Conclusion

Abstract

What do we learn from these white middle-class parents? Clearly, there are partially realised goals, undercurrents of provisionality and surges of anxiety associated with against-the-grain choices of secondary school. But looking at the often pragmatic, sometimes conflictual aspirations of most of the parents in the sample, we also learn a great deal about the narrowness of mainstream white middle-class aspirations under neoliberalism, the failures, ignorance and short-falls of privilege. Despite their left-leaning, ‘radical’ inclinations, they, like the majority of middle-class parents, are motivated by the desire ‘to make the most of the child’ (Ball 2003 p. 25), and view them in terms of investments in and for the future. Theirs is a carefully monitored investment of human capital in educational stock that many of their middle-class peers have rejected as too risky. But the differences between mainstream middleclass practices and those of most of our sample are fairly superficial, and when we strip them away to focus on what lies beneath, the processes at play are similar. These parents are also playing the educational market, and capitalising on educational investments. While most would claim that they want a good education for all children, their actual social practices in the educational arena are still primarily about competition and trying to generate a greater profit than other parents. This paucity of aspiration comes as something of a surprise. The irony here is that it has traditionally been the white working-classes who have been judged for a paucity of aspirations: perhaps it is just that the circumscribed range of aspirations differs for different classes.