Education and Class

Today, the Eduwonk, citing data on the growth in demand for skilled blue-collar labor, writes about the apparent contradiction of placing schools under so much pressure to raise academic rigor when labor market projections show substantive growth in jobs that have traditionally required little schooling. He suggests, though, that in these high-tech times, even many blue-collar jobs require advanced skills and education, so the college-prep curriculum should become the default curriculum for all.

Yes.

I essentially agree with goal.

But not with the justification.

And not in its exact form.

As I’ve written before the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports labor market projections in two ways:

The data linked from The Eduwonk’s post seem be drawing from the “fastest growing” reports, in which the rate of job growth may appear impressive, even while the actual number of jobs created might be quite small (100% growth in a field with only 1,000 workers creates very few new jobs).

But a quick skim of the two right columns of the alternate way of reporting labor market projections — the actual number of new jobs in a given field — suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are finding themselves in low wage jobs that require neither skill nor education.

So, what if our education policy choices can no longer be limited to whether we educate more young people to a) start work right after high school or b) four years later?

What if even the traditional college-prep curriculum is now woefully inadequate for educating kids to find their way — as workers, and as citizens — within the seismic shifts of this new global economy? What if education was also understood to be about educating all young people to do exactly the kind of analysis, critique and advocacy of public policy that The Eduwonk himself engages in with this post, regardless of the jobs they happen to hold?

How, when too few jobs provide workers with the ability to pay the rent and the medical bills, might we educate all young people about how badly their minds are needed in public deliberation about the common good in these new economic times, even if their minds not required on their jobs?

What would that curriculum look like?

From NPR’s Day to Day show comes this story on a study released today indicating that sons  today are faring less well economically than their fathers. Specifically:

on average, 30-something males make about 12 percent less than they would have 30 years ago.

Additional commentary is provided by a high school social studies teacher, the son of a mortgage banker.

Perhaps, rather than “No Child Left Behind” [NCLB], we should be have “Ok, So Many Of You Are Going To Be Left Behind your Parents’ Generation. Now, How Far Will Your Slide Be?” [OSMOYAGTBLBYPGNHFWYSB]

Even Margaret Spellings would have trouble spinning that one on Jon Stewart.

There’s a great post and discussion over at Alas! a blog about working one’s way not just through college, but through elementary and high school.

How rare it is to have people from different class backgrounds engaged in this sort of dialogue about their schooling.

I always find something provocative in Beverly Skeggs’ books and many articles on social class and gender. This week, I read a piece in which she argues that attention to “excessive, unhealthy, publicly immoral white working-class woman” proliferates when there are other social tensions around morality, propriety, and self-responsibility.

She suggests that as TV programs like Sex in the City or The L Word have broken long-standing social boundaries regarding femininity, sexuality, and propriety, the culture has experienced “ambivalence, a dislodging of certainty” about what is acceptable and appropriate.

At such times, she argues, particular social groups (for example, women who wear plastic stilettos, rather than Monolo Blahniks) are designated in the media as unambiguously disgusting; unambiguously loud alarms are then sounded about the threat of such people to an orderly society. In times of moral uncertainty, then, consensus can at least be reached around this: Whatever their own shifting morals, middle class women are at least better than those loud and and vulgar women tottering around on their cheap shoes.

Skeggs writes of recent media “obsession” with “hen parties” in England, but I think also of Gwen Foster’s work on the huge popularity of reality shows in the U.S. that “fix” working-class people. From Wife Swap, to the Nanny shows, to the deliberately humiliating “outing” of badly dressed working-class women by the hosts of  “How Not to Dress”, we have multiple opportunities to see middle-class people responding to the “fixees” with justifiable measures of revulsion. Viewers are quite obviously meant to learn their own lessons of redemption as the “fixed” weep grateful tears at the end of each episode.

Skeggs writes:

Attributing negative value to the working class is a mechanism for attributing value to the middle-class self (such as making oneself tasteful through judging others to be tasteless). So, it is not just a matter of using some aspects of the culture of the working class to enhance one’s value, but also maintaining the position of judgment to attribute value, which assigns the other as immoral, repellent, abject, worthless, disgusting, even disposable.

What then? How might working-class people respond to such judgment?

Skeggs suggests three possibilities:

• Contest it via managing one’s public presntation of self within norms of respectability.
• Critique the pretensions of the potential judge.
• Ignore it, and thereby steadfastly refuse to recognize the authority of those judging. Skeggs notes that this might be the “Jerry Springer” response.

I’m not clear that we could teach any of these forms of contestation and resistance within school, even as schools are places where more privileged children quite freely express their disgust with less privileged peers.

What, instead, would challenge the very positions of judgment that weigh morality at least in part against the cost of one’s footwear?

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Skeggs, B. (2005). The making of class and gender through visualizing moral subject formation. Sociology, 39, 965-982.

Foster, G.A. (2005). Class Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

It’s an unusually rich day for writing about class in the blogosphere, as Mr. Excitement opens his essay with these words:

In building a career as a theater director, I have been extremely conscious of my social class. It affects every aspect of both my artistic work and my career development.

The essay and comments provoke questions about access to the arts, about pursuing dreams from distant places, about the costs of becoming educated. He promises that there’ll be a Part 2. I’ll watch for it.