The Explanation of Educational Failure
The Explanation of Educational Failure
It is perhaps worth noting initially that Bernstein is not attempting to provide a total explanation of educational failure. As Halliday says,
he is offering an interpretation of one aspect of it, the fact that the distribution of failure is not random but follows certain known and sadly predictable patterns.... Even here Bernstein is not trying to tell the whole story; what he is doing is to supply the essential link that was missing from the chain of relevant factors (1973, p. ix).
Just as Bernstein's later accounts of the class stratified types of family environment that produce restricted or elaborated codes of different orientations are mainly elaborations of his earlier sketches, so his explanation of working class educational failure has remained basically the same through changes in formulation. In barest outline it is probably obvious from the preceding section: only some families promote elaborated codes; elaborated codes are the currency of formal educational systems, the precondition of success therein; so some children start at a tremendous advantage in the race for educational certification. Those children who lack a family orientation to elaborated codes may, of course, be lucky enough to pick them up from the educational system (though Bernstein does not devote the kind of attention bestowed by Bourdieu to the problems and more subtle discriminations such persons face in trying to move up the educational cum social ladder), but such children are initially at a loss, they are strangers in what for others is not far from home, and there are strong pressures for them not to see the point, not to appreciate how far they are misunderstood, not to feel wanted in the school system.
I will now illustrate Bernstein's own accounts from different stages of his writings. The very first paper concludes with four and half pages on how working class public language and its attendant mode of perceiving and "structuring of receptivity conflicts with and induces a resistance to formal education" (1958 = 1974, p. 34). One point Bernstein makes is that the public, peer group language lacks the signs of deference required in speaking to teachers, and so may well be interpreted as rude; conversely the formal elaboration of feeling may come across as impersonal. As we have noted above, since the point of language use is different (between public and formal), working class children may see no need to extend their vocabulary in many of the ways endorsed by the school. The failure to attend to principles in public language is said to reflect itself in an inability to follow the principles in mathematical calculations or to make any sense of formulae such as are used in algebra.
Further Bernstein stresses the differences between the structuring of working class life and that of the school, with its slow plodding to distant and scarcely conceptualized ends. Formal language users find cues in the school to respond to, ways of enhancing their self-esteem; the public language user misses these cues, he is a fish out of water, and so finds little to be proud of in his achievements within the school. Noting the comparative failure of working class children in grammar schools, Bernstein notes that even when a working class home endorses middleclass values, its own modus operandi ...
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Further Bernstein stresses the differences between the structuring of working class life and that of the school, with its slow plodding to distant and scarcely conceptualized ends. Formal language users find cues in the school to respond to, ways of enhancing their self-esteem; the public language user misses these cues, he is a fish out of water, and so finds little to be proud of in his achievements within the school. Noting the comparative failure of working class children in grammar schools, Bernstein notes that even when a working class home endorses middleclass values, its own modus operandi may put the same obstacles in the way of its children's appropriation of what the education system offers.
It is perhaps worth stressing that it is not just language behaviour that is involved in the way the codes help to shape educational outcomes, or perhaps rather we should not forget that language is part of a much larger whole. Thus Bernstein on one occasion stressed the "differential awareness of mothers to the educational functions of play and toys" and made the point that
Working class children often have to learn at school what is part of the experience of the middle-class child. Some middle-class mothers understand, even if they do not always approve, the classroom world of the infant school. Many working-class mothers are at a loss to see what it all means (Bernstein & Davies, 1969, p. 59).
(It is worth noting that in his later work Bernstein has tended to stress the extent to which middle class families, especially those from his "new" middleclass, approve of the child-centred and somewhat mysterious classrooms to be found in many English primary schools. He and others [Sharp and Green, 1975] have also stressed the ways in which this apparently unacademic pedagogy allows all the advantages of middle class cultural capital to determine children's fates in what is apparently a most benign ethos. But as King (1979) has discovered, neither teachers nor parents are quite so taken with child centredness as the theory requires , though I do not see that this impugns the point about a smooth elimination procedure for those who do not shine in the informal classroom.)
In the more abstract terms of his later code theory, these points appear thus:
the school is necessarily concerned with the transmission and development of universalistic orders of meaning. The school is concerned with the making explicit and elaborating through language, principles and operations, as these apply to objects (science subjects) and persons (arts subjects). One child, through his socialization, is already sensitive to the symbolic orders of the school, whereas the second child is much less sensitive to the universalistic orders of the school.... The school is necessarily trying to develop in the child orders of relevance and relation as these apply to persons and objects, which are not initially the ones he spontaneously moves towards... Orientations towards meta-languages of control and innovation are not made available to these children as part of their initial socialization. (1969 = 1974, p. 196)
And it is not only the un-commonsense knowledge that is alien; the whole moral ethos of the school is different from that of the home.
In a recent account, Bernstein links a middleclass mode of questioning, in which parents may test a child's ability to answer and from which a child may learn "the confidence to manage a social relationship where the presuppositions of everyday relationships are temporarily suspended" (1977b, p. xiii), to the expectations made almost with out thinking in the classroom.
Because of the correspondence between features of middle-class familial transmissions and formal educational transmissions, middle-class children have the means to appropriate such transmissions, and their experience is legitimated by the school, which in turn enables the child to legitimate the school, irrespective of the immediate relevance of what is to be acquired or the level of the child's performance (ibid., p. xiii).
In the absence of such a correspondence there is likely to be a vicious spiral of rejection. Recalling the early remarks about the means-end thinking of the middle-class, and introducing his view of the relative autonomy of educational systems which he thinks is mirrored in middle class cultural norms, Bernstein suggests that the middle class transmit both sides of the educational coin:
. The dependency relation translates into the motivation of the child with respect to school, irrespective of its immediate relevance or interest to the child/pupil.
2. The relative autonomous relation translates into an orientation towards the school's context-independent meanings, and to specific performance rules and texts these create (ibid., p. xiv).
I have quoted fairly extensively from Bernstein so that we can get a clear idea of the kind of claim he is making. As I have said already, I am not going to look at the empirical support for these claims, but I think it is worth exposing the prima facie irrelevance of the kind of work that is often adduced against Bernstein's explanation of educational failure.
It is crucial to the explanation that pupils need elaborated codes for educational success. So "researchers" went into classrooms and listened to what the teachers said. And they found that typical teachers spoke a pretty extreme form of restricted code (I leave aside the qualifications to that sort of statement that need to be made in terms of Bernstein's actual theory). So Strivens claims that one such researcher "suggested that it was highly misleading to associate the use of the elaborated code with requirements of the teacher/pupil roles. He demonstrated convincingly that the ordinary language of teachers in schools is much closer to restricted code use" (1980, p. 99). Musgrove (1979, pp. 49-51) appeals to similar evidence and makes the same points rather more caustically; but there seems to me to be here a perverse blindness to the issue Bernstein is raising.
We have noted already that Bernstein admits that not all schools devote their time to trying to transmit elaborated codes to all, or perhaps any, of their inmates; and it is important here to remember that much of the detailed observational, ethnographic work that has been done in English schools at least has focussed on the average or the lower than average pupils, those whom in many cases Bernstein admits society has given up trying to educate. But even without this possible bias in the evidential basis for these criticisms, the more important point is that children do not merely have to survive in schools, putting up with the gruff commands and physical assaults of laconic teachers; they have to read books, they have to write essays, take examinations, even, if they are lucky, follow educational films or interact with a personal computer. No doubt a researcher armed with a tape-recorder would fail to note the written words pupils were trying to deal with, but surely these written words would play a very significant role in such pupils' achievements, or lack of them. The idea that one reads for one's degree is not totally alien to the lower reaches of the school system. And indeed, there is some evidence that the place of literacy in the family home can play a significant role in the differential achievement of children in the earlier years of schooling, which are for many the most fraught with longer term consequences ("it seems possible that the relationship between family background and educational attainment in the early years may be quite largely mediated by class- associated differences in the relative salience that is given to activities associated with literacy in interaction between parents and children" [Wells, 1981, p. 197], reporting recent very detailed English work, with which one may compare Reid, 1976, for some suggestive data from Jamaica).
There are other criticisms that could be made of the relevance of such empirical research to Bernstein's claims, but my main point now is simply to highlight the crudity of what counts as significant work in this area, and as significant findings.
