Education study-guide 7
External factors: cultural deprivation theory
Cultural deprivation theory focuses on class differences in achievement within state
schools. It essentially blames working-class parents and culture for depriving
working-class children of the essential cultural skills required for success in
schools. Consequently, it suggests that working-class children do less well than their
middle-class peers because they are allegedly culturally deficient or disadvantaged
by their parents’ failure to either show an interest in their education and/or their
failure to equip their children with certain skills.
Cultural deprivation theory argues that working-class children are ‘failed’ by their
parents in three crucial cultural ways
(1) They do not teach their children to speak or think in a way that suits the
classroom.
(2) They subscribe to values that impede educational success
(3) They lack interest in their children’s education.
LANGUAGE
Bernstein (1975) argued that middle-class parents socialise their children into an
‘elaborated speech code’ which means that their children can confidently use
language that is both abstract and complex. Consequently the language use and
level of middle-class children is similar to that used by teachers and found in
textbooks and exams. In contrast, working-class parents socialise their children
into ‘restricted speech codes’ which involve less use of adverbs and adjectives and
which fail to fully convey complex meaning. As a result, working-class children
fail to fully understand teacher exposition or instruction, and are less likely to
understand information conveyed in textbooks or exams as quickly as their
middle-class peers. Bernstein suggests that this linguistic deprivation is responsible
for working-class underachievement.
WORKING-CLASS CULTURE
Some cultural deprivationists blame working-class culture for the educational
underachievement of working-class children,. Sugarman, for example, argues that
working-class culture generally sees the world as an insecure place. As a result,
working-class children are encouraged by their parents to think in terms of short-
term goals and immediate gratification or reward. They supposedly rarely think
long-term, for example, in terms of the possibility of going to university. They are
rarely encouraged to make sacrifices, for example, to work hard now in order to
achieve the long-term goal of university. Instead, they are encouraged to leave
