5 - Snakes and ladders: aspirations and barriers

Summary

Life and destiny are largely determined by birth and social class position, as Salman Rushdie (1981: 141) contends in his Booker Prize-winning magical realist novel Midnight's Children: ‘All games have morals, the game of Snakes and Ladders captures as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake a ladder will compensate.’ The novel is a loose allegory based on events coinciding with Indian independence in 1947 and demonstrates the impact on children born at that moment in history.

Those who experience disadvantaged childhoods find themselves locked into a world dominated by poverty, discrimination and exclusion from which it is very difficult to escape. Education purportedly provides the ladder of opportunity to an autonomous and prosperous life, but participation is already constrained for young working-class people and marginalised ethnic minorities by a lack of what Pierre Bourdieu has called cultural, social and economic capital. Bourdieu (1973: 60) argued that the main function of education is the cultural and social reproduction of power relationships and the maintenance of privilege and social hierarchy across the generations:

By making social hierarchies and the reproduction of these hierarchies appear to be based on the hierarchy of ‘gifts’, merit or skills established and ratified by its sanctions, or, in a word, by converting social hierarchies into academic hierarchies, the education system fulfils a function of legitimation which is more and more necessary to the perpetuation of the ‘social order’.

DEIS schools seek to compensate for often invisible inequalities hidden in divergent expectations, cultural codes and popular vernacular shared meanings. Disadvantage is also visible in the material poverty of children's lives, where every day is a struggle for existence, including adequate nourishment and food security. At the core of educational inequality is the class system based on a binary between privilege and disadvantage that has both objective and subjective dimensions.

Pierre Bourdieu, at a conference in Grenoble in December 1997, delivered a paper entitled La Precarite est aujoud hui partout, in which he identified alienated youth as ‘the precariat’, recognising the vulnerability and support needs of this marginalised group.