White Working Class Boys
Section of a book I wrote: it's culture, not poverty.
There are white working-class children who fail in schools who have not grown up having been especially or even at all tainted by poverty. As an example, a few years ago, at Christmas, I received the rather unwanted present of a class that were chaotic in early lessons. This was in probably the second whitest school I have ever taught in, in Bexleyheath. There were a number of boys from the social order in question, but three in particular stood out: ‘Jimmy’, ‘Gavin’ and ‘Bob’.
Jimmy, I think, got grade 2s in both language and literature, Gav 3s and Bob a four and a five.
Gav was inclined to being something of a rotter, continually disrupting other people’s learning, continually complaining and with a stock response to teachers that everything was “unacceptable”. He was from a well-known and large local family who were probably not rolling in money. You could see why George failed. It was sort of written in him.
Bob, who was in possession of a haircut that suggested possible aggression but who was actually a gentle soul who recognised that he had a teacher who might be worth listening to, gave me some of my best memories of the year. I’d been given carte blanche by the head to move kids around the year group in order to save the results of however many of the kids in this class I could and, having had five or six lessons disrupted, I came in one morning and moved three students who were disrupting everyone’s learning out of the class and into different sets as I said I would do in the previous lesson. Bob’s response was enlightening. “F*** me”[1], thankfully it was uttered in exclamation rather than imperative, “a teacher that does what he says he’s going to do. I never thought I’d see it.” Bob took the ball, ran with it and came out with grades that were perhaps unexpected for him.
The problem presented by Jimmy is the issue in question. Jimmy was/is bright. In conversation, he was articulate. He was a well-tended, handsome young man who was always nicely clad and relatively expensively shod. His dad was a carpenter; there were none of the whispers of poverty curling around his shoulders that perhaps haunted other members of the same class. In lessons, however, he was, to use a phrase beloved of our social class, ‘bone-idle’. He was not highly disruptive but was prone to writing two lines and thinking he’d utterly exhausted his wit. You could engage him briefly on a one-to-one basis but, once your back was turned, he was back into some conversation about nothing of any particular importance with Gavin – probably moaning about teachers, blaming them for his own lack of effort. He seemed to have no real respect whatsoever for the idea of education. There were no learning difficulties at all; he was well looked after; he was intellectually capable; he was, most decidedly and obviously, not on free school meals, yet he failed miserably and had always seemed absolutely determined to do so. The problem this book seeks to solve it what is the difference between Bob and Jimmy? How do we make Jimmies become Bobs? What is it about school that makes Jimmy reject it? Or is Jimmy right?
There was something encultured about Jimmy’s failure: he had somehow, probably unbeknown both to him and to those who had, unconsciously perhaps, provided the training, been trained into it, been trained into a cultural response to the issues that education presented him. The question is how does this training come about and what can we do, if anything, to either reverse it or work with it? There are many families who are in possession of relatively middle-class incomes and middle-class expenditure, who have large televisions tuned to subscription services, who wear relatively expensive jewellery and clothing but who, culturally, are working class. And it is their culture that affects their engagement with education. The contention of this book is that to help these students to experience education as something that they value and therefore try hard at, we must first understand the manifold, complex and knottily interlinked reasons that they don’t see value in it and, consequently, don’t try enormously hard. I had one moment with Jimmy that, had we more time together, might have been an early breakthrough that could have been built upon.
At one point, having won a small version of trust and having been, again, disappointed with his lack of application, I took him outside the classroom for a chat. I spoke about my own background, that I was one of very few people from my extended family who did not ‘work with their hands’ and, perhaps weirdly, told him that I respected his dad, his family values, who they were and their responses to education. His ears pricked up; his eyes became a little brighter. I could see something had half interested him. The teacher had reached across a seemingly unbridgeable cultural barrier and tried to meet him in a place he felt comfortable. He started trying a little harder in lessons and would smile at me as he came into the class. But it was April. He was in year eleven. It was far too late. The solution that might have made some difference to his engagement needed to have been tried years before.
The contention of this book is that we must attempt to do something systemic in terms of reaching out to these children, in showing them that they and their culture and their families are approved of.[2] It’s long about time that we attempted to meet them halfway. It’s likely that there is little that we can do to affect systemic change in the way we treat these young people. But understanding the level of the problem is what this book attempts to do and, if it has a use, it is in educating people, specifically teachers, into who it is that is turning up at school and why they might have bloody good reason to doubt its worth. It may be that there is no solution to this biggest of all problems and, if there was a silver bullet, someone would surely have thought to have loaded and shot the gun by now. But just shrugging and uttering the morally vacuous and, to my mind, unforgiveable line, “What can you do with kids like these?” isn’t good enough. The answer to this question is “quite a lot really.” But in order to do something with kids like these you have to care, you have to seek to understand.
But there are no pat solutions. I have always felt guilty about this when presenting on it. I outline the size of the problem but struggle to point in the direction of, “if you do this, it will make it better.” I’ll attempt to put a few ideas together at the end of each chapter, but they may feel spindly, tokenistic even. For me, aside from the fact that the system itself must start thinking about ways to better engage this community, it is the remit of individual schools and the leadership of those schools to use this book to come to an understanding of the specificity of the problem and to tailor what they might do about it to the context of those communities. So, use this as a guidebook to where the problems occur and what they actually are and perhaps you might want to have a notebook where, while you are reading, you note down your own ideas on a whole school basis and also on a subject basis. If there is a solution, well, that solution is you. You’ve got the guts and the interest to have got hold of this text. You clearly have something of a passion for this area. Let you and I join together, metaphorically get in the trenches side-by-side and see if we can’t do something about this bloody issue.
[1] I’m not terribly/at all offended by swearing.
[2] Recall this phrase at the end of the book.