New book on Social Class
March 27, 2007
I just came across this post today in a relatively new blog by Peter Sacks, who has written some compelling pieces in The Chronicle of Higher Ed about social class and access to college.
His new book Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, looks as compelling as his often-circulated essays.
Working-Class Parents Get It Right
March 15, 2007
Annette Lareau’s book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life has generated a great deal of discussion in courses, on listservs, in the popular press about contrasts in childrearing in upper-middle class homes and working class homes.
Lareau characterizes middle-class child-rearing as “concerted cultivation”. Children are often hyper-scheduled and goal-driven, raised with a sense of entitlement by parents who schedule their own lives around their offspring’s many activities and who coach their children in negotiating their way through institutions and organizations.
Working-class child-rearing is described as facilitating “natural growth”. Children engage in free play, and are more often responsible for their own entertainment. They are more likely to spend unsupervised time with siblings, cousins, and neighbors in driveway games or runs to the neighborhood store.
Journalists, students, and even some family scholars have argued the benefits of middle-class childhoods filled with structured activity and the intense personal involvement of parents.
Now, from the American Academy of Pediatrics (via the Family Involvement Network of Educators at Harvard) comes this report on the importance of ample time for free play for children’s physical, intellectual, social, and emotional health.
Will working-class parents now be given credit for “getting it” and perhaps even be held up as models for middle-class parents?
Social Class, Tea, and Shame
March 14, 2007
In his typically intricate way, Andrew Sayer (in The Moral Significance of Class) writes:
The struggle of subordinated groups for self-respect is particularly likely to lead to contradictory dispositions and opinions. They may try to make a virtue out of their position and their toughness and fortitude in bearing burdens, at the same time as they feel shame about having to bear those burdens. …
Such mixtures of shame and defensiveness and defiant pride are typical of situations in which people have to seek self-respect in circumstances that are not of their own choosing. …The shame that can sometimes be a product of situations beyond actors’ control is vitally important for understanding the experience of class.
He goes on to describe how challenges to self-respect can come in forms as subtle as slightly grimaced smiles or “physical drawing back” from an object of distaste.
I thought of such dynamics as I wondered about how those who just wanted a cup of tea might have blogged their own version of being served their “cuppa” by this educated young woman who chose to work for a time as a waitress in their cafe.
If only those complex, contradictory feelings of defensiveness and defiant pride were clear enough to name as they occur. And if only it were clear how one can possibly respond to those many slightly grimaced smiles.
Middle and Working Class “Losers”
March 13, 2007
Thanks to Jim Vander Putten on the Working Class Academics List for sending this beautifully written post from Heo Cwaeth about the very different ways in which middle class grad students and working-class grad students might come to define themselves as “losers”, and about how the ground seems to shift beneath our feet when we come to recognize the depths of those differences.
Case Study: The Need to Teach About Class
March 12, 2007
The tangled discourse about class in the U.S. seems to be richly illustrated in this exchange about a panel on High Class, Low Class Web Design at South by Southwest. In this post, Christopher Fahey, the moderator, describes the panel and also links to bloggers who were at the session and wrote about the presentations and the Q and A as they happened.
We could start with the judgmental language of the panel title, but what is even more troubling for me is that these panelists and bloggers (seemingly all highly educated) seem to have no common referents for talking about class, few perspectives outside of their own experiences to draw from, little common language about what class might be.
The only references in this entire written exchange are to classism.org, to Paul Fusell’s book on class, and alas, to Ruby Payne.
Fahey writes that he did seem some substantive analysis:
Notably the general observation that technology could potentially serve as a very powerful social class flattening agent, and in many ways it is in fact already doing so. User-generated content, blogs, etc, are putting the tools of design into everyone’s hands, dismantling the top-down model of publishing and, by extension, design itself.
Yet these points –of access to information and access to the tools of public voice –seem to be somewhat lost in discussion of whether poor and working class people simply have poor taste.
One of the bloggers does mention that an audience participant noted that aesthetic “standards” can, in fact, be constructed as barriers to mobility. It’s not clear if that comment got much response.
Fahey mentions that they had a huge turnout for the panel. Interest in class seems high these days. Informed discourse about class may, perhaps, still be a way off.
