Schooling the working-class subject, the production of working-class identities through bourgeois discourse

grantor: University of TorontoWhile there has been much attention devoted to examining the working class in the academic literature on schooling, very little attention has been paid to the 'practices and politics of representing the working class. ' In this thesis, I explore a range of representations of social class. I argue that these representations are central features of the production of class difference and that they are effects and products of ideals and desires embedded in bourgeois discourses of meritocracy, rationalism and objectivity. One of the main goals of the thesis is to pay attention to whose desires are being represented in discourses and representations about the working class and to challenge the assumption that knowledge is a universal truth that applies to everyone in the same way. A key problem that is explored is locating and defining what is "normal" in relations of oppressive power. The idea of the bourgeois gaze is used to deconstruct the ways in which knowledge has been constructed about the working class through various education discourses. The thesis reviews new discourses of learning that have emerged as part of a general economic restructuring. I draw from a variety of sources, including life history interviews of adult workers in the industrial and service sectors in Ontario, workplace aptitude testing practices, recent workplace training literature, academic studies on social class and difference, as well as my own involvement in workplace training endeavours. I examine how it is that these discourses fail to recognize the worker as "knower" or as a producer of knowledge and I demonstrate how these discourses transfer normative liberal ideals about knowledge onto the working-class subject. I suggest that the very notion of "learning" is a moral discourse that regulates how working-class people are positioned discursively in relation to schooling and to the workplace. I situate the findings as part of a process of objectification and "othering" and examine their roots in the development of liberal democratic governance. I suggest that the construction of workers as ignorant, or incompetent is rooted in the development of modern capitalist society and in notions of rationality. I conclude that the discursive production of class difference is an important part of bourgeois identity formation and of broader forms of social inequity.Ph.D