Introduction

There is another working class: what we might call the working class of the mind.

This chapter focuses specifically on the emotional landscapes of class, showing how schools can become the source of all kinds of fantasies, fears, anxieties, hopes and desires. In particular, it attempts to expose the injuries of class that are perpetuated through the educational system. While the greatest damage is inflicted on the working classes, the chapter also draws on data to reveal the damage exacted on the middle and upper classes.

In earlier chapters we have seen repeatedly the ways in which classed experiences generate powerful emotional responses, from Steve McQueen’s rage and disgust to the bottom-set students’ shame and abjection. This chapter presents interview data collected between 2000 and 2015 to illustrate the powerful dynamic between emotions and class inequalities. Arguing that class is always lived on both a conscious and an unconscious level, it focuses on affective aspects of class, revealing the complicated combinations of guilt, shame, anger, fear, defensiveness, empathy and conciliation that are generated in response to class inequalities in education. In the first part of the chapter I draw on a number of case studies in order to illustrate the intense emotional pressure that results from attempting to succeed ‘against the odds’. In the case of Shaun, the working-class boy, this pressure is caused by his working-class background; for Max, the middle-class boy, it is a consequence of context, the predominantly working-class comprehensive he attends. In the second part of the chapter I examine the powerful affective costs for working-class children of attending schools seen as being ‘second rate’ and ‘low status’ by both themselves and others.

Tales of trouble and turmoil

Shaun’s story is of a hard-working, well-behaved, poor, white, working-class boy trying to achieve academically, first in a predominantly working-class, multi-ethnic primary school, then in a ‘sink’ inner-city boys’ comprehensive school, while simultaneously trying to maintain his standing within the male peer-group culture. And, despite his efforts and struggles, Shaun ended up leaving school at 16 with minimal qualifications. In order to understand Shaun’s predicament I wanted to make sense of his psychic struggles as well as his educational trajectory; I wanted to understand how structures become embodied and generate ambivalences and tensions.