UPPSALA UNIVERSITY                                            LITTERATURE EXAMINATION
The institution of pedagogy
Spring term 2003

                

                                THREE REPRESENTATIVES OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
                                      POPPER, BOURDIEU AND HULTQVIST
                                     A PRESENTATION AND A COMPARISON 

                                                                                     Education and culture
                                                                                     Author: Charlotte Baltzer
                                                                                     Examinator: Professor Donald Broady

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Purpose and method

Three scientists - Karl Popper, Pierre Bordieu and Elisabeth Hultqvist - a presentation

A comparison of these three scientific schools  

Conclusion

Final word

Litterature

Preface

As the professorship of the family disappeared along with my husband´s divorce from me a few years ago I´ve realized, taking this course and after tasting a bit of Pierre Bourdieu, that my real need for further education and enlightment is just a natural step in order to improve my lost cultural capital.     

I attended, however, this course since I am interested in schooldevelopment or rather in what ways the Swedish schoolsystem and its curriculums have changed over the last decades. I felt the need to get some answers to my questions after returning to my job as a teacher at the upper department of the comprehensive school in 1999 after an eleven-year-break from schoolwork.
A lot of things had changed during my absence, a period from the late 80´s,  which had inflicted a lot of areas concerning the teaching profession in different aspects as the teachers´working hours, working conditions, responsibilities and duties etc as well as  the curriculum, the classes and so on. When I started asking both myself and my collegues how this process  of reorganizing and developing the schoolsystem influenced us as teachers and in what ways we were able to take part in this process I felt the urge to get some scientific answers as well.

 

 

Introduction

In this essay I will try to give a picture of three representatives of social science.  Two old and well-known scientific names from the past centuriy and a younger scientist who is very up-to-date.     My intentions originally was to cover a greater number of names and ideas but  now it seems like an overwhelming task and  I must reduce the number to three. My  choice of names may seem a bit odd at first sight. I´ll explain my choice later on. I will, however, briefly try to interpret those   social scientists and their fields. Only one of them is on our reading list, one is an old favourite of mine and the last one a new relationship of great interest, as I hope  to write my coming essay about the very same issue that her disseratation deals with. 

My old favourite is Karl Popper and I made his aquaintance during a c-course in economic history a few years ago. What I liked in him was not  only his striving for scientific truth, which I found attractive, but as I´ve understood is not very up to date these days, but also his political conviction and advocating for democracy and for helping needing people who suffered from hunger, cold and unemployment at the time for the great war when he was a young student in Vienna.

My next choice is Pierre Bourdieu, although I find him very intricate and difficult to understand, but since he´s a dominant figure at this institution it seems like a natural choice to at least try understand him. To be honest though, I have mostly read Donald Broady´s interpretetation of Bourdieu which in my opinion is the only practicable way of getting to know Bourdieu´s work. 

The last scientist is Elisabeth Hultqvist whose thesis I´ve read with great interest. As I teach students at the IV-program and the fact that her study is about IV-students and their attitude to the IV- program at a number of schools in the north of Stockholm, quite near where I work, as a matter of fact, makes her work very intersting reading.  

Purpose and method

The assignement that was given to us concerning this essay, as far as I see it, was to summarize some of the litterature that we have read during the course. Our task is to try to understand the litterature and try to interpret a few of the ideas that are found among all the authors that we have been introduced to. My purpose with this essay is to give a brief presentation of three different perspectives of social science and their spokesmen: Popper, Bourdieu interpreted by Broady and Hultqvist and to try analyse some of their thoughts and basic standpoints. My analysis will of course only be brief and shallow. Later on, writing my c-essay, I hope to be able to go deeper into one of them. 

My method is simply to choose some books from  the reading list and add a couple of books that  I´ve found om my own.  I will present each author briefly and try to draw some main lines out of their work.  After that I will try to compare these three writers and finally I will try to make some conclusions based on my comparsion. The main work written by Popper that I have used is An intellectual Autobiogaphy "En intellektuell självbiografi" where he summarizes his lifes and his ideas. I´ve also skimmed through two of his important works Conjetures and Refutations, The growth ofscientific knowledge and also
The open society and its enemies. As for Bourdieu I have read parts of Donald Broady´s Sociologi och epistemologi, Om Pierre Bourdieus författarskap och den historiska epistemologin and Kapitalbgreppet som utbildningssociologiskt verktyg. I have glanced through Bourdieus´s The state nobility but I found it very hard to get through, I must admit. Finally concerning Elisabeth Hultqvist I´ve read her thesis Segregerande integrering En studie av gymnasieskolans individuella program and  Skolverkets rapport nr 93, Utvärdering av den reformerade gymnasieskolan och den gymnasiala vuxenutbildningen 1995 Det individuella programmet - ett flexibelt program för framtiden?

Three scientists - Karl Popper, Pierre Bourdieu and Elisabeth Hultqvist - a presentation

Karl Popper

Karl Popper was born in Vienna in 1902. He was a philosopher who mostly devoted himself to theory of science and theory of knowledge and also social philosophy. He was brought up in a very bookish and intellectual surrounding.  Both his father and his uncles had taken a doctor´s degree in law and his father worked as a laywer. His mother was a pianist. Books and music became important to Popper at an early age. Besides the duties as a lawyer Popper´s father decicated himself to historical research as well as translating poetry. Besides  the great European philosophers like Platon, Kirkegard and Nitsche, which the young Popper found in his father´s library his mother read Nils Holgerssons underbara resor genom Sverige to her son. His family belonged to an intellectual aristocracy and owned a vast amount of cultural capital, using one of Bourdieu´s terms.  Popper also inherited a political engagement from his father and  took a great interest in  helping people who were needing. When he was twelve years old the great war broke out and his experience from those years  made a great impact on him. 

Already around fifteen he had expressed one of the most cruical statements in his later philosophy. This statement was formulated around this time:

                           Låt dig aldrig luras att ta problem rörande ord och deras mening på allvar. Vad som måste 
                                tas på allvar är frågor om fakta och påståenden om fakta: teorier och hypoteser, de problem
                                de löser,; och de problem de ställer.

Realism was also a term of great importance to him. As school was concerned he found it very boring and he said that his time in gymnasium was so boring that it vaccinated him from boredom for the rest of his life; he used to entertain himself by thinking of other things than the teachers were talking about. In 1918 he entered university. The fact that the great war had been going on and the situation fore many people was disastrous made him politically involved and for a short period of time he became socialist; but  soon he  turned into an anti-marxist and kept that conviction during his lifetime. He strongly disliked the deterministic features in marxism. On the other hand freedom and individuality were terms of great importance to him. He sais:

                                         Och om det kunde finnas något sådant som socialism i förening med individuell 
                                                  frihet skulle jag fortfarande vara socialist. Ty ingenting kunde vara bättre än att 
                                                  leva ett anspråkslöst, enkelt och fritt liv i ett egalitärt samhälle.

Popper showed a great interest in both politics and science, as one can see redaing his text. Though he drew a sharp line between science and pseudoscience  - Einstein representing the former and Marx representing the latter.  At the age of twentysix Popper achieved his Phd and at this time he had formulated the essential standpoints and his personal view on science. He claimed that theories will always remain hypothesis or guessings if not falsified - which means proved to be not true. He had solved the scientific problem and said that scientific development or movement - which he believes is possible - is to move against theories with great content. Such a theory can be tested harder. Scientific development is not accumulation of observations.

Pierre Bourdieu

He was born in France in 1930, in a small village by the Pyrenées. His father was a tenant farmer who also worked as a postman. Bourdieu´s way to Paris and the prestigious schools was far, not only in a physical sense. After studies at a gymnasium nearby his home he attended the most highly respected gymnasium in France, École normale supérieure. After his examination there he worked as a teacher between 1954 and 1955. From 1955 to 1958 he did his military service in Algeria. This period was a turningpoint in his life and made way for the offspring of his theories which he formulated later on.

In the early 60´s he came back to France and settled in Lille where he started investigating French culture and education. In 1964 he was assigned a prestigious chair at École pratique and he got his own research center there too; he had a prominent position in the French academic world. Though, Bourdieu´s theories are frequently used in academic work all over the world, after 1964 he hasn´t been working for the university in France, and a professorship is out of the question, since he in spite of all his publications never  has published a dissertation. 

Bourdieu started using  his terms capital, habitus and field  already in the late 50´s and developed them during the decades to come. He believes that scientific klowledge is gained neither by deduction, proving theroetical statements, nor by induction, drawing conclusions from a gathered material, but through construction. You construct an object and you use the terms habitus, capital and field as tools. A constructed object could be education or art for example. Bourdieu also advocated strongly against mixing politics with science but in his later days he became politically involved. 

Elisabeth Hultqvist

Elisabeth Hultqvist published her thesis named Segregerande integration in 2001, which is an educational-sociological study on 'less able' students and their meeting with the individual program, IV, in the upper-secondary level of our Swedish school sysem. IV was established  in the early nineties as a way to help pupils with unsufficient grades fronm comprehensive school in the basic subjects as Swedish, English and Mathematics in order to qualify for a national program.

Before her dissertation Hultqvist had participated in other studies concerning IV. At the time when our Swedish educational system in general went through a vast change in the early nineties and the responsibility for our schools moved from the state to the municipalities,  which implied   new methods for the state to exercise their control,  Elisabeth Hultqvist was asked by the municipality of Stockholm to evaluate the individual program in a limited amounts of schools in Stockholm. She talked to schoolleaders and teachers and listened to their view on the reform.  Prior to this evaluation she had studied 'new' groups´entrance to higher education at the end of the 60´, which was part of a Swedish Bourdieu study.

In her dissertation Hutqvist uses the British sociologist Basil Bernstein´s theory, and his terms classification and framing are important in her work, which is performed as classroom studies in three different IV-classes in the north of Stockholm. Classification in this context means the boundaries between classes and free time and framing means the teacher´s degree of controlling the class. The attitude that Hultqvist found through her observations was that the normal boundaries between classes and breaks, lessons and spare time was very fluid at IV. Also in her interviews with students attending the IV-program she found that they regarded ther education too slack and too little school-like. A remarkable statement, she thought, regarding the fact that these students in their earlier school situation in comprehensive school had not valued traditional school codes and as a consequence  had no possibilities to attend the national programs.  

At the end of her book she makes some reflexions on advantages and drawbacks concerning this IV-model and she refers to a Norwegian educational researcher, Peder haug and his onclusions in this matter. In order to establish equality in an educational perspective, we must move away from the exluding models as IV is an example of.

Comparison and conclusion

To compare such different scientific representatives as those three is very difficult. Considering the shallow knowledge I have gained of skimming through the litterature and the complexity of theories and the vast amount of litterature they have produced. What Popper focused on, which  perhaps I have failed to show in my portrait of him; I see now that I´ve spoken mostly about him as a person and less about his work, was the importance of scientific truth and the means to get it, the method, deduction, while  Bourdieu  hardly ever speaks of truth and does not advocate for a certain method but rather for  tools to investigate certain constructed objects. 

Popper was very influenced by the natural sciences and especially physics and he met  Albert Einstein a few times and regarded him as one of the greatest scientists ever. Popper talks of objectivity, a term that is not found in Bourdieu´s terminology, as far as I have noticed. Popper also advocates strongly against induction, to draw certain conclusions from a number of observations was absolutely out of the question. This view of science  does not seem to be emphasized today when even one single case study is regarded as an act of science. 

Elisabeth Hultqvist does not talk either of objectivity or truth but uses a theoretical method invented by Basil Bernstein. She constructs her body of work out of two parts:  a theoretical framework and a number of observations combined with an empirical backgrund. Her method seems to me like a very passable and well adjusted way of doing scientific research. 

Litterature

Broady, Donald, (1997), Sociologi och epistemologi Om Pierre Bourdieus föfattarskap och den historiska epistemologin. Stockholm.

Broady, Donald, (1998), Kapitalbegreppet som sociologiskt verktyg. Uppsala: SEC/ILU, Rapporter från Forskningsgruppen för utbildnings-och kultursociologi nr 15.

Engelbertsson, Bob och Karlsson, Lynn, (1998), Seminarieuppsatsen En grnomgång av formella krav, (Uppsala papers in economic history, basic reading nr 5.) Uppsala.

Hultqvist, Elisabeth, (2001), Segregerande integrering En studie av gymnasieskolans individuella program. Stockholm.

Popper, Sir Karl, (1976), "En intellektuell självbiografi", An Intellectual Autobiography. Lund.

Popper, Karl R, (1963), Conjectures and Refutations The Grouth of Scientific Knowledge, London.

"Popper, Karl", (1994), Nationalencyklopedin, band 15.

Prawitz, Dag (1992), "Induktion", Nationalencyklopedin, band 9.

<<<

	FÖLJEBREV
X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2 
Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 16:32:39 +0200 
Subject: Preliminart utkast till litteraturuppgift ped.C 
X-FC-Form-ID: 141 
To: broady@nada.kth.se 
From: "Charlotte Baltzer" <Charlotte.Baltzer@edu.upplands-bro.se> 
Hej Donald!

Sänder enligt anvisning i informationshäftet till C/D-kursen i pedagogik
med inriktning Utbildning och kultur ett preliminärt utkast till den
litteratursammanställning som vi skall göra.

Som Du ser skriver jag på engelska och vill gärna fortsätta med det i min
kommande C-uppsats. Vad gäller denna litt. sammanställning så är jag
medveten om att många brister föreligger, men jag ansåg det vara bättre at
skicka in något. 

Vad gäller min C-uppsats så har jag nu efter vissa funderingar hit och dit
bestämt mig för att köra enligt det första förslaget som jag fick av
Mikael Palme. Jag skall försöka göra intervjuer med elever på IV, kanske
enkligt den narrativa modellen(fick tipset av en granne som är professor i
socialfarmaci) jag vet inte riktigt vad det innebär men han skulle ge mig
någon bok. 

Jag har ännu inte kontaktat Elisabeth Hultqvist, som Du rekommenderade mig
att göra när jag tittade förbi på institutionen vid ett tillfälle, men det
är väl på tiden att jag gör det.

På återhörande

MVH
Charlotte Baltzer

UPPSALA UNIVERSITY .doc