In the previous chapter I have distinguished three broad areas within which Bernstein has worked: the sociolinguistic, the educational, and the macro- social. As noted there, it is the first set of concerns that has made by far the largest impact, especially on the amorphous body of thought that goes under the umbrella of "education". In this chapter I intend to indicate the few visible1 signs of Bernstein's thinking on work in the English speaking Caribbean; all of the little that there is relates to the first area I have distinguished, the question of sociolinguistic codes and their educational ramifications.
Perhaps the predominant attitude in those circles that have confronted Bernstein's writings or his much more pervasive influence is expressed by Alleyne's reference to "Bernstein's work, which has fortunately not prevailed in the Caribbean" (1979, p. 17). It is possible to doubt, however, the accuracy of such perceptions of Bernstein's work, since, as was noted in the previous chapter, in the educational mass market Bernstein's thought was usually seen as a kind of "deficit" theory, despite his continuous rejection of such notions, and since Alleyne's own characterization of Bernstein is arguably a caricature: "Bernstein's work ... compared Standard Written English with non-standard oral speech" (ibid.). While it has been argued that this is the "objective truth" of Bernstein's work (as by Stubbs, 1981, p. 111-2, or 1983, p. 81-2), or at least of his most influential early writings, it is certainly not an accurate description of the phenomena and it supposes Bernstein to be unable to separate issues that he has repeatedly distinguished himself, such as the nature of written versus spoken language and dialect versus standard.
Be that as it may, I shall proceed to substantiate Alleyne's claim that Bernstein is, and probably always was, negligible in the Caribbean. I shall look first at those few references to his work that do exist in Caribbean educational and sociological literature; I shall then briefly discuss the one author, Dennis Craig, who has actually confronted Bernstein's work as a central part of his own research project; and finally venture to suggest some of the reasons for the apparent lack of interest in Bernstein's work and his style of theorizing within Caribbean sociology more generally. The first survey will also indicate the kind of use, or abuse, to which Bernstein is put within educational circles in Britain and north America and to which I have already referred in the previous chapter.
Among the Berbers of the central Atlas, "the legal decision procedure is trial by collective oath, with the number of co-jurors dependent on the gravity of the offence" (Gellner, 1981, p. 121). Academics, at least in education, would seem to practice a similar custom: nothing may be said before a host of witnesses have been summoned to attest to background assumptions, similar findings, and often the reliability of methodological procedures. It is almost as if the writer believed that his readers (or at least his referees or examiners) were more impressed by the number of witnesses than by the substance of his own case. An advantage academics have over the Berbers is that they do not need the physical presence of their witnesses and can proceed to put testimony into their mouths, the more creatively given the intrinsic unlikelihood of anyone actually checking up. Bernstein's major role in the Caribbean has been as such an uninvited witness. Thus Bernstein has "demonstrated ... that middle and upper class children are more capable of abstract verbalization" (Camacho, 1970, p. 107); similarly "the relationship between verbal ability and test scores [scil. IQ tests] has been clearly demonstrated by Bernstein in a number of different studies" (Cross and Schwartzbaum, 1969, pp. 193-4). Reid simply nods at Bernstein to endorse his claim that "higher SES also nourishes the children in the middle class language norms of the school and this gives them an advantage over low SES who are deprived of language growth" (1976, p. 223, but based upon a thesis of 1964). Here we see a classic example of the equation of middle class language norms with language per se and so the immediate inference to mass deprivation. It is worth noting that at least one of Reid's colleagues was well aware of Bernstein's rejection of the notion of working class language deprivation, though this only surfaced in a book review (Wilson, 1975). At about the same time Murray (1975) invoked Bernstein on the disadvantages of lower class pupils, a way of speaking that perhaps allows for deprivation or its opposite. Such references still crop up occasionally, as in Landman et al (1983) where in fact Bernstein is cited with reference to the educational potentialities of toys but two of his one-time associates are mentioned in connection with mother-child language use.
It is again typical of Bernstein's influence elsewhere that only Cross and Schwartzbaum, among the authors cited, are unambiguously sociologists. Camacho, Reid, and Murray belong somewhere in education, while Wilson is an expert in the teaching of English. It might then be no accident that Bernstein's desperate appeals to the distinctive aesthetic of the typically working class code ("simplicity and directness of expression, emotionally virile, pithy and powerful" [1959 = 1974, p. 55]) found a sympathetic response in Wilson rather than the others, for whom success or failure at the Common Entrance is much more important than a distinctive and vibrant style of speech. It is among language specialists that Bernstein has found his most attentive Caribbean audience, in fact, mainly in the person of Dennis Craig. But he also came in for mention by Dennis Solomon (1976), a lecturer in French at St Augustine, in a discussion of the ways the syntax of language may be affected by what people are trying to achieve by using it.
One final purely ritual reference to Bernstein occurs in an article on environmental education by an expatriate writer who lumps Bernstein together with eight other authors whose varying approaches to learning transformed "the traditional concept of 'intelligence' and ... exercised enormous influence upon the nature of curriculum developments" (Dutton, 1980, p. 52), particularly emphasizing experience, exploration, and other environmentally orientible activities.
It may indicate both the comparative isolation of the Caribbean academic community, the isolation of the educational community, and the ritual nature of most of the references I have noted above to look at the date of the most recent Bernstein source cited. Thus Camacho relies on a 1958 paper (in 1970), Reid on a 1961 paper, a year that is also the terminus ad quem for Murray and Dutton (published in 1975 and 1980 respectively). Somewhat greater awareness is displayed by Cross and Schwartzbaum whose latest citation is 1965 (in 1969) and Solomon who refers to a 1972 paper in his 1976. It is perhaps symptomatic of a reluctance to engage with Bernstein that Craig himself only reaches to a 1966 paper in his important 1974 (originally presented in 1972); to a 1972 reference in his 1978; and seems not to have addressed the papers classified by Bernstein as "explorations" in his 1973 collection even as recently as Craig's 1982, though he is aware of considerable modifications in Bernstein's later writings. It is no doubt also a reflection of the fact that much of the empirical work Craig uses against Bernstein is drawn from his 1971 thesis.
Craig's 1971 thesis studies the use of language by Jamaican children from differing socio-economic environments. His characterization (1982, pp. 1-3) of his problem situation places the evaluative, linguistic deprivation issue at the forefront, together with the "language equality" arguments of Labov, Abrahams, and other investigators of Black American English. In a context marked by growing interest in the distinctiveness of creole languages, he might also be seen as responding to the thinking expressed by Robinson with respect to East Africa that "in multilingual societies ... a whole language may function as a restricted code" (1971, p. 80) - certainly students in Jamaica tend to equate restricted code and creole speech. Craig's 1971 contribution, which he has stressed in many later publications, is the claim that "the linguistic characteristics of restricted coding ..., where they did exist in low-social-class language, could not have the intellectual and cognitive significances attributed to them in the early writings of Bernstein" (1982, p. 3). Restricted code characteristics were to be seen as expressing "a particular 'style of communication' that was an equally efficient alternative to the one referred to as an 'elaborated code'" (ibid.). This suggestion was, for instance, the main conclusion of Craig's 1974, which puts forward a theory of early versus late "lexification" of a shared grammar to account for the social class differences in his data.
Grammatical theory and the bearing of creole languages thereon became one of Craig's major concerns (e.g. 1980, a paper presented in 1975, and 1979). But he has returned to the question of different styles of communication through a re-analysis of his thesis data in his 1982. I shall discuss the detail of this approach in a later chapter. Of more interest to us now is the fact that while Craig recognized that "the later portions of this work along the Bernstein line in the 1960's stressed the socialization factor somewhat more" (1982, p. 2), neither he nor anyone else has seen fit to pursue their language studies in Jamaica into the possibly varying home environments in the way Bernstein at least attempted to do in the work Craig refers to. Craig's own categories for the children's backgrounds are simply rural low social class, urban low, and urban high social class, high and low being determined by reference to parental occupation and school locality. While it might not be appropriate to import Bernstein's contrast between positional and personal families just as it is, this conventional and very crude SES classification is certainly not sensitized to the kind of factor that Bernstein was focussing upon.
What is, I think, apparent from this brief survey of Caribbean references to Bernstein is that almost the only concern that has been remarked in Bernstein's work is the linguistic contribution to educational failure. Most of the energy has gone into attacking the evaluations supposed to be found in Bernstein's approach, and now that Craig believes that Bernstein has apparently shifted his ground we can predict a diminution of the vehemence of such attacks. The main thing is that very little of Bernstein's work has been discussed or used in the Caribbean, very little of the sociolinguistic work, let alone the work on the curriculum (that has been widely available since 1971) or the more recent and grander theorizing.
It may be somewhat pointless to try to explain an absence of this nature. It presupposes, of course, that one might have expected his presence, at least within Caribbean sociology of education, and while that is plausible from within some perspectives it might not be defensible from other equally respectable perspectives. But I think one can point to aspects of the Caribbean scene which are not conducive to a sympathetic appropriation of Bernstein's work, even without the possibly misunderstood evaluative connotations it has been made to carry.
As Brathwaite remarked, the sociological study of education is "still largely confined to institutional/statistical effects rather than with content/curriculum research and its relationship to the embodying culture" (1975, p. 6). There has been a good deal of Caribbean replication of the type of research typical of the early days of sociology of education in England, whose basic concern was, as Bernstein himself reports, "the demonstration, not explanation, of institutional sources of inequality in education" (1972 = 1977a, p. 160). But, as Bernstein's contrast suggests, the interest has been more on gross effects, correlations, say, between values and academic achievement, school authority patterns and pupil social development, and so on, than with exploring detailed models of the mechanisms involved.
This may be exemplified by a study of value transmission in Negro and Indian families in Trinidad (Green, 1965) where the author concludes, for instance, that Negro pupils (about 12 years old) are oriented to the present while East Indian pupils are oriented to the past and to the future. This is the sort of contrast that Bernstein might look for in different home environments, but Green is simply concerned to establish that such differences are produced without committing herself to the types of mechanism (behaviour patterns, sociolinguistic interactions, external pressures, etc.) that might have mediated the transmission of these different values, or the deeper structural factors producing such transmissions in these families.
I think that the same lack of interest in the exact mechanism helps to account for the absence, not just of Bernstein's views but of virtually any in-depth examination of the educational system, in recent more general sociological thought about Caribbean societies.
As Susan Craig (1982a) has recently re-affirmed, the major theoretical issues in Caribbean social history and sociology have been the debates triggered by plantations and pluralism. It is perhaps curious that in the course of the long debate on the plural society approach to Caribbean social formations very little use has been made of educational data. M. K. Bacchus (1970) did, however, confront two versions of plural society theory with his findings for the Guyanese educational system, in particular with the differential involvement therein of East Indians and Negroes. Thus he notes, for instance, the reluctance of the East Indians to set up their own schools to promote Indian cultures and religions, and the failure of attempts to teach Hindi and Urdu in the primary schools. These and other data would not sit happily with plural society models; or so one might think. In his recent somewhat selective survey of the debate, however, M. G. Smith claims that as a consequence of their profound cultural differences the members of different sections of "biracial Creole societies ... participate differentially in such sectors of the public domain as education, industry, commerce, ..." (1984, p. 37) but he seems not to be worried by the observation that in Guyana the Creoles and East Indians shared "certain national institutions such as local government and education" (ibid., p. 105). This exemplifies one perennial problem with the whole debate - the difficulty of specifying exactly what one is committed to by the various models, of specifying therefore what would count as evidence for or against such claims. But leaving these general difficulties aside, Bacchus' paper is one of the few to try to bring educational data into the arena to test plural society claims.
Others have, of course, discussed education within putative plural societies; but usually to exemplify claims about the society that were presupposed rather than, as with Bacchus, to test such claims themselves. Thus Joseph Farrell confronted pluralist theory with data from several Caribbean societies but with an eye to determining how far these societies had moved from a pure plural form towards heterogeneity. According to his model, a pure plural society should reveal a basic cultural component like education as differentiated among the segments; but he found instead that in all cases education was now a "broker between superordinate and subordinate cultures" (1967, p. 175). He also stressed the importance of support systems to help get the educational system's messages across. But the main point for us now is that Farrell is simply using the plural model, and in particular its conception of post-plural heterogeneous societies, rather than testing its applicability to the data, as Bacchus attempted to do. A similar use of educational data to illustrate a thesis rather than to test it is found in Miller's paper on Jamaica (1971). Miller argues that "the educational system ... cannot be expected to operate in such a way that it would create radical, revolutionary or even substantial changes in the social order" (p. 65) but again he is content to note the educational outcomes of his claimed transitional stage between pure plural and pure class society without examining how they are achieved in detail or trying to test independently based accounts of the society. The Marxist analyses of various Caribbean societies exemplified by several of the essays in Craig's collection (1982b) similarly assume a basically conservative educational system whose actual workings are too insignificant to examine.
While the academic social science debates about pluralism have thus in general remained at several removes from data on cultural and social reproduction in education, the more popular, more literary debates on West Indian identity, creoledom, and negritude have equally avoided detailed mechanisms, though they are not averse to the notions of style, the importance of language, and other less quantifiable features. And they have offered some striking portrayals of the oppressive and demeaning process which schooling represented, and continues to represent, for most West Indian children. This nastiness, and a deep ambivalence about the worth of the high culture that most of them managed to acquire, has perhaps helped to discourage detailed examination of the processes of schooling and social reproduction, although such explanatory theorizing does not in any case come naturally to the literary mind.
Bernstein claims that in England in the 50's and early 60's there were only two academic sociologists of education. The situation in the English speaking Caribbean is not much different even today, and since mainstream sociology has never given education quite the prominence of stratification, industrialism, or even religion, it is not surprising that there has been so little interest in a Caribbean redaction of the detail of Bernstein's thoughts about education and cultural reproduction. There has, in fact, been comparatively little sociological work even of a crudely empirical nature on education in the Caribbean; it is perhaps significant that the only number of Social and Economic Studies devoted to the sociology of education (volume 14, no. 1, a collection of conference papers) mostly contains empirical work on Latin America. Add to this paucity of workers the predominantly "applied" ethos of a lot of the teaching of sociology of education (and of sociology itself) and it is by no means difficult to understand the absence of Bernstein and the later fashions in metropolitan sociology of education, none of which are exactly forthcoming with prescriptions for getting a bored class through a meaningless curriculum. Whether the Caribbean has been missing anything, I hope the rest of this study will reveal.
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© E.P. Brandon. Last revision: 9th June, 2000.