Educational Disadvantage and Meritocratic Schooling

Abstract

The debate amongst Australian sociologists about the causes of educational inequality appears to be gathering momentum. Two major issues have been mooted. The first concerns the relative importance of 'cultural' vis-a-vis 'economic' influences in causing the restrictions on educational opportunity for lower-status children. Connell ( , 1974 has emphasised the role of differences in wealth produced by the institutions of capitalism. In his view the resulting educational inequalities are made possible and acceptable within the society by the operation of a dominant valuesystem which is individualistic, competitive, progress-oriented and meritocratic, and which leads to a definition of educational failure as being individual rather than system-centred. He rejects the existence of class differences in values and supportiveness for educational success of a nonfinancial kind in Australia. In a previous paper (Toomey, 1974a) I have argued that differences in children's family environments exert an important influence upon their scholastic attainments relatively independent of differences in wealth, and that these are connected to, but not identical with, differences in socio-economic status (SES).The second issue concerns the relative importance of the influence of the family environment vis-a-vis that of the organisation of schooling, with Knight (1974) arguing that the latter is much more influential than the former. The views of Knight and myself have recently drawn support from Edgar (1976), while Marjoribanks (1977) has made a contribution to be referred to below.Connell's insistence on the role of a meritocratic ideology has so far received little comment, and this paper will pay some attention to it in an attempt to put some of the other issues in perspective.Lack of space forbids a detailed presentation of the evidence and the finer points of the argument on which this paper rests (for these, see Toomey 1974b), but it should be mentioned at the outset that the view offered here is more relevant to metropolitan populations and to the education of males.The Meritocradc Ideology in Education I shall assume that a meritocratic ideology is widely accepted by teachers, parents and students, though this is not to deny the importance of competing ideologies, especially in the schools. More detailed explorations of this ideology are to be found in recent writings in the sociology of knowledge (e.g., Young, 1971; Hopper, 1971), but for the purpose of this paper I will concentrate on the following assumptions of the ideology: The knowledge purveyed by schools is arranged in hierarchically graded curricula and syllabuses, ordered into successive levels of difficulty. Students differ in rather generally defined abilities which determine the level in the curriculum they can attain. So in a meritocratic system, merit is determined by achievement. This means that in the schooling system, expectations of a student's future educational and occupational attainments are based on his or her current scholastic attainments' (i.e., ...

'Two Problems of Educational Inequality': a Reply to Abbey and Ashenden 1

“…They point to the way in which the organisation of schooling is dominated by a meritocratic ideology which ensures that schools supply the labour force needs of capitalism, and legitimates the existence of inequality (cf. Connell, 1977;Edgar, 1976Edgar, , 1978Toomey, 1976a). Collins (1976), reviewing their work, claims that a second revolution is also needed.…”