Cultural Deprivation

The concept of cultural deprivation has been - and remains - a contentious one within Sociology, mainly because (unlike its material counterpart) questions of cultural deprivation (as opposed to cultural differences, involve subjective judgements about value.

In basic terms, we can only decide that someone is "culturally deprived" by having a clear conception about such things as what is normal in society (and, by extension, the education system). However, leaving this idea to one side for a moment, we can note that a number of witnesses have come forward in support of the concept of cultural deprivation.

In general, the evidence in support of the concept has focused on social class, whereby the cultural attributes of those who succeed in the education system are identified and, by extension, the cultural attributes of those who fail are similarly identified. In this way, it is argued, we can build-up a model of the "successful", identify the cultural attributes that contribute towards success and suggest ways that those who lack these cultural attributes can be educationally compensated.

For example, one of the first studies to focus on the attributes of successful working class boys who attended Grammar school and stayed until they were 18 was that carried-out by Jackson and Marsden.

Ball ("Education", 1986) summarises the attributes of this group:

"The majority come from relatively prosperous home-owning working class families. Often the families could be described as ‘sunken middle class’, where parents or grandparents had been downwardly mobile as a result of ill health, bankruptcy or other misfortune. Typically, they came from districts of mixed social class and an important minority of middle class children attended their primary school.".

In terms of cultural deprivation theory, the "solution" to working class underachievement lay in two areas:

• Working class culture would have to change - to become, in effect, a mirror-image of middle class culture.

• Working class children would have to be compensated for their home background by the provision of extra educational resources that would give them an equal opportunity to compete with their culturally advantaged middle class peers.

This usually involved pre-school educational compensation (since, according to educational psychology, the "damage" to working class children done by exposure to working class culture through the experience of primary socialisation was too far advanced by the time a child reached school age for "compensatory education" to be of any real benefit).

Compensatory education was first put into effect in America during the Kennedy Presidency in the early 1960's as part of the "War on Poverty" and it continued during the Johnson Presidency that followed, under "Operation Head Start". More resources were put into pre-school educational facilities for the poor, but the results of this effort were "disappointing" for cultural deprivation theorists. No appreciable increase in attainment among the working class resulted.

In Britain, compensatory education was adopted in the form of "Educational Priority Areas". In the late 1960's the government increased the resources available for such things as school buildings, teaching materials, teachers' salaries, etc. in parts of four areas of the country (Liverpool, Birmingham, West Yorkshire and South-East London). Although many involved complained about the relative lack of resources put into the scheme, the results were again disappointing. No significant improvement in the educational attainment of working class children seems to have resulted from their participation in such schemes.

Despite complaints that compensatory education was either under-funded or that resources were misdirected, a more-plausible explanation for the failure of such schemes lies in the concept of cultural deprivation itself, for the following reasons:

Firstly, it views working class culture as inferior to that of the middle classes. That is, as something that must be eradicated by the best efforts of concerned middle class professionals, in the interests of the working class themselves.

Secondly, it theorises culture in terms of a set of basic attitudes that have to be changed - as if all that is required for educational success is for the working class to "throw off" the attitudes that are holding them back. In short, the real "solution" is for the working class to adopt middle class cultural attitudes.

The problem here is the simplistic notion of "culture" involved. If cultures simply consisted of "attitudes", then it would be a relatively simple matter to change them - but clearly they do not. People develop cultural styles and attitudes out of the facts of their material existence; culture is rooted in the life experience of people and develops out of the way they experience the world as both individuals and as part of a wider social and cultural system of beliefs. Cultural change requires more than a simple psychological adjustment, since it is rooted in the structural arrangements that exist in any society.

• People, for example, do not choose to be poor, to live in sub-standard housing, to fail in the educational system or to work in low status employment. In a society that provides these type of conditions as part of its very structure, people will be forced to exist under these conditions. To live under such conditions needs a different form of cultural adaptation than is needed to live under different conditions.

• Cultural deprivation theory sees little wrong with the way schools are organised as social institutions. Since upper and middle class children seem to display few problems of adjustment, the "problem" must lie in working class culture, rather than the way in which both schools - and society as a whole - are socially organised.

Overall, therefore, we might conclude that any cultural theory of education that does not recognise cultural differences as stemming from the experience that people have in the social world cannot adequately explain differential educational achievement.

This is not, however, to say that cultural deprivation theory is uninfluential in political circles; precisely the opposite is probably true since, somewhat perversely, of all the theories discussed so far, it is the one that probably has least sociological validity (cultural deprivation theory) that has been applied most often by governments in an attempt to understand and remedy working class educational failure.

The last Conservative government in Britain (1992 - 1997), for example,  repeatedly tried to lay down (or prescribe) various ways that children should present themselves in schools in terms of things like use of language, spelling, grammar and punctuation. In addition, the concept of "failing schools" was developed, whereby any school that failed to meet certain standards in terms of examination targets, for example, could find itself closed down.

The Blair government (1997 - ) has continued and even extended some of these policies. The concept of Educational Priority Areas has also been resurrected under a different name (Educational Action Zones).

Action Zones, for example,  involve a partnership between schools, Local education Authorities, voluntary and statutary bodies and businesses and are intended to "raise standards" through the promotion of "good educational practice" and "lifelong learning". Although little of any real substance has, as yet, been done to develop this particular policy, the first of these Zones will be established late-1999, early-2000.