Young People and the Urban Comprehensive: Remaking Cosmopolitan Citizens or Reproducing Hegemonic White Middle-Class Values?

Abstract

Middle-class parents, ambitious for their children, tend to have a sense of ‘futurity’ (Prout 2000) or what Butler with Robson (2003) term ‘horizon’, that is middle-class parents are confident in how they envisage their children’s future trajectories and how to ensure these (p. 141). Underpinning these objectives lies a strong, implicit desire to socially reproduce the family. However, our middle-class parents have not been as strategic in such intent (through their choice of school) as for example those studied by Ball (2003) or Butler with Robson (2003). They do not engage to the same degree in the competition for reproducing their class advantage. As we have seen, one of their intentions in choosing the urban comprehensive school was to provide a more expansive and diverse experience for their children which would provide them with opportunities to prepare them as global twenty-first-century and even cosmopolitan citizens (Beck 2006). The question for us is whether they have merely found new strategies to ensure their social and cultural reproduction or whether their actions reflect an attempt to re-orientate or reconstruct their and their children’s middle-class identities based on a more equitable cosmopolitanism. Through the preceding chapters we have seen the tensions and struggles that surround these endeavours and have also shown that the parents are beset with contradictions and moral ambiguity (Sayer 2005; Crozier et al. 2008), although in Chapter 4 we demonstrated the assurance with which parents made potentially ‘risky’ decisions. In this chapter we turn to the views of the young people themselves and explore from their perspectives and through their voices the impact of the urban comprehensive experience on their identities