8 - Aim lower: leashing aspirations and internalising notions of (in)ability

Summary

This chapter tells a more troubling story in which I return to the starting point of aspirations. Following an incessant policy mission to ‘raise aspirations’, with schools working hard to promote this discourse, young people now largely possess high aspirations for the future (see Chapters 3 and 4). In Chapter 8 I discuss the way in which the careers advisor in Eagles Academy, faced with young people with increasingly high aspirations but relatively little chance of fulfilling them, must work to realign aspirations with position in social space, cultivating within the pupils a particular disposition towards failure. In this chapter I present extracts from interviews with the careers advisor from Eagles Academy alongside notes from observations of one-to-one careers sessions where the careers advisor consciously works to lower aspirations. While all schools appeared to conduct some work to ‘dampen aspirations’, the form this took and the response from the young people differed. In this chapter I discuss how the Grand Hill Grammar and Einstein High pupils, secure in their dominant position in the field, confidently challenged the careers advisors. Meanwhile this was deeply problematic and painful for the Eagles Academy pupils as, unable to contest the school, they came to internalise the idea that they were lacking in the ability necessary to fulfil their ambitions.

Aim lower: doing the aspiration work

The automatic effects of the conditionings imposed by the conditions of existence are added to by the directly educative interventions of the family, the peer group and the agents of the educational system (assessments, advice, injunctions, recommendations) which expressly aim to favour the adjustment of aspirations to objective chances, needs to possibilities, the anticipation and acceptance of the limits, both visible and invisible, explicit and tacit. By discouraging aspirations oriented to unattainable goals, which are thereby defined as illegitimate pretensions, these calls to order tend to underline or anticipate the sanctions of necessity and to orient aspirations towards more realistic goals, more compatible with the chances inscribed in the position occupied.

(Bourdieu, 2006 [2000]: 217)

Despite political rhetoric of the need to ‘raise aspirations’ in disadvantaged communities, the careers advisor in Eagles Academy told me that students rarely aim too low. This corroborates the interviews I conducted with the pupils themselves where the majority held relatively high aspirations (see Chapters 3 and 4).