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AbstractThis article deploys insights from Michael Young's 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy to challenge the dominant ideology of meritocracy in contemporary British society. It draws on ethnographic research in schools over a twenty‐five year period to illustrate the damage the illusion of meritocracy inflicts on children and young people, but particularly those from working class backgrounds. It argues that the consequences of the pretence of meritocracy are to be found in everyday practices of testing, hyper‐competition and setting, and beyond the classroom in the designation of predominantly working class schools as 'rubbish schools for rubbish learners'. It concludes that, beyond the negative consequences for working class learners, there are wider consequences for British society, exacerbating social divisions and encouraging the growth of distrust, prejudice, envy, resentment, and contempt between different social groups.

This article examines the extent to which families can operate against the dominant practices of the societies they are part of by focusing on a specific fraction of the white middle classes: those who can be seen to be acting against the grain of white middle-class orthodoxy by sending their children to schools with a substantial percentage of working-class and/or minority ethnic students. Drawing on concepts of 'amoral familism' and 'social solidarity', it explores the tensions the families confront between a strong commitment to comprehensive schooling and a wider collectivity, and a more narrow inward focus on the interests of the immediate family to the exclusion of wider society. It concludes that as long as neoliberalism remains the dominant ideology, there is little hope for the development of new ways of 'doing family' that involve looking out in inclusive open ways rather than focusing inwards in exclusive, and often excluding, ways.

This short paper is a response to Nel Noddings's article on schooling for democracy. Whilst agreeing with the basic premises of Noddings's argument, it questions the possibility of parity between academic and vocational tracks given the inequitable social and educational contexts the two types of learning would have to coexist within. Drawing on the educational philosophies of John Dewey and R. H. Tawney, I argue that both the United States and the United Kingdom need to create educational systems that reduce the social distance between people rather than, as the current systems do, exacerbate them. This is an issue of hearts and minds as well as policies and practices. As Dewey pointed out a hundred years ago, what is required is education that results in "mutual regard of all citizens for all other citizens," and the paper concludes that both countries are still far away from achieving this.

Die Haltung der Oberschicht gegenüber der Arbeiterschicht hat sich zwar gewandelt, ist aber noch immer stark beeinflusst durch ein kulturell bedingtes Verständnis der Gesellschaftsschichten. Die Sicht der Elite auf die Arbeiterschicht hat sich dahin gehend verändert, dass sie statt als wilde und undisziplinierte Masse nun als Gruppe von Individuen angesehen wird, die mehr Eigenverantwortung für ihr Leben übernehmen müssten. Sowohl Medien als auch Politiker sind in Bezug auf mangelhafte Bildungsleistungen der Arbeiterschicht ganz auf kulturelle Aspekte fokussiert. Ein höheres Bewusstsein für den gesellschaftlichen Wettbewerb, die Wirtschaft und eine höchst individualisierte, konkurrenzorientierte neoliberale Kultur bilden mächtige und tief verwurzelte Barrieren für größere Bildungsgleichheit. Das Ergebnis ist ein polarisiertes Bildungswesen, das noch immer von einer klassenmäßig stark gespaltenen Gesellschaft gezeichnet ist, auf welche die endlosen Initiativen der Politik mit ihren Versprechungen, größere soziale Mobilität und soziale Gerechtigkeit zu fördern, bisher kaum Einfluss nehmen konnten. (ICF2)

This article draws on qualitative in-depth interviews with 63 white middle-class families whose children attend inner London comprehensives.The white middle classes, as they are inscribed in policy discourses, best fit the ideal of the democratic citizen — individualistic, rational, responsible, participatory, the active chooser. Yet, narratives of white middle-class choice reveal both powerful defences and the power of the affective. Sublimated in the psyche of the majority white middle classes who avoid inner-city comprehensives and the more inclusive parents in this ESRC-funded research project are multifaceted and differing responses to the classed and ethnic `other'. This article examines frequently overlooked anxieties, conflicts, desires and tensions within middle-class identities generated by education choice policies. However, the main focus is white middle-class relationships to their classed and ethnic `other', and the part played by the psychosocial in white middle-class identities and identifications within predominantly working-class, multi-ethnic schooling.