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The International Library of Sociology

WORKING CLASS COMMUNITY

Founded by KARL MANNHEIM

 The International Library of Sociology
o(Sociology

CLASS, RACE AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

In 21 Volumes

1 The Changing Social Structure in England and Wales

1871-1961 Marsh
II Class in American Society Reissman
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
III Class Structure in the Social Consciousness Ossowski
IV Co-operative Communities at Work Infield
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
V Co-operative Living in Palestine Infield
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
VI Colour and Culture in South Africa Patterson
VII The Deprived and the Privileged Spinley
VIII First Years ofYangyi Commune Crook and Crook
IX The Functions of Social Conflict Coser
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
x
X The Home and Social Status Chapman
XI The Marginal Situation Dickie-Clark
XII Negroes in Britain Little
XIII Neighbours Bracey
XIV The People of Ship Street Kerr
XV Social Class, Language and Education Lawton
XVI Social Mobility in Britain Glass
XVII The Sociology of Colonies (Part
(part One) Maunier
XVIII The Sociology of Colonies (Part
(part Two) Maunier
XIX Stevenage Orlans
(The above title is not available through Routledge in North America)
XX
XX Studies in Class Structure Cole
XXI Working Class Community Jackson
 WORKING CLASS
COMMUNITY
Some General Notions Raised by a Series of
Studies in Northern England

by
BRIAN JACKSON
 First published in 1968 by
Routledge

Reprinted 1998, 2002

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

© 1968 Brian Jackson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders

of the works reprinted in The International Library a/Sociology.
This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would
welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies
we have been unable to trace.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

Woding Class Community

ISBN 0-415-17639-5
Class, Race and Social Structure: 21 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17826-6
The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17838-X

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent
 CONTENTS

I Voices page 1
2 Styles of Living 3
3 Brass Bands 21

4 At the Club 39
5 In the Mill 69
6 On the Bowling Green 99
7 Riot III

8 Jazz Club 120

9 School Ends 13 2
10 Change and Community 147
II Some Proposals 167

INDEX 178

v
 for
BRIAN, DOUGLAS, SHEILA
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My chief debt in preparing this book is to Dennis Marsden who
did so much of the early fieldwork and writing up, and in partic-
ular put far more than I did into the section on the Mill. If life
had been rather different this might have been a joint book with
him, and the better for it. The cost of the initial interviewing
was met by the Frederick Soddy Trust who got the venture off
the ground. It was saved from collapse by further help from
Michael Young and the Institute of Community Studies. And that
it was written up at all is due to the generosity of the Department
of Applied Economics and its director W. B. Reddaway who
during my time as a visiting member there gave me the space and
quietness I couldn't otherwise have had.
I don't suppose I would have stuck at the project at all had I
not only had initial help from Sheila Jackson with the fieldwork
and writing up, but generous and selfless encouragement all the
way through. Drafts of this book have been circulating for five
years, and many people put long hours, sometimes at con-
siderable personal inconvenience, into helping me with it. Perhaps
I've drawn most on the help of Jeremy Mulford, David Grugeon,
Peter Laslett, Sonia Abrams, Richard Hoggart, Royston Lambert,
Jennifer Platt, Kim Townsend and Douglas Brown. But the
crises, complications and pressures of other work have been so
strong that this book has had to be fitted into odd days over the
last six years, and to do all that has meant that I've leaned more
heavily than I care to acknowledge on the perception and patience
both of the people I mention, and many other friends and
colleagues.

vii
 Chapter One
VOICES
'I got hit with a frying pan one day. When I got married and
lived with my husband's mother, there was a do up our street. I
was fascinated, and I got a bit too close. Old Ma Ryan threw a
frying pan at her husband and I got it. My mother-in-law said it
served me right for being too nosy.'
'We've been in Millbank Methodist Chapel all our lives, we've
been connected but no, we never went, not after we were little
you know. Bah, you had to go, it were a case of your parents
making you go in them days, you had to do as you were told.
What, don't you forget it, it were real in them days, but when we'd
taken each other like, we didn't go no more.'
'I'll tell you what, I've noticed this with old folk that's been
moved away-they don't seem to have reigned long. It's too bad
rehousing old people, they should leave them alone. I'll give you
an example, that woman over there, her sister and her husband
they were moved from Brow Road. Well he were a big mate 0'
mine, used to go about a lot, and they were moved up Crosland
Moor. Well nothing wrong with Crosland Moor, up top end it's
a nice district, but do you know they were both dead within twelve
month. Somehow it seemed to knock all t'stuffing out of them,
down here you know everything and everybody, I know Millbank
stone by stone as you might say.'
'I know one or two Indians. I go drinking with them, they're
nice blokes. Of course since this Mau Mau job we've got some-
thing against the Jamaicans. We're not so keen on them.'
'We used to think it was real going down to Chinny's, to the
dance. Getting black drainpipes on, and a long duffle coat, and
you looked exactly like a bopper. I couldn't bop, but I used to
think it was real, and we felt it was smashing going out with
greasy faces. We just used to put Hi-Fi on, smear it all over our
I
 Voices
faces, no powder or anything and lots of black mascara. Then
we'd go down in the dark and we'd feel exactly like boppers. It
didn't last though, you don't stop at Chinny's very long. Then
after Chinny's, you go to the Empress or Charlie Frost's. Oh I
remember a time down there, the first time I ever went to
Chinny's, and I wasn't wearing the right clothes or anything, I'd
gone in a sort of party frock. And everybody else they all looked
at me, and I cried upstairs because I couldn't get anybody to dance
with me, and then somebody danced with me and I thought I'd
got a partner, but it turned out it was a girl I went with, that had
put him up to it. So next time I went, I got the proper clothes on,
except I'd got a blouse on under me sweater and the neck was
all showing you know. When I got there and took me coat off,
they all looked at me and they said, you don't wear a blouse under
your sweater, and they made me go upstairs and take it off straight
away.'
'I always give to the blind, but I don't like these other things.
What I want to know is where does all the money go ? There's too
many of these things. There's somebody filling their nests. Where's
it go? Congo? Why, we've enough of our own refugees in
England without bothering sending money to that lot. They want
to get some work done, that's what they want. Like the rest of us
have to do. I work with a black woman and I should know.'
'There's this guy next door, Mr. Nugent, an Irishman. When
he's sober he dresses quite smart, but when he's drunk-he shouts
out "Get out! Get out of my house!" And they have to get out. All
twelve. He has twelve children. And some nights he shouts out
"which is the finest race?" And they have to shout back, all in
unison they have to shout back "The Irish!" Or else he might
have them all saying "Heil! Heil Hitler I" When the police
come, he gets out of the bathroom window.'
'On this estate you've got more community spirit than you
would have, say, down Edgefield-real community. We've got
to think first of all of getting this on a local scale; everybody in
Huddersfield being co-operative and community-minded. Then
on a national scale. Then on an international scale. I take it that's
brotherhood.'

2.
 Chapter Two
STYLES OF LIVING
When you hear them, those voices are Yorkshire, deliberate,
authoritative within their worlds. This book is an attempt to
exemplify why they matter, why we should hear them. They are
all working-class voices-the mill girl at the dance, the plumber
with his vision of 'brotherhood', the labourer climbing out of the
bathroom window. Following their leads, I've tried in half a
dozen ways to define the qualities, good or bad, of working-class
life: the styles of living that it offers us.
Listening to the voices, or exploring the communities that have
gathered around the weaving sheds, I shall be asking a series of
familiar questions. Questions about the clash between established
working-class values and established middle class values; about
those older working-class values and their encounter with the mass
media; and most of all, about whether the new world of relative
affluence inevitably means the total end of the old styles of living.
To be extreme: are we, by a thousand and one deliberate decisions,
moving in the direction of a society sapped by the poorest middle-
class concerns (such as those about personal status), the poorest
mass media attitudes-(those preoccupied with the packaging and
not the packet's contents), and the poorest of all the old working-
class situations: a vast but enclosed community transformed into
a passive, conforming audience? Or can the decisions, in an
inevitably changing society, be taken differently? Can they lead
to a fusion of middle class feeling for individual development,
with the multiplication of experience that the mass media may
offer, and those qualities of spontaneity and community that my
opening 'voices' suggest?
It would be a bold man who could tackle such large general-
ities head-on. In most of this enquiry I have explored the
questions indirectly, letting the patterns establish themselves and
3
 Styles of Living
knowing that my pattern would not always be the reader's.
This study began, in 1958, out of that debate on working-class
life which blazed up, and died down, so very quickly. The Uses of
Literary was fresh on the bookstalls, so was Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning. On television Dennis Mitchell was showing
Morning in the Streets. The papers were attending to the work on
family and kinship that Michael Young and his colleagues were
reporting from Bethnal Green. And the whole structure of our
school and university system was clarified by findings of untapped
working-class talent recorded in such surveys as Floud, Halsey and
Martin's Social Class and Educational Opportunity. Looking back,
we can see that there was an element of fashion in the extent to
which this debate was taken up. No doubt our society needs to
discover a working-class novelist every three or four years as a
kind of exotic thrill: it needs the sense of a rough, sexy, warm,
violent world just around the corner. The nineteenth century was
in the habit of taking up a working-class poet every few years-
John Clare is a sad example. But the subsequent discussions on
rural strengths and uncomplicated freshness of response, though
they concerned real qualities (for Clare is still alive and his
lionizers dead), were often part of the froth of intellectual diver-
sion. Something like this happened around 1958.
But of course the questions raised at the time remain important
and unanswered, and people have continued the work. Any
'answering' must be a collaborative activity involving not only
many people, but time itself and the insight of several disciplines.
These are not questions for the sociologist or the psychologist
or the literary critic or the writer or the film producer alone; but
for all of them on our behalf.
The ground work was laid in the previous debate. For the
matters I intend to explore here, the most interesting survey was
Fami!J and Kinship in East London. 1 In this Michael Young and
Peter Willmott analysed the way the working-class family centred
on Mum: daughters married and lived close by, and the 'extended
family' stretched over several households. Most of their report
suggested strengths in this system, especially for the women:
there was abundant mutual help-looking after children, cooking
1 Young, M. and Willmott, P. Family and Kinship in East London (Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1957).
4
 Styles of Living
meals, sharing shopping. There was quick support in the great
personal crises of death, accident and illness, and a constant flow
of more everyday advice and encouragement. The 'extended
family' mattered a great deal too for men and women-a widow,
an unmarried son-who might otherwise live isolated lives in
small flats. In East London they were absorbed into the linked
system of households, often taking on satisfying roles as sub-
stitute sons or mothers. Against this, the authors contrasted an
analysis of a new housing estate where material conditions were
vastly superior-hot water, gardens, good schools-and where
husband and wife were closer together. Nevertheless there was
unhappiness and loneliness, and the loss of the 'extended family'
meant that a vital part of working-class life, with much of the
emotional and practical support it offered, had been needlessly
destroyed. It was needless, they concluded, because housing
schemes could be built round the existing style of living: to
destroy that and substitute an estate with a 'community centre' was
useless action based on ignorance of our own society. The im-
portance of this survey and the others that cluster round it! lies
firstly in their unravelling of the kinship network which underlies
all working-class 'community'. Secondly, they changed the focus
from untypical 'problem families' or male-centred discussions of
collective bargaining and the creation of trade unions, to the
ordinary world of women and home. And they show the quite
needless harm that can be done by well-meaning middle-class
officials and policy makers who take their decisions in ignorance
of the style of living around them.
This interpretation does not go unchallenged. In Ship Street,
a Liverpool 'problem family' study, Madeleine Kerr emphasized
the restrictive and smothering role of Mum, whose emotional
hold makes it difficult for the children ever to break away-even
into a larger and more attractive life. And in Coal is Our Life,'2 an
enquiry centred on Featherstone in Yorkshire, Dennis, Henriques

1 Especially Townsend, P. Family Life of Old People (Routledge and Kegan

1957); Marris, P. Widows and their Families (Routledge and Kegan Paul,
Paul, 19n);
1958); Mogey, J. M. Fami!y
Fami{y and Neighbourhood (Clarendon Press, 1956);
Bott, E. Family and Social Network (Tavistock Publications, 19n).
1957).
2 Dennis, N., Henriques, P., and Slaughter, C. Coal is Our Life (Eyre and
Spottiswoode, 1956),
1956).
1
 Styles of Living
and Slaughter looked at working-class life from the point of view
of the men at their jobs. They showed the tightness of the
historical bond between the men expressed daily in all manner of
mutual help and personal generosities.
'When I was lamed five years ago, and I came out of hospital on
crutches, I. J. was the first one to buy me a drink. Since then he has
given me 2.s. 6d. or 3s. or whatever change he has happened to have
in his pocket, so that I could have a quiet drink.
'I can't pay him back straight away. But I had a pair of glasses and
I.J. tried them on. "Champion! Just right!" he said.
, "Put them in your pocket," I said.
, "What do you want for them?" he said (i.e. how much do you
want to sell them for ?).
, "I want you to put them in your pocket, that's what I want!
My eyes are too far gone for reading glasses." ,
But they argued also against the shifting orthodoxy of life, and
suggested that the women's life especially was one of subjection
(contraceptives thrown on the fire because they took all enjoyment
out of sex, husband's wages never known, violence at night when
he returned with a skinful of ale). And a life too which did not
allow for 'much expression of qualities of intellect or personality'.
I take these different studies as being representative of the know-
ledge we have of the centre of working-class community, the
family. Since 1958 the drift of evidence has largely been behind
the first account-that the 'extended family' makes good sense,
and helps many millions of people to lead humdrum but satisfying
lives. The other picture-violence, sexual aggression and ig-
norance, small narrow lives-flares up less frequently. It has
authority behind it, yet it no longer-except in lighter fiction-
can be offered as the typical account.
But at this point the enquiry into community slowed down.
Instead, interest and research split into several channels. Much
the most successful-they were with the tide-were those en-
quiries which considered the degree to which the education system
failed to bring out the best in working-class children. Stimulating
and underpinning a series of major government reports-
Crowther, Newsom, Robbins-they led to a vastly enlarged sense of
how much the nation needed these children to realise their gifts,
especially through the universities. And working at another level
6
 Styles of Living
they communicated the subtle relationship between a child's
'social' and 'academic' education, within what was shown to be
a class system of schools, and so helped to promote the gradual
growth of comprehensive education. Out of this movement will
probably come a sharper penetration of the working-class com-
munity by formal education and those 'outside' experiences it
brings to the individual. At the same time, though slowly and
with many snags, the comprehensive school-a neighbourhood
school-may help transform the existing physical community into
an educational community. If so, though the line is pitted with
difficulties, the sixth-form girl may no longer be writing in her
library, sharply rejecting the community from which she comes
for the elite she is promised.
Less successful, but often more impressive, has been that line
of enquiries from Richard Titmuss' Essays on the Welfare Statel to
Peter Townsend's research into the situation of old people, the
sick, the unemployed, the widowed, the workers on low wages
with large families. These have substantially altered the common
view that need and poverty ended in the 1930s, and that today the
working-class is affluent and moving easily into a middle-class
standard and style of living. Titmuss has often shown how the
welfare services-state hospitals, free medical care, family
allowances, pensions-have worked to the advantage of the
middle class, and frequently widened the gaps between manual
workers and others. And in a neat summary2 of the available
evidence he suggests that since the levelling period of 1940-50,
there have been substantial increases in inequality. He contrasts our
imperfect knowledge of middle class wealth and income with the
sharp public attention given to the earnings of working-class boys
and girls compared with middle class children, and comments:
'Later in life, however, the latter may be twenty times or more better
off than the former, measured solely in terms of annual cash income,
1 Titmuss, R. M., Essays on the Welfare State (Allen and Unwin, 1958) and
such reports as Townsend, P. The Last Refuge (Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1962); Lynes, T. National Assistance and National Prosperity (Codicote Press,
1962); Townsend, P. and Wedderburn, D. The Aged in the Welfare State
(Bell, 1965); Wedderburn, D . Redundanry and the Railwaymen (Cambridge
University Press, 1965).
2 Titmuss, R. M. Introduction (1964) to Tawney, R. H. Equality.

7
 Styles of Living
with less disabling disease, a longer expectation of life, a lower age
of retirement, more inherited wealth, a proportionately greater and
more assured pension, a tax free lump sum perhaps one hundred
times greater, and in receipt of substantially more non-wage income
and amenities in forms that escape income tax, being neither money
nor convertible into money. Which of two individuals from these
classes receives more aid in absolute terms from the generality of
taxpayers through "the social services" and other redistributive
mechanisms, especially during that phase of life when the foundations
of earning capacity, opportunity and achievement are laid?'
Peter Townsend and those around him have broadened the
great tradition-Rowntree, Booth, the Webbs-of enquiries into
working-class poverty. He has shown that in 1965 there are still
seven and a half million people living below an income level set by
the National Assistance Board as necessary for rent, clothing and
food. 'Poverty' needs to be redefined in each age: it is a relative
statement of lack of primary wants. 1 It may be less visible than it
was. The great city sprawls-Attercliffe in Sheffield, Stepney and
Bethnal Green, the Gorbals-are not as horrifying as they were.
But it still exists, on a big scale, in a complicated system of pockets
-the large family at the end of the street, the widow in the base-
ment fiat. This research has given us new eyes. It has insisted that
behind the 'community' problem-and behind all the fractions of it,
such as education-still lie crude problems of neglect and extreme
inequality: and that the solution of those is the first priority.
A third line of enquiry has concerned itself with the nature and
effect of the mass media. Probably the most important achieve-
ment here of writers such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond
Williams has been to break up the easy concept of the working-
class 'masses' being given the rubbish they ask for and being well
satisfied with it. ('Masses are other people. There are in fact no
1 'The children of 1965 are in some ways more deprived than the poor of the
1 940S when there was a communal poverty. They are surrounded by apparent
affluence. They have no vests and shoes that are too tight, but other children in
their classes will be talking about the Continental holidays they are going to
have. Children who go to school badly dressed are not usually spotted as being
poor, unless it is known that their mothers are widowed or deserted.' Jean
Stean commenting in the Guardian (2, Feb., 1966) on research by Peter Town-
send and Brian Abel-Smith. See Townsend, P. 'The Meaning of Poverty'. Brit.
Journal of Sociology, vol. XIII, no. 3, Sept., 1962. See also Runciman, W. G.
Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
8
 Styles of Living
masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.')! It has
been shown with some care that 'mass' audiences are made up of
multiple, shifting sub-groups, that programmes or papers with
equally large audiences are not viewed or read with equal in-
tensity, and above all that we must beware of transferring a judg-
ment about cliches and shallowness in magazines or television
into one about trivial or stock responses in their audience. In 1958
it was easy for policy makers-like M.P.s-or the face-to-face
decision takers-like teachers or doctors-to talk about 'the
masses' and television in the same unquestioning way that the
nineteenth-century bourgeoisie could talk about 'the masses' and
the vote. That has gone, and if anything the run of new evidence
now concentrates attention on the fact that the content of the
media very often stems from producers, editors, writers, with
middle class backgrounds and expensive educations. The more
serious surrender to the 'packaging' values may come not from
working-class teenagers but from ex-public schoolboys down from
Cambridge knowingly grading their 'copy' according to the
educational level of their audience. 2 But so far as questions of
working-class community are concerned, what is now coming out
of these enquiries is a sharper sense of discrimination within the
mass media instead of the old black-and-white opposition between
'mass' art and the older 'minority' arts. ('School and home' said
the Secretary of the National Union of Teachers 'are often cases
threatened by the surrounding desert'.) What is only just begin-
ning to be accepted is that the mass media-from Marks and
Spencer to television-have penetrated working-class com~
munities with new goods and experiences of an important kind. 3
1 Williams, R. Culture and Society (Chatto and Windus, 1958).
a 'A Bri-nylon fabric is advertised in a gay, carefree manner in Woman's
Own, but in a suave, modish and expensively restrained way once it reaches
the pages of Queen, About Town or Vogue. Advertising contributes to cultural
stratification in our society'. Hall, S. and Whannel, P. The Popular Arts (1964)
p. 415, from whom the quotation by the Teachers' Secretary (p. 21) and E.
Shils (p. 380) are also taken.
3 'Mass Society has liberated the cognitive, appreciative, and moral
capacities of individuals. Larger elements of the population have consciously
learned to value the pleasures of eye, ear, taste, touch and conviviality. People
make choices more freely in many spheres of life, and these choices are not
necessarily made for them by tradition, authority, or scarcity'. Shils, E.
Culture for the Millions.
B 9
 Styles of Living
To take a small example, the middle class with its background of
good schooling over several generations, and its strong pull
towards London, has easy access to the dramatic heritage of
western civilisation. But the arrival of television into almost every
home in Dewsbury, Warrington or Swindon is often the first
sustained encounter with what 'drama' can offer as an entry into
other experience: a leap of the imagination so common to many
well-educated middle-class citizens, and so fundamental to their
most serious culture, that they may be inclined to accept it as
being open to all.
Lastly, that familiar line of enquiry which could once have been
safely summarised as 'working-class problem studies', has under-
gone a most extraordinary change. (Though the older middle class
attitudes about the 'problem' can still be tenaciously held.) This
could be illustrated by recent work on delinquency, l but I want
to take two studies of subjects that are more central to this book.
The first is Infant Care in an Urban Community, 2 a survey of 700
Nottingham mothers. Compared with earlier work this is
remarkable by virtue of its readiness to accept that varied styles
of living might make sense in different ways, and its insistence
that we must start by 'looking at real families'. When they did
look at 'real families', they found that far from the majority of
working-class husbands being absent all the time at the pub, the
majority of them took a practical part in the care of small babies.
'At a time when he has more money in his pocket, and more
leisure on which to spend it, than ever before, the head of the
household chooses to sit at his own fireside, a baby on his knee
and a feeding bottle in his hand.' Of course this is a picture of a
changing life. The quality of family life has plainly been affected
by the arrival of the forty-hour week, the husband having more
energy and time to give to his family-especially at weekends. And
during the day, the woman's load has been considerably lightened
by the benefits of mass production-and even such humble things
as the proliferation of effective cleaning materials, more easily

1 Such as Wilkins, L. T. Delinquent Generations (H.M.S.O., 1961) which

destroys many middle-class stereotypes of working-class delinquency and
violence.
2 Newson, }. and Newson, E. Infant Care in an Urban Community (Allen
and Unwin, 1963).
IO
 Styles of Living
prepared food, the practical information in women's magazines,
or the myriad forms of the 'plastics revolution' are a boon that
their mothers could hardly have conceived. All this helps to lead
to a larger sense of possibilities, and more intimately, to a different
attitude towards the small child running round the house. 'I think
we're not so happy about ourselves these days, we blame ourselves,
not the child.' Of course the middle-class mother still has the
advantage. In this survey we see how her doctors automatically
get her into the desired maternity hospital, whilst working-class
patients must more frequently have their babies at home. And her
material and educational start makes it easier for her to rear a child
according to principles and not to a succession of impulses. But
the Newsoms record how this has its unhappier side, how some-
times the child can be obscured by the principle. A study like
this neatly recalls the liberating effects of better conditions,
and yet has the virtue of 'looking at real families' and not
(like most mothercraft literature and not a little social science)
basing itself on unquestioned stereotypes of the working-class
home.
The same spirit in what once would have been 'problem studies'
can be illustrated from the work of Dr. Basil Bernstein. l It has
been recognised since J. D. Nisbett's FamilY Environment (1953)
that in large families the IQ tends to drop successively after the
first child. This applies in all social classes, and is probably because
the only child is surrounded by an environment of adult language
during his most formative years, whilst the youngest child of six
is surrounded by a less stimulating environment of 'child' lan-
guage. Bernstein starting with this subtle sense of an environment
('out there') which progressively becomes part of the child's
thought structure and emotional definition ('in there')-reworked
the problem in terms of social class. He produces research evidence
to support two suppositions. The first is that there is a kind of
language (he calls it 'public') which is used by most working-class
people as their onlY language, and can be used by most middle-class
people when they choose. It is a style of language which is con-
1 See Bernstein, B. 'Social Class and Linguistic Development' in Halsey)
A. M., Flood, ]., and Anderson, C. A., Education, Economy and Sociery (1961,
and Social Class, Speech Systems and Psycho-Therapy' in Brit. Journa/ of
Sociology, Vol. XV, no. I, March 1964.)
II
 Styles of Living
crete and descriptive, arguing or thinking in terms of a succession
of anecdotes. The second kind of language which is onlY usually
used by the middle class (partly because of the generations of
education and intellectually exacting experience and occupation
behind them) he calls 'formal'. By this he means a manner of
speech which can handle concepts, the language of ideas. Its
syntax is much more complex and is so built up that even small
children can immediately begin thinking in conceptual rather than
descriptive ways. He quotes two four-year-old girls arguing in a
middle-class home. 'I'm bigger than you.' 'No, I'm bigger than
you.' 'Well, my sister's seven and a half.' 'Well, but she's not you.'
'No, everyone's theirselves.'
In a society such as that of Elizabethan England, the command
of 'public' language-anecdotal, descriptive, metaphorical-could
give access to the central culture of that age. But in a scientific,
technological age it may well be that, as Bernstein's work suggests,
'formal' conceptual language has to be mastered if a child is to
advance through education. There is an unseen breakdown of
communication between working-class children and their teachers.
'The methods and problems of teaching need to be thought out
almost as though middle class children do not exist. This does not
imply that pupils of the two social strata need to be educated in
different institutions.'
Bernstein's own thoughts are constantly changing, and one
need not wholly agree with the concepts of 'public' and 'formal'
language, to see that his analysis of an old 'problem' ('By fourteen
years of age many lower working-class children have become
"unteachable".') carries an importance outside the school system.
It implies that working-class life-especially that of the semi-
skilled and unskilled-is surrounded by a language barrier, and
that the breakdown of communication now revealed between
teacher and pupil probably exists in the same way between the
working-class man or woman and all those representatives of the
middle class world-doctors, matrons, magistrates, council offi-
cials-who have such a day-to-day influence on his life. It also
tells us something more than we knew in 1958 about 'community'
and about the working-class 'voice.' In these analyses, working-
class language tends to communicate similarities rather than
differences in experience: it reinforces feelings of solidarity.
12.
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