When students are failed: 'love' as an alternative education discourse?

Abstract

This article explores how classist education practices are constituted through education systems and structures and through the habitus of key agents. This school and classroom ethnography focuses on the education practices and habitus of the head teacher of a girls' secondary school, who is also a key agent in the Maltese national education policy community. Though structured through the discourses and institutional practices of the highly selective national system, Ms Sicura's habitus is also a response to the challenges the present conjuncture poses to her. This includes the biographies of her low socio-economic status students and the complex needs they bring to school, as well as the increasingly contradictory demands placed by the decentralisation process of the selective education system. Overwhelmed by these and struggling to offer a valid school experience for her low-achieving students, Ms Sicura responds with a discourse of 'love'. However, this replaces a programme for educational progress. It reproduces the global and national classist education discourses, in which low socio-economic status students are contained by 'care', while middle-class students are offered quality education in competitive market.