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Making the Difference
Schools, Families and Social Division
By R. W. Connell, D. J. Ashenden, S. Kessler, G.W. Dowsett Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 1982 Connell, Ashenden, Kessler & Dowsett
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-206-8
CHAPTER 1
Inequality and education
This book is written at the end of an era in Australian secondary education.
We began our research intending to study one aspect of the social background of educational success. We now find ourselves grappling with questions about curriculum reform, school organization, and how the system as a whole can be reshaped to meet profoundly changed conditions. Though this was unintended and unexpected, we can now see why it should have happened: partly the problem we started with, and partly the nature of the times. Before presenting our research findings, then, we must discuss their context. This chapter introduces the problem of inequality, the school system in which it arises, and the way it has been usually discussed — and misunderstood.
Before the Second World War, the secondary school system was a small device sitting on top of a mass primary system. High schools and private colleges took the 'cream' — the small number of boys (and fewer girls) who were going to get on — while technical schools trained some of the workers' children for trades. Most pupils left at or about the minimum legal age. Social inequality was hardly a problem: it was built in to the system from the start.
With the war's end there was an abrupt shift. Secondary schooling expanded with dramatic speed. It was widely argued that secondary education was the right of all, and that every child would have equal access. Not only to the secondary school, but through it to the university and the privileges beyond.
Thirty years later, the schools were still being criticized as giving working-class youth a separate and inferior education, and much less than equal opportunity. For a time, in the early 1970s, it looked as if there would be still more expansion (especially of tertiary education) in pursuit of the goal, and extra help for the 'disadvantaged' as well. It is now clear that that will not happen for the foreseeable future.
Growth has ended. Programmes like the Disadvantaged Schools Programme were small and weak when they began and have not become any stronger. Central government policy now tends to increase educational inequality rather than reduce it. The relationship of schools to the labour market has changed. A programme for a drastic reform of schooling in a socially conservative direction is emerging. Secondary education has reached a turning point that looks as abrupt as that of 1945.
This is not just the stuff of history. It is the circumstance of everyday experience for people like Wilma Roberts and Sophie Phelan. Sophie and Wilma are both 15 years old and both in Year 10: Sophie at Auburn College, one of the country's most prestigious girls' Independent schools, and Wilma at Rockwell High, a government school built, like the suburbs around it, in the 1950s.
Wilma has always enjoyed school, and done reasonably well. She has usually been among the top four or five in her class, and is now in the 'A' stream in a large and (by the standards of the system) well-equipped and properly-staffed school. Her parents want her to get the education they missed out on. Wilma's father, Dave Roberts, is a tradesman's assistant and knows that
I have missed many opportunities because I did not have the papers.
He left school thirty years ago, when he was Wilma's age, after 'wagging' most of his last two years. He wants Wilma to go on to Year 12 so that she can have her pick of any kind of job. Judy Roberts left school, like her husband, on the day she turned 15, and was in a factory job the next day. She doesn't push as hard as he does, but she too gives Wilma support for going on at school as long as necessary to get the job she wants. When Wilma watches TV, Mum tells her:
That won't help you. Homework will. You're losing marks!
It's just what the educational sociologists ordered; but somehow it's not quite working. Wilma is, as her Dad puts it, 'browning off' and 'losing interest' in school. She wants to leave at the end of the year. Most of the kids at Rockwell do. 'They can do it', says Wilma, 'why can't I?' The school is glad to see the back of many of them. 'So undisciplined, so noisy, so rude!', as one shell-shocked young teacher put it. Wilma wants to do a secretarial course.
In the meantime Sophie Phelan, and her school, are flying. Auburn College has had its ups and downs, but at the moment it has a long waiting list for places. Around 90 per cent of its girls take Matriculation and a good proportion of them get straight A's in the 'hard' subjects of maths, physics and chemistry. Sophie is likely to be one of them. Her teachers say that she is even brighter than her two older sisters. Both of them went through Auburn and both are at university doing professional degrees. James and Mary Phelan, their parents, did well at school too. James is a successful barrister and Mary was, until her marriage, a teacher. Sophie has always taken her schoolwork seriously, but now that Year 11 is looming, she is really starting to stretch out. 'I can't be anything', she says, 'unless I do well at school'. Her parents are amazed, even a little troubled, at the way their daughters work — much harder than they did. While Wilma wavers and Rockwell High struggles, Sophie and Auburn College accelerate away.
We met the Roberts and the Phelans in 1978, in the course of the research project which forms the basis of this book. We worked in twelve schools in two cities, and talked at length with a hundred 14 and 15 year olds, their parents, their school principals, and many of their teachers. Half of those hundred students were the sons and daughters of tradesmen, factory workers, truck drivers, shop workers; the other half were the children of managers, owners of businesses, lawyers, doctors. We wanted to find out why the relationship between home and school worked so much better for one group than for the other; and we were guided by a mass of research evidence which showed that Wilma Roberts and Sophie Phelan are not exceptions.
Here are some examples from recent Australian studies. In 1974 Martin and Meade began a survey of about 3,000 state high school Year 9 students in Sydney, whom they followed through the Higher School Certificate (HSC) in 1977. Among other things they asked about fathers' jobs, which were then divided into two groups representing higher and lower 'socio-economic status'. Here are the percentages of students in each group who stayed in school to the final year to do the HSC:
Higher status 43%
Lower status 28%
About the same time as Martin and Meade began their study, the Australian Government Commission of Enquiry into Poverty did a smaller but more intensive survey of 150 18 year olds in Melbourne, looking back at the level of education they had reached. This group too were classified according to their fathers' jobs. Here are the percentages of each group who remained to the HSC:
Fathers %
professional, managerial 52
clerical, sales 27
skilled workers 30
semi-skilled, unskilled 6
In 1978 the Schools Commission and the Australian Bureau of Statistics compiled a volume of statistics on 'Australian students and their schools'. Curiously they didn't compile any statistics on the effects of occupation, income, or wealth; but they did calculate the overall percentages going through to the Matriculation or HSC year (apparent retention rates to Year 12) for the different school systems:
Schools %
Independent 86
Catholic 43
State 30
Facts like these have turned up in every study of school retention and social background that has been done in Australia for the past thirty years. Facts like these have piled up in all the advanced industrial countries; and they are even piling up in third-world countries as they develop education systems on the Western model. Social class inequality is a massive fact of our system of secondary education. It has persisted through a transformation of schooling that many hoped would abolish it. Why? To begin to answer that, we must look at the transformation of schooling itself.
THE SHORT HISTORY OF MASS SECONDARY SCHOOLING3
The growth of secondary schooling in the decades after the war was extraordinary. Several hundred high schools were created, many of them newly-built in the suburbs of the cities and in new towns (eventually provoking a revolution in school architecture). The total of secondary students in the country rose from about 181,000 in 1945 to 771,000 in 1965, and to 1.1 million in 1975. The number of secondary teachers rose from about 6,000 in 1945 to 74,000 in 1975. Before the war, half of Australian children did not go to secondary schools at all; by the early 1970s a large majority were getting four years in secondary schools, and about a third were getting six.
This growth, which was paralleled in many other countries, was not the product of a major policy decision by Australian governments, nor of organized public agitation for more schooling. In fact it was all done remarkably quietly. Its main architects were not premiers or prime ministers but bureaucrats such as Robertson in Western Australia and Wyndham in New South Wales in the 1950s, supported by a very diverse coalition of interests, and a groundswell of popular feeling that there should be more education, for all.
The coalition favouring growth had a number of elements. People of a liberal mind had long been urging that more education meant social uplift. Critics and researchers in the 1940s pointed out the class biases in the education system, and a natural response was to eliminate them by extending more schooling to those who had been excluded. Advocates of economic growth believed that more education meant a more efficient workforce and hence more rapid national 'progress'. This was a period of industrialization, and businessmen, while supporting the rapid expansion of the workforce by immigration, could also see the virtue in having it more highly trained. Both Liberal and Labor parties were converging on broadly similar strategies of expanding the action of the state into 'welfare' areas like health, social services and education. Both took credit for any rise in enrolments or buildings completed in the annual Education Department reports.
Above all, there was popular support. For most people in the 1940s, more education was one of the hopes they had for a better and more equal postwar world. It was not (as many commentators have supposed) that the masses entertained large ambitions and tripped over each other in the rush for tickets into the middle class. Rather, Depression memories saw education as a protection against unemployment. With full employment, massive immigration and economic expansion in the 1950s, it was more a case of getting left behind if you didn't join in. This was the lesson Dave and Judy Roberts learnt. They aren't pushing Wilma to become a professional; they do want her to stay at school longer than most of her schoolmates, so she can avoid getting the jobs that most of them get, in factories and shops.
When this is combined with the specific and very strong desire in immigrant families for their children to use the schools to maximum advantage, it can be seen how the independent actions of millions of people cumulated and confronted each other as a 'social pressure'. Governments removed some barriers to it: high-school fees and qualifying exams were abolished in most states during the war, and the age of compulsory attendance was raised (partly out of fear of unemployment for returned servicemen). The trickle of students through the high schools became a flood.
With expansion came reform of organization. The main vehicle of the boom was a new kind of school: the comprehensive, coeducational, urban area high school. The move to comprehensive area schools for the most part eliminated the distinctions between full selective highs and junior or domestic-science highs. In most states it also spelt decline for the technical school system, which for 40 years had been the educational pride of the labour movement. The move to coeducation was uneven, as a good many of the new schools were built segregated. (For example: in the northern beach suburbs of Sydney in the 1950s, a new boys' high was built at Brookvale and a new girls' high a few miles north at Narrabeen; as population continued to grow, a new separate girls' high was built across the road at Brookvale and a new separate boys' high at the other end of the same block of land at Narrabeen.) But in due course coeducation became general policy in the state system.
Yet in other ways the organization of schooling was not significantly changed. First, the dominant position in the whole system held by the competitive academic curriculum. Originally defined and administered by university academics through the public exam system, and the special province of the selective high schools, it was not in fact rejected as those institutions declined in weight. The reform of curricula proposed by progressive educators was far slower in winning acceptance than the reform of school organization.
Rather, the academic curriculum was internalized by the new mass schools, and became the province of their top streams. As a result the 'comprehensive' schools became, informally, 'multilateral' schools, with several programmes running within the same walls, the academic programme having most prestige and influence. There is evidence that the children of more affluent parents tended to be concentrated in the academic streams and the children of poorer parents in the non-academic streams.
Second, there was no change in the division of Australian school children among three systems: state, Catholic and Independent (mostly Protestant). The Catholic system, a microcosm of the whole with its own rank-and-file schools for the children of the workers and elite colleges for the children of the affluent, also attempted to expand at a great pace. It consequently found itself in dire straits economically, until pushed into alliance with the Protestant private schools to win state aid in the 1960s.
The Protestant and Catholic elite schools, as a group, had dominated academic secondary education and university graduation before the war; their only serious competition coming from a small group of selective state schools. (A South Australian study found that 86 per cent of Medicine and Honours Arts graduates, in the 1930's, and 78 per cent of Law graduates, had come from private schools.) Wealth was a simple discriminator — and that was why James and Mary Phelan, who went to private schools in the 1940s, hadn't had to work terribly hard to keep up their position. This situation came under increasing pressure as the growth of state schools produced more and more claimants for academic honours. The private schools shifted their concerns further towards academic pursuits — and that is registered in how much harder Sophie Phelan works. They not only survived, but in due course flourished, as a specialized sector of the secondary system.
So the educational 'revolution' of the postwar decades was by no means as thoroughgoing as some of the rhetoric suggested. And as expansion continued, results began to appear which were very different from what its sponsors hoped for.
One has been a deepening problem of authority in the schools. The failure to renovate curricula meant that more and more children encountered knowledge which they found of little use or relevance and which led them nowhere in particular. Teachers were increasingly faced with dilemmas about content and motivation; some fought for socially-relevant curricula and student-centred classes, some fought for established standards and teacher control. Problems of 'discipline' in the non-academic streams became endemic.
At the same time, the experience of growing up was changing. The transition from child to adult became more extended; 'the teenager' as a social category appeared. With it came adolescent peer groups, and a kind of youth culture with its own music, clothing, and amusements ('sex and drugs and rock and roll', to quote the title of a recent rock song), fed by specialized businesses. The authority of adults was weakened, in families and in schools. Both the Roberts and the Phelans are worried about this — though more about other peoples' children than their own. The schools, especially suburban state schools like Rockwell High, had to cope not only with increasing scepticism about their syllabuses, but also with a new disrespect for teachers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making the Difference by R. W. Connell, D. J. Ashenden, S. Kessler, G.W. Dowsett. Copyright © 1982 Connell, Ashenden, Kessler & Dowsett. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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