Class, codes and control

The reviewer said "I would therefore recommend that the author look to Basil Bernstein’s theoretical work, Class, Codes, and Control, Vol. 3 (1970?), which is less culturally specific and makes a more sophisticated argument in favor of a strong relationship between pedagogical framing and social class position."

actually this is not my main argument at all. my main argument is just that social interactions have been theorized to have an impact on the wider social structure and so by using anyon and bernstein i argue that any evidence of a difference that exists in classrooms overtime in china could have important implications for the future social order.


Notes on the "Introduction"
I do not like Bernstein's writing very much and yet I can see that he is absolutely essential to my work and so i do need to read him more carefully. it seems that i am interested in just exactly the things that he was working on. why do i say that? there are key words that he brings up--ritual interactions, institutionalization, organizational analyses, educational ideology.

He talks about how his paper "open schools--open society?" was a polemic against application of organizational anlaysis to the school, integration of structural and inter-actional features of transmission. He says that he owes a lot to Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society. i don't know anything about this.

"although i made it evident at the beginning of the paper... that i was discussing what existed at the level of educational ideology, rather than what existed in the day-by-day practice of teh schools teh paper was taken in some quarters as a description of the facts"


he is interested in the "specifics of transmission ". I believe that the structure of socialization is not a set of roles, but classficationa nd framing relationships. It is these i think that shape teh mental structues by establishing coding procedures whicha are prediated upon distinctive rules. However...behind any given classification and framing are the power relationships and the fundamental principles of social control.

p. 22 a general thesis for the socialization into codes

1) how class regulates the structure of communication within the family and so the initial sociolinguistic coding orientation of children.
2) how class regulates the institutionalizing of elaborated codes in education, the forms of their transmission adn therefore the forms of their realization.

level I macro-institutional level
level II transmission level
level III textual level

this is interesting--p. 23 "we should be able to move from the distinguishing features of a specific text, to the distinguishing features of the agency, to the distinguishing macro-institutional features.

p24. will be crucial to the construction of my theoretical framework:
class
polity ----> level I macro-institutional level
division of labor

dominant cultural principles (codes)
family education -----> level II transmission controls
social relationships [classification frames: regulative, instructional, inter-personal, imaginative]
situations
ground rules (meanings and realizations)
speech variant

meanings
context independent ----->level III textual
context dependent


in the introduction Bernstein references
Parsons (1964) The link between character and society" in Social Structure and Personality.

This seems like it would also be very relevant to my purpose.

willard waller also "the sociology of teaching" by willard waller.

Part I--changes in the moral basis of schools
chapter 1 sources of consensus and disaffection in education

this chapter covers an analysis of the expressive and instrumental orders of the school

p. 38 "I propose to call that complex of behavior and activities in the school which is to do with conduct, character adn manner the expressive order of the school, and that complex of behavior, and the activities which generate it, which is to do with the acquisition of specific skills the instrumental order."

the instrumental order is affected by technological change in society, affects teaching methods which leads to instabilities in the school
the expressive order is legitimized by notions of acceptable behavior outside of the school

"the more the instrumental order dominates schools in England, the more examination-minded they become adn teh more divisive becomes their social organization. the greater the emphasis on this type of instrumental order, the more difficult it is for the expressive order to bind and link all the pupils in a cohesive way. It is quite likely that some pupils who are only weakly involved int eh sinstrumental order will be less receptive to the moral order transmitted through the expressive order. In this situation the children may turn to an expressive order which is pupil-based and anti-school."

in a changing society the moral order outside the school becomes increasingly ambiguous this may lead to a weakening of the expressive order within the school..."the weakening of the schools expressive order is likely to weaken the schools attempt to transmit behaviors working for cohesion between staff, between pupils, and between pupils and staff" p. 39

the rest of the chapter focuses largely on family dynamics that generate different attitudes in students towards school and how this affects the expressive and instrumental orders of the school: alientation, detachment, commitment, deferment, estrangement. he also argues that the teachers can be subject to the same array of attitudes and thus there can be permutations of teacher and student attitudes.

there is an interesting table on page 53 that summarizes a theoretical framework of the instrumental and expressibe orders.

chapter 2--ritual in education

consensual rituals--function to bind all of the school in one moral community as a distinct collectivity...assemblies, ceremonies, dress, signs, totems, scrolls, plaques, revivifying of special historical contexts and other symbolic features. Important component is the ritual of punishment and reward.

differentiating rituals--are concerned to mark off groups within the school from each other, usually in terms of age, sex, age relation or social function.

p. 60 this idea of consensual rituals and the value systems of school and society is especially interesting in the case of China. in China a great deal of attention is given to cultivating common value systems.
p. 62 comments on ritual in stratified and differentiated schools

"ritual involves a highly redundant form of communication in the sense that, given thesocial context, the messages are highly predictable. teh messages themselves contain meanings which are highly condensed. thus the major meanings in ritual are extra verbal or indirect; for the are nto made verbally explicit. ritual is a form of restricted code. the expressive order, then, in a stratified school is transmitted through a communication system which is verbally both highly condensed and highly redundant. the expressive order of a differentiated school is likely to be transmitted not through ritual and it restricted code, but through a communication system where the meanings are verbally elaborated, less predictable and therefore more individualized. if the basis for social control through ritual is extra-verbal or indirect, impersonal and non-rational, then the basis for social control where ritual is a major source of control in stratified schools is the internalizing of the social structure adn teh arousal and organization of sentiment evoked through ritual, signs, lineaments, heraldic imagery and totems."

so what is it that i can take away from this chapter and apply to my own analysis of interaction ritual. it seems that bernstein is interested in the effects of the structure of the school on the strenght of ritual and the power of its effect on the expressive order and the moral order and social solidarity. he feels that in the stratified school ritual is more powerful but that it is weakened as the school become more open, more interested in diversity.

i am not sure what is teh relationship between consensual/differentiated ritual and stratified--it seems he is arguing that with industrialization the response to ritual changes? he argues that ritual is more pronounced in stratified schools where students are categorized according to perceived fixed attributes eg. iq. he further argues that if the focus is more on cognitive development as a process then ritual is likely to be weakened. he calls such a structure a differentiated structure. in this case the focus is on education for diversity.

chapter 3--open schools--open society

bernstein draws on durkhemian notions of social solidarity to argue that the schools are moving from mechanical solidarity to greater organic solidarity

mechanical solidarity--use of punishment, punishment has symbolic value
organic solidarity--reconcile conflicting claims