The habitus, field, and capital of the teaching service
I recently published a book review of the Oxford Handbook of the History of Education in the Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching. It reminded me of my attempt at writing up the history of Singapore’s education system for my dissertation. I will serialise that particular chapter in the blog, an excerpt of which I am reproducing below:
The Habitus, Field and Capital of the Teaching Service
To codify means to formalise and to adopt formal behaviour… Codification is an operation of symbolic ordering... (which) minimises ambiguity and vagueness, in particular in interactions. - Pierre Bourdieu
This chapter will attempt to answer Research Question 1: “In what ways has the Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (TSLN) initiative been working as a means of codification and doxa of misrecognition?” Further in this chapter, there will be additional considerations on the method of inquiry, as well as, findings and discussions relating to Research Question 1.
Bourdieu’s Field Theory
Whilst Bourdieu did not write explicitly about education policy, his work on cultural capital and social reproduction, first written as an alternative understanding of disparity in students’ academic achievements, has had significant bearing within the sociology of education (Swartz, 1997). Thomson (2005) suggests that Bourdieu’s field theory is able to explain policy shifts and offers an approach to show how policies could cause misrecognition. Hence, in this study, Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts, which offer insights and understandings that are not as immediately lucid in other approaches (Grenfell and James, 2004), are used as the framework for analysing the policy changes in the Singapore education system, in particular, TSLN. Lingard et al. (2005b, p. 664) found “the lack of application of Bourdieu to educational policy in a globalising context... surprising”. In the immediate Singapore context of this case study, the application of Bourdieu too is sorely lacking, but hardly surprising; thus, warranting the use of Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts in this case study.
Codification & Misrecognition: Educational Developments from Colonial Times
The objective of researching a social field is to account for the relations between the agents within that field. It involves identifying:
the practices particular to the field
the dominated and dominant agents
amount and forms of capital possessed by the agents
We begin by looking back at the developments of the Singapore educational system over time.
The emergence of an education system per se in Singapore can be dated back to 1867 when the Colonial Office took over the island from the East India Company. Prior to this, schools were mainly vernacular and managed by the diverse local communities. This is perhaps a natural progression for a port of exchange as Singapore became a choice destination for immigrants from various parts of the Malay Archipelago, Southern China and India. The Teachers’ Training College (TTC) aptly summed the phenomenon as follows:
It was the composition of the population and the prosperity of the island which largely influenced the growth of educational activities before 1867. After that time it was the interaction between the people of Singapore and the British colonial administration which shaped the educational policies and development.
The British government formed the Department of Education in 1872 but was reluctant to upset the status quo of an eclectic mix of vernacular schools and a few English stream schools. Despite their disinclination for sweeping changes, they did take “deliberate steps to promote English as the medium of instruction” (Tan et al, 2008, p. 8). This would appear reasonable as English was the administrative language of the colonial government. Nevertheless, this promotion was not unproblematic as it would inadvertently give rise to the stratifying of society into dominant and dominated groups.
Immediately, government grants were biased. They favoured schools that taught English to pupils whose native language was not English and the only vernacular schools that were consistently receiving funds were the Malay schools as the Malay community was deemed indigenous by the British government. Tamil vernacular education on the other hand was almost non-existent as the number of Indian students in the English stream schools consistently outnumbered those in Tamil stream schools (Tan et al, 2008). Meanwhile, Chinese-medium education received no funding and was backed instead by rich Chinese merchants.
Apart from imbalanced funding, boys with English stream qualifications also received markedly higher wages than their vernacular-educated counterparts and enjoyed greater mobility especially after the introduction of the Queen’s Scholarships in 1885 and adoption of the Cambridge Examination in 1891. As such, the English language became a desirable cultural capital. In contrast, Chinese stream schools were hardly regulated and in the early years taught classical Chinese education which had little relevance to the straits settlement context. The disparity between English stream education and otherwise was significant.
Events took a violent turn when more Chinese stream schools were founded with strong orientations towards China and Chinese nationalism. These Chinese schools became shelters for exiled reformers from China, and bedrocks for revolutions that took place in the mainland; the alarmed British government intervened. The initial disregard and subsequent perceived interference inadvertently resulted in deep distrust within the Chinese community towards the colonial rulers. These contradictions went unresolved though there was “an uneasy truce” up till the outbreak of the Second World War (Gopinathan, 1991, p. 271). Subsequently, in the post-war years, the pent up distrust and marked inequality in employability between the English-educated and Chinese-educated students would culminate in the communist-led social unrest and student demonstrations of the 1950s. Already, the potential embodiment of cultural capital through being in the right school (habitus) and its conversion into economic capital is apparent.
<to be continued>
References:
Bourdieu, P. (1990). In Other Words. Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gopinathan, S. (1991). Education. In E. Chew & E. Lee (eds), A History of Singapore, pp. 268-287. Singapore: Oxford University Press.
Grenfell, M. & James, D. (2004). Change in the Field – Changing the Field: Bourdieu and the Methodological Practice of Educational Research. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(4), pp. 507-523..
Swartz, D. (1997). Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Tan, Y.K, Chow,H.K & Goh, C. (2008). Examinations in Singapore: Change and Continuity (1891 – 2007). Singapore: World Scientific Publishing.
Thomson, P. (2005). Bringing Bourdieu to Policy Sociology: Codification, Misrecognition and Exchange Value in the UK Context. Journal of Education Policy, 20(6), pp. 741-758.
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