EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY: THE SPECIAL CASE OF PACIFIC STUDENTS.

• Author: Nash, Roy
• Position: Statistical Data Included

Abstract

A causal relationship between aspirations and achievement is widely recognised by the sociology of education. Bourdieu, for example, has argued that students "internalise the odds" of their social group and thus reproduce these "objective chances" imposed by the social structure. Contemporary studies, however, particularly of ethnic minorities, indicate the relationship to be more complex. In New Zealand, the achievements of Pacific students, for example, are generally poor despite their high aspirations. These issues are discussed in the context of empirical data, both quantitative and qualitative, from the Progress at School project, and with reference to recent commentaries on this theme by Bourdieu. Some brief comments on the implications for policy makers are offered.

INTRODUCTION

The Government's policy initiatives designed to reduce the "gaps" are directed at improving social and educational opportunities, in the widest sense, for low socioeconomic communities, in order to bring them closer to the levels of well-being enjoyed by those not in this category. Although the attention of the media is often focused on Maori, it is appropriate to examine the circumstances of Pacific people where they have special characteristics (Earle 1995). The sphere of education is one where this is arguably the case. Both Maori and Pacific students underachieve in the educational system compared with Pakeha and Asian students, and there is some merit in examining the position of Pacific students in an analysis able to attend to the particular history and status of their communities. The following analysis will draw on published Ministry of Education statistics and data from the Progress at School project (Nash and Harker 1998). The Progress at School project, funded by the Ministry of Education, was designed as a school-effects study and monitored the educational attainments of 5,400 students from Year 9 (in 1991) to the completion of their secondary education. The research was conducted broadly within a theoretical context influenced by the eminent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1999). It is necessary to point out at once, however, that the common recognition of Bourdieu as a "reproduction theorist" will be subjected, with the aid of his own recent work, to a revisionist interpretation in this paper.

THEORETICAL CONTEXT

Bourdieu supposes that social and economic relations are reproduced from one generation to another because people acquire from their socialisation a habitus, "a system of acquired dispositions functioning at the practical level as categories of perception and assessment or as classificatory principles as well as the organising principles of action" (Bourdieu 1990:13), which sets their aspirations broadly in line with the opportunities open to their social group. In a sense, people come to internalise their statistical fate, and in that manner bring about what appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The school, moreover, contributes to this process by excluding, through its active neglect of their "nonrecognised" habitus, working-class and cultural minority children.

In a nutshell, the argument is that, "[t]he working classes are trapped in their habitus through cultural impoverishment and cultural difference" (Branson and Miller 1991:42). This position, although accepted by many, has also been sharply criticised as a "dark", "determinist" and "immutable formulation" (Mehan et al. 1996:216), Bourdieu (1999) refers to the "internalised chances" argument as "the statistical mode of reproduction", and Fowler (1996:9) points out that in his view, the "low percentage of the children of workers and peasants who achieve educationally at the levels of the children of the haute bourgeoisie, is in itself proof of the operation of such generative relationships which often act against the will". This epistemological manoeuvre, to say the least, is not universally accepted.

The model requires that all individuals from a certain group have the odds of success and failure for their group embodied in a generative habitus, so that if, for example, only 5% of lower working-class children enter university, children from this class have a taken-forgranted knowledge of the odds against them built in to the habitus and so reproduce them. But in order for this argument to work it would have to be shown that individuals possessed a learned ability to estimate the probability of those "like themselves" to achieve any relevant future state, and that their actions were shaped in accordance with that knowledge. That has not been done and it is difficult to imagine how it could be done. People certainly have specific dispositions to act, but they do not have that kind of disposition -- and it is unrealistic to suppose that they do in order to maintain a form of "statistical" explanation. Nevertheless, Bourdieu's status as a theorist of "reproduction" has been widely accepted and maintains a radical appeal for many who work in education.

The Role of the School in Working-class Reproduction

Reproduction through the internalisation of objective chances, even if demonstrated by its results, seems at the same time to suggest that aspirations among the dominated classes and groups that fail at school should be low. As an empirical fact this has actually been in doubt for many decades, and in the case of certain groups is spectacularly untrue. One of these problematic cases, the French North African population, has forced itself to Bourdieu's attention. How does Bourdieu explain the complete mismatch between the high aspirations of this community and their actual location in the division of labour and the social hierarchy? The answer will be developed in a discussion of a parallel "special case" nearer home: Pacific families and their children in New Zealand also maintain very high aspirations similarly quite at odds with their actual location in the social structure.

Bourdieu's theory has always been multi-layered, subtle, and free of an over-pedantic insistence on "consistency". The school -- as he writes -- makes its own contribution to the reproduction process. The particular nature of its reproductive mechanisms, moreover, is not static, and, in a paradox more apparent than real, the contemporary school retains as it rejects (Bourdieu et al. 1999:185):

Destined by their lack of cultural capital to almost certain academic failure, these young people are nevertheless placed in conditions likely to raise their aspirations, often remaining there until a fairly advanced age. By provisionally setting them apart from productive activities and cutting them off from the world of work, School breaks the "natural" cycle of working-class reproduction that is based in the anticipated adaptation to dominated positions. Only in recent decades has the school assumed a central role in working-class reproduction. But it is now the case that most young people remain in school -- there is virtually no other choice -- until they are 17 or 18 years of age. For many this means passing through adolescence while coping with the experience of cumulative failure in an alienating institution. It is in this context that working-class boys and girls -- particularly the former -- typically create a world in which fantasy and reality co-exist in contradictory forms. The school seems unreal in as much as it refuses to acknowledge an entire range of practices central to the identity of young people as they begin to live as the adults they wish to become. But at the same time, the truly defining property of adult status -- work -- seems so remote, despite the fact that many students have part-time jobs, that aspirations often long remain at the level of fantasy.

In the protected, indeterminate world of the school, that delays their entry to "real world", working-class boys indulge in dreams of becoming professional sports stars, or Of joining the army, and working-class girls of becoming singers and actresses, showing little or no interest in the occupations most must before long enter. Students at school often practise, as Bourdieu notes, "the art of surviving at the least possible cost" (Bourdieu 1999:429) and have learned how to provoke their teachers with that attitude of "disenchanted resignation disguised as careless nonchalance" (p.425) that even in France is known as "le cool". The contemporary school has been forced to adapt to these conditions with singular modifications to its educational practice and theory.

The theoretical changes are particularly interesting. Bourdieu notes that the most influential of current theories -- which has a certain "radical" genesis -- rejects the once dominant psychological perspective in favour of "structural" alternatives:

Factors that seem "natural", like talent or taste, give way to poorly defined social factors such as the inadequacies of the educational system or the inability and incompetence of the teachers (whom parents increasingly hold responsible for their children's poor results), or, even more confusedly, to the logic of a completely deficient system in need of an overhaul. (p.422) There are followers of Bourdieu who will not be amused by the irony of these comments. He suggests that those, not least among them teachers, who once maintained the conventional view that educational inequality was the result of "natural gifts" or intelligence, and so on, have now adopted a different position. It would be unkind to overdocument the existence of this "critical" position, subjected to such unexpected critique, and Walkerdine and Lucy (1989:192)...