Signifying the Transition from Modern to Post-Modern Schooling... 29considered as a text cannot be read in oppositional ways. It is true though that school place
like any place is practised by its inhabitants through the local appropriation and counter-
codification of associated signs, symbols, and myths. What is often omitted from accounts of
school space is the generative possibility of the ̳performances‘ through which bodies
decipher, enact and concretise a place and the knowledge vested in it.
A conclusion of major importance that a significant number of studies have come to is
that the design does not determine the teacher‘s practice (McMillan, 1983; Rivlin and
Rothenberg, 1976). Bennett et al. (1980) include a case study of a comparison of practice in
two identically designed units, containing the same number of students, with dramatically
different teaching styles and organization. They argue that ̳expertise and philosophy of the
staff are the central determinants, not the design of the building‘ (p. 222).
However, the interrelation of consciousness and material conditions is a thread linking
many theoretical traditions from Marxism to post-structuralism. Lefebvre was one prominent
thinker who laid arguments for the integrality of space with human existence. According to
Lefebvre space is not akin to a mere frame (as in the frame of a painting) or a neutral
container. ―Space is social morphology... [space] is to lived experience what form itself is to
the living organism‖ (1991, pp. 93-94). In other words, space substantiates and dynamically
defines lived experience for physical bodies in a physical world. Lefebvre‘s work is the most
creative contribution which provides a framework that treats the activities of materiality,
representation, and imagination as dialectically constitutive of each other (Stephen, 2003).
Therefore, material culture of schooling has profound implications for the long term
process of identity formation of both teachers and students. Here, we are going to be
restricted only to the implications for students. In order to better understand these
implications we could draw on the grid-group theory developed by the social anthropologist
Mary Douglas, over the course of her long and distinguished career (Douglas, 1973). Based
on this theory Douglas, (1997) in her essay ―In defense of shopping‖ distinguishes four
mutually exclusive identities. She explained that individuals in all cultures (hence in school
culture as well) have to decide who they are (what group they belong to) and what they
should do (follow the rules of the group or negotiate them).
Therefore according to these two criteria one could distinguish the four identities shown
in Figure 10.
As Thompson et al., (1990) point out ―Strong group boundaries with minimal
prescriptions produce social relations that are egalitarian...When an individual‘s social
environment is characterized by strong group boundaries and binding prescriptions, the
resulting social relations are hierarchical (sometimes known as hierarchical
elitist)....Individuals who are bounded by neither group incorporation nor prescribed roles
inhabit an individualistic social context. In such an environment all boundaries are
provisional and subject to negotiation....People who find themselves subject to binding
prescriptions and are excluded from group membership exemplify the fatalistic way of life.
Fatalists are controlled from without‖ (1990, p.6-7).
It is hard for one not to notice the equivalence between the theoretical notions of group
and grid of Douglas‘ theory with the corresponding notions of classification and framing of
Bernsteinian theory. Thus, it follows that at the level of students‘ identities post-modern
schooling tends to construct individualists while modern schooling tends to form hierarchical
elitists.