and knowledge gained).

According to Slayback, in order to be successful, graduates need to get better at signalling their skills through social media, rather than relying on the simple fact that they’ve got a degree to so that for them. He even goes so far as to suggest that the internet itself is actually undermining the value of a degree.

He gives the example of a young man who connected with him on Linked In, and through a Google search, managed to get an insight into what he’d actually achieved, which made the fact that he didn’t have a degree irrelevant.

Personally I think Slayback has a point about the virtues of social media in signalling your skills – if you’re looking to go into a sector that requires you to produce content in any form, them it’s an obvious idea to have a social media platform where you show off that content, through which you can demonstrate your skills.

I’m not so convinced that it’s worth risking not doing a degree, maybe you’re better off doing one, but from day one thinking about how to leverage every essay you write or every project you do into something that you can use in the future to make you more employable…. two birds with one stone and all that….

Why are Oxford and Cambridge Still Bastions of Privilege?

A recent freedom of information request from David Lammy MP led to him commenting that Oxford and Cambridge operate a form of ‘social apartheid‘. Two of the most stark statistics are below:

  • More than 80% of offers go to the top two social class, the children of barristers, doctors and CEOS, many of whom are privately educated and from the South East.
  • In 2015, one in five colleges at Cambridge and one in five at Oxford failed to admit a single black A-level student.

Writing in The Independent, Tom Rasmussen suggested that this was because people who work in admissions in Oxford and Cambridge are disproportionately from privileged white backgrounds, and so fail to grasp the challenges that people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds face.

Labelling at Cambridge

A second possible reason, according to The Observer, is that the independent schools themselves are institutions of white privilege.

Cambridge and Oxford respond to the above by saying that they’re not institutionally racist, pointing out that they recruit plenty of Indian, Pakistani and Chinese A-level students, and that the simple truth of the matter is that only a few hundred black Britons achieve the required 3 As at A-level.

Discussion Question

Given the above – do you think that Oxford and Cambridge should practice ‘positive discrimination’ and recruit more black A-level students?

Teacher Labelling and the self-fulfilling prophecy

Labelling theory holds that if a teacher labels a pupil a certain way, they will accept that label and it will become true.

Last Updated on March 3, 2023 by Karl Thompson

The labels which teachers give to pupils can influence the construction and development of students’ identities, or self-concepts: how they see and define themselves and how they interact with others. This in turn can affect their attitudes towards school, their behaviour, and ultimately their level of achievement in education.

self fulfilling prophecy

Labelling refers to the process of defining a person or group in a simplified way – narrowing down the complexity of the whole person and fitting them into broad categories. At the simplest level labelling involves that first judgement you make about someone, often based on first-impressions – are they ‘worth making the effort to get to know more’, are you ‘indifferent to them’, or are they ‘to be avoided’.

According to labelling theory, teachers actively judge their pupils over a period of time, making judgments based on their behaviour in class, attitude to learning, previous school reports and interactions with them and their parents, and they eventually classifying their students according to whether they are ‘high’ or ‘low’ ability, ‘hard working’ or ‘lazy’, ‘naughty’ or ‘well-behaved’, ‘in need of support’ or ‘capable of just getting on with it’ (to give just a few possible categories, there are others!). (*See criticism one below).

According to a number of small-scale, interpretivist research studies of teacher labelling, the labels teachers give to students are sometimes based not on their behaviour but on a number of preconceived ideas teachers have about students based on their ethnic, gender or social class background, and thus labelling can be said to be grounded in stereotypes.

A closely related concept to labelling theory is the that of the self-fulfilling prophecy – where an individual accepts their label and the label becomes true in practice – for example, a student labelled as deviant actually becomes deviant as a response to being so-labelled.

Labelling theory is one of the main parts of social action, or interactionist theory, which seeks to understand human action by looking at micro-level processes, looking at social life through a microscope, from the ground-up.

Classic studies on teacher labelling in education 

Most of the work of labelling theory applied to education was done in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Three classic works, summarised below include:

  • David Hargreaves (1975) Deviance in Classrooms
  • R.C. Rist (1970) Student Social Class and Teachers’ Expectations: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Ghetto Education
  • Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) Pygmalion in the Classroom (the ‘famous’ self-fulfilling prophecy experiment!)

David Hargreaves: Speculation, Elaboration, Stabilization

Hargreaves Deviance in Classrooms

David Hargreaves et al (1975) in their classic book ‘Deviance in Classrooms’ analysed the ways in which students came to be typed, or labelled. Their study was based on interviews with secondary teachers and classroom observation in two secondary schools, focusing on how teachers ‘got to know their students’ entering the first year of the school.

Teachers have only a very limited idea about ‘who their students are’ as individuals when they first enter the school, based mainly on the area where they came from, and they thus have to build up an image of their students as the school year progresses. Hargreaves et al distinguished three stages of of typing or classification:

  1. Speculation
  2. Elaboration
  3. Stabilisation

In the first stage, that of speculation, the teachers make guesses about the types of student they are dealing with. The researchers noted that there were seven main criteria teachers used to type students:

  • their appearance
  • how far they conformed to discipline
  • their ability and enthusiasm for work
  • how likeable they were
  • their relationship with other children
  • their personality
  • whether they were deviant.

Hargreaves et al stress that in the speculation stage, teachers are tentative in their typing, and are willing to amend their views, nevertheless, they do form a working hypothesis, or a theory about with sort of child each student is.

In the elaboration phase, each hypothesis is tested and either confirmed or contradicted, and through this process the typing of each student is refined.

When the third stage, stabilisation, is reached, the teacher feels that ‘he knows’ the students and finds little difficulty in making sense of their actions, which will be interpreted in light of the general type of student the teacher thinks they are. Some students will be regarded as deviant and it will be difficult for any of their future actions to be regarded in a positive light.

Labelling and social class

A lot of the early, classic studies on labelling focused on how teachers label according to indicators of social class background, not the actual ability of the student. 

Student Social Class and Teachers’ Expectations

Research in one American Kindergarten by Ray C. Rist (1970) suggested that the process of labelling is not only much more abrupt than suggested by Hargreaves et al, but also that it is heavily influenced by social class.

Rist found that new students coming into the Kindergarten were grouped onto three tables – one for the ‘more able’, and the other two for the ‘less able’, and that students had been split into their respective tables by day eight of their early-school career. He also found that teachers made their judgments not necessarily on any evidence of ability, but on appearance (whether they were neat and tidy) and whether they were known to have come from an educated, middle class family (or not).

Aaron V. Cicourel and John I.Kitsuse (1963) conducted a study of the decisions counsellors made in one American high school.

The counsellors largely decided which students were to be placed on programmes that prepared them for college. They claimed that their decisions were based on the grades students achieved in school and the results of IQ tests, but there were discrepancies: not all students achieving high grades and IQ scores were being placed on college-preparation programmes by the counsellors.

They found that the social class backgrounds of students had an influence. Those from middle class backgrounds were more likely to be placed onto higher level courses even when they had the same grades as students from lower class backgrounds.

Cicourel and Kitsuse argued that counsellors decisions were based around a number of non academic criteria related to social class such as the clothes students wore, their manners and their general demeanour.

Similarly when deciding which students were to be classified as ‘conduct problems’ counsellors used criteria such as speech and hairstyles which were again related to social class.

In general those with middle class manners were more likely to be labelled good prospects for college while those with working class manners and style were more likely to be labelled as conduct problems.

Labelling theory and the self fulfilling prophecy 

Self Fulling Prophecy Theory argues that predictions made by teachers about the future success or failure of a student will tend to come true because that prediction has been made. Thus if a student is labelled a success, they will succeed, if they are labelled a failure, the will fail.

The reasons for this are as follows (you might call these the positive effects of labelling):

  • teachers will push students they think are brighter harder, and not expect as much from students they have labelled as less-able.
  • Building on the above point, a positive label is more likely to result in a good student being put into a higher band, and vice versa for a student pre-judged to be less able.
  • Positively labelled students are more likely to develop positive attitude towards studying, those negatively labelled an anti-school attitude.
  • The above may be reinforced by peer-group identification.

It follows that in labelling theory, the students attainment level is, at least to some degree,  a result of the interaction between the teacher and the pupil, rather than just being about their ability.

A classic study which supports the self fulfilling prophecy theory was Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) study of an elementary school in California. They selected a random sample of 20% of the student population and informed teachers that these students could be expected to achieve rapid intellectual development.

They tested all students at the beginning of the experiment for IQ, and again after one year, and found that the RANDOMLY SELECTED ‘spurter’ group had, on average, gained more IQ than the other 80%, who the teachers believed to be ‘average’. They also found that the report cards for the 20% group showed that the teachers believed this group had made greater advances in reading.

Rosenthal and Jacobson speculated that the teachers had passed on their higher expectations to students which had produced a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Gender, ethnicity and labelling

A considerable amount of research has been done into the ways in which students of different genders and ethnicities are labelled by teachers.

One classic study of gender and labelling was John Abraham’s research in which he found that teachers had ideas of ‘typical boys’ and typical girls’, expecting girls to be more focused on schoolwork and better behaved than boys in general. Teachers also had higher expectations of girls than boys.

The issue of gender and labelling is covered in more depth in this post: Gender and educational achievement: in school processes.

Many studies have also focused on how teachers label differentially based on both gender and ethnicity simultaneously.

David Gilborn (1990), for example, has argued that teachers have the lowest expectations of Black boys and even see them as a threat, while Connolly (1998) found that teachers label Asian boys’s disruptive behaviour as immature rather than deliberately disruptive, so they weren’t punished as severely as Black Boys. Meanwhile Asian girls were largely ignored because they were seen as passive and not willing to engage in class discussion.

The issue of ethnicity and education is covered in more depth here: Ethnicity and differential achievement: in school processes

Contemporary research on labelling theory 

Waterhouse (2004), in case studies of four primary and secondary schools, suggests that teacher labelling of pupils as either normal/ average or deviant types, as a result of impressions formed over time, has implications for the way teachers interact with pupils.

Once these labels are applied and become the dominant categories for pupils, they can become what Waterhouse called a ‘pivotal identity’ for students – a core identity providing a pivot which teachers use to interpret and reinterpret classroom events and student behaviour.

For example, a student who has the pivotal identity of ‘normal’ is likely to have an episode of deviant behaviour interpreted as unusual, or as a ‘temporary phase’ – something which will shortly end, thus requiring no significant action to be taken; whereas as a student who has the pivotal identity of ‘deviant’ will have periods of ‘good behaviour’ treated as unusual, something which is not expected to last, and thus not worthy of recognition.

Criticisms of the labelling theory of education

Negative labelling can sometimes have the opposite effect – Margaret Fuller’s (1984) research on black girls in a London comprehensive school found that the black girls she researched were labelled as low-achievers, but their response to this negative labelling was to knuckle down and study hard to prove their teachers and the school wrong.

Given the above findings it should be no surprise that the Rosenthal and Jacobson research has been proved unreliable – other similar experimental studies reveal no significant effects.

Labelling theory attributes too much importance to ‘teacher agency’ (the autonomous power of teachers to influence and affect pupils) – structural sociologists might point out that schools themselves encourage teachers to label students. In some cases entry tests, over which teachers have no control, pre-label students into ability groups anyway, and the school will require the teacher to demonstrate that they are providing ‘extra support’ for the ‘low ability’ students as judged by the entry test.

One has to question whether teachers today actually label along social class lines. Surely teachers are among the most sensitively trained professionals in the world, and in the current ‘aspirational culture’ of education, it’s difficult to see how teachers would either label in such a way, or get away with it if they did.

Signposting

This post has been written primarily for A-level sociology students, although it will hopefully be a useful primer for anyone with a general interest in this subject.

Labelling Theory is one of the main theories taught as part of the education module, and it is one of the main ‘in-school process’ students need to understand, alongside banding and streaming and student subcultures.

Students can also use this material to illustrate some of the key ideas of social action theory more generally when they study social theory in more depth in their second year.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources/ Find out More

  • David Hargreaves (1975) Deviance in Classrooms
  • R.C. Rist (1970) Student Social Class and Teachers’ Expectations: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Ghetto Education
  • Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) Pygmalion in the Classroom (the ‘famous’ self-fulfilling prophecy experiment!)
  • Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives.