Basil Bernstein: An ObituaryAuthor(s): Brian DaviesSource: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Dec., 2000), pp. 485-486Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1393377 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 01:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to British Journalof Sociology of Education.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.141 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 01:54:35 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 21, No. 4, 2000 • z

P UD't

0J PF /4 4 F,,,e%5 Basil Bernstein--An Obituary

Basil Bernstein, who has died of cancer at the age of 75, was both the most interesting and important British sociologist of recent times. He has also been internationally better known for longer than any other, having held a variety of visiting professorships and

honorary degrees at major European, American and Latin American universities and

having his work very widely translated. Even during the advancing illness that confined him to London over the last year or so, he continued to write and publish as actively as ever.

He had spent the second half of his life, since 1963, at the University of London Institute of Education where he rapidly developed the largest single educational research

group of its day or probably since, the Sociological Research Unit. Its work, with the aid of substantial funding from the Ford Foundation, focussed on a series of sociolinguistic and educational projects which showed evidence for class-related differences in the social functions of communication. Given certain assumptions underlying educational practice, including those prevailing then and now, these differences were transformed into

inequalities. These complex and highly nuanced studies, on the boundaries of linguistics, sociology and psychology, were steadfastly misread as indicating black and working class

language deficit and inevitable relative educational failure. Working with Basil at the

time, I well remember the strength and depth of his indignation that a decade of work should end up with such calumny heaped upon it by those who saw it as an obstacle to more egalitarian educational forms. No irony could have been more complete with

respect of a man driven to understand both how they were and might be. At the British Sociological Association conference in 1970, the first and only one

devoted to education as its theme, Basil presented a closing address On the Classfication and

Framing of Educational Knowledge. It captivated and astonished his audience, promising an

approach to analysis that dealt directly with issues of curriculum teaching, evaluation and social relations (collectively, pedagogy) in education that transcended our narrow pre- occupation with educability. Part of its impact relied on his wit and skill as a communicator. He claimed not to have been 'a born teacher' of day-release youth but several generations of higher education students have recorded epiphanies of sorts in his

presence. Its real force, however, which he continued to elaborate to the end, lay in the

cogency and continuity of his arguments about how power relations are transformed into what there is to be known, or discourse and how access to it is regulated, whether in the

family, school or at the knowledge frontier. His final and, as always for him, most

important paper dealt with aspects of the internal properties of forms of discourse and their social context [1]. This is no dry matter, asking what forms knowledge takes and what they do to the identities of their knowers, inluding those of his disciplinary colleagues.

In it, as elsewhere, Basil noted the irony of having to invent new conceptual vocabulary in the pursuit of a more systematic and general language of description. The least endearing commentary upon his own disciplinary community is that many have

managed to do no more than find his work unconventional or difficult, failing, despite its inspirational character, to provide accessible routes to its theories. This is amazing in face of the fact that, across five volumes of his own and colleagues' collected papers, he has provided detailed commentary upon his own intellectual odyssey, inviting others like

Donald MacRea and Michael Halliday to further preface them. Most amusing and

ISSN 0142-5692 (print)/ISSN 1465-3346 (online)/00/040485-02 @ 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/01425690020027615

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.141 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 01:54:35 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

486 Obituary

instructive of all is Halsey's deficit theory. Being an 'autodidact' rather than 'a conven-

tionally educated man' Basil was, apparently, never destined to communicate clearly with

us, despite having a radical sociologist's pedigree, from furrier's apprentice, through grammar school early leaver, RAF combatant, East End settlement worker, LSE

graduate, to trained teacher to die for. No doubt his knowledge of and delight in music and art and the general urbanity of his manner was some small compensation to those who could not manage his writing. His own explanation of some of his readers' difficulties lay in the fact that he was essentially a researcher who never attempted to

codify his work in textbook form or to develop a 'school'. Toward the end of twelve years of sociolinguistic researches, he confessed that he felt that the theory was now adequate to the task of beginning them. His published ideas, in the form of research reports and their discussion, were subject to constant revision and change. And for the last twenty five years of his life, the empirical work on his ideas was done very largely by his doctoral

students, though they would assent to being their own people rather than his, and others attracted to his theories. Symptomatically, the majority of them, until recently, have not been English and only since his 1996 book and the series of festschriften and tributes in his honour has awareness of their existence been raised in Britain. His intention has

always been to 'fit it all together', to produce work on pedagogic practice that spanned social institutions that, necessarily, involved the deepest questions of the relationships between knowledge and power, identity and communication, consciousness and change. The long-standing English suspicion of those continental Johnnys who usually aspire to do such things has successfully overlaid his potential, not least its insistence on the

importance of the research text being not so much a source of instant (including policy) gratification as a theory led, carefully won, means of connecting problem and reality levels. He was, indeed, roughly the antithesis of the conference-going, media-feeding, policy-advising academic trouper or hireling. Apart from his research unit which, he

conceded, he had to give up in order to think, and the crucial work that he did before his retirement in leading the Institute to its recent high research reputation, he had very little interest in 'running' anything. He was a great puncturer of pretension; always as

generous in sharing his views on the academic undeserving as in giving his time and

experience to students and colleagues who wished to hear. In the last ten or so years, as policy besotted as they have been, this journal amply

attests to the increasing attention paid to his mature ideas, not least as to the vicissitudes of policy itself where he believed that, for the first time, 'pedagogic panic has masked the moral panic' [2]. No doubt, as with other thinkers of his importance, the real dissemination and elaboration is to be left to followers who, though they share his belief that in the end all may be made plain, accept the task of exegesis and discovery as its means.

Marion and his sons Saul and Francis survive him. Brian Davies

Basil Bernard Bernstein, Emeritus Professor of the Sociology of Education, born 1 November 1924, died 24 September 2000.

NOTES

[1] Vertical and Horizontal Discourse: an essay. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20(2), 157-173.

[2] This is taken from a transcript of a closing discussion by video link with participants of the Symposium Towards a Sociology of Learning--the contribution of Basil Bernstein to research, Lisbon, Portugal, June 2000.

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.141 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 01:54:35 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions