Studying the Family

Abstract

Much educational research established that students’ family contexts influenced their educational outcomes. Work particularly focused on social class as mediating these outcomes. It was demonstrated that there was a disparity between the achievement-oriented values of the school, including language use, directed to the future, allied to what were more likely to be middle-class values, and the more collectivist, family and peer-group oriented values of working class students, which tended to be less future-oriented (e.g., Bernstein, 1973; Marjoribanks, 2002).