The White Middle Classes and Urban Comprehensive Schools: Ambivalences and Anxieties of Privilege

Abstract

This chapter examines the motivations, attitudes and practices of white middle class families who send their children to multiethnic urban comprehensive schools. The current historical period of economic recession, public sector cuts and increasing austerity in the UK has intensified the middle class drive for social reproduction, reinforcing competitive individualism and self-protective educational strategies across the middle classes (Ball, 2003; Brantlinger, 2003; Butler with Robson, 2003). However, the parents in the research that colleagues and I have recently carried out (Reay et al., 2011) are making ‘against the grain’ educational choices by choosing schools most white middle classes avoid. In doing so they are forced to address the troubling issue of how to balance ideals and political commitments with social privilege and tactical imperatives for social reproduction. The chapter explores how this tension is experienced by the parents who often succumb to ‘getting the best for their own child’ despite their good intentions and civic commitments. In particular, it focuses on the powerful affective consequences of juggling dispositions of self-interested acquisitiveness with more civic and communal impulses.