Page 131 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

124 In search of a ‘good mix’
is no more “classificatory” practice than concert-going or playing a “noble”
instrument’ (Bourdieu 1994: 18). I would argue that the same was still true
of Britain in the 1990s. The desire for children to grow up with an apprecia-
tion for music allows for the expression of both the potentially contradictory
desires that I have identified within this middle classness. Music is able to
represent both free-flowing creativity and expression of self as well as order
and a particular type of middle-class habitus that values ‘high’ culture and
particular modes of appreciating it.
The women were keen to establish their difference from conservative,
over pushy and aspirational middle classness. Sometimes, these middle
classes were condemned for the way they did not support the state school
system. The argument was that they distorted the intake of local schools
by their absence. In contrast to the conservative positions they ascribed to
others, the interviewees emphasised their desire to give their children the
freedom to develop their imaginations and creativity. Steiner schools were
mentioned favourably as an alternative route to state schooling, and there
was an anxiety about too much emphasis on reading and writing at an early
age. But the key concern that emerged from the interviews with the middle-
class women in Clapham was that of the ‘right mix’ of children in school.
In the following extract, Deborah began to explain why she was unhappy
with Crooms Hill. Her son was at a preschool nursery at the school, but she
wanted to move him before he started primary school. She brought up the
issue of the community and her search for a school ‘where there was a really
good mix’. At first, this appeared to be largely to do with class:

Deborah: And it’s just . . . really sad actually, they’ve just become really
underfunded, rundown, everything. [. . .] I was very anxious,
still am, for Tom to go to a local school and to walk to school
and to socialise with kids from the school, and to go somewhere
where there was a really good mix that reflected the community,
and um, the schools don’t, really – as far as I can see, the schools
close to us just don’t.
BB: Because they’re dominated by . . .?
Deborah: Well,...I think what’s happened is that in this road, I think this
road is a good illustration of it probably, people come in, do up
the houses, send their children to private school, . . . and a lot
of new private schools have opened up, they’re opening all the
time, and so the local schools are, well, I think they’ve really
become sink schools in a lot of ways, and then they’re sort of
fused between Lambeth and Wandsworth and um . . . all sorts
of things I think contribute to it. But basically the mix that I
wanted to be there isn’t there.
(Interview 17)

Deborah, like others, felt caught between the ‘wrong kind of middle class’