‘Thinking about the future’ has not been a major strand of research and theory in the sociology of education. As a result, ‘futures thinking’ in education has been largely left to educationalists who give little explicit attention to sociological issues, especially those concerned with the question of knowledge. The typical approach of such thinking is to identify what is seen as the increasing mismatch between schools and changes in the wider society and how the formal education system, and schools in particular, almost systematically resist such changes. The assumptions of such ‘future thinking’ tend to be that certain wider social changes are not only inevitable but of positive benefit to humanity and that schooling in the future will have to follow them. The ‘following’ is invariably unproblematic.

The future of schooling in these scenarios is one of throwing off what is seen as its medieval past and adapting to global trends towards greater flexibility and openness to change from individuals; as a consequence it is predicted that schooling will become less and less differentiated from other social institutions. The following two not un-typical, but in many ways very different examples of this kind of ‘future thinking’ will illustrate this point. The first is by Peter Mortimore, the former Director of the Institute of Education. In a recent Guardian column, he wrote:

Many changes are affecting Western societies. New citizens are importing different cultural and religious traditions, families are taking on different configurations, work hours are becoming more varied and the internet is taking over our shopping, entertainment and information-gathering activities … People have become more conscious of individual rights, but are less deferential to those in authority …

Yet English schools … are slow to change … all but the most confident of headteachers are inhibited from experimenting with new approaches.

Many aspects of schooling have changed … the abolition of corporal punishment and the introduction of a national curriculum … But should there be more fundamental changes in how pupils are educated in order to better match the way people live today? (our italics) Should issues such as the sustainability of the environment and the dangers of obesity, drugs and Aids and, in the light of current events, financial education be given more prominence? (Mortimore, 2008)

Our second, more overtly academic, example is a recent paper by the distinguished sociolinguist, Gunther Kress (2008). Kress argues that global social changes are calling into question the appropriateness of:

• our dominant myths about education that are derived from an already quite distant past, and
• our assumptions about the homogeneity of the audience for education and .. about the ontological/epistemological security of “knowledge’ …

The school is increasingly left, Kress argues, “without its legitimating purposes”. It is faced with “an emblematic shift in the emphasis of educational rhetoric from teaching to learning …. No institution (any longer) regulates what is to be learned … no clear curriculum exists … and knowledge is made by learners in relation to their needs, as tools to solve problems encountered by them in their lifeworlds” (our addition in brackets)

Kress goes on to claim that “a significant proportion of the young are alienated from school – they no longer judge school to be of relevance to …the world as they experience it. … What the school actually offers is … no longer of interest to these young people …. the responsibility (for the transition from school to work) now falls on the young themselves.” Kress (2008)

Mortimore is pointing to a greater emphasis, in a possible ‘curriculum of the future’, on ‘relevant’ and contemporary themes. His argument is not unlike that of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in their new curriculum proposals which shift the balance in school science from subject content to what might be relevant and have personal meaning for pupils. However neither the QCA nor Mortimore tell us how such themes might be addressed by teachers in ways that go beyond a sharing of opinions on issues such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic that involve complex bodies of specialist knowledge in fields such as micro-biology.

Kress tells us that the future is here today and that it is largely educationalists, unlike young people, who are too blinded by tradition to see it. Whether his future in which schools adapt and respond to the ‘demands’ of the next generation will really empower and enthuse them is another question.

In this review we will draw on the sociology of knowledge to tell a rather different story about schooling and its possible futures in an increasingly global society. We shall argue that a focus on the conservative nature of educational institutions, their resistance to change and their perpetuation of anachronistic forms of authority and archaic curriculum priorities that bear little relation to the demands of the contemporary world, is limited as a basis for ‘future thinking’ in a number of ways. Firstly it fails to distinguish between the inherently ‘conservative’ role of schools as institutions involved in the ‘transmission of knowledge’ from one generation to another and conservatism as a tendency of all institutions to resist change and preserve privileges. We need to distinguish between these two forms of conservatism if we are to envisage a very different future in which societies will still want schools to transmit knowledge (and values) from one generation to another. Secondly, a focus on changes in the wider society, and how schools should adapt to them plays down the extent to which, if schools are agencies of cultural transmission, they will have a logic of their own which may go against the immediate demands of young people even it is in their long term interests.

Education and the sociology of knowledge

Research in the sociology of knowledge has had a significant if controversial influence on debates about education in the UK and elsewhere, at least since the early 1970s. Although this influence can be traced back to the appointment of Karl Mannheim to the Chair in Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education in 1946, it was not until the 1970s that sociological ideas about knowledge began to be taken seriously within educational studies. Furthermore, it has only been in the last decade that a distinctive social realist research tradition – the theme of this review – began to emerge in the UK (Moore, 2004; Young, 2007), in South Africa (Muller, 2000; Gamble, 2006), in Australia (Weelahan, 2007), and in a number of Latin American and other European countries such as Portugal and Greece. The major resource for this work has been the ideas/theories of the English sociologist, Basil Bernstein, who died in 2001, and the inspiration that he found in the ideas of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim writing a century ago. However this emerging tradition in the sociology of education has also drawn on a number of wider developments in (i) sociological theory (Collins 2000), Bourdieu(2004) and Gellner (1996), (ii) the sociology of science (Collins and Evans, 2007), (iii) philosophy (Norris, 2006: Bachelard (see Tiles 1984) and (iv) linguistics (the Sydney Systematic Functional Linguistics Group who explicitly tie the notion of knowledge to the wellsprings of language [Christie and Martin, 2007]).

This review will therefore begin by locating the intellectual origins of a specifically realist sociology of knowledge in the early 20^th century work of Emile Durkheim (1984). However we will suggest that its emergence as a strand of research within the sociology of education has been as much a critical response to other developments in the broad field of educational research and in educational policy as a re-discovery of a social realist tradition in mainstream sociology. These developments in social and educational research include:

(i) social constructivist/post modernist views of knowledge and truth that are found in much recent sociology of education as well as more broadly across the humanities and social sciences (Kronman, 2008)

(ii) socio-cultural theories of learning that have, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, dominated educational research in a range of fields such as science education, work based learning and diversity studies.

These theoretical developments have been paralleled by a number of policy developments that have their roots in the new – neo-liberal – politics and its celebration of markets. Examples include:

(a) the increasingly ‘instrumental’ focus of educational policy which conceptually, albeit not politically, has many affinities with (i) and (ii) above . For example, it is increasingly difficult to make a public case for ‘education for its own sake, i.e. ‘to promote young people’s intellectual development’

(b) the uncritical enthusiasm of research funders and policy makers for the educational potential of digital technologies and the challenge that this poses for the role of specialist educational institutions and the role of teachers (Keen, 2007; Sharples, 2007).

The distinctive implications of the ideas discussed in this review follow from their recognition of (a) the necessary objectivity of knowledge as a condition for any kind of enquiry or reliable prediction about the future and (b) that knowledge is emergent from and not reducible to the contexts in which it is produced and acquired. At the same time a social realist approach implies an explicitly historical approach to thinking about future trends. Without such a historical approach to knowledge, predictions are likely to be little more than extrapolations from the present as if the present itself had no history.

The dilemma posed by a recognition that knowledge is both ‘objective’ and historical is not new and takes us back at least to Hegel. It is a dilemma that lay at the heart of the sociology of knowledge that was established a century ago by Durkheim, Weber and Mannheim and has been continued more recently by Habermas, Randall Collins and others.

This review argues that it is important to distinguish what we refer to as ’social realist’ theories of knowledge from the two approaches that have set the terms for most recent debates about knowledge in the social sciences and in philosophy. The first of these approaches – symbolised perhaps by logical positivism and its empiricist parallels in the social sciences – can be described as invoking an a-social or ‘under-socialised’ epistemology that defines knowledge as sets of verifiable propositions and the methods for testing them. It treats their social production in particular historical contexts and within the boundaries of particular disciplines as implicit or taken for granted. The second approach which arose in direct response to the first – what we here refer to as ‘over-socialised’ – plays down the propositional character of knowledge and reduces questions of epistemology to “who knows?” and to the identification of knowers and their practices. In contrast, a social realist theory sees knowledge as involving sets of systematically related concepts and methods for their empirical exploration and the increasingly specialised and historically located ‘communities of enquirers’ with their distinctive commitment to the search for truth (Charles Pierce) and the social institutions in which they are located.

A social realist approach to knowledge and its educational implications

The emergent, non-reducible and socially differentiated character of knowledge has, we suggest, potentially profound educational implications. Examples of such implications, which deserve a paper in themselves, we can only list here, include the importance of:

• the distinction between curricula and pedagogy
• the ‘non-arbitrariness’ of boundaries between knowledge domains and between school and non-school knowledge
• the ‘objective’ basis of the authority and professionalism of teachers and other experts
• the inescapably hierarchical nature of pedagogy
• the conditions for, and definitions of, creativity and innovation
• the epistemological constraints on the scope of policies for widening participation and promoting social inclusion.
• the limitations of ‘generic skills’ as a model for ‘general education’
• The crucial importance of ’subject-specific content’ and the importance of distinguishing between ’subject content’ – as the relatively stable component of subject knowledge – and ‘information’ (such as what is available on the internet) which is never stable and always changing.

Running through all these themes is an emphasis on the irreducible differentiatedness of knowledge. Knowledge is structured, in part independently of how we acquire it, and knowledge fields differ in their internal coherence, their principles of cohesion, and their procedures for producing new knowledge. These internal differences are mirrored in the different forms of social relations between the actors that practice in the institutions of those fields: knowledge relations and social relations vary in tandem.

The distinction between the ’structural’ and ’social’ conservatism of education institutions referred to earlier is important in identifying the epistemological ‘constraints’ on curriculum design. Social realism views the former as a condition for progress and innovation and the acquisition of knowledge. However it is easily confused, especially by those seeing themselves as educational radicals, with the ‘social ‘conservatism of educational institutions which preserves the power and privileges of particular groups. Gramsci’s well known critique of the Gentile reforms of Italian education in the 1920s makes this distinction clearly. He defended the structural conservatism of the old curriculum against the ‘progressive’ changes proposed by Gentile which would exclude subordinate classes from access to knowledge via spurious forms of ‘vocationalism’ (Entwistle, 1979)

The second distinction that we want to make is between two meanings of the idea of education as ‘cultural transmission’. In everyday language, transmission refers to ‘passing on’- of a signal, a message or a disease. Education also involves a ‘passing on’, of knowledge, or more broadly, a culture. However, whereas the everyday meaning of the transmission of a signal is a one-way movement in which the receiver is the passive recipient, the cultural or knowledge transmission that is associated with education is a much more complex process that involves the active role of the ‘recipient’ in making the knowledge his/her own. The research literature mistakenly polarises these two meanings of transmission. An example is Anna Sfard’s well known and in many ways perceptive essay on theories of learning (1994). Her analysis leaves the polarity un-resolved because she treats learning as a generic process separable from ‘what is learned’. In contrast, we would argue that ‘learning’ always implies ‘learning something’; there is a parallel here with Alastair McIntyre’s(2002) argument that teaching as a generic concept is empty – we always ‘teach something’. It follows that learning necessarily involves cultural transmission or the transmission of knowledge. The transmission of culture, increasingly but not exclusively through educational institutions, from generation to generation, is what distinguishes human from animal ’societies’, and enables them to reproduce and progress. Cultural transmission is always reproductive and potentially progressive.

We argue that a social realist approach which gives priority to the knowledge that is (or is not) being transmitted, while at odds with much contemporary educational thinking which focuses largely on the learner and his/her experience, provides a more reliable basis for identifying underlying trends and imagining possible futures or, in Eric Olin Wright’s evocative phrase), ‘real utopias’.

By emphasising the social differentiation of both knowledge and institutions, social realist approaches challenge the widely shared assumption that boundaries are always barriers to be overcome rather than also conditions for innovation and the production and acquisition of new knowledge. As Bernstein (2000) argues, boundaries play an important role in creating learner identities and are thus the conditions for acquiring ‘powerful knowledge’ as well as barriers to learning. It follows that:

• the global future of education is not necessarily one of greater flexibility, portability, and transparency

· it will continue to be important to differentiate learning in schools, colleges and universities from learning in homes, workplaces and communities

• experience itself cannot be the sole or primary basis for the curriculum, and
• as learners cannot actually ‘construct’ their own learning (because, in Foucault’s pithy phrase, they can’t know what they don’t know) the role of teachers cannot be reduced to that of guide and facilitator rather than as a source of strategies and expertise.

Three scenarios for the future

The role of boundaries and the social differentiation of knowledge are the key principles which we draw from the sociology of knowledge in identifying possible future scenarios. Bearing these assumptions in mind the next section explores three possible futures scenarios for the next 20-30 years.

The Three Futures

Future 1 – Boundaries are given and fixed – the ‘Future’ is associated with a naturalised or ‘under-socialised’ concept of knowledge;

Future 2 - The end of boundaries – the ‘Future’ is associated with an ‘over-socialised’ concept of knowledge;

Future 3 – Boundary maintenance as prior to boundary crossing. It follows that it is the variable relation between the two that is the condition for the creation and acquisition of new knowledge.

Future 1 – Boundaries as given and fixed – a naturalised or under-socialised concept of knowledge

Every mass education system has its origins in an elite system; that is, a system for transmitting elite cultural knowledge to the ’select few’, sometimes the ‘elect’, who are most usually the offspring of the dominant classes. Such systems involve induction into the dominant knowledge traditions that keep them dominant. These traditions are overwhelmingly static, because their boundaries are fixed by social imperatives that override the conditions for knowledge and its innate dynamism, fecundity and openness to change. They are socially conservative in this dual static sense. By the end of the 19th century (at least in Europe), two democratising social forces bore down on this elite template. The first was the generalized demand from below for access to schooling – the demand for it to massify. The second was the explosion of knowledge about the social and natural worlds. This explosion of ‘powerful knowledge’ challenged the traditional idea of the curriculum as ‘knowledge of the powerful’, and gradually but steadily eclipsed the outmoded canons of the old elite system. The elite educational systems found in every country have had to deal with this dual challenge. Future 1 represents attempts to continue the elite system whilst opening it to access to the broader populace as marginally as possible.

At some point, expanding elite systems meet a number of in-built limits with which they have to contend. These limits include:

(i) the inability of labour markets to absorb any more workers trained in the same conservative mould.

(ii) the limits of a mass schooling system to induct all children with equal success into elite knowledge traditions that require the middle class home as a critical adjunct and condition for that success.

To widely varying degrees all mass schooling systems have failed to overcome these limits and failed to ‘compensate’ for the unequal distribution of conditions for success that they give rise to.

The default position to deal with this ongoing scandal has been one or other type of tracked or streamed system which preserves the elite track for the elite and a trickle of the mass. For the rest, one or more kinds of vocational track is provided, that in their worst forms represent ‘dumbed down’ versions of elite knowledge – mathematical literacy, communications or ‘popular science’ for example (Young, 2007; Wheelahan, 2007). This so-called ‘vocational’ curriculum becomes proceduralised, increasingly so with technology, (Lauder’s (2008) ‘digital Fordism’) – and access to ‘powerful knowledge’ is blocked for the masses. The result is a system overtly stratified along social class lines, with schooling as its principal instrument. Its destiny is to be perpetually seen as unfair, and hence resisted. In this sense, Future 1 is a recipe for social divisiveness, inequality, unhappiness, and conflict. The mechanism producing the injustice is perceived, by those who oppose it, to be the form of the elite curriculum – overt, strictly stipulated and paced. Its boundedness is seen to be the main problem, and the condition for greater social justice and less inequality, at least as far as the Future 2-ists are concerned, is the removal of these boundaries.

In the Future 1 scenario there are few new sources of innovation within the education system. Education and the wider context will continue to exist as two parallel worlds. We can however predict increased differentiation based on locality and the conservatism of traditional cultures, increasing divisions between North and South, and, for example, between different fundamentalist traditions. Treating boundaries as given, not social, becomes in this scenario a basis for maintaining and legitimising existing power relations and restricting sources of debate. There are of course no pure forms of Future 1 even in autocracies; however it would be a mistake to think that Future 1 has no future. Many elements of Future 1 linger in the English system, for example (Fitz, Davies and Evans, 2006) and it is probable that they will linger on well into the future. The worst case consequence of this scenario is expressed most stridently and evocatively in Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations (1993) and more colloquially in George Bush’s ‘War on Terror’.

Future 2 – the end of boundaries – an ‘over-socialised’ concept of knowledge

As we have already indicated, Future 2 is born in ‘progressive’ opposition to Future 1. It envisages a steady weakening of boundaries, a de-differentiation of knowledge and institutions, a blurring of labour market sectors, and a greater emphasis on generic outcomes rather than inputs as instruments of equalization and accountability. Elements of the ideals of Future 2 can be seen in the scenarios suggested by Mortimore and Kress which we referred to at the beginning of this review.

To the extent to which such learner-directed trends, coupled with the wider introduction of digital technologies, are endorsed, we shall see a de-professionalisation of teaching at all levels and the de-specialisation of research. It is a trend that will meet resistance from the forces underpinning Future 1, but it is a trend everywhere gaining ground in Europe and beyond.

The curricular ‘instrument of choice’ for those seeking to pursue boundary-weakening and de-differentiation is, using the term in its broadest sense, modularization. Among the expressions of this boundary weakening, various combinations of the following are likely to be found:

• the ‘integration’ of school subjects – as boundaries between subjects and between school knowledge and everyday knowledge are weakened
• the stipulation of curricular content in generic, usually skill or outcome terms – also as a consequence of boundaries between subjects and knowledge fields being weakened
• the promotion of formative over summative assessment - as boundaries between the achievement scores of different learners are weakened
• the introduction of unified national qualification frameworks – as the boundaries between different (especially academic and vocational) qualifications are weakened
• the promotion of facilitative rather than directive teaching – as the boundaries between experts and neophyte learners are weakened.

Our position, as we stated above, is that educational boundaries are social but also real; that is, they cannot be dissolved, at least in the short term, without serious consequences for most if not all learners. What such de-differentiating mechanisms are most likely to achieve is not to dissolve the boundaries, but to render them invisible – an invisibility that is exaggerated for the more disadvantaged. That is to say, against their best intents, the main effects of Future 2-ists - those endorsing progressive pedagogy and its variants – is to render the contours of knowledge and learning invisible to the very learners that the pedagogy was designed to favour – namely the learners, invariably but not always those from low income homes, who fall behind their peers. Where Future 1 produces stratification and resistance, Future 2 also produces stratification; however, this time it is of a covert kind, because the overt targets associated with Future 1 are now submerged, and the unfortunate learners who stumble – for stumble they do – cannot see what it is, this time, that causes them to stumble. This too causes disaffection, a disaffection that, together with more specifically material factors, lies at the root of much of the youth apathy described so well by Gunther Kress, as well as its more destructive cultural forms, such as self and other-directed violence. In other words, whereas the overt stratification of Future 1 leads, at least optimally, to opposition and the ‘voice’ of the excluded, the covert stratification of Future 2 leads increasingly to a variety of individualized ‘exit’ strategies that feed a disintegrating public culture. The proponents of Future 2 find themselves unwittingly becoming the legitimisers of this trend in their denial of the special worth of expert knowledge, in their at least implied validation of all cultural forms as equal , and in their uncritical celebration of experiential forms of knowing.

The ‘end of boundaries’ scenario of Future 2 is unlikely to lead to access to specialist knowledge disappearing in the elite and private sectors and institutions. What is more likely is that that public education will replace unequal access to knowledge by increasing access to qualifications leading to credential inflation as qualifications are competed for but have less and less worth – either as use value or exchange value.

A critical exploration of the role of boundaries in the production and acquisition of new knowledge enables us to argue that, despite clear political differences between neo-liberals, who are obsessed with promoting markets and individual choice at any price, and the radical social constructivists, who want to free learners from what they see as the authoritarianism of expertise, they share an underlying epistemological similarity. Both end up with an instrumental view of knowledge with its inevitable relativist consequences. Future 1 and Future 2 are in this sense epistemological mirror twins: they may differ in their proclaimed rhetoric, their means and desired goals, but their end result is, uncannily, the same.

Future 3- Boundary maintaining and boundary crossing as conditions for the creation and acquisition of new knowledge in the emerging global context

Future 3 arises out of the critique and analysis we have made of Futures 1 and 2. It will in a sense be a demonstration of what a social realist theory of knowledge can offer and why it is needed if our alternatives for the future are to have any degree of reliability. Future 3 is based on the assumption that there are specific kinds of social conditions under which powerful knowledge is acquired and produced. These conditions are not given; they are historical but also objective. Whereas their historicity is denied in Future 1- boundaries are given and taken for granted, the historicity and objectivity that is embodied in the critical role of specialist communities is denied in Future 2. At best Future 2 offers an increasingly boundary-less and fragmented global de-differentiation, together with a naïve optimism about the potential of new ‘bottom up’ social movements and epistemologies located in a metaphorical ‘South’(eg Hardt and Negri (2000), de Sousa Santos). In contrast Future 3 emphasises the continuing role of boundaries, not as given entities, whether in the brain (neuro-science), in the mind (a-historical rationalism) or in the world of human practice (pragmatism and dialectical materialism), but in defining domain-specific but increasingly global specialist communities as a basis both for the acquisition and production of new knowledge and human progress more generally. The contemporary British philosopher Christopher Norris expresses this scenario, following Habermas, as the ‘unfinished project of modernity’. We find it, albeit expressed in different ways, in the theories of both Max Weber and Emil Durkheim writing over a century ago.

The last section of this review explores a number of the features of Future 3, their implications and how they may change. We shall consider, although our list makes no claim to be comprehensive, the following:

• Boundaries and their types – in relation to both knowledge and institutions and their interdependence – with particular reference the case of disciplines and their future
• Knowledge as real (powerful knowledge) and the social as real (knowledge of the powerful) and how the two ideas might be held together
• Preferred curriculum and pedagogic models
• Implications for educational inequalities

Boundaries and their types – the future of disciplines

The most critical point about knowledge in the next fifty years is to understand why some forms of knowledge tend towards specialization and others towards variation or diversification. These different tendencies in the development of knowledge have critical implications for the curriculum and education more generally. The first tendency poses questions about sequence, pace, and hierarchical organization, whereas the latter poses questions predominantly of choice, of what to include in the curriculum and, at its extremes, of the absence of any objective criteria at all. The intimate link between knowledge form and curriculum organization is what a social realist approach to the curriculum seeks to elucidate.

It has become fashionable to proclaim the end of disciplinarity (Gibbons et al, 1994; Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons, 2001) , but disciplines seem almost obstinately to linger on. They do, it is true, morph and adapt, as do all robust social forms, but reports of their end are much exaggerated. This does not mean that new disciplinary formations do not periodically appear. They do. However new formations invariably arise from existing disciplines, first in the form of ‘regions’ (Bernstein, 2000) or groupings of existing disciplines around new problems; only later do they form into discrete identifiable formations, with their own stable communities. The reason for this is that, as we said earlier, knowledge boundaries are not arbitrary, and the internal forms they foster and the social relations that sustain them shake down over time into stable socio-epistemic forms. These forms are determined by the strength of boundary appropriate to each form and consequently by how each form of knowledge develops or grows.

Disciplines differ, first, by their form of conceptual advance, and secondly, by their form of objectivity. As to the first: some disciplines tend towards robust, conceptually justifiable advances. Their knowledge structure is determined by their ever-advancing conceptual spine which tends towards unity (which does not mean that there is only one conceptual spine in the discipline). The curriculum implications of this type of conceptual advance is that these disciplines in their mature form develop long ‘hierarchies of abstraction’ which are best learnt in sequence under the guidance of specialists (Mathematics and Science are the most obvious examples). We may say that these disciplines are, in a specific sense, concept-rich. It is not that they necessarily involve large numbers of concepts (the number of concepts does not distinguish them from a wide range of disciplines). It is that that they have long sequences of hierarchically-related concepts. Getting stuck at any rung of the hierarchy usually means that conceptual learning stops. Other disciplines tend towards advance through variation or diversification of concepts; this, however, is less about concepts than it is about different contents or content-clusters, although there is usually a macro-conceptual organizing principle (the ‘past’ (or more abstractly time) for History and ’space’ for Geography, for example) involved. Still others develop practically, by developing new skills and ways of doing things. Practical development may refer to new practices within traditional manual crafts like cabinet making or to new forms of conceptual practice such as software development or website design. Concepts, content, and skills are embedded in each discipline, but their relative salience is what differentiates them .

All disciplines, in order to be disciplines, have objects of study, and in order to be robust and stable, display objectivity – that is to say, they possess legitimate, shared and stable reliable means for generating truth (Young and Muller, 2007). Truth is, by this account, a stable partnership between the objects of study and an informed community of practitioners. Disciplines, however, display differing albeit equivalent kinds of objectivity, depending on whether their object is natural or social. The more social the object, the greater is the limit on the object being subsumed by the concepts of the discipline. Each form of objectivity nevertheless has to meet the same criteria of analytical adequacy – the simplest, maximum degree of subsumption by the disciplinary concept without distortion of the particular object.

The reason for rescuing a strong notion of objectivity from the Future 2-ists is so as to reinstate a strong and trustworthy notion of expertise (Collins and Evans, 2007). The erosion of expertise and the loss of trust in specialist knowledge has been an inadvertent consequence of the relativism of boundary-less thinking (Muller, 2000). Trust in strong knowledge and in the judgements of specialist knowers has been hollowed-out by commonsense scepticism. Amongst adults in Europe at least this has led to a peculiar form of self-deception – we deride specialised knowledge and knowers even as our lives are ever more dependent upon them. For example, we live in ever-more medicalised worlds even as medical litigation rates grow exponentially.

The youth of our society have not yet evolved the protective strategies of self-deception; many inherit a social derision towards strong knowledge from their parents and the media; as a consequence they fail at school for lack of trying hard enough to master something they perceive as meriting such widespread diminishment (Menand, 1995). Even as specialist knowledge grows apace at the cutting edge borders, the English education system may finally be failing to produce enough highly specialised practitioners of the future because the young have inherited the popular wisdom that the prize is not worth the effort. This underwrites, too, the swing to instrumentalism. If knowledge is not valued in its own right, then its social worth can only be measured by its usefulness. It is sobering to reflect that this corrosive popular wisdom is wholly absent in the emerging economies of South Korea, China and India. Silicon Valley in California could not have happened without a majority of engineers recruited from the East. Another such leap forward will almost certainly emerge in the East rather than the West if Future 2 prevails. Thus decisions about the ‘curriculum of the future’ will have lasting long term effects.

Preferred forms of curriculum and pedagogy

To say that we live in a knowledge economy has two principal implications for schooling: the first is that the economy and the society that supports it places a premium on advances in knowledge, though paradoxically not necessarily on its reproduction, as we have shown above. This means that in a time of accelerated knowledge development, specialization and variation (or diversification) become the dominant social codes, and the curriculum comes under increasingly frequent pressure to constantly adapt. This is less apparent in the university curriculum because their communities of practitioners live close to the nexuses of advances in knowledge – indeed, they are driving them. What it does mean, and where this becomes visible, is that this marks a new distinction between those higher institutions that are driving advances in knowledge and those that are not. This hierarchy is currently very crudely marked by global rankings, and far more sophisticated examples are certain to be developed in due course. There is no doubt that the economies and societies of the future will continue to require robust signalling mechanisms for ranking the productivity of knowledge producers. The second implication is that, even in those disciplines where concepts have traditionally taken a back seat – like History for example – advances will increasingly be conceptually driven. This does not mean that new historiographical approaches will be plucked from the air, rather that new digital technologies will allow forms of investigation that produce facts not previously able to be brought to light and require new conceptual advances. The MRI scans that are driving new advances in neurology are an example. There are parallels in demography, the Large Hadron Collider in physics and in nano-technology across a range of biological sciences.

These developments have some specific implications for the curriculum and for pedagogy. The elite curriculum, developed at a time when knowledge changed very slowly, was content-driven, and in its worst pedagogical form, was memorization and rote-learning driven. Consequently, the main alternative to the elite curriculum, which finds its most sophisticated expression in Future 2 thinking, has taken a stance against ‘mere’ content and ‘mere’ rote – and in its radical forms against all stipulation of content and all forms of rote learning or memorisation. This opposition finds expression in the emergent Future 2 consensus around generic skills and outcomes based curricula (Mangez, 2008; Lundahl et al., 2008). In other words, in articulating an alternative to the rigidities of Future 1, Future 2 has swung from content-based to skills-based priorities. In both of these formats, especially in the latter, concepts get short shrift. This is because conceptual progression can only be signalled or stipulated in conceptual not skill-based terms. Because concept-based stipulations necessarily involve content (what is being conceptualized), this looks, at least to Future 2 sensibilities, far too like the old content-based priorities of Future 1. The result is that even in concept-rich subjects like science, the curriculum becomes under-stipulated in a Future 2 world as is indicated by the latest curriculum proposals for school science from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (Perks, 2007).

These tendencies are not insurmountable obstacles for well resourced schools able to recruit teachers with strong subject qualifications, who can fill in the gaps. It is, however, inevitably a problem for schools servicing poor communities that cannot attract such teachers. What happens in such schools is that teachers lack clear markers in the curriculum and fall behind without knowing it, or miss out conceptual steps that may be vital later on (Reeves and Muller, 2005; Smith, Smith and Bryk, 1998). At the same time, students fall behind until a conceptual terminus is reached and they lack the resources or motivation to progress. This tendency is exacerbated by the favoured non-directive (facilitative) pedagogy of Future 2 that eschews strong signals from the teachers, especially regarding evaluation and assessment. Contemporary research shows unequivocally that in the concept-rich subjects, strong signalling in assessment is critical for improving the performance of pupils from both poor as well as well off homes (Morais, Neves and Pires, 2004; Hoadley, 2007; Bourne, 2004; Muller and Gamble [forthcoming]).

Implications for educational inequalities

Future 3 argues for the importance of recognizing the ‘differentiatedness’ of knowledge. Two implications follow. First, curricular formats that are too ideologically fixed on only content (Future 1) or skills (Future 2), gives some subjects short shrift, as well as having implications for the distribution of educational opportunities and achievement. Second, recognizing the differentiation of knowledge makes explicit that concepts, skills and content are all important and must be stipulated in the curriculum. Failure to do so means a slowing down of any progress that has so far been made towards equalizing epistemological access. This has implications for both social justice and the viability of a knowledge-based economy in the future.

Concluding Note

We have framed our predictions for the future of education in terms of three scenarios and on the basis of a social realist theory of knowledge. We have indicated our preference for the Future 3 scenario on both social justice and epistemological grounds and pointed to the negative outcomes that are likely to follow from Future 1 and Future 2. As we have implied, these Futures are ideal types rather than predictive descriptions and must be judged as Max Weber pointed out long ago, in terms of how useful they are in identifying tendencies and possible unintended consequences of current policies.

On the other hand we have said little about which Future is most likely to dominate in the next 30 years. This is both a political and an educational or cultural question. It is political because it relates to questions of power and the reality that the curriculum inevitably expresses ‘knowledge of the powerful’. Insofar as the neo-liberal combination of markets and accountability and institutional ranking continue to dominate educational policy, Future 2 is likely to dominate. Neo- liberalism, however, is under challenge, at least in the field of economics and financial management. It is difficult to predict the impact of such changes on educational policy. One possibility is that a greater scepticism about the growth possibilities of service occupations may led to a resurgence of manufacturing and a greater valuing of science-based knowledge.

Predicting likely futures is also a cultural question because, for better or worse, epistemological constraints will shape what curriculum policy can do, whoever has power and whatever the economic constraints. In a sense we might re-phrase Marx’s famous but ambiguous aphorism about ‘men making history …” in recognizing that epistemological constraints, like historical circumstances for Marx, are not “of our own choosing”. This review (and the research tradition that it is part of) is an attempt to re-assert the long term educational importance of these constraints. Our purpose is not to defend a conservative position or to look back to a ‘golden past’; far from it. It is to challenge the view that access to powerful knowledge is a right for all not just the few (a view that we share), with a theory of ‘powerful knowledge’ and how it is acquired and the crucial role of formal education in that process. Not surprisingly, this leads us, at least in the short term, to a pessimistic view about the future. The short term possibilities of Future 2 present a seductive scenario for governments and international organizations as well as appearing to offer short cuts to some learners – perhaps real learning is easy and fun and more like a game. This, we are convinced is a false dawn and likely to punish the disadvantaged most. There is no sign of it catching on in our elite schools – quite the opposite.

Futurology is, in its nature, a highly inexact science, because we never have all the facts at hand. That being said, two things do not necessarily follow: because we do not have all the facts at our disposal does not mean the trends we discern are not probable; more pertinently, because the scenarios we sketch and their projected consequences have a certain apocalyptic ring to them does not mean they are necessarily exaggerated or wrong. As the novelist Philip Roth (1984) once said, ‘Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry’. That prophetic sentries are still welcome is certainly an encouraging sign.

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An example is the influential Portuguese sociologist Bouoventura de Sousa Santos in his “epistemology of absent knowledges’ which he claims t goes beyond what he sees as the ‘blindness’ of western science. Here is how he refers to it in a paper in the European Journal of Social Theory:

“the epistemology of absent knowledges starts from the premise that social practices are knowledge practices…(and that) non-science-based practices, rather than being ignorant practices, are practices of alternative rival knowledges. There is no apriori reason to favour one form of knowledge against another. “(de Sousa Santos 2001)

This does not deny, of course, that in a deep sense, even the concepts of the natural sciences are social.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Schools are a space where identity is solidified and redefined. Students with marginalised identities, such as sexual and gender-variant ones, find schools to be difficult spaces to express their identity. Reneé DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson (2006), researchers from the University of Sunderland, have challenged the traditional focus of schooling using what Judith Butler (1999) refers to as the “heterosexual matrix. This matrix, according to DePalma and Atkinson citing Norm Fairclough (1988) and James Gee (1996), ensures that “normalizing discourses maintain and support heteronormativity in all social contexts” (p335). Simply, heteronormativity assumes heterosexuality and furthers the squelching of non-heterosexual discourse. Schools reassert heteronormativity. Discussions in schools attempting to breach the “heterosexual matrix” are reined in as inappropriate (Pascoe, 2006), deemed too sexual, silenced through political correctness or verbal abuse (Pascoe, 2006), possibly “labeled as evil” (Ricks, 2005) and accused of promoting a “gay agenda” (DePalma, 2006). Initial exploratory research shows that this trend appears to be international in scope (Ferfolja, 2008; Morris, 2002; Reimers, 2007; Rothing, 2008; Sears, 2005) though challenges exist to the universality of the construct’s application (Boellstorff, 1999; King, 1993). Schools remain important battlegrounds for social change (Miceli, 2005), but heteronormativity shapes the direction of that change.

Since students are not taught in schools to understand deeply their own and their peers’ sexualities, learning about sexuality becomes largely the terrain of mass media. With the advent of the mass media as a government apparatus affecting perceptions on the local, national, and international levels (Iyengar, 1997; Edwards, 2001), social science research – centered on the effects of the media in political and social struggles – has shifted research paradigms from solely content analysis of the media to “how media news coverage affected an issue’s salience on the agenda” (p226-230) (Rodgers, 1997). In this theoretical context, the heteronormative discursive environment of schools relegates rights for, and understanding of, non-heterosexual persons to relative unimportance.

But the media of today is not the media of the past, so it requires diverse approaches to understanding it. Traditional media outlets such as film, television, and print media are being supplemented with – not totally supplanted by – cybermedia sources: social networking sites, YouTube, video games and even online virtual worlds. Students can be at school during the day and submerged in a virtual world at night (Buckingham, 2008). What are the implications of this media shift on educating all students about sexuality in the 21st century? How does heteronormativity function and affect perception in these new spaces?

In this critical review of current literature on sexuality, education, and technology, I outline how current media shape youth’s perceptions of sexuality. To accomplish this, first I suggest we need to learn from mistaken assumptions that traditional media no longer matter. Then I analyze structures of social networking and virtual worlds while acknowledge challenges to and advances of heteronormativity. In conclusion, learning from the prior discussions of media, I suggest formalising a queering of pedagogy and teacher’s roles more generally to help resist heteronormativity in schools. Throughout and in my conclusion, I argue that the dynamics of an ever-shifting media environment creates a critical space for a virtual disruption of heteronormativity: where heteronormative frameworks are not taken for granted and the lessons of virtual lives are brought to bear on real life. The virtual disruption of heteronormativity, in particular through new media, challenges assumptions about the possibilities of education. But as this disruption is only virtual, researchers, educators and activists need to promote explicit connections between worlds – instead of treating the “virtual” and the “real” as entirely separate.

When writing about sexuality, word choice affects the way any text is received. Writing becomes unavoidably more difficult when choosing between words “gay” or “queer,” both of which hold very different histories and connotations in different locales. I choose to use the word “queer,” as an American who identifies as such and who has been influenced by “queer” theory, though I realise that using “queer” tends to be viewed as academic, subversive and to some, derogatory. On occasion I use “gay” to connote a broader social movement that may or may not be radical or centered on subversion or resistance. I unpack “queer” identities whenever possible by being explicit about whom I reference, navigating between identities and designations when appropriate and available in the literature.

he persisting effects of traditional media

Traditional media has been simultaneously complicit in perpetuating stereotypes of queer individuals, and downplaying the sex part of sexuality to appeal to, and to not upset, mainstream viewers. This denies audiences the opportunity to inspect heteronormative assumptions. A recent case from California – the outcome of which remains undetermined – reveals this dynamic.

Supporters of Proposition 8 – which seeks to define marriage as being between a man and a woman – aired television advertisements in California where “first graders were taken to a lesbian wedding as a teachable moment.” Another advertisement warned, “Some of the most profound effects (of not passing Proposition 8) are for children.” The speaker in the advertisement then delineates how gay marriage will be taught in public schools (Yes on 8, 2008). In this case, the assumption that teaching about sexuality is equivalent to teaching children about sex is used as leverage to organise supporters against civil rights for queer individuals and families. Yes on 8 mobilised a reactionary citizenry to rescind rights granted to same-sex couples by invoking the spectre of teaching about queer lives in schools – resulting in the proposition passing. Traditional media, in this case, did not encourage people to pull away from society and become cloistered denizens of their living room: living virtual lives spent in front of the television (Austin, 1995). Media presence in people’s lives seems to become more and more ingrained, habitual, and ubiquitous, but withdrawal from civic life is most certainly not a by-product of this transaction.

Traditional media has the potential for challenging assumptions about sexuality. More recent films which do appeal to, at least, secondary school students, include the genre of secondary school and college, comedy films (including Old School (2003), American Pie (1999)). In these films there are diverse constructions of masculinity, usually “jocks” and “nerds”; “frats” and “pledges” that inevitably resort to stereotyping sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity, immigrants, ability levels and just about any combination of the above. The static portrayal of the characters is, at times, strangely queer because of the need for unique and awkward situations that are humorous. Such films as Legally Blonde (2001), Sorority Boys (2002), American Wedding (2003) and The House Bunny (2008) present audiences with opportunities to observe the effects of assuming too much about gender or sexuality.

For example, in American Wedding (2003), Stifler, the “jock” prototype known for getting girls, enters a gay bar where, due to an inability to realise where he is, he entangles himself in a dance-off with a tall, hairy club-goer named Bear. He enters an environment most men would find threatening, yet when he realises he is in a queer space, his heterosexual claim to masculinity allows him to feel comfortable. Stifler and Bear dance off while a montage of music from the 1980’s plays including “I’m Your Venus” by Bananarama and “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics. Stifler engages Bear by dancing around him, staring at him, and verbally challenging him. He rolls under Bear’s legs thrusting his pelvis in Bear’s direction, who then returns thrusts his direction. They do not touch but make their desires for each other clear. After the dance competition is completed with no clear winner, Stifler collapses in Bear’s arms. He regains his senses and leaves the bar. Bear comes out and mentions “he manages some girls” who may be useful for the boy’s bachelor party – relying on his ability to manage women’s bodies to gain acceptance among the presumed heterosexual protagonists. Bear hands Stifler his business card and Stifler remarks, “Told you that guy wanted to fuck me.”

As the other boys brush him off, the audience lands firmly back in heteronormative discourse after briefly journeying through an amazingly queer scene. Stifler attempts to justify his actions by saying that the other queer man wanted to fuck him presumably because he is so attractive; but as his vanity is proven rhetorically by the other man wanting to fuck him, there is something still queer about his position. Bear’s masculinity, assured through his “management of girls” and his imposing figure, does not challenge Stifler who relegates his experiences to manly competition – and thus not technically engaging in queering himself. He does not claim his enacted desire for Bear, yet the moments where the two danced so intently together allow for a virtual disruption in heteronormativity.

The effects of the discourses in these films on heteronormative assumptions, including their overlap with adolescent fag discourse in America (Pascoe, 2006), have yet to be examined in the research on media studies, likely because they are seen as low-brow schlock, primarily for adolescents, or simply not serious film. Yet as Pascoe argues, American adolescent male masculinity constructs itself in relation to, not based solely on, these primary sources of information on sexuality. Masculinity in these films often require the usual displays of queerness and sexism to reify itself, but the continued shift in this genre to discuss and show queerness more openly will likely impact understanding of queerness by future generations. Further challenges to sexism as an essential element of masculinity, and a deep understanding of gender identity in general, are also needed within these influential genres.

In the past, and particularly within the British context, images from television and the movies have unified queer movements to fight for positive representations (Weeks, 2003). Television has definitely had wider impact than film for youth, however. In a study conducted in 1994, two groups of participants were assessed on measures of homophobia and empathy both pre- and post-intervention. The experimental group which received lectures on homosexuality, homophobia and the role of the media in perpetuating this, exhibited lower levels of homophobia and higher levels of empathy than their control group peers (Walter, 1994). Converging evidence comes from a pilot study of heterosexual television viewers, in which participants were asked to recall which homosexual characters they remembered best (Bonds-Raacke, 2007). Their impressions of these individuals were then evaluated to determine if the participants had an overall positive impression. While it is difficult to separate the fact that some participants only remembered positive or negative portrayals, positive role models in traditional media appear to foster positive feelings toward homosexuality, and prime social attitudes for future relationships (Bonds-Raacke, 2007).

These last two cases appear to rest on a theory that positive gay or lesbian role models in the media provide a way to promote the normalcy and acceptability of homosexuality, which may be true. However, television programmes have also helped normalise and fictionalise high-class gay and lesbian cultures. The impact of which has effectively solidified and sold heteronormative and classist visions of queer sexuality as simultaneously hypersexual and asexual, as fashion-obsessed, overtly body-conscious, young, hairless, urban and largely Caucasian. This begs a comparison with images from the American adult gay press – The Advocate, Genre, Instinct, and Out – which also mirror this trend (Saucier, 2008). The impact on this for queer youth and thus for their aware heterosexual peers is that many youth have to either accept or reject these images when speaking about a community of which they may or may not claim to be a member.

Images from traditional media have defined what it means to be queer and have shaped an international culture where one can be “globally gay”: moving from one country to the next, and never having to leave a gay ghetto. The concept of being “globally gay” must be taken along with a push that traditional Western terms to define sexuality in non-western contexts upsets the universal assumptions of labels like heterosexual, lesbian, or bisexual which seem to not apply with the same rigidity everywhere (Boellstorff, 1999; King, 1993).

As we have discussed, traditional media may be shifting in response to the increased use of the internet by youth, but since the emergence of a trend toward moderating the influence of television and film on perception, research is in danger of forgetting the persisting effects of traditional media – both positive and negative. Thus teaching media awareness in schools requires approaches to both types of media and an ability to distinguish between opportunities for learning about heteronormative assumptions and the momentary disruptions of it.

New media’s challenge

The dissipated interest in television and film and the focus on the impact of the internet has had a profound impact on education today. Marginalised identities have found on the internet “an opportunity to share in the benefits of group membership” (McKenna, 1998), and “to express their true-self qualities” to someone else (Bargh, 2002). With shifts in technology have come shifts in the ways we conceptualise and talk about sexuality (Cooper, 2000; Ross, 2005). How will media representation and personalisation shape the future? If “cybersexuality is a space between action and fantasy” (Ross, 2005), what does it offer? In addition, how have the creation of avatars and virtual lives also directly influenced sexual expression in offline lives? In the following section, I attempt to address these questions and more by reviewing two common forms of new media and their potential for producing virtual disruptions of heteronormativity.

Social networking sites

Social networks in and of themselves do not necessarily challenge heteronormative assumptions. In order to understand the potential of virtual disruptions of heteronormativity in this area of new media studies, a few cases must be presented. By discussing the potentials of MySpace and networked activism, I describe how social networks can shape and inform sexual identity through meaningful discussion and the creation of viable non-heteronormative spaces.

When filling out the details of a MySpace or Facebook profile sexual orientation as a descriptor is presented differently. MySpace’s choices include “Bi,” “Gay/Lesbian,” “Straight,” “Not Sure,” and “No Answer.” Facebook asks applicants to check if they are interested in “Men” and/or “Women,” avoiding a direct statement of one’s sexual orientation. So personal details on MySpace require a user to select a non-dichotomous answer or potentially no answer, and Facebook does not explicitly ask for an answer but does not necessarily assume heterosexuality or homosexuality. So for a brief moment during the “profile creation” phase where one is “initiated” (boyd, 2008), social network users step outside of heteronormative assumptions and are allowed to identify or not identify as they wish. Where else would students have the opportunity to identify as they choose?

A critical essay by danah boyd (2008) describes a youth culture where “If you are not on MySpace, you don’t exist.” The implications I introduce to this statement are that all youth participating in social networking are asked questions about their sexual interests explicitly. She then defines the social networking environment through her construction of networked publics, participation, initiation, and identity performance. Of most interest here is her description of how MySpace allows for a fluidity of identity negotiated by one’s perceived audience yet monitored by an unseen audience. She describes a cautionary tale where a black applicant to college who wrote about struggling with gangs in his neighborhood in his admissions essay was nearly declined because the admissions officer reviewing his case discovered allusions to gang membership on his MySpace page.

So, extrapolating back to the example of sexual orientation given above, how revealing one’s sexuality online could be unevenly mapped back into reality. MySpace members could be playing with the possibility of being queer online, but hiding their sexual orientation or gender identity to various offline acquaintances. boyd’s examples reveal how future generations, while given the opportunity to disrupt heteronormativity, are faced by heteronormative pressures in their lived experiences, thus potentially censoring or obfuscating their online lives.

Net activism

Net activism has experienced resurgence, civic engagement is flourishing online in gaming, blogging, and petitioning, as well as personal sites not sponsored by non-governmental agencies (Bennett, 2008). Though the results of this shift are difficult to assess, Peter Dahlgren (2007) asserts, that knowledge and skills are being spread through activist networks and becoming institutionalised. As Dahlgren rightfully reminds his readership, the internet is not only an opportunity for progressive social causes to network, but fascist, racist, and undemocratic ideals survive there as well.

Bharat Mehra (2006) describes how cyberculture studies and action research can combine to document the empowerment of marginalised communities online. Through his examples, he traces how he largely assists racialised communities of difference, but the leap to queer and/or youth cultures seems reasonable. Mehra as a researcher and educator played the role of an active participant in constructing meaning for the communities in which he worked. His role as an advocate was magnified through his use of the internet as a means of communication. Similar stories appear to be played out across international contexts (for example, Foran, 2003; Terranova, 2001).

The role of the advocate is not always so straightforward, however. Sometimes advocates, instead of using their voices as leverage to benefit marginalised communities, can provide opportunities for these communities to advocate for themselves (Goldman et al, 2008). Through case studies of how digital media allowed youth to participate in school boards and in their larger community, Goldman et al showed how the role of the advocate becomes more nuanced, possibly as facilitator rather than arbiter of justice and possibility. They show how ” the mix of social, cultural, and digital technologies, brought youth to new levels of participation – levels that surprise, inspire, and even threaten the adults who support their democratic engagement” (p203).

Net activism also exists in queer youth networks that inhabit spaces on the web where sexuality as commonly presented is redefined and challenged based on gender, race, ability, and nation. Digital queer youth discuss transgendered and bisexual identities more willingly; communicate safer sex practices “candidly”, and examine the sociopolitical nature of queerness thoroughly and provocatively (Alexander, 2006; Driver, 2008). Part of the energy that is channelled into reproducing networks of like-minded individuals online, likely arises from commercial descriptions of queerness that do not resonate with youth. Not all digital queer youth make it to these discussions, however, and most end up at more commercial websites such as PlanetOut.com or Gay.com (Alexander, 2006).

Networking based on sexual identity also has its drawbacks. Juana Rodriguez in Queer Latinidad (2003) describes an experience of getting rejected from a lesbian chat room because she could not prove that she was a lesbian; in fact her responses to the three questions asked by the members of the chat community caused them to label her a man and ban her. This is an example of how identity is negotiated in a space where anyone could be anything; proving one’s own identity can be difficult for the uninitiated or simply left out. Youth who may not know the necessary codes of behaviour or have the same knowledge base could easily fall into this category. Further, because of the persistence of speech acts online, a discussion about sexuality online could lead to offline consequences days, months, or years later (boyd, 2008).

Online simulation and gaming

The literature on video gaming and learning has grown recently (Gee, 2008) but has not directly assessed its impact on marginalised sexual identities. Even the creation of avatars, or online selves, and its potential for learning has been discussed (Gee, 2007). Video gaming – a transmedial phenomenon – can be defined as where the online world of gaming blends with the culture of reading strategy guides, buying tee-shirts, and playing board or card games related to the video game in real life (Taylor, 2006) How do we interpret and understand the impact of virtual lives, the creation of avatars, and virtual worlds on youth and their perceptions of sexuality given this complexity? I defer to an online resident to describe his experience with avatars and sexuality:

“Avatars are an amazing way of controlling the intensity of intimacy. This is why some people prefer Second Life and systems like it to the real world. Their intimacy and interaction can be more easily controlled and they feel more protected… But in fact we are more exposed precisely because we feel this way” (Meadows, 2008, p36).

Meadows continues to describe a world with “no narrative” that seems unbounded by anything but the imagination, yet concedes that some terrifying elements are present in the virtual world of Second Life. One of his first experiences online is with a slave trader who enslaves women and keeps them as pets; he stumbles into a forest where mice with oversized erections discuss contemporary issues; and he describes the inescapable influence of pornography. While different worlds exist for young and adult gamers, the blending of these cultures seems unavoidable.

The online world described by Meadows is imminently more sexual than traditional media outlets and more diverse in its expressions of queerness. The potential for users to construct new identities and even multiple or conflicting identities online needs to be examined in relationship to adolescent identity formation and sexuality. Through the experiences of your avatar, a gamer can play “gay” and experiment with their sexuality. Further, heterosexual-identified gamers are forced to confront queer identities online regardless of their desire to avoid them. The creation and design of avatars may be a way to escape or resist heteronormative assumptions as well.

A case available for examination within the public sphere, where the meeting of online and offline queer identities is challenged, involves an online massive multi-player role playing game (MMORPG) known as World of Warcraft (WOW): a game where at times, more than 8 million players take on a persona from one of ten different races and populate a pre-designed world. In an effort to escape the heteronormative assumptions and homophobic bullying present online, Sarah Andrews, a gamer who actively recruited members for her guild – a group or team that comes together to achieve game objectives – stated that her group was not “GLBT only” but “GLBT friendly.” Blizzard Entertainment, the owners of World of Warcraft, argued that Andrews’ recruitment inside the game was a violation of sexual harassment policies and policies protecting against sexual orientation discrimination. Blizzard threatened to ban her and her guild, dismantling the group before it began in an effort to protect online gamers, many of whom are adolescents, from harassment (Terdiman 2006). The heteronormative matrix became a filter through which preventing discrimination resulted in silencing the discourse on sexuality. Andrews was later allowed to reinstate her guild. If this action had occurred in an environment where there was little or no homophobia, heterosexism, sexism, racism, etc., then Blizzard Entertainment might have had an argument, however, a quick venture into this world proves otherwise. So in an alternate world to Second Life populated by many youth, any discussion of sexuality outside of the bounds of traditional heteronormative assumptions is eschewed, and sexually diverse users are acceptable if they silence themselves.

Video gaming and the roles of avatars in the virtual world provide the best and most anonymous space discussed heretofore for creating virtual disruptions in heteronormativity. In the case of Second Life and potentially World of Warcraft, that virtual disruption could exist everytime a gamer logged in – transforming the virtual to the permanent. This assumption, however, is contingent on the whims of a shifting corporate politics as evidenced above.

Reasserting heteronormativity through new media

Before discussing the implications of virtual disruptions of heteronormativity by media on education, there are a number of phenomena that need to be explored more fully that do the reverse. Through cyber-bullying and concerns about cyber-”safety,” heteronormativity gains new traction potentially in spaces where individuals were allowed to define the norms of their own discursive environments. Any discussion of the potential of unsettling heteronormativity needs to address these two trends that seek to resettle it.

Cyberbullying

Lisa-Jane McGerty (2000) (borrowing from Kendall 1999) acknowledges a missing element in the research literature focusing on use of the internet, simply that one does not live their life either only online or in reality. So discussing internet use without being situated in an everyday environment is inauthentic. Youth experiences on the internet appear to at least somewhat mirror those in real life. One of the difficulties of understanding the impact of cyberspace on queer perceptions is that the lives of youth are increasingly lived online, and the limits of what they are exposed to are unknown. The U.S. Census bureau estimates that more than 57% of children and youth have access to the internet at home and more than 21% indicate going online to do school reports and assignments (2001). This has resulted in an extension of school grounds and thus the heteronormative discourses surrounding it. In a survey (n=1400) conducted on bullying experiences in cyberspace (cyberbullying), researchers identified that:

“Within the past year, 72% of respondents reported at least 1 online incident of bullying, 85% of whom also experienced bullying in school. The most frequent forms of online and in-school bullying involved name-calling or insults… When controlling for Internet use, repeated school-based bullying experiences increased the likelihood of repeated cyberbullying more than the use of any particular electronic communication tool. About two thirds of cyberbullying victims reported knowing their perpetrators, and half of them knew the bully from school. Both in-school and online bullying experiences were independently associated with increased social anxiety. Ninety percent of the sample reported they do not tell an adult about cyberbullying…” (Juvanen 2008)

These powerful findings appear to hold traction, and perhaps even reveal a more dramatic trend, when compared to similar findings by other researchers in more traditional school environments (McNamee, 2008; Warwick, 2006; Young 2004). So perhaps, it is easier to bully and thus more haunting to have unprecedented access to schoolmates online. Homophobic bullying has long been established as a norm, a rite of passage for young men, and even tacitly acceptable in most school systems. Some scholars argue that this is part of what distinguishes masculinity in adolescence (Pascoe 2006). Cyber-bullying appears to be an extension of the heterosexual matrix into the private online lives of youth. Within total institutions such as boarding schools, bullying in all forms must be even more pervasive, and this idea holds up historically (Wackenfuss 2007).

Cyber-’safety’

Julie Frechette (2005), a professor of communication studies, comments on how “cyber-safety” concerns have been translated by market forces on the internet into a discussion of the internet as possessing “value-laden” content. Yet, most online “safety measures” do not confront the onslaught of advertising information directed at youth. So corporate interests still communicate mostly whatever they want to an eager audience: including pornography and exploitative materials. No effort is made to understand these materials. Instead, Frechette proposes that we teach students helpful media literacy skills to avoid them. Further, the author overlooks that if parents or schools impose “safety” measures, most youth are denied access to critical information about queer sexuality web because many of the programs “protect” children from queerness and not heterosexuality. Discussions of cyber-”safety” often assume an “innocent” and thus uninitiated youth who has never been exposed to sexuality in general. A quick look around oneself reveals how that is clearly false and how efforts to censor instead of understand are dangerous.

Virtual environments are not good or bad in and of themselves. Sometimes riddled with heteronormative assumptions and some of the same, perhaps worse, bullying trends present in schools, mostly the potential of new media can be evaluated. For some queer youth, as referenced by Alexander (2006), the internet is a lifeline, but for how long? Will trends like cyber-bullying and cyber-”safety” subsume the queering of online environments?

General recommendations

The last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st have brought increased visibility for diverse sexualities. Jeffery Weeks (2007) – a scholar of intimacy and sexual life – describes a post-war culture that has made enormous strides, yet has a number of “unfinished revolutions” regarding sexuality. Among these, he insists that fostering the coming out of homosexuality, preventing the continued institutionalisation of heterosexuality, monitoring the commercialisation of the erotic, and combating the “culture wars” hold enormous sway over the future of queer politics. In The World We Have Won, Weeks outlines a thorough and thoughtful history of how sexual and intimate life have changed for the better, but he acknowledges that the true power of these changes has not been brought out.

Similarly, throughout this critical review of the literature I have tried to report not only the extreme opportunities associated with digital media (social networking, video gaming and creation of avatars) – at times, bordering on utopian visions – but also some of the new challenges posed by media (cyber-bullying and cyber-”safety”). I have grounded this discussion in the reality that the effects of traditional media are not going away. Nevertheless, understanding the virtual disruptions in heteronormativity by understanding the different functions and thus potential of media sources will allow digital non-natives leverage their knowledge of the world outside of school to change the way schools work on the inside (Gee 2007). Care should be taken not to co-opt youth-friendly media and instead leverage our knowledge of media that engages youth (Gee 2007).

Moving from post-modern approaches of understanding the discursive function and presence of heteronormativity to practical solutions schools can address is difficult, however (Pascoe 2007). This is further compounded by issues such as the “digital divide” where access to technology is not even across class lines and where technology may indeed be used to exploit some people, while jettisoning others into high-profile lives (Buckingham 2008).

Practical steps

I propose that schools should systematically teach media literacy, addressing each form of both traditional and cybermedia as an opportunity to ask, “Who benefits?” “Who is left out?” If these discussions involve a deep understanding of the way heteronormativity functions in these various spheres and how the spheres overlap, then educators can bring virtual disruptions into their own school environments. This will contribute to a queering of instructional practice to provide support to queer identities and challenge heteronormativity within schools.

A variety of scholars have presented methods by which teachers can learn through and about queerness and thus communicate that to their students (Grace 2000; Kumashiro 2002; Rodriguez 2007). A study (Mudry and Medina-Adams, 2006) of pre-service teachers and their sensitivity regarding sexual minority student populations, found that sensitivity training around issues of sexuality needs be incorporated into teacher preparation programmes. This appears to be even more important for male early childhood teachers and teachers who are non-white. The authors suggest that discussions in teacher education programmes need to match current issues in schools and not solely issues of race and racism, though she acknowledges them as important (Mudrey 2006).

Though methods differ, all agree that at present, it is dangerous for queer teachers to open up and tell their stories to their students for fear of parental retaliation, being fired, or being harassed by students, administrators, other faculty, and parents (Jennings 2005). So while researchers point out that queer autobiographical stories can serve as teaching points for classes, this comes with much risk and sacrifice on the part of the queer educator, and not on the heterosexual educator (Grace 2000). A possible solution to this quandary is the teaching of queer life stories through immersive online environments, both within schools and outside of schools taking pressure off just the queer teacher to tell his/her story.

So “queering” pedagogy, providing an instructional space where queerness is substantively present, involves Queering Straight Teachers as well as opening the possibility of accepting queer teachers, in reference to the title of a recent book edited by Nelson Rodriguez and William Pinar (2007). In the collection of essays presented, the authors pose that critical pedagogy requires an examination of the assumption of heterosexuality in schooling, with heterosexuals leading the charge. A variety of techniques are presented, from video creation, to metacognitive discussions about sexual identities, from carnival moments celebrating queer performance, to introducing queer theory to straight educators. All of these appear to be possibilities, and if they can be translated accurately into strong instructional practice, they could very well be the future of education. If heteronormativity in schools is to be challenged, then everyone must recognise the virtual disruptions that start the process of change.

Conclusions

Protecting children from discussing sex will hurt them (Levine 2002) and protecting students from discussions of sexuality will as well. In September 2010, all British state schools will be required to educate children about sexual health from age seven on (Cassidy 2008). Now might be just the opportunity to prepare future generations to resist heterosexist assumptions based on media perceptions of themselves and others by engaging in lively discussions of sex and sexuality. Open discussions of sexuality in schools need to be accompanied with complex discussions of ability, race, immigrant status, nation, class, gender, and age, and should seek some sort of status in the curriculum, in school functions, and in classroom discourse.

But the danger for the future is that more of the same will continue: heteronormativity within educational institutions, along with normalising gay politics, will continue to censor queer representations. Opportunities granted by the virtual disruption of heteronormativity through media could be lost, due to a lack of serious attention by researchers, educators, and activists. Since the future is not predetermined, we have the opportunity to transform virtual disruptions into a lesson for all students. We have the opportunity to take discussions of sexuality in schools, in homes, and in virtual worlds seriously.

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Even some proponents of queer theory argue that it has lost its usefulness for creating social change, though this argument is mediated by the cultural context in which the theory is applied (Kirsch, 2006).

A source for discussing the benefits of using the word queer can be found in an essay by Judith Butler (1993), Critically Queer.

Film has also had an interesting role in educating about sex that will not feature directly in this analysis since images from popular culture are the primary area of study (see Eberwein 1999).

More work needs to be done to understand the differences between the American adolescent fag discourse and British “laddism” as means by which masculinity is constructed.

If adolescent’s acceptance of same-sex peers depends both on sexual orientation and gender expression with gender expression being rated as less acceptable, then an understanding of being queer relies on a complex understanding of gender (Horn 2007).

Due to the disparity between actual and perceived queer people, many seek other communities that better suit their personal body image, for example Bear communities which embrace hairy and sometimes overweight men (Manley 2007).

In the field of education, social networking is still presented as a new idea with students networking among each other and many teachers and parents left unable to understand the extent of this contact. Examples abound from the media where teachers variously are not allowed to interact with students via social networking sites, engage students inappropriately, or thankfully provide help for homework (Simon, 2008; Trotter 2008).

Note the exclusion of transgendered individuals who identify as neither male nor female and those who may be attracted to them from both of these websites.

Critical cyberculture studies also offers a lens through which to understand the perceptions of sexuality on-line (Bell 2007; Silver 2006).

Some research conducted on adults who created avatars for viewing by their significant others reveals the diverse ways an avatar can be used to convey a variety of social messages (Vasalou 2008) and the leap can be made that this is true for adolescents as well, though research does not exist for us to evaluate this trend.

One theory not advanced here is that cybersex and pornography are a sources of information for youth: but since these practices are illegal in many areas, documentation of these experiences is difficult (some examples of work that could be studied in youth include, Carballo-Diéguez 2006; Daneback 2005; Icard 2008; Rosenmann 2006; Ross 2005; Ross 2007)

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Certainly, such technological developments have been trumpeted for their alleged egalitarian and democratic progressiveness. However, it is also arguably the case that much of the discussion about new technological developments in this sphere very often submits to the temptation to see these developments themselves as independent of wider societal conflicts of interest. In so doing, a tacit top-down standpoint is adopted which misses the ideological investment by dominant forces in such controversies. It is these issues which the current review seeks to explore with regard to media representations.

The question of popular representations of the working class appears to be currently attracting renewed interest following the fashionable silence on class characterising the 1980s and most of the 1990s (Kirk, 2007). What emerges from this body of work is the argument that, contrary to widespread claims for classlessness, or at least declining class division, the arena of media representations is an important site where the ‘cold war’ of class struggle is fought out (Skeggs, 2004). It will be argued that if this is the case then educators need to acknowledge the significance of this pervasive and tenacious ideological context, and draw appropriate practical and organisational lessons if the systematic reproduction of educational disadvantage is to be interrupted.

In focusing on cultural meaning-making as an important realm in which class division is produced, it is useful to initially spell out this review’s underlying conceptualisation of class as an objective relationship. The working class, and indeed its political capacities, is viewed as a process of becoming. Thus what is fundamentally at issue are the complex dynamics of the ‘working class-in-the-making’ (Rowbotham and Beynon, 2001, p3). It is a standpoint which is grounded in a view of history as involving regular reshaping of the working class in accordance with wider economic and technological restructuring and its new productive requirements. This view aligns with the notion of class as primarily about one’s relationship to the organisation of social production (Ste Croix, 1981). While always manifesting in complex and conditional ways through a variety of more or less transitory visible ’symptoms’ – in the shape of different types of subjectivities, cultural forms and lifestyle behaviours – it is certainly not reducible to such things.

The connection between this reshaping of the working class, and the latter’s changing level of self-consciousness as a class, including as a political agent, is a much mediated one. But, essentially, a viewpoint which takes the working class as a process represents an important place from which to criticise common attempts to simply collapse the future into present states of consciousness; or, in other words, to conflate class as an analytic category into class as a category of consciousness: ‘as long as unequal and exploitative conditions persist, there is a strong likelihood of an awareness of class refiguring, even though the manner in which a new consciousness of class will be expressed is not apparent’ (Rowbotham and Beynon, 2001, p3).

Frozen working-classness

It had been suggested that modern society is partly characterised by tendencies which work to disorganise the working class – economically, politically, and ideologically – as a class, including through ‘pulverizing… [it]… into atoms easily manipulated by the bourgeoisie’ (Lukács, 1924/1997, p66). Various studies of media representations appear to confirm this process – at least as it operates at the ideological level – including the negative implications for the availability of valued independent working class identities. By inflating the individualised cultural realm of personal relations, consumption and self-fashioning of the private self, a situation arises whereby certain subjectivities, cultural attitudes and lifestyles come to be treated as wholly definitive of class. Correspondingly, the formative role of material constraints becomes obscured (Crompton and Scott, 2005; Harry, 2004). Class, the studies claim, is both present, with, for example, television viewers led to negatively judge participants’ assorted cultural and psychological faux pas from the stand-point of the middle class norm, and absent in that we have only isolated individuals with seemingly endogenous character traits, detached from any explanatory material circumstances.

Across a range of TV entertainment formats, including sitcoms, drama, and reality TV, common tropes through which working class people can be devalued relative to middle class identities have been identified. These include excess, waste and disgust; overly authentic; tastelessness; and lacking modernity (Skeggs, 2004). Recent detailed study of reality TV, for example, has shown it to offer an almost bottomless reservoir of scenarios for displaying the ‘moral failure’ of working class attitudes and self-management, such as in relation to child care or diet, for example. It is observed that while ‘”lifestyling” is often mooted as one of the indicators of the demise of class… it is in fact one of the rhetorical techniques used to devalue working-class taste and culture’ (Wood and Skeggs, 2007, p9). One witnesses then a class-based pathologizing of working class personhood and self. Although such studies do point to a few scattered moments of resistance to middle class evaluations, such moments only seem to confirm the overall atmosphere of futility. The final impression is a grim one of individuals trapped within unequal struggles over taste which they must almost always lose. Lawler refers to working class people becoming ‘little more than personae in a bourgeois drama’ (2005, p442).

More contradictory and less pre-closed scenarios do however emerge in other TV formats. A recent example is the series Jamie’s Ministry of Food, documenting the efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to show how people in the working class town of Rotherham who previously did not cook themselves, can learn an easy recipe in a short time and ‘pass it on’ to others. On one had, highlighting the significance of class in shaping people’s diets appears not to form the official agenda of the program. And indeed, Oliver himself, when subsequently appearing in front of a House of Commons select committee on health inequalities, publicly rejected the notion that poor diet was a class issue: ‘”There are plenty of City boys who earn – well, used to earn – a lot of money who can’t nourish their kids, even on a gold card… I can tell you it is categorically not about money or time. It’s about knowledge… It is a poverty of being able to nourish their family, in any class”‘ (quoted in Pidd, 2008). On the other hand, and despite this classless orientation, the powerful effect of material conditions on people’s dietary habits regularly bursts through in a striking fashion (Lawrence, 2008), as does the message that, contrary to some myths, working class people do not want to live on a diet of unhealthy food.

However, it remains the case that most of the time in the popular media circuits, the notions of change and working class consciousness is a contradiction in terms. There is a freezing of working-classness, such that future consciousness is identified with the permanently ‘fallen’ present, and temporally specific features appear as an inherent and eternal truth (Ollman, 1993). This erasure of potentiality for development is reinforced both by the one-sided perspectives in which people appear as psychologically fixed clichés and caricatures (Garnett, 2001); and by the invisibility of material and social conditions. But if there can be no progressive change in working class consciousness, it is often the case that the only solution to the ‘problem’ of this devalued consciousness is a change out of such consciousness by becoming more like the middle class (Lawler, 2000). And this involves adopting a version of individuality which represents the negation of working-classness. Thus while working-classness is always static (for change means negation of one’s classed position), it is sometimes also inherent and eternally fixed and thus cannot be escaped from via religious-style conversion.

This is illustrated with respect to the theme of cultural development. In most media portrayals, if there is such a thing as working class culture it is not ‘real’ culture but rather ‘non-culture’ in the sense of lacking all intelligence and intellectual aspiration, thus being the opposite to a culture of the mind (Lawler, 2005). Indeed, just as historically there was a distinction in the Social Democratic imagination between the mindless mass resembling inert matter, and the benevolent saviour from above representing pure idea and spirit (thus standing opposed to the notions of working class self-consciousness and self-emancipation) (Draper, 1978), so in contemporary representations the qualities of the mindless mass live on in the now individualised framing of the (overly) embodied working class figure.

Again, either the person is incapable of cultural development (and the raising of consciousness in general terms), or if it does happen it must be at the price of losing that which underpinned their own class identity. One can note in this regard how the tenacious image of working class stupidity or ‘buffoonery’ (Butsch, 2003) echoes the consistent efforts of the British class system to draw ‘a sharp distinction between workers and thinkers’ whereby ‘it was the prerogative of the latter to interpret religion, economics, society and literature for the former’ (Rose, 2001, p7). Such an image is contradicted however by recent scholarship which has further unearthed the extremely rich history of autodidactic culture amongst the British working class (Rose, 2001). Whether through the Mutual Improvement Societies, or the Workers Educational Association (WEA), whole generations of worker-intellectuals were able to utilise the contradictions of culture in order to appropriate specific aspects of canonical ‘Bourgeois’ literature, theatre and music in a way which ‘tended to ignite insurrections in the minds of workers’ (p9). Such a movement for self-education through the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, often based on a suspicion of state provision or middle-class philanthropy, was driven by the realisation of founders of the Labour Party and other self-educated radicals that ‘no disenfranchised people could be emancipated unless they created an autonomous intellectual life. Working people would have to develop their own ways of framing the world, their own political goals, their own strategies for achieving those goals’ (p7).

The record of very many of the educated classes treating this movement with hostility, realising the threat which it posed to their own social position, justifies the founding concern with defending intellectual independence. In this way they followed the balancing act whereby one ‘has to learn regardless of the fact that learning carries certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one’s enemies’ (Trotsky, 1960, p205; see also Au, 2007).

A survey of the continuing reproduction of the thinker-worker distinction in the media realm would need to include the process of decontextualisation of working class people such that they find themselves disorientated in a setting alien to their usual class-stamped milieu. Thus one could note the role of the technological setting of the TV studio in helping foster images of working people as fundamentally feeble-minded and rarely with thoughtful things to say about their condition and the world. This is expressed in the following section of an interview with film maker Ken Loach:

“He believes that TV and broadcasting should be about ‘finding exactly what people have got to say rather than trying to confuse them into inarticulateness’. Instead the media usually ‘works against people being articulate’ by transplanting them into an alien setting, where they face unstated assumptions that cast them in predetermined roles.

‘A television studio is a very hostile place. You can be an articulate person but not be able to express yourself in a TV studio. The lights are very harsh, and you’re blinded. You are in a very strange environment, talking to somebody who is accustomed to a sound-bite politician. They won’t ask the core questions; they will ask the ones that are superficial. So you have to change the question in order to make your point, and that’s a skill in itself. If you put people in a situation where they feel at ease they will talk absolutely clearly. All you have to do is listen and ask the question that is central to the issue’.” (Rowbotham, 2001, p84)

Similar reference to the deployment of technological setting in reality TV to decontextualise people in the interest of devaluing them is also found in Skeggs (2007):

“Reality TV objectifies class by detaching persons from the set of relations (working-class) that make up their experience in the world, to place them inside another set of relations. Objectification is accomplished through the technologies deployed (camera angles, lighting, mis-en-scene, music, etc), performances, speaking to camera; all of which constitute aural and visual evidence about the person and their value. The technologies materialise a subject position. Personhood is bracketed out from the conditions of possibility through which it is constituted.” (p17)

Media coverage of everyday work life

Paradoxical though it seems, the other side of the coin to the counter-position of workers to thinkers is a severe absence of media coverage of working class people at work, as well as of the activity of associated institutions such as trade unions. In other words, central components of the daily lives of the large majority of a national population are treated as somehow not worthy of media attention. As such, yet another opportunity for class-based identification is closed down. The worker appears only as an abstract atomized citizen, rather than a concrete person occupying a specific position within social production. Kirk (2007) notes that ‘it is the economic where the working class is, or should be, most visible’, and that this ‘accounts for the tendency within middle class discourse on class, going as far back as the nineteenth century, to discount or displace or simply mystify economic relations, not to mention emphasizing strategies to weaken and to attack working class institutions… spaces through which working class identities might be voiced and celebrated’ (pp.101-2). Martin (2004) argues that in the ‘consumer is king’ society, the news media adopts a frame summed up in the statement ‘the process of production is none of our business’, and ‘collective economic action is bad’. Regarding the former, there is a clear preference for the process of production and work life in general to remain a hidden realm, with news characterising the lack of disclosure about this sphere as normal.

With reference to trade unions in the United States, Zweig (2000) claims that ‘organizations of working people, especially unions, are systematically ignored or attacked’ (p56). Similarly, despite British trade unions with their seven million members being the country’s largest voluntary organisation, there is minimal coverage of their work. And where they are mentioned it is often in a way which exaggerates their decline, helped by a very inaccurate picture of a disproportionately male and white membership (Harman, 2008). Studies have also argued that in the rare moments of media interest trade unions are generally presented as only ‘dispute’ organisations, and that broader everyday aspects of their work in negotiating central aspects of economic life – not to mention other social contributions such as concerted anti-racist work – remain invisible (Walsh, 1988). Ken Loach goes as far as to argue that this media suppression helps ensure that the ‘whole body of experience and ideas’ represented by the Labour movement ‘has no existence in our political and cultural life; it can only exist as an alternative’ (Rowbotham, 2001, p85).

However, evidence suggests that even when there is news focus on work life its framing can still reflect the over-expansion of the cultural and the personal spheres. Thus stark working class realities may be obscured by nostalgic middle class fantasies about the lives of those working in traditional industries. Kitch (2007), for example, considered media coverage of a coal mine explosion in Sago, West Virginia in which 12 miners died. Through notions of working-class heroes, following their ‘tough’, ‘proud’ and patriotic vocational duties in the ‘tradition of sacrifice’ as part of the national ‘family’, the rural miners were made to bear the weight of others’ romanticised expectations. Consequently, the working class disappears as a category with which to think about workers’ experience. And the notion of working class identity as tied to a conflict of interests is undermined in favour of the suggestion of an essential industrial and national harmony. Thus the nationally told story of Sago was not one about the horrible conditions of mining and a deadly industrial accident’ – one which was preventable if the proper health and safety regulations had been prioritised over cost-cutting – ‘but one about life-affirming acts of faith and sacrifice’ (p125) and ‘down-to-earth people who stand for the best in all of us’ (p128).

This example points to the particular susceptability of workers associated with declining traditional industries to being represented in ways which reflect the needs of commodification. Stangleman et al (1999) trace this process with regard to ex-mining communities which can be mythologised in both positive and negative terms. Attracting inward investment, for instance, may require an emphasis on the supposed impressive work ethic of the ex-miners. In this sense the mining industry is framed within a heritage discourse (Dicks, 2008). Alternatively, attributing a ‘culture of dependency’ may fit nicely into a narrative of modernization, whereby ‘backward’ character traits of the labour force can be blamed for their alleged failure to embrace new working conditions. Again, therefore, essentialising of certain personality traits excises an objective picture of developing class relations in the context of specific social and economic problems affecting former coalfield areas.

Consistent with the lack of attention given to work-based existence and institutions is an over-inflation of the image of the underclass wherein the working class poor are confined to a degraded space peripheral to productive life and thus economic power. This then comes at the cost of obscuring the reality of the overwhelming majority of working class people in regular employment, with, for instance, most part-time workers being permanent workers (Harman, 2008). A notable example of this underclass discourse is the recent concern with ‘Chavs’ (Tyler, 2007). In this case, immediately visible cultural markers such as purported habits of dress, lifestyle, deportment and speech come to signify a range of classic ‘underclass’ traits, such as dirt, sexual promiscuity, ignorance, psychological stasis, work-shy, aggressive masculinities, and over-fertile femininities – ones which continue the well-worn tradition of positing an existential divide between the ‘respectable’ and ‘disreputable’ working class. The overall result is that the wider context of significant rises in inequality, deindustrialization, the often sudden economic ’shock’ experienced by traditional sources of employment, and cuts in welfare services (Thomas and Dorling, 2007), remain hidden.

It is notable that in addition to the role of traditional news outlets in helping to foster such images, there has been an unprecedented growth of internet forums, such as chavscum and urbandictionary dedicated to especially violent expressions of class hate. Tyler suggests that ‘that the level of disgust directed at the chav is suggestive of a heightened class antagonism’ (p18). However, it is also useful to include not only objective increases in inequality in the explanation of such class snobbery, but also a range of political attacks on the working class poor, which involve individualised scapegoating as part of a heightened political authoritarianism (Callinicos, 2001).

Educational implications

These observations enable us to raise two broad issues with regard to education. Firstly, given that the study of media representations highlights various tenacious assumptions about working class people, it can help indicate how certain educational practices may confirm such assumptions and stereotypes, but also suggest how a school classroom can be an important site whereby such perspectives can be challenged. The second issue relates to the theme of the contradictions of culture – where, for example, the form and content of education will both express a middle class bias (Evans, 2006) at the same time as possessing aspects of a more universal value. In order for learners to access the latter, there is a need for educators to acknowledge the former, in the shape of respecting working class students’ own cultural and historical particularities.

This points to a challenge to the above-mentioned narrative characterising individual development exclusively in terms of becoming more middle class. As against the long tradition of students facing a stark alternative of school success or continuing involvement in their neighbourhood and friends, various evidence from community schools and projects ’show that learning is enriched and achievement rises when schools build on the lives and interests of the neighbourhood… This is the challenge whenever communities are at a distance from the orthodox school curriculum’ (Wrigley, 2005, p130; see also Ajegbo, 2007). A similar point applies to the language used in the classroom. Keeping any grammar – whether Cockney or Creole – other than Standard English outside the classroom was the norm for many years. But a growing body of argument has suggested that while general prejudice meant that ‘Black and white working class students would face serious disadvantage without competence in Standard English, both spoken and written’, such competence ‘could only be achieved on the basis of respect for other forms of speech and encouraging its use for school learning’ (Wrigley, 2005, p129).

A related point applies with regard to the highly standardised national curriculum, as well as more passive and disembedded forms of teaching and learning in general which replicates the same disorientating effect of the TV studio mentioned earlier. In the case of the former, by embodying a particular elite vision, it is highly likely to foster boredom, frustration and disengagement unless spaces emerge for critical questioning of the nature of worthwhile knowledge.

Here arises also the constant danger whereby educational practices can provoke a situation in which educators’ stereotypes concerning student’s intellectual inferiority can seem to gain confirmation, and so guide teachers’ perspectives, such that disadvantage is reproduced. This is especially pertinent with regard to the tendency for placing pupils from economically impoverished backgrounds, whose parents are less well educated or who speak little English at home, in ‘low ability’ groups. That these groups ‘are likely to have a less interesting curriculum, based heavily on dull and repetitive exercises without any meaningful context or purpose’ (Wrigley, 2006, p18), would in turn provoke resistant behaviour which seemingly reinforces the negative stereotypes.

Furthermore, the underclass discourse looms large in this respect. The more social and cultural distance between school and wider community/neighbourhood, the easier it is for teachers to ‘generalise from dramatic incidents and conclude that the neighbourhood they serve is nothing but a concrete jungle full of dysfunctional families and drug-crazed youths.’ Thus, any chance to appreciate the community for its positive features, including how its particular interests and social network can foster ‘different patterns of learning’ compared to the orthodox decontextualized classroom agenda, are likely to be sidelined (Wrigley, 2006, p69)

Finally, alongside the risk of excluding a specifically working class route to intellectual achievement, so also we have the appearance in policy of attempted accommodation to the traditional dichotomy between workers and thinkers with its pessimistic view of immutable consciousness. This is seen in the government’s Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (Department for Education and Skills, 2004) whereby training for work is attributed the key role in making education more relevant and accessible for working class children. There is evidence that this has brought with it acceptance of unspoken limits on which children will be able to develop creativity, cooperation and thinking skills, and what they will be allowed to think creatively about. In this way, the universal entitlement of all students to gain a broad sweep of knowledge is sacrificed to the mantra of ‘preparation for work’.

Anti-racism and the question of the ‘white working class’

In the previous section we saw how media representations commonly work against both the acknowledgement of structured class disadvantage, and also the development of valued independent working class identities. It was also suggested how related tendencies in the educational sphere can lead to pupil alienation and the reproduction of class-based segregation. In what follows these themes will be expanded by considering a trend in certain areas of media discourse to defend a particular section of the working class. In the process, the idea of working class identity as standing for potential progressive and dynamic unity across different national and cultural traditions is undermined. Such a situation provides further support for incorporating respect for the category of the working class within anti-racist practice in school.

As part of the academic criticism of media treatment of the working class, the racialised nature of some of the representations has been noted, especially the way in which particularly white working class people have been targeted.

“Whilst the term chav is a term of abuse directed almost exclusively towards the white poor, chavs are not invisible normative whites, but rather hypervisible ‘filthy whites.’ In a way that bears striking similarities to other national stereotypes of the white poor such as the US ‘white trash’ figure, the chav foregrounds a dirty whiteness – a whiteness contaminated with poverty.” (Tyler, 2008, p25)

There is evidence that there is significant ambivalence in representations of poor whites: on one hand recognising their intimate proximity – geographical, cultural, familial and sexual – with working class blacks and Asians (Tyler, 2007; Collins, 2004); on the other hand still portrayed in terms of an ethnically exclusive grouping. Critics have suggested that whiteness can indeed come in certain situations to signify the ‘unmodern’ – such that poor working class whites are portrayed as specially prone to racism and general cultural backwardness (Skeggs, 2004), thus becoming a vessel into which middle class racism can conveniently be projected. A seemingly primitive psychology thus becomes emblematic of the idea that the working class no longer exists as a viable or privileged political agency. Consider, for example, the following passage from an article by journalist Janet Daly in The Times newspaper:

“This self-loathing, self-destructive tranche of the population is far less assimilable into morally constructive social life than any immigrant group… Those ethnic minorities which bring with them religion, cultural dignity and a sense of family will find a way. The only bar to their steady progress will be the mindless hatred of the indigenous working classes, who loathe them precisely for their cultural integrity… I fear that long after Britain has become a successful multi-racial society, it will be plagued by this diminishing (but increasingly alienated) detritus of the Industrial Revolution.” (Daly, 1994; cited in Haylett, 2001, p359).

One response to this sort of attack has been to defend white working class identity against what are seen as attempts to bolster middle class identities as precisely modern and forward-looking. And an issue is sometimes made of how the ‘white working class’ has been treated with embarrassed silence within an academic discourse primarily concerned with more ‘exotic’ oppressed identities. Haylett (2001), for example, in her analysis of the political rhetoric of welfare reform in the UK, suggests that the white working class is represented as embodying ‘a poverty of identity based on outdated ways of thinking and being’ (p352), and as such forms an obstacle to the development of the modern nation.

“[A] representative middle class is positioned at the vanguard of ‘the modern’ which becomes a moral category referring to liberal, cosmopolitan, work and consumption based lifestyles and values, and ‘the unmodern’ on which this category depends is the white working class ‘other’, emblematically a throwback to other times and places. This middle class dependency on working-class ‘backwardness’ for its own claim to modern multicultural citizenship is an unspoken interest within the discourse of illegitimacy around the white working-class poor” (pp364-5)

While there is a focus here on the gains for middle class identities, there is no expression of concern with the implications for working class identities. This includes the implications of a focus – demonstrated by the media, but also echoed in academic studies – on the white working class as a distinct identity separate from the working class in general. In fact, there is a danger that in defending ‘white working class culture’ it is illegitimately reified as an oppressed ethnic grouping; that an apparent defence of working class people may work to undermine the specificity of the category of working class as representing underlying commonality of interest between groups of workers.

This danger has been highlighted in the recent series of television programmes which have taken the theme of the marginalized white working class and given it a distinct slant which is arguably open to Far-Right political appropriation (Evans, 2008). BBC2’s White Season series screened in March 2008, and carrying the subtitle ‘Is white working class Britain becoming invisible?’, presented a pessimistic picture of the post-industrial white working class as forming a hermetically sealed cultural unit under siege in a multicultural Britain. It was portrayed as resenting the loss of its identity and rights to its own cultural space to non-white immigrant communities in the competition for social welfare, and as banished to a voiceless wilderness of disenfranchisement and disorientation. This was the predominant framing of the series as a whole even though it was particularly three out of the series of five programmes which were most representative of this line: Last Orders is about a Working Men’s Club in Bradford; Rivers of Blood considers the fortune of Enoch Powell’s dire warning in 1968 about the social consequences of immigration and multiculturalism to Britain; and The Poles are Coming is about the tensions which are claimed to have been generated by recent immigration of East European labourers into Peterborough.

Richard Klein, who as the BBC’s commissioner for documentaries commissioned the White Season series, explains his motivation in an article entitled: ‘White and working class: the one ethnic group the BBC has ignored’. Here he argues that in the midst of the debate over the consequences of the changes in Britain over the last two decades wrought by globalisation, mass migration and economic upheaval, ‘one voice has been largely absent: that of the white working class’. He notes a common perception of the white working class as ‘reactionary or backward’ whereas once they ‘were seen as an integral and respected part of our national life’. The TV series is presented as a factual vehicle by which the white working class express their perception of themselves as what an interviewee in one documentary called ‘the forgotten people’. Klein wished to convey the ‘complexity of working class attitudes’, for ‘it is far too easy for the middle classes, who benefit from cheap labour – whether it be from a Polish plumber or a Ukrainian nanny – to fail to understand the difficulties facing the white working class’.

“In part as a consequence [of] multiculturalism, the irony is that many of the white working class see themselves as an oppressed ethnic minority too, and lower down the ladder than other ethnic groups on the hierarchy of victimhood. They complain of double standards and hypocrisy, pointing out that the media revel in telling stories [about] Asian and African immigrants, but ignores tales from the white working class. Every other culture, they argue, is revered except that of the indigenous population… they feel abandoned. I am in no way a spokesman for the white working class. But I think the message from the White Season is a troubling one. In the modern world’s rush to embrace diversity and globalisation, we cannot afford to ignore the voices of any section of society which feels bewildered by the pace of change. If we don’t give everyone a voice, it may only lead to further social division.” (Klein, 2008)

In contrast to the concerns of radical film makers who have sought to give voice to excluded sections of the working class by highlighting the injustices and material and social fetters of class society as a whole (Bromley, 2000; Rowbotham, 2001), the issue is now transformed into one concerning competition within the working class for resources and recognition.

This view of the white working class as an oppressed ethnicity seeking recognition is also found in another journalistic intervention which can be seen as part of the same tendency. Michael Collins’ book entitled The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class (2004), based on his Channel 4 television documentary The British Working Class, is presented as partly inspired by the growing ‘demonisation of the white working class’, especially ‘by middle class progressives who had traditionally come out fighting these underdogs’ corner, or reporting their condition as missionaries or journalists’ (p8).

Collins argues that the contemptuous portrayal of the white working class led him to write his book because ‘it ignored both the detailed experience and the wider history of the white working class, and simply reduced them to a caricature similar to that in which they were cast centuries before’ (p8). As against this he offers a history of the ‘white working class that dominated the area [of Southwark, in South East London] for so long [and] … the inside story of a tribe on a particular reservation and during a particular period, as told by an erstwhile native son’ (p11). On the website for the Channel 4 documentary Collins complains that ‘whites were not allowed the status of an ethnic group, and in the urban areas with which the white working class were synonymous, anything that identified them with a culture, a history, and a singular experience was omitted from any dialogue or literature that took multiculturalism as its theme’.

What results is an exercise in essentializing white working class culture such that the rich historical processes of ongoing reconstitution of the working class through successive waves of immigration (Winder, 2005) disappear from view. This includes, for example, the key role of Irish (not to mention also Jewish) labour in the area discussed by Collins, and the central function of the Labour movement – especially during periods of heightened economic conflict – in breaking down ethnic separatism and encouraging class-based forms of occupational identification to come to the forefront (Davis, 2000; see also Virdee, 2000). Collins instead provides a deeply nostalgic and romanticized image which relies on very minimal coverage of the realities and struggles of workplace life. In this way, it ‘flies in the face of historical-geographical processes of place and community construction and ignores the fact that cultures are just as relationally (“and dialogically”) constructed as individuals, and a good deal more porous’. Consequently, what results is ‘the building of a ‘”particularist theory of justice” with respect to cultures as embodied things‘, thus advocating ‘a politics that would effectively freeze geographical structures of place for evermore’ (Harvey, 1996, p342).

It can be seen as simply one of the many historical examples of ‘ethnic’ divisions being invented arbitrarily through any range of different characteristics being inflated into an imaginary and determining essence called ‘ethnicity’. One witnesses in particular varieties of the appeal which seem uncomfortably close to the rhetorical tropes of what Balibar (1991) terms ‘neo-racism’. That is to say

“a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short, it is… a differentialist racism.” (p21; italics in original)

Here then is a discourse which illustrates how ‘culture can also function like nature’, as a ‘way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin’ (p22). Furthermore, this discourse also proposes to explain racism as resulting from what is pilloried as ‘abstract’ anti-racism. Attempts to go against human proclivity to maintain our ‘natural’ cultural difference and particularity, will, it is claimed, inevitably result in eruptions of collective elemental aggressiveness.

The pertinent nature of these observations for grasping the underlying pessimistic assumptions of claims around the white working class is exemplified in a final study by Robson (2000) looking at Millwall Football Club. Here one can see the possible dangers of trying to defend what is said to be aspects of ‘authentic’ white working class culture against middle class hegemony. The study highlights the moral and cultural forms expressed by Millwall fans, including the ‘rather menacing sense of carnival’ (p228), traditional masculinities, and racist taunts, underpinned by the values of ‘physical and personal inviolability, contempt for pretension, volatile emotionality and ruthless gallows humour’ (p227). He suggests that this represents a working class identity which has resisted attempts by middle class ‘outsiders’ to introduce their own sets of values and standards. He argues that prevalent media characterisations of Millwall as a racist subculture manages to ‘obscure the complex realities of relationships between Millwallism, identity and race’ (p225). And he suggests that fans’ resistance to anti-racist initiatives can be explained in the context of defending ‘particular working-class identities and traditions’:

“The central perspectives of Millwallism are implacably opposed to liberal culture. Anti-fascist ’stances’ are associated with leftist local authorities and liberal progressivism in general. If, as I have argued, Millwallism is best understood as an expression of defensive but culturally entrenched opposition to bourgeois cultural hegemony, then a certain reluctance to embrace ‘politically correct’ moral perspectives is one of its central perspectives…” (p227)

Robson adopts a discourse of the rights of white working class Millwall fans to their own specific cultural traditions, traditions which middle class activists derogate for their backwardness, thus risking ‘driving underground… white claims to pride in cultural identity’ with the effect that ‘new forms of aggressive nativism’ (p229) may be consolidated.

“This highlights the complex ways in which Millwall is kept Millwall less out of white nativism pure and simple than a demand for the right to the kind of cultural particularism which is perceived as acceptable when practised by other groups than the white working class, and positively encouraged among them by the liberal/leftist culture of municipal anti-racism in inner London.” (p230)

Rather than pointing to the potential for a progressive transformation of ‘white working class’ identity into ‘working class’ identity, and exposing the political factors which hold it back, the projected future is solely one of a struggle for recognition by eternally competing frozen cultural particularisms. There is little analysis in Robson’s work of the wider context of economic decline and restructuring, nor of the role of external political forces, in forming an environment in which ‘tribalist’ divisions within the working class thrive (and often attract disproportionate media attention). This is despite the function of such factors in working in the interest of the very middle class hegemony which Robson is supposed to be targeting.

Furthermore, it is interesting that collective expressions of racism are explained by means of a particular version of crowd psychology which reintroduces assumptions about the immutability of working class consciousness. Thus the issue is one of provocation (by anti-racism) of people’s aggressive instincts for maintaining cultural distinctness: ‘The masses are presented with an explanation of their own “spontaneity” and at the same time they are implicitly disparaged as a “primitive” crowd’ (Balibar, 1991, p23).

There have been attempts to transfer similar notions of the white working class into educational contexts – for example, the idea that one fights racism by affirming the particularity of culturally sealed collective units, as when it is argued that white working class youth should be provided with a reconstructed white identity (Fekete, 1998). By contrast, an alternative pedagogic approach to identity involves an attempt to take account of historical struggles to overcome conditions of economic and social degradation and of cultural segregation in the locality to which the school is tied (Fekete, 1998). The latter approach would then form a basis for understanding the origin of anti-immigrant themes which represent the corruption of the progressive traditions.

Consistent anti-racism involves both an emphasis on black and white unity, and an acknowledgement of the class relations at work, thus reasserting the importance of space for affirming independent working class identity. This issue of class simply can no longer be ducked. And against recent attempts to counter-pose the needs of Black and white working class pupils in a context of scarce resources (Mahamdallie, 2005), it is necessary to emphasise their common interest in well resourced education protected from the logic of market competition and associated managerial standardization. One of the challenges here is the way that segregating practices in which, for example, Black pupils are more likely to be put in bottom sets, reinforces stereotypes, including amongst students themselves, that they are the ‘under-achievers’ (Bennett, 2005).

All of these points would also require improvement in the shallow and tokenistic multiculturalism which has been previously offered: ‘Traditional culture was frozen and dynamic fusions were overlooked. More than this, multicultural education often stopped short of challenging racism’ (Wrigley, 2005, p130; see also Ajegbo, 2007).

Conclusion: some future trends

The future direction in which representations of the working class may tend is tied to wider economic and political developments. On one hand, it is possible that continuing increase in inequalities and social polarisation, together with a growing authoritarian emphasis on criminalizing working class youth, and demonising welfare recipients, will find its corresponding supportive images in the media. In addition, various historical reference points indicate how, in response to growing popular discontent around the effects of economic recession, there is a strong probability of increasingly racialised representations, scapegoating the most vulnerable sections of the working class, and so functioning to weaken potential for building unity.

This could unfold in a direction indicated by the White Season documentary The Poles are Coming, which painted quite a dark portrait of apparently inevitable division and conflict between recently arrived immigrant labour and the host labour force. In this way, the extensive current examples of mixed workplace cultures and trade union efforts to recruit Eastern European workers as members and as full-time union organisers, remained out of view. We have also witnessed other attempts by influential social commentators to explicitly respond to economic recession by reasserting the role of the white working class as the ‘true losers’ who should be targeted with ’special measures’ to make them ‘more competitive’ and prevent a seemingly natural resentment being targeted at East European or non-white beneficiaries of jobs and welfare services (Travis, 2008).

On the other hand, depending on the wider political balance of forces, not least an increased likelihood of a more co-ordinated trade union response to recession-related cuts in people’s jobs, pay, and conditions (Harman, 2008), there is a fertile ground in which more class-conscious representations could flourish, marked by a greater historical awareness. This potential unity also finds its roots in the high levels of racial integration relative to the European average as measured at the levels of geographical neighbourhoods, workplaces, and the family, and the already deep commonalities in the lives of working class people of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds (Simpson, 2008). The role of the anti-war movement in building unprecedented political unity between Muslims and non-Muslims could also be a significant building block here.

Earlier on we saw how technology of various kinds – whether the TV studio, or the internet – provided means for reinforcing derogatory representations, whether directly in their role as dissemination hubs, or indirectly through predisposing participants to behave in ways which would seem to justify particular stereotypes. Despite the existence of such examples, one can predict that ongoing triumphantist claims for technology as itself beckoning a more egalitarian or classless future will continue largely unabated.

Some additional remarks can be made concerning the prospects for both the propagation of derogatory stereotypes by internet forum participants, and for online efforts to challenge them. Despite early claims for the openness of online newsgroup technology as an alleged guarantor against the seclusion and uninterrupted self-confirmation of the worldview of groups fostering hate speech (Zickmund, 1997), this has been proven very over-optimistic. The reason largely relates to limitations of the Usernet and bulletin board format more generally in terms of fostering open political discussion. The lack of a moderating role, of accountability, and of engagement with those holding differing viewpoints, mean that provision of rational argument and supporting evidence can be simply bypassed by many users, and self-reinforcement dominate over interaction and exchange (Davis, 2005). Thus the prevailing tendency for personal attacks and harangues has often been commented on. Furthermore, online talk ’segregates participants into a multitude of narrowly specialised discussion groups… The internet, generally, produces severe audience fragmentation’, and even ‘when participants do interact, they often talk past each other without enough listening to others, particularly those with whom they disagree’ (Davis, 2005, p123).

In cases where online reinforcement of shared stereotypes can grow in a symbiotic relationship with popular TV entertainment – such as the invented characters populating certain comedy programmes (Tyler, 2007) – then constantly evolving opportunities for apparently pleasurable dehumanisation flourish. Indeed, nourished by the heightened versatility of internet multimedia technology, and a social setting characterised by geographically disparate, isolated individuals, novel manifestations of the fetishistic fascination with the Other characterising colonial anthropology are made possible. Opportunities for resistance will depend on the relative resources of the demonised groups which, as, for example, in the case of working class poor, remain very limited. However, it is possible to envisage more hopeful scenarios, albeit ones which again are largely dependent on the trajectory of the wider working class movement. Nevertheless, it seems wise not to foreclose the possibility of such demonised groups following, in unpredictable ways, the example of stigmatised groups such as gays for whom internet forum participation may have contributed to a situation whereby identity ‘demarginalisation’ can take place and stereotypes debunked (McKenna and Bargh, 1998).

If there is a role for education here it may be partly signalled in the evolving pan-European co-operative development of more radical programmes of critical literacy skills. Such skills could be brought to bear on students’ understandings of media images and the different interests at stake (Wrigley, 2006). And this could also beckon a greater willingness to embrace controversies and contradictions as part of the official teaching curriculum.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.