Values and Norms

The basic thrust of this type of explanation for differential educational achievement is the idea that, since schools are, by definition, middle class institutions (involving values that derive from middle class experiences and concerns) a pupil's social class will have important consequences in terms of their potential educational career.

One of the basic assumptions here is that educational success or failure has less to do with such things as "innate intelligence" than with the ability of pupils to get themselves "in tune" with what happens in schools. While conformity to dominant norms of behaviour doesn't necessarily guarantee educational success, it does appear to make it much more likely that the child who conforms, willingly and "naturally", has a far greater chance of achieving educational success than the child who, for whatever reason, finds him / herself unable or unwilling to conform to school norms.

In basic terms, therefore, this an an "anomie argument", in the sense that a working class child, for example, comes into the school with a cultural background significantly different to the cultural ideas perpetuated inside the school. Such a child is, therefore, placed an an immediate disadvantage to his or her middle class peers, mainly because they have to learn a new (informal) set of cultural values and norms in addition to the formal learning perpetuated in the classroom.

The middle class child, for whom the informal norms and values of the school are reasonably familiar, starts with a marked classroom advantage in that they can concentrate on learning the formal aspects of the school curriculum. The working class child, on the other hand, must learn (and accept) the informal cultural values and norms of the school at the same time as trying to learn the formal aspects of the curriculum.

A number of researchers have pointed out that schools involve a culture clash between the norms and values of teachers and the norms and values of working-class pupils. J.B.Mays ("Education and the Urban Child", 1962) summarises this idea in the following way:

"The teachers in the school find themselves at the nexus ["meeting point"] of two distinct cultures with a correspondingly difficult role to play. Being themselves mainly conditioned by a...middle-class system of values, they have to make a drastic mental readjustment to be able to deal sympathetically with the people whose attitudes and standards are so different. Even those teachers who have themselves risen from working-class backgrounds, do not, contrary to what is generally supposed, always find it psychologically an easy matter to adopt a sympathetic, non-condemnatory, attitude towards the less favoured representatives of their own social class.".