Education and Class

In today’s NYT is this article about College Summit, a non-profit that runs an intriguing program that teaches low-income young people to craft college essays from the fabric of their lives. They learn the cultural capital of essay writing, they learn to frame their lives as something infinitely richer and deeper than an accumulation of deficits, they learn to show admissions officers the complex lives behind the test scores and grades.

As the article notes, so many afluent kids are writing the same “I went on a service trip to Costa Rica and saw dire poverty for the first time” essays that admissions officers roll their eyes at the first mention of Latin America. I love the idea that low-income kids could come across as relatively wise, experienced, and motivated as they narrate their own lives.

I’ve been reading and working in narrative and storytelling this year, and love, also, that in writing these essays, these young people are also writing their lives, on their own terms, as they actively construct identity and voice.

The program reaches only 1500 kids a year.

At least it’s a start.

Robin Toner’s essay in today’s NYT suggests that economic populism will be a key theme in this presidential campaign. At stake, argues Toner, are questions of who stands with “the people” against the powerful elites in these times of growing inequalities and stagnant wages.

Republicans have charged that wealthy Democrats can’t vow to change the economy while simultaneously profiting from the status quo.

Toner reminds us that Ted Kennedy faced similar charges when he first ran for the Senate:

[W]hen Mr. Kennedy ran for the Senate in 1962, he was attacked by his opponent as being privileged, unaccomplished, and for having “never worked for a living.” A burly worker approached him one day and said, “Ted, me boy, I understand you’ve never worked a day in your life.”

He paused, then added, “You haven’t missed a thing.”

Toner concludes: “Champions of the working class, in short, are often made, not born”.

But are any of the current candidates honestly champions of working class? What exactly does it mean to be a champion of the working class in the new service and knowledge economies? What education policies are now in the best interests of working class kids?

Stick with a Nose weighs in on “class warfare”, writing

What I find most frightening is how fragmented the US population is already. The sad reality is that the various social classes live drastically different lives and remain so very isolated one from another… geographically, economically & socially [and legally].

His post is spurred by Scott McLemee’s post on Crooked Timber about a network (Late Night Shots) of wealthy young power brokers in D.C. Scott writes:

The point of a club like Late Night Shots is, in large part, to keep other people out of it. That’s obvious. But those other people have to (be imagined to) want in.

The greatest terror is not that they will try to overthrow you—or even that they might somehow break through the barriers of exclusivity. It’s that the outsider might laugh at the exclusivity.

Perhaps, instead of teaching kids to imitate or even to internalize the values, behaviors, and tastes of the wealthy and powerful, we can teach kids to laugh at their claims of superiority. Metaphorically, of course. We wouldn’t want to encourage snarkiness.

How else do we even begin the conversations about the vast social distances between the classrooms in which the children of the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the entitled are being educated?

How else do those on the margins even get on the radar screens of the wealthy? Moral arguments seem not to work. Perhaps incisive disregard might?

Here is a sadly amusing post from Werner Herzog’s Bear on how to tell if you’re a declasse academic.

Go on.  Take the quiz.  You know that you’re wondering.

From the Institute for Higher Education Policy comes this report on the working poor in college. These students face a conundrum: They need to finish college to earn more, but they don’t earn enough in their current jobs to pay for school. They work so many hours that they can’t enroll full time, but full financial aid is available only to full-time students.

Even with financial aid, thought, these students have to come up with thousands of dollars a year to cover living expenses and tuition.

Many of the students that I teach face these impossible choices: as tuition goes up, they either have to work even more to pay for school, or they have to pile on more credits than they want to so that they’ll be eligible for loans. Many try to do both.

Are there campuses working on ways to make college more accessible to these students?