Theme Issue Reproduction

Rethinking Social

The question of social inequality is anything but new, and schooling has always shared some role in promoting it. Historian Michael Katz, in his classical 1971 tract about the origins of the American system (Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Change, New York: Praeger), notes that as early as the 1880s the system was already "Universal, tax supported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and class biased." Writing today, Katz might be obliged (on inspection and retrospection) to expand the list to include more unfortunate adjectives - - sexist, intolerant to "deviants," culture biased, and so on. Katz's evidence and jabs aside, the official liberal ideology of schooling (certainly from Dewey on down) has been to gloss over the differences in school effects and to assert the universal utility, fairness, and opportunity of schooling. Transformations of consciousness and society in this model are seen principally as problems of adequate interaction, communication, and sequenced cumulated learning fostered by teacher/student dyads in schools. During the late 1960s and 1970s, this pristine vision of schooling was rather badly soiled. Mass data sampling facilitated by advances in statistics, research design, and computer technology made the empirical inspection of the relationships of social structural variables to schooling's outcomes not only possible but inevitable. Such works as those of Sewell and Hauser, Blau and Duncan, Coleman, Plowden, together with the reanalysis of these works by Jencks et al. and by Bowles and Gintis (Jenck's co-workers), provided powerful evidence that social structure and family background (as well as exogenous factors like luck) were more powerful determinants of cognitive (and non-cognitive) outcomes than even the best schooling. In Britain, the new critique was embedded in such works as Bernstein's volumes on linguistic coding. Back in North America, curriculum theorists such as Michael Apple were adding flesh to the structuralist skeleton by illustrating how classroom practice and content contained a "hidden curriculum" which telegraphed social roles, values, and norms to students. Classroom analysts like Philip Jackson and Sharp and Green illustrated how even the demographics and physical spaces of classrooms embodied a hierarchical and competitive gestalt. The cumulative impact was a bomb-shell blast to the opiated serenity that suggested schools work for all. This detonation impacted with such force among theorists (if not among educators) not simply because it showed that schools worked badly for certain groups of children such as minorities and the poor; sensible educators had intuitively known this all along. What made this conceptual rendering trigger such a reaction was the empirical documentation of how very little impact schooling had when structural v_ariables were controlled. Given this evidence, the effect of schooling paled as passive servant to the active determinant masters of social background and structure. Thus, what this very intelligible Interchange / Vol. 12, Nos. 2-3, 1981

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interpretation did was to spawn renewed awareness of how powerful social and economic determinants were. Prevalent among the new doctrines was the "correspondence" notion (see, for instance, Michael Carter, "Contradiction and Correspondence: Analysis of the Relation of Schooling and Work" - - in M. Carnoy and M. Levin, The Limits o f Educational Reform, New York: Longman, 1976). Recently, educational theorists, including many in this special issue, have begun to question whether the sheer force of impact of correspondence theory might not have dulled some sensibilities as well as awakening others. Notably, they argue, by refocussing our attention on structural elements, correspondence theorists have inadvertently led us to overlook that: first, schools are places where social inequalities are created and not just reproduced; second, schools are special contexts nested within general social structure but which, at various junctures, contradict as well as reproduce structural order; and third, there are, in addition to economics, a range of other factors which shape schooling outcomes (e.g., cultural factors, individual histories, vagaries of the state, mass movements, quirks of context, and so on). These newer analyses do not deny the importance of structural variables but insist that how these aggregated effects are achieved needs to be illustrated as lived experience. Paul Willis's ethnography, Learning to Labour, is interesting in this respect because it shows that there are complexities in the lived situation and cultural specifics of his students which could account for the observed social reproductional relationship but which would not have been anticipated by a simplistic correspondence model. The critics of correspondence theory also illustrate through analysis that active contestation and resistance to structure are as integral to the stratification in schooling as the pacifying effects of streaming. In other words, the relationship of actors to schooling is an active and ongoing process in people's lived experience m not just a masked form of social cloning. What the newer social constructivist logics demand is active analysis of concrete situations and theory which begins to integrate these understandings with strategies to counter inequality in schools. It is to these grand ends that this special issue attempts modest contribution. Each of the authors speaks for himself or herself; but embedded within the writings of each, I find a common light seeking to illuminate situational problems of this kind. Giroux, Apple, Willis, Dale, and West all furnish us with theory directed toward rethinking what types of theorizing and methodologies and strategies would, given the evidence in hand, be best to engage in. Connell, Dowsett, Kessler, Ashenden; Wexler, Whitson, Moskowitz; and Anyon offer detailed ethnographic and comparative data to illustrate how curricula (surface and hidden) produce class variation and assist internalization of hegemony. HerLricksen, Grumet, and Clarricoates share, among other things, perceptiveness in unravelling the interdependencies and interdependence of gender and class. Taxel, Nelsen, and Rist are empirically helpful in detailing how theory operates in specific contexts. At the same time, we make no claim to be exhaustive. The issue contains multiple omissions for a piece even modestly seeking to rethink inequality and social reproduction. For example, race relations (with the exception of Rist and Taxel) is one underrepresented area that leaps to mind. We do believe, however, that there is progress to be made in sharing, and there is honor in learning from our insights and mistakes. Paul Olson (Department of Sociology in Education, OISE) - - Editor of this issue.