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Lynsey Hanley argues that perceptions of educational ability and achievement are tainted by class. She asks how we can ensure that working-class children get the same opportunities to succeed

"They just don't want to learn." This was a phrase I used to hear all the time at the large, tatty, hugely undersubscribed comprehensive school I attended between 1987 and 1992. Some teachers - in particular those who were newly qualified or ground down - would say it directly to us, parents would say it to each other (because it was always someone else’s child who "didn't want to learn") and I would say it to myself. "You can’t teach them anything, because they don't want to learn," we said conspiratorially, as if it was the children who were to blame for the fact that ours was the school you went to if no one had got round to telling you what a bad idea it was.

The reason I did relatively well at school, I was told and told myself, was because I “wanted to learn", while others "weren’t interested". I would get all my GCSEs because I was “the sort of child who would anyway”: I didn’t need to be pushed, because I pushed myself. “A pleasure to teach", they would write in reports, which sounded suspiciously like "makes my job easier". And the others? If they didn’t want to learn, you couldn’t make them.

Because that's how it had seemed on the surface throughout my school career, and because the phrases were repeated often enough, I held on unselfconsciously to the idea that some children were innately indifferent to learning and creativity until at least the time I reached university. The fact that I’d achieved that long-held ambition seemed to vindicate the years spent sitting in classes where nothing got done because the temperament and atmosphere of the room was dictated by the person who cared least whether anything useful might be learned that day.

None of this is intended to sound smug. The results I managed - seven As and a B at GCSE, an A and two Bs at A-level and a lower-second-class degree - would depress a middle-class child of averagely high attainment in an era when stars are added to high As to make them more special. What I hope it shows is the ease with which it’s possible to believe the things you are told when your experiences are limited, and the extent to which such myths persist about the ability of children in working-class schools to achieve as highly as those in largely middle-class ones.

The experience of university revealed, finally, that to feel vindicated was not only wrong, it was irrelevant. At sixth form college it was just about possible to persist with the idea that meritocracy was a living concept. Although it contained few students from my part of the borough, which tended instead to supply school-leavers either straight to work or to the technical college down the road, it was such a relief to have arrived at an institution filled with people who 'wanted to learn' that it took a long while for the simple clear facts of class inequality to sink in.

The penny ought to have dropped earlier. I’d known one other person from school, five years older, who’d begun A-levels at the same college and had to drop two of her three courses out of sheer unpreparedness for their difficulty. Two or three other pupils from the same year, all boys, were going to the same college, but eventually dropped out through a combination of social awkwardness, filial priorities and a general sense that they simply weren't cut out for it.
No one had ever used the phrase 'working class' when we were growing up. Instead it was 'people like us', to which I took to mean people who could expect certain things from life but not others. It took another couple of years before I made a connection between the expectations of 'people like us' and the attrition rate from our already tiny cohort of stayers-on at sixth form college. When you have an opportunity that you have been ill-primed to take up, it is not only more likely that you will not be able to make the most of it, but that you will also blame yourself for having being ill-primed.

Confidence is everything. Being told I was 'the sort of child' who would do well led me to do well. It wasn’t an expectation, it was an assumption. Expectations are for middle-class children, who, despite varying levels of motivation, tend to knuckle down and deliver good results simply because it is expected of them. Assumptions are those that suggest that any success achieved by a child in a working-class school must have an innate, rather than environmental, basis. After all, "If it’s not there, y’can’t put it there".

The American psychotherapist and social activist Michael Lerner, having practised in a working-class district of Oakland, California, in the 1970s and 1980s, developed a compelling theory of 'surplus powerlessness' to explain why few working-class adults challenged unfair working practices, low status and inadequate pay. Powerlessness corrupts, he wrote in 1986, because it crushes out of all proportion our sense of what is worthwhile and possible: "We look at our world and our own behaviour and we tell ourselves that, although we really aren’t living the lives we want to live, there is nothing we can do about it."

Although we may lack power as individuals in relation to human-dwarfing yet human-made institutions, we still have the power to shape our own lives and to provide solace and solidarity to each other. If we don’t, then powerlessness has indeed corrupted us, because it has led us to deny responsibility for our lives and for the lives of others. On reading Lerner’s work I realised that what prevented my secondary school from being a happier and more successful place was surplus powerlessness on the part of everyone involved: parents, teachers and the pupils themselves. There weren’t enough people involved in the school who weren’t in some way trapped by assumptions about the way working-class children fail disproportionately to benefit from the education system.

Yet, to give one example, the impact of depression on working-class parents and, by extension, on their children, is consistently overlooked. One great benefit of Jamie Oliver's recent television series, Jamie’s Ministry of Food, was that it showed plainly and clearly how a persistent lack of money led mothers who didn’t, or couldn’t, cook to feel endlessly trapped; that this feeling of being trapped often led to chronic depression; and that depression caused them to eat poorly, to lack the motivation to cook and to have difficulty meeting their children’s needs.

There are, as a consequence, many children who raise themselves in their home environment and, once characterised as either 'unteachable' or 'self-reliant', are left to educate themselves in their school environment.

Gillian Evans, an anthropologist and author of the study 'Educational Failure and Working-Class White Children in Britain', has described the way in which troubled children’s responses to authority is assumed to be pathological by their teachers, who come to believe that insubordination is innate and therefore, in a way, their own fault.

Families struggling with multiple economic and social pressures will contain more than their fair share of children who are tired, confused and angry. This is why a school like the one I went to - unpopular and situated on a council estate with high levels of poverty - suffers far more from the effects of poor teaching than more popular schools in 'nicer' areas.

Evans calls the refusal of many working-class boys, in particular, to engage with schooling as it is presented to them as 'an oppositional stance'. They are not ignorant to start with: they choose ignorance because it shows how forcefully they reject being told what to do by someone who doesn't understand where, in the common parlance, they’re coming from. Nieztsche called this 'ressentiment': abdicating responsibility for your behaviour because you refuse to accept the limits placed on it. The problems of choosing ignorance are manifest in a society that now relies on knowledge for jobs and that places a high premium on self-policing, self-regulating behaviour.

So tightly bound is social class to the education system, I would argue, that education has the potential to cause deep rifts within families and peer groups if it doesn’t equally benefit all members. This is another reason why it can be expedient for working-class children to stifle or deny the desire to learn for fear of displeasing parents or friends. One student at an unnamed high-ranking British university described to the educational sociologists Gill Crozier and Diane Reay how she had learned not to mention her university, or anything she did there, in front of her mother, who was deeply suspicious of the institution and perhaps fearful of its potential to change her daughter's outlook and priorities.

There are exceptions to every rule. Unlike the 'black swan' of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's bestseller The Child Who Would Do Well Anyway, it doesn’t subvert the idea of a natural order of things. It only shows what is possible if the oppressive armour of surplus powerlessness can in some way be dented.

Of course children want to learn - in fact, they can’t help it. How else would they know what exasperates their teacher, what placates or frightens their parents, or what keeps their peers at their side?

"They just don't want to learn" is what they hear, however, and so they learn that all the things they have been taught in the home, in the street, by observing, count for little in a world quite different to the one in which they live. 

Author Lynsey Hanley's most recent work is Estates