1. SOCIOL 316: Critical Theories of Schooling
Week 3: Labelling Theory
Lecturer: Dr Bruce Cohen

2. Last Week Durkheim: Schooling a major site of socialization.
A ‘moral education’ learnt through:
Discipline
Attachment
Autonomy
Parsons: Education promotes achieved rather than ascribed status.
As with wider society, schools operate on a meritocratic basis.
Last Week

3. This Week Reminder: Talcott Parsons Symbolic Interactionism
Jackson reading - group work
The Hidden Curriculum
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Labelling Theory
Limitations

4. Reminder: Talcott Parsons
Schooling promotes achievement through the:
Equalization of ‘contestants’ by age;
Imposition of common sets of undifferentiated tasks;
Sharp polarization between the pupils and a single teacher;
Systematic process of evaluation of pupil performance.

5. Symbolic Interactionism
Focus upon the ways meanings emerge through interaction.
Analyse the meanings of everyday life via close observational work and intimate familiarity.
Contrast to macro-sociological work in examining what actually happens within schools.

6. Jackson reading – group work (15 mins)
What features of the ‘total institution’ does Jackson identify within the school environment (give examples)
According to Jackson, what three general aspects of school life make up the ‘hidden curriculum’?
In what ways does Jackson’s descriptions of life in classrooms potentially challenge conservative notions of schools as meritocratic ? (note examples)

7. “the way in which cultural values and attitudes (such as obedience to authority, punctuality, and delayed gratification) are transmitted, through the structure of teaching and the organization of schools.” (Scott and Marshall 2005: 267)
The Hidden Curriculum

8. Pygmalion in the Classroom (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968)

9. Consequence: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Climate factor
Input factor
Response-opportunity factor
Feedback factor.
“The results of the experiment … provide further evidence that one person's expectations of another's behavior may come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When teachers expected that certain children would show greater intellectual development, those children did show greater intellectual development.”

10. “Binet’s [IQ] test used criteria that were directly educational and behavioural. They were direct assessments of the degree of adaptation of individual children to the expectation that others had of them.” (Rose 1999: 142, emphasis added)
“..there is a basis for the belief that teachers at all levels are prejudiced by information they receive about a student's ability or character.” (Goaldman 1971)
Testing bias

11. Gender, Ethnicity and Social Class
“Many of these children don't realize the worth of an education. They have no desire to improve themselves. And they don't care much about school and schoolwork as a result. That makes it very difficult to teach them.”
“That kind of problem is particularly bad in a school like [name of school]. That’s not a very privileged school. It's very under-privileged, as a matter of fact. So we have a pretty tough element there, a bunch of bums, I might as well say it. That kind you can't teach at all. They don't want to be there at all, and so you can't do anything with them. And even many of the others-they're simply indifferent to the advantages of education. So they're indifferent, they don't care about their homework.
(Chicago teachers, cited in Becker 1952: 463)
Gender, Ethnicity and Social Class

12. Rist (1973): The Urban School
Observational study of a class of “ghetto children” in St. Louis, Missouri, during their kindergarten, first- and second-grade years ( ).
On the eighth day of kindergarten, the teacher places the students in three different table groups.
The assignment to tables 1, 2, and 3, are done on the basis of various sources of information as well as teacher's initial observations of the pupils….

13. Rist (cont.)
“Within this framework, the actual academic potential of the students was not objectively measured prior to the kindergarten teacher’s evaluation of expected performance. The students may be assumed to have had mixed potential. However, the common positive treatment accorded to all within the group by the teacher may have served as the necessary catalyst for the self-fulfilling prophecy whereby those expected to do well did so.”

14. Labelling Theory
Howard Becker (1963): Deviance not quality of the act, but a consequence of the application of rules and sanctions.
Moral entrepreneurs: individuals who serve as rule creators or enforcers (usually middle and upper classes).
Gender, class and ethnicity are major characteristics in differential decision-making made by teachers.
Labelling process eventually leads to identification with a deviant image (a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’).

15. Limitations and Criticisms
Lacks systematic structural analysis?
Continued belief in positive function of schools system?
Ahistorical?
Also: methodological and conceptual issues…
Limitations and Criticisms

16. Next Week: Marxist Theory I Selected Bibliography
Becker, H. S (1952) ‘Social-Class Variations in the Teacher-Pupil Relationship’, The Journal of Educational Sociology, 25(8):
Rist, R. C. (2000) ‘Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto Education’, Harvard Educational Review, 70(3):
Rosenthal, R. and Jacobson, L. (1968) Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Next Week:
Marxist Theory I