Bringing Norbert Elias to School: Education and the Civilising Process

In this chapter, we will argue that an Eliasian figurational approach can enhance our knowledge of schooling, while a detailed study of everyday life in schools brings new insights into civilising processes in welfare state societies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Danish schools, we show how seeing schools and school classes as social figurations akin to Elias’s court society illuminates how children’s habitus is not just moulded by teachers’ inculcation of the right behaviour. They are also shaped by children’s negotiations of relationships, conduct and status in the intense social theatre of the classroom, as well as by their chains of interdependence outside school, to parents, policy makers and the state. Furthermore, the fact that today’s civilising of children in welfare societies takes place in schools and in families that are closely dependent on these institutions means that the ‘institutional sociality’ that children learn in school has a great impact on the norms and conduct in wider society.