Pie Fight

PhD on different systems for educating disaffected teens

It'd be fun to do a PhD comparing the strengths and weaknesses of how America educates disaffected teens with how England does it.

Practice exam question: Inside the black box of the family

Practice exam question: Explain why policy makers should invest more time in understanding processes internal to the family.

Hmm, can start here with Okin's notion of justice, and her contention that underlying all the inequalites specifically affecting women is the unequal distribution of unpaid labour in teh household. And Hobson's contention that the family is a site of great inequality, of a sort which doesn't mirror societal inequality. They should invest more time in understanding it because we have limited understanding of it - i'll discuss the theories of household bargaining that we have. But mainly they should invest more time in understanding it because, as feminist theorists observe, social policy is both shaped by and shaping of what goes on within the so-called black box of the family. And social policy understanding has always been skewed towards the public sphere, but as Hobson argues, the policy divide between public and private is arbitrary, ideological, and not gender neutral. Because women take on more of the caring duties within the family and tend to have weaker bargaining positions economically, policy which does not seek to peer into the black box is policy that tacitly supports, approves of and furthers the current gender gap.

Practice exam question: "Malestream" theories

Practice question: "In the field of social policy, mainstream theories would be more appropriately referred to as malestream theories." Discuss.

Ok, how to address this one? First of all, I don't know a lot about mainstream theories. I know a fair amount about EA, and I know that Willensky's was based on social expenditure. And I know that Marshall was the mac daddy of social citizenship, and that in general social citizenship is defined as one's ability to participate fully in the activities of society. What I could say is that I'll argue that mainstream theories have been said to be malestream because they were far more concerned with the welfare of men than with women. This concern expressed itself  through a concentration on class and an ignorance of the role of gender in personal welfare, as well as an implicit assumption that women's primary role was as carer rather than provider.

Practice exam question: citizenship, gender, and Wollstonecraft's dilemma

In what ways can policies that seek to address the distribution of unpaid and caring work be seen as an attempt to solve Wollstonecraft's dilemma by requiring both women and men to be "citizen workers"?

Ok, I'm a bit shaky on this material right now, but the purpose of this practice question is to get me up to speed with the key concepts and contributors. So here goes a kitchen skink approach, which I'l clean up later.

Who says working class kids don't swot?

More from the interview with Learning to Labour's Paul Willis. (Note how Willis isn't actually catching the interviewer out: the latter refers not to middle class kids in the school, but to the school's middle class culture):

Tillekens: In the book, there is some permanent clash going on between the middle-class culture of the school on the one hand and the working class culture of the "lads" on the other and you yourself, so it seems, take a partisan view in this struggle.

Willis: Yes, well I'm not sure if the ear'oles in any sense are middle class. For me this is another misunderstanding of the book. Both the lads and ear'oles represent working class culture. So, at school, there were two working class roots at that point and as the subsequent history of the lads and ear'oles shows, in time many of them did change places, depending on the accidents of the labour market.

Learning to labour

Below the fold, an idea for my diss. One of the books that might influence it is Paul willis's Learning to labour. In trying to ascertain why, as Willis asks, working class kids let middle class kids get away with taking all the good jobs, one key idea may be the cultural production of meaning in everyday life. As Evans says in her observations of estate life in Bermondsey, working class people are often very proud of many aspects of working class life, and will seek to reproduce those aspects - eg a sense of close kinship and community, the ability to have a laugh, not taking oneself too seriously, and not buckling in to authority. These are good values. The problem is that their reproduction often conflicts with doing well in school, which is of course the ticket into middle class jobs.

Along these lines, it sounds as if Willis's more recent work might be useful:

In my recent book, I'm saying that schooling is a kind of early modernist formation of cultural transmission and there's a huge question about what it means for the subordinate class.

 

Assessed essay - SA4A7

Download sa4a7_assessed_essay_draft_3.doc

A better life, even without doing better in school

I'm curious: the preschool programmes that don't improve educational outcomes but do improve life outcomes in terms of higher employability, more home ownership, less involvement in crime, etc - well, what is happening here? Is it simply the effect of being more likely to graduate from high school? Or is there something or several things not related to educational attainment buth which is related to the better inputs kids get from decent preschool programmes? Is it self-esteem? Better sense of relationships?

Peer group trumps parenting

Evans' principal argument is one of environment more than nurture. She sees the schools that working class kids go to, and, particularly with boys, sees that they are environments in which it does not make much sense in terms of peer group status for boys to attempt to succeed in school. Looking in the home, she sees parents who raise their children to do well within their own millieu - to bond with their families, primarily, and, for boys, to be able to hold their heads high in the neighbourhood - but who, particularly in the case of hte boys, are very unlikely to be raised to do well in school.

And even if they were, would it stick? There are two things working against working class kids, Evans argues. One, the schools they go to tend to suck, in large part because they are filled with disruptive boys. Two, and this is especially true for the boys, peer group socialisation strongly discourages academic excellence.

Judith Harris is heavy on the peer group socialisation, obviously. She argues that kids slot themselves into peer groups they are relatively comfortable in, then conform to the norms of those groups. For the academic-minded, this encourages success, but for the non-academic types, there is a self-perpetuating "learning sucks" mentatlity that takes hold. She would argue in favour of all-black schools in the US, for instance, because then black kids couldn't self-define themselves against whites as poor in school/anti-school. There would presumably be differentiation within the all-black school, but not on  the basis of simply being black, so more kids would feel motivated to strive to achieve. This is why a school such as KIPP might do so well: the peer group is self-selected, and the entire peer group is changed, rather than just some people among it.

How parents show love to their children

Gilllian Evans argues that the key difference between her and common as shit Sharon is that, as a mc mum, Gillian uses education as a means of forging a strong relationship with her children, whereas Sharon, as a (representative?) wc mum, is more likely to feel that efforts to educate her children actively interfere with showing them love and kindness. For instance, when her children were young, Gillian read to them repeatedly as a means of bonding and showing them affection - this results in them being very familiar and comfortable with reading, but also with them associating it with lovely things. And Evans feels that kids first they associate reading with love and bonding, only then later coming to love it for its own sake. In contrast, Sharon, who reads poorly and does not associate reading with pleasure, showed her love for her children through other means, eg by giving them more freedom to grow naturally, and by playing and joshing with them more.

In both cases, the mother is actively expressing love for her children, but only in the case of the mc mum is it in a way that better enables the child to succeed in an education-centred society.