Miseducation

Diane Reay grew up in a working-class coal-mining community before becoming an inner-city primary school teacher for 20 years. She is now Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and visiting Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with particular interests in social justice issues in education, and cultural analyses of social class, race and gender. She has researched extensively in the areas of social class, gender and ethnicity across primary, secondary and post-compulsory stages of education.

• Introduction;Why can’t education compensate for society?;The recent history of class in education;Working-class educational experiences;Class in the classroom;Social Mobility: a problematic solution;The middle and upper classes: Getting the ‘best’ for your own child;Class feeling: Troubling the soul and preying on the psyche;Conclusion;Epilogue: Thinking through class.

“Miseducation would benefit anyone interested in social mobility and education in the UK… Reay’s contribution to debates on education and social background is to personalise everyday working-class experiences of school and university, something usually absent from current discourse. This, combined with statistical evidence of the extent of inequalities, makes for particularly engaging reading.” LSE Review of Books