The process of normalisation (in the Foucauldian context meaning ‘to refine and make everything the same’) within the school separates children from their individuality and binds them to collective standards. Examination is designed to reward children who have come to the same conclusion as each other or the same conclusion of adults and to view new or unique ideas as wrong by default. The curricula of Maths, Science, History, Geography and Technology are rigid and focus on past beliefs and discoveries; Art, English Literature, Media Studies encourage originality but still within predetermined frameworks and methods. One will not be rewarded from straying from the curriculum, arguably, they will be punished, which Foucault (1991) calls the “penalty of the norm” (p. 183).

The “possibility of new achievements” depends “upon making them in what may be some very different way” (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 128) than before. Creative freedom in education is crucial to innovation but is disallowed in school despite children having the right to freedom of thought and of belief (UNCRC, 1989). Punishing them for not having the prescribed thoughts or beliefs that are handed down from government arguably violates this right.  

School uniforms

All students are held to the same standards, regardless of their circumstances or background. Uniforms are compulsory and a child may be punished for wearing the incorrect shoes, jumper, blazer or even skirt and trousers. The average cost of school uniform in the UK is a staggering £212.88 according to a government report in 2015. Poorer children are more likely than wealthier children to be punished or humiliated because brand new uniform may be inaccessible to them and regularly outgrown.

School uniforms are symbolic of normalisation. “We all know deep in our hearts that wearing uniform is a method of control” (Beloff in Times Educational Supplement, 2003 as quoted in Meighan & Harber, 2007, p. 82) and arguably exclusive to more wealthier households. Compulsory schooling is situated behind a uniform pay-wall. Children who cannot afford uniform with the school logo will be immediately identifiable thus labelled as low-income.

A popular argument for school uniform is that it limits social class inequality by disallowing home clothes that could be distinguished by brand or quality and therefore the financial status of the pupil be laid bare. This, however, is a hypocritical argument as pupils or parents are still expected to buy their own (expensive) uniforms, the newness and legitimacy of which can easily be observed. “The average total expenditure on school uniform for the 2014/15 school year […] was £212.88. This was less expensive for those in primary school (£192.14 for boys and £201.04 for girls) than in secondary school (£231.01 for boys and £239.93 for girls)” (DfE, June 2015). This means that the average cost for boys’ uniform is £211.58 and girls’ is £220.49, a 4.1% difference in price between the genders. This does not include the average price for P.E. kit which was £87.67 in 2015. Families have no choice but to meet these ever rising prices (Battersby, 2019). Meanwhile, 30% of children were living in poverty in the UK in 2018-19 (Department for Work & Pensions, 2020).

Considering this, can education in the UK really be considered ‘free’ when there are a multitude of extra costs? If uniforms are there to protect poorer children from alienation, all uniforms should theoretically be provided with no cost to the parent nor child. Uniforms make everybody look the same with the exception of those who cannot afford them.

Classism and meritocracy

Setting based on ability or rewarding good behaviour with prefect positions creates a feeling of inferiority and superiority amongst peers. Paul Willis (1978) conducted a series of interviews with working class, male school pupils titled Learning to Labour. This study revealed how teachers may sexualise working class boys, with one teacher remarking “’he’s had more than me I can tell you’” (p. 16); how working class boys recognise that factories are “’just like an extension of school’” (p. 96) and notes that working class boys adopt a “counter-school culture” and most do not aspire to do mental labour in the future nor acquire the rewards it may bring, further, that meritocratic ideals in school assume that every pupil wants the same things from life (p. 147). The “self-disqualification” of working-class boys from education is partly due to how “manual labour is associated with the social superiority of masculinity, and mental labour with the social inferiority of femininity” (p. 148); the resentment of the superficial authority given to teachers over children and being “’subject to their every whim’” (p. 11); and negative attitudes from teachers towards working-class pupils. Apple (1980 as quoted in Meighan & Harber, 2007, p. 333) views the attitudes of these boys as being a “rather realistic assessment of the rewards of the obedience and conformism which the school seeks to extract from working class youths”. Willis (1978) concludes that teachers should decentre themselves in handling the rebellion of pupils:

Rather than being scared into a moral panic about ‘disruption and violence in the classroom’ (which has its own reproductive function with respect to conservative ideology) teachers can place the counter-school culture in its proper social context and consider its implication for its members own long-term future. (p. 190)

Goodman (1971) suggests that the idea that lack of schooling results in unemployment is “propaganda” (p. 19) and he questions whether schooling is beneficial for individuals and society. In schooling, there are those who achieve and there are those who do not. These are relative concepts: the success of one pupil depends on the failure of another. If all students nationally were to achieve over 90%, the grade boundaries would be changed to maintain the bell-curve, rather than awarding each pupil with an A*.

The idea of a meritocracy suggests that success and failure exist within the individual: one can born with intelligence or possess the drive to work hard for it. Setting is a process of separating children by ability with the ‘cleverest’ doing creative and challenging work and the ‘least cleverest’ doing worksheets and repetitive labour:

We learn reading and boredom, writing and boredom, arithmetic and boredom, and so on according to the curriculum, till in the end it is quite certain you can put us in the most boring job there is and we’ll endure it. (Common in Meighan, 1986, p. 75)

MacIntryre (2007, para. 17) emphasises the need for  “liberal education, not job training”; in many ways, job-based education hinders the possibility for true innovation as it reduces educational practice to the aim of repeating history (see MacIntyre, 1987) and reproducing social hierarchies.

It can be argued that low achieving students are trained to do unstimulating work to make them submit to similar jobs in the future. The educational system is not designed nor enforced for equal opportunity and awareness of the reproduction of inequality in schools will not be sufficient in tackling it. Just like sexist, racist and homophobic laws took a great deal of opposition before they were removed, the opposition to ageism will require a similar degree of determination. As Illich (1971) argues, the socially constructed differentiation between adult and child allows for segregation, domination and forceful educational labour to be imposed on children. While education that is accessible to all is undoubtedly a privilege, the separation of children based on age makes the false assumption that all within that age group should have similar attainment, alienating those who do not, and creating a meritocratic ideal that ignores the disadvantages faced by marginalised groups.

Cheating and assessment

School pupils are forbidden to collaborate with one another unless instructed to do so. Separating bodies and minds makes analysis of each child possible: “it [makes] the educational space function like a learning machine, but also as a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding” (Foucault, 1991, p.147). Foucault (1991) likens this process to the way prisoners are disunited from their peers and observed constantly. Underachieving or misbehaving students are easily identified and receive correctional punishment or are removed entirely. Wenger (1998) suggests that this type of examination has a negative impact on education:

To assess learning we use tests with which students struggle…where knowledge must be demonstrated out of context, and where collaborating is considered cheating…Most of us come out of this treatment feeling that learning is boring and arduous, and that we are really not cut out for it. (p. 3)

Grades are supposed to measure intelligence but actually measure memorisation; students “merely read and imitate essays that have been successful in the examinations in recent years” (Zhu Xi, n.d. translated by de Bary & Bloom, 1999, p. 741). The child is taught that the selected information is correct while all other knowledge is wrong by strict assessment criteria.

The more sinister side of normalisation is the fact that children are, indeed, punished if they do not conform, forcing them to sacrifice their own will and creativity to escape short-term penalties or long-term poverty. Foucault (1991) suggests that assessment and examination is a “normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish” (p. 184) with “eyes that see without being seen” (p. 171) i.e. exam boards. Those who have memorised the information of the curriculum are granted access to further and higher education; those who do not or cannot memorise the information will be labelled as inadequate by job or university entry requirements. The idea of a meritocracy informs us that this is fair and equal; however, it could be argued that a fail grade is a punishment, one that may have serious consequences for a child later in life.

Labelling theory and self-fulfilling prophecies

Labelling theory suggests that people can be labelled as deviant, underachieving, average or gifted by adults, who have a presumed authority especially in the environment of the school, and the person who is labelled may internalise this, becoming and re-enacting the behaviours that are expected of and associated with that label. For example, children born in the summer may be labelled as developmentally behind in reception and year one; by the time they reach an age where this disadvantage is significantly reduced, they still carry a label that is difficult to remove. 88% of pupils do not move from the sets they are placed in at the age of four throughout their entire time at school (Boaler, 2008) and black boys are overrepresented in lower sets (Francis, 2018). Labels can prevent social mobility and equality:

Children allocated to higher sets and streams tend to improve their performance, yet the performance of children of similar initial measured ability who are placed in lower sets and streams deteriorates. (Meighan & Harber, 2007, p. 398)

Cognitive psychology suggests that people are more likely to put in effort into their work if they believe that they can succeed (Zimmerman, 2000). Setting may prevent hard work from low achieving pupils because they are lead to believe that their set (or assigned location within the school) represents their intelligence and rank within the educational sphere. Labelling children limits them. Furthermore, Becker (1963, p. 8-9) highlights that:

Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’. The deviant is one to whom the label has successfully been applied: deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label.

Labelling theory is widely used in criminology, sociology and education (Meighan & Harber, 2007, p. 368); it describes a general but common pattern of subjective judgements from authority figures, when made obvious and repeated over time, dominating an individual’s perception of themselves and thereby heavily influencing their behaviour. Furthermore, Seligman and Maier’s (1976) learned helplessness theory reveals a tendency for animals to ‘give in’ to suffering when they learn that their actions do not or cannot affect outcomes or the occurrence of mistreatment. Therefore, a child’s capacity to attempt to disprove their label is limited. Instead of pathologising the labelled child, responsibility can be placed on the environments, hierarchies and authority figures that construct the ideal pupil and demonise natural variations that occur within aged-based grouping.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a label given to children who struggle with obedience, quietness and who “only pay attention to things she/he is interested in” (Conners’ Teacher Rating Scale, 1997). These children, who have no say in their diagnosis nor prescription due to ageism, are forced to take psychostimulant medication to better their educational capability which is increasingly being viewed as unethical (Carlson et al., 1992). Teachers are given a “formal role” in the diagnosis of ADHD, according to the DSM-IV (1994), despite them having a “vested interest in detecting and managing disruptive children” in their classroom (Phillips, 2006, p. 182). Timimi (2005) argues that the diagnostic criteria for ADHD is subjective as it uses Likert-scale options such as “very often” which are open to interpretation. ADHD is sometimes criticised as being a myth (Armstrong, 1997) and that its symptoms are “the result of a conflict between individuals and their environment (a socially constructed problem)” (Freedman, 2016, p. 33). The diagnosis of ADHD and the subsequent medicalisation is a way for a child’s behaviour in school to be managed by people whose job depends on obedience from children. The teacher’s role in diagnosis makes the label unreliable due to their proximity to the child and the subjectivity of the symptoms.