The Institutionalisation of Exclusion within Education

Abstract

What the genealogy so far reveals is the gradual consolidation of practices relating to exclusion in England, framed by increasingly elaborate apparatuses and techniques of governance emerging as part of an evolving biopolitics that consistently categorised the population of destitute children as the natural product of degenerate families, resistant to change. Official documents rarely consider the causes of inequality and poverty, except by reference to faults in the poor themselves. The prevailing views seem to regard the bodies and minds of these children as having been marked from birth with the defects that determined their destiny as future delinquents and burdens on society. However, we have argued with regard to the work of Carpenter, Demetz and others that different discourses and institutions emerged which had put into practice the conviction that conditions in the socio-economic environment were key determinants in accounting for destitute children’s behaviour. The success of the educational and pedagogical techniques devised by people such as Carpenter and Demetz vindicate their arguments that alternative approaches guided by empathy, respect and recognition are more effective for rescuing these children. Yet their approaches, as we have shown, have not been able to dislodge the dominant policies that, far from intervening to change the conditions that produced pauperisation and inequality, have instead succeeded in institutionalising exclusion in the education system. How this has been achieved, and the consequences for the present, is what we address in this chapter.

The fact that England is the most pauperised country in Europe, and that in which the Government has affected little or nothing for the education of the poorer classes Dr. James Phillips Kay. (1839: 5)

I would, first of all propose that it should be made unlawful ever to take any children into the workhouse, or into any establishment within three miles of one. (Mary Carpenter, 1861a:19)