Youth insecurity in schools: what’s going on with class?

Abstract

Young people from working-class backgrounds are feeling increasingly insecure in school, and for good reasons. The institution of schooling is being converted into an instrument of neoliberal control. In this paper, I discuss how schools are becoming increasingly insecure places for working-class young people, and how they are responding, and I do this in four parts; first, through the construction of a particular kind of classed learning identity; second, I make the case for why we need a more explicit focus on social class in schooling; third, I pursue how working-class students are being taught to ‘learn their place’ in school, and what this means for sociological analysis; and finally, in moving beyond a bleak and deterministic interpretation, I provide some examples of counter-storytelling to illustrate how working-class culture ‘speaks back’ to the institution of schooling.