Oxford Review of Education

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Sociology, Education and Equality in the Sociology

of Education: a review of Halsey, Heath & Ridge's
Origins and Destinations

Norman Dennis

To cite this article: Norman Dennis (1980) Sociology, Education and Equality in the Sociology
of Education: a review of Halsey, Heath & Ridge's Origins and Destinations, Oxford Review of
Education, 6:2, 111-131, DOI: 10.1080/0305498800060201

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305498800060201

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 Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 6, No. 2,1980

Sociology, Education and Equality in the Sociology

of Education: a review of Halsey, Heath & Ridge's
Origins and Destinations

NORMAN DENNIS

Referring to the teachers in London's elementary schools in 1895, Senior Chief Inspector
Sharpe wrote, "Of one thing I am sure, that so far as their teaching goes it is thoroughly
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intelligent and practical." For Sharpe, therefore, the standards attained in the lowest
grade of school at that time were already high. "It rests with the generation of ten or
fifteen years hence to pronounce how successful they have been." Successful in what
terms? Sharpe's answer is, "In training English men and women for their lives' work."
G. A. N. Lowndes' judgment was that the London elementary schools of 1895 had been
"triumphantly vindicated." That they had been properly trained for their lives' work was
proved by the conduct of the London army battalions in the Great War, "in the withering
machine-gun fire at Gommecourt, in the desperate resistance at Cambrai and Gavrelle, on
the sun-scorched plain at Gaza and in the mud of Glencorse Wood" [i].
The unarticulated yet conspicuous assumptions of such a sociology of education will
seem outdated to most readers and may strike some as bizarre. Yet thirty years ago few
sociologists and fewer educationalists would have questioned them. In these times of
rival and unreconciled sociologies of education, therefore, a balanced assessment of an
important new book (which, like Lowndes' The Silent Social Revolution, reviews forty
years of education in this country) cannot depend only on the book's merits taken in
isolation. Origins and Destinations: Family, Class and Education in Modern Britain
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980), by A. H. Halsey, A. F. Heath & J. M. Ridge, must be
judged also on the contribution it makes to the continued existence and vitality of the type
of theoretical interest, concern for craftsmanship and social-value commitment it repre-
sents.

THE CONSENSUS AND ITS COLLAPSE

The 1950s saw the rapid abandonment of Lowndes' style of work, of his values and of his
assumptions about the operations which had to be completed to justify his making 'factual'
statements about schools, pupils and teachers. The first heir was the sociology of education
that was developing at the London School of Economics. Its interests and methodology
brought together native traditions of political arithmetic, the increasingly sophisticated
quantitative techniques of American social science, social-democratic or ethical-socialist
preoccupations with class privileges, and the sociological 'action frame of reference'. The
action frame of reference for the study of society was widely accepted within the still tiny
but now growing body of British sociologists. This approach meant the study of society-
wide values, specialised institutional norms, organisational objectives, sets of role pre-
scriptions, and the role behaviour of social actors. Its main exponent was Parsons. His

111
 112 Oxford Review of Education
own evaluation of the action frame of reference was the received wisdom of the profession.
It transcended both holistic interpretations of man in society and atomic, individualist
interpretations, and thus revolutionised social thought [2]. It asserted that social theorising
and investigation must take into account the independent importance of the shared moral
judgments through which men in society make choices between open possibilities that
developments of the material forces of production may make available. Sociology must
also take into account the independent importance of each actor as a unique carrier of his
own ethics, intentions and perceptions. As against Utilitarianism, it emphasised the
significance, first, of the individual's social, especially his moral, environment. It empha-
sised, secondly, the always imperfect endeavour to inculcate into the personalities of the
individuals of each succeeding generation such moral sensitivities and modes of perceiving
the world as would enable given patterns of social co-operation to continue in operation.
Sociological studies must meet the twin tests of, in Max Weber's terms, motivational
adequacy and causal (quantitative-correlational) adequacy. A. H. Halsey and his collabor-
ators were among the pioneers in this country of such a sociology as applied to the study of
education.
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In the next decade these 'pillars of the best known truths' in sociology were shaken.
Not unconnected with Halsey's distinguished contributions to the sociology of education,
the 1960s was a period of educational reform. In the general expansion of higher educa-
tion, 28 new departments of sociology were created. Staffs were rapidly recruited from
each year's output of graduating sociologists. In this way, from small beginnings, demands
for teaching staffs were met in the universities, and subsequently in polytechnics, colleges
of education, further education colleges and the schools. While this expansion was taking
place, the war in Vietnam was radicalising student campuses in the United States and in
Europe. Western academic sociology, which historically had been a so-called 'answer to
Marxism', became hospitable to Marxist thought in a wide diversity of manifestations.
The new sociology which appealed most strongly to radical students, and which retained
its attraction as they passed into teaching posts, was a style of neo-Marxism known as
critical sociology or critical theory—the sociology of the Frankfurt School. Although it
was only one of many varieties of radical sociology, its special interest lies in its direct
opposition to the quantitative, ameliorative sociology which in the 1950s had worked
within the action frame of reference, and which had been 'sociology'. The original group
of critical sociologists, bearing the multiple stigmata in Hitler's Germany of being Marxist,
Jewish, intellectual and, many of them, upper-class, were exiled to the United States.
They produced many important sociological works before, during and after the war. They
found successors such as Jiirgen Habermas in post-war Germany. In the United States
they had affiliations even with the doyen of the quantitative sociologists, Paul Lazarsfeld.
In the years of student and faculty unrest, however, the conception of sociology which
underpinned their monographic productions came into prominence. First, favourable
assessments of modern institutions are impermissible. "The fully enlightened earth
radiates disaster triumphant" [3]. The most civilised nations had already destroyed, almost
beyond hope, their own and others' well-being. Secondly, endeavours directed to gradual,
peaceful reform along Fabian or ethical-socialist lines are worse than useless, they are
actually harmful. Redemption could not lie in the direction of piecemeal social engineer-
ing. The transition to the world of the administered life and its accelerating advance are
themselves the problem. Thirdly, although more gnomically and indeed not consistent
with their own practice, empirical, especially positivistic, studies are superfluous. The
world was sinking into a new kind of barbarism. The principal achievements of the most
advanced nations were the Nazi extermination camps; the atomic bombing of Japan;
napalm, defoliation and blanket bombing of civilian populations in Vietnam; and the
 Sociology, Education and Equality 113
application of all that was brightest and best to the purposes of mass stupefaction and
repression. In the face of these experiences, all other concerns were trivial or diversionary.
The enemy of men's efforts to preserve freedom, and to extend and develop it, was "the
self-oblivious instrumentalization of science" and "the present triumph of the factual
mentality" [4]. Positivism—science—which since Comte had been sociology's proudest
motto, became under the influence of the critical sociologists a wide-ranging, all-purpose
and severe term of disapprobation. Associated with these ideas there is, fourthly, a strand
of epistemological nihilism. 'Truth' is a chimera. Quantitative—positivistic—social
studies, with their individualistic assumptions, generate materials which lie within 'the
bourgeois problematic'. They allow people to perceive what may be changed, and how
and by whom it may be changed, only in terms compatible with the continued existence of
state-regulated capitalism—big business and big government. 'Facticity' is one of the
modern tyrannies that must be broken. Fifthly, and finally, no-one but the permanent
critic of society can be a sociologist. Whenever he willingly emerges from his natural
element, which is criticism, the intellectual becomes a "mere means at the disposal of the
existing order" [5]. That is the fate of all triumphant thought. When criticism becomes
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affirmation, its truth evaporates.

These guidelines for sociology as a discipline are clothed in the unfamiliar concepts,
and the impressive, dignified and complicated cadences of scholarly German. They are
transliterated into English words, rather than fully translated into the English language.
Die Metamorphosen von Kritik in Affirmation lassen auch den theoretischen Gehalt nicht
unberiihrt, seine Wahrheit verfluchtigt sich. ("The metamorphoses of criticism into affir-
mation do not leave the theoretical content untouched, for its truth evaporates.") Die
Philosophie, die im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, der Infamie die Todesfurcht entflosste, ging
unter Bonaparte schon zu ihr iiber. ("The philosophy which put the fear of death into
infamy in the eighteenth century chose to serve that very infamy under Napoleon" [6].)
To the extent that critical theory and various associated bodies of thought and practice
have been incorporated into scholarly production and academic courses, sociology has
travelled far from Lowndes, and has distanced itself from the sociology of the 1950s.
K. R. Popper—an important influence on the sociology of the 1950s, with its commitment
to the controvertibility of the data generated in the course of social investigation and to
piecemeal, peaceable reform—dismisses the critical sociologists as "irrationalist" and
"intelligence-destroying" [7]. Like the false clerics of Milton's day, they are misleaders of
youth: The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,/But swoln with wind, and the rank
mist they draw,/Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
Professor Halsey and his colleagues have been resistant to these anti-empirical (cer-
tainly anti-positivistic) and apocalyptic strains. It is interesting that in America also it is
the sociology of education which has been relatively, although by no means entirely
immune from the attacks on positivistic social science. As Torsten Husen points out, such
neo-Marxist sociologists of education as Bowles, Gintus, Levin and Carnoy, unlike many
of their colleagues in Europe, are social scientists with outstanding technical competence
in quantitative methods [8]. According to the tradition to which Halsey and his colleagues
have been faithful, it is bad sociology that is not guided by and contributing to theoretical
developments. It is not bad so much as impossible sociology that attempts to operate on
the assumption that a researcher's choice of subject-matter can or ought to be free from
his own judgments of value of what is worth investigating. Every sociological topic has
(to use Weber's term) value-relevance—Wertbeziehung. But both theory and policy, both
explanation and choice, must take full cognisance of things as they are and of the limits to
the changes which given things are capable of undergoing. This applies to the things of
the physical environment, like the large stone which Dr Johnson kicked with "mighty
 114 Oxford Review of Education
force" when Boswell told him that it was impossible to refute Bishop Berkeley's proof of
the non-existence of matter: "I refute it thus!" It applies just as much to the things of the
social world (which Durkheim therefore insisted should be thought of and treated as
'things'). They cannot be ignored or wished away. To work within their range and to
change them means having to take their existence into account.
When confronted with things, therefore, every effort must be made to remove the
influence of one's own fears of what the facts may show, and the influence of one's own
desires about what the facts ought to show if the world were benign and just. Science is a
set of procedures which over a range of activities and practitioners has been shown to
have been effective in diminishing subjectivity. It is impossible to diminish subjectivity to
zero anywhere. It is extremely difficult to get it below a very high level in the study of
social affairs. Some researchers pretend to follow the protocols of science but do not.
There are difficult topics and dishonest men. To say that a social science, again to use
Weber's term, is value-free—Wertfrei—is never, therefore, to describe what has been
achieved. It only indicates the direction of endeavour.
Quantitative social science constitutes a set of procedures which are simply inappro-
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priate to the study of many social phenomena. But over a certain range of topics and in
the investigation of certain aspects of those topics, they are applicable. Where they are
applicable, the procedures of quantitative social science are the most effective checks on
subjectivity that sociology possesses.
Origins and Destinations places itself firmly in the camp of those who attempt to marry
"a value-laden choice of issues" with "objective measures of data collection" [9]. This
approach cannot settle ideological conflicts. If and in so far as the choice of values is
made upon a correct appreciation of the relevant facts, values are beyond the scope of
empirical confirmation or refutation. But a study such as this can "check the factual basis
of some of the assertions made" [10].

THE CLEAR BOUNDARIES OF QUANTITATIVE EDUCATIONAL HISTORY

Educational equality and inequality have been much researched in both Britain and
America, including the experience of the educational system through time (as, for example,
in Douglas' The Home and the School, and in Davie, Butler and Goldstein's From Birth
to Seven [11]). Origins and Destinations does not duplicate these studies. Instead of
charting the progress of a given cohort through the educational system as it is during a
particular period, Halsey and his colleagues trace the impact on children, over a period of
forty years, of expansion and change in resources (human, physical and financial), in
organisation and in standards. "This is our major purpose" [12].
Their purpose, however, is severely constrained. It is constrained by the nature of
their methodology, by various pragmatic or expediential considerations, and by their own
self-chosen interests. They have seized the opportunity provided by an aspect of the
work of their Oxford Social Mobility Group, the Oxford Social Mobility Survey. This
covered a sample of over 10,000 men aged 20-64, resident in England and Wales in the
early summer of 1972. They use over 8000 of the respondents, those aged 20-60, and
certain of the responses—the testimony of living witnesses—to trace the development and
diminution of class inequalities. The inequalities studied here are those between the
experience of private as against state schooling, of selective as against non-selective
secondary schooling, of few as against many years of schooling, and of post-secondary
education as against no post-secondary education.
It is no disparagement to speak of the narrow scope of the book. It is governed by a
very definite idea of what it can and cannot do, and is a model of explicitness on what it
 Sociology, Education and Equality 115
intends to attempt. The reader is continually warned, directly or indirectly, that the
meaning of the results "crucially depends on the technical definitions and analytical
procedures through which they are obtained" [13]. Enter not, who knows no statistics.
More than anyone, the authors are aware that their social and educational classes, their
measures of family attitudes, types of school and academic qualification "all do scant
justice to a more complex reality" [14]. The merit of their approach is that it makes these
problems manifest. It correctly makes a virtue of deliberately revealing them in the lime-
light, instead of using the limelight to dazzle the spectator.
There is therefore a long list of what evidence was not at the disposal of the authors.
There is no direct evidence, respondent by respondent, on measured intelligence. There
is no evidence of differences in drive and ambition. They did not attempt to secure
information on parental income and so they cannot control for financial circumstances in
any strict way. Apart from one or two tentative comments, on the results of education
they could hardly be at a further remove from Lowndes' broad confidence about "training
for their lives' work" and the "triumphant vindication" of the schools. They were not
able, in the present volume, to examine the relation between test scores and individual
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economic success. They were not able to judge educational reforms by tests of verbal
fluency, reading comprehension or mathematical skill. But their aim is to describe and
test empirical relations; therefore what they do demand are "measurable consequences of
some kind" [15].
Beyond the bare registration in global statistics of the answers to each of the questions
from which the study's variables are created, there is no comment from and no description
of any of the 8529 respondents. No working-class grammar-school boy tells of his bore-
dom with, reaction against, of guidance from morning assembly. No public-school
Orwell recalls his memories of his expensive and snobbish cramming school, where sons
of the unaristocratic rich (who had cars and butlers and lived in shrubberied houses in
Bournemouth and Richmond, but did not have country estates) were frankly prepared for
a sort of confidence trick upon the entrance examiners of Harrow and Eton. No sour
school porridge flakes from under the rims of pewter bowls [16]. The attempt to quantify
the 'meanings' to the participants of the situations in which they found themselves in
family and school is in abeyance in this study [17].

THE CONCEPT OF 'EDUCATION'

The authors are mainly concerned with the answer to a question which can be very
briefly if inelegantly put in three words, "Who gets education?" An answer can hardly be
given if another question is avoided altogether, "What is education?" This being like, if
not the original of, the fabled morass in which armies whole have sunk, both the reviewer,
and the social scientist intent on minimising all that may be subjective, may well feel
entitled to touch only the edges, and then only under duress.
Origins and Destinations considers, therefore, at one extreme only those broad di-
mensions of education which are essential to the argument. It uses, at the other extreme,
such operational objective indices as are generated within the educational system itself.
The authors do not commit themselves—they disavow any commitment—to the worth of
the indices as indicators of 'true' educational experiences or experiences of which they
themselves would approve.
As is common in the sociology of education, a distinction is made between the school as
the transmitter of a common culture and the school as the magnifier of inter-personal
differences. A second distinction is made between education which constitutes for the
 116 Oxford Review of Education
individual his maximum self-development, and the education which moulds individual
potentialities in accordance with the requirements of a stable system of social co-operation.
'Common culture' is an uncontroversial concept—so long as it is kept at the level of
Comenius' much-quoted aim, that of "securing for all human beings training that is
proper for their common humanity". The common school for all children, of all nations,
from all walks of life, noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and towns, villages
and hamlets, is indeed the 'Great Equaliser'. But what, in content, is that common
culture to be? "Whatsoever the hand findeth to do, do it with thy might"? "Not teaching...
the shape of letters and the tricks of numbers; and then leaving them to turn their
arithmetic to roguery and their literature to lust; but on the contrary training them to the
perfect exercise and knightly continence of their bodies and souls" [18]? Sharing the
"dream of adventure, deeds of empire" [19]?
Similarly, it is uncontroversial that a tension exists between the wishes of the individual
to conserve his energies for his own altruistic or egoistic purposes, and the demands others
make upon him to use his energies according to their wishes, whether for his own or their
good. On the one hand a sufficiently high proportion of the members of any society must
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maintain a sufficient degree of agreement upon the correctness of certain choices which
must be made in given situations (i.e. have the same morality) if social co-operation is to
continue, or if it is to be re-established after a period of dispute and conflict. On the other
hand, there is the necessity of identifying or creating different skills and motivations in the
population, if the advantages of the division of labour are to be enjoyed.
Controversy arises, endlessly, when these abstractions have to be filled out with con-
tent. What is and ought to be the balance in a given society between self-orientation and
collectivity-orientation? Between feeling and doing? Between allocating tasks on the basis
of proof of ability to carry them out and ascribing them to predetermined categories of
the population independently of proof of ability? Between responding to others 'uni-
versalistically' and responding 'particularistically'? Between those roles which carry
diffuse tasks and those which are specific in their function? (This is Talcott Parsons'
list [20].)
By another self-denying ordinance Origins and Destinations does not raise these difficult
questions. It is in that sense, therefore, a sociology of education in which education itself
is kept at arm's length.

THE CONCEPT OF EQUALITY

Differences and similarities between personalities
A major concern for Halsey and his co-authors is the nature of the handicaps that prevent
individuals from achieving educational success. "Is it merely a matter of IQ? Or is culture
more important still?" [21].
These two questions involve the authors in the problem of inherited differences. What
limits do inherited differences set to what can be achieved by any given level and content
of cultural input? If and in so far as there are educationally relevant hereditary differences,
what are they and are they categoric or non-categoric, i.e. are they distributed in the same
way in all groups otherwise defined, or do certain groups have higher average amounts or
different qualities of the hereditary trait? Is "the problem of Negro-White inequality in
educability . . . essentially a problem of Negro-White differences in intelligence", as
Jensen asserts [22]? Are social classes already different in their average inborn intel-
ligence, and is there being "precipitated out of the mass of humanity a low capacity
(intellectual and otherwise) residue", which is Herrnstein's view [23] ?
 Sociology, Education and Equality 117
To what extent are the marks on the individual's personality, which result from the
interplay of his innate endowment and his experiences, eradicable? As Halsey, Heath &
Ridge point out, a similar answer to this question comes both from the ideological left and
the ideological right. For Bourdieu, the working-class child comes into the educational
system with his personality already formed. The child's endowment, his or her "system
of predispositions", are such that the particular type of information and training which
the school endeavours to transmit and inculcate, falls on barren ground [24]. In terms of
the school's particular input, he is permanently ineducable. The same message comes
from the right. The mere indication of inherited intelligence does not, in itself, indicate
the ability to benefit from what is a foreign experience, the segment of high culture put
before working-class children by the school. If they are to obtain educational satisfaction,
this may spring out of an exploitation of "such cultural possibilities as form part of their
world" [25].
Whatever differences exist, and however indelible or irreversible they are, it is of course
always possible to define the characteristic that is present to a greater degree in some
people than others, or is present in some and altogether missing elsewhere, in such a way
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that it is associated with something else which does not differentiate people. For example,
all the inborn qualities of all men and women may be said to be the same in that the
individual who enjoys them did not create them: "It is he that hath made us, and not we
ourselves."

Differences and similarities in externally derived resources

The two questions, first, of differences in the innate and cultural endowments that have
become part of their personality and, secondly, of the ranges within which an individual
as he is at a given point of time is malleable, may be left to one side. The fact remains that
there are differences in the external resources and experiences which different individuals
enjoy or to which they have access. These include health, sickness and life itself [26].
Here, too, the differences may be more or less categoric or non-categoric, in the sense
given above to these two terms. Emphasising the existence of the non-categoric element,
Jencks writes that "there is always more inequality between individuals than between
groups". White workers in the United States may earn as a group an average of 50%
more than black workers; but the best paid one-fifth of all white workers earn 600% more
than the worst-paid one-fifth. "From this point of view", Jencks writes, "racial inequality
looks almost insignificant" [27]. It is necessary to be clear, in studying Origins and Destina-
tions, where the emphasis is being placed in any particular passage, whether on categoric
or non-categoric differences and similarities. Sometimes it is on the elimination of
distinctions; sometimes it is on society where distinctions are merely uncorrelated with
the child's family background, skin colour, sex and other such educationally irrelevant
traits.
The difficulty of the concept of equality lies partly in the complexity of the interplay
between resources and the units to which they are being applied. On the political right,
the application of unequal resources is justified in terms of the inequality of the units.
For Eysenck, bright working-class children are entitled to be selected and specially
treated to "an education appropriate to their talents" [28]. On the political left, inequality
of resources are justified where they act as a countervailing force to the inequality of the
units and to inequalities elsewhere. As Husen says, "We have begun to realize that uni-
form educational provision is not the solution for a more equal society. Differences in
biological [and culturally derived?] assets calls for pluralism and not identity of treatment"
[29]. Halsey and his colleagues take the same view. It is not sufficient to remove only
 118 Oxford Review of Education
certain of the disabilities of black, female, working-class or other disadvantaged groups:
disabilities such as, for example, legal discrimination, or requirements to pay fees, or
living in dwellings without an inside water closet. What is required instead is the allo-
cation of such resources, and those resources in sufficient quantities, as will ensure that
the members of these groups do have the same effective chance of success [30].

EDUCATIONAL GAINS AND LOSSES IN ENGLAND AND WALES 1918-1972

Halsey, Heath & Ridge have studied the educational experiences of men who with few
exceptions had completed their formal education in 1972. The book is therefore a history
of a system which, in the state sector of secondary education, has been substantially
superseded. They have simplified their analyses by dividing the men into four age
groups, those who were born 1913-22, 1923-32, 1933-42 and 1943-52. The oldest of
their informants had therefore started school at the end of the 1914-18 war, and were 60-
year-olds in 1972. The youngest of their informants were 20 in 1972.
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The growth of favourable educational experiences

"The major educational fact" has been the programme of continuous expansion and it i s
clear to the authors that they have been studying a period of "remarkable progress" in the
formal education of the population as a whole [31]. It was a period of "remarkable growth"
in the length of secondary schooling. It was a period of remarkable growth, too, in
examination successes [32]. The expansion of the secondary schools meant that the
transmission of what they had to provide, and the dissemination of motivation to value it
highly, was increased among boys of all ages and from all social-class backgrounds. "The
outstanding feature of the expansion of secondary schools by the state", the authors
write, "was the creation of new cultural capital in each generation and every class" [33].
The state system of education gave 'superior' education to vast numbers of boys from
'uneducated' homes [34]. "Enormous strides" were made after the 1939-45 war in the
provision of sixth-form education [35]. There have been "impressive increases" in school
attendance beyong the minimum leaving age over the course of the period [36]: only 3%
of the men who were aged 50-59 in 1972 had stayed on at school until 18, but this was
true of 14% of those aged 20-29. At school, the actual history of rising norms of edu-
cational attainment discredits "Black Paper pessimism" as much as "the parallel des-
pondency" of certain commentators from the political left [37]. As compared with their
predecessors, the 50-59S, twice the proportion of the cohort aged 40-49 in 1972 obtained
Higher School Certificates (4% as against 2%). As compared with their predecessors, the
30-39S, twice the proportion of the cohort aged 20-29 m *972 obtained at least one 'A'
level (14% as against 7%) [38].
Eighty per cent of the boys who attended technical schools in the period were from
homes where neither parent had attended a selective secondary school. This was true of
nearly 70% of the boys who attended grammar school [39]. The proportion of those aged
50-59 in 1972 who had been to grammar school was 1 1 % ; of those aged 20-29, 21%. In
the lowest of the authors' three class-background categories, attendance at grammar school
increased from 6% of the 50-59S to 15% of the 20-29S [40]. From the oldest cohort to the
youngest, the proportion entering university quadrupled from under 2% to over 8% [41].
In what Goldthorpe describes as "the last comprehensive statement of the British
ethical socialist case" [42] C.A.R. Crosland said that a good primary and secondary
education, in decent buildings, with classes of reasonable size, and up to a reasonable
age was " the least we can ask for". Due to the appallingly low quality of parts of the state
 Sociology, Education and Equality 119
educational system, many working-class children were enjoying nothing of the sort [43].
Improvements have taken place in buildings and staffing and in the lengthening of com-
pulsory school life [44]. During the period, the state primary schools had actually become
more attractive to middle-class families (although part of their attraction may have lain in
the convenient course they provided to free places in Direct Grant schools) [45]. The
evidence is that there has been a substantial increase in the expenditure per unit of edu-
cation given to people [46]. Clearly, Halsey, Heath & Ridge have expansion and change to
record, and they report the above development as progress.

The growth of problem areas in educational provision

Up to and including the 1960s—perhaps most markedly in the 1960s—formal education
was seen virtually without reservation as beneficial to both the individual and those with
whom he was or would in due course be collaborating in society. By the late 1970s this
unquestioning support and firm confidence had given way to "disenchantment and severe
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criticism" [47]. Voluntary school attendance continued to expand, but another raising of
the age of compulsory attendance had no constituency. G.B. Shaw, in praising the un-
tutored genius of Sean O'Casey, once advised C. B. Cochran to "put on no plays by men
who had... been inside a school after they were thirteen" [48]. Along these lines, in the
late 1960s there was a brief left-wing fashion to revile the bureaucraticised educational
system, and find true education in new settings of community-based, parent-controlled
free schools. The time had come to de-school society, and counteract the diseducation
provided by the state. From another standpoint, Vaisey, pouring scorn on the work of the
Panel on Youth of the President's Science Advisory Committee of 1974, with its evidence
of the "very lovely nature" of today's youth and the "justifiability of their detestation of
parents, society, etc.", remarks that "one would have expected the Panel to have made
some mention of the hitherto unexpected but marked increase in serious violent crime and
vandalism" [49].
The period of educational history with which Origins and Destinations deals is concluded
in 1972. The authors are nevertheless careful to balance the general gains up to that date
against considerations of the ambiguity of the indices they use to measure them, and
against patent general losses. They lay particular stress on the fate of the technical
schools after the 1939-45 war. In the authors' view, the potentialities of the technical
schools may have greater than those of their more celebrated rivals, the grammar schools.
Their decline has been "one of the tragedies of British education". They believe that a
link may well exist between the failings of Britain's economic performance and "the
withering away of the technical schools" [50]. They fear that the distinctive contribution
of the technical ethos is in danger of disappearance, too, at post-secondary level [51].
Weber, in his essay on the code of the Prussian Junker as an ideal of individual and
social conduct, contrasts it with the code of the English gentleman. The Prussian Junker
could not but be a member of a restricted and exclusive clique. By contrast, the code of
the English gentleman, at at least substantial parts of it, could "mould personalities down
to the lowest strata" [52]. British education's attempt to make gentlemen of the whole
male population extended to all schools. "I attended the school from the age of five to
fourteen (1923-32)" writes a Sunderland man about a school in the poorest part of what
would now be called the inner recesses of the inner city.

Mr. Fewtrell had his school organised like a miniature boarding school. Most of
us were a rag-a-tag lot, but headed by Mr. Fewtrell the vast majority of pupils
turned out to be good citizens and deeply imbued with manners, honesty and
 120 Oxford Review of Education
courtesy. I am deeply grateful to them all from Standard I to Standard VIII
[53L

Origins and Destinations registers the demise of this effort. The authors' own view is
overall on the optimistic side; but the pessimists have been on firmer ground, they
concede, "in their scepticism . . . that a common culture could be formed through mass
education in the taste and style of the Victorian gentleman" [54].
With possibly less rigour than characterises their approach elsewhere, the authors
address themselves to the question of academic achievements. In comparing the standards
reached by their 20-39-year-olds with those reached by their 40-59-year-olds, they have
to face the technical difficulty that the whole examination system was changed in 1950
from the school certificate system to 'O' levels and 'A' levels. What gradual changes
may have taken place over time? Solutions are considered and discarded with the con-
clusion that "the argument that standards have declined is almost impossible to test in
any sensible way" [55]. The evidence, such as it is, is not sufficient to refute, although it
does not support, the view that expanding numbers—or changes in the ethos of the
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teaching profession or other factors?—have involved declining examination standards [56].

The notion that general standards have fallen is "not likely to be a helpful one in ex-
ploration of the trends in our data" [57]. Their final research decision, however, is to
equate for certain tabulations the Higher School Certificate and Ordinary School Certifi-
cate of the older generation, which had to be passed or failed as a whole, with, in the case
of the younger generation, a single 'A' level and a single 'O' level respectively. Caveats
abound; their number and weight suggest that they should have tilted the decision the
other way.
One of the authors has developed elsewhere a theory of the actor's rational choice in
social situations [58]. This is utilised in an assessment of the three-fold phenomenon of the
increased demand among pupils for secondary school certificates of achievement; the
even more rapid increase in the demand for certification at the higher levels than at the
lower; and slow growth followed by rapid growth followed by another period of slower
growth (the 'S'-shaped curve). The intrinsic as opposed to the instrumental benefits of
education are left to one side. Using a model that assumes that the benefits from obtaining
a given qualification are the difference it makes to job prospects; that the difference
decomposes into two parts, namely, the difference it makes in terms of the utility of the
job itself (how much better the job will be) and in terms of one's chances of getting the
job; and that choice is governed solely by the calculation of these benefits and the costs of
obtaining them, a good fit is observed between the model and the three phenomena. But
for the successive generations of 'rational choosers' of the model the significance is
negative; they are climbing a descending escalator which is speeding up, and they are
having to walk ever more quickly simply to stay in the same place [59]. This applies to
university entrance as well as jobs. Two-thirds of the boys with 'A' levels went on to
university in the 1950s, but only one-half of them did so in the 1960s [60].
One closely related issue which has tended to throw up reports of a negative kind on
formal educational systems is specifically excluded from the purview of Origins and
Destinations: the crucial question of the extent to which formal schooling does determine
adult social status and life earnings [61]. The trend of pupils' attitudes towards school is
outside the scope of their data. It is possible, in any case, that so-called 'negativism in the
classroom' is a phenomenon which has changed its magnitude significantly only sub-
sequent to the school experience of the informants of the Origins and Destinations study
[62]. Outside the scope of their data are changes over time in the so-called bureaucratisa-
tion of the school and of'value for money' in terms of the relation between input and any
 Sociology, Education and Equality 121
criterion of educational output: successful examinees or athletes, efficient economic
actors or those who have 'learnt to live', dutiful parents or effective egoists. There is the
barest hint of the disutilities of the transition from the tripartite system to a compre-
hensive system, for their period ends with the transition; but they suggest that "the price
of friction and reorganization remains heavy" [63].
They do deal extensively, however, with the disutilities of the private sector of educa-
tion to the education of the nation's children considered as a whole. The relationship
between class and education in the forty years they cover is the heart of their work.
Although the private sector is small, in the authors' view the private schools have an
importance far beyond their numerical strength especially, perhaps, in relation to the
comprehensive schools. They starve the comprehensives of the resources they need to
reach high standards. The private schools "exact their uncalculated but enormous toll of
reduced political pressure from middle-class parents, of stimulus from expert teachers and
response from motivated childen" [64]. That is the authors' view. But if a parallel is
drawn with similar problems in private and council housing, it may be doubted that an
accession of political pressure from middle-class parents would be sufficient to counteract
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the simultaneous increase in the power over their own work situations of state and local
administrators, and teachers and other school-based workers individually and as collective-
ly organised. At present the experience of active middle-class parents and governors, even
those who remain in the catchment areas of working-class schools, is of an impermeable
structure of syndicalist control. In a situation of monopolistic supply they may well
experience the structure of control as impregnable. Certainly, a prognosis based upon the
'rational choice' model could hardly be a hopeful one. When there is no conflict, there is
no problem. But where there is conflict sufficient parents, after all, have to feel that they
have some chance of success against the staff of the school, the local authority and the
state. As Hobbes said, there is no denying the existence of human beings motivated to
behave well in their social relationships by desire for approval or by pride in themselves.
It is simply that "this later is too rarely found to be presumed on" [65]. To increase their
numbers in a society requires the most intensive efforts of socialization and social control—
that is the axion of conventional, bourgeois, sociology. There are few signs to indicate
either that the general culture or the culture of the school is moving towards an intensifi-
cation of such efforts. Research might contradict the comment, but lay commonsense,
at any rate up to the very recent past, would say: quite the reverse.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF EDUCATIONAL BENEFITS

Given the stock of educational benefits and detriments at any point of time, who suffers
from or enjoys them? That question, rather than the question of absolute improvement
or deterioration, is the focus of interest in Origins and Destinations.
Within that general area, the book focuses more carefully still on the question of the
educational experiences of different groups of boys, categorised according to the work
situation of his father when each boy was 14 years of age. In classifying the father's work
situation, the authors use a condensed version of the Hope-Goldthorpe scale: occupations
ranked according to their general desirability in popular estimation [66]. At its most con-
densed, this is a three-fold division of occupations. The class highest in public estima-
tion includes professionals (both self-employed and salaried), administrators, managers,
supervisors and higher-grade technicians. Presumably to avoid the inappropriate his-
torical connotations of'upper class', and the implicit endorsement of public opinion were
the term 'top' chosen, Karl Renner's label Dienstklasse, service class, is extended and used:
"the class of those exercising power and expertise on behalf of corporate bodies, plus such
 122 Oxford Review of Education
elements of the classic bourgeoisie as are not assimilated into this new formation" [67].
What they term the 'intermediate class' includes the following: routine non-manual
employees, sales personnel and other rank-and-file employees in services; the 'petty
bourgeoisie'—small proprietors (including fanners and smallholders), self-employed
artisans and others working on their own account; and the 'blue-collar' elite—lower-grade
technicians whose work is to some extent of a manual character, and supervisors of
manual workers. The 'working class' is composed of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled
manual wage-earners in all branches of industry, and agricultural workers. The importance
of the work situation of the father is that it is part of the family situation of the boy.
The educational situation of the pupil is classified for some analyses as private school
versus state school. For other analyses his situation is classified as selective versus non-
selective schooling, a distinction which applies, of course, only to post-primary education.
The significance of different school situations for pupils is indicated by the fact that
(taking those respondents aged 20-29 in J972 as an illustration) one or more 'O' level was
gained by 88% of those boys attending public (HMC) schools but by only 11% of those
attending secondary modern schools. If in a public (HMC) school, a boy would be in a
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situation in which on average 97% of his school-fellows would be staying on until 16 or

later; if in a secondary modern school, the average would be 20%. Whatever his other
situations and his personal assets, the school situation of such a 20-29-year-old had on
average made a tremendous difference to his formal academic achievements. The grammar,
direct grant and major independent (HMC) schools stood on a level at one extreme, the
comprehensive and the secondary-modern schools stood at the other [68]. Data on other
aspects of the situation which would ideally be balanced against these criteria were not
available. It is not possible to say, therefore, what the scaling of school situations would
have been if all relevant factors were weighed—whether, overall, differences would dis-
appear; whether, overall, differences would be magnified; or whether the positions on the
scale, as situations for a boy of any given family and local background, intelligence and
motivation, would be switched. Such matters remain in the realm, therefore, of common
sense knowledge, ideological fervour and occupational self-interest.
The main personal assets of the boy which the analysis takes into account are his
measured intelligence and his internalised attitudes. As nothing is known directly about
these matters from the information supplied by the respondents, various assumptions are
made about them.
Other aspects of the boy's external environment are taken into consideration. But the
relationship that predominates is that between these personal qualities and this aspect of
his family situation on the one hand, and the educational fate of the boy, in the above
terms, on the other.
Inequalities of educational experience, inequalities of personal endowment, inequalities
of family and community situation, and the interplay between them have been seen by
most sociologists (especially those associated with the political-arithmetic tradition) as
major barriers to the achievement of a culture common to all, "irrespective of sex, age,
creed, class or ability" [69]. They have also been seen as obstacles to efficiency within the
system of the generalised social division of labour, including economic efficiency [70].
Halsey, Heath & Ridge use Douglas' metaphor: the pump from the pool of talent is
leaking badly [71]; but in the absence of data, the actual effects on the efficiency of the
adult society is not assessed by them.

The question of openness

In his companion volume to Origins and Destinations, Goldthorpe shows that there has
 Sociology} Education and Equality 123
been an expansion of favourable work situations. There has been an increase, that is, in
the proportion of more highly regarded, pleasant and fulfilling occupations. But he
concludes that the result may "best be regarded as being not that of facilitating egali-
tarian reform, but rather that of obscuring its failure" [72]. The same issue is raised by
Halsey, Heath & Ridge in relation to educational advances. What results have educational
reforms had for educational inequalities?

Progress towards openness

In certain respects there has been a diminution in class differences. In attendance to the
age of 16 and beyond (prior, that is, to the raising of the compulsory attendance age to 16)
class differences had narrowed. Comparison of the 50-59-year olds with the 20-29-year-
olds shows that the proportion of boys from service-class homes staying until 16 or later
increased by 50% but from working-class homes by 240%. "Expansion has been associ-
ated with increased equality" [73]. Those boys from working-class homes who survive to
take examinations do almost as well or as well as service-class boys (when the measure is
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the proportion of boys staying on until the appropriate age who then obtain ordinary or
higher school certificate or one or more 'O' or 'A' levels) [74]. Comprehensive education
had affected in significant numbers only the 20-29-year-old respondents. While main-
taining that a generation must pass before an attempt can be made at an objective assess-
ment, the authors believe that perhaps the main future hope is that one of the structural
problems, that of the state tripartite system, is now probably settled. The comprehensive
school will be the engine of openness [75].

Failure to progress towards openness

"We must not neglect the extent of educational opportunity." But how far was such
educational opportunity (which was not only 'formal' but also 'effective' for many boys
from unschooled homes) the result of expansion and not the result of the levelling of
opportunities between the social classes [76]?
First, there is the problem of the private schools. Crosland said that he could not under-
stand why socialists had been so obsessed with the grammar schools, when they were at
the same time indifferent to "the much more glaring injustice" of the independent schools.
These "superior" private schools were "out of reach of poorer children, however talented
and deserving" [77].
For the most recent generation, the 20-29S, as a school situation for each pupil from
whatever class background, the private primary school was more solidly service-class
than ever. Nearly 70% of the pupils at private primary school were drawn from that class
in that age group's experience, as compared with 50% in the case of the experience of the
30-39-year-olds and that of the oldest cohort, the 50-59S [78]. Constantly throughout the
forty years covered by the study about one-quarter of service-class boys attended private
primary school. Between 4 and 9% of intermediate-class boys did so [79]. Of all the boys
of self-employed professionals over the forty years, no less than 55% attended private
primary school [80]. Of boys coming from families'where both their parents had attended
private primary school over three-quarters went to private primary school [81].
In their study of the private secondary schools—the public schools, the non-HMC
private secondary schools and the direct grant schools—the authors consider the statistical
relationships between the attendance of boys at such schools on the one hand and, on the
other, their previous educational experiences (specifically, whether they had attended a
private primary school) and the material and cultural background of their homes. The
 124 Oxford Review of Education
boy's material situation at home (when he was aged 14) is measured by the family's tenure
of the dwelling (owner-occupation, council tenancy, tenancy from private landlord),
father's occupation, the number of the boy's siblings, and the possession of certain do-
mestic amenities. The cultural situation for the child at home is measured by the parents'
education (private or state), the father's higher educational experience, and the valuation
that the parents put upon private education as such. In the last instance, the measure is
obtained by separately comparing families otherwise the same, some of which sent another
son to private school, some of which did not.
In this discussion, the authors find a place for considerations traditionally of concern to
users of the action frame of reference. The authors' conclusions are properly very guarded.
(What determines the choice of private secondary school for their son is "unclear".
Circumstances and consciousness are "more or less closely tied together". The indicators
are "imperfect".) Nevertheless, they are led by their analysis to put greater emphasis on
cultural than on material circumstances, and especially on the parents' evaluations of the
private school as a favourable environment for their children [82].
The intractability of the problem of class privilege is underlined by these findings. As
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the authors remark, "The evidence from capitalist and communist countries alike is over-
whelming that stratification . . . heavily conditions what knowledge is regarded as socially
valuable." This applies to parents as well as children. Parents differ in their judgments of
where the socially valuable knowledge is to be gained, and how important it is that their
children should gain it. The class, ethnic, status and cultural conditioning of these
judgments "may be expected to carry over to any conceivable future in Britain" [83].
Secondly, there is the question of selective secondary education. From the earliest days
of British sociology's post-war efflorescence Halsey has been among the most distinguished
contributors to the debate on selective education [84]. In this study, special attention is
paid to the connexion between selection in the public system and selection in the private
system. For Halsey and his colleagues, private schools are important for the serious
threat they present to the more open and equal opportunity hi state schools. Beneath the
measured tread of the multiple regression analyses and the log distances there is the
fearful sound of someone grinding the faces of the rich. Selective secondary education
is therefore classified as education hi the grammar and technical schools of the state
sector or the direct grant schools or the private HMC and non-HMC secondary schools.
Over the forty years, nearly three-quarters of the service-class boys received selective
secondary education. Less than one-quarter of the working-class boys did. Thirty-five
per cent of the service class boys received their selective education in the grammar
schools (which were not fully state schools for the whole of the period). This was true of
only 11% of the working-class boys [85]. From ten-year cohort to ten-year cohort,
however, the history of the forty years throws up what may be entirely unexpected.
Those who were aged 40-49 in 1972 had been more likely to receive a selective secondary
education than those aged 50-59, and the differences between the boys from different
class backgrounds had narrowed. Those aged 30-39 did better still, with increased chances
of selective education and more even class chances. But for those aged 20-29 in I 972, the
chance of a selective education had diminished and the handicaps of working-class boys
had increased. In both respects, the 20-29-year-olds were worse off than either of their
two previous ten-year cohorts, even on the assumption that all comprehensive school
pupils were 'selective secondary' pupils [86]. The 20-29-year-olds were the beneficiaries
of the supposedly revolutionary Education Act of 1944. How are these findings, then, to be
explained?
The authors do not "necessarily" endorse the ideals of selection on the basis of 'merit';
on the question of merit as 'intelligence' they have additional reservations about the
 Sociology3 Education and Equality 125
possibility of eliminating the effects of class situation from its measurement [87]. They
are nevertheless interested in the effect of differential class chances of boys with the same
measured intelligence in obtaining selective secondary education. They therefore create
a model which provides a standard against which they can judge how far the British
educational system has realised "its own professed ideals" [88].
The authors make the assumption that measured intelligence is normally distributed in
each of their social classes, with the same standard deviations. But they assume also that
the average IQ of service-class boys is 109, of intermediate-class boys 102 and of working-
class boys 98 [89]. Even on this assumption of substantial differences in measured in-
telligence between the classes, by which no less than 55% of the service-class boys aged
20-29 by 1972 would have obtained selective secondary school places on strict 'IQ merit',
still more did so, 66%. Only 26% of the working-class boys—those aged 20-29 by 1972,
the beneficiaries of the 1944 Act—would have obtained selective secondary school places
on strict 'IQ merit'; only 22% did so [90]. "There was, in both the state selective and
private schools, a modest trend towards equalization of class chances throughout the first
three cohorts, followed by a modest reversal among the post-war cohort" [91].
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Part of the explanation for the reversal was the withering of the technical schools. The
post-war expansion of grammar school places was almost exactly matched, for working-
class boys, by the contraction of technical school places. "Thus, in the period of our study,
one-hundred working class families sent an extra eight boys to grammar school, but they
also sent eight fewer to technical school" [92]. Part of the explanation is the dispropor-
tionate expansion of the service class. Twice the proportion of the boys aged 20-29 by
1972 as compared with those aged 50-59 by 1972 came from service-class homes (18%
as compared with 9%) [93]. A substantial part of the explanation was the fact that there
were simply many more children competing for the selective school places in the post-war
than in the inter-war period. There were more places, but there were even more children.
Having dropped from 7 million after the 1914-18 war to 6.5 million after the 1939-45
war, the number of 5-14-year-olds rose to 7 million again by the mid-1960s [94]. Part of
the explanation was differences in the material and cultural situations of the boys in their
own homes. The authors display mastery of their craft in deriving as much is to be derived
from the data at their disposal on these questions. They are far from innocent of the
indefiniteness of the links between, say, lack of domestic amenities and educational suc-
cess. "Van Gogh dreamed of electric light, hot and cold water, w.cs and general confort
anglais. I have them all and remain unsatisfied" [95].
The authors conclude that there remained an element of selection on other bases than
'IQ merit'. The power of 'IQ merit' did not increase after the 1944 Act. Traditional
educational advantages of family origin persisted. Changes in class chances had come about,
but essentially by the provision of places in different kinds of secondary schools—plain
expansion or contraction overall—and the supply of childen in total numbers and from
different classes [96].
Beyond the question of selection, there is the question of survival at the selective
school, and success in examinations. There are extensive discussions and sophisticated
statistical examinations of these 'secondary effects' of class. Briefly, the higher the
educational level, the greater the eventual class inequality [97]. As with the possession of
television sets, however, as the saturation point of those classes which have historically
consumed the highest proportion of all 'school years' is reached, there will be a trend, on
the authors' calculations, towards greater class equality in this respect [98]. Those working-
class boys who do survive beyond the minimum leaving age do as well at examinations, as
has already been remarked, as their age-peers from higher classes.
 126 Oxford Review of Education
PROBLEMS AND POLICIES
The authors fear that the more class bias is eliminated from the state schools, the more
tempting it is for service-class, intermediate-class and a few working-class parents to flee
to the private sector. So long as private schools exist as an option, to the authors' fears can
be added the possibility that the achievement-oriented boy may himself begin to put
pressure on his well-to-do parents to secure his escape from what he perceives as lack of
gratifications within a passively anti-achievement culture among the teaching staff and a
more or less aggressively anti-any-achievement culture among his fellow-pupils [99].
Futhermore, the public system might be starved of funds by the state. The system might
deteriorate objectively, because recruits shun the profession due to prejudice about, or due
to the actual cultural state of affairs in the schools. (Oxford university appointments
board currently reports that fewer graduates are going into teacher training. Some
prospective teachers, the board comments, undoubtedly felt that they might not be
"sufficiently robust" for work in comprehensive schools [100].) Halsey and his colleagues
fear also that a jump might be being made from the "frying pan of the segregated schools
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into the fire of comprehensives residentially segregated and internally streamed" in such a
way as to replicate the usual patterns of socially based educational inequality [101].
Goldthorpe and his collaborators, working from material derived from the same 1972
social survey as Halsey and his co-authors used, report a solidification rather than an
increase in the fluidity of the service and working classes in England and Wales. The
service class, even when expanding, has tended to retain its children in the class from one
generation to the next [102]. At the other end of the scale, the working class has been able
to provide recruits to the service class without its own inter-generational stability being
undermined [103].
For Goldthorpe, the standpoint of "ultimate importance" in the study of social mo-
bility and social class is class formation and class action [104]. He regards it as a serious
shortcoming of ethical socialism that it has neglected and underestimated the significance
of class conflict. Ethical socialists ought to have a keener appreciation that their ideals
have a far better chance of being realised if the working class is seen as the social vehicle of
those ideals, through its class actions—electoral "and otherwise". He draws, therefore,
"not on the tradition of ethical socialism but one of a Marxist or at least a marxisant
character" [105]. If class inequalities are to be modified significantly, the factor crucial to
success would be the forcefulness of class-based action—"institutional—or extra-insti-
tutional"—that would back such an effort, against the class-based opposition "which it
would inevitably meet" [106].
Halsey also is fundamentally concerned with social change, and with the question to
which sociologists historically addressed themselves in considering Marxist thought.
Applied to education the question is, can education change society, or is education merely
a creature of economic forces outside the educational system? He concludes that the
inference is false that equality in education is beyond the reach of peaceful public policy
[107]. For him, it is possible to integrate the private schools, so pernicious to the system
considered as a whole, into a national system, and that this would make a difference to
class inequalities [108]. Sheer expansion, as he shows, "can bring higher standards more
fairly shared" [109]. Of no less importance and promise is the task of developing compre-
hensive schools with "high standards and flexible internal organisation" [no]. His
standpoint remains, therefore, that of the ethical socialist. Education, he believes, has
changed society and can do more to change society: it remains the friend of those who seek
more efficiency, more openness and more justice [ i n ] .
The branching paths of the selective school system were well marked and universally
 Sociology3 Education and Equality 127
understood. To take one or the other was to have a distinct and therefore memorable
experience. To collect the data for his history, there was no need for the researcher to rely
on the permission of any one but the ex-pupil. He did not require the permission of
anyone with political or occupational reasons for suppressing unpalatable facts and for
creating such uncertainty about the true state of affairs as to enable any adverse comment
to be answered with plausible and sincere denials. The social history of selective education
could be reconstructed from the evidence of the living witnesses who had themselves
attended the schools.
The time will come to assess the comprehensives. But with all state pupils passing
through them, cohorts of ex-pupils will not be the carriers of their selective school pre-
decessors' hard data. Comparisons and the plotting of change will depend to a greater
extent on what ex-pupils remember about their subjective impressions, formed and
recalled with little knowledge of the ethos and standards of other schools. It is not unlikely
that changes in examination style and content will make developments over time more
difficult to characterise with any degree of certainty. (The difficulties of comparison
presented by the change to the 'O' level and 'A' level system loom large in Origins and
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Destinations.) The occupational interests of teachers attract them to a state of affairs in

which judgments based on measurable and controvertible consequences can be dismissed
as deplorable philistinism. Whatever their other merits and justification, success in
meeting criteria put in place of 'positivistic' results is less capable of being tested by the
methods of political arithmetic.
The metaphor of the educational map is repeatedly used in Origins and Destinations. It
is to be hoped that successors to Professor Halsey and his colleagues do not find that a
mist has descended, the ground has become soggy underfoot and that the party is harras-
sed by saboteurs intent upon deflecting or denying the utility of the compass. But if the
assessment of the comprehensive schools proves to be another Origins and Destinations
we shall be in possession of another outstanding and indispensably quantitative contri-
bution to the social history of education.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[1] LOWNDES, G. A. N. (1937) The Silent Social Revolution: an Account of the Expansion
of Public Education in England and Wales 1895-1935, p. 44 (London, Oxford Uni-
versity Press).
[2] PARSONS, TALCOTT (1968) Preface to 1949 edition, in his The Structure of Social
Action, p. xvi (1937) (New York, Free Press).
[3] HORKHEIMER, MAX & ADORNO, THEODOR W. (1947) Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 3
(London, Allen Lane).
[4] Ibid., p. xii, p. 4.
[5] Ibid., p. xii.
[6] Ibid., p. xii. What does 'der Infamie' mean to a German? Is it a reference in German
to Voltaire's, Quoi que vous fassiez, écrasez I'infame: crush superstition (or the
Roman Catholic Church?)? What does 'the infamy' mean to a speaker of English?
[7] POPPER, KARL R. (1976) Reason or revolution? (1970), in: ADORNO, T. W. et al.,
The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, p. 289 (1969) (London, Heinemann).
[8] HUSEN, TORSTEN (1979) Observations—rather than a 'reply', Oxford Review of
Education, 5, p. 271.
[9] HALSEY, A. H., HEATH, A. F., & RIDGE, J. M. (1980) Origins and Destinations:
Family, Class, and Education in Modern Britain, p. 1 (Oxford, Clarendon Press).
[10] Ibid., p. 1o.
 128 Oxford Review of Education
[11] DOUGLAS, J. W. B. (1964) The Home and the School (London, MacGibbon & Kee);
DAVIE, RONALD, BUTLER, NEVILLE, & GOLDSTEIN, HARVEY (1972) From Birth to
Seven (London, Longman); Origins and Destinations, pp. 20-21.
[12] Origins and Destinations, p. 22.
[13] Ibid., p. 91.
[14] Ibid., p. 195.
[15] Ibid., p. 13. Emphasis added.
[16] ORWELL, GEORGE (1956) Such, such were the joys (1952) in The Orwell Reader,
pp. 424,425 & 436 (New York, Harcourt, Brace).
[17] 'Meaning' is a key concept for the action frame of reference. Unfortunately, it is a
transliteration of the German word Bedeutung—significance, meaning, importance.
To render it as 'meaning' was, perhaps, to make it as mysterious as it could be in
English. The 'meaning' of the various aspects of his environment to the actor is their
relevance, as means or unalterable conditions, for the attainment of a state of
affairs he intends to bring about (including maintaining the status quo). The actor's
intentions are governed by his own knowledge of the situation, by his perception of
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painful or pleasurable consequences for himself and by his value judgments (in
Parsonian terms, by cognition, cathexis and evaluation).
[18] These are Ruskin's sentiments (The Crown of Wild Olives).
[19] GREEN, MARTIN (1980) Dream of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London, Routledge
& Kegan Paul); ARNOLD, GUY (1980) Held Fast for England: G. A. Henty, Im-
perialist Boys' Writer (London, Hamish Hamilton).
[20] Talcott Parsons worked out the implications of his 'pattern-variables' for education
in his Family structure and the socialisation of the child, in: PARSONS, TALCOTT &
BALES, ROBERT F. (1956) Family, Socialisation, and Interaction Process (London,
Routledge & Kegan Paul). He argues that both of each pair of all the pattern-
variables have to be incorporated in some degree in each member of a co-operating
group of actors; a culture is a particular pattern of the variables.
[21] Origins and Destinations, p. 7.
[22] JENSEN, A. R. (1973) Educability and Group Differences, p. 355 (London, Methuen).
Quoted Origins and Destinations, p. 9.
[23] HERRNSTEIN, R. J. (1973) I.Q. in the Meritocracy (London, Allen Lane). Quoted
Origins and Destinations, p. 9.
[24] BOURDIEU, P. (1977) Cultural reproduction and social reproduction, in KARABEL, J.
& HALSEY, A. H. (Eds) Power and Ideology in Education, p. 494 (New York, Oxford
University Press). Quoted Origins and Destinations, p. 74.
[25] BANTOCK, G. H. (1965) Education and Values, p. 151 (London, Faber & Faber).
Quoted Origins and Destinations, p. 10.
[26] CARTER, C. O. & PEEL, JOHN (Eds) (1976) Equalities and Inequalities in Health and
Disease (London, Academic Press).
[27] JENCKS, C. et al. (1972) Inequality: a Reassessment of the Effect of Family and School-
ing in America (New York, Basic Books). Quoted Origins and Destinations, p. 11.
[28] EYSENCK, H. J. (1973) The Inequality of Man, p. 225 (London, Temple Smith).
Quoted Origins and Destinations, p. 9.
[29] HUSEN, TORSTEN, (1979) The School in Question: a Comparative Study of the School
and its Future in Western Societies (London, Oxford University Press).
[30] Origins and Destinations, p. 11.
[31] Ibid., pp. 216,198.
[32] Ibid., p. 124.
[33] Ibid., p. 90. Emphasis added.
 Sociology} Education and Equality 129
[34] Ibid., p. 199. The quotation marks are in the original, to indicate the authors' wish
to dissociate themselves from a definite statement that the schools were superior or
the parents were uneducated.
[35] Ibid., p. 201.
[36] Ibid., p. 136.
[37] Ibid., p. 216.
[38] Ibid., p. 197. (On p. 109 the proportion of those aged 20-29 obtaining one 'A' level is
higher still.)
[39] Ibid., pp. 77, 199.
[40] Ibid., p. 68.
[41] Ibid., p. 197.
[42] GOLDTHORPE, JOHN H. (in collaboration with Catriona Llewellyn and Clive Payne)
(1980) Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, p. 35, note 76 (Oxford,
Clarendon Press).
[43] CROSLAND, C. A. R. (1956) The Future of Socialism, p. 258 (London, Cape). Quoted
Origins and Destinations, p. 195.
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[44] Origins and Destinations, p. 195.

[45] Ibid., p. 45.
[46] VAISEY, JOHN et al. The Economics of Educational Costing: Inter Country and Inter-
Regional Comparisons (Lisbon, Gulbenkian, 1968-71); The Political Economy of
Education (London, Duckworth, 1972); Origins and Destinations, p. 109.
[47] Op. cit., pp. 176-179.
[48] G. B. Shaw to C. B. Cochran, November 23rd 1929, in: O'CASEY, EILEEN (1971)
Sean, p. 108 (London, Macmillan).
[49] VAISEY, JOHN (1979) The school in question: an economist's viewpoint, Oxford
Review of Education, 5, p. 209.
[50] Origins and Destinations, p. 214.
[51] Ibid., p. 216.
[52] WEBER, MAX (1948) National character and the Junkers, in: GERTH, H. H. & MILLS,
C. W. (Eds) From Max Weber, p. 391 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul).
[53] Readers' Letters, Echo, Sunderland, April 16th 1980, p. 7.
[54] Origins and Destitutions, p. 216.
[55] Ibid., p. 111.
[56] Ibid., p. 124.
[57] Ibid., p. 111.
[58] HEATH, A. F. (1976) Rational Choice and Social Exchange (Cambridge University
Press).
[59] Origins and Destinations, pp. 108-124.
[60] Ibid., p. 201.
[61] JENCKS, C. et al, op. cit,; their Who Gets Ahead? The Determinants of Economic
Success in America (New York, Basic Books, 1979); ana Origins and Destinations, p. 13.
[62] The term is Husén's.
[63] Origins and Destinations, p. 213.
[64] Ibid., p. 213.
[65] HOBBES, THOMAS (1914) Leviathan: or the Matter, Form and Power of a Common-
wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, p. 73 (1651) (London, Dent).
[66] GOLDTHORPE, JOHN H. & HOPE, KEITH (1974) The Social Grading of Occupations: a
New Approach and Scale (Oxford, Clarendon Press); GOLDTHORPE (with Llewellyn
and Payne), op. cit., pp. 39-42; and Origins and Destinations, pp. 17-19.
[67] GOLDTHORPE (with Llewellyn and Payne), op. cit., p. 40.
 130 Oxford Review of Education
[68] Origins and Destinations, pp. 107,171.
[69] YOUNG, MICHAEL (1958) The Rise of the Meritocracy, p. 33 (London, Thomas &
Hudson). Quoted Origins and Destinations, p. 8.
[70] Origins and Destinations, p. 3.
[71] Ibid., p. 4.
[72] GOLDTHORPE (with Llewellyn and Payne), op. cit., p. 252.
[73] Origins and Destinations, p. 136.
[74] Ibid., p. 142.
[75] Ibid., p. 220.
[76] Ibid., p. 144.
[77] CROSLAND, op. cit., pp. 260-261. Quoted Origins and Destinations, p. 195.
[78] Origins and Destinations, p. 38.
[79] Ibid., p. 37.
[80] Ibid., p. 36.
[81] Ibid., p. 39.
[82] Ibid., p. 103.
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[83] Ibid., p. 217.

[84] His early works include the following: HALSEY, A. H. & GARDNER, L. (1953)
Selection for secondary education and achievement in four grammar schools, British
Journal of Sociology, Vol. 4, No. 1; FLOUD, JEAN, HALSEY, A. H. & MARTIN, F. M.
(1953) Education and social selection in England, Transactions of the Second World
Congress of Sociology, Vol. I I ; their Social Class and Educational Opportunity
(London, Heinemann, 1956); HALSEY, A. H. & FLOUD, JEAN (1957) Intelligence tests,
social class and selection for secondary schools, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 8,
No. 3; and HALSEY, A. H. (1958) Genetics, social structure and intelligence, British
Journal of Sociology, Vol. 9, No 1.
[85] Origins and Destinations, p. 52.
[86] Ibid., p. 63.
[87] Ibid., p. 72, note 9.
[88] Ibid., p. 58.
[89] Ibid., pp. 55, 71, note 8.
[90] Ibid., p. 64.
[91] Ibid., p. 65.
[92] Ibid., p. 67.
[93] Ibid., p. 197.
[94] Ibid., p. 196.
[95] Augustus John to Sean O'Casey (1929) O'CASEY, EILEEN op. cit., p. 97.
[96] Origins and Destinations, p. 90.
[97] Ibid., pp. 138,140.
[98] Ibid., p. 140.
[99] An anti-achievement culture of a pupil body was well expressed in the popular song:
"We down wan now edu-cy-shun/We down wan now fought controwl" (Pink
Floyd, 1979).
[100] The Times, April 28th 1980, 41.
[101] Origins and Destinations, pp. 213-214.
[102] Op. cit., pp. 255-257.
[103] Ibid., p. 260.
[104] Ibid., p. 253.
[105] Ibid., p. 28.
[106] Ibid., p. 253.
 Sociology, Education and Equality 131
[107] Origins and Destinations, p. 216.
[108] Ibid., p. 213.
[109] Ibid., p. 219.
[110] Ibid., p. 213.
[111] Ibid., p. 219.
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