Education, Change and Society sample

YOUNG PEOPLE IN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

After reading this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions:

• What is education?

• How did educational institutions become the predominant way education is done?

• How is value in educational institutions distributed?

• How do educational institutions shape young people according to certain values and ideals?

• How can education be done differently?

Growing up Aboriginal in Australia is an exercise in resistance. You are presented with circumstances where your identity, and humanity itself, is challenged, and it places intense pressure on the mental health of those already dealing with the changes from a physiological and neuroscientific standpoint.

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The messaging embedded in the media, in advertising and in the curriculum taught at school is all geared towards the superiority of whiteness and the ‘otherising’ of anyone that does not fall within the homogenous idea of ‘Aussie’.

(natalie Cromb, in ‘g rowing up in a ustr alia isn’t easy when you’re made to feel different’, ABC News, 9 a ugus t 2019.)

REMY LOW AND VICTORIA RAWLINGS

Introduction

In this chapter, we look at some of the ways that education is implicated in the process of reinforcing ideals of the nation and ‘otherising’ those who do not fit the mould, as described by Natalie Cromb in her account of growing up in Australia as a young Aboriginal woman. We will also point to possibilities for doing education differently. To begin, let us consult the Macquarie Dictionary (2020) on what ‘education’ might mean. According to this authoritative source on Australian English, the word in its noun forms can refer to three things:

1 the act or process of educating; the imparting or acquisition of knowledge, skill, etc.; systematic instruction or training.

2 the result produced by instruction, training, or study.

3 the field of study which deals with learners and learning, curriculum, the science or art of teaching, and related topics. Further to these common uses of the word, and perhaps in a more metaphorical sense, the Macquarie Dictionary (2020) also adds that ‘education’ may be used more broadly, as in:

4 be an education, to be an experience that teaches one a lesson in life

We will use these dictionary definitions of education to structure this chapter. In the next section, we will look at the first definition—that of education most broadly as actions or processes of giving and receiving knowledge, skills and so on—and consider what this has to do with the institutions that we have come to see as synonymous with education itself: pre-schools, schools, colleges (including vocational, technical and further education institutes) and universities. We will argue that education conceived most broadly, as with the first definition, is part-and-parcel of the reason it is used in ways described in the fourth definition. In other words, we intuitively know that we learn many things—possibly more—outside of formal educational institutions. Whether it is with family, friends, communities, sporting teams, online and sometimes by contemplating more deeply on our experiences, we are always teaching and learning with others. So, if education is happening everywhere all the time, then why do we have formal educational institutions? Or, to put it differently: Why is education not more ‘free range’, so to speak?

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This will be followed by an exploration of the second definition as we ask: What are the intended results of education, especially in those institutions? Or, to put it more plainly, what does it mean to be ‘educated’? We will review the ways that formal educational institutions construct and discipline the people within them in particular ways, and in doing so, ‘teach’ far more than what is on the syllabus. To do this, we will look at the ways that educational institutions hold expectations about the students in them, and how they respond to students who do and do not meet these expectations.

As for the third definition, or at least a part of it: who does the educating? And by what authority are they deemed to possess knowledge of ‘learners and learning, curriculum, the science or art of teaching’?—we will leave this for Chapter 12. As will be clear in what follows, the responses of each of these subsequent questions hinges on the first: What, exactly, is education? So it is to this that we now turn.

What is ‘education’?

To highlight the complexity behind an apparently straightforward question, let us approach this with another question: Was there education in these lands we today call Australia before British colonisation beginning in 1788?

We know that across this continent, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples spoke over 250 diverse languages—many with several dialect offshoots (Meakins & O’Shannessy, 2016). This multilingual landscape was also multicultural: each people group sustained rich local knowledges of cosmological, ethical and practical significance over many millennia. Martin (2005) offers us a glimpse of this:

To know who you are in relatedness is the ultimate premise of Aboriginal worldview because this is the formation of identity. This is acquired through being immersed in situations, contexts of people and other elements which lead us to come to see and to come to know, and then be part of the relatedness through change and past, present and future. (p. 28)

Importantly, this relatedness, which is at the heart of the First Peoples’ ways of knowing and living, is not limited to human beings, but also encompasses everything in the world around: ‘the animals, the plants, the skies, the climate, the waterways, the land and the spirits’ (Martin, 2005, p. 29). This vibrant and sentient understanding of time–space interconnectedness is expressed in the Aboriginal English term ‘Country’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2015).

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While a more in-depth look into the rich traditions of Indigenous education will be reserved for Chapter 7, we can see from this brief snapshot that before the arrival of Europeans on this continent, there was indeed education. For how else would sophisticated ways of knowing, being and doing just outlined be perpetuated over such a long period of time? Before colonisation, as Jackson-Barrett and LeeHammond (2019) summarise, education for First Peoples ‘was in the form of intergenerational knowledge transfer which was based on people’s connection to Country, their place in the kinship system, gender and age and was established through the sharing of cultural heritage knowledge passed on by Elders’ (p. 299). In terms of pedagogy, oral transmission of songs and stories, as well as participation in rituals and practical experimentation, were key features (Welch, 1988).

Numerous languages and knowledges of First Peoples continue to be passed down and built upon today in these ways across Australia, although many have

Mass education

state-sponsored and supervised formal education that should be available—and even compulsory up to a certain level—for young people living within a particular territory.

also been fractured due to the devastating impacts of colonisation (Marmion et al., 2014). And a key instrument of this fracturing was education—or more specifically, how education was (and is) conceived. As Pihama and Lee-Morgan (2019) point out: ‘Education was both a target and tool of colonialism, destroying and diminishing the validity and legitimacy of Indigenous education, while simultaneously replacing and reshaping it with an “education” complicit with the colonial endeavour’ (p. 19). They point specifically to formalised institutions of education such as schools in this endeavour.

The reasons for our historical detour should now be more apparent: in the first place, no account of education in Australia is adequate without an acknowledgment that it has been happening for many thousands of years here; and second, that education as a process has happened and continues to happen in all places, but it is not always recognised as such. There were indeed lively and sophisticated forms of education in Australia prior to British colonisation in 1788. But were such forms of education recognised as such by the interlopers who came from the late-eighteenth century onwards? By and large, they were not. And the reasons for their inability to see education even as it happened in front of them are perhaps not too distant from some of our ‘common sense’ assumptions today: namely, that education happens only, or primarily, in formal institutions such as pre-schools, schools, colleges and universities. Sure, we may learn a lot of useful things—possibly even more—outside of them, but those other sites of learning are not as widely recognised as education per se, even if we do sometimes refer to broader life experiences as ‘teaching us a lesson’ in a metaphorical sense. To get an education, in our everyday parlance, is taken to mean attending an educational institution.

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How did we come to this? While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a detailed global history of all the causes and conditions that led to education being seen today as synonymous with educational institutions, we can with some confidence make the following historical generalisation: that the institutionalisation of education—especially in the form of ‘mass education’—arose with the modern nation-state. By mass education, we are referring to the idea that state-sponsored and supervised formal education should be available—even compulsory—for people living within a particular territory. Mass education systems are formally constructed by national laws requiring young people to attend state-sanctioned educational institutions (Soysal & Strang, 1989). However, it is important to note that depending on context, there are exceptions to such rules. Young people who are refugees, for example, may not be included in mass education provisions (Waters & LeBlanc, 2005).

The idea that formal education should be imparted to everyone with state support was first touted in late-fourteenth-century China. The ascendent Ming dynasty believed that establishing ‘community schools’ throughout the empire would be ‘the capstone of the stable, peaceful, hierarchical society’ (Schneewind 2006, p. 9). However, the implementation of this decree was patchy, and the idea fell out of favour in China with the shift of dynasties by the seventeenth century.

Not long after, this idea took on a different life in late-eighteenth-century Europe: governments were persuaded by the wealth-creating theories of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers that there might be material as well as spiritual benefits from schooling the poor, and so the first systems of state-wide elementary education were established—particularly in the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire (Brockliss & Sheldon, 2012, p. 1). This type of education then spread throughout Northern and Western European countries in the nineteenth century, supplanting the sporadic and pluralistic educational landscape run mostly by religious institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What made these national systems of education in Europe distinct were their stated aspirations to ‘universality’ (i.e. for all people), and the ‘specific orientation towards the secular needs of the state and civil society’ (Green, 2013, p. 38).

In Europe’s colonies, such as Australia, this nineteenth-century ‘universality’ did not initially include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples or non-white migrants. For instance, in the colony of New South Wales the successful passing of the Public Instruction Act 1880, which legislated ‘free, compulsory and secular’ public education, was soon followed by the passing of the Influx of Chinese Restriction Act 1881. Then, in 1883, the New South Wales Minister of Public Instruction George Reid (who would later become the Premier of New South Wales in 1894, and then Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1904) made the following statement: no child whatever its creed or color or circumstances ought to be excluded from a public school. But cases may arise especially among the Aboriginal tribes, where the admission of a child or children may be prejudicial to the whole school. (in Reynolds, 2009, p. 85)

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This statement, which would become the infamous ‘Clean, clad and courteous’ directive in 1884, allowed for Aboriginal children to be admitted to New South Wales public schools on condition that they were ‘habitually clean, decently clad, and that they conduct themselves with propriety both in and out of school’ (Office of the Aborigines Protection Board, 1885, p. 2). In practice, this meant that Aboriginal children were excluded at the discretion of local school authorities if white parents protested (Harris, 1978, p. 28). So, while Australia, like its European and North American counterparts, shared an optimism concerning schools at the dawn of the twentieth century—that they ‘could contribute to the making of better people, a better society and new citizen-subjects for the new Australian nation’ (Campbell & Proctor, 2014, p. 106)—it is important to keep in mind that certain populations were precluded from this vision of a ‘better’ future. All this gives us a clue as to what the ‘secular needs of the state and civil society’ are that mass education was invented for:

At its core … main concern of modern schooling in the early nineteenth century was with making society by making the child as a future citizen. The school was conceived as a repository of the general good and as society’s mechanism for promoting the moral health and social regeneration of society. (Keynes, 2019, p. 5)

Culture

t he particular ways that a social group lives and makes sense of the world they live in.

We can see that—beginning with elementary schools in the nineteenth century, then extending to secondary schooling from the mid-twentieth century (Campbell & Proctor, 2014), and then arguably to pre-school and post-school education in the early twenty-first century for many wealthier industrialised nations (White & Friendly, 2012; Southgate & Bennett, 2014)—mass education has been imagined as a way of forming ideal citizens and inculcating desired attributes for the nationstate that sponsors and governs it. Consider, for instance, how instinctive it is for many governments and people to posit that education is the solution to almost every social ill: from poverty to racism to sexism to environmental catastrophes. Of course, the many personal and social benefits of education are not under question. Yet when taken in conjunction with the educational experiences of First Peoples in Australia outlined earlier, we are led to ask further questions about mass education, specifically: according to whose ideals and desires? And how does this forming and inculcating happen? We will deal with the first question immediately, and this will lead us to the second in the next section.

Recall that education as a process of teaching and learning happens everywhere, within as well as beyond formal educational institutions. Long before the latter arrived on the scene, as Australia’s First Peoples exemplify, people have always passed on ways of knowing, being and doing across generations. Another way of saying this is that every culture on earth, to survive, must have some form of education. While culture is sometimes associated with works of elite art and literature (i.e. ‘high culture’), we use the term here in its more everyday sense: ‘the particular ways in which a social group lives out and makes sense of its ‘given’ circumstances and conditions of life’, which entail ‘a set of practices, ideologies, and values from which different groups draw to make sense of the world’ (McLaren, 2009, p. 65). There are two important points to remember about culture: first, it is never fixed, but involves a continual process of interpreting, valuing and making the world (Wadham et al., 2007); second, culture is embodied insofar as it shapes the ways we respond to others and act in the world.

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While it is commonplace for educational institutions to celebrate ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘respect for different cultures’, we should nonetheless ask what culture is represented in the ways that these institutions go about their daily business. More precisely put, we need to probe more deeply into what or who is valued—or not valued—in the core dimensions of educational institutions such as teaching, curriculum, and assessment. Speaking of schools, Carter (2005) makes this point by noting that they are:

more than institutions where teachers impart skills and lessons; they are places where teachers transmit cultural knowledge … Education is as much about being inculcated with the ways of the ‘culture of power’ as it is about learning to read, count, and think critically. (p. 47)

There is much to unpack in this pithy passage. The most important point to note is that educational institutions such as schools are not just neutral places where ‘objective’ knowledge about literacy and numeracy are taught and learnt. They are places where particular types of knowledge and particular types of people are more valued than others.

RESEARCH IN ACTION

REPRESENTING EDUCATIONAL VALUES

g ottschall, k ., wardman, n ., edge worth, k ., Hu tchesson, r . & s altmarsh, s . (2010). Hard lines and soft scenes: Constituting masculinities in the prospectuses of all-boys elite private schools. Australian Journal of Education, 54 (1), 18–30.

wardman, n ., Hu tchesson, r ., g ott schall, k ., d rew, C. & s altmarsh, s . (2010). star ry eyes and subservient selves: Portraits of ‘well-rounded’ girlhood in the prospectuses of all-girl elite private schools. Australian Journal of Education, 54 (3), 249–61.

mcCandless, t. (2015). Classing schools. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36 (6), 808–20.

The authors of these three studies undertake analyses of how different schools in Australia represent themselves to the public—and especially to prospective parents—who may be ‘shopping’ for a school in a choice market to send their children (see Chapter 10). Taken together, these studies offer rich and interesting observations of how schools—private and government—style their ideals through their students. The study by Gottschall et al. (2010) looks at the prospectuses of six private, all-boys schools in the Sydney region of New South Wales, Australia. They make many insightful observations about these prospectuses—the quality of the paper, the number of pages, their layout and design, glossy photos, school mottos, promotional slogans and content—to show how these texts are crucial in supporting these schools’ claims to elite status (Gotschall et al., 2010, pp. 20–1). Of most relevance for this chapter is how ‘superiority’ in education is imagined. The authors of this study point out that common to all the prospectuses of these elite schools is the idealised image of the hyper-masculine senior boy: ‘active, heavy, skilled, dangerous, dirty, interesting, virile, strong, independent, capable, rational, knowing, hard’ (Gotschall et al., 2010, p. 23). Of note is how being capable—succeeding at physical pursuits and academic success—is what it means to be the idealised male school subject, according to these prospectuses. These are also attributes of hegemonic masculinity (see Chapter 8) and neoliberal subjectivity (see Chapter 5).

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In an accompanying study by the same authors, Wardman et al. (2010) also look at the ways elite all-girls schools represent themselves through their female students. They show how, in contrast to the all-boys schools, the idealised image that predominates this marketing material is that of ‘well-rounded girls who are both empowered and feminine’ (Wardman et al.,

2010, p. 258). So while the ideal male prospectus student is the hyper-masculine boy who can use physical and academic prowess to demonstrate leadership, ‘the idealised female student in the prospectuses … is healthily empowered yet simultaneously cares for and serves others, is romantically hyper-feminine (passive, pure and attractive) and natural’ (Wardman et al., 2010, p. 251).

Building on this work is McCandless’s (2015) analysis of school websites in the Australian state of Victoria, which adds a social class dimension to our understanding of how schools represent ideal students through photographs. Apart from some general commonalities between both government and private schools—smiling and happy students, school sports—there were also striking differences between them. For instance, while students in private schools were represented as relaxed and even laughing in classrooms, students in government school classrooms are almost always shown in rapt attention, and more often than their private school counterparts, engaged in serious academic work. According to McCandless (2015), these subtleties tell us something not only about what the ideal student might look like for each type of school, but also about what and who are more valued in the education system as a whole:

State schools exhibit more images with a disciplined comportment, images in keeping with a regimen of work and diligence, and this is because those viewing these images are unlikely to assume that self-discipline will come naturally to these students. Whereas, in nongovernment schools, images exhibit students with a happier comportment, one in keeping with a more relaxed educational ethos. This is suggestive of school cultures where students do not have to work at being academic; they can be displayed as having already achieved this state. (p. 818)

1 What are seen as the ingredients of a ‘good education’?

2 Who is seen as a ‘good student’?

3 What is excluded from such images of ‘good education’?

4 Who are excluded from such images of the ‘good student’?

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By reflecting on what and who are more valued or less valued in educational institutions, we can begin to discern how educational institutions are not neutral spaces where objective knowledge is transferred. They are places where value is distributed to some things and some people, and not to others. To take an obvious example, British-Australian English is the language of instruction in Australian educational institutions. The Macquarie Dictionary that we cited at the beginning of this chapter—described as ‘the first comprehensive dictionary of Australian English … one of the essential parts of Australian nationhood’ (Horne, 1997, p. x)—is a testament to this. This seems to be taken for granted as ‘just the way things are’. But why? One may respond straightforwardly that ‘Australia is an English-speaking

country’, which is certainly an accurate description in an official sense. Yet it is also not an accurate description either historically (as we have seen from the multilingual landscape of Australia’s First Peoples), or presently: there were more than 300 separately identified languages spoken in Australian homes, with more than onefifth (21 per cent) of Australians speaking a language other than English at home, according to the 2016 census (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017).

Or to take another example, consider the holiday calendar that organises the study dates of most educational institutions in Australia. You will notice that they are structured according to key public holidays such as New Year, Australia Day, Good Friday, Easter and Christmas. Again, this strikes us as a matter of fact. However, we might also reflect on what and whose culture is represented by this ‘fact’. Or, to put it more practically in an educational setting, we might notice which students need to request a special leave of absence because their cultural events and celebrations are not observed as holidays in the calendar, and which students do not need to do so.

Consider the public holidays observed by public schools in New South Wales, Australia, for the years 2021 and 2022. Whose culture do they represent? Are the significant cultural and religious events in your life reflected in this calendar?

HOLIDAY 2021 2022

New Year’s Day

3Additional Day

2Australia Day

Good Friday

Easter Saturday (the Saturday following Good Friday)

Easter Sunday

Easter Monday Anzac Day

Queen’s Birthday

1Bank Holiday

Labour Day

Christmas Day

Boxing Day

Friday 1 January 2021

Saturday 1 January 2022

Monday 3 January 2022

Tuesday 26 January 2021

Friday 2 April 2021

Saturday 3 April 2021

Sunday 4 April 2021

Monday 5 April 2021

Sunday 25 April 2021

Monday 14 June 2021

Monday 2 August 2021

Monday 4 October 2021

Saturday 25 December 2021

Sunday 26 December 2021

Wednesday 26 January 2022

Friday 15 April 2022

Saturday 16 April 2022

Sunday 17 April 2022

Monday 18 April 2022

Monday 25 April 2022

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Monday 13 June 2022

Monday 1 August 2022

Monday 3 October 2022

Sunday 25 December 2022

Monday 26 December 2022

source: nsw government (2021). school and public holidays.

Pause and reflect

A final example: examinations are common practices in educational institutions. It tends to be assumed that all young people have a fair chance in examinations and that achievement in them reflects individual merit: lots of effort, intelligence and so on. This view reflects what is known as ‘meritocracy’, a social system within which it is assumed that individuals earn rewards according to their abilities and efforts (Meroe, 2014, p. 487). Meritocracy was foundational to the design of mass education in the nineteenth century ‘in order to ensure that those children who show the greatest potential get the best possible education so that “talent does not go to waste”’ (Mijs, 2016, p. 16). This view assumes that educational attainment and eventual career success correlate with ‘natural ability’, with the resultant inequalities understood as ‘a Social Darwinist natural order of things and an indication of the inherently selfregulating tendencies of a free market in the distribution of resources’ (Meroe, 2014, p. 489). Yet is this ‘test and selection’ process as fair as it purports to be? Are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in educational institutions sorted solely by individual merit?

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Dominant culture

t he social practices

an d representations that affirm the central values of those who control the symbolic and material wealth in a particular society.

Consider this illustration. What do you think the artist is communicating about examinations and meritocracy in educational institutions?

From these examples of language, holidays and examinations, we can begin to discern that some cultures and cultural traits (including bodily presentations) are more valued in educational institutions than others. When educational institutions value cultures in a way that mirrors the patterns of the broader society where they are located, we can say that they reflect dominant culture. That is, in practice, they ‘affirm the central values, interests and concerns of the social class in control of the material and symbolic wealth of society’ (McLaren, 2009, p. 65). For those who find themselves excluded from this dominant culture for reasons of class (see Chapter 5), race and religion (see Chapter 6), gender and sexuality (see Chapter 8) and geography (see Chapter 4), ability and so

source: russo, a. (2012). Cartoons: ‘Climb that tree’. This Week in Education, 24 august.

on, we might say that they are part of subordinate cultures. Young people who occupy positions in subordinate cultures are less likely to find that their values, interests and concerns are represented in educational institutions. And for young people who occupy multiple subordinate social positions in relation to others—say, a female student from a low-socio-economic status district who, because of the headscarf she wears, is labelled as being from a racial and religious group seen as ‘prone to violence’ (Mansouri & Trembath, 2005)—educational institutions may be experienced as threatening social environments. In such instances, we can see how educational institutions that reflect dominant culture have the effect of compounding experiences of oppression. This can be analysed through the framework of intersectionality, which sensitises us to ‘the dynamic and complex ways that race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, ability and age shape individual identities and social life’ (Tefera et al., 2018). According to Patricia Hill Collins, this sophisticated way of analysing relationships of power and inequality is guided by four principles:

(1) race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, ability, age, and similar markers of power are interdependent and mutually construct one another; (2) intersecting power relations produce complex, interdependent social inequalities; (3) the social location of individuals and groups within intersecting power relations shapes their experiences within and perspectives on the social world; and (4) solving social problems within a given local, regional, national, or global context requires intersectional analyses. (in Collins et al. 2021, p. 694)

In the next section, we will consider more closely how the imagined ‘ideal student’ of many educational institutions can be understood through an intersectional framework. The important point to note at present is how pre-schools, schools and post-school institutions relate to the broader patterns of society, especially with regard to dominant and subordinate cultures. This is what Carter means in the earlier quote when she refers to education involving inculcation into the ‘culture of power’—a term she draws from the work of education scholar Lisa Delpit (1988).

RESEARCH IN ACTION

d elpit, l . (1988). t he silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. Harvard Educational Review, 58 (3), 280–99.

Subordinate culture

g roups whose social pr actices and lives are devalued in relation to a dominant culture.

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Addressing the battle in education over whether writing instruction should be ‘process-oriented’ or ‘skills-oriented’—or what is known today as ‘inquirybased’ versus ‘direct instruction’ respectively—Delpit short-circuits the debate by introducing the concept of the ‘culture of power’. Prior to any generalisation that can be made about what makes for a better education for Black and poor students in the United States, she argues, educators must first see how the culture of power frames such debates and prescriptions. ‘The dilemma is not

Intersectionality

a perspective that emp hasises an understanding of identity as formed by multiple, connected and intersecting relations of power and positions.

really in the debate over instructional methodology’, Delpit (1988) suggests, ‘but rather in communicating across cultures and in addressing the more fundamental issue of power, of whose voice gets to be heard in determining what is best for poor children and children of color’ (p. 296). What she is pointing out is that if teachers do not first reckon with how power relations operate in society, they will unwittingly replicate such inequalities in the classroom despite their good intentions. There are five aspects to such a reckoning for teachers, according to Delpit (1988, pp. 282–3). They involve realising that:

1 issues of power are enacted in classrooms: this is manifest in the power of the teacher over the students; the power of the publishers of textbooks and of the developers of the curriculum to determine the view of the world presented; the power of the state in enforcing compulsory schooling; and the power of an individual or group to determine another’s intelligence or ‘normalcy’

2 there are codes or rules for participating in power: this is evident in ways of talking, ways of writing, ways of dressing and ways of interacting in educational institutions

3 the rules of the culture of power reflect the rules of the culture of those who have power: because of points 1 and 2, ‘success’ in educational institutions is predicated upon acquisition of the culture of those who are in power

4 if you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier: for students who will be judged according to the rules of the culture of power—based as it is on the specific codes of a particular culture (point 3)—it is helpful to make it clear both that their cultural and language styles are valuable, and that ‘there is a political power game that is also being played, and if they want to be in on that game there are certain games that they too must play’ (p. 292)

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5 those with power are frequently least aware of—or least willing to acknowledge—its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence: moving past this lack of awareness or acknowledgment of power involves self-awareness and cultural humility on the part of teachers. A first step in practising this is attentive listening to others— especially those from subordinate cultures—with open hearts and minds so as to put one’s own beliefs on hold, even for just a moment.

Delpit (1988) believes, as we do, that these are good ways for teachers to work within and beyond the prevailing culture of power so that all students can flourish.

As educators and learners, we usually go about our daily work in educational institutions without really questioning the values—or more specifically, what or who is more/less valued—that underlie our practices. Perhaps this is one of the

more pernicious consequences of ever-increasing pressures on teachers’ work (see Chapter 12): we are too busy and stressed to break from our habits, even if we have good intentions (Schwabe & Wolf, 2009). Whatever the reasons, when we think and behave in ways that assume that ‘this is just the way things are’, when we unquestioningly take the present relations of domination and subordination to be ‘common sense’, we can be said to be consenting to the prevailing state of affairs. This is a process known as hegemony, which refers to ‘the maintenance of domination not by the sheer exercise of force but primarily through consensual social practices, social forms, and social structures produced in specific sites’ such as pre-schools, schools and post-school institutions (McLaren, 2009, p. 67). Hegemony thus reveals a dearth of critical thinking about the way things are, of courage to do things differently and of creativity in imagining how education can be otherwise conceived. Thankfully, there are educators and educational institutions that are boldly innovating beyond the confines of ‘common sense’ practices so that young people from diverse backgrounds can have a better sense of belonging as learners.

THEORY IN ACTION: DOROTHY HODDINOTT AND HOLROYD HIGH SCHOOL

Six out of ten students at Holroyd High have a refugee background. Around one-third of students have been in Australia for less than three years. Many of the students have come from war-torn backgrounds and have been through traumatic experiences. Some of the students arrive with no English at all and many are illiterate and appreciate the fresh start this high school gives …

It was 1995 when Dorothy Hoddinott became the principal of Holroyd High. What she saw then was an atmosphere of underachievement.

It was more like a typical suburban high school; it was not a happy school; it was a school with low achievement, I think, overall, and it was a bit down at the heels and miserable and children in the IEC (Intensive English Centre) were generally not accepted.

A year later, Dorothy abolished all of the school rules and has overseen two decades of dynamic change.

Hegemony

t he acceptance of p resent social relations of power and the social practices that support them as ‘common sense’ or ‘normal’.

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We decided that the raft of school rules we had didn’t really serve the needs of a school with an emerging complex population … and we spent a year negotiating with the students and the teachers and the parents about how we would organise the ethos of the school.

I think as always when you’re changing the culture in a school you start with a core of people who want to change and who believe that that change is important. The whole purpose of the school is to ensure that all the students are going to be successful …

Despite the fact that 60 per cent of students were asylum seekers, and 83 per cent of students had a language background other than English, a Grattan Institute report found that the school delivers strong post-secondary education outcomes.

In the three years to 2012, an average of 40 per cent of final Year 12 students took up university offers and more than 20 per cent enrolled in TAFE and private colleges, according to the report …

[In 2019], 54 per cent of year 12 students received first round university offers and there is no shortage of ambition in this next cohort of seniors …

Dorothy wrote in the Parramatta Sun:

I have learnt a lot on my almost 50-year journey in teaching: that birth, social class, wealth, ethnicity and gender should not define or limit your future.

That all children can learn; that all children regardless of their background and family circumstances, deserve a sound education that respects them and provides them with the firm foundation they need for the rest of their lives as active participants in society.

t his is an edited version of an article by a nne l in (2 020). Holroyd High: t he school of hope for refugee students, SBS Insight, 27 a ugu st.

By refashioning education in ways that serve different students, families and communities better, these inspiring educators and educational institutions remind us of the point of this section: that education as a process is always broader than education in its current institutional forms, and so being sensitive to diverse experiences allows us to explore different ways of educating that are more culturally responsive—‘that value, and mobilise as resources, the cultural repertoires and intelligences that students bring to the learning relationship’ (Morrison et al. 2019, pp. 1–2). In this way, educators and educational institutions can take steps to move away from the ideals and desires of dominant culture that have historically shaped mass education.

What does it mean to be ‘educated’?

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Recall the point made earlier that unlike education defined more broadly, institutionalised mass education emerged relatively recently with the rise of the modern nation-state. Its purpose at inception was to form future citizens according to certain ideals, which we now know is contingent upon the culture of power. We argue that this is still the case, although what are regarded as desirable cultural attributes may change over time. Speaking particularly of schooling, Keynes (2019)

sums up accurately that, ‘Since the emergence of modern schooling systems, the production of the national citizen has been a foremost concern and aim of education’ (p. 5). If this is the case, then we should be able to discern from this what a ‘national citizen’ is supposed to be like by examining what educational institutions hold to be the ‘ideal student’. From our years of experience as students in pre-schools, schools and post-school institutions, it is almost certain that we carry with us a ‘common sense’ of who the ideal student is.

If you could design an ‘ideal student’, who would have the maximum chance of succeeding in today’s educational institutions with minimal ‘problems’:

∙ What w ould they look like?

∙ What w ould they sound like?

∙ What w ould they behave like?

∙ What w ould their background be like?

It is important for us to critically reflect on our common-sense understandings of what an ideal student is supposed to be like. As already mentioned, ‘common sense’ is an expression of hegemony: an acceptance of the values of dominant culture over subordinate ones. Yet how have so many of us come to intuitively know what an ideal student is meant to look/sound/behave like, even what a ‘good background’ is supposed to be like? We suggest that this happens through a range of mechanisms commonly found in educational institutions.

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So far, we have shown that formal educational institutions such as schools and early childhood centres are there to teach things that are laid out in their curricula, but they also shape students more broadly—often in ways that reflect dominant cultures of power. Some people think about this as the ‘ hidden curriculum’, where unofficial lessons take place, often teaching us how to be particular kinds of people. The hidden curriculum draws our attention to ‘the tacit ways in which knowledge and behaviour get constructed, outside the usual course materials and formally scheduled lessons’ (McLaren, 2009, p. 75). Common examples include putting one’s hand up to speak, asking for permission to go to the toilet and addressing teachers by formal honorifics (Ms, Mx, Mr, Dr, Sir, etc.).

Sometimes, however, schools are quite open about the kinds of people that their practices will shape. They may have, for example, statements, images or videos on their websites explaining the particular attributes of people they aim to educate and produce (see the ‘Research in action: Representing educational values’ box earlier in this chapter).

This language of ‘producing’ is particularly interesting when we think about modern schools as internationally renowned education scholar Ken Robinson does. In his popular TED Talk ‘Changing education paradigms’, he argues that

Hidden curriculum t he implicit outcomes of the education process in institutions. i t re cognises that educational institutions shape students through standardised learning situations, rules of conduct, classroom organisation, expectations, the organisation of time and physical spaces and so on.

School culture

contemporary schools are modelled on the image of industrialisation (Robinson, 2010). Robinson draws our attention to the ways that schools mirror factory lines; that they have ringing bells, particular areas of specialisation and that children are educated in ‘batches’ (i.e. ages). He argues:

I believe we have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines: ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches, you know, we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? You know, it’s like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture. Well, I know some kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines, or at different times of the day, or better in smaller groups than large groups, or sometimes they want to be on their own. If you’re interested in the model of learning you don’t start from this production line mentality. It’s essentially about conformity and it’s increasingly about that as you look at the growth of standardized testing and standardized curricula. And it’s about standardization. (Robinson, 2010)

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t he system of un written rules, traditions, customs and expectations that binds students and teachers together in educational institutions.

Many of the issues that he raises here, such as standardised testing and curricula, will be dealt with in Chapter 11. For now, it is important to be aware that educational institutions aim to ‘produce’ a particular kind of person, which then allows us to think about what these spaces see as the ‘ideal’ student—‘that is, the student who performs and displays the right kinds of behaviour, is rewarded and thus gains greater access to the privileges of education than those who do not exhibit such exemplary attributes’ (Wadham et al., 2007, pp. 133–4). We can see from this quote that students who are successful at school are those who are seen as ‘doing student’ well, and as a result, are rewarded. In our own formal education, we might remember some of the kinds of rewards that might be offered—‘free’ time, merit awards, regular praise and positions of responsibility such as becoming a prefect or captain.

More specifically, we can think of the various procedures, material environments and interactions in schools as producing cultural environments where certain students thrive while others are subordinated or marginalised. This can be considered as an effect of ‘school culture’: the system of unwritten rules, traditions, customs and expectations that binds students and teachers together in educational institutions. This can happen in any institutional context, even those that we might consider to be privileged or elite. Through her research, Helen Proctor has shown, for example, how one elite boys’ school in Australia grappled with its own school culture and its effects on its students.

RESEARCH IN ACTION

HELEN PROCTOR AND ‘YOUNG CHRISTIAN GENTLEMEN’

Proctor, H. (2011). masc ulinity and social class, tradition and change: t he pr oduction of ‘young Christian gentlemen’ at an elite a ustralian boys’ school. Gender and Education, 23 (7), 843–56.

City Grammar School was a prestigious boys’ school in a large Australian city where Helen Proctor (2011) undertook research. She was interested in finding out about the school culture: how this had been developed through history and policy; how it related to class, race, gender and other social markers, and how the teachers and students at the school interpreted and co-created the cultural settings of the school. In particular, she was interested in how schools were ‘sites for the making of different or competing kinds of manliness’—in other words, how school culture might operate around gender. Her research showed that at City Grammar in the 1990s, while the overt ethos and culture was experienced and represented as producing ‘young, Christian gentlemen’, there was a problematic culture of violence and toughness that led to certain students being subordinated. The school’s discipline system had been ‘violent and confrontational’ and the social system between the boys had consisted of ‘pecking orders governed by testosterone’. There was a culture of anti-intellectualism, unimaginative teaching strategies and an over-emphasis on sports, especially rugby, at the expense of other areas such as performing arts. Prefects at the school—those with special privileges— often tended to be rugby players, rowers and cricket captains, with these ‘leading sportsmen sometimes having a sense of entitlement that was tolerated by the school if not exactly encouraged’. This school culture led to particular students becoming maligned—namely those who didn’t fit the ‘rough, tough, unreflective masculinity’ image that the school was valuing and fostering. An internal report detailing these values also noted that the school culture fostered ‘constricting concepts of masculinity’. As the school recognised these shortfalls, they reformed their material, relational and knowledge environments, in part because of the need to equip students with the skills, aptitudes and abilities to meet a changing, more diverse and modern Australian (and global) economic environment. Proctor’s work details the complexity of these cultures and their changes, and how they were experienced ‘on the ground’ at City Grammar.

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Think back to a time when you got ‘in trouble’ during your education: this could be from your peers or from your teachers.

1 What did you get in trouble for?

2 How did you know you were in trouble? What happened?

3 What might this say about your school culture, and the ‘ideal student’ that it is looking to produce?

Pause and reflect

From Proctor’s example, we can see that school culture is created in very specific ways in individual schools. At City Grammar, a ‘good’ student, and a student who was ‘trouble’, might look very different from those categories of student in, say, a government, co-educational and secular school. Her findings especially show what kind of student would be seen as ‘ideal’ in this environment, and how certain students would not meet these expectations. We might imagine, for example, the types of policing that students or teachers who were less masculine or presented as gay might experience at City Grammar. In her research, Proctor interviewed Adrian (pseudonym), a gay man who was a former student there. He described being deeply troubled by his school’s open teaching against homosexuality, which was also combined with a complex and multidirectional establishment of a particular type of ‘maleness’ through the school culture. For Adrian, and many other students who might not have fit the ‘rugby captain’ mould, City Grammar might have been a difficult place to spend their adolescence. From this we can see that the complex social, institutional and material elements of each school can combine to form an ideology of who the ‘ideal student’ is—and the consequences for those who do not fit that script.

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While Proctor’s study is a helpful examination of the commitment of educational institutions to transmit cultural values, more broadly, these institutions are also concerned with disciplining children and young people in order to produce a particular type of student. Despite a growing recognition of the multiple intersecting factors that influence students’ lives, there remain dominant discourses of what makes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ student that circulate in popular culture and educational institutions. According to Wadham and colleagues (2007), the ‘normal’, ‘well-adjusted’ student can regulate their own conduct, making the ‘right’ choices, and is accountable for these choices. To achieve these outcomes, educational institutions often engage particular material, curricular and temporal organisations. For example, the organisation of a school day has start and finish times, periods of study, and recess and lunch breaks. Students are required to be in particular places at particular times, and there are expectations for their behaviours and tasks at those times. The ‘ideal’ student is one who meets these expectations, showing up on time, being ‘on task’ and completing required tasks in the prescribed times. This includes their progressions through weeks, terms and years of study, through exams and subject courses. Those who fail to do this might be ‘held back’ in detention, or need to repeat a year, showing that they have not made the most of their time. School spaces, too, are organised to enable teachers and other staff to ‘track’ students’ use of time—even in places such as playgrounds—often ensuring that areas where visibility is low are ‘out of bounds’. In classrooms, desks tend to be arranged so that all students are visible from a teachers’ vantage point. Teachers reinforce how students operate in school spaces by way of techniques such as in-class commentary and pointing out exemplary students’ work and behaviour. Through the combination of these spatial, temporal and relational techniques in educational institutions such as schools, the ‘ideal student’ is constructed in our society as resourceful, task-oriented,

individual, competitive, self-disciplined, self-directed and proficient. Educational institutions are tasked with ensuring these outcomes—and particularly to transform immature and low-skilled infants into mature, productive adults, ones that fit the contemporary neo-liberal model of being ‘good corporate citizens’ (Wadham et al., 2007, p. 140; for more on neo-liberalism, see Chapter 2). In this way, institutions of mass education, such as schools, have not changed much since their inception. Of course, we are not suggesting that significant changes have not occurred in terms of curricula and subject content, as well as teaching techniques and school procedures. Corporal punishment, for example, is no longer an acceptable practice in most Australian educational institutions, with the exception of non-government schools in Queensland (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2017). What has not changed is the purpose of mass education: to form future citizens according to certain ideals informed by the dominant culture.

Of course, not all children and young people have equal access to the resources that might allow them to achieve such ideals. If we think of schools as only valuing particular kinds of students with particular behaviours, we can acknowledge that these institutions will also devalue other students with other behaviours. While we have seen some of this in terms of cultural attributes in Proctor’s research on City Grammar, we can also see examples of the ‘ideal student’ at work in more disadvantaged schools and communities. A clear example of this is the different trajectories that students follow to enter formal education as a result of their family’s resources, and the types of learning and ‘education’ that they have already encountered. Pat Thomson (2002) has termed these resources the ‘virtual schoolbag’. What Thomson calls into question is which students’ ideas and skills are seen as more worthy when they enter school and which students’ are not. The value accorded to the contents of each student’s virtual schoolbag usually correlates with how value is distributed in wider society—that is, the dominant culture. Children may enter educational institutions knowing different languages, having skill sets that relate to a family business or caring responsibilities, or knowing how to read or confidently encounter numeracy tasks. However, only some of these aptitudes are valued by contemporary schooling systems. Only some of them ‘count’ towards results in tests and examinations, for example, and others cannot be performed in the classroom or do not contribute towards their formal results. Thomson shows how the processes of educational institutions undervalue the knowledges and skills that working-class children bring to school, as they are not important for school success. This means that when socio-economically advantaged children enter educational systems, they are already privileged with a partial education about how to ‘do’ student. Perhaps they already know, for example, how to read along to a story with an adult, or how to participate in social interactions with adults in positions of power, how to write, appreciate art from family visits to galleries, or have familiarity

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Virtual schoolbag a term used to illustrate how all students who enter school have a metaphorical backpack full of ideas and skills, but not all of their ideas and skills are valued by schools.

with various countries as a result of having travelled. As US-based early childhood teacher and scholar, Megan Erickson (2015) points out:

[F]rom birth to age six, children from affluent families have spent 1,300 more hours in environments beside their home, school, or day care than children from low-income families.

Wealthy parents have the luxury of time to impart knowledge essential to understanding science and social studies to their children beginning in early childhood through exposure to travel, museums, and even simple excursions like going to the supermarket or the post office.

Another example of how the virtual schoolbag works to advantage some and disadvantage others arose at the time of writing: the shift to learning from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the long-term effects of this period are yet to fully unfold, some research has begun to show that extended periods of learning from home have exacerbated inequalities experienced by young people in Australia. For example, negative learning and well-being outcomes have been shown to be disproportionately experienced by students from regional areas and lower socioeconomic backgrounds whose families have been impacted by pandemic-induced unemployment and underemployment (Noble et al., 2020). In addition, the requirements of educational institutions at this time also widened the advantage gap between those whose family homes had the physical and technological capacity to accommodate learning from home and those that did not, as well as between those students whose families spoke English in the home and those whose did not (Brown et al., 2020).

So, students with a virtual schoolbag of advantages owing to the ‘fit’ between their home environments and the demands of educational institutions can acquire more privilege in the form of rewards such as good test scores, awards, praise and positions of leadership in educational institutions. Entering the ‘game’ of educational institutions that reflect their social status and cultural values, it is no surprise that they are more likely to encounter them as something relatively familiar and comfortable (Bourdieu, 1998).

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Of course, in such a system, there will be children who are not familiar with the practices of the ‘game’. For those who find themselves in a subordinated position in relation to dominant culture—and especially for those who find themselves subordinated at multiple intersecting axes—the features of the ideal student are likely to seem inaccessible. In many ways, educational institutions are organised to make differences and differentiation between students based on existing structures of advantage and privilege. As evidence of this, consider the ‘bands’ system in standardised tests such as the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia. In high stakes tests such as this, ‘national

minimum standards’ have been established for age groups, and students, teachers and parents are provided with data as to how they compare with the ‘norm’ for these stages. This functions as a disciplinary mechanism, one that ‘compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 183).

We would further argue that while the ideal or ‘normal’ may be more accessible for those who may more or less ‘fit’ into the mould of the ideal student set out by the dominant culture, the pressures involved in so doing may have deleterious effects on their wellbeing. Without saying that there is a straightforward causal relationship, or that they are the sole cause, we might suggest that constant measurement according to educational ideals are a key reason why young people in educational institutions are experiencing immense pressure. A survey conducted by the Australian Primary Principals Association (APPA) of 700 primary schools across the country found anxiety to be a ‘significant issue’ by 80 per cent of school leaders at their school (Elliott, 2021). According to 2015 data from the Programme for International Student Assessment study, 65 per cent of 15-year-old Australian students reported higher levels of schoolwork-related anxiety than the OECD average (Schmid, 2018). Notably, the report adds, female students and those from Indigenous, migrant and low socioeconomic status backgrounds are the most anxious about schoolwork (Schmid, 2018). While the chapters that follow will explore in more depth why this may be the case, the important question from this that arises at present is this: Are the ideals and norms that govern educational institutions serving young people well?

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have offered a sketch of how education—specifically educational institutions such as pre-schools, schools and post-school institutions—have been tied up with the culture of power in broader society. Given the historical and ongoing position of such institutions as a key instrument of national projects of mass education, it is perhaps unsurprising that they tend to reflect the dominant culture of the nation-states they are situated in. In addition, we have argued that the educational ideals produced by such a dominant culture will marginalise young people who do not—and perhaps cannot ever—‘fit’ into them. And while the subsequent chapters of this book will take up the different dimensions of power and inequality that produce such marginalisation, it is important to keep in mind that these dimensions are not separate in the lived experiences of young people in educational institutions. Unlike the way school timetables are usually organised, young people are not of a social class only on Mondays and Tuesdays, a gender on Wednesdays, then identified as a marginalised cultural group on Thursdays before ending the week as someone who lives in a remote location. All these factors intersect in complex ways to shape experiences of education.

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Amid the challenges of inequality in educational institutions that we have laid out in this chapter, we hope that we have also illustrated how educators and education leaders can make a difference. This is because, regardless of how educational institutions may be organised at present, education is always more than what is happening in them right now. What this means is that educators can always look beyond the confines of ‘common sense’ and ‘the way things are’ in educational institutions to find practices that will enable all the young people they teach to flourish, not only the select few.

FoCus Questions

1 What and who are educational institutions ‘made for’?

2 What and who are educational institutions ‘not made for’?

F urt Her re ading

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Proctor, H. (2011). ‘Masculinity and social class, tradition and change: The production of “young Christian gentlemen” at an elite Australian boys’ school’. Gender and Education, 23(7), 843–56.

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