Bottom Set Citizen Ability Grouping in Schools – Meritocracy’s Undeserving Routledge Advances in Sociology Series

While research evidence shows the negative impact of ability grouping on children, this book suggests that the reason the practice is still embraced is the unspoken allegiance to the values of empire that governments, schools, and many parents still uphold, promoting competition and hierarchies over and above ethical principles on the education of society?s most vulnerable, our children.

The practice, which happens across social class, humiliates children deemed ?less academically able? by ?rounding them up? in front and in opposition to their ?better? intellectual peers. Wielding knowledge as a weapon of humiliation warps children?s relationship to organized forms of knowledge, making them antagonistic or indifferent towards it. This book responds to Michael Young?s The Rise of the Meritocracy, by focusing on the plight of those who are educationally placed in opposition to the ?intellectual elites?: the bottom set citizen, rich or poor and ready to vote.

This book will appeal to anyone concerned with democracy and children?s rights in education, including the rich, on whom I shine the light of deficit for a change. Thus, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage exemplify the bottom set citizen in all his facilitated glory. Other, more vulnerable BSCs are not as lucky.

Introduction

1. You have never been to this place

2. There is no democracy in childhood

3. Meritocracy and its allegiance to empire

4. Knowledge and humiliation in schools

5. When knowledge does not pay

6. The rise of the Bottom Set Citizen

7. ‘It never did me any harm’ – Some BSC exemplars

Paula Ambrossi is a lecturer at the Institute of Education, University College London. Her experience as a Modern Foreign Languages teacher in secondary education, followed by almost 20 years as tutor and researcher in Primary Teacher Education, has allowed her to reflect and write on topics related to pedagogy and philosophy of education. Her recent work includes Language and Culture in Foreign Language Teaching, in Exploring Education and Childhood: From Current Certainties to New Visions (2015), Mastering Primary Languages (Mastering Primary Teaching) by Paula Ambrossi and Darnelle Constant- Shepherd (2018), Sustaining Hegemony: Educational Use of Photographs Representing Human Distress (2019), and The Languages We Teach and the Empires We Embrace: Addressing Decolonization Through the Gaze of the Empire (2024).