They don’t want, they don’t know, they can’t: categorizations about families who are very estranged from the school norms

Abstract

They do not want, they do not know, they cannot. These three judgments structure the discourse and the categories more frequently employed by school professionals on families further away from school norms. Based on in-deep interviews, the study was conducted in several Andalusian Preferred Education Care Neighbourhoods. This administrative designation is actually based on the higher prevalence in these circumscriptions of family strategies of social reproduction and rearing practices far away from the school socialisation model. The analysis shows how school professionals’ doxic perceptions, coupled with cumulated experiences in their hard professional appointments, guide the various strategies undertaken with families at the school. By constant modulations of regulations and protocols, exchanges with families are focussed on neutralising the effects of the so-conceived «family handicaps» —not-knowing/not-being-able discourse which, on its turn, affects the permanent disqualification of parental ability to socialize— and the effects of the «cultural ill will» —not-wanting-to-know discourse which affects a range of parental disaffections with basic school-related obligations—, on the dynamics of the institution.