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Stephen Ball: Education is a matter of family values

Taken from the inaugural lecture by the Professor of Sociology of Education at London University's Institute of Education

Thursday 13 March 2003 01:00 GMT
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The middle-class family is engaged with its children's education as a family project, and the vast majority of the work is done by mothers.

Middle-class parents do not want the child to be "dragged down" or distracted. These parents fear that, in the "wrong" context, the child will come under the influence of children with bad attitudes and "dangerous minds".

They also want the child "stretched". This can also be read as a form of differentiation, based upon their responsibility to the child to provide opportunities for self-development.

These experiences develop in the child certain skills and capabilities and also work to constitute the child as able. In this sense we can see "ability" and "achievement" partly at least as a social assembly achieved within the family, as a collective endeavour, which often extends beyond the family itself and requires various forms of capital investment in order to be maintained.

By buying in private tutors and activities and making sure the child moves in the right circles, the parents ensure that the child gains skills, capabilities and an orientation to schooling that work to constitute him or her as "clever".

Viewed in this way, ability and achievement can be understood as the composite productions of families, which at times involve enormous emotional exertions and capital expenditures – rather than as either a natural or an individual phenomenon.

Only a part of this activity is visible in the classroom – the middle-class child in the classroom is in part a cipher of attentive, surveillant, participant parenting or more often – and more accurately – "intensive mothering".

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