Resistance to schooling : a case study carried out in a girls' trade school

Abstract

Trade school children are often portrayed as disruptive and underachieving students. What does society do to remedy this situation? Students are punished for misbehaving and for playing truant. So, in reality society merely attends. to the symptoms of this malady and fails to consider the root problem. What we tried to capture in our research is the root cause of such students' resistance to schooling. In order to do so we found that we had to understand how these students live and what their values and beliefs are. Ethnographic research strategies helped us discover that resistance to schooling is not the result of individual deficiencies or pathological delinquency but rather is dependent on social forces. By means of hegemonic control and a hidden curriculum the school tries to maintain social inequalities. But this control is not absolute and students do resist it. It is therefore imperative for teachers to interpret these subtle messages in the language of deviance and understand the structures in the wider social context that gives rise to this resistance. Then the classroom will function as an arena of emancipation rather than just a site of resistance.