The Cognitive Habitus: Its Place in a Realist Account of Inequality/Difference

The Cognitive Habitus: Its Place in a Realist Account of Inequality/DifferenceAuthor(s): Roy NashSource: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 26, No. 5 (Nov., 2005), pp. 599-612Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30036100 .

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British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 26, No. 5, November 2005, pp. 599-612 rou

Routledge Taor&FrancisGroup

The cognitive habitus: its place in a

realist account of inequalityldifference Roy Nash* Massey University College of Education, New Zealand

The existence of social differences in educational achievement as a social fact presents the sociology of education with a challenge to which it has responded with indifferent success. It is argued that contemporary explanations that dismiss the existence and relevance of differences in cognitive performance arising as a consequence of class variation in socialisation are likely to misrepresent the real causes of inequality/difference. The substantive discussion, organised around six questions dealing with the explanatory capacity of this concept, suggests that a satisfactory theory of inequality of educational opportunity will need to concern itself with the effects of socialisation on cognition. Some implications for educational practice and policy-making are briefly noted in conclusion.

Introduction

What explanation does the contemporary sociology of education have to offer for the existence of social differences in educational achievement? One might think, as this is the original question from which the subdiscipline sprang, that a rigorous theoretical model specifying the agents, institutional sites and modes of practice responsible for the generation of inequality/difference would be available, but such is not the case. The discipline is characterised by sharp theoretical and methodologi- cal divisions; in the conduct of research, quantitative and qualitative methods are more commonly opposed than integrated, and theoretical (and political) alliances create intellectual fields in which radical narratives of reproduction compete against liberal models of rational decision-making (Gorard, 2000; Scott, 2000). It would be pretentious to suppose that these entrenched divisions might be affected to any perceptible extent by this attempt to redirect the sociology of education towards an integrated framework for the explanation of inequality of educational opportunity, in the generally accepted term, but such is the intention of the programme in which this paper is situated (Nash, 2004a, b).

* Massey University College of Education, Hokowhitu Campus, Centennial Drive, Private Bag 11 222, Palmerston North, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0142-5692 (print)/ISSN 1465-3346 (online)/05/050599-14 C 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/01425690500293546



600 R. Nash

An explanation of social inequality in education should not be confused with an explanation of differences in educational achievement. The clumsy formulation 'inequality/difference' is intended to signify that the explanation is concerned with the origin of disparities in the educational achievement of identifiable class and cultural groups within a national system. The emphasis on explanation, rather than the more common 'theory', is also deliberate: it may be possible to define 'theory' with no reference to explanatory power, but if the goal is to discover the mechanisms by which a social state of affairs comes to exist then such 'theories' have little to contribute in that respect. The complex processes that generate inequalilty/difference are not necessarily studied by the formal models used in the investigation of variance in educational achievement. The logic of quantitative models designed to account for the variance in educational achievement is often, in fact, inappropriate to the explanation of social inequality in education. A regression model of the variance in educational achievement will almost certainly include an indicator of social class, which will have the same status as all other indicators, such as IQ, school type, and so on, with the result that social class competes for variance with whatever factors are included in the equa- tion. The weakness of this approach should be obvious. There is no point in attempt- ing to explain the origin of class differences (the dependent variable) in educational achievement by class-associated indicators (the independent variables), and the

attempt to do this, by distinguishing between structural and non-structural variables, or collective and individual variables, can produce inadequate and confused analyses. Some related technical matters have been discussed elsewhere (Nash, 2005), and cannot be expanded further in this context, but it may be noted in passing that the

tendency of sociologists to contrast structural or non-structural variables in models of social inequality of achievement concedes far more than necessary to the fundamentally non-sociological explanations so prevalent in this field. A full sociological account should show how social structures give rise to habituated dispositions to engage in collective practices and the conventional approach to statistical modelling is indifferent, to say the least, to this explanatory scheme. But this aspect of the argument has also been developed at greater length in other publications (Nash, 2003), and the central purposes of this paper must now be pressed.

The specific concern of the discussion is to make the case for a concept of cognitive habitus and to defend it against those currently popular explanations of social disparities in educational achievement that dismiss any mention of social differences in cognitive ability as a reference to deficit theory. The concept of cognitive habitus is designed in order to facilitate the discussion of matters relating to the nature of cognitive skills, including their contexts of acquisition, course of development and conditions of exercise, in order that the contribution of socially developed intellectual capacities may be included within a general theory of inequality/difference. The argument is as much conceptual as empirical in form. It will put six questions to an explanation of inequality/ difference and suggest that a new orthodoxy may be inferior in certain crucial respects to the traditional positions it seeks to transcend. Social disparities in educational achievement are a real state of affairs about which information of a more or less reliable kind can be obtained. There are associations, in particular those between familial



Cognitive habitus: a realist account of inequality/difference 601

'cultural capital' and educational achievement, that require a satisfactory explanation. There are also continuities between levels of pre-school and school achievement that must be explained. Whether the performance of schoolwork utilises cognitive skills acquired in early childhood, although more accessible to empirical evidence, also involves a certain level of conceptual analysis. It does seem important to demonstrate, if only briefly, that this is not an exercise in tilting against windmills.

The theoretical elimination of the cognitive habitus and its effects

Ball (1990, p. 4), surely to be counted as an influential writer in this field, adopts a characteristically distanced tone to the sociological theories of only a generation ago, which, he asserts, were organised around and reinforced the 'problem of working-class underachievement' and 'constructed a sophisticated and powerful social pathology of working-class family life as deficient and culturally deprived-abnormal.' An explanatory account of social disparities in education that refers to family resources and practices, particularly as these influence the development of cognitive and non-cognitive dispositions associated with educational attainment, is here dismissed as a deficit theory that blames the victims of class and cultural oppression for their conditions of life and modes of response to it. No self-respecting sociologist of education would now treat such deficit theories with anything but disdain. Ball's postmodern account describes how '[i] n the processes of schooling the student is compiled and constructed both in the passive process of objectification, and in an active, self-forming subjecti- fication, the latter involving processes of self-understanding mediated by ... the teacher' (1990, p. 4), in such a way that difference is understood as the product of discourse. The 'techniques and forms of organization' of the school lead to the 'creation of separate and different curricula, pedagogies, forms of teacher-student relationships, identities and subjectivities are formed, learned and carried.' Social differences in educational achievement are thus understood in terms of 'power-knowledge, the single, inseparable configuration of practices and ideas that constitute a discourse.' (1990, p. 5).

In this formulation, there is no cognitive habitus with any durable effects on learning, and the concept of 'ability' is regarded as an object of discourse with no reference outside the formation in which it is located. The practical consequences of this position are taken to their ultimate extreme by Gillborn and Youdell (2000, p. 70), who argue that teachers' taken-for-granted theories of 'ability' and its social distribution are responsible for class disparities in examination results. It seems to be evidence enough for Gillborn and Youdell that if A-C GCSE passes are awarded to 70% of professional workers' children, and only to 15% of unskilled workers' children, then the school is responsible for that disparity and no further discussion is necessary. The current sociological explanation of group disparities in achievement, whether expressed in a Foucauldian or Bourdieusian idiom, is founded on assumptions that

may be vulnerable to challenge. The defence presented, however, is not a retreat to the past and, although it may be presented as a continuation of a traditional position, it is argued with great respect for the conceptual problems involved.



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In defence of the concept of cognitive habitus and its effects

By contrast, the position to be defended, although no longer popular, has authorita- tive support. Most leading sociologists of education have accepted that certain durable cognitive skills are acquired in early childhood. Jencks et al. (1972) incorporated the effects of measured intelligence into quantitative models, allocating this factor a due proportion of the explained variance in educational achievement. Coleman (1966) was convinced that home socialisation was responsible for most of the variance in developed intelligence and educational attainment. He even argued that equality of educational opportunity should be abandoned as a policy objective, on the grounds that although some level of pedagogical input sufficient to eliminate group differences in attainment might be a theoretical possibility, it was a level so unlikely to be achieved in practice that such a policy could only fail. The view that the existence of group disparities in achievement shows that system inputs are inadequate, it may be noted, is simply the expression of a dual professional and bureaucratic faith, one that unites teachers and education policy-makers, in the power of schools to educate and of institutions to fulfil their due functions. Boudon (1973; Hamlin, 2002) developed his view that the primary effects of class socialisation, although not to be ignored, were less significant in models of access to tertiary education and social mobility. Bernstein's (1996) theories were subject to different interpretations, but it is worth noting that some sociologists of education were aware that he was concerned with 'the development of intelligent behaviour in which the linguistic code plays a part of unknown importance' (Swift, 1977, p. 253). This tradition still exists, and many writers have located Bourdieu's (1974) work within it. Savage and Egerton (1997, p. 652), for example, note that his theory of cultural capital suggests that 'all salient advantages come early in life and are mediated through the construction of ability in children'. The British political arithmetic tradition in the sociology of education, indeed, has probably never abandoned this taken-for-granted position (Heath, 2000).

It is Bernstein and Bourdieu, of course, who have been so influential to the development of contemporary theories of reproduction, and a defence of a more traditional reading in this context requires a sustained discussion. Bernstein held that semantic comprehension was effected by a linguistic habitus (his analysis of meaning has an orthodox structuralist form) acquired in classed environments; and Bourdieu, by far the most ambiguous theorist in every respect, considered unreal the belief that a social capacity for logical thought could develop in those forced to endure the oppressive conditions of class domination. Even so representative a text as Reproduction (Bour- dieu & Passeron, 1990) attempts to distance itself from 'populist illusions,' and the

tendency is even more marked in a late text such as Pascalian Mediations (Bourdieu, 2000). This may not be the Bourdieu of received opinion, but it is arguably closer to the 'real' Bourdieu (Lane, 2000). Indeed, the critical comments on the cult of 'popular culture' as an 'ultimately very comfortable way of respecting the "people", which, under the guise of exalting the working class, helps to enclose it in what is by convert-

ing privation into choice or an elective accomplishment' (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 76),




might be given more attention. The basic argument, that these leading sociologists all shared is that students who reject the necessary culture of the school as unfamiliar need to be provided with a universal pedagogy (Bourdieu, 1974) in order to gain access to the necessary curriculum. This universal pedagogy often, in fact, has the form of a culturally specific pedagogy in the sense that the school attempts to reflect certain formal elements of local culture, which is more easily managed in the case of ethnic cultures than that of groups with a shared class position whose practices of resistance are a response to exploitation, but it is convenient to regard them as a reform to pedagogy rather than the structures of the core curriculum. This theory can be supported by related hypotheses about the significance of teachers' expectations and student identities, which, in turn, can be theorised with equal facility within the conceptual frameworks of mainstream psychology and postmodern social discourse theory. This paper accordingly defends the proposition that fundamental cognitive skills, which might be acknowledged as the dispositions of the cognitive habitus, are exercised in the performance of schoolwork and implicated in the production of social differences in scholastic achievement. The defence takes the form, in fact, of an enquiry into six central questions, many of which are shown to be in need of conceptual clarification rather than evidence from specific observation.

Cognitive habitus

The term 'cognitive habitus' introduces nothing substantively original to the concep- tualisation of intellectual development, and is intended to facilitate sociological approaches to cognition (McLennan, 2003). The concepts of 'habitus' and 'cognition' retain their standard references and the combination is productive. The habitus denotes that structure of dispositions, acquired in specific cultural settings, by virtue of which individuals are able to adopt the established practices of their social group with the accomplished ease of those who know the rules of the game. The term 'cognition' has a wide reference. Vygotsky's (1994) higher mental processes, of selec- tive attention, verbal thought, logical memory, and so on, which in his psychological theory are first social products, illustrate the central meaning. Bernstein's (1996) forms of social thought, characterised by the principles of abstraction-concreteness, universality-particularity, decontextualisation-context tied, and so on, also belong to the study of cognition. Those activities of remembering, deciding, reasoning, classi- fying, and so on, seen by Harre (2002) as the central domains of contemporary cognitive psychology, may all be included as cognitive processes. The concept of cognitive habitus is not intended to suggest that a sharp distinction can be maintained between cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions of thought. The concepts necessary to

thought processes are the very subject of analyses of habitus. Bourdieu's revival of the term 'habitus' was stimulated, it will be recalled, by Panovsky's (1957) depiction of the principle of clarification, as a mental habit generated by Scholasticism and

expressed in the various practices of theological argument and Gothic architecture- and the entire approach is directed at showing how the concepts of thought that inform practices are structured by generative cognitive principles. Vygotsky's concept



604 R. Nash

of cognition is equally comprehensive in its scope and does not allow a strict separa- tion of cognitive and non-cognitive activities into different spheres. The broad compatibility between the positions of Vygotsky and Bourdieu is not accidental. In Bourdieu's theory, practices generated by the habitus have a reproductive effect precisely because the habitus is formed in response to objective social structures and hence can be recognised as the internalisation of those relations. In Vygotsky's theory, modes of thought emerge as a consequence of internalised social concepts generated in specific social environments. Both theories, in fact, reveal the influence of Durkheim's sociological thought, which gives priority to collective representations, as social facts, in the explanation of social events. Bourdieu's indebtedness to Durkheim goes without saying, but the influence of Durkheim on Vygotsky, through the French psychologist Janet, is perhaps less well known to sociologists (Zinchenko, 2002). This point is worth making, not as a display of superfluous erudition, but as an indication that this is a proper domain for the construction of sociological explanation. There is, in short, a collective intellectual tradition in this area that allows one to speak legiti- mately of the cognitive habitus as those active dispositions, the skills dedicated to clas- sifying, remembering, concept formation, problem-solving, and so on, that must be at the heart of a productive sociology of cognitive development (Tomasello, 1999). The concepts are intended to do no more than provide a framework for sociological research into the specific character of cognitive skills, their conditions of emergence in social environments and their effective application in the performance of schoolwork. The contributions of Vygotsky and Bernstein may, in fact, be regarded as research into the generation of the cognitive habitus. If the concept is to be accepted as useful, however, certain questions need to be faced: the following section deals with six of the most important.

Key questions for the concept of cognitive habitus

How can fundamental cognitive skills be identified from the performances of which they are the exercise?

All skills are known by the fact that they are exercised in the performances made possible by their possession. This makes the identification of skills seem a trivial matter of observation (a child is seen to read and so is known to have the skill to read), and makes the explanation of performances based on skills seem empty (to suppose that a child can read because he or she has the skill to read adds nothing to the observation that he or she can read). The introduction of fundamental skills into these arguments may complicate rather than alter the nature of these problems. It is essential to work through the positions staked out in these debates. If a child is making poor progress in reading, a good teacher will carry out some basic diagnostic tests in order to find out where the problem lies, and after weighing up the data might conclude that the child's relative inability to decode print is largely due to his or her poor phonological skills. The child knows individual letter sounds, has an adequate spoken vocabulary, comprehends semantic meaning, but cannot recognise that 'basketball', for




example, is made up of two words and three syllables. This intuition is potentially useful because it may enable the teacher to offer the kind of instruction most likely to improve the student's reading. This illustration will provide a pattern for the analysis of fundamental skills and the relationship to educational attainment. A skill is identified from a performance, and a form of empirical investigation is required to demonstrate that performances, which are never completely identical and necessarily occur at different times, can be placed in the same category. Swimming and typing are obvi- ously different skills, but the skill displayed by reading 'basketball' and 'table-tennis' is one and the same. Learning to read confers the ability to read any word that conforms to the orthographic rules of the writing system employed for that language. When explanations of attainment are given in terms of mental operators they can almost always be restated in the language of skills. If cognitive psychologists find the concept of 'psycho-logic' useful as a reference to a functional system, their position may be accommodated. Samuels et al. argue that:

If Adam's psycho-logic ignores base rates, endorses the conjunction fallacy, and approves of affirming the consequent, while Bertha's does not, then, in these respects at least, it seems natural to say that Bertha's reasoning competence is better than Adam's. (1999, p. 83)

This is to say that Adam reasons in such a way that certain skills, those of not affirming the consequent, and so on, have not been learned, or at least not learned to the same level of Bertha, with the result that the performance of their schoolwork, in so far as it depends upon such skills, is not identical. This information may be relevant to a diagnosis of strengths and weaknesses in learning and thus useful in the preparation of a programme of instruction. Howe (1989, p. 357) points out that it is legitimate for a teacher to form the view 'that Josephine's test scores suggest that she currently lacks intellectual skills which are necessary in order to achieve at a certain level', but illegitimate for a teacher to believe 'that Josephine's test scores prove that she has insufficient intelligence or "potential" ever to succeed.' The distinction may seem narrow, but it is vital, and explanations of performances made in terms of specific skills are not intrinsically circular or defective. It is possible to regard investigations of skills as being, in fact, concerned with the structures of the cognitive habitus.

In what respects is it possible to show that certain cognitive skills are fundamental and necessarily involved in the performance of academic work?

The argument that skills form a hierarchy in such a way that higher order skills

incorporate lower order skills cannot be accepted without examination. A complex skill, like driving, for example, can be analysed as one made up of elementary skills such as gear-changing, braking, mirror use, anticipating traffic movements, and so on, that might appear on an examiner's checklist. The complex skill is just the sum of a series of more elementary skills. This apparently reasonable assumption is actu- ally dubious: the application of a model based on this assumption to cognitive performances certainly requires some caution. The assumption that a performance



606 R. Nash

involving multiplication and division, for example, rests on a set of elementary skills suggests that all computational performances reveal the existence of a common basic skill set that can be applied in different contexts. There is convincing evidence that arithmetical skills, for example, are more context-specific in their exercise than this model implies. Workers with minimum schooling, young match-sellers on the streets of San Paulo, for example, can be highly proficient at working out problems directly related to their business, but quite lost when confronted with tasks outside their sphere (Carracher et al., 1985). Educated individuals from the same societies, by contrast, are able to deal with problems set in the familiar mode of the school, but

relatively incompetent at the kind of problems solved with ease by match-sellers and domestic maids. It seems that it may be one thing to show, by an epistemological analysis of the kind employed in information-processing models, that certain operations are necessary, and quite another to show that an ability to carry out such expe- riences reveals the existence of an effective psychological operator that can be exercised independently of the context in which the information to be processed is embedded. The concept of the cognitive habitus is well adapted to the study of the social environments of thought and may assist in the exploration of its forms and contexts.

How can fundamental cognitive skills be assessed and can they be treated as objects of measurement?

The study of the cognitive habitus requires a vocabulary of skilled performances carried out with concrete and symbolic tools, some aspects of which may be assessed or measured. Assessment is a relatively unproblematic concept (Campione, 1996). When a teacher makes an assessment of, say, phonological skills, he or she adopts procedures adequate to the purpose of revealing the degree to which the development of these skills facilitate reading. It may or may not be useful to situate that level of development to a standard or a population norm. The process of assessment is not logically tied to a concept of standard other than in an internal sense: one may be a poor driver (in the habit of crashing the gears, braking sharply and incapable of reverse parking), and one would still be a poor driver even if everyone else on the road were worse, for being a good driver is defined by a reference to an internal, technical, standard.

Measurement is a much more complex concept. The operation of measurement involves mapping a numerical system on to some property of a real entity that occurs in a greater or lesser quantity. The key to sensible thinking about measurement is the distinction between the measured object and the object of measurement (Berka, 1983). When a nurse takes a child's temperature the child is the measured object and its temperature is the object of measurement. All measurement operations require a unit of measurement that must be fixed by reference to an external indicator. In the case of heat this is commonly achieved by means of an instrument designed with a scale set to the behaviour of a substance that responds in a constant way to changes in heat: a column of mercury makes a very convenient thermometer because it expands rapidly and consistently in response to changes in ambient temperature.




Problems with the measurement of non-physical properties stem largely from the facts, first, that the object of measurement is obscure (is it a 'concept', a 'tool', a 'skill' or a 'performance'?) and, second, that units of measurements keyed to constant physical properties are not available. Psychometrics has developed an entire technology for the purpose of finding solutions to these difficulties, but its methods cannot be accepted without a clear understanding of their conceptual foundations. The standard approach to the 'measurement' of phonological skills, for example, will involve the production of a collection of items designed to reveal the ability of a reader to decode print using the appropriate techniques; the establishment of a standard population distribution of the responses to these items; and to the consequent production of a norm-referenced test using standard deviation units as a proxy for natural units. It would be better to regard this as a form of scaling (rather than measurement in its full sense) but, if the point must be conceded, to insist that the object of measurement is skill at phonological decoding. This is a disposition, necessarily expressed by means of a brain modified by learning, that generates performances capable of being ordered by the psychometric techniques described. The study of the cognitive habitus should allow the problems of measurement to be approached within a realist conception of the object of measurement.

What is the status of an explanation that holds differences in cognitive skills to be a cause of differences in school attainment?

A skill is made evident by its exercise. To explain a performance of reading, as this discussion has shown, by pointing to the skill to read may be uninformative. It is not uninformative, however, to explain a poor reading performance by, for example, the presence of inadequate phonological decoding skills. The central problem of explanation in this area is that of circular reference or, which is but a variant, by reference to a non-existent entity. This criticism is easily directed, for example, at IQ theory; and as the importance of this theory can hardly be overestimated, an illustration of the point may be relevant. Suppose it is said that Bertha's high mathematics attainments are due to her high intelligence as evidenced by her high IQ score. The obvious objection is that her attainments in mathematics are an exercise of her skill to perform tasks involving the manipulation of abstract symbols, which are just those tasks presented in IQ tests and, hence, no real explanation is provided. It is merely pointed out that Bertha, on a standardised test of this kind, is placed in, say, the MENSA range of the highest two per cent: the technology has provided information about the relative level of that performance, but that contributes nothing to an explanation of school performance. All explanations in terms of dispositions to act, which have their classical expression in Ryle (1960), encounter this difficulty. Ryle's position is, however, far from impervious to criticism, and Clarke (2001) is not alone in preferring explanations grounded in some concrete mechanism. If the object of measurement can be represented, for example, as a neural property (speed of transmission across synapses, etc.) or as a mental property ('pattern recognition module', etc.), then the circular explanation can be broken provided that there is evidence independent of the



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test performance to support the claim that these entities exist, or that they may be accepted as 'hypothetical variables' and made the object of a research programme directed at establishing their existence. The use of terms such as 'brain power' and 'mental energy' should be admitted to the language of science with the greatest circumspection.

One conventional strategy, however, should be treated critically. It is common to construct a model in which the precise reference of its terms to anything outside the model is not stated. Such a model may include terms such as 'general intelligence', 'working memory', 'psycho-logic', and so on, which plainly have the status of functional entities; that is, as generative organs of the thinking processes they are introduced to explain, and are not grounded in the neural system. The status of such models as scientific explanations is open to debate. It is certainly necessary to defend the existence, or imagined existence, of these objects and their properties. In practical applications, of course, this entire problem is bypassed almost by necessity for it is impossible to engage in psychological testing without participating in a discourse of 'measurement', 'hypothetical variables', 'effective functions', and so on, and not consequently legitimate the theoretical assumptions of its origin. The problems in this area are, therefore, acute. This does not mean, however, that putative references to the 'mental substrate' (in the phrase cognitive psychology often uses to refer to the brain) are necessarily doomed to failure. It may be salutary to consider what might count as evidence for the proposition that a distinct neural property, more or less reliably indicated by a psychological test, is causally associated with a cognitive performance given an appropriate epistemological specification. The serious efforts of biologists, neural specialists and psychologists to forge links between their disciplines are likely to present challenges for the future that will not easily be ignored. Explanations in terms of habitus are given in terms of dispositions and as such are fundamentally identical with those adopted in other disciplines, including cognitive psychology, and, in so far as the problems with such explanations can be solved, the concept may have an explanatory value.

What socialisation practices promote the development of the fundamental cognitive skills

engaged in the performance of academic work?

In as much as fundamental skills can be identified, the social conditions of their origin are clearly an area of interest to a theory of inequality of educational opportunity. The concept of habitus emerges from a tradition in which investigation into the practices of its generation is the entire point of sociological investigation. It may be useful to rehearse certain basic arguments. All skills are exercised during the course of development. There are some skills, speech is an important example, that are generally learned with little direct instruction, whereas others, like numerical calculation, are learned as a result of education. All skills require tools in their performance. The activities of speaking and calculating make skilled use of the brain, a language system, numerals and, perhaps, microphones, electronic calculators, and so on. Skills are the

possessions of those who have learned and practiced them, and the possession of a skill implies the possession of the tools necessary to its application. A tool is always a




social product, whether a language system or an electronic calculator, and although linguistic knowledge and things like calculators are owned in different ways, the relationship of being vested in a particular individual is similar. A specific reading skill, like phonological decoding, which is a basic elementary skill in the hierarchy that constitutes reading skill, is acquired, usually with some instruction, and makes use of whatever neural tools are involved. All learned skills are likely to be learned better by those who have been taught them, dedicated themselves to their practice, identified themselves with their competent display, and so on. The creation of environments specialised for the effective acquisition of fundamental cognitive skills is, therefore, a matter of considerable importance to the sociology of education.

All cognitive skills, which involved the manipulation of a symbolic system of repre- sentation, depend for their exercise on language, and the acquisition of language is, therefore, crucial to the investigation of cognitive development. The most fruitful research into the origins of systematic differences in cognitive skills is likely to concen- trate on the linguistic structures of the language of a social group and on the patterns of verbal interaction between mother and child that effect its variable transmission. It is for this reason that Bernstein's theory of semiotic codes which identifies systematic class-related differences in speech associated with literate thinking as characterised by universal, general and abstract concepts rather than by local, particular and concrete concepts, is so valuable. There is increasing recognition that Bernstein's work can be located within the neo-Vygotskyian tradition and read in the context of psychological investigation of discourse and speech genre (Daniels, 1995; Hasan, 2001; Moss, 2002). Grigorenko (2004) has recently pointed out that Vygotsky created a tradition of Soviet/Russian psychology in which demonstrated that it is possible to study intelligence without using the concept of intelligence at all. Bernstein's theory is expressed in the structuralist terms of 'code', but the effective explanation of group disparities in educational attainment is given in terms of functional processes of thought (which may be treated as skills), which have been structured by classed environments. All this suggests the need for a dual emphasis, sociological and psychological, to the conduct of research into the role of cognitive development.

What forms of education are most suited to deal with variance in attainment caused by differences in fundamental skill?

If the evidence that fundamental cognitive skills, which are acquired in early childhood, make a substantial contribution to educational attainment, and hence to class-related differences in success at school, then the implications for pedagogic intervention need to be examined. The association between social and economic conditions and effective socialisation practices is sufficiently strong to encourage the elimination of relative poverty by structural policies directed at housing, income support, employment opportunities, and so on, and nothing that is possible in this area should be left undone. At the same time, there is every reason to recognise and encourage forms of communication in the community and home that assist the development of the cognitive habitus in forms adjusted to the necessary educative



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work of the school. As far as the school is concerned, the task is to educate, as Bernstein pointed out more than a generation ago, rather than compensate for what children seem to lack. And yet if necessary fundamental cognitive skills are relatively underdeveloped, as the hypothesis being considered maintains, then the necessity of their further development cannot be denied.

What matters most for theory and practice is that the skills of the cognitive habitus and the practices of their generation are investigated and analysed. If certain fundamental skills acquired in classed community and family environments are such that the necessary tasks of the school are performed, with different levels of success, then the school is faced with a pedagogical exercise of a particularly difficult kind. If certain skills are fundamental then they must be taught, and if they cannot be taught with a full measure of success, perhaps because some critical period of learning development has passed, then that possibility must be faced. The business of teachers is always teaching. A poor reader must be helped to improve-and assessment able to provide useful information on the specific domain of skills involved, phonological decoding, vocabulary, semantic comprehension, and so on, can assist in the preparation of appropriate modes of instruction. The effort to teach, it goes without saying, should never be abandoned simply because progress is slow, and there is, perhaps, no organic condition so severe that learning is impossible. And yet, a teacher who is doing everything within his or her

power should not be held responsible, no more than should a school, because students have not attained an arbitrary standard. The concept of cognitive habitus is well placed to serve the interests of research into the real possibilities of pedagogical practice.

Conclusion

Theories of social disparities in education are inherently political. To the extent that they make statements about the intellectual and moral capacities of social groups, they enter the arena of class and cultural conflict; and to the extent that they make statements about educational practice, not least those of teaching, they fall within the one of the most strongly contested domains of educational practice. The interest in the causes of social disparities in educational achievement is, therefore, almost necessarily motivated by political considerations, and theories of inequality/difference are liable to be accepted or rejected in accordance with their perceived likely effects on policy, as much as by their ability to describe what is the case. This is a conceptual paper, little concerned with the immediate policy environment, but the influence of empirically substantiated economic analyses of the durable effects of early cognitive development on adult occupation is not without its relevance (Feinstein, 2003).

A theory of inequality/difference that declines to acknowledge that structures of the cognitive habitus acquired in early childhood have any durable consequences for educational achievement will always be incomplete and inadequate. Whether it is technically possible to estimate the extent to which the observed social variance in educational achievement is the result of durable cognitive structures generated by, say, age 5, is an entirely separate matter. This paper asserts only that the effect is probably something greater than zero and does not slight in any respect the importance of




non-cognitive dispositions and the structures within which they are generated (Nash, 2001). Sociology of education cannot maintain an approach to this question entirely independent of psychological assumptions. The new orthodoxy rejects not only IQ theory, but, often, the actuality of fundamental cognitive skills themselves. Even when group skill differences are conceded, then, it is likely to be denied that skills developed in early childhood have an effect on learning that is not simply allowed to happen by the structural inefficiency of the school. Any account that refers to the durable effects of classed forms of cognition generates resistance from sociologists of education who suspect this as a 'deficit' theory that 'blames the victim' and distracts attention from the school. The school, regarded as an institution responsible for delivering an education demonstrated to be equitable by virtue of its identical results for all groups, is thus both accountable for inequality of educational opportunity by administrative definition and its effective cause by theoretical fiat. As the idea that the cognitive skills of some children are less useful in the performance of academic tasks than those of others can seem indistinguishable from the basic premise of classical IQ theory that some children are less intelligent than others, it is not surprising that sociologists of education have preferred to give their support to theories of educational inequality in which 'ability' is treated as an effective discourse generating the very facts that it seeks to explain. Yet if inequality/difference is the result in no small part of cognitive skills produced by classed family environments, then it will be necessary to entertain

hypotheses suited to the rigorous examination of empirical evidence required to model the extent to which this is the case.

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The Cognitive Habitus: Its Place in a Realist Account of Inequality/Difference

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