John Goldthorpe*1“Decades of investment in education have not improved social mobility” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/13/decades-of-educational-reform-no-social-mobility
かなりショッキングではないだろうか。英国における教育制度の拡張は「社会移動」の促進、つまり社会階層（社会的格差）の流動化に殆ど寄与していないと言っているのだから。また、その発言の主は社会学的な社会移動・社会階層研究の世界的な権威であるジョン・ゴールドソープ氏なのだ。ただ注意しなければいけないのは、ゴールドソープ氏の話はマクロというか全体社会の準位であって、ミクロというか個人の準位における「教育」の有用性を否定しているわけではないということだ。
20世紀半ばに「社会移動」、特に「上昇的社会移動」が促進されたのは経済成長一般の効果ということになる。経済成長が鈍化すれば、社会の「上昇的社会移動」を受け入れる余地が狭くなる。自分の父母や祖父母よりも低い階層に甘んじなければいけない可能性に直面する若者の増大*3。
The period from the end of the Second World War to the present has been one of more or less continuous educational expansion and reform – from the Butler Act of 1944, introducing free secondary education for all, through the shift from selective to comprehensive secondary education, to the rapid expansion of tertiary education in the 1960s and again in the 1990s.Yet despite all this expansion and reform, inequalities in relative mobility chances have remained little altered.
If we think of mobility simply in terms of the proportion of individuals who are found in a different social class position to that of their parents, this proportion remained remarkably stable across birth cohorts of men and women from the end of the Second World War down to the 1980s. On the basis of the seven classes of the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification*2, this “total” mobility rate works out at around 80%.
But, where change is apparent is in the upward and downward components of the total rate. In the middle decades of the last century, in what has been called the golden age of social mobility, upward mobility was clearly more frequent than downward, primarily as a result of the expansion of managerial and professional employment. There was “more room at the top”. But the positive effects of this class structural change are now weakening and the negative effects strengthening.
The dark side of the golden age is that more individuals are now experiencing social descent and fewer social ascent simply because the numbers “at risk” of the former have increased. A situation is emerging that is quite new in modern British history. Young people entering the labour market today face far less favourable mobility prospects than did their parents – or their grandparents.
経済成長によって全体的に底上げされたとはいえ、個人の教育程度と出身階級との相関は全然弱まっていない。また、「下降的社会移動」のリスクが高まることとも相俟って、上の階層はさらに教育への「投資」を増やしたり、（政治的・社会的資源を使って）教育制度の拡張を図ったりするので、下の人たちが追いつくことは難しい*4。
ここで求められる政策的メニューは先ず、「教育機会の不平等」はそれ以前の様々な「諸条件の不平等」に基づいているので、それを是正すること。或いは、先端技術開発などの「最高級」の職を増大させるような経済政策。Education is a major factor in determining who is mobile or immobile – in terms of determining which individuals. But it does not follow from this that education will be of similar importance in determining the total amount of mobility within society at large. For education to have an impact in this regard two things are necessary. First, the link between individuals’ social origins and their educational attainment must weaken; second, the link between their educational qualifications and the level of social positions they end up in must strengthen. There must be a movement towards an education-based meritocracy. But in fact there is little evidence of any such movement.
If education is viewed not simply as a consumption good but as investment good in relation to the labour market, it would appear appropriate to measure educational attainment in relative terms. What is important is not how much education individuals have but how much relative to others and especially relative to those others who will be most direct competitors in the labour market.
Thus, for example, having A-levels should count for more for someone born in the 1940s than for someone born in the 1980s when A-levels were far more widely held, and mainly as a stepping stone to a university degree. If we treat education in this relative way, what we find is again a rather remarkable over-time constancy. Across successive birth cohorts, the association between individuals’ class origins and their educational attainment does not change, and neither does the association between their educational attainment and their eventual class destinations, or not in any consistent way.
Why should this be? What is important to recognise – but what politicians prefer to ignore – is that if social mobility is to be increased by reducing the inherent stickiness between the class positions of parents and children, this must mean increasing downward mobility to just the same extent as upward mobility. But, as against this mathematical symmetry, there is a psychological asymmetry. There are grounds for believing, consistent with the psychological theory of loss aversion, that parents and their children are yet more concerned to avoid downward mobility than they are to achieve upward mobility. Thus parents in more advantaged class positions will respond to any expansion or reform of the educational system by using superior resources – economic, cultural and social – to help their children retain a competitive edge in the system and in turn in the labour market. It is this coming together of the strong motivation to avoid déclassement and the usually adequate means for doing so that is the source of the powerful resistance to change.
ゴールドソープを巡っては、
“Five minutes with John Goldthorpe: “More equal mobility chances are unlikely to be achieved without having a generally more equal society”” http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/5-minutes-with-john-goldthorpe/
もマークしておく。
*1:See eg. http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/People/sites/Goldthorpe/SitePages/Biography.aspx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Goldthorpe https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A7%E3%83%B3%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B4%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB%E3%83%89%E3%82%BD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%97
*2:http://images.slideplayer.com/7/1729965/slides/slide_5.jpg
*3:See eg. Zygmunt Bauman*1 “Downward mobility is now a reality” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/31/downward-mobility-europe-young-people Mentioned in http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20120605/1338922558 or Patrick Butler “Decline in professional jobs fuels increase in downward mobility” http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/06/downward-mobility-graduates-parents-jobs-careers
*4:See eg. http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20100729/1280429288 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20130708/1373245762
