Social Class Stereotypes in Upper-Secondary School

Abstract

This chapter is a little different to the two preceding ones, in the sense that although it has been produced within an ethnographic research project, it is not primarily an ethnographic chapter. It is based on reconsidered data and analyses from an article from 2015 called Institutional discrimination: Stereotypes and social reproduction of “class” in the Swedish upper-secondary school by Anna-Carin Jonsson and Dennis Beach that was published in the journal of the Social Psychology of Education. Following up on findings described in an earlier publication it is based on a questionnaire submitted to upper-secondary school pupils and discusses some alarming effects of separating 15–16 year-old school pupils for isolated academic and practical study programmes. It considers specifically the creation of stereotypes by youth on academic programmes regarding themselves and people like them (in-group characteristics) on the one hand, and young people who are enrolees on vocational programmes on the other (out-group characteristics). These are shown to be very discriminatory stereotypes about the self and others that are very negative toward students on vocational, so-called practical programs. Academic programme pupils describe themselves as civilised, aware and cultivated individuals and others as uncivil, uncultivated and irrational beings who need a form of moral surveillance in both their own best interests and the collective (common) interests of the societies they are part of. Like the ruling colonial elite as described in books such as Orwell’s Burmese Days, they see themselves as members of a special group who are the bearers of civilisation, rationality, self-control and autonomy due to their possession of bourgeois cultural and educational capital and the purported absence of cultivation in the other group.