Failure in school and social origin: results from a guiding inquiry

Abstract

The selective and reproductive function of the school in the class-divided society has been studied in some capitalist countries. Taking these studies for a basis, this is the general assumption accepted as a startingpoint by the researchers that try to approach this issue today: in every class-divided society the school has, implicitly or explicitly, as its function, to operate a social selection according to some criteria that are commonly accepted as universal but correspond, in fact, to the cultural patterns of the ruling class. In this study, done in a schooling area of Lisbon, one collected some data that made possible to reconstitute the scholastic past of those children that achieved their primary studies in that area in 1975-1976. It was also possible to distribute those children through three social categories: superior, middle and popular. Four main conclusions were drawn: 1) repeating - academic failure grade - rises as one goes down in the social scale; 2) the repeating falls upon the first grade, what seems to be explainable on account of the initial shock suffered mainly by children belonging to the popular areas when they meet the school institution; 3) those children from the superior and the middle classes begin schooling earlier than those from the popular class, what determines an initial advance of a certain importance; 4) children from the superior class achieve primary schooling earlier than those from the middle class and the delays of those children coming from the popular class show a deep separation between this category and the other two.