Education in a mobile modernity

Education in a mobile modernity Martin Forsey School of Social Science, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia Email: martin.forsey@uwa.edu.au Received 19 October 2015 • Revised 21 April 2016 • Accepted 30 April 2016 Abstract The main contention of this paper is that education helps frame a modernity in which individual progress and achievement are increasingly linked to the sheer physical act of movement. Thinking of modernisation as a trajectory of progress and development symbolised by industrialisation and a reordering of ‘traditional societies’ through rational forms of governance, we can begin to recognise the importance of the disembedding of people and communities from local institutions and relations that these modernising processes continue to require. Individual education stories are filled with movement that often reflect a commitment to the mobility imperatives of modernity. Reflecting the different scales of practice evident in this mobile modernity, the empirical focus ranges from rural settings to urban mobilities and then out to transnational mobilities and the educational choices exercised by the global middle classes. The paper explores the profound and the mundane ways in which educational structures affect family and individual mobilities. Keywords mobile modernity; family decision-making; school choice; global middle classes; working class families; Australia; Canada The modern world, one informant told me has “no use for peasants”. (Corbett, 2009, p.6) Emplacement, relocation, and social class In 2015, I had the good fortune to spend an extended period of leave in France during which I took a short, concentrated introductory course in French. In that week, I met with a number of people, but it was with a fellow Australian that I struck up the deepest conversation, which I am a little chastened to say was in our native tongue rather than the language of instruction. Beth (not her real name) is of my vintage—a woman in her mid-50s at the time we spoke. She told me a good deal about herself in the short breaks we shared, relating how she had moved to France with her husband who had recently taken up a three-year contract as a very senior public servant in a famous European institution. Beth had time on her hands and felt the need to be able to communicate better with those around her, particularly—at this early stage of settling in —with tradesmen and real estate agents, hence Geographical Research • February 2017 • 55(1), 58–69 doi:10.1111/1745-5871.12189 her motivation for taking formal French lessons. I was ‘off duty’ so I was not really looking for any ‘data’ to share or analyse, but Beth was soon stirring my relatively recent sociological interest in educational mobility as she offered a potted family history of overseas contracts in the early stages of her marriage—‘while the kids were young when it doesn’t matter so much’, followed by a return home so that her eldest son could attend an Australian secondary school and, in turn, so could his two younger brothers. Beth’s youngest was in his final year at university at the time we spoke, and by then, she felt that she and her husband were able to move on to the next phase of their life, picking up their love of travel and of working overseas. Her husband’s job certainly sounded interesting and important, whereas her ability to take up professional work seemed limited, especially given her expertise as a primary school teacher with little understanding of the local language. Beth seemed simultaneously excited by the new life evolving before her and nervous of where it might lead her. 58 M. Forsey, Education in a mobile modernity As Beth’s story helps show, albeit at a particular end of the socio-economic spectrum, individual education stories are filled with movement, or at least they can be. As an academic, I cannot help but be aware of education’s mobility imperative; many of us are very conscious of, and responsive, to the official and unofficial rules requiring and suggesting movement away from home in order to build a fruitful career (see Forsey, 2015a; Overall, 1995). David Greenwood, a university-based environmental scientist, co-edited a special issue of a science education journal focusing on ecological mindfulness. Thinking about his own career and the highly mobile biography this has helped produce, alongside what he has observed of the careers of his colleagues and friends, Greenwood (2015, p.8) points out that he (and they) have followed ‘the siren song of a good/better job that fits middle class expectations, interests, and white-collar abilities’. And for many a person, not just academics, ‘the brute fact of physical movement’ is strongly correlated to social mobility and advancement (Corbett, 2009; Reechi, 2009). Beth’s story hints at the profound impacts upon family life and well-being these movements can have: a topic that is picked up further in due course. Given the centrality of social class to the arguments developed here, a word or two about the concept is important. Having written recently about the challenges posed by blue collar affluence produced in and through the Australian mining industry to the modernist myth of education that posits a direct relationship between income and levels of formal education (Forsey, 2015c), it should be obvious that I agree with the majority of contemporary social researchers and theorists looking beyond simple definitions of class as a socio-economic category, or as an occupation. Although such categorisations still have salience, class is no longer a simple vertical ranking (Dorling, 2014). Kincaid (2016) posits two broad forms of class categorisation existing simultaneously that are productive to think with. The first is a strong Marxian form that recognises class as a social entity existing for itself with a strong sense of self-recognition, characteristics that Kincaid attributes to the ruling class, or power elite and to a lesser degree to the so-called ‘underclass’. The second categorisation is much more fluid, less of an entity and much more a grouping that is best conceived in terms of ‘types of individuals’. This grouping of types approach reflects a more Weberian sense of social class, as something that is able to explain © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers 59 individual outcomes in terms of life chances but in more limited ways than the stronger, more concrete entities at the polar ends of the social field. These ‘middling groups’, which include bluecollar groupings, are sorted according to occupation, income, and prestige. In a research program that is well established in sociology, Kincaid (2016, p.204) argues that these classes are not required to display ‘extensive social organisation in the sense of tight networks, common organisations and institutions, or class consciousness’. Rather, the usefulness of the categories is located in their ability to ‘explain individual outcomes such as education levels, health, poverty, and employment stability’. In this pluralistic modelling of social categories, class is fluid to greater and lesser degrees, depending on where one is situated in the social field. Class is also a cultured, structured practice (Bourdieu, 1977; Forsey, 2015a), something that is performed or ‘done … rather than a system into which we are slotted’ (Lawler, 2005, p.804). And I agree with Lawler that class is but one of the axes around, which identities and cultures are formed, inter-related as it is to gender, race/ethnicity, bodily abilities, and sexuality, among others. Education plays a significant role in class formations and practices and in particular for the groups often referred to with the broad umbrella term of middle class whose lives are structured quite firmly and consciously by formal education (Lareau, 2003); indeed, middle classness as a category is often defined in no small part by degrees of formal education (Forsey, 2015c; Savage et al., 2013). It seems an obvious point to make, but somehow the significance of the links between formal education and family decision-making around emplacement and relocation —to mobilities—is somewhat hidden in the research literature. Corbett (2009, p.2) attributes the invisibility to processes of naturalisation, pointing out that for many of those who have been successful in formal education systems, ‘the connections between a movement away from place and the processes of formal education are so well established and ingrained that we seldom even recognise them’. The broad brush strokes of Beth’s family biography help illustrate a point I have already made (Forsey, 2015b) about the impact of schools and universities in helping create ‘the conditions and motivations for the “mobilities and moorings”, the simultaneous “deterritorialization”, “rhizomatic attachments” and “reterritorializations” of contemporary societies’ (Hannam et al., 2006). Beth’s relating of 60 family decision-making built, in no small part, around particular perceptions of educational structures, took me back to the research experiences in the remote mining towns of northern Western Australia, where my musings about education in a mobile modernity first stirred, helping me draw connections between a middle class habitus and educational mobility. The phenomenon was always visible but took a little time to actually recognise for reasons that may well be associated with my own class positioning (discussed later). Beth’s lack of concern about primary school education and the concomitantly strong focus on secondary schooling was entirely predictable. Time and time again in my researching life, I have heard parents exclaim that it does not matter which schools their children attend in their early years. It is a belief that elides questions about the importance of ‘the early years,’ allowing them to move around a bit if they wish to (and obviously quite a bit in Beth’s case). The transition to high school triggers in many parents concerns regarding future opportunities for their offspring. Secondary education’s eventual position at the gateway to tertiary pathways in many jurisdictions has clear structurating effects (Giddens, 1984) on some, perhaps even most, parents and their children, with consequences that are simultaneously settling and unsettling. In Karratha, the mining town in north Western Australia where I conducted research in 2010/ 2011, the transition to high school often triggered a flight response in parents, regardless of how much the family might have been enjoying the relaxed lifestyle of the town. The imminence of high school meant it was time to put in place the plan to leave Karratha and return home, or relocate to a city with more, and perhaps better, educational amenity (Forsey, 2011; 2015b). A parent I interviewed in a Karratha coffee shop decided to stay through the entirety of her daughter’s and son’s secondary schooling captured the compromises involved in her decision-making by pointing out that ‘yes, the education system certainly is quite lacking in lots of ways but it’s a decision you make: you can go, you can put the kids in boarding school, you can pack up and leave, I stayed, and they’re quite happy with what they’re doing’. Happiness of the children was often the focus of the parents who chose to stay and deal with the perceptions and realities of the educational offerings in their local place. Educational movement is scalar of course, and Beth’s story helps show that one does not need to Geographical Research • February 2017 • 55(1), 58–69 be in remote areas of educational disadvantage for the transition to high school to act as a clarion call to home. For her family at least, the moment had come when the transnational lifestyle had to be sacrificed for the good of their kids, or at least so the rhetoric goes. It was time to return to the known and trusted world of a national school system; either that or send the children to boarding school ‘at home’, an option that many families are unwilling to exercise. These ‘small tales from the field’ begin the process of illustrating mobility as a defining feature of modernity and the role of educational practices in the creation of this mobile modernity. Thinking of modernisation as a trajectory of progress and development symbolised by industrialisation and a reordering of ‘traditional societies’ through rational forms of governance, we can begin to recognise the importance of the disembedding of people and communities from local institutions and relations that these modernising processes require (Giddens, 1991; Kesselring, 2006). As I have argued elsewhere, ‘mobility’s association with opportunity, progress and freedom, [however misleading or mythical this has proved to be], suggests a hand-in-glove relationship with modernity’ (Forsey, 2015b, p.765; cf. Cresswell, 2006), a relationship enabled, to no small, degree by education and its continuing promise of social mobility. In other words, formal education helps frame a modernity in which individual progress and achievement are increasingly linked to the sheer physical act of movement. Messages transmitted through education systems about needing to ‘experience the world’ to ‘internationalise’ or to ‘network’, and ‘to get out of this town if you really want to make something of yourself’ (see Corbett, 2007) suggest that personal growth and development require movement. The modern world has no room for peasants, as Corbett’s young informant suggests in the epigraph opening this paper, an insight that is simultaneously temporal and spatial. Not only does education promise (and sometimes even deliver) social mobility: there are various ways in which educational institutions impel individuals and family groups to move, be it to head off to university, to move inside the boundaries demarking the intake zones of desirable schools, or to get out of places where educational opportunities seem limited. It is important to keep in mind that modernity is neither clear-cut nor homogeneous (Forsey, 2015b; cf. Kesselring, 2006), and that experiences of modernity are contingent and changing. Those of us © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers 61 M. Forsey, Education in a mobile modernity living in the so-called ‘West’ are now experiencing a deindustrialising, degovernmentalising present. While some may want to suggest we have moved beyond modernity, I am persuaded more by depictions of a developing, historically contingent, evolving model of social change (see Tonts et al., 2012). Beck’s and Lau’s (2005) portrait of a second, reflexive modernity is helpful, whereby the apparent certainties and securities of initial modernity—collective patterns of life, progress, and controllability, full employment—have given way to globalisation, increased individualisation, underemployment, and global risks. Tonts and his colleagues’ (2012) discussion of the changes that have overtaken Australia’s wool industry in recent times is instructive in this regard and helpful for the discussion of rural mobilities that is to follow. In their exploration of evolutionary models of social change in rural Australia, they depict sharp declines in an agrarian system that was once built on scientific selection and breeding programmes, buoyant markets, farmer knowledge, and various forms of government support, including a guaranteed price for product, all characteristics of the post-war period of high modernity. In these more neoliberal times, government support is in decline or has disappeared altogether, consumer taste has shifted in favour of more synthetic products, and the nature of markets has changed. In response, agricultural practice has had to change or the farmers move on. To suggest we are living in a mobile second modernity is clumsy, but it is important to recognise the historical continuities and mutabilities underpinning the title term of this paper, which the notion of a second modernity does better than references to us being close to the end in late modernity. To help illustrate education’s role in this mobile second modernity, and consider the ways in which it helps mark and shape individual and collective growth, development, and progress, I draw upon various aspects of my own experiences as both social researcher and social actor, coupled with those of various colleagues, to uncover still further the profound and the mundane ways in which educational structures affect family and individual mobilities. Indeed, this paper is modelled at least in part on one written by one of my key interlocutors—Michael Corbett. Corbett (2009, p.1) has reflected on the ways in which his own biography affected his contribution to the sociology of education through his influential book Learning to Leave (2007), exploring ‘the troubled and complex relationship between rural education and the sustainability of rural communities’. Insofar as I share © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers some of my personal experiences, this essay is less of a biographical reflection and more of sharing of various stories if you prefer, picked up along my own research trail. I proceed by means of an engagement with Corbett’s work from rural Canada, drawing upon the research I conducted in the ‘Far North’ of Western Australia. From there, I will move into the suburbs, using some important work from the school choice literature by Stephen Ball et al. (1995) in London as a means of reflecting upon some of the matters arising in households in Australian suburbia. A final point of focus expands back out to where I started, considering the mobilities and family decision-making of “the global middle classes”, particularly those who constitute a broad category referred to as the transnational managerial class (Embong, 2000; cf. Cox, 1996). Rural emplacements and displacements I was raised to understand place as a point in a network rather than as a worthwhile locale in its own right. (Corbett, 2009, p.5) Corbett’s reflection is personal but one that he generalises to be part of the training and experience of those located in the professional classes, a process that he recognises as playing a part in his work as a school teacher. Formal education, he argues, is a key institution of ‘disembedding’ (see Giddens, 1990) ‘loosening ties to particular locales and promoting out-migration from rural places’ (Corbett, 2009, p.1). His concerns about the messages emanating out from schools into wider rural communities arose from his own experiences as a school teacher in remote parts of Canada, most notably in a town in the province of Manitoba where the majority of the population are of indigenous descent, but also in fishing communities in Nova Scotia. In each of these places, Corbett experienced a resistance among some, in Manitoba among most, to an educational message that measured success by the willingness of students to leave their homelands in order to take up the opportunities available to them in the cities of the south. Reflecting upon his experiences in these far-flung places, Corbett came to recognise the various skills and forms of intelligence it takes to live successfully in these spaces, helping explain why learning associated with formal education was not necessarily appreciated in the ways that teachers hoped it might. Not surprisingly, the pressures to stay or leave the sorts of remote regions and communities Geographical Research • February 2017 • 55(1), 58–69 62 Corbett writes about are experienced differently by women and men. Schooling is ‘girls stuff’, with women three times more likely than men to leave their home areas in pursuit of further education and/or employment opportunities, findings that are reinforced in other recent North American studies (Carr & Kerfalas, 2009; Howley & Hambrick, 2014). Young men are much more likely to be moulded into the socio-cultural systems built in and around the fishing communities that shape their knowledge and abilities to suit the available resource industry employment: … “success” in formal schooling was understood locally as not being “particularly gifted” by community standards, not able to handle a complex and difficult life of entrepreneurial risk-taking, raising a family on limited resources, and the physical toil and manual skills in the “real world” of the community and on the water. (Corbett, 2009, pp.1–2. See also Corbett, 2007) There is a blue-collar, masculinist ethic driving a narrative counter to the imperatives suggested by formal education. It is an ethic that helps structurate career choices in the resource industry towns Corbett writes about. Things are changing in late modernity of course, as resource bases collapse and consumer tastes and demands shift, changes that undermine this counter-narrative in significant ways. I will pick up on this theme a little later. Turning attention to the resource town I spent five weeks in as part of a commissioned research project in 2010/11 in my home state of Western Australia, I have used the imagery conjured by Corbett in his depiction of an education system promoting the value of learning to leave, to write about a set of interventions in Karratha promoting the importance of learning to stay (Forsey, 2015b; 2015c). The contrast is a little deceptive, as the overwhelming message delivered through formal schooling still points towards higher education in metropolitan areas as the next logical step for clever enough students. Out-migration of youths from rural towns is of concern throughout most of Australia, raising concerns about the sustainability of many rural towns (Cuervo & Wyn, 2012, p.68; Gibson, 2008). Compounding this concern, at least for some, is the so-called ‘brain drain’ from rural places triggered by the high proportion of youths from rural towns who gain university qualifications and then choose to settle in metropolitan and regional centres (Cuervo & Wyn, 2012, p.82; Drozdzewski, 2008, p.154). Consistent with Corbett’s findings, young men from rural towns in Australia who do not have tertiary education qualifications are less likely than their female counterparts to move away from their place of residence upon completion of compulsory schooling. However, as already indicated, major companies in Karratha were keen to address another mobility issue, one that tended to result in teenagers of high school age leaving town in proportions above the State average. The company executive was concerned about employees rather than teenagers. From its point of view, too many workers were leaving too quickly. Karratha is a town with a population churn that is spectacular by national standards (City of Karratha, 2014). At the time of the 2006 census, for example, ‘approximately 56 per cent and 24 per cent of the town’s residents lived at their current address one and five years ago, respectively, compared with 75 per cent and 48 per cent for the State’ (Government of Western Australia, 2010). Employee surveys conducted on behalf of the North West Shelf Joint Venture (NWSJV), a conglomerate of companies responsible for gas extraction in the area, indicated quality of secondary education to be a major concern and a highly important push factor in the decision to leave town (Forsey, 2015b). The NWSJV estimated that ‘employee churn’ was costing the company in excess of AU$15m per annum, and they wanted to do something about it. The NWSJV invested quite heavily in a project called the Karratha Education Initiative (KEI), aimed at improving the educational offerings of the two high schools in the town. The details of the project need not detain us here; suffice to say that the KEI sought to make the local secondary schools more attractive to parents and their children. While the initial thrust of its application was meant to broaden the educational horizons of students into the arts and sciences, leadership and community service, it narrowed fairly quickly into measuring success by university entrance examination results (Forsey, 2011). I have written about the ways in which the attention paid to pathways to universities was significant to the professional classes in Karratha, ‘white collar’ workers, usually with tertiary qualifications, who were working in various settings around the town (Forsey, 2015c). The issues raised by a number of these professional parents, some who had already left the town because they were not convinced it was in their child’s best interest to stay on, reflect concerns about the sort of blue© 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers M. Forsey, Education in a mobile modernity collar, masculinist ethic Corbett identified in the fishing communities of Nova Scotia. However, in contrast to Corbett’s findings, many of the parents I interviewed saw the schools as reinforcing this ethic, not undermining it. One parent, an engineer whose family had moved back to their home in Perth, while he continued to work in Karratha on a ‘fly-in-fly-out’ contract,1 expressed his doubts about the educational offerings available in Karratha in terms of aspiration. In his view, the schools emphasized vocational training at the expense of those students with an interest in going to university. Explaining this point to me during an interview at his family home, he noted that … if you take a look at some of the wages that are going on up there, they are high and children look at that and go, ‘Well, why do I need to go to university? My dad’s a scaffolder or a rigger or whatever and he’s making more than an engineer so why would I do that?’ And so they don’t actually have any aspirations to go beyond that. Corbett’s tussle with the failure of educational curriculum and practice not only to acknowledge the significance of place, but then to give it a central position in the delivery of curriculum and other educational services, emanates from research conducted in spaces of long and deep habitation, or at least in the context of Euro-Canadian settlement it does. Several generations of fisher families have occupied the spaces in which he lived and worked, creating a world view and life practice that is deeply embedded in place. Karratha is not like this, and yet, as shown later, its people managed to produce practices that sound remarkably similar to those described by Corbett (2009, pp.1–2) when he writes of a locally produced set of informal education systems that integrate young men into resource industry employment. Could it be that there are cultural ideals and practices that transcend place and are more attributable to one’s position in the broad assemblage that is usually referred to as a social class system? The town of Karratha was created by a mining company in the 1960s to service the needs of its employees. It has not been a place of permanent white settlement, or significant Indigenous settlement for that matter, since its inception. In recent times, the Western Australian government has invested significant resources to make the town a more desirable place to settle. The person who oversaw the project in the Pilbara region commented on national radio that the measure of success of what became known as the Pilbara © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers 63 Cities project would be a population of 50,000 persons and a full cemetery. As can be gathered from this statement, very few retire and continue to reside in the town until reaching their ultimate destination. Complete life cycles are the exception rather than the rule in Karratha. It is interesting to ask what a place centred curriculum would look like in a place of temporary, transient settlement. That said, there were times when parents I interviewed spoke in ways that suggested a deeper rootedness in the place than I was used to hearing. I recall visiting the home of John, a former student of the Catholic high school. He was one of the educational success stories of the Karratha Education Initiative, having been accepted into Medicine at the State’s oldest and most prestigious university.2 When I went to his family home to interview his mother, John was in the middle of his third year at university, and he was not there. On arrival, I was offered the first of several beers and invited to sit on the sofa in the lounge where the adults of the household were intent on watching a greyhound race on the television. It turned out that they owned the race favourite and, true to form, he won the race. That event over, I was invited to sit outside on the large patio with its very large bar dominating the space. John’s mother and I sat down to negotiate the process of informed consent. As we talked, John’s father was hovering. Ostensibly, he was waiting for a couple of his mates to arrive to take him to another mates house to work on a car he was having some trouble with. John’s dad is a boiler maker. I had the impression that he wanted to talk with me as he hovered, and after a few minutes, he offered me the following observation: ‘He was always different was John’. To illustrate the point, he told a story of taking him out hunting when he was eight or nine years old. ‘He shot the wrong bird, one that was on the endangered list. I told him this, that he’d shot the wrong bird and he burst out crying. He never went hunting again. Yeah, he was different was John’. As he finished the story, a car horn sounded, John’s dad looked over the fence and was off to join his mates. Towards the end of an hour long interview with John’s mum, his dad returned. He hovered again for a few moments and then asked me a question, one that seemed to be bothering him quite a bit: ‘You know when they leave to go to uni?’ he paused for a moment, ‘well, you know, do they forget where they come from?’ I was dumfounded and remained so for some moments, searching for the most constructive way to respond. I did not really have an answer to his question, just more 64 questions. I would like to have asked him much more about the origins of his query, but he did not hang around much longer. The question was left hanging. It still is. At first blush, the question posed by John’s dad appears to be spatial, but it is really more of a social question. While John’s family had lived in the north of Western Australia for close to 20 years at the time that I met them, they were not people who seemed deeply rooted into the place. Indeed, John had already informed me of their plan to return to their native state of Victoria to breed and race greyhounds. When John’s dad asked with some passion on his face, ‘do they forget where they come from?’ I believe he was referring to a turning away from origins rooted in a class habitus that values a commitment to place-based family life. The working classes are also mobile, but perhaps John’s father’s question helps show that middle class commitments to forms of growth and maturity that encourage spreading beyond hearth and home in order for proper development to take place are not necessarily part of a working class mobility, they are not generally built into a working class habitus (see also Lareau, 2003). Corbett is well aware of the class dynamics at play in the ways that differential positions in social structures and the concomitant access to social, cultural, and material resources impact specific socio-spatial identities, but his research sample was predominantly blue collar. What my research among mainly white collar middle class families associated with schooling in a remote area of Australia helps confirm is the ways in which a middle class habitus is attuned to educational messages about the importance of physical mobility for social improvement and advancement. The modernity that the middle classes have played such a significant part in developing (Earle, 1989; Lopez & Weinstein, 2012) is aided by the intimate relationship between education and mobility. In light of the foregoing, Ball et al. (1995) offer a compelling analysis of differences among working class and middle class families when it comes to choosing the sorts of schools the children of the family should attend. Working class families are very much more likely to be focused on the local schools, fitting their choices around work, family life, household organisation, and the sexual division of labour; whereas, middle class families are prepared to be mobile in their quest for the best school for their children, accommodating household, and family tasks to the needs of getting the children to school Geographical Research • February 2017 • 55(1), 58–69 wherever that may be. Their research was based in suburban London, and it is interesting to shift focus and think about how this mobile modernity is experienced in metropolitan arenas. Metropolitan and cosmopolitan emplacements and displacements Learning to leave is not just a rural imperative. The reputation of certain urban spaces can be such that the message that one needs to get out of the place if one wishes to get on in the world is not difficult for teachers and other community members to convey. This point was illustrated in interesting ways by an Australian federal by-election for the Western Australian seat of Canning that took place in September 2015. The by-election assumed particular importance because it was seen as a very real test of the popularity of the Liberal-National Party coalition government led by then Prime-Minister Tony Abbott. The seat of Canning, currently covers 6,187 square kilometres. Originally a rural seat, Canning became part of metropolitan Perth over several decades. More recently, it has been extended beyond the metropolitan boundaries. It now encompasses a mixed socio-economic area, stretching from a working class heartland to a spread of new suburbs reaching eventually to peri-urban and rural domains south of the capital city (see Green, 2015). In the early phases of the campaign, the emplacement of the candidates was of apparent importance. The Liberal party candidate, a former soldier, was portrayed by the Labor opposition as an ‘outsider’ parachuted into the seat by a desperate Prime Minister. This particular candidate was at pains to point out that he had been located in Western Australia for some years and he and his family had recently settled inside the boundaries of Canning. Meanwhile, the Labor candidate made sure that the first photographs of his campaign were taken in the kitchen of his parents’ home in the suburb of Kelmscott, a place that is well and truly within the seat of Canning. Local credentials were part of what he was putting on display, informing the journalists gathered around him and the Opposition leader who happened to be there for morning tea, that ‘I grew up in this area and I’m really committed to this area and making it a better place.’ Mr Keogh made sure the press knew of his family’s long history in the electorate, pointing out how had worked in his grandfather’s local law firm, and had served as a youth group leader in a variety of community groups. It was © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers M. Forsey, Education in a mobile modernity also made clear that the local area had hit hard times, with youth unemployment identified as a particular problem, alongside the closing of local businesses (Perpitch, 2015). Inevitably, Keogh’s claims of being an authentic local candidate were derided by government politicians, most notably by the Western Australian federal MP and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop who dismissed the Labor candidate as a ‘hipster lawyer who was living in the affluent inner city suburb of Mt Lawley’ (Parker, 2015). Politics are politics, and the veracity of the claims made is not important to the ideas I am pursuing. Much more interesting are the ways in which the Labor candidate demonstrated the movements that many on both sides of the rather narrow political spectrum would view as the natural, desired order of things—the modernist myth of education alluded to earlier (Forsey, 2015c). A boy who experienced the types of educational success that enabled him to become a lawyer as an adult did what he was supposed to do in demonstrating the fruits of this success, locating himself in one of the affluent corners of town. Keogh’s attempts to demonstrate an authentic sense of belonging to one of the working class fragments of what one commentator described as a “kaleidoscopic seat” (O’Connor, 2015) were understandable both politically and socially. Growing up in a place surely impacts on a person, offering insights that are otherwise unavailable. However, claims to having an authentic sense of belonging to the place are always going to be scrutinised with scepticism when one has exercised the prerogative to leave. The larger point is well illustrated; that learning to leave is a suburban phenomenon as well, and despite the relative lack of distance between the likes of working class Kenwick and “hipster” Mount Lawley, the brute fact of physical movement that is so often facilitated by educational achievement can create significant social conundrums, if not chasms. The potential chasms opened up by the double movement of the physical and social body help drive an educational market-place, which, no matter how “quasi” this market may be, is very real in its consequences (Bradley & Taylor, 2002; Walford, 1996; Whitty, 1997). As already indicated, writing about parental school choice in suburban London in the early 1990s, Ball et al. (1995, p.57) identified how the calculations surrounding the choices were class based, ‘embedded in a complex pattern of family demands and structural limitations’. Remembering Bourdieu’s caution (1998, p.6) about recognising that when we write about © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers 65 social class we are always thinking statistically, Ball et al. (1995) write of the different priorities shown by working class and middle class participants in their research, which reflect the varying space-time budgets available to these different groupings. Working class families were often constrained by time, limiting their ability to traverse space in order to place their children in what arguably might be more desirable schools. However, the idea of desirable schools looked very much like the preserve of the middle classes, with the working class respondents extolling the virtues of the local as a value in its own right, tending not to contemplate schools outside of their local area (Ball et al., 1995). Cause and effect are difficult to unravel in these considerations because, as Ball and his colleagues point out, working class parents were more time poor than their middle class peers, but neither did they have the desire, perhaps best understood as a cultural inclination, to run around after their children in other parts of the city. These findings are consistent with Lareau’s (2003) fascinating ethnographic study of middle class and working class parenting “styles” in the USA. Whereas the middle class parents she spent time with—both in their homes and beyond— were inclined to ferry their children to schools outside of their normal catchment, as well as to a wide variety of extra-curricular activities, working class parents were much less likely to structure the days of their children around a range of educative, ‘selfimproving’ activities. Extra-curricular activities were more often experienced by working class parents as an inconvenience, an unwelcome imposition on their time; for middle class parents this is simply what was expected. Concerted cultivation is the term Lareau uses to describe middle class styles of parenting, in contrast to the “natural growth” model—let them get on with it—that working class parents tended to subscribe to. Lareau’s conclusions are consistent with the depiction of middle class commitment to accommodating family roles and household organisation to the needs and requirements of schooling made by Ball et al. (1995, p.57), while working class ‘ideas about school were often subordinated to … the constraints of family and locality’. According to their work, the end result of the processes of choice opened up by a deregulating so-called ‘school markets’ in the final quarter of twentieth century England, at least in the London suburbs in question, was the production of a discourse among working class parents dominated by ‘the practical and the immediate’ sitting alongside a middle 66 class commitment to ‘the ideal and advantageous’ (p.74).3 The causes and effects of these binary ideals are ongoing and, of course circular. As already indicated, academics constitute the group who of all occupational categories are arguably the most intensely and intimately entwined with formal education. Their experiences can reveal a good deal about the part played by education in constituting a mobile modernity. A recent invitation to contribute to a volume committed to expressing the ‘voices of Australian academics from the working class’ (Michell et al., 2015, np) has drawn my attention to a pattern of experiences among my fellow travellers of persons who often find themselves feeling intellectually and socially ‘nowhere at home’ (Overall, 1995, p.219). With a lifestyle, a set of interests and a working life that is often incomprehensible to their families (Gardner, 1993) academics of working class origins identify themselves as ‘outsiders within’ or ‘insiders-out’ in their workplace, and at home (Hoskins, 2010, p.135; Wright et al., 2007, p.153). As Overall (1995) helps exemplify, many who have already written about being an academic from the working class express varying levels of discomfort, awkwardness and sometimes even guilt about leaving their familial places, while their families oft-times express bewilderment at their drive to do so. Home is a significant theme in the literature on academics from working class backgrounds for which Ball et al.’s contrast of a working class commitment to localism to the cosmopolitan leanings of the middle classes offers some useful analytical purchase. Academic imperatives push outwards, away from the alleged parochialism of origins, towards a sense of self and citizenship that defies and transcends the local. It is a cosmopolitan calling and as such it is deeply attractive. However, it can also be confusing for one imbued with the localising imperatives of a working class culture. In my response to the challenge of writing about being an academic from the working class (Forsey, 2015a) I reflected on the difference the desert makes to certain elements of Australian experience, especially in terms of educational mobility in the Western third of the nation. The vast majority of Western Australians who are fortunate enough to qualify for university attend one of the five located in the State. This pattern presents a stark difference to the experiences of young people in nations where it is usual to the point of convention and expectation to move away Geographical Research • February 2017 • 55(1), 58–69 from home in order to go to university particularly among the middle class. For most of my adult life, my immediate family members, of which there are seven, have all lived within a ten kilometres radius of each other. Ruminating on my good fortune in being able to stay in the place I grew up in, I wrote the following: ‘Not moving on’ is often construed as a problem in academia and among academics. I take the point about the importance of cross-fertilisation of ideas, and of gaining a range of training and experiences, but other commitments and alternative values can also be valorised. Insofar as the desert structures, or at least symbolises, a more ‘stay at home’ ethos in Australian academic life, for those for whom this matters, it is something to be grateful for. Corbett captures well aspects of the confusion between home and away in this academic life, linking it to the values associated with a mobile modernity that is so strongly imbued into a middle class habitus. Recalling early experiences in his doctoral studies programme and the inevitable introduction of self that take place, he began by describing the places he had come from. For Corbett (2009, p.6), a good introduction of self requires some revelation of origins—‘how can you introduce yourself without addressing the fundamental place question?’ But his revelatory statements were met with puzzlement in the Vancouver classrooms in which he found himself (or perhaps lost himself, at least a little). Corbett’s (2009, pp.6–7) reflections on this puzzlement are worth quoting in full: “What do you mean: Where I was born?” as if to say, “what does that have to do with anything?” It is an impolite and inappropriate question that is thought to belie a lack of sophistication if not xenophobia and even racism. Modern identities are implied to be detached from place. The important question, the question contemporary, real, educated people ask, is “where are you going?” It is movement that matters, not where you have been. As soon as one arrives then there will be yet another place and another journey to desire … Education is not about where you are, it is about where you are headed. In introducing himself it was his project he was supposed to focus on, not his origins—apparently this would have been the best way to prove his cosmopolitan credentials. © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers M. Forsey, Education in a mobile modernity Education in a mobile (second) modernity: summaries and prospects We live in a mobile modernity that is propelled and compelled by formal education. It is a simple enough proposition that I hope this paper has helped demonstrate. In social science literature educational links with social mobility are obvious and well documented, while the links between formal education and physical movement are less well developed (Corbett, 2009; Forsey, 2015b). That there are inextricable links between physical and social mobility is part of the argument I am making here; it is this link that brings formal education into the modernity project. Modernity carries the promise of social advancement for all, providing the right steps are followed. A fundamental belief that successful adulthood depends upon the commitment one makes to formal education in childhood and youth, reflects what I have called the modernist myth of education, which posits a direct relationships between levels of formal education and income potential (see Forsey, 2015c, p.361). The myth is not without foundation. A recent article by journalists working for the Australian national broadcaster suggests a ten per cent increase in income for every year of formal education completed by an individual and that ‘the typical [university] graduate will earn around 35 to 45 per cent more than their non-graduate peers’ (FactCheck, 2014). It is no wonder that middle class parents, replete with their own cultural knowledge and positioning, as well as a certain fear of loss in the competition for the right sorts of credentials for their offspring, are prepared to go to great lengths to ensure their child is advantaged more than they are disadvantaged through formal education. There are cultural practices linked to class positioning that the likes of Stephen Ball, Annette Lareau, and Michael Corbett have brought to our attention, practices that enable the middle classes to use the various forms of mobility available to them to their advantage. The research cited here helps demonstrate that while mobility is certainly not the sole preserve of the middle classes, there is something in the training and material advantages of the middle classes that allow them to use mobilities strategically. It seems to be the case that built into the socialisation of middle class persons is an implicit belief in the necessity of travel, be it to a school beyond the local catchment, or on a student exchange programme, or to another town to attend a different school or to go to university. © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers 67 It is a cultural imperative that impels people along various paths, opened up by various means, routes of thought and action distinct from pre-modern imaginations, and ways of being that help broaden the mind and increase one’s chances of social and cultural success into the future. Some interesting work could be carried out in building a more thorough sociology of choice making, a theme that has extra poignancy in this late modern, neoliberal era by documenting the different forms and types of mobility discourse evident across the variables of class and space canvased earlier. Doing so is not simply intrinsically interesting; it can advance understanding of how inequality is reinforced in a highly mobile modernity and might even suggest ways of ameliorating these effects through curriculum change, or policies that pay greater attention to the disadvantage faced by children and youth who through no fault of their own have not had the opportunity to naturalise the messages available to others in their age cohort about the importance of experiencing the world, of internationalising, networking or simply getting out of particular situations in order to improve their life chances and situations. Returning to Beth and her brief story of educational choice across national boundaries, she is emblematic of a group that Stephen Ball among others is suggesting have been barely noticed in the research literature—the global middle classes (Ball & Nikita, 2014). A British geographer, Sam Scott (2006, p.1125) stimulated some debate and activity in asserting that skilled international migration is now a normalised middle-class activity and not something exclusively confined to an economic elite: globalisation theorists, he argues, ‘have very capably conceptualised flows in goods, services, finance and knowledge’; however, ‘they have been less able to tackle the complex human outcomes of the system they describe’. Schools are very good to think with when contemplating the complexity of outcomes in such systems. Ryan and Mulholland (2014), for example, in a study of highly skilled French migrants in London’s financial and business sectors, demonstrate the important role played by women in family migratory strategies, for which schooling of children is deeply influential (see, for example, p.593). Imagining an opportunity to conduct a proper sociological interview with Beth, I would predict a very similar story to the ones uncovered by Ryan and Mullholland would emerge for an Australian family in France (and other places), demonstrating how women are not simply the ‘passive “trailing wife” ’ that much of the expatriate 68 literature suggests they are (Ryan & Mulholland, 2014, p.597). Focusing squarely on education, Ball and Nikita (2014, p.83) call upon scholars to pay closer attention to the ways in which the educational choices and strategizing of the global middle classes causes social inequality to reach beyond national boundaries into ‘new globalising microspaces’ (see also Kreckel, 2006). It is a call colleagues in Germany have invited me take up with them in considering the strategies and choices evident in online discussion of international schools in Berlin. It is clear that the increasing numbers of skilled migrants are impacting the Berlin “eduscape” in interesting ways, especially when considered alongside the local desire for an internationalising curriculum that is so much a part of second modernity (see Breidenstein et al forthcoming; Forsey et al., 2015). The ‘prospect’ for rich, revealing research is clearly there and emblematic of where future and further research into the mobilising effects of education in late modernity might lead helping to further understanding of the rich complex human systems in which we are all currently located and implicated. Notes 1. The conditions of these contracts vary quite a bit, but they all involve a period of intense work in the site of employment over a set period of time, say ten days or so, living in temporary accommodation, followed by a similar amount of time spent at home on leave. For a discussion of this practice and some of its local implications see Argent (2015), McKenzie et al. (2015), Peck (2013), and Tonts (2010) among others. 2. For a more detailed version of John’s educational story see Forsey (2013). 3. Similar findings and observations are evident across the globe, although it is important to acknowledge that not all of the researchers are as sensitive to the issues arising from considerations of space, place and time. See for example Walford (1996) for an expanded discussion of school choice in England and Wales, Narodowski (2008) for coverage of the issues in Argentina, Phillips and Stambach (2008) writing about school choice in Tanzania, Campbell et al. (2009) in Australia and Lubienski et al. (2009) discussing the inequalities of school choice in various parts of the USA. Conflict of interest None declared. References Argent, N., 2015. Australasian rural geographies: at the core, in the antipodes? Geographical Research, 53(4), pp.357–369. Ball, S. and Nikita, D., 2014. The global middle class and school choice: a cosmopolitan sociology. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 7(3), pp.81–93. Ball, S., Bowe, R. and Gewirtz, S., 1995. Circuits of schooling: a s-ociological exploration of parental choice of school in Geographical Research • February 2017 • 55(1), 58–69 social class contexts. The Sociological Review, 43(1), pp.52–78. Beck, U. and Lau, C., 2005. Second modernity as a research agenda: theoretical and empirical explorations in the ‘metachange’ of modern society. The British Journal of Sociology, 56(4), pp.525–557. Bourdieu, P., 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Translated by Richard Nice. Bradley, S. and Taylor, J., 2002. The effect of the quasi-market on the efficiency-equity trade-off in the secondary school sector. Bulletin of Economic Research, 54(3), pp.295–314. Campbell, C., Proctor, H. and Sherington, G., 2009. School Choice: How Parents Negotiate the New School Market in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Carr, P.J. and Kerfalas, M.J., 2009. Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and what it Means for America. Boston: Beacon Press. City of Karratha, 2014. Green paper on developing the North, City of Karratha submission. Available at: http:// northernaustralia.infrastructure.gov.au/submissions/files/ city_of_karratha.pdf. [Accessed 15/09/2015]. Corbett, M., 2009. Rural schooling in mobile modernity: returning to the places I’ve been. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 24(7), pp.1–13. Corbett, M., 2007. Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Cox, R., 1996. A perspective on globalization. In: J. Mittelman, (ed) Globalization: Critical Reflections. Boulder: Lynne Reinner. Cresswell, T., 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge. Cuervo, H. and Wyn, J., 2012. Young People Making it Work: Continuity and Change in Rural Places. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Dorling, D., 2014. Thinking about class. Sociology, 48(3), pp.452–462. Drozdzewski, D., 2008. ‘We’re moving out’: youth out-migration intentions in coastal non-metropolitan New South Wales. Geographical Research, 46(2), pp.153–161. Earle, P., 1989. The making of the English middle class: business, society and family life in London, 1660–1730. Berkeley: University of California Press. Embong, A., 2000. Globalization and transnational class relations: some problems of conceptualisation. Third World Quarterly, 21(6), pp.989–1000. FactCheck, 2014. Christopher Pyne’s claim that graduates earn more is overblown. ABC News Online. Available at: http:// www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-29/pynegraduate-earningsand-unemployment-claim-overblown/5446462. [Accessed 12/2014]. Forsey, M., 2011. Living on edges: supplementing education in an Australian mining town. International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter, 56, pp.21–23. Forsey, M., 2013. But did it help you get to university? A qualitative study of supplementary education in Western Australia. In: J. Aurini, J Dierkes. and S. Davies eds. Out of the Shadows? An Introduction to Worldwide Supplementary Education. International Perspectives on Education and Society Series. Oxford: Emerald Press. Forsey, M., 2015a. I didn’t work for it: the acquisition of an academic habitus (or how a working class kid got a middle class job). In: D. Michell, J. Wilson, H. Brook and V. Archer, eds. Bread and Roses: Voices of Australian Academics from the Working Class. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. pp.9–17. © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers M. Forsey, Education in a mobile modernity Forsey, M., 2015b. Learning to stay: mobile modernity and the sociology of choice. Mobilities, 10(5), pp.764–783. Forsey, M., 2015c. Blue-collar affluence in a remote mining town: challenging the modernist myth of education. Ethnography and Education, 10(3), pp.356–369. Forsey, M., Breidenstein, G., Krüger, O. and Roch, A., 2015. Ethnography at a distance: globally mobile parents choosing international schools. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(9), pp.1112–1128. Gardner, S., 1993. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? In: M. Tokarczyck and E. Fay, eds. Working Class Women in the Academy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Gibson, C., 2008. Youthful creativity in regional Australia: panacea for unemployment and out-migration? Geographical Research, 46(2), pp.183–195. Giddens, A., 1991. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A., 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A., 1984. The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Government of Western Australia, Department of Planning, 2010. Regional Hotspots, Land Supply Update: Karratha. Perth: Western Australian Planning Commission. Green, A., 2015. Canning: Perth South-East Suburbs and Mandurah. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/2015-canning/. [Accessed 12/09/2015]. Greenwood, D., 2015. Place, mobility, and faculty life: mindfulness and learning through change. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 10(1), pp.5–16. Hannam, K., Sheller, M. and Urry, J., 2006. Editorial: mobilities, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities, 1(1), pp.1–22. Hoskins, J., 2010. The price of success? The experiences of three senior working class female academics in the UK. Women’s Studies International Forum, 33(2), pp.134–140. Howley, C. and Hambrick, K., 2014. Getting there from here: schooling and rural abandonment. In C.B. Howley, A. Howley and J. Johnson, eds. Dynamics of Social Class, Race and Place in Rural Education. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. Kesselring, S., 2006. Pioneering mobilities: new patterns of movement and motility in a mobile world. Environment and Planning A, 38(2), pp.269–279. Kincaid, H., 2016. Debating the reality of social classes. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 46(2), pp.189–209. Kreckel, R., 2006. On national and global “middle classes” (Paper prepared for the Indian-German Workshop, University of Munich, 7–8 September 2006). Available at: http://www2. soziologie.uni-halle.de/ emeriti/kreckel/docs/middleclass04. pdf. [Accessed 28/01/2014]. Lareau, A., 2003. Unequal Childhoods. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lawler, S., 2005. Introduction: class, culture and identity. Sociology, 39(5), pp.797–806. Lopez, R. and Weinstein, B., Eds, 2012. The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History. Durham: Duke University Press. Lubienski, C., Gulosino, C. and Weitzel, P., 2009. School choice and competitive incentives: mapping the distribution of educational opportunities across local education markets. American Journal of Education, 115(4), pp.601–647. McKenzie, F., Haslam-McKenzie, F. and Hoath, A., 2015. Flyin/fly-out, flexibility and the future: does becoming a regional © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers 69 FIFO source community present opportunity or burden? Geographical Researcher, 52(4), pp.430–441. Michell, D., Wilson, J. and Archer, V. Eds, 2015. Bread and Roses: Voices of Australian Academics from the Working Class. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Narodowski, M., 2008. School choice and quasi-state monopoly education systems in Latin America: the case of Argentina. In M. Forsey, S. Davies and G. Walford, eds. The Globalisation of School Choice? Oxford: Symposium Books. pp.131–144. O’Connor, A., 2015. Canning, a kaleidoscope seat that’s no easy win. ABC news. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/ news/2015-08-25/oconnorcanning-a-kaleidoscopic-electorate/6722126. [Accessed 15/09/2015]. Overall, C., 1995. Nowhere at home: toward a phenomenology of working class consciousness. In: C. Dews, ed. This fine place so far from home: Voices of academics from the working class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp.209–220. Parker, A., 2015. Quality candidates on display for canning by-election voters, The West Australian. Available at: https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/29365415/qualitycandidates-on-parade-for-canning-byelection-voters/. [Accessed 14/09/2015]. Peck, J., 2013. Excavating the Pilbara: a Polanyian exploration. Geographical Researcher, 51(3), pp.227–242. Perpitch, N., 2015. Candidates hit the hustings as by-election in federal seat of Canning takes shape. ABC News Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-21/matt-keoghandrew-hastie-on-stump-for-federal-canning-byelection/ 6715980. [Accessed 10/2015]. Phillips, K.D. and Stambach, A., 2008. Cultivating choice: the invisible hand of educational opportunity in Tanzania. In M. Forsey, S. Davies and G. Walford, eds. The Globalisation of School Choice? Oxford: Symposium Books. pp.145–164. Reechi, E., 2009. The social mobility of mobile Europeans. In E. Recchi and A. Favell, eds. Pioneers of European Integration: Citizenship and Mobility in the EU. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. pp.72–97. Ryan, L. and Mulholland, J., 2014. Trading places: French highly skilled migrants negotiating mobility and emplacement in London. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(4), pp.584–600. Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N. et al., 2013. A new model of social class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment. Sociology, 47(2), pp.219–250. Scott, S., 2006. The social morphology of skilled migration: the case of the british middle class in Paris. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32(7), pp.1105–1129. Tonts, M., 2010. Labour market dynamics in resource dependent regions: an examination of the Western Australian goldfields. Geographical Researcher, 48(2), pp.148–165. Tonts, M., Argent, N. and Plummer, P., 2012. Evolutionary perspectives on rural Australia. Geographical Research, 50(3), pp.209–231. Walford, G., 1996. School choice and the quasi-market in England and Wales. Oxford Studies in Comparative Education, 6(1), pp.49–62. Whitty, G., 1997. Creating quasi-markets in education: a review of recent research on parental choice and school autonomy in three countries. Review of Research in Education, 22, pp.3–47. Wright, C., Thompson, S. and Channer, Y., 2007. Out of place: Black women academics in British universities. Women’s History Review, 16(2), pp.145–162.