Presentation, due after 24 hours

chapter3.pdf

Home >English homework help >Presentation, due after 24 hours

3 Class and institutional form of culture

Class fonn

The main emphasis so far has been upon the apparently creative and self-made forms of opposition and cultural style in the school. It is now time to contextualise the counter-school culture. Its points of contact with the wider working class culture are not accidental, nor its style quite independent, nor its cultural skills unique or special. Though the achievements of counter-school culture are specific, they must be set against the larger pattern of working class culture in order for us to understand their true nature and significance. This section is based on fieldwork carried out in the factories where 'the lads' get jobs after leaving school, and on interviews with their parents at home.

In particular, counter-school culture has many profound similarities with the culture its members are mostly destined for -shopfloor culture. Though one must always take account of regional and occupational variations, the central thing about the working class culture of the shopfloor is that, despite harsh conditions and external direction, people do look for meaning and impose frameworks. They exercise their abilities and seek enjoyment in activity, even where most controlled by others. Paradoxically, they thread through the dead experience of work a living culture which is far from a simple reflex of defeat. This is the same fundamental taking hold of an alienating situation that one finds in counter-school culture and its attempt to weave a tapestry of interest and diversion through the dry institu- tional text. These cultures are not simply layers of padding between human beings and unpleasantness. They are appropriations in their own right, exercises of skill, motions, activities applied towards particular ends.

The credentials for entry into shopfloor culture proper, as into the counter· school culture, are far from being merely one of the defeated. They are credentials of skill, dexterity and confidence and, above all, a kind of presence which adds to, more than it subtracts from, a living social force. A force which is on the move, not supported, structured and organised by a formal named institution, to which one may apply by written application.

The masculinity and toughness of counter-school culture reflects one of the central locating themes of shopfloor culture -a form of masculine chauvinism. The pin-ups with their enormous soft breasts plastered over hard, oily machinery are examples of a direct sexism but the shopfloor is suffused with masculinity in more generalised and symbolic ways too. Here is a foundryman, Joey's father, talking at home about his work. In an inarticulate way, but perhaps all the more convincingly for that, he attests to that elemental, in our culture essentially masculine, self- esteem of doing a hard job well - and being known for it:

I work in a foundry ... you know, drop forging ... do you know anything about it . . . no ... well you have the factory down in Bethnal St with the noise . . . you can hear it in the street ... I work there on the big hammer ... it's a six tonner. I've worked there twenty-four years now. It's bloody noisy, but I've got used to it now ... and it's hot ... I don't get bored ... there's always new lines coming and you have to work out the best way of doing it . . . You have to keep going ... and it's heavy work, the managers couldn't do it, there's not many strong enough to keep lifting the metal . . . I earn eighty, ninety pounds a week, and that's not bad, is it? . . . It ain't easy like ... you can definitely say that I earn every penny of it ... you have to keep it up you know. And the managing director, I'd say 'hello' to him you know, and the progress manager ... they'll come around and I'll go ... 'Alright' [thumbs up] ... and they know you, you know ... a group standing there watching you ... worldng ... I like that ... there's something there . . . watching you like ... worldng ... like that ... you have to keep going to get enough out. •

The distinctive complex of chauvinism, toughness and machismo on the shop- floor is not anachronistic, neither is it bound to die away as the pattern of industrial work changes. Rough, unpleasant, demanding jobs which such attitudes seem most to be associated with still exist in considerable numbers. A whole range of jobs from building work to furnace work to deep sea fishing still involve a primitive confrontation with exacting physical tasks. The basic attitudes and values most associated with such jobs are anyway still widely current in the general worldng class culture, and particularly in the culture of the shopfloor. The ubiquity and strength of such attitudes is vastly out of proportion to the number of people actually involved in heavy work. Even In so-called light industries, or in highly mechanised factories where the awkwardness of the physical task has long since been reduced, the metaphoric figures of strength, masculinity and reputation still move beneath the more varied and visible forms of workplace culture. Despite the increasing numbers of women employed, the most fundamental ethos of the factory is still profoundly masculine.

Another main theme of shopfloor culture - at least as I observed and recorded it in the manufacturing industries of the Midlands - is the massive attempt to gain informal control of the work process. limitation of output or 'systematic soldiering' and 'gold bricking' have been observed from the particular perspective of manage- ment from Taylor [l]onwards, but there is evidence now of a much more concerted - though still informal - attempt to gain control. It sometimes happens now that t11e men themselves to all intents and purposes actually control at least manning and the speed of production. Again this is effectively mirrored for us by working class kids' attempts, with the aid of the resources of their culture, to take control of classes, substitute their own unofficial timetables, and control their own routines and life spaces. Of course the limit to this similarity is that where 'the lads' can escape entirely, 'work' is done in the factory - at least to the extent of the

production of the cost of subsistence of the worker - and a certain level of activity is seen as necessary and justified. Here is the father of one of 'the lads', a factory hand on a track producing car engines, talking at home:

Actually the foreman, the gaffer, don't run the place, the men run the place. See, I mean you get one of the chaps says, 'Alright, you'm on so and so today'. You can't argue with him. The gaffer don't give you the job, they swop each other about, tek it in turns. Ah, but I mean the job's do!}e. If the gaffer had gi'd you the job you would ... They tried to do it one morn· ing, gi'd a chap a job you know, but he'd been on it, you know, I think he'd been on all week, and they just downed tools( ... ) There's four hard jobs on the track and there's dozens that's ... you know, a child of five could do it, quite honestly, but everybody has their turn. That's organised by the men.

Shopfloor culture also rests on the same fundamental organisational unit as counter-school culture. The informal group locates and makes possible all its other elements. It is the zone where strategies for wresting control of symbolic and real space from official authority are generated and disseminated. It is the massive presence of this informal organisation which most decisively marks off shopfloor culture from middle class cultures of work.

Amongst workers it is also the basis for extensive bartering, arranging 'foreigners' and 'fiddling'. These are expanded forms of the same thing which take place in school amongst 'the lads'.

The informal group on the shopfloor also shows the same attitude to conform· ists and informers as do 'the lads'. 'Winning' things is as widespread on the shopfloor as theft is amongst the lads, and is similarly endorsed by implicit informal criteria. Ostracism is the punishment for not maintaining the integrity of the world in which this is possible against the persistent intrusions of the formal. Here is the father of another of 'the lads' on factory life:

A foreman is like, you know what I mean, they're trying to get on, they're trying to get up. They'd cut everybody's throat to get there. You get people like this in the factory. Course these people cop it in the neck off the workers, they do all the tricks under the sun. You know what I mean, they don't like to see anyone crawlin' ( ... ) Course instead of taking one pair of glasses [from the stores] Jim had two, you see, and a couple of masks and about six pairs o'gloves. Course this Martin was watching and actually two days after we found out that he'd told the foreman see. Had 'im, Jim, in the office about it, the foreman did, and,( ... ) well I mean, his life hasn't been worth living has it? Eh, nobody speaks to him, they won't give him a light, nobody'll give him a light for his fag or nothin' ... Well, he won't do it again, he won't do it again. I mean he puts his kettle on, on the stove of a morning, so they knock it off, don't they, you know, tek all his water out, put sand in, all this kind of thing( ... ) if he cum to the gaffer, 'Somebody's knocked me water over',

or, er, 'They put sand in me cup' and all this business, 'Who is it then?'. 'I don't know who it is'. He11 never find out who it is.

The distinctive form of language and highly developed intimidatory humour of the shopfloor is also very reminiscent of counter-school culture. Many verbal exchanges on the shopfloor are not serious or about work activities. They are jokes, or 'pisstakes', or 'ldddings' or 'windups'. There is a real skill in being able to use this language with fluency: to identify the points on which you are being 'kidded' and to have appropriate responses ready in order to avoid further baiting.

This badinage is necessarily difficult to record on tape or re-present, but the highly distinctive ambience it gives to shopfloor exchanges is widely recognised by those involved, and to some extent recreated· in their accounts of it. This is another foundry worker, father of one of the Hammertown 'lads', talking at home about the atmosphere on his shopfloor:

Oh, there's all sorts, millions of them Uokes]. 'Want to hear what he said about you', and he never said a thing, you know. Course you know the language, at the work like. 'What you been saying about me?' 'I said nothing.' 'Oh you're a bloody liar', and all this.

Associated with this concrete and expressive verbal humour is a well-developed physical humour: essentially the practical joke. These jokes are vigorous, sharp, sometimes cruel, and often hinged around prime tenets of the culture such as disruption of production or subversion of the boss's authority and status. Here is the man who works in a car engine factory:

They play jokes on you, blokes knocking the clamps off the boxes, they put paste on the bottom of' his hammer you know, soft little thing, puts his hammer down, picks it up, gets a handful of paste, you know, all this. So he comes up and gets a syringe and throws it in the big bucket of paste, and it's about that deep, and it goes right to the bottom, you have to put your hand in and get it out ... This is a ftlthy trick, but they do it ( ... ) They asked, the gaffers asked X to make the tea. Well it's fifteen years he's been there and they say 'go and make the tea'. He goes up the toilet, he wets in the tea pot, then makes the tea. I mean, you know, this is the truth this is you know. He says, you know, 'I'll piss in it if I mek it, if they've asked me to mek it'( ... ) so he goes up, wees in the pot, then he puts the tea bag, then he puts the hot water in ( ... ) Y was bad the next morning, one of the gaffers, 'My stomach isn't half upset this morning'. He told them after and they called him for everything, 'You ain't makin' our tea no more'. He says, 'I know I ain't not now'.

It is also interesting that, as in the counter-school culture, many of the jokes circle around the concept of authority itself and around its informal complement, 'grassing'. The same man:

He [Johnny] says, 'Get a couple of pieces of bread pudding Tony [a new worker] we'll have them with our tea this afternoon see. The woman gi'd him some in a bag, he says, 'Now put them in your pocket, you won't have to pay for them when you go past, you know, the till'( ... ) Tony put 'em in his pocket didn't he and walked past with his dinner( ... ) When we come back out the canteen Johnny was telling everybody that he'd [i.e. Tony] pinched two pieces of bread pudding( ... ) he told Fred, one of the foremen see, 'cos Fred knows, I mean ... Johnny says, 'rve got to tell you Fred', he says, 'Tony pinched two pieces of bread pudding', I mean serious, the way they look you know( ... ) he called Johnny for everything, young Tony did, Fred said, 'I want to see you in my office in twenty minutes', straight· faced you know, serious. Oh I mean Johnny, he nearly cried ( ... ) We said, 'It's serious like, you're in trouble, you'IJ get the sack', you know and all this ( ... ) they never laugh. He says, 'What do you think's gonna happen?'. 'Well what can happen, you'll probably get your cards'( ... ) 'Oh what am I gonna do, bleeding Smith up there, he's really done me, I'll do him'. I says, 'Blimey, Tony', I says, 'It ain't right, if other people can't get away with it, why should you 'a' to get away with it'. 'Ooh'. Anyway Fre~ knocked the window, and he says, 'Tell Tony I want him'. He says, 'You've got the sack now Tony', you know. 'Hope I haven't', he says, 'I dunno what I'm gonna do'( ... ) After they cum out, laughing, I said, 'What did he say to you Tony'. He says, 'He asked me if I pinched two pieces of bread pudding', so I couldn't deny it, I said I had. He says, 'Alii want to know is why you didn't bring me two pieces an' all'.

The rejection of school work by 'the lads' and the omnipresent feeling that they know better is also paralleled by a massive feeling on the shopfloor, and in the working class generally, that practice is more important than theory. As a big handwritten sign, borrowed from the back· of a matchbox and put up by one of the workers, announces on one shopfloor: 'An ounce of keenness is worth a whole library of certificates'. The shopfloor abounds with apocryphal stories about the idiocy of purely theoretical knowledge. Practical ability always comes first and is a condition of other kinds of knowledge. Whereas in middle class culture knowledge and qualifications are seen as a way of shifting upwards the whole mode of practical alternatives open to an individual, in working class eyes theory is riveted to particu· lar productive practices. If it cannot earn its keep there, it is to be rejected. This is Spanksy's father talking at home. The fable form underlines the centrality and routinisation of this cultural view of 'theory'.

In Toll End Road there's a garage, and I used to work part·time there and ... there,s an elderly fellow there, been a mechanic all his life, and he must have been seventy years of age then. He was an old Hammertown professional, been a professional boxer once, an elderly chap and he was a practical man, he was practical, right? ... and he told me this( ... ) I was talking to him, was talking about something like this, he says ( ... ) 'This chap was all theory and

he sends away for books about everything', and he says, 'Do you know', he says, 'he sent away for a book once and it came in a wooden box, and it's still in that box 'cos he can't open it'. Now that in't true, is it? But the point is true. That in't true, that didn't happen, but his point is right. He can't get at that box 'cos he don't know how to open the box! Now what's the good of that?

This can be seen as a clear and usually unremarked class function of knowledge. The working class view would be the rational one were it not located in class soci- ety, i.e. that theory is only useful insofar as it really does help to do things, to accomplish practical tasks and change nature. Theory is asked to be in a close dialectic with the material world. For the middle class, more aware of its position in a class society, however, theory is seen partly in its social guise of qualifications as the power to move up the social scale. In this sense theory is well worth having even if it is never applied to nature. It serves its purpose as the means to decide precisely which bit of nature one wants to apply it to, or even to choose not to apply it at all. Paradoxically, the working class distrust and rejection of theory comes partly from a kind of recognition, even in the moment that it oppresses, of the hollowness of theory in its social guise.

Even the non-conformists in the high status grammar school in the most exclus· ive part of the larger conurbation recognise the social essence of theory as it is articulated with practice in our society. For them, qualification is choice and mobility in a class society. It is not simply the ability to do the job better. It is this central realisation, in fact, which characteristically limits their anti-school feeling:

larry ... What I want to do, I want to get me ·A' levels [he had only just finished his '0' levels and decided to carry on to 'A' level] and then go touring the world, then OK, live it fairly rough for a few years, just dossing around, then I'll carry on, but at least then I've got the choice of whether I want to carry on, whether I want to go back and get a decent job. If you've got qualifica· tions, then you can choose what you want to do: if you want to drop out, or whether you want to carry on being part of the system. But if you haven't got, you know ... if I didn't have the qualifications, I don't know what I'd do, this is all according if I get them, but if I do get them, at least I'll know I'll have a choice of whether I want to get a steady job and you know pension scheme, car, two kids and wife and house mortgage and everything like, or whether I just want to roam the world.

It is, of course, the larger class dimension which gives the working class counter· school culture its special edge and resonance in terms of style, its particular force of opposition and its importance as an experiential preparation for entry into working class jobs. Although all forms of institution are likely to breed their own informal

accretions, and although all schools of whatever class always create oppositional cultures, it is the crucial conjunction of institutional opposition with a working class context and mode which gives the special character and significance to 'the lads' ' culture. Institutional opposition has a different meaning according to its class location and expression. The non-conformists in the high status grammar school, although sharing similar attitudes to school, know that they are different from the Hammertown lads. They cannqt through institutional means alone transcend their class location. Ultimately, they have not only a different attitude to qualifications but also an inevitable sense of different social position.

Larry A lot of kids that you've been talking to [in Hammertown], they'd regard us as poufs, 'cos we go to a grammar school. Not only 'cos we go to a grammar school, but because we're from here in the first place which is regarded as a snob area.

Some of the non-confonnist group in the grammar school are, in fact, from working class families. Despite even their origins and anti-school attitude, the lack of a dominant working class ethos within their school culture profoundly separates their experience from 'the lads'. It can also lead to artificial attempts to demon· strate solidarity on the street and with street contacts. That the working class cultural forms of school opposition are creative, specific, borne and reproduced by particular individuals and groups from afresh and in particular contexts ... though always within a class mode - is shown by the cultural awkwardness and separation of such lads. The lack of the collective school based and generated form of the class culture, even despite a working class background and an inclination to op· positional values, considerably weakens their working class identity: John Kids ( ... ) have casually bracketed me as that [a snob] ( ... )

I live near a school called The Links, and there's a lot of kids there, 'Oh he goes to grammar school. Oh'. Well, my attitude's been, I never want to be called anything like that, I think it's really horrible, so for a start, I've never tried to improve my language. I have these basic things of doing things daft, doing things daft. It's mainly just to make sure that everybody knows that I'm not a typical Percival Jones( ... ), he's got a really posh accent, 'Old chap', Lady Byron Lane type [indicating a middle class accent] of person, you know, not one of us kind, proud of the school and all that ( ... ) I've said to kids who've really been getting on my nerves, you know, 'I know I'm better than you', you know, but these things when I muck about, that's trying to make sure that everybody knows I'm not.

It could be suggested that what non-conformists in middle class schools - no matter what their individual origins - are struggling for is some kind of conversion of their institutional opposition into a more resonant working class form. Insofar as they succeed and become influenced by processes discussed in the rest of the book,

so does their future 'suffer'. Insofar as they fail, or insofar as, for instance, con· formist working class boys in a working class school are insulated from working class culture, and become free from its processes, so they are likely to 'succeed'. Cultural location, especially in terms of shifts between patterns, is a much better model for explaining social mobility than is the mechanistic undialectical notion of 'intelligence'.

Institutional fonn

No matter how hard the creation, self-making and winning of counter-school culture, it must, then, be placed within a larger pattern of working class culture. This should not lead us however, to think that this culture is all of a piece, undif· ferentiated or composed of standard clonal culture modules spontaneously re· producing themselves in an inevitable pattern.

Class cultures are created specifically, concretely in determinate conditions, and in particular oppositions. They arise through definite struggles over time with other groups, institutions and tendencies. Particular manifestations of the culture arise in particular circumstances with their own form of marshalling and developing of familiar themes. The themes are shared between particular manifestations because all locations at the same level in a class ·society share similar basic structural prop· erties, and the working class people there face similar problems and are subject to similar ideological constructions. In addition, the class culture is supported by massive webs of informal groupings and countless overlappings of experience, so that central themes and ideas can develop and be influential in practical situations where their direct logic may not be the most appropriate. A pool of styles, mean· ings and possibilities are continuously reproduced and always available for those who turn in some way from the formalised and official accounts of their position and look for more realistic interpretations of, or relationship to, their domination. As these themes are taken up and recreated in concrete settings, they are repro· duced and strengthened and made further available as resources for others in similar structural situations.

However, these processes of borrowing, regeneration and return in particular social regions are not often recognised by those concerned as class processes. Neither the institutionalised, customary and habitual forms in which domination is mediated from basic structural inequality, nor the regional forms in which they are broken out of, opposed and transformed, are recognised for what they are. This is partly· because social regions and their institutional supports and relationships really do have a degree of autonomy and separateness from each other and the rest of the social system. They have their own procedures, rules and characteristic ideological balances. They have their own legitimising beliefs, their own particular circles of inversion and informality.

Despite their similarity, it is a mistake, therefore, to reduce particular social forms and regions too quickly to the obvious central class dynamics of domination

and resistance. They have simultaneously both a local, or institutional, logic and a larger class logic. The larger class logic could not develop and be articulated without these regional instances of struggle, nor could, however, these instances be differentiated internally and structured systematically in relation to other instances and the reproduction of the whole without the larger logic.

The state school in advanced capitalism, and the most obvious manifestations of oppositional working class culture within it, provide us with a central case of mediated class conflict and of class reproduction in the capitalist order. It is especially significant in showing us a circle of unintended consequences which act finally to reproduce not only a regional culture but the class culture and also the structure of society itself.

Emergence of opposition

Even if there is some form of social division in the junior school, in the first years of the secondary school everyone, it seems, is an 'ear' ole'. Even the few who come to the school with a developed delinquent eye for the social landscape behave in a conformist way because of the lack of any visible support group:

[In a group discussion] Spike In the first year . . . I could spot the ear'oles. I knew who the

fucking high boys was, just looking at 'em walking around the playground - first day I was there ( ... ) I was just quiet for the first two weeks, I just kept meself to meself like, not knowing anybody, it took me two yean to get in with a few mates. But, er ... after that, the thitd year was a right fucking year, fights, having to go to teachers a lot ...

In the second to fourth years, however, some individuals break from this pattern. From the point of view of the student this break is the outstanding landmark of his school life, and is remembered with clarity and zest. 'Coming out' as a 'lad' is a personal accomplishment:

[In an individual interview] Joey And in the second year, I thought, 'This is a fucking dead loss',

'cos I'd got no real mates, I saw all the kids palling up with each other, and I thought, 'It's a fucking dead loss, you've got to have someone to knock about with'. So I cracked eyes on Noah and Benson, two kids who weren't in the group, fucking Benson, summat's happened to Benson, summat terrible, he's really turned fucking ear'ole now, but I still like him, he still makes me laff. He can't say his r's properly ( ... ) but I clocked ... I seen these two, 'cos our mum used to be at work then, and our dad used to go out at night, so I grabbed them and I said, •J>o you want to come down to our fucking house tonight?', and skin· heads just starting up then, and I think Benson and them had

the first fucking levis and monkey boots. And I started knocking about with them, they came down the first night, and we drank a lot of whisky, and I pretended to be fucking drunk like, which we warn't, and it was from there on. We parted off from the rest ( ... ) we always used to sit together, we used to start playing up wild, like, ~cos playing up i~ them days was fucking hitting each other with rulers, and talking, and it just stemmed from there. And Bill started to come with us, Fred and then Spike ... And from then on it just escalated, just came more and more separated. We used to go out of nights, and carrying on from hitting each other with rulers we used to fucking chuck bottles at each other, so the major occupation was roaming around the streets, looking for bottles to lam at each other. And from that came a bit of vandalism, here and there like.

[In a group discussion] Fred It's the second year I went astray. Me and Spike first, I used to

come, I come twelfth in the first years or twelfth in the second years and then I met Bill and all them ( ... ) we went out with them one night, picked up a big crate of bleeding bottles, Bill and them did. I thought if I don't do it they're goin' to think I'm a right wanker .. : Picked up a crate of bottles, threw them, me and Spike you know, shit ourselves like, we was down the end of the road before they'd even started running, and then Bill threw bricks and all this you know, and scratching cars, fucking hell.

'The lads' themselves very rarely identify any deep causes for the changes they describe so vividly. Apparently for them it really is a question of the need for friendship or even of accidental causality - sitting by so and so in class, meeting 'the lads' at night by chance or being 'called for' unexpectedly. Of course these accounts do testify to the importance of the group in the change.

Staff too notice these dramatic changes and are not short of explanations. Kids start 'lording it about' and develop 'wrong attitudes' because they become exposed to 'bad influences'. The 'bad influences' arise from behaviour attributed, in the first place, to individual pathology: 'He's made of rubber, there's nothing to him at all', 'If you want the truth, you just take the opposite of what he says', 'He's a mixed up lad, no idea where he's going', 'He worries me stiff, his personality is deficient'. The counter·school culture arises from permutations of these character deficiencies in relation to 'the impressionable'. We have the classic model of a minority of 'troublemakers' being followed by the misguided majority:

Deputy Joey is the outstanding one as far as follow my leader is con· head cerned ( ... ) Spike being the barrack room lawyer would support

him, and those two did the stirring ( ... ) and Will is easily led.

It is interesting generally to note just how much teachers personalise, and base observations about kids - themselves lost in social and class processes - on what are taken to be concrete individual characteristics. Verbal comments start with 'I like' or 'I haven't much time for', and accounts are interrupted - in a way which is presented as illuminating - with ' ... a bloody good lad too', or ' ... a bad lot altogether, have you seen his dad?' Written school leaving and other reports clearly demonstrate notions of pathology in relation to a basic social model of the leaders and the led:

[Joey] proved himself to be a young man of intelligence and ability who could have done well at most subjects, but decided that he did not want to work to develop this talent to the full and allowed not only his standard of work to deterioriate, except for English, but also attendance and behaviour ( ... ) too often his qualities of leadership were misplaced and not used on behalf of the school.

[Spanksy] in the first three years was a most co-operative and active member of school. He took part in the school council, school play and school choir in this period and represented the school at cricket, football and cross-country events. Unfortunately, this good start did not last and his whole manner and attitude changed. He did not try to develop his ability in either academic or practical skills ( ... ) his early pleasant and cheerful manner deteriorated and he became a most unco-operative member of the school ( ... ) hindered by negative attitudes.

[Eddie's] conduct and behaviour was very inconsistent and on occasions totally unacceptable to the school. A lack of self-discipline was apparent and a tendency to be swayed by group behaviour revealed itself.

Explanations involving random causality or pathology may or may not hold elements of truth. Certainly they are necessary explanations-in-use for teachers trying to run a school and make decisions in the contemporary situation; they will not do, however, as proper social explanations for the development of an anti· school culture.

Differentiation and the teaching paradigm

The particular process by which working class culture creatively manifests itself ~s a concrete form within, and separates itself from even as it is influenced by, the particular institution I shall call differentiation. Differentiation is the process whereby the typical exchanges expected in the formal institutional paradigm are reinterpreted, separated and discriminated with respect to working class interests, feelings and meanings. Its dynamic is opposition to the institution which is taken up and reverberated and given a form of reference to the larger themes and issues of

the class culture. Integration is the opposite of differentiation and is the process whereby class oppositions and intentions are redefined, truncated and deposited within sets of apparently legitimate institutional relationships and exchanges. Where differentiation is the instrusion of the informal into the formal, integration is the progressive constitution of the informal into the formal or official paradigm. It may be suggested that all institutions hold a balance between differentiation and integration, and that differentiation is by no means synonymous with breakdown or failure in function. Indeed, as I will go on to argue, it is the aspects of differenti- ation in the make up of an institution, and its effects upon particular social regions, which allow it to play a successful, if mystifying, role in social reproduction. Differentiation is experienced by those concerned as, on the one hand, a collective process of learning whereby the self and its future are critically separated from the pre-given institutional definitions and, on the other hand, by institutional agents, as inexplicable breakdown, resistance and opposition. What is produced, on the one side, are working class themes and activities reworked and reproduced into particu- lar institutional forms and, on the other, retrenchment, hardening, or softening - all variants of a response to loss of legitimacy - of the formal institutional paradigm. Within the institution of the school the essential official paradigm concerns a particular view of teaching and its differentiation produces forms of the counter- school culture.

There are a number of possible relationships between teacher and taught. Recent years have seen a wide variety of experiments and developments as well as a more recent retrenchment and self-examination in this country under the auspices of Callaghan's 'great debate' on teaching.[2] I want to outline the basic teaching paradigm which I suggest locates all others- even as they attempt to go beyond it- and which, I would argue, remains massively dominant in our schools. Whether modified or not, near to the surface or not, its structure is common to all the varied main forms of classroom teaching.

Teachers know quite well that teaching is essentially a relationship between potential contenders for supremacy. It makes sense to speak of, and it does feel like, •winning and losing':

Deputy head

It's a funny thing ( ... ) you get a situation where you've got a class or a boy and you think, 'God, he's beaten me', but the dividing line is so close, push a bit harder and you're over, and you're there ( ... ) this is surprising about kids who are supposed to be dull. They will find a teacher's weakness as quickly as any lad.

Yet the teacher's actual power of direct coercion in modern society is very limited. The kids heavily outnumber the teachers and sanctions can be run through with frightening rapidity. The young teacher often wants a show of force to back him up; the experienced teacher knows that the big guns can only fire once:

Deputy head

Head

You see we have very few sanctions and punishments we can apply. Very few indeed. So it's a question of spacing them out and according them as much gravity as you can. And we've got a reporting system with the staff now, whereby eventually they get through as far as me, the head's the ultimate, the next ulti- mate in the range ( ... ) You can't go throwing suspensions around all the time. Uke the football referees today, I mean they're failing because they're reduced to the ultimate so quickly somehow ( ... ) the yellow card comes out first of all, and once they've done that, they've either got to send the player off or ignore everything else he does in the game( ... )

If enough people set out in defiance of anything ... if all my boys tomorrow in school decide to do something wrong, what chance have I got?

The teacher's authority must therefore be won and maintained on moral not coercive grounds. There must be consent from the taught. However, the permanent battle to assert and legitimate a personal moral supremacy, especially with limited personal power, is tiring and not really a viable strategy for the long term. Sleight of hand is involved. It is this which marks off the 'experienced' teacher. It is the le~rning of the relative autonomy of the teaching paradigm: the recognition that the ideal of teaching is related only variably to particular individuals. It is the idea of the teacher, not the individual, which is legitimised and commands obedience.

This idea concerns teaching as a fair exchange - most basically of knowledge for respect, of guidance for control. Since knowledge is the rarer commodity this gives the teacher his moral superiority. This is the dominant educational paradigm which stands outside particular teachers but enables them to exert control legitimately upon the children. It is legitimated in general because it provides equivalents which can enter into other successive exchanges which are to the advantage of the individ· ual. The most important chain of exchanges is, of course, that of knowledge for qualifications, qualified activity for high pay, and pay for goods and services. The educational is, therefore, the key to many other exchanges.

All of these exchanges are supported in structures which hold and help to define, as well as being themselves to some extent created and maintained by, the particular transaction. The educational exchange is held in a defining framework which establishes an axis of the superiority of the teacher in a particular way. Whilst the exchange and its 'fairness' is open to view and is the basis for consent, the framework which hold and defines the terms is both less explicit and in some ways more powerful. It must be considered as an integral part of our basic view of the teaching paradigm. The exchange spins, as it were, like a giro in this framework which it thus helps to stabilise and orientate. But the framework must be secured and ensured by other means as well. It must be capable both of enforcing definitions to some degree where the exchange itself cannot generate them (which is, of course, the case for such as 'the lads'), and to reinforce the exchange, where it is successful,

by guaranteeing the equivalents, the concrete referents, external signs and visible supports.

This framework or axis is held by the school on the material basis of its build- ings, organisation, timetable and hierarchy. It is sanctioned (in normal times) by dominant cultural and social values and backed up in the last analysis by larger state apparatuses. The final if messy breakdown of Tyndale,[4) .the public enquiry and suspension of seven teachers, shows us on what ultimate basis our other schools stay open. Within the school 'good teaching' is maintained only by the proper establishment and reproduction of this axis. Usually much short of any direct force the establishment of the often implicit structural axis necessary for the explicit teaching paradigm proceeds through the 'slow drip' and the suppression of other or private meanings which might tilt the axis, devalue the teacher's knowledge, or make responses other than politeness appropriate.

Deputy head

In telling them off, you've got to make them feel ever so small, to think, 'Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't realise'. If you can get them like that, not where you're making them flinch or necessarily cry, the way you can make them realise that you are very upset, or I am very upset, with what has happened, and give them the very good reasons for being upset, you know, convince them that they are a bloody nuisance, if you like, once you get to that stage, I mean, thiit's the way to tell them off. If you do call a kid a shit bag, you get nowhere do you, he'll call you one back.

The school is the agency of face to face control par excellence. The stern look of the inquiring teacher; the relentless pursuit of 'the truth' set up as a value even above good behaviour; the common weapon of ridicule; the techniques learned over time whereby particular troublemakers can 'always be reduced to tears'; the stereo· typed deputy head, body poised, head lowered, finger jabbing the culprit; the head unexpectedly bearing down on a group in the corridor - these are ·all tactics for exposing and destroying, or ffeezing, the private.· What successful conventional teaching cannot tolerate is private reservation, and in the early forms in virtually any school it is plain to see that most kids yield that capacity willingly. The eager first form hands reaching and snapping to answer first are all seeking approval from an acknowledged superior in a very particular institutional form. And in the individual competition for approval the possibility of any private reservations becoming shared to form any oppositional definition of the situation is decisively controlled.

The relative independence of the paradigm from particular teachers, and the importance of this separation is demonstrated nicely when teachers specifically reverse the teacher/pupil role. They are exploiting the degree to which the educa· tional paradigm has been internalised by - or at least has a degree of legitimacy for - the student.

Head To actually have to impose a punishment on a fifth year person . . . you try to avoid anything inasmuch as you put them in the position, then you ... I think you can make them see from there. I say to these kids quite often, 'What shall I do about it, you say you're old enough to know, what shall we do about it? You get in my chair, now I'll stand over there, now you tell me what you're going to do about it?'.

Discipline becomes a matter not of punishment for wrongs committed in the old testament sense, but of maintaining the institutional axis, of reproducing the social relationships of the school in general: of inducing respect for elemental frameworks in which other transactions can take place.

Deputy If you can catch them you do, and you make hay of it. But only head to impress on them, of course, that you can't do as you please in

this life, and you can't break rules ( ... ) every time you bring home to them something thafs gone wrong, then it does some good somewhere.

It should also be noted that the basic framework and the teaching paradigm stretch upwards as well, and that deviation from it amongst staff is regarded in an equally pathological light. The position of all teachers, and of the young teacher especially, both in learning their performance as an embodiment of the abstract educational paradigm, maintaining and reproducing what makes it possible, and in fulfilling an expected relationship with other staff, can be extremely exacting:

Deputy head

You've got to be seen to be a man of great integrity, a man who's honest, a man who's just ... now if you become all these things to a member of staff, you can tear a ruddy great strip off him, and the respect will still be there ( ... ) they know damn well that when they've done something wrong, they've done something wrong. They know when they've done it wrong, and if they're told off, they haven't a leg to stand on, so ... Some of them argue, of course, out of sheer defence due to some character deficiency, but the fact remains, they know deep down, you can't cheat in golf and you can't cheat at this game either.

It is the moral intensity of maintaining this axis and attempting to exclude or suppress the contradictory, murky cross-currents of normal life which can give to the school a cloying, claustrophobic feel of arrested adolescence. Everything ultimately turns on the fair exchange and the maintenance of the axis which makes it possible. In this sense the school is a kind of totalitarian regime. There is rela· tively little direct coercion or oppression, but an enormous constriction of the range of moral possibilities. Everything is neatly tied in, every story has the same ending, every analogy has the same analogue. The word 'co-operation' - the

common-sense-in-use term for the exchange of 'equivalents'- creeps in everywhere. It is what has not happened when one is punished. It is what has happened when one is rewarded, ironically often by early release from the very system one has excelled in.

Perhaps the essence of the fair exchange, the quality of the axis which supports it, and the nature of the attempts to maintain it are best illustrated by program- matic statements made in what is still widely regarded as the ritual keystone of the institution of the school: morning assembly. This is the head talking to the school after his office had been broken into and human faeces deposited under his chair:

I respect you, I respect your abilities. In some areas your abilities are greater than mine. I accept that ( ... ) Last Friday I was feeling pretty low after I found out about this lot, I thought, there's not much here to respect ... but then I went to football on Saturday, there were several lads and teachers there, playing their hearts out, or giving up their time just for the school, and then I thought, 'Perhaps it's not so bad after aW ... I do 'respect your talents and abilities ... but I expect you to respect my talents as a teacher, and accept what I say ... It's difficult to distinguish between the real and the plastic today ... What's best to swallow isn't always best to eat. It's not always the most brightly packaged item that's best to eat. Here we're trying to do what's best for you, really help you, not give you the easy way out ... •

It is of the utmost importance to appreciate that the exchange relationship in the educational paradigm is not primarily in terms of its own logic a relationship between social classes or in any sense at all a self-conscious attempt on the part of teachers to dominate or suppress either working class individuals or working class culture as such. The teachers, particularly the senior teachers of the Hammertown school, are dedicated, honest and forthright and by their own lights doing an exacting job with patience and humanity. Certainly it would be quite wrong to attribute to them any kind of sinister motive such as miseducating or oppressing working class kids. The teacher is given formal control of his pupils by the state, but he exerts his social control through an educational, not a class, paradigm.

It is important to realise just how far the teaching paradigm and especially the axis of control and definition which makes it possible are clearly bound up, sup· ported and underwritten in countless small and in certain large, as it were, architect- ural ways by the material structure, organisation and practices of the school as we know it in our society.

In a simple physical sense school students, and their possible views of the peda- gogic situation, are subordinated by the constricted and inferior space they occupy. Sitting in tight ranked desks in front of the larger teacher's desk; deprived of private space themselves but outside nervously knocking the forbidden staff room door or the headmaster's door with its foreign rolling country beyond; surrounded by locked up or out of bounds rooms, gyms and equipment cupboards; cleared out of school at break with no quarter given even in the unprivate toilets; told to walk at least two feet away from staff cars in the drive - all of these things help to

determine a certain orientation to the physical environment and behind that to a certain kind of social organisation. They speak to the whole position of the student. [ 5]

The social organisation of the school reinforces this relationship. The careful bell rung timetable; the elaborate rituals of patience and respect outside the staff room door and in the classroom where even cheeky comments are prefaced with 'sir'; compulsory attendance and visible staff hierarchies - all these things assert the superiority of staff and of their world. And, of course, finally it is the staff who are the controllers most basically and despite the advent of 'resources centres' of what is implied to be the scarce and valuable commodity of knowledge. The value of knowledge to be exchanged in the teaching paradigm derives not only from an external definition of its worth or importance for qualifications and mobility but also from its protected institutional role: its disposition is the prerogative of the powerful. Teachers distribute text books as if they owned them and behave like outraged, vandalised householders when they are lost, destroyed or defaced; teachers keep the keys and permissions for the cupboards, libraries and desks; they plan courses and initiate discussions, start and end the classes.

Of course much of this is obvious and apparently dictated by 'necessity'. It is perhaps difficult for us to imagine the school in any manner which is basically different or dictated by other 'necessities'. But our familiarity with the institution of the school in our society should not obscure the way in which its accepted material infrastructure and organisation underwrites specific kinds of pedagogic options and places a firm limit on the range of possible change. What is 'obvious' in one instance cannot be forgotten in another.

It is especially important to bear this material limit in mind when considering the extent to which what I have called the basic teaching paradigm can be and is modified in practice. Certainly many teachers would deny that their teaching relationship was so simple or structured, and there have indeed been many pressures towards change from below and from above. Leaving aside individualistic, stoic or heroic solutions there seem to be two main sets of (linked) variants of the basic paradigm identifiable in school: those from 'below' and those from 'above'. Essentially, I argue, both are responses to differentiation, or the fear of differentia- tion, whether or not this occurs in particular cases as a direct response to oppo· sition or as an aspect of overall school policy. Neither modify the material basis and organisation of the school in any significant way. No matter what their internal ideologies or justifications, they are attempts, I argue, to re-integrate the same basic paradigm on a somewhat different and wider footing.

Many experienced teachers in working class schools sense a potential weakness in the hold of the basic paradigm on their 'less able', disinterested and disaffected students and seek to modify one of its terms in some way or another. Perhaps the classic move here, and one which is absolutely typical of the old secondary modern school and still widespread in working class comprehensives, is the revision from an objective to a moral basis of what is in the teacher's gift and is to be exchanged by

him for obedience, politeness and respect from the students. This is the crucial shift and mystification in many forms of cultural and social exchange between unequal territories in late capitalist, society: that the objective nature of the 'equivalents' are transmuted into the fog of moral commitment, humanism and social responsibility. A real exchange becomes an ideal exchange. The importance of all this is not, of course, that the values and stances involved might be admirable or execrable, correct or incorrect, or whatever. The point is a formal one: the moral term, unlike the objective one, is capable of infinite extension and assimilation because it has no real existence except in itself. The real world cannot act as a court of appeal. Moral definitions make their own momentum. So far as the basic teach· ing paradigm is concerned what it is worth the student striving for becomes, not knowledge and the promise of qualification, but somehow deference and politeness themselves - those things which are associated certainly with academic and other kinds of success but are only actually their cost and precondition. The shift implies that such qualities are desirable in their own right, detachable from the particular project and negotiable for themselves in the market place of jobs and social esteem.

The pivotal notion of 'attitudes' and particularly of 'right attitudes' makes its entry here. Its presence should always warn us of a mystiflcatory transmutation of basic exchange relationships into illusory, ideal ones. If one approaches school and its authority, it seems, with the 'right attitude' then employers and work will also be approached with the 'right attitude' in such a way indeed that real social and economic advances can be made - all without the help of academic achievement or success. Of course this crucial move renders the basic paradigm strictly circular and tautological since the same thing is being offered on both sides without any dis- junctions or transformations occurring io the circle of the relationship. What the student gets all round is deference and subordination to authority. He could learn this for himself. The objective tautology which turns on that too little examined category, 'the right attitude' does not necessarily damage the basic paradigm so long as its nature remains concealed or mystified. Indeed insofar as it maintains the tempo of apparently fair exchange, reinforces the institutionally defined axis and restrains other tendencies this modification strengthens the basic paradigm. It keeps its giro spinning.

These modifications of the teaching paradigm and associated views on life chances and the nature of reward are usually held quite sincerely by the individual teacher and are in no sense machiavellian. This is a powerful reason, of course, for their effectiveness. Often the whole is integrated by a genuinely and strongly-held conservative ethic concerning the organic, harmonious society.

A senior teacher at the Hammer- town school

There must be hewers of wood and drawers of water. This is an inescapable fact and people tend to look down on the lad, 'Well, of course, he's gone on the milk round'. But you think of your own milkman. Is he doing a good job in the community? Is he a pleasant fellow? Does he give you good service? And as the answer to all those is 'yes', what the hell's wrong with him,

why should we look down on him? I think it's dreadful and I'm not a socialist, but I do think it's dreadful. Most of our milkmen are blooming charming blokes. 'Morning Sir', I say that to him, why shouldn't I? Invariably he says the same sort of thing back and this boosts your ego. But the fact remains that you can still say good morning sir to the milkman and why the hell shouldn't you. I mean, you have a respect for him as a human being and the job he's doing, and you hope to God he's got one for you. I know there's no such thing as altruism but there you are( ... ) talking in terms of sheer academic ability( ... ) little Jimmy's as thick as two short planks (but) he'd make a marvellous milkman or breadman. And you know it's considered, 'Well, he'll have to go on the milk won't he', instead of saying, 'Just the job for you, you've got personality, you're honest with money, you like people, ideal', you know, so the kid thinks, 'I'm getting the right job, I'm going places'. Why shouldn't they think that? They are, it isn't a question of earning less money than anybody else these days, 'cos they earn good money.

Another, so to speak, grass roots variant of the basic paradigm is also a product of long experience in the school. It concerns a revision of the other item in the expected exchange - respect, politeness and what is expected from the students. Quite simply not much is expected and there is no particular moral indignation when it does not come. Allied with this is often a non-programmatic interest in providing useful information where possible. Though this represents an unillusioned reduction of the teaching relationship, and provides the elements towards a realistic assessment of what is actually possible with disaffected kids, it still remains within the basic paradigm since institutional control remains the essential stake and no effort is made to change the material arrangements and organisation of the school. The yielding of some ground to the students and to their definitions and interests is made in the interests of ensuring a more basic control. The fundamental axis of the teaching relationship is maintained by accepting with good grace battles which are already lost- and making sure that the really important battles can never be fought. Such educational views are often associated with what might be called a pragmatic, not over-hopeful and poorly integrated solidarity with the working class - an uneasy but fatalistic sense of their basic oppression. A senior teacher at the Hammer- town school

I've never been one who thinks we are really teaching these lads ( ... ) even if they are reacting away from the school, they're still experiencing, still growing up, and our job is to listen to them, be around, be there to be argued with( ... ) and we might get something in on the side, quickly( ... ) With the fifth [year] I reckon it's careful containment, we give them little bits you know, let them think they're big tough men getting their own way, but in all the important things they're doing what you

want ... you know, don't confront them, let them think it's going their way. •

The other basic set of variants of the teaching paradigm observable in schools come, so to speak, from 'above'. They enjoy a more public and influential proven- ance, but turn, I argue, on the same broadening and redefinition of the exchange relationship and acceptance of what is basically the same if somewhat modified material structure and organisation of the school. In situ, at least, it concerns reintegration of a differentiated or threatened teaching paradigm.

'Relevant' education proposes that the teacher of the non-academic working class child should start off from where the child is in terms of his/her own interests, rather than from the distanced interests of an academic subject. The local neigh- bourhood, work, tax matters and dealing with officials, and civics should be the curricula of the boys; home-making, family life and bringing up children those of the girls; and popular music, art and the mass media are to be studied by both. 'Progressivism' suggests that activities should not be imposed, but encouraged: approaches are 'child centred' rather than 'subject centred'; 'individual programmes' allow children to go at their own speed; and 'team teaching' opens up the widest resources possible to the children. In Britain these techniques have made the greatest inroads in the primary sector of education, and have been steadily spread- ing upwards. In the case of the non-academic at least, progressivism and relevance are usually taken together to denote the new specialised, liberal techniques first germinated in specialist centres, universities and colleges.

These ideas and techniques have had a thorough political and theoretical airing. (6] They have been linked to changes in social democratic thought generally since the war and have been the subject of a massive literature and expenditure in research. These are specific determinants and there has been a strong and clear thread of relatively independent theoretical developments which have produced their own concrete techniques and pedagogic objectives at that level. Certainly this whole debate and corpus of intellectual work may well have given a form to, and set limits for, educational reform, but I would argue that they have in no real sense determined downwards a new pedagogic practice. In the actual school the two main approaches anyway have an 'elective affinity' with patterns I previously character- ised as from 'below'. Though they are interlinked, relevance is concerned mainly with what the teacher offers, and progressivism with how the child is suppostd to respond. Teachers select from the repertoire of teaching styles and developments which are currently available to deal with the problems as they know them. These still centre on the maintenance of the basic teaching paradigm- which seems the only possible one and which is anyway minutely supported by material infra· structures which have been only marginally changed. The 'new' techniques may or may not have had a radical genesis (there is certainly a case here to be argued for progressivism) but they have been taken up on very different and more ancient grounds. If the new techniques seemed revolutionary they were profoundly post· revolutionary solutions to pre-revolutionary problems. They have been taken up

often, in real situations, for control purposes or for the justification and rational- isation of existing tendencies. For those concerned with the 'permissiveness' and 'breakdown' of schools using the 'new' techniques it may seem strange to argue that they are actually mobilised to reintegrate failed or threatened traditional models. The alacrity with which some schools, under the pressure of the great debate, straightened circumstances, and return to a somewhat more authoritarian general climate, are further integrating, or attempting to, the teaching paradigm into something very much like the old model, might reassure them that the fundamental issue has always been the same no matter how it is represented at other levels. It will be much easier than it is commonly supposed to 'modify', 'restrain', 'redirect' the 'new permissiveness'. In its essentials the 'great debate' is a fraud which will not and cannot touch the real questions concerning the teaching paradigm and its material supports.

During differentiation the basic paradigm (no matter how modified) is to some extent delegitimised. The teacher's superiority is denied because the axis in which it is held has been partially dislodged. Because what the teacher offers is seen to be less than an equivalent the establishment of the framework which guarantees the teaching exchange is regarded with suspicion and is seen more and more obviously in its repressive mode. For 'the lads' other ways of valuing the self and other kinds of possible exchange present themselves. The teacher's authority becomes increas- ingly the random one of the prison guard, not the necessary one of the pedagogue. Where 'the private' was penetrated and controlled before it now becomes shared, powerful and oppositional. In a system where exchange of knowledge and the educational paradigm is used as a form of social control, denial of knowledge and refusal of its educational •equivalent', respec~, can be used as a barrier to control. 'The lads' become 'ignorant', 'awkward' and 'disobedient'. It should be noted that measured intelli~ence and exam results in general are much more likely to be based on the individual's position in this social configuration of knowledge than on his 'innate' abilities. Furthermore, many of an individual's 'personal characteristics' should be understood in this social sense rather than in an individual sense.

At any rate the challenge to the formal paradigm, and re-evaluation of the self and the group, comes from those 'private' areas now shared and made visible which were held in check before. These private areas are nothing more nor less, of course, than the class experiences of the working class boy and derive basically from outside the school. Where the basic paradigm excludes class from the educational realm, its differentiation invites it in.

It is interesting to trace in the earlier accounts of how individuals joined 'the lads', just how the development, both of the culture, and of the individuals in or moving towards it, starts from the school and steadily moves out to the street and neighbourhood, drawing with it a larger and larger content of working class values, attitudes and practices. It is clearly this expanding area which supplies informal and unofficial materials for the differentiation of the educational paradigm in the school. Where the cultural location of the school is not working class, then there is of course a different set-up: there is much less for the educational paradigm to be

differentiated with respect to, and therefore a much greater possibility of the paradigm holding in the long run.

In the working class area, though, there is a huge reservoir of class feeling to be drawn upon once trust has been decisively withdrawn from the school. Neighbour· hood, street and the larger symbolic articulations of working class youth cultures supply themes for, and are themselves strengthened dialectically by counter· school culture. Of course parents and family are very important and influential bearers of working class culture too. Stories are told in the home about shopfloor culture, the things which happen and the attitudes which prevail there - especially attitudes towards authority. The language in the home reproduces (minus the swearwords) that of work culture. There is also a characteristic division of labour and a form of male supremacy in the home. The man earns the living and does practical work around the house, and the wife works for the 'extras' and services the needs of the family. There is also an interface here with the more extreme aspectS of working class culture so that the father may 'tip the wink' occasionally about what to do in a fight ('Get one in, then ask questions') or how to approach theft ('Small fish are sweet, son').

Nevertheless parents should only be considered as one set - though important - of many possible 'bearers' of working class culture. Not all parents act in the same way or share the same values. Parents have their own complex and creative relations to class themes and in no sense press ,their children into a simple standard working class mould. There is a degree of relative independence between parents and kids. Some very conformist, 'respectable' parents who visit the school and try to back it up in everything have kids who inexplicably, to them, 'go wrong' and join 'the lads'. Other parents who are indifferent or even hostile to the school have 'ear' ole' kids- sometimes to their discomfort and dislike. We should be wary of any mechanistic analysis arising from particular indicators such as 'parental attitude'.

Still, there is an undoubted sense in which working class values and feelings - importantly though not always borne by parents - work against the ·school and provide concrete materials for differentiation. Spanksy's father, for instance, voices a profound working class suspicion of formal institutions and their modes of working. tntimately he is not willing to legitimise the teacher's authority either. It is seen as basically artificial even though fearsome as it exploits, for instance, his own felt weakness in expression. Here he is talking about the last school open nighJ he had attended:

The headmaster irritated me, I can't put me finger on it now ... 'cos I could see ... could see, I was 'im, I was 'im, I was standing there, and I was 'im. I thought, 'Aye, aye, he's talking to hisselr, you know, wa'nt talking to me( ... ) he put my back up( ... ) and then there was this person, you know, family, father or some· thing, instead of coming out, asking the teacher a question he knew what he'd gotta ask, he knew what answer he wanted to get, you see, I don't know how to explain it, like. I thought like,

PW Father Mother

PW Mother Father

'Mate you'm only asking that question, just to let people know you'm in the room', know what I mean, •cos he wasn't listening to the bloke's answer, he'd already accepted whatever the bloke was going to say was right, you know what I mean, how can I explain that. I don't know how to put it ... See now, I can't get up in a room and talk against teachers, like, I couldn't talk against you, because I'd be flabbergasted, I'd be 'umming' and 'ahhing', and I'd be worried stiff you know( ... ) I dunno how to say it, how to put it, 'cos I'd look around me and I'd think, 'These people don't want to know anyway'( ... ) If I could have been in a room with 'im [the head] you know on his own, with· out anybody hearing us, I could have said ... Could have said what? You're full of bull. They say, 'Children's night', go down, they ain't interested really in what you'm saying, am they? They don't want to know. What's the whole thing in aid of then? I don't know. l·think it's trying to show you what good they'm doing for your kid ( ... ) They don't tell what they'm doin' wrong for him, they tell you exactly what they're doing right for 'em, what good they're doing.

The letter of invitation for the open night has a tear-off strip saying that u.nless. it is filled in and returned the head will assume parents are not going. It also says that questions must be submitted in writing beforehand and that only selected questions will be called Even staff underline and put exclamation marks after the part of the information sheet which reads: 'Walk round the school and see for yourself exactly how the school works day to day'. Add to this the curiously pompous and elliptical style which can be used to parents al>out their children's misbehaviour (Spanksy's father received a letter beginning, 'I would like to discuss with you your son's possible future in the school' .- my italics) and it can be seen that this working class mistrust is responding to something real. This is not necessarily a criticism of the school. It is doing its own job well in its own terms. But the axis of moral authority underlying its certainties and its style is quite different from the profane confusions, compromises and underlying spirit of resistance in working class culture. Once the working class boy begins to differentiate himself from school authority there is a powerful cultural charge behind him to complete the process:

[In an individual interview] Spanksy He [father] doesn't want me to cheek the teachers, but he

wouldn't want me to be a wanker, sitting there working, you know ... My old man called me an ear'ole once, in the second years, playing football and com in' to the school. It upset me it did, I was surprised ( ... ) I'd like to be like him, you know, he

can't stand no bull, if anybody tries it on him, he hates it. It's the same with me, I think I'm gonna be little and fat like him, Pd love to be. I'd love to be like him, he's a great bloke.

It is not quite that the parents become any more influential during the period of differentiation, of return to, and regeneration of, working class themes. In a crucial sense they become less influential as their world becomes more so. The develop- ment of the young boy and his growing cultural confidence often put him in a role of competition with his father and a kind of attempted half-domination of his mother. He becomes not so much like his father as of the same world: the working class male world of independence, physicality and symbolic intimidation - and standing up to these things. The boy becomes a force to be reckoned with in this world. Despite filial affection there can be a definite tension in the domestic atmosphere where 'measuring up to dad' can mean being able 'to put one on 'im'. Often parents say 1 'He goes his own way 1 like they do', or 'You can't tell 'im a thing', or there is a fatalistic recognition that certain profound cultural processes are already in train strengthened especially by the need for cash.

Spanksy's This is probably one factor you don't ... People don't probably father think it's important, is money today. There's a group of chaps

here, they go out every day ( ... ) then there's little [his son), 'cos he goes to school, he has to rely on me to give him a pound. I can't afford to give him any more but how does he feel amongst them others. Education's gone by the board now, they'm out there ain't they. Somewhere to go, a discotheque or something, they go and buy sandwiches, ice cream, cake ... can't, he ain't got it, he's the same age as them or he might be a few months younger you know ( ... ) Education is right at the back of their minds you see. Their pockets you see, that's in their minds.

From the boy's side this fatalism can come across as indifference. This under- lines the harsh importance of finding your own way through.

[In an individual interview] Joey I asked the old lady ... 'Ain't you fucking bothered what I be-

come, don't you worry about it like?' Her never said, 'What do you want to be?' Nor the old man never said anything. But she answered it in a nutshell. She said, 'What difference would it make if I fucking said anything?' Her said, 'You'll still be what you want to be'. So I thought, 'Oh well'.

The middle class pattern is different. Though disillusion with the school and affiliation with some group form can be seen, these things do not occur with reference to a distinctive outside culture. Authority is not properly differentiated with respect to class dynamics. The emergent culture does not benefit from the force of working class themes. Consequently optimal conditions exist for the

dominant educational axis to recoup its former position. The second term necessary for institutional differentiation is basically lacking.

When the middle class child is thrown back on to his indigenous culture, instead of finding strengthening and confirming oppositional themes there, he finds the same ones. Centripetal forces act to throw him back to the institution.

His relationship at home is not one of competition but of dependence. The axis at home is similar to that at school. Knowledge and guidance are exchanged for hoped-for respect in a relationship of superior/inferior. This relationship is secured particularly by the parents' likely financial ability to support the child. Thus no matter what the crisis, there is likely to be a parental notion of responsibility to a dependent instead of the working class notion of indifference to an independent. This reproduces to some extent the relationship which obtains at school. In particu- lar, there is likely to be a reinforcement of a certain view of the social importance and value of knowledge, though on somewhat different grounds from the school's more idealistic paradigm. Middle class parents, in fact, are more likely than the teacher to insist on the importance of the school as a source not of theory for application to concrete practice, but of qualifications as a means of mobility in the chain of exchanges which characterise our society.

Although in the fourth year they are designated as the anti-school group by teachers ('All the school's problems are in there'), of the ten members of the group from the high status grammar school who say they are going to leave at the earliest opportunity, only two actually do so the end of the fifth year - one of these to be an assistant golf professional taking "A' levels through a correspondence course.[?] They finally realise the strategic importance of qualifications, and are therefore more open to the rational dimension of careers advice, and can be brought back to the dominant institutional paradigm on purely instrumental grounds.

[In a group discussion at the end of the fifth year] PW Sketch for me the future of one of 'the lads'. Nigel Prosperity and gloom ( ... ) anybody that leaves school will be

prosperous the first two years when we're at college, and if you see them, they've got plenty of money. I think the difference will start to show the year after you leave college ( ... ) I think we'll have a, generally, we'll have a better selection for work ( ... ) watch ourselves climb up the ladder, while 'the lads', if they don't like their jobs, they'll be swapping around( ... ) It was forty five minutes of talk (his personal interview with the careers master] and that, everything was a bit more information for me. There was no stops in it, complete, nothing but talk and all the time he was telling me everything I wanted to know. He summed up my character, he told me why I wouldn't fit into certain jobs, why I'd be better suited to others. I really found that helpful. You know I walked in ( ... ) half wanting to go to work, half want· ing to stay on and I came out completely satisfied that I'd stay on.

The working class 'lads' ' settlement of their own future cannot be so easily diverted.

Post -differentiated relationships

We should not underestimate the hostilities which can develop in the post-differ· entiated school situation. Just because we have looked at the 'richness' of the cultural response of 'the lads' we should not forget what that response is to. Where knowledge becomes devalued or worthless, authority, stripped of its educational justifications, can appear very harsh and naked. That is why it is opposed. The teaching paradigm is seen more and more in its coercive mode. The total experience of school is something 'the lads' most definitely want to escape from.

One of the most oppressive forces is the belittling and sarcastic attitude of some teachers. This attitude arises from the particular conjunction of class and institution as it is exposed after differentiation. We may call it the 'class insult': it occurs in class but its referent is social class. Understandably enough, many teachers are outraged when the received educational paradigm breaks down. They register this breakdown as an affront: a breach in those manners which they expect as a matter of course. As we have seen, one of the essential equivalents in the educational exchange is respect. For good reasons of their own, therefore, after differentiation 'the lads' stop being polite to staff- at least as the main mode of their relationship, and this change is expressed at the very heart of the general style of their culture. All some staff see, of course, is wholesale impertinence and rudeness - not the logic of a changed relationship. Their frustration and anger takes the form of withdraw- ing their own equivalent, 'knowledge' - or, more precisely, revaluing its nature to make it utterly beyond the reach of 'the lads' anyway no matter whether they offer anything in exchange or not. Now whilst this has a certain logic of its own, and may even be successful in reasserting the old relationship where differentiation has not gone too far, its essentially institutional dynamic is perceived as a class dynamic by 'the lads'. There is a double articulation of meanings which is absolutely character- istic of institutions in a class society. We are faced with a mystifying and exacerbat· ing process of the conversion and reconversion of institutional into class, and class into institutional, meanings. The teacher's frustration and attempts to re-orientate himself to the changed relationship and the changed notion of 'knowledge' at stake between him and his pupils, though taking place within the institution, are taken by 'the lads' as insults, not to their institutional identity, but to that whole class identity which they have turned to and reworked. These class insults are given an extra bite by the facility with which they are delivered. The teacher still has the ma~tery of formal words and expression. It is an area increasingly abandoned by 'the lads'. Examples of this kind of ridicule are extremely common:

Various teachers 'The Midwich Cuckoos is about children with frightening to class mental powers- that won't concern us here.'

'X has just asked me about this exam question, "Discuss, how can you do that sir there's only one of us".'

'Y has just asked me, 'Do you have to do both sections?' The first section is instructions'. 'It's a good job you didn't have to learn to breathe, Y, you wouldn't be here now'. •

'The lads' are very sensitive to this kind of approach. Where it fails, of course, or is incompetently executed (as in 'Shut your mouth when you're talking to me'), they make hay of it. Often, though, it really strikes home. It is the most hurt-ful barb of what they increasingly take to be the essentially arbitrary nature of authority in school.

Spanksy

Bill Spanksy

Derek

What gets me about teachers (is] when they try and embarrass you in class, like [they did with) Fuzz, for instance. In front of all your mates. They says to him, you know, 'I'll get a sand pit for you next week', don't they? [Laughter] They started reading my essay out and it was really crap it was. Made it sound worse than it was.

In an increasingly vicious circle 'the lads' respond to the overall pressure on their culture with attempts to hit back in any way that is open to them:

Joey

Spike Joey

Joey

You do anything you can here to, you know, go against them. Well, I mean, you vandalise books. Yeah, you smash chairs up, take the screws out of ... Really afterwards, you think, 'Well, stuff me, our old lady paid for that lot out of tax', but at the time you're doing it, you don't think and you don't really care. But do you think of it in the same way as smashing bottles or thieving? It's opportunity, getting your own back on the teachers when you're caned or something. If you think, if you can get your own back on him you'll do anything you can ( ... ) revenge, sort of thing, getting revenge.

As the pressure increases, so does misbehaviour, opposition to authority, vandal- ism, and the exploitation of any weakness or mistake on the part of the staff. They threaten to overwhelm the staff particularly towards the end of term. But the mark of commitment and of the 'good' school is the refusal to give way:

A senior teacher You're faced with a tide, you can't·stop it, we try, we try to stem it ... at some places they let the tide go over them. •

At the highest levels of the staff hierarchy something very like the old paradigm can be maintained, though with a somewhat altered balance of coercion and con- sensus and perhaps a shift towards the 'right attitudes' variant of the exchange relationship. The progressive distance of the head of the upper school, deputy

head, and finally headmaster from day to day class life means they are held in a degree of awe. The weight of the material structure and organisation of the school and the knowledge that what formal and coercive power there is resides here, makes 'the lads' generally subdued, if not exactly tamed, in front of them. Over really fundamental issues senior staff have to hold the line. The basic paradigm is enforced if only as a lesson to others and as a general defence of the legitimacy of the insti- tution. After the last lunch-time when 'the lads' return drunk from the pub senior staff are determined that they should not get away 'scot free':

Head of upper school

What they don't realise is that they are still at school on that last afternoon, we can still reach them. We can go to see their parents, and they're very surprised when we do that, 'You can't come here, I've left school', and we can put it on their reports, or give no report.

After the fire extinguisher incident the head of upper school uses the final 'confession' of 'the lads' to make his own points to the rest of the school. The suppression of Joey's objections, he explains afterwards, is the crucial point where the line is held. 'The lads' know it too, and they cannot break it:

[In a group discussion) Joey I was just dead angry that Peters had been trying to make out,

Peters had got us alf there, he was talking about the 'big boys', he wanted to dispel the idea that any kids could get away with something, and that any kids were the big boys, so knowing all the first years was there, knowing it would make an impression, he tried to make out we were all snivelling and crying. Nothing happened [i.e. during 'the confession'] ( ... ) he [the head] says, 'What about the name of the school?' I said, 'You ain't The Plough [a local pub] here', I says, 'You ain't got to go for pop· ularity polls ( ... ) you gotta go for how you teach the children, no matter how many fire extinguishers you lose'. I was gonna te11 'im [the head of the upper school in the hall] it was a load of cobblers, I put my hand up and I told him. 'Er', he says, 'Does anyone want any points clearing up?' I put my hand up and I says 'Yeah, I want this point cleared up about us', I says, 'We weren't crying or nothing, we weren't grovelling'.

Derek 'Now shut up', he says. Joey Snuffed it out he did.

Where senior staff take individual classes containing members of 'the lads' some- thing of their larger authority remains, and disruption is rare. The culture of 'the lads' is suppressed on such occasions, and a rei fled form of the traditional paradigm enforced.

The most horrific classroom breakdowns seem to occur where more junior teachers try to assert the old educational paradigm when it is simply not tenable:

the moral basis for the educational exchange having disappeared. Nothing brings out the viciousness of certain working class cultural traits like the plain vulner- ability of the mighty fallen. Nothing annoys senior staff more than being brought in to try to sort out the wreckage.

In such classes advertising jingles are sung in unison to break the period up like a television programme. Regular 'news flashes' contain wicked mixtures of all that is known to give the teacher apoplexy. In one case the teacher has told 'the la_ds' never again to mention the school moped which they had been pestering him to let them ride, and never again to mention Picasso whom he had once unwisely been drawn into describing at length. A raucous advertising jingle - 'Beer at home means Davenports' - is interrupted for an 'important announcement': 'Picasso has just been seen riding through the school gate on a stolen school moped'. It takes the teacher twenty minutes to get the five offenders to the head's office because they keep circling back to their seats after he has lined them up by the door.

On another occasion 'the lads' are reading a play, and in a fine symbolic homo- logue of their submersion of the educational paradigm, slowly begin to take over the play and substitute their own. It begins with individual words, 'bastard' for 'blasted' and 'jam rag' for 'towel', to the insertion of whole lines, 'my mother bought a sink fro~ a supermarket', and whole jokes, 'daddy bear says "Who's been eating my porridge", baby bear says, "who's been eating my porridge", and mummy bear says, "shut your 'ole, I ain't made it yet",' to a final chaotic climax of simulated battle scenes with bangs and clashes, loud rapping desk knuckles, and stomping feet.

In this permanent guerrilla war 'the lads' give no quarter to a weak opponent. Their own culture provides a commonsense map by which to judge what they take to be a failure in nerve and authority:

(In a group discussion] Eddie Anybody these days who puts up with what he does, they'll be

played up for the rest of his life. If you don't show your authority straight away when somebody starts to pick on you, like, they'll keep on all the time, like, all the kids if they know somebody you can pick on like, or summat, they'll play on him for the rest of their life as long as they know him, they'll keep playing up. You gotta show him that you ain't gonna stand for it in the first place.

Spike It happens with us, like Spratt in the first and second year, I used to be a right cunt I did. I was shit scared of everybody I was, I was a right little wanker, especially him, Spanksy, he used to push me around left, right and centre Spanksy did ( ... ) Then one day, I'd had enough and 'cos Spratt was one of the hard boys then, you know, he was a little tufty, and we was in Science, and he got me fucking mad, he kicked me in the fucking back, and everything, so I chased him round and I fucked him, really,

I really done him, y'know all his face was smashed up and ever since then, y'know, if you show a bit of authority, show you ain't fucking scared of 'em.

In a mutation of the basic paradigm many teachers operate with a schizophrenic notion of the pupil. In a half-recognition of the basic shift of 'the lads' from an institutional to a class identity they are seen as simultaneously carrying sets of referents to both. This acts as a double-bind on 'the lads'. Typical comments are: 'I'll start helping you when you start helping yourselr; 'You're your own worst enemy'; 'Would you give me just some common decency, you haven't even got manners to listen to me, so why should you be treated like men?'. It is as if pupils were composed of two people one of whom is supposed to save the other. They are continually exhorted to behave in precisely those ways of which they are sup- posedly incapable of behaving. This nagging vestigal but insulting attempt to re- assert the old authority further disqualifies the authority of the school in the eyes of 'the lads'.

The most 'successful' teachers, those who survive with 'the lads' and do not burden senior staff with their problems (the main criterion of success in the view of hard-pressed senior staff), are those who have adapted, somewhat, the basic para· digm whether or not it is theif usual style just enough to contain the counter- culture without provoking incidents on the one hand or collapse on the other. This tactical withdrawal for strategic containment is often dignified with the rubric of progressivism and 'relevance'. The justification concerns 'individual learning', 'discovery', 'self-direction' and 'relevance' but their logic in use concerns control. Though such classes may appear noisy, aimless and undisciplined, they rarely degenerate into chaos or psychic, symbolic or real violence towards the teacher.

For 'the lads' such classes are a matter of 'riding' the formal to extend, use and celebrate their own values of independence, the 'lafr and opposition, without pushing the teacher to the point of a final confrontation in which they might suffer. If things have gone too far there is a momentary return to the old paradigm. Priming questions or sudden interests die, though, as soon as the threat of an explosion has been averted. The following of instructions becomes mindless and literal so that the teacher is forced to qualify or even contradict himself. 'The lads' know the nature of the informal dimension much better than the staff, and especially the techniques for playing it off against the formal and its weaknesses. 'The lads' are experimenting and playing with themes of authority and of the con- tainment of authority. The following examples are from a general science class discussion about a possible syllabus for the coming term: Fuzz Teacher Fuzz Eddie

Please sir, Joey's talking to Bill. Why are you telling me? Oh, I just felt like doing a bit of tell-taling sir. Let's measure the football pitch, and then the girls' netball pitch ... then the girls' hall.

Teacher

Spanksy

Fuzz

Teacher Spanksy Teacher

Fuzz

Joey

( ... ) Teacher

Fuzz Teacher Fuzz Teacher Fuzz Teacher Fuzz

Spanksy

Teacher Fuzz

Yes, right, that's a fairly small job ... what are you going to do then, what are you going to do with the results? [Sarcastically] Well it's like this sir, we'll get a big piece of paper - green paper if you like - then we'll draw out the pitch and the semicircles and everything, [Laughter] and then we'll put little footballers on and play Sub buteo. [More laughter] No sir, we can find the area of the semicircles, and all that, anct the different areas of the pitch. · What's your long term aim then ... what are you trying to do? We can go all round the school measuring and that. Now (to Spanksy) I don't want you to approach it with silliness, or a couldn't care less attitude, it's got to be useful. It would sir, we'd have to find out all the areas of everything and go into the girl's school and take measurements [Laughter] I'd prefer to stay in sir. The way I see it we might as well waste time here in the warm as outside in the cold.

Well, you'll need some equipment if you're going to do a survey ... perhaps I can get you some. If you're serious about doing it I can get you the equipment. I'll go and get a tape now sir [marches towards the door] . What's this, where are you going? To get a tape sir, to do the measuring. Where from? From the youth wing sir, I know there's one there. But you can't get up just when you like and go out( ... ) [Still standing] But you said we needed some equipment sir. And I know where a tape is. We want to do something sir, take some action on the decision, not talk about it all day. I know you just want to get out of the class. We don't sir, we just want to do the measuring, working out all the measuring and that. Will you sit down please, I'll organise the equipment. It's useless this is, I only wanted to make a start.*

Here 'the lads' are talking about such classes:

Joey

(. .. ) Just how far can you push the teacher around without them coming right down on you? Really, it's an instinctive thing, really. Actually you always know ( ... ) Mr Archer, you don't play him up 'cos you can have a laugh with him, but you don't have to play up. Mr Bird, h~'s got a sort of effect about him, like, he'll shout when you're playing up and

PW Joey

Spanksy

Joey Fuzz

( ... ) PW

uh . . . we carry on talking when we go in his lesson, just sit there talking to BUI and as long as you aren't disrupting the rest of the class, he doesn't mind( ... ). Can you tell when you've gone too far? You can tell by just looking at 'em, really by what he sez to you, what you can say back. Or when they start getting mad, y'know like this in the face [straining] . Mr Samuels, his neck goes all red, it's his neck. His neck, not his face, just about that far [indicating a point on his neck].

I mean when you say you can 'talk' to somebody are you really talking seriously or are you just playing them along a bit? Playing along. Playing along, trying to get on the good side.

Techniques which attempt to get too close to 'the lads' are simply reJected because they come from 'teachers' and are embued with what 'teaching' already stands for in the institution. Spanksy

Spike Eddie Spanksy

PW Spanksy

Fred

Some teachers try to get down to your level like, and try to be like, you know ... like Chapman, he gets us all in the gym. He calls him Eddie. Yeah, I can't stand that, a teacher to call me Eddie. He was talking to us, he was goin' 'Bloody' you know, he was saying, 'The boss', you know Simmondsy. What did you think of that? We thought it was good at the time, you know, now we realise he was only trying to bring us round to his ways, you know what I mean? Split us all up. Reagan used to come over and sit by me and he used to talk to us. I got really fed up with it one time. I just told him to fuck off. He says, 'Go to the headmaster', I had four [canings] war'n it?

For all their much lauded differences, in the real situation both traditional and modern techniques are basically about winning a form of consent from students within as tightly controlled an axis as possible. It is quite wrong, as we have seen, to assume that the traditional paradigm is about any simple domination of the students. Indeed an overcompliance with the teacher's wishes is registered as 'girl· ishness' and 'lack of backbone' even in the traditional model. The crucial relation· ship even here is predicated on the consent of the pupils to reciprocate - willingly and from their own resources -in acts of educational exchange. Progressivism as it is usually practised can be seen as a continuation of traditionalism in the sense that it attempts to preserve a version of the consent which has always been at the heart

of the older method. In the concrete situation progressivism is a broadening of its terms in the face of reality, not an overthrow of traditionalism.

One of the main consequences of the 'new' methods has been to partially legitimise and routinise the counter-school culture and therefore also the processes which it sponsors. Though an outright confrontation and explosion of the culture is prevented by these techniques, the clogging of its processes with concessions and tactical withdrawals actually gives it a much more massive and less illicit presence in the long run. Not only this, but prolonged skirmishes of classroom interaction glve it masses of continuous material with which to work up its forms in a way which would be curtailed in a swifter resolution of conflict.

In this sense we can see that progressivism has a particular part to play in what constitutes the specialness of the school in relation to working class culture in general. The really distinctive difference between the school and the shopfloor, for instance, is precisely the protected and even indulgent nature of the former. RSLA and the often sincere liberal aims of educationalists all create more protected space in the school than is possible in the factory. I am in no simple sense arguing for 'de-schooling'. At one real level the school is there to help kids such as the ones under study. However, the nature of this 'help' is far from obvious and seems to have produced some unintended effects. Instead of bringing these kids into the safe camp of conformism and progress in the dominant mode, the altruistic and ano-

. dyne aspects of the school have been re-interpreted and claimed in particular forms by the class culture. It is hard to believe that working class kids are not very much more developed now and that RSLA (after the initial violent fluctuations), and more liberal school regimes have produced youngsters who are more mature and confident on leaving. The direction and me~ning of this greater maturity is, how- ever, far from settled. Instead of feeding into the conventionally approved pool of qualities and feelings, it is quite possible that the direction of these changes will be towards strengthening inherited aspects of an oppositional class culture. In particu- lar, for instance, 'the lads' of this study have adopted and developed to a fine degree in their school counter-culture specific working class themes: resistance; subversion of authority; informal penetration of the weaknesses and fallibilities of the formal; and an independent ability to create diversion and enjoyment.

Any school year is, of course, a complex mixture of individuals ranging from 'lads' to 'ear'oles'. The non-conformists are in a minority - though often not as small as is made out -and there are other patterns and threads to the teacher/pupil relationship not brought out here - particularly that operating on the sports field.(8); In large working class comprehensive schools the situation is likely to be more confused and diversified as the chances increase of a phalanx of working class kids trying to achieve something academically whilst still keeping their dues paid up with 'the lads'. Furthermore, in schools where a sizeable proportion of working class kids are properly upwardly mobile and going on to university, the option of being something of an 'ear'ole' might be seen somewhat differently. All of these things may well act to blunt the starkness of the opposition we have uncovered in the Hammertown school between the conformists and non-conformists, and to

make the social map more complex. Furthennore, in those schools where there is a genuine mix of social class - again, much rarer than is often clabned - there may be some interesting convergences between middle class and working class 'ear'ole' values, and between working class and middle class 'lads' ' values.

In addition, as many schools become multi-racial institutions, we may expect further patterns both of opposition and cross influences between parallel West Indian, Asian and white groups in the school. Of particular importance here is the recent rapid emergence of what we might think of as a hyper 'lads' culture de- veloped by young West Indians in inner city schools. They differ from white varieties of counter-school culture principally in that differentiation of the institu· tion has occurred with respect to themes borrowed from the West Indies. It is particularly clear in this case that the new culture is not a mere reprodu~tion of the old, but a re-working of some old themes in the specific context, and with the specific problems in mind, of the particular institution (and later on, of course, of the specific employment situation faced by West Indians). Although these new counter-cultural forms are clearly West Indian, they are more strident, developed and anglicised than their parent cultures, and often a source of considerable alarm to West Indian parents. The consequences of these new cultures for the preparation of labour power and attitudes to work are even more profound than those arising from the parallel white forms. In particular, the theme of wagelessness and survival without a job borrowed from the underdeveloped context may well be in the process of being converted into the theme of refusal to work in the developed context. We are facing for the first time in this society the possibility of the re· jection of contemporary forms and structures of work by at least a significant minority of our second generation immigrant population. [9]

We cannot be concerned with every variety of student culture and teaching relationship here, but this does not mean that our focus on the white male working class non-conformist element assumes rigid and exclusive divisions in actual school populations. The non-conformist culture is a vital tool with which to think through the nature of other positions. Any classroom situation is a complex combinatipn of elements: acceptance, opposition, legitimacy, and the particular way in which the teacher inhabits the educational paradigm. The aim of this book is to separate out some of the central, strong patterns in the grey and confusing dally pattern of institutional life. I see no contradiction in saying that the reader's aim (especially where he is a practitioner) should be the opposite: to test reality with the concepts outlined; to contextualise; to see what role different fundamental processes play at different strengths in different situations at different times.

Notes

[ 1] F. Taylor , Scientific Management, Greenwood Press, 1972. [2] In a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, in October 1976, the Labour prime minister commented on problems and fears in current educational practice. He

called for a 'great debate' on educational issues which was subsequently taken up by the DES who organised a number of regional conferences and a background paper outlining four main areas of concern: the school curriculum, 5-16; the assessment of standards; the education and training of teachers; school and working life. DES, Educating our Children, January 1977. [3) This/goes some way to explaining why teaching is so often likened to, and experienced as, a performance, There is, in a sense, an external script, and it is this realisation which marks the breakthrough of the young teacher, and which is most certainly not taught in colleges and departments of education. As a senior teacher in the school said of team teaching: 'If the new teacher can see that the older ones are acting, then he will perhaps realise earlier than he would have done under nonnal circumstances that everybody acts in their own way.'

These considerations also strengthen the sense in which we can speak of teachers as a group with distinctive characteristics, no matter what their particular collection of personalities and idiosyncracies, and of teaching as a discrete activity. It is in this unity that we can partly understand the practice of education as a semi-autonomous social region not directly reducible to class relations. (4] William.' Tyndale Junior School in London broke down during the summer and autumn of 1975 after complaints by some staff and parents about indiscipline and the ineffectiveness of the new teaching methods, a staff strike and an inspectors' report. SeeR. Auld, William Tynda/e Report, July 1976; J. Gretton and M. Jackson, William Tyndale: Collapse of a School - or a System, Allen & Unwin, London 1976; T. Ellis, J. McWhirter, D. McColgan, B. Haddow, William Tyndale: the Teachers' Story, Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative, London 1976. [5] Joey during a purge: 'We might as well have dog collars, we might as well have leads on, running up a wire from the playground to the bogs.' (6] This has been conducted partly in a succession of official reports. R. H. Tawney, Secondary Education for All, Allen and Unwin, 1922; Hadow Report, Report of the Consultative Committee on the Education of the Adolescent, HMSO, 1926; Spens Report, Report of the Consultative Committee on Secondary Educa- tion with Special Reference to Grammar School and Technical High Schools, HMSO, 1938; Norwood Report, Cu"iculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools: Report of the Committee of the Secondary School Examination Council, HMSO, 1943; Central Advisory Council for Education (England), Early Leaving, HMSO, 1954; G. Crowther (Chairman), Fifteen to Eighteen, Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England), HMSO, 1959-60; Newsom Report, Half Our Future: A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England), HMSO, 1963; Robbins Report, Higher Education, HMSO, 1963; Plowden Report, Children and their Primary Schools: A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England), HMSO, 1967. [7] This lad is interesting. He is working class, rejects school, but has a total commitment to upward mobility through his chosen sport of golf.

[In an individual interview at work] Boy I'm fighting to establish myself as a higher class of person almost( ... ) you

see so many people doing better, like, of my father's age group, doing so much better, they've got good jobs, and you are in fact envious of them, and of the provisions they can make for their families, so you just go out and try to achieve that.

PW [What's] a better person? Boy It's having respect for people, I mean my father has got very little respect as

a factory worker, and, you know, generally you find that your middle class has got more respect.

Very typically of upwardly mobile working class lads, however, his rejection of his own culture does not amount to an acceptance of the middle class one:

PW Are they [middle class people] still 'they' or do you already feel you've .. . Boy No, I still treat them as 'they'( ... ) you know I sort of talk to them( ... )

thinking to myself you know, 'Piss off, my God you're a right one aren't you', things like that, you know. When some of them come in, like that bloke you saw having those new irons, the grey-haired· guy, you know, the stiff upper lip, and all that, I mean, I really despise him. He signifies to me a supremacy over other people.

Sport is his way to the top. In a very real sense the 'killer instinct' is a class instinct:

I wanted to prove that somebody without their, you might call it intellectual or financial, well you might say greatness, could be beaten by somebody years younger and intellectually weaker, and a very much poorer back- ground ( ... ) you have to have a killer instinct ( ... ) when I play I couldn't care less who it's against, I'll try and beat them, I couldn't care less if they are paying me and they want a friendly game, I'll beat 'em( ... ) it's the hunger to win, probably a primitive feeling, almost like the hunger for food. You grab out for food and some people will grab out to win, they will try and practise and try and try until they win( ... ) middle class people don't have the killer instinct, they don't have the natural aggressiveness to get out there in the cold and practise.

[8) Sport is a very important zone which distinguishes the 'ear'oles' and 'the lads' and where the staff are able to control a certain independence, with its roots in 'the lads' culture, by operating a paradigm containing elements both of con· ventjonal teaching and of the oppositional culture: principally toughness, masculin· ity and physical dexterity. The following extract comes from a recognised school sportsman:

If it was true I wouldn't mind admitting I was an ear'ole, but I think I come somewhere in between ... I suppose in the first year I was a bit of an ear' ole, you know, and, like more, I've got on with the sports teachers, because

I enjoy me sport and I've progressed, because I don't mind having a joke. I don't take it too serious but sometimes I crack a joke about the teachers, you know to their face sort of thing, and they see the funny side of it all. They don't seem to have relationships like that with the ear'oles. They teach 'em, nice good lads. They seem to treat me as somebody to talk to like.

[9] See the article by Farrukh Dhonely in Race Today, 4 June 1974. This whole area urgently needs to be researched along the lines set out in this book.