Friday, 27 January 2012

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Basil Bernstein Investigating the language gap between different social classes WORKING for many years at the Institute of Education at London University, Basil Bernstein was one of the most imaginative sociologists of his generation. His descriptions of the role of communication in teaching and learning, which tended to see the schooling process as a form of social control, greatly influenced thinking about education and class and about how the social world is implanted in the individual's mind. His career was not a conventional one. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, but left school early to volunteer for the RAF. In later life he said little about those two periods, but was more positive about his experience as a social worker, when after the war he worked for three years in the East End at the Bernhard Baron Settlement and learnt about the cultural divide between working-class boys and middle-class social workers. From this world of social practice Bernstein moved in 1947 to theoretical sociology at the London School of Econ- omics. Often at odds with his teachers, he took only a lower second, and decided to earn a living as a teacher. During six years at the City Day College of Further Education he learnt more about working-class ways, and published some research in the British Journal of Sociology. The importance of this work was not recognised for several years, partly because the evidence was difficult to assemble, and partly because his writing was not clear. Nevertheless, it made a perceptive distinction. Bernstein pointed out that communication between people who know each other well (in families, working groups or military units, say) tends to consist of short sentences and predictable utterances on a limited range of topics. This code is restricted in both range of topics and degree of abstraction. But people also use a second linguistic form, with more complex sentences, the elaborated code, which has a wider range of uses and can encompass more abstract ideas. So far so good. Then, responding to one of the most difficult educational questions of the 1950s and 1960s, Bernstein went further, saying that working-class children tended to be limited to a restricted code, whereas middle-class children typically had access to both codes. And this, he claimed, explained the relative under-achievement of working-class children in school. Despite his caveats about the danger of generalising, Bernstein was criticised by some sociologists, including friends on the left, for suggesting that working-class culture was inferior to that of the middle class. In his defence, he made further qualifications in ever more convoluted language. In particular he was anxious to deny that his ideas implied that working-class children suffered from a deficit of some- thing (such as concentration, the ability to defer gratification, respect for authority or love of learning). It would perhaps have been easier to declare that there was indeed a deficit, and that he was trying to remove it. Instead, by insisting that working-class culture was not inferior but merely different, his work began to suffer from cultural relativism. Bernstein carried on digging. When he moved to University College in 1959, Bernstein met Dr Frieda Goldman-Eisler, whose analyses of hesitations in recorded speech added empirical evidence to Bernstein's ideas. Goldman-Eisler showed that pausing in speech was related to thinking time or the verbal planning of more complex speech forms; Bernstein was able to demonstrate a relationship with social class. The obvious conclusion was that working-class speech must therefore be inferior in quality to middle-class speech. But so anxious was Bernstein not to upset those who wanted to sentimentalise about the merits of working-class traditional life that he dug even further down into the pit of cultural relativism. His later work deliberately moved away from questions of working-class under-achievement into more general studies of language and socialisation. He produced a series of books under the title Primary Socialisation, Language and Education, which were published by Routledge. By this time Bernstein was firmly established at the Institute of Education. He was appointed senior lecturer in 1963 and gained a chair in 1967. He not only enriched the sociology of education, but encouraged research throughout the institute. From the 1970s he was an international figure in the world of sociology and education, receiving many prizes and honorary degrees. He retired in 1990. He is survived by his wife, Marion, a distinguished clinical psychologist, and by their two sons. Professor Basil Bernstein, sociologist, was born on November 1, 1924. He died on September 24 aged 75. 11 Oct 2000
The Times Investigating the language gap between different social classes WORKING for many years at the Institute of Education at London University, Basil Bernstein was one of the most imaginative sociologists of his generation. His descriptions of the role of communication in teaching and learning, which...
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