Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division

Making the Difference draws on a detailed study of the schools and homes of the powerful and the wealthy, and of the ordinary wage-earner.

It allows children, parents and teachers to speak for themselves and from what they say it develops strikingly new ways of understanding ‘educational inequality’, how the class and gender systems work, and schools and their social roles.

It argues that secondary schooling in Australia is at an historic turning-point and shows why traditional recipes for change will not do. ‘Equality of opportunity’, co-education, and ‘relevant and meaningful curriculum’ are all questioned, sympathetically but incisively.

Ranging across educational policy from system level to the everyday experience of kids and teachers, from the problems of schooling to the production of class and gender relations, Making the Difference is a path-breaking combination of theory, research and politics. Lucid and controversial, it will have a powerful impact on a wide readership.

Bob Connell teaches sociology at Macquarie University; Dean Ashenden teaches education administration at Kuring-gai CAE; Sandra Kessler teaches adult literacy at East Sydney College of TAFE; and Gary Dowsett is a research assistant in behavioural sciences at Macquarie University.