On balance, the school I work in is failing, and the solution is not clear to me. On the ground, the failures of schools manifest in conflict. Failing schools are full of conflict, and teachers therefore experience the failure of their school through experiencing and absorbing conflict. Provoked by a string of difficult incidents with primarily male students, my partner and I have been discussing the role of class, and whether it can be used to understand the dynamics, and failures, we experience. Does part of the problem of our school lie in a culture clash between working class families and their liberal, middle class teachers?

As is a common theme in education, there is in some cases a class divide between the liberal, exclusively educated teaching staff, and some of the families of the students we teach. It is interesting to consider whether behaviour ‘incidents’ take place as the manifestation of this divide, as expressions of a culture clash. When discussing a recent spurt of confrontations between ourselves and our students, my partner alluded to the middle class ‘habitus’ which I certainly possess, and the extent to which this jars with some of the the students I teach. The idea of ‘habitus’ was coined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to describe the way in which social stratifications become ‘deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions… structured propensities to think, act and feel in determinant ways’ (Wacquant 2005: 316, cited in Navarro 2006). We are socialised to become adept at using our habitus to communicate within our social stratifications , something which he called ‘praxis’. We are less adept when in social situations in which our habitus is alien.

The idea that communicating across a habitus divide can result in misunderstanding resonates; I misunderstand a students’ assertion with rudeness, that student misunderstands my attempt at calmness as disinterestedness, and these misunderstandings provoke escalation. I am of course at risk of generalising here. With some challenging male students I have made observations, and perhaps some evidence to suggest that a cultural dissonance is at play. These are purely anecdotal, and do not represent any definitive comment on the ‘culture’ of the students I teach. One is that some male students are extremely loyal. On Friday there were two fights at lunch break. The participants of both fights, having emerged, were greeted by both their groups of friends with handshakes and pats on the back. On a separate occasion that week, a parent had explained to my partner that her son had only got in trouble because he stood up for his younger brother who was being picked on, and that this justified the incident which followed. These anecdotes reflect a morality which is pervasive, and can be sensed by simply spending a day tuning into conversations which pass you in the corridor. There is a a high sensitivity to honour, and respect, and to the moments in which those things are breached. On a separate occasion, a student explained to my partner that a teacher ‘deserved’ to have a chair thrown at them because they confiscated his phone. Clearly (though I am not blaming the teacher) the way in which they addressed this student triggered him. He probably felt humiliated, unheard, disrespected. Or perhaps he felt a lack of respect towards the authority of the teacher, felt there was more to be gained by asserting his will over her, than there was by following her instructions. I have had countless similar experiences. They reflect a culture which is individualistic, valuing individual rights, dignity and respect, and anti-establishment. These two worldviews dovetail neatly, and manifest in a hostility to authority, which is seen as belittling and illegitimate.

There are multiple, interconnected factors which lie at the root of these confrontations. Only last week I declared that all antipathy towards school stems from teachers failing to provide students with a clear path to success. I still believe this to be true, but intuitively, culture also feels important. Masculinity is another cultural phenomena present within the interpersonal dynamics at school. A feature of the way the some male students carry themselves is undeniably inflected with an idea of what it is to be ‘masculine’; they talk loudly, they occupy the space they are in, they are prickly to authority (especially when they feel patronised), they value humour and try to make each other laugh, often by getting a rise out of the teacher. These boys also are hyper conscious of their status as ‘men’, and how that category is under threat. My partner, a sociology teacher, remarked upon the presence of an ‘anti-school subculture’. Common in schools, this is a group of students who feel excluded from the value system of the school, communicated, no doubt, as clearly by the posters containing the words ‘faith, excellence and kindness’, as by the habitus of the teachers. Naturally, these students turn to each other for their validation and feeling of self-worth. Across year groups, the male groups which display the characteristics of anti-school subcultures, appropriate a language associated with opposition to police. Alongside the reversion to a ‘scrap’ to settle disputes, there is the awareness of ‘ops’, ‘feds’ and getting ‘nicked’. Within year 8, one groups of boys who’s classroom behaviour I struggle to control watch, glamorise and use the language of the Netflix show ‘Top Boy’. I watched and enjoyed this show myself. I spoke with one of these boys in the playground, in an attempt to build a rapport with him, asking him what he thought of the ending. I could tell he took pride, within earshot of his friends in saying ‘you know that Sully had a ‘glock’ and could have shot Stef if he wanted’, that Sully had already ‘put Jamie in a box’. His familiar and easy use of slang earned him credit. Part of the. allure of shows like ‘Top Boy’, which depict characters resisting establishment authority, is surely that the students feel they are doing the same thing. I find it interesting that performing masculinity is a key part of the cultural make-up of these anti-establishment subcultures. Why is it that masculinity is performed alongside the language of crime? Is it because within liberal culture and within schools, we do not offer masculinity any clear routes to value? Masculinity, particularly white masculinity, is expressed as something to be squashed, that individuals who identify as white and male, through their cultural upbringing, are then deprived of tangible ways to feel good about that identity at school, and so come to understand themselves as opposed to the values the school represents.

Last week, I had a student walk in late with a rolled up piece of paper pretending to smoke it, announcing to the class it was a joint. This was obviously distracting. I walked over, knelt down to his level and asked him softly to put it into his bag. This only fanned the flames as, with the attention of the whole class, he shouted ‘but it’s just a piece of paper.. you’re telling me to put a piece of paper in my bag’. When he refused and I requested he be removed from the lesson, this accusation became stronger: ‘What.. for not putting a piece of paper in my bag!?’. The boy next to him was in hysterics. The incident only escalated from there. I have tried the method of talking quietly to boys who are enjoying the spotlight, creating a scene at my expense, on countless occasions, and it has almost always failed to have the desired effect. I fear my habitus does not register. In talking quietly and by robotically reciting the language of the school (‘I notice you are not showing me excellence or kindness’) I am appealing to a morality which fails to bridge a cultural divide. As a man who shies away from being loud, assertive, and ‘alpha’, I am perhaps displaying a version of masculinity they do not respect or associate with. Linked to this, there is noticeably a divide within classes oriented around the current ‘culture war’. When principles of gender equality, rights of protected characteristics or positive discrimination arise in PSHE, there is without fail a vocal, often male, minority who express opposition. Given the pervasiveness of this ‘war’, this is unsurprising, students on both sides parrot what they hear at home. Again, however, amongst some male students, there is a feeling of threat. I have had male students express they feel like men have less fewer rights, that they are marginalised as voices in the modern world. So, when I explained the equalities act, some students heard something they had to fight against; ‘yes but what if you wanted to cast a man as a male character, are you going to cast a woman? No’. Students are, generally, highly literate in explaining the hardships men face in the modern world, that male suicide is the highest cause of death in men under 50, and that this stems from men not being ‘allowed’ to talk about their feelings. These are well developed understandings, and reflect an interest, an affiliation, and an exposure to such opinions online. They clearly feel like masculinity is something that needs protecting, and that is dear to them. You can forgive them for feeling like this attitude is not something shared by schools and teachers. You can imagine a school experience in which the rights and achievements of other identity groups are more obviously celebrated. Of course the normativity of white males is still there. But it takes a developed social awareness to read in that normativity an implicit celebration of maleness, as explicit celebration of maleness is more rare.

Michael Merrick’s episode of Four Thought on Radio 4, entitled ‘Socially Mobile?’ Articulates beautifully what can be the experience of education from the perspective of white, working class students, who ‘will often find themselves at odds with the moral norms of those who educate them’. He remarks upon the ‘creation myth of the liberal mind’, one ‘in a constant battle against intolerance, bigotry and demonisation of the other’, in which a class of ‘anywheres’ seeks to educate a class of somewheres’ (see David Goodhart for this distinction). What liberals, don’t notice, he says, is that ‘these (intolerance, bigotry etc) are precisely the sins they commit in the eyes of those who are the recipients of their evangelism’. This leaves students in a position where they either have to oppose the moral system they are surrounded by at home, which is heartbreaking, or reject the one they find at school, which results in repeated conflict. I can fully sympathise with students of mine that feel annoyed when lectured by people like me about how to empower people less advantaged, from outside their community, when they identify themselves and their community as systematically disadvantaged.

There is of course a delicate line to tread, and I am unsure how to tread it. The insights to be gleaned from Merrick’s talk is not that we should shy away from any particular political message because it is oppositional to ‘working class values’, however defined. Students should be taught, for example, to avoid a masculinity which is informed to any degree by Andrew Tate. This is not cultural, or class related to any meaningful degree. There is a much more positive message to be taken from Merrick’s talk: That we need to avoid embodying a a habitus of bigotry, and treat all children with dignity and respect. We need to see the value of each culture students bring with them to school. Jonathan Haidt, and ‘moral foundations theory’ was the first to bring to my attention the idea that political differences can be understood as differing sensitivities to different but equally valuable moral principles; what is sometimes labelled as ‘bigotry’, can instead be understood as a high sensitivity to loyalty and deference to the authority of tradition; no bad things.

Merrick’s talk encourages us to see the individual, not a label, to help students feel happy within the society they are in. Talking with a friend recently, we reflected that the white working class are almost the last demographic for whom it is socially acceptable to demonise, label and understand as ‘backward’ within liberal culture. Admittedly, I have felt this within my own practise. Displays of masculinity, for example, jar, and I can feel my emotions become heightened. The students feel the oppositional emotional response. In my last few months of teaching, I want to practise greater sensitivity.