Why Bernstein?

For all practical purposes, “the Anglo-Saxon world” refers to where English is predominantly spoken as a first language, that is to say, the UK and its former colonies/dominions, particularly the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. However, Bernstein scholarship in the sociology of education is vestigial in North America, while his ideas have had powerful appeal to some scholars in the Portuguese-and Spanish-speaking worlds. With few exceptions, the empirical and theoretical advances which Bernstein codified in successive volumes of Class, Codes and Control rest foursquare on the empirical work of Pedro, Diaz, Cox, Morais and the like. Moreover, while his sociolinguistic work has sustained lively academic progress in some centres in Australia and work of highest quality on pedagogic discourse has been sustained in Cape Town, the purchase of his ideas on the sociology of education in general in the UK has been limited; it remains more enclave than mainstream. There have always been at least three audiences for his scholarship, in sociolinguistics, teacher education and the sociology of education. The former served as the origin of Bernstein’s public reputation, providing the notion of “codes” which undergirded the structure of his thought throughout his work and continues not least in the work of former colleagues, such as Hasan (2004) who has sought, among other things, to relate it to Vygotsky, as have Daniels (2001) and other activity theorists. Yet we might do well to remember that, even in sociolinguistic circles, when Bernstein visited the USA his welcome was as an anthropologist. In the UK, a popular work such as Chambers’ (2003) Sociolinguistic Theory has not a single mention or citation of Bernstein’s work. His sociolinguistic thesis set Bernstein in the consciousness of British teacher trainers in the 1960s and 1970s as the person who demonstrated the ineducability of the working class – those who could neither speak nor learn “properly” – rather missing the carefully nuanced theoretical delicacy of his Sociological Research Unit’s findings on class-control relationships, consciousness, cognition and behaviours. The episode with Labov became a wonderful example of knowledge recontextualization, the re-forming, always ideological, of “new” knowledge into that which is regarded as safe and fit to teach, in this case, largely to intending teachers. “Cultural deprivation” served the interests of both political and school masters; blame for educational failure lay with the lower social orders themselves; pedagogy had no voice of its own. That these issues are not dead may be witnessed in relation to Nash’s (2006, p. 550) claims. Systematic misrecognition of his sociolinguistic thesis deeply wounded Bernstein and led directly to his decision that future empirical work would be carried out in the context of doctoral supervisions rather than funded team work. The agenda was portended by his famous 1971 “Classification and Framing” paper and its successive reworkings traced in the volumes of Class, Codes and Control published between 1971 and 1990, culminating in the eponymous volume V in 1996 and his final words in 2000 and 2001.

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