Telling Tales out of School

Conclusions

A school-based myth (or series of myths) which is told and retold through time, both draws support from, and comments on, the structures implicated in that school's existence. As Anthony Giddens (1981; 1984; 1991), Roy Bhaskar (1979), and others have pointed out, structures are constituted by human social practices, which they themselves have shaped. Though it might be easy to see teachers and administrators as the agents whose practices reinscribed particular structures at Beal, student behaviour - passive or active - also played a role. The school's overall organization, and varying course contents, pedagogic styles and approaches to discipline all contributed to the structuration of everyday school life, as did the rules and norms of youth culture. Thus the structured maintenance of gender divisions through course selection, curriculum variation and coercive control over much student activity also received support in the 1930s from student practices such as wearing gender-distinctive clothing, or lining up on opposite walls at the start of school dances (see also Connell, 1987). By the 1960s though, students were moving towards a more unisex youth culture, subverting curriculum structures which would fall during the 1970s.

Although oral testimony offers a range of insight into the myths, structures and practices of everyday life, it is still only one way of understanding what goes on in a particular classroom, school, or education system; many other, equally useful, ways of representing schooling are possible. Each type of data or description - whether "primary" or "secondary" - is only one more way in which people try to present their understanding of the extremely complex process of education.