EDUCATION SOCIAL INEQUALITY

To what Extent can Education Overcome Social Inequality in UK

To what Extent can Education Overcome Social Inequality in UK

Introduction

At the heart of the relationship between education and social inequality is the idea that some expressions of education are valued more than others in a way that is associated with some people being more valued than others and some ideas expressed by people through education being more valued than others. The purpose of this paper is to explore the range of ways that these connections are articulated in Britain's education sector.

Gender and Social Inequality

The gender and education literature in linguistics, sociology, and anthropology developed in response to the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s, a social movement that focused on changing women's inferior position relative to men in British society.

Education and Social Inequality

Education is implicated in the feminist critique in several ways. First there is the idea that the semantic structure of English derogates women, and renders them invisible, among other things. Examples of these ideas include the proliferation of terms that disparaged women sexually, such as “whore” and “bitch,” that dimunized them, as in “baby,” “chickie,” and “cutie,” and that rendered them invisible, as in the use of the pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his” to refer to both women and men.

Second there is the idea that women's education style is perceived as powerless, compared to the powerful education of men. Lakoff characterized women's education as more polite, and her work opened up the development of politeness theory more generally (Bourdieu, 2007), and the development of comparative inquiry on whether women's education is cross-linguistically more polite than men's. Power- lessness means not being attended to, and accordingly involved a kind of silencing of women (Blommaert, 2008).

Third, women in conversation were thought to be disadvantaged compared with men in the regulation of turns at talk by being interrupted more than men (Bloch, 2005) and by not having the topics they introduced into conversation developed to the same extent that men's are (Besnier, 2007). In this way there was overlap between the literature on education use in bureaucratic settings. This too was seen as a way of silencing women.

Some of these claims about differences in women's and men's speech have been challenged as conceptually inadequate, as varying contextually, as having undergone change as a result of the critique of patriarchy, or as simply empirically undemon- strable, most notably the idea that men interrupt more than women (Bauman, 2006). Yet all of the features I have discussed continue to be perceived by women as sources of inequality in their daily lives.

Feminist anthropological research and research in the ethnography of communication also has given rise to the idea that a gendered social organization of speech entails the exclusion of women from speech events and speech genres in public domains, as opposed to private domains of education use (Bakhtin, 2006), and it is this theoretical perspective that is most unique to linguistic anthropology. The kind of speech community anthropologists envisioned when they developed ...