Basil Bernstein: Class, Codes and Control: The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse

211 Pages·2003·1.552 MB·English

by  Basil Bernstein

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CLASS, CODES AND CONTROL
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CLASS, CODES AND CONTROL
VOLUME IClass, Codes and ControlTheoretical Studies towards a Sociology of
LanguageBasil Bernstein
VOLUME IIClass, Codes and ControlApplied Studies towards a Sociology of
LanguageBasil Bernstein
VOLUME IIIClass, Codes and ControlTowards a Theory of Educational
TransmissionsBasil Bernstein
VOLUME IVClass, Codes and ControlThe Structuring of Pedagogic
DiscourseBasil Bernstein
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CLASS, CODES AND
CONTROL
Basil Bernstein
Volume IV
The Structuring of Peydagogic
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Discourses
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LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published in 1990 by Routledge.
This edition published 2003 by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Transferred to Digital Printing 2003
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBooksytore.tandf.co.uk.”
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© Basil Bernstein 1990i
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© 2003 The Estate of Basil rBernstein
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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known or hereafter invented, including nphotocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval syUstem, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this boook is available from the British Library
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Library of Congresss Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog recorgd for this book has been requested.
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ISBN 0-203-01126-0 Master e-book ISBN
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ISBN 0-415-302862 (Set)
ISBN 0-415-30290-0 (Print Edition) (Volume 4)
Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original book may be apparent.
To Marion
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Part I On codes
1 Code, modalities, and the process of cultural reproduction: a 10
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model
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2 Social class and pedagogic practice 55
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3 Elaborated and restricted codes: overview and criticisms 81
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Part II On pedagogic discourse n
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4 Education, symbolic control, and social practices 114

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5 The social construction of pedagogic discourse 143
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References g 189
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Index 196
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the many research students who, over the years, have been a
crucial source of challenge, criticism, and enthusiasm, and most especially to
Christian Cox, Mario Diaz, Ana Maria Domingos, Isabel Faria, Janet Holland,
and to William Tyler for showing how much more there is to see, to Roger
Hewitt for his steadfast dedication to finding out abyout language and culture, to
Ruqaiya Hasan, whose courage, integrity, and geniterous scholarship I would like
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here to acknowledge. I am very grateful to Heidi Berry, who managed the
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transformation of written pages into manscripte with immense tolerance and high
competence. v
The contents of this volume first appeareid as or are based upon:
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Chapter 1: ‘Code, modalities and thUe process of cultural reproduction: a
model’, Language and Society 10 (1981) 327–63.

Chapter 2: ‘Education and democrnacy’, Robert Finkelstein Annual Lecture,
Adelphi University, New York, 1988o.
Chapter 3: ‘Class, codes andt communication’, in Sociolinguistics: an
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International Handbook of theg Science of Language and Society, Vol. I, ed.
U.Ammon, N.Dittmar, K.Matthneier, W.de Gruyter, Berlin, 1987.
Chapter 4: ‘Education, syimbolic control and social practice’, public lecture
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under the aegis of CIDE, Santiago, Chile, 1988.

Chapter 5: ‘On pedagogic discourse’, in Handbook of Theory and Research
for the Sociology of Education, ed. J.G.Richardson, Greenwood Press, New
York, 1986.
The order of the papers, and sometimes their contents, in this volume, unlike
the companion volumes, are not in the same order in which they were written,
and this has created problems of presentation. With the exception of one, all the
papers have their origins in the 1981 paper ‘Code, modalities and the process of
reproduction: a model’, and therefore it was necessary to give that paper in its
entirety. However, this has led unfortunately to some marked repetition (on
pages 99–107 and 113–14). Further, the section on symbolic control which was
originally part of the paper ‘On pedagogic discourse’ has been placed in
Chapter 4 (pages 134–43) because a discussion of the field of symbolic control is
essential to the argument in that chapter. There have been some additions to all
of the original papers.
Introduction
Contents Part I of this volume deals essentially with the concept of code and the
modalities of pedagogic transmission and acquisition. The first chapter is entirely
concerned with the integration, synthesis, and development of past attempts to
formalize the concept of code. Chapter 2 is a revision and extension of chapter 6
in Class, Codes and Control, vol. 3 (1975). They original model of a visible
pedagogy set out in that chapter is now shown toit have, among its modalities, a
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relatively self-regulating autonomous mode (at least, until recently in the UK)
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and a market-oriented mode. The internal ordeering rules of modalities are given,
together with those of an opposing modality,v an invisible pedagogy. The latter is
shown to have both liberal and radical fiorms. All pedagogic modalities are
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generated by the same set of internal ruleUs, whose realizations vary according to
their classification and framing values. It is not appropriate to see these

modalities as simple dichotomies. Tnhey are held to be opposing modalities,
translations of power relations, idoeologies, and interests of different class
fractions. t
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The third chapter is essentialgly an overview of the theory of elaborated and
restricted codes and of itsn research which concentrates on the more
sociolinguistic features ofi the theory, discusses criticisms made by
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sociolinguists, and treats Labov’s criticisms in some detail. I was not sure where

to place this chapter, as thematically it belongs to Part I but it does make
reference to some concepts which appear only in Part II.
Chapter 1 is placed first because subsequent chapters are based in part upon
ideas outlined in the initial chapter. However, this chapter is a highly formal
account of the thesis: some readers may well find it an advantage to reverse the
order of chapters in Part I and commence with the general overview and
criticisms of the thesis presented in chapter 3.
Whereas Part I is concerned with elaborated codes and pedagogic modalities
and is concerned to make explicit their underlying generating rules, Part II is
concerned essentially with an analysis of the social construction of pedagogic
discourse and its relation to symbolic control. Chapter 4 is an explorative essay
which, on the basis of an hypothesis of the changing relations both within and
between the economic field and the field of symbolic control, attempts to trace
the changing orientation, organization, and relation of education to both these
2 INTRODUCTION
fields from the medieval period to the twentieth century. It is argued that there is
now a dehumanizing of pedagogic discourse, brought about by inserting a
market principle between knowledge and the knower, between the inner relation
to, and the outer form of, knowledge. This insertion has enabled the construction
of two quite separate markets: one for knowledge and the other for creators and
users. This essay takes for granted the social construction of pedagogic discourse.
The final essay is an attempt to analyse the device which is thought to be the
condition for any pedagogic discourse and models the processes underlying the
various modalities of pedagogic discourse which the device makes possible. The
starting point of this analysis is appendix 6 to the code modality paper
(chapter 1) which discusses the production, recontextualizing, and reproduction
of official pedagogic discourse. Appendix 6 has been repeated in chapter 5
simply for ease of reading. There have been a number of versions of the paper
constituting chapter 5, involving minor changes of organization and content
(Bernstein, 1986, 1987). The conclusions in this volume have been changed to
incorporate a discussion of the fundamental pedagogyic outputs of the device and
to clarify the use of the concept of relative autonoimty.
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The form of analysis of pedagogic discourse is similar to the analysis of
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pedagogic practices in chapter 2, where a distienction is drawn between the rules
of construction of pedagogic practices and vthe various realizations these rules
make possible: a distinction between a relayi and what is relayed by that relay. In
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the same way, the analysis of the sociaUl construction of pedagogic discourse
begins with a distinction between the rules which constitute the pedagogic

device, the stable form of the relay, annd the rules regulating the vicissitudes of its
realizations, the variable forms of owhat is relayed. This paper’s fundamental
concern (and probably the funtdamental concern of the whole research
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endeavour) is to describe the degvice which constructs, regulates, and distributes
official elaborated codes and thneir modalities.
Code and class The integirating concept of the papers in this volume (as in
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others) is the concept of code, which is formally defined in the first chapter and

is discussed later in this introduction.
It should be clear from the early chapters that the concept of code is not simply
a regulator of cognitive orientation but regulates dispositions, identities, and
practices, as these are formed in official and local pedagogizing agencies (school
and family). The past thirty years have been taken up almost wholly with the
specification, development, and regulation of this concept, especially that of
elaborated code and its several modalities, which form the focus of this volume.
The concept of code bears some relation to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. The
concept of habitus, however, is a more general concept, more extensive and
exhaustive in its regulation. It is essentially a cultural grammar specialized by
class position and fields of practice. It is by no means clear what are the rules of
these class-specialized grammars and fields of practice, nor is it clear how the
specialized grammars are constructed and relayed in the process of their
transmission and acquisition. But these are not the special objects of Bourdieu’s