Education and Class

In my Education and the American Dream class last week, we were talking about Michael Zweig’s notion that class is primarily about the power that some people have other others and the relative powerlessness that therefore shapes the lives of many.

We talked for a bit about how it is, then, that both teachers and kids are rendered relatively powerless in the administrative structures and pedagogies of many low-income/working class schools and about how it might be otherwise.

A few days later, I found a post at  Practical Theory about explicitly preparing kids to believe that they “always belong in the room”.

I can’t imagine there being many objections to teaching kids skills like “networking” and engaging strangers in conversation.  Businesses expect their workers to be adept at such things.

Yet as Chris suggests in this post,  teaching these things explicitly in schools can also be about co-opting those “business” skills for the empowerment of kids long excluded from the board room.

• Sociological Images » SOCIAL CLASS AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

  Interesting imagery of class interesections

  tags: Social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

He was one of those funny drivers,  quipping as he called out the stops, bantering with the people up front, pronouncing the names of local businesses in phony French.

He slammed on the brakes, yelled “incoming” .   A small red car had stopped suddenly in front of the bus, the driver deciding late to attempt a turn.

Crash averted, he yelled “Yeah, that one looked like a college degree. You can tell them a mile off.  Those folks are meeeean”.

The weary  people in the front rows laughed.

Later, chatting  with a rider about the economy, he quipped that Marx said that we’d never have a revolution as long as people had big screen TVs and could watch a few car chases every night.

It was class analysis played for humor on the bus, and while the people in the front rows laughed, I wasn’t at all clear if I should hide or flaunt the academic book on class that I was reading at the time.  It did not seem an obvious symbol of solidarity.

• Colleges Accepting More Students Who Can Pay Full Fare – NYTimes.com

  From the article: “There’s going to be a cascading of talented lower-income kids down the social hierarchy of American higher education, and some cascading up of affluent kids,” said Morton Owen Schapiro, the president of Williams College and an economist who studies higher education.

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.