Big data enthusiasts argue that the greater data collection and analysis potential provided by e-learning platforms such as Khan Academy and Udacity provide much more immediate feedback to students about how they learn, and they thus predict a future in which schools and private data companies will work together in a new educational ecosystem…
This is a continuation of my summary of Meyer-Schonberger and Cukier’s in their (2017) ‘Big Data: The Essential Guide to Work, Life and Learning in the Age of Insight.
The advantages of e-learning platforms over traditional education
Khan Academy is well-known for its online videos, but just as important to its success is the software which collects data about how students learn, as well as what they are learning.
To date, Khan Academy has data on over a billion completed exercises, which includes information on not only what videos students watch and what tests scores they achieve, but also on the length and number of times they engage with each aspect of the course, and the time of day they did their work. This enables data analysts to deduce (probabilistically) how students learn most effectively, and to provide feedback as to how they might improve their learning.
The Kahn Academy is just one online learning platform, along with a whole range of MOOCs offered through Udacity, Coursera and edX, as well as SPOOCs (small, private online courses) which are collecting huge volumes of data on student learning. The volume of data is unprecedented in human history, and Cukier suggests that this could change the whole ecosystem of learning, incorporating third parties who do the data analysis and with the role of instructors (‘teachers’) changing providing advice on which learning pathways students should adopt.
At least some of the Khan Academy Data on learning is available to third parties to analyse for free, and information personal to students is presented to them in the form a dashboard, which allows for real-time feedback to take place.
Cukier contrasts the above, emerging ecosystem of online learning, to the present ‘backward’ way in which data is collected and managed in the current education system as backward (he actually uses the term ‘agrarian’ to describe the process) – in which students are subjected to a few SATs tests at predetermined stages, and this score is ‘born by them’ until the next test, which makes labelling by teachers more likely.
In addition to this, the school day and year are run in a 19th century style, pigeon holed into year groups, pre-determined classes, students exposed to the same material, and with digital devices often banned from classes. All of this means data cannot be harnessed and analysed.
Where does this leave existing institutions of learning?
Schools and universities are well poised to harvest huge amounts of data on students, simply because they have 1000s, or 10s of 1000s of students enrolled.
To date, however, these traditional education institutions have shown a very limited ability to collect, let alone analyse and use big data to better inform how students learn.
The coming change will affect universities first – these have mature students, and this audience is more than capable of digesting insights about how to learn more effectively… the big universities where fees are expensive and students don’t get much back in return are poised for disruption by innovators…
Some of the very top universities seem to have got the importance of BIg Data – MIT identified EdX as a crucial part of its forward strategy in 2013 for example, but some of the universities lower down the pecking order may find it difficult to compete.
The response of some forward looking schools is to embrace elearning – recognising the importance of getting and utilising more data on how students learn – Khan Academy is partnered with a number of schools, for example Peninsula Bridge, a summer school for middle schoolers from poor communities in the Bay area. – Cukier cites an example of one girl who managed to improve her maths due to this (again, evidence cited is almost non existent here!)
The chapter concludes with imaging a future in which schools are just part of a broader ecosystem of learning – which includes a much more prominent role for private companies and where data plays a more central role in learning.
Comments
There are number of factors which may contribute to schools’ inability to harness big data:
Time limitations – as Frank Furedi argues in ‘Wasted’, the function of schools have expanded so that they are now expected to do more than just educate kids – thus an ever larger proportion of schools’ budgets are taken up with other aspects of child development; combined with meddling by successive governments introducing new policies every few years, schools are caught in the trap of having to devote their resources to adapting to external stimuli rather than being able to innovate.
Financial limitations/ equality issues – correct me if I’m wrong, but any online course tailored to GCSEs or A-levels is going to cost money, and this might be prohibitively expensive!
The negative teacher experience of governance by ‘small data’ – there is a staggering amount of small data already collected and teachers are governed by this – it might actually be this experience of being governed by data that makes teachers reluctant to collect even more data – no one wants to be disempowered!
Child privacy rights – there is the not insignificant issue of letting big ICT education companies have access to our children’s learning data!
Big Data will make Feedback more focussed on effective teaching rather than student progress, it will make learning more individualised, and it will enable us to make probabilistic predictions about what programmes are best for different students.
This is according to Big Data enthusiasts Meyer-Schonberger and Cukier in their (2017) reprint of their 2013 original ‘Big Data: The Essential Guide to Work, Life and Learning in the Age of Insight…
An excellent counter point to the outrageous, almost entirely speculative and sweepingly general claims made in this book is Neil Selwyn’s ‘Is Technology Good for Education?‘ – the later is based on stacks of peer-reviewed evidence, the former on speculation only.
How will big data change feedback in education?
In the small data age, data collection in schools was largely limited to test scores and attendance, focussing on collecting standardised data on student performance, with feedback being almost exclusively in one direction – from the teachers to the schools to the kids and their parents – what is not measured is how well we teach our kids, or how effective different teaching techniques are in facilitating student progress.
Big data changes this by datafying the learning process – for example, e-books allow us to track how students read books, what they take notes one, at what point the give up reading, what sections they go back and check – thus we can measure how effective different books are, or different passages within books are, at helping students to understand knowledge, which can be used as a basis for immediate and differentiated intervention by teachers.
We could also use e-books in conjunction with testing to measure the relationship between different textual materials and the ‘decay curve’ – the rate at which students forget knowledge, which might be useful in improving test scores.
Companies such as Pearsons and Kaplan are very involved in producing e-books, but at time of writing (2017) even in America only 5% of school text books are digital.
Individualisation
In schools, the education which we are exposed to is standardised into a one size fits all package, tailored to a mythical average student. Learning has barely evolved from the industrial era – the materials students are given are identical, and the learning process still works essentially like an assembly line, with all students being paced through a syllabus at the same rate and learning benchmarked against a series of standardised tests.
All of this is tailored towards the needs of the teachers and the system, not the needs of the students.
However, in the Big Data age, following the American economist Tyler Cowen, ‘average is over’, and following Khan Academy founder Sal Khan ‘one size fits few’. The problem with the current, industrial era education system is that very few people actually benefit from it – the bright student is bored, while the weaker understands nothing. What we need is a means of flexibly adapting the pace and content of teaching to better fit the needs of individual students.
Tailoring education to each student has long been the aim of adaptive-learning software – an example of this is Carnegie Learning’s ‘Cognitive Tutor’ for school mathematics which decides which math questions to ask based on how students answered previous questions. This way it can identify problem areas and drill them, rather than try to cover everything but miss holes in their knowledge, as happens with the traditional system.
Another example is New York City’s ‘School of One’, a math programme in which students get their own personalised ‘playlist’ determined by an algorithm, each day, with maths problems for them suited to their needs.
Such individualised learning systems are dynamic — the learning materials change and adapt as more data is collected, analysed and transformed into feedback. More advanced material is only provided once students have mastered the fundamentals.
All of this is based on the idea of the ‘student as consumer/ client’ – one argument is that ‘if we can rip our favourite music and burn it into our own playlist’, why can’t we do this with education? A second argument is that in any other field of business, consumers provide feedback on products and the manufacturers improve (and increasingly personalise) the products to meet the demands of diverse consumers…. Adaptive learning should transform education into something which is more responsive to the needs of students/ consumers, rather than it being led by unresponsive systems and teachers.
Supporting evidence for adaptive learning:
In a trial of 400 high school freshmen in Oklahoma, the Cognitive Tutor system helped them achieve the same level of math proficiency in 12% less time than students learning math in the traditional way.
According to Bill Gates, talking in 2013, students on remedial education courses using adaptive software outperformed students in conventional courses and colleges benefitted from a 28% reduction in the cost per student.
Probabilistic Predictions
Big data will provide us with insights into how people in aggregate learn, but more importantly, into how each of us individually acquires knowledge. These insights are not perfect – they do not give us cause and effect relationships – Big data insights are probabilistic:
For example, we may spot that teaching materials of a certain sort will improve a particular person’s tests scores by 95%, but if we make a recommendation based on this, it will not work in 5% of cases.
This is something we are going to have to learn to live with, and parents and students are going to have to bear the risk – for example, all Big Data can do is to tell ‘clients’ that if they study this particular course, then there is a 70-80% chance they’ll see ‘x’ amount of improvement.
However, some probabilities will be more certain than others, and so for at least some specific recommendations, we can act with reasonable certainty.
We are going to have to get over seeing through the world through the lens of cause and effect…
Criticisms of Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier’s views on how Big Data will transform education
Personally, as a teacher myself I’m sceptical when non-experts start making sweeping predictions about the future of education based on speculation, especially when one of the claims for the Big Data is that it provides empirical insights, such speculation is hypocritical, precisely because it’s not based on any actual data!
The idea that transnational technology companies are going to help everyone in education is nonsense – they are profit driven, the fact that profit comes first, and that this will be a limiting factor in how data is used in the future is not even mentioned.
They see ‘teachers as the enemy’ – as a barrier to Big data, this is highly dismissive of a group of people who have gone into a job to benefit children, where I doubt that people for tech companies do not have this as their primary motive – also see below, for an alternative explanation of their criticism to ‘teachers as a barrier’ to ed tech companies playing more of a role in education.
The ‘one size fits all model’ might be dominant in education because with a teacher student ration of 1-100 (in colleges) teachers literally cannot meet the individual needs of individual students. There simply isn’t time for this, along with the need for teachers to keep on top of the knowledge themselves, and keep up to date with technological changes, institutional-legal requirements, and do all of the (still necessary) marking of students work.
Related to the above point, making teachers analogous to other professionals with clients, I don’t believe there’s any other field of work where professionals are expected to deal with 100 clients at a time and personally interact with each of them every single day in a meaningful way… dealing with diverse and complex knowledge (rather than specialising in one particular thing, i.e. a haircut, or a financial advice for example) – while it might be fair to expect teachers to respond to ‘clients’ demands, 1 teacher cannot do this with 100 students. The ratio needs altering (1-10 maybe?).
The authors cit very few examples of peer-reviewed evidence to back up their claims.
Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier start off by arguing that public education treats children like ‘another brick in the wall’, seeing them as empty slates on which instructors may make their mark – but this mindset is an artefact of the constraints in which the school system exists – we mass produced graduates because for centuries there was no other way to deliver individualised instruction to a broad population. The old system was based around ‘small data’ which slotted students into set paths, big data favours a more flexible and open approach to education:
How big data will change the process of education?
First – we know more about individual differences because we can track student performance better – continuously through the learning process – educational data moves from stock to flow.
Second – we can tailor lessons to the needs of the individual, not the general average, which is actually no one!
Third – we can more easily learn what works best in teaching, the data enables a feedback loop.
‘The result is that education is one of the most significant areas where big data will make its mark. It will improve learning, which in turn will improve society and economic prosperity. Just as importantly it will improve student’s self-esteem.’ (202)
In short, the education system can be redesigned around handling individual differences, rather than trying to eradicate them or treat them as if they don’t exist.
How big data will change what we learn in education?
As to the question of what we learn – the increased role of big data in society means we will need to become more comfortable dealing with probabilities rather than certainties… and we will need to learn that we know far less than we think!
Big data means that many jobs – many of those involving making decisions – will be automated in the future, but humans have unique capabilities such as creativity and originality, irrationality and the ability to break radically from the past – so education should foster these things rather than seeing education as a process of pouring knowledge into the skulls of students.
Conventional education may have difficulty of breaking out the old mold of education, and digital disrupters are playing an insurgent role….
Will Britain Ever Have a Black Prime Minister? aired on the BBC IN 2017, which looked at the relative average life chances of a Black British child progressing through life… NB Thank you kindly to whoever uploaded this to You Tube (it won’t be there forever, the BBC have unjustly removed this from iPlayer already)
In the summary below I focus on some of the educational disadvantages black children face highlighted by the programme…
Teachers mark black children’s test scores more harshly than other ethnic groups
For in-school test scores, the scores for black British students are consistently lower throughout schooling, until we get to the actual GCSE Results, when the scores of Black British students increase dramatically, with Black African students actually overtaking white British students.
The suggested explanation for this is that in school tests are marked by teachers who know their students and thus know their ethnicity, and that they have an unconscious bias against black students, and thus mark their test scores at a lower level, while GCSEs are marked independently – the markers do not know the students who sat them, and thus do not know their ethnicity: when the tests are marked in a neutral, unbiased way, the scores of black and white pupils are much closer together.
This is backed up by research conducted by Professor Simon Burgess which compared the results of test scores marked by teachers who knew the students sitting the tests (and hence their ethnicity) with the results of tests marked independently, where the markers did not know the ethnicity of the students who sat the tests: the results for some ethnic groups were lower when the teachers knew the ethnicity of the candidates, suggesting that there is an unconscious bias against certain ethnic groups.
This seems to be pretty damning evidence that teachers hold an unconscious bias against black students
Black students are less likely to get three As at A level than white students
Here we are told that….
Only 4% of black children get 3 As or more at A level, compared to…
10% of white pupils
28% of independent school pupils, who are disproportionately white.
In fact, the programme points out that you are more likely to be excluded from school if you are black than achieve 3 As at A-level
This seems to be less an example of evidence against black students, rather than evidence of the class-bias in A level results.
The Chances of being admitted to Oxford University are lower for black students compared to white students
The programme visits Oxford University, because every single Prime Minister (who has been to university) since 1937 has attended this bastion of privilege.
We are told that black applicants are less likely to be accepted into Oxford University than White students, even when they have the same 3 As as white students.
In an interview with Cameron Alexander, the then president of the African students union, he comes out and says that Oxford University is ‘institutionally racist’ and that structural factors explain the under-representation of black students – he points out the dominant culture of Oxford University is on of elite, white privilege, one in which staff identify more with independently schooled children, who have benefitted from the advantages of huge amounts of material and cultural capital; while they fail to identify with the hardships a black child from an inner city area may have faced – the result is that privileged white student has a higher change of being accepted into Oxford than a black student, even when they have the same grades as a the privileged white student.
As with the example of test scores above, at first glance this evidence seems damning, however, Oxford University has previously explained this by saying that black students have a higher rejection rate because they apply for harder courses on average than white students.
So what are the chances of a black person ever becoming Prime Minister…?
In short, a black person has a 17 million to 1 chance of becoming Prime Minister, compared to a 1 in 1.4 million chance for a white person…
Or in short… a black person is 12 times less likely to become Prime Minister in the U.K. compared to a white person…
Postscript…
Unfortunately this programme has already disappeared from iPlayer, despite the fact that anyone in Britain with a T.V. has already paid for it, which is just bang out of order.
I’m just in the process of re-examining the AQA’s ‘specification’/ vaguefication* for the sociology of education section to get a better idea of what kind of 10 mark ‘analyse’ questions might come up.
In case you don’t know (and you wouldn’t know this unless you’ve been on a course run by the AQA) a 10 mark ‘analyse’ question will take any aspect from any two of the bullet points in the AQA’s specification and ask you to make the links between them (with reference to a small item)….
Now… IF you’re already aware of this, then you probably know that there’s four main topic areas listed under the education specification/ vagueficiation, hence it’s quite easy to think up some nice combination questions taken from across these four bullet points.
HOWEVER, this might not be the limit of 10 mark question combinations – because under the education section of the A-level specification/ vagueification there is also specific reference to the ‘6 core themes’ of socialisation, power etc… so this might open up the possible of an even greater array of 10 markers.
A few possible 10 mark analyse questions:
Using material from Item A (remember there will be an item!) analyse two ways in which the functions of education have changed due to globalization.
Using material from Item A, analyse two ways in which selection policies might have influenced the process of teacher labeling.
Using material from Item A, analyse two ways in which the privatization of education has affected the way in which different ethnic groups experience school.
Using material from Item A and elsewhere , analyse two criticisms of the view that the hidden curriculum in schools helps to reproduce economic inequalities in wider society.
Using material from Item A and elsewhere, analyse two ways in which education policies might help overcome some of the disadvantages boys face as a result of gendered socialization practices.
I know some of these are just horrible, but remember, that the AQA has a burning hatred of all teenagers, and at least the above questions make sense, unlike some which have come up previously!
A reminder of the AQA’s specification for the education section of A-level paper one:
The study of the topics in this paper should engage students in theoretical debate while encouraging an active involvement with the research process.
The study should foster a critical awareness of contemporary social processes and change, and draw together the knowledge, understanding and skills learnt in different aspects of the course.
In their study of the topics, students should examine:
topic areas in relation to the two core themes (socialisation, culture and identity; and social differentiation, power and stratification)
both the evidence of and the sociological explanations for the content listed in the topic areas below.
Throughout, students should be encouraged to use examples drawn from their own experience of small-scale research.
Attention should be given to drawing out links with other topics studied in this specification
4.1.1 Education
Students are expected to be familiar with sociological explanations of the following content:
the role and functions of the education system, including its relationship to the economy and to class structure
differential educational achievement of social groups by social class, gender and ethnicity in contemporary society
relationships and processes within schools, with particular reference to teacher/pupil relationships, pupil identities and subcultures, the hidden curriculum, and the organisation of teaching and learning
the significance of educational policies, including policies of selection, marketisation and privatisation, and policies to achieve greater equality of opportunity or outcome, for an understanding of the structure, role, impact and experience of and access to education; the impact of globalisation on educational policy.
*I prefer the term vagueification because this ‘specification’ doesn’t actually give us a precise idea about what might come up in the exam – nowhere in the above specification does it explicitly state you need to know (for example) about ‘Chinese’ students or ‘compensatory education’, yet these have both come up in previous exam papers. Thus this specification gives you a vague idea of what might come up, not a specific idea. To get a more specific idea, you need to spend a few years teaching or examining A level sociology, read the four main text books and and intuit the advice circulating about the content of A-level.
Looking at the A level exam entries by gender in 2017 over 90% of people who sat computing were male, compared to only 23% of people who sat sociology A level.
Either click on the above graphic or check out the interactive version here (irritatingly I can’t embed dynamic visuals in a wordpress.com blog, yet!)
These are only selected A-levels, to make the amount of information more manageable…. I didn’t deliberately select it so sociology was the most feminine, but it’s certainly ‘up there’ as one of the most female dominated subjects… must be all that empathizing us sociologists do?!
Talking about empathy, or lack of it, I have to say absolutely no thanks whatsoever to the Joint Qualifications Alliance who did not even respond to my email request for a spread sheet of this A-level data.
The JCQ only make this public data available in the form of a PDF which makes it less accessible for data manipulation – I had to enter this info by hand, which was massively inefficient use of my time.
This post is primarily me testing out the capabilities of Tableau (Free data viz software)…. More on subject choice at different levels of education later, as well as analysis of WHY males and females choose different subjects…..
Many of the theories of learning that were developed during the first decades of the twentieth century tended to conceptualize learning as an end product or outcome – most often as a distinct change in behavior.
Students and educators who subscribe to this notion of learning-as-product tend to see learning as consisting of the following:
A quantitative increase in knowledge
Memorizing or storing information that can later be retrieved.
Acquiring facts, skills and methods that can be retained and used as necessary.
However, it is also possible to see learning as an ongoing process, and people who subscribe this notion of learning tend to describe learning as:
Learning as making sense or abstracting meaning, learning that involves relating parts of the subject matter to each other and to the real world.
Learning as interpreting and understanding reality in a different way, learning that involves comprehending the world by reinterpreting knowledge.
These later two descriptions of learning as an ongoing process see the learner as building upon his or her previous experiences and, in some instances, changing his or her behavior as a result.
Learning as a process is the view of learning that many contemporary educationalists and psychologists would concur with. As Bruner (1996) puts it ‘learning is not simply a technical business of well managed information processing’. Instead, learning might also be seen to involve individuals having to make sense of who they are and develop an understanding of the world in which they live. From this perspective, learning can be seen as a continuing process of ‘participation’ rather than a discrete instance of acquisition.
IMO working within a marketised education system encourages us to see learning as a product – that is the ‘bottom line’ of education is the results, and there is much store placed on exam-training in order to game the system and get better results (the final outcome), and students, teachers and parents increasingly judge the quality of a school or it teachers on their ability ‘to deliver results’.
This is, in fact, an extremely narrow and shallow way to judge the quality of education.
If, on the other hand, we consider ‘learning as a process’ this forces us to focus on the quality of the learning experience and the context in which learning takes place – reflecting on the marketised system we realize what a poor educational experience many of us get (teachers and students alike) because of the pressure to achieve results. In such a system, there is little time to ‘understand the world and who we are’.
Another benefit of seeing learning as a process is that we come to realize that ‘learning’ takes place in many contexts outside of the formal education system – at home, at work, and through the many informal channels through which we ‘develop ourselves’.
Maybe more of us need to forget formal education with its obsession with learning as a product, and instead just focus more on life-long learning and self-development outside of formal education?
Sources
Selwyn (2017) Education and Technology – Key Issues and Debates
Most UK schools have introduced trousers for girls into their uniform codes in the last twenty years, but some continue to ban them and will send home any girl who turns up wearing trousers, at least according to Trousers for All, which campaigns to give girls the option to wear trousers as part of their school uniform.
Trousers for all notes that ‘The ban on trousers for girls covers the entire spectrum of schools: primary, secondary, public and private, faith and non-faith”.
While it might seem like a throwback to the 1970s, or even the 1870s, this really does go on today – take this 2016 Mumsnet discussion as an example:
Despite the above, there does seem to be widespread support (there certainly is on Mumsnet) for schools adopting uniform policies which either stipulate a ‘skirt ban’, so that that both boys and girls must wear trousers only, or that girls at least have a choice over whether they wear trousers or a skirt.
The following arguments have been put forward for allowing girls the freedom to wear trousers:
Firstly, it seems to be a pretty blatant breach of the government’s own 2010 equality act, and while it hasn’t been tested in court yet, it seems unlikely that if a parent mounted a legal challenge against a school banning their female child from wearing trousers, the school would lose – I mean, it’s been a workplace norm for 40 years now after all!
Secondly, forcing girls to wear dresses restricts their sense of freedom (Guardian Opinion Article (2017), and it does seem somewhat hypocritical that schools are expected to inspire in children a sense that ‘they are free to achieve anything they want’, except for wearing trousers in school for the next few years, if you’re a girl.
Thirdly, according to Becky Francis: “The stipulation that boys wear trousers while girls must wear skirts promotes messages that boys are active, while girls should be less active, decorative, and ‘demure’.” (Professor Becky Francis, Director of UCL Institute of Education).
Trousers for All takes this a step further, suggesting that… ‘Schools forcing girls to wear skirts is equivalent to states forcing females to wear a veil and to companies forcing females to wear high heels. All of these are expressions of sexism.’
What do you think: is it right for schools to ban girls from wearing trousers?
Deeper Analysis: will a gender neutral clothing policy end the ‘policing of girls’ bodies in schools’?
Laura Bates (of Everyday Sexism) makes the argument that whether we have a gender neutral clothing policy in schools or not, girls bodies are still going to be ‘policed’ in school more than boys, citing examples of girls being sent home for wearing skirts deemed to be too short (and distracting to boys and teachers), and even examples of girls who have been sent home for wearing trousers which were too tight.
The Hidden Curriculum is the unwritten rules, norms and values to which students are expected to conform while in school.
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.
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.
A summary of some sociological studies on pupil subcultures exploring different types of subculture such as pro-school and anti-school subcultures.
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
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
This is according to Big Data enthusiasts Meyer-Schonberger and Cukier in their (2017) reprint of their 2013 original ‘Big Data: The Essential Guide to Work, Life and Learning in the Age of Insight…
