Education and Class

While it’s relatively easy to find critiques of child-rearing in low-income families in popular media and academic circles, it’s relatively rare to find any critique of the ways in which children are raised within wealthy families.

Thus, I was intrigued by this short piece from American Public Radio’s Marketplace show that speaks to the challenges of talking with wealthy children about family finances. Apparently, many families find these conversations awkward, so often simply avoid them. From a transcript of the broadcast:

The thing is, the majority of parents in the survey said being open with their children about finances was important. But more than half have never discussed the responsibility that comes with family wealth.

One parent who doesn’t talk much about money with her kids is Lucy. She didn’t want her last name used.

Lucy: Well, I just don’t like to be very public with finances.

Lucy has two kids, 18 and 20. The family is worth more than $50 million from when her husband’s telecommunications company went public. But she says her kids learn by example, because the family doesn’t live extravagantly.

Lucy: Well, that’s a little bit not true. We do have probably a few more houses than we can properly deal with but . . .

Cole: How many is a few more than you can deal with?

Lucy: Well let’s see, we have . . . five houses, I guess, effectively.

The children of parents who lose track of how many houses they actually own are likely not going to be found in public school classrooms. They are beyond the reach of policies of income-based integration of public schools, of public school curriculum about social class, of public deliberation about the declining affordability of higher education.

In public schools, we are educating poor and working-class children whose work lives, whose access to public resources, whose access to health care and quality education for their own children will be shaped by those who have grown up in families where no one talks about how owning five homes is, in fact, extravagant.

Certainly, at least in public schools, we can — and must — talk about this?

Over at the Education Policy Blog, Aaron Shutz has posted a powerful piece on childhood, hunger and learning, asking how much difference pedagogy might make when children have too little food, poor vision, and inadequate health care.

No Child Left Behind? When baby formula has to be put behind locked doors at the drug store and schools are sending home crackers over the weekend so that kids have something to eat between school lunches?

How did learning come to be defined as only a problem of pedagogy?

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 want to read more about this researcher’s work, but this newspaper article on relatively high levels of distress among affluent youth caught my eye.

The researcher, Suniya Luthar, says that

upper-middle-class adolescents reported far more incidents of substance abuse, anxiety and depression than those in inner cities and the general American teen population.

She tells the reporter that it has been hard to find funding for her research, because few people think that the problems of rich kids are worth studying.

Ellen Brantlinger made similar points in her poignant case studies of “the winners” in high school who fared less well as young adults in Dividing Classes.

There are at least two things at work here that intrigue me:

First is the tendency of the press and academic community to local psycho-social problems primarily within “at risk” kids in poor and working class homes, in spite of how often studies like this show otherwise.

But second, is that the “problems of rich kids” are part of the story of how class works in America. We talk too little about the ways in which intensified competition for too few opportunities affect kids trying just to get in the game, but we’ve hardly talked at all about the costs for kids trying to hold their places there.

We can’t understand class without understanding both.

I wrote in a an article a few years ago about how seldom educational researchers “study up” to the upper-middle classes or the wealthy.

In part, I suspect, the children of powerful families are more protected from the scrutiny of researchers than are kids in poor and working class schools.

But I wonder, also, whether we’ve even been interested in what we might find there beyond the high test scores? Even as we insist that test scores can’t capture the full educational experiences of kids on the margins, do we have a lot more to learn about what lurks beneath the accomplishments of the poster children of achievement in upper-middle class schools?

In her chapter in The Lost Dream of Equality: Critical Essays on Education and Social Class, Beth Kelly returns several times to Patricia Williams’ encouragement to find the strength to “spoil a good party” by speaking against taken-for-granted privilege. Kelly writes this in the context of remembering an incident when a professor said incredibly classist things to the laughter of other students. And Kelly didn’t speak up.

She writes that “Especially for those of us whose lives are deeply rooted in poverty, and who retain poverty in memory long after we have obtained some measure of the financial security and comfort that was denied to our parents, it can be humiliating to tell these stories”.

Someone that I read recently noted that when people of color, women, or gays and lesbians began speaking out in classes, at work, or at actual and metaphorical parties, they were connected at least peripherally to some broader social movement that had already started that conversation elsewhere. Classism seems a different animal: there is no broader social movement, no simmering moral outrage, no alliances across class differences, no representations of class conflict in popular culture to spark deliberations.

More commonly , there is simply each of us, one by one, and our stories of childhood and family.

And those can be raw and painful stories to tell, especially when our hearts are pounding and our mouths are going dry because someone has said something, again, that reminds us of how invisible their class privilege is.

So, I didn’t say anything, again, when I sat in a meeting a few weeks ago listening to a lovely woman segue from a politically informed critique of high oil prices to her worry that “our generation’s” retirement plans would be curtailed by the global economy (she was particularly sad that unlike her parents, she probably couldn’t take annual trips to Europe for granted). I didn’t say anything about how my mother is counting her dwindling assets from selling her small house and calculating the number of months she can afford to stay in her low-rent assisted living center (not many). There are very few choices for her when the money is gone.

And I bit my lip as, in another meeting, a very young colleague monopolized the social chatter over lunch by pressing everyone else for advice about investing in rental property (this in one of the more inflated real estate markets in the country), assuming that everyone at the table did own investment property. At his age. I didn’t remind him then –or a few weeks later when he supported action that would mean higher tuition — that most of our students are so deeply in debt that they’ll likely never own their own homes.

And I didn’t dash off the outraged letter to the editor of the magazine that I had picked up in an airport, in which the author of an article on reinventing oneself at middle age encouraged me to not feel guilty for investing my share of the “unprecedented” inheritance that my generation can expect on my own dreams. “How dare you assume that you and your inheritance represent your generation?” I seethed. But I didn’t write the letter.

So I teach. And now I blog. And I aspire to be part of generating richer public discourse about such things.

In part, I do this as part of my broader commitment to social justice.

In no small part, I do this because I’m weary of the puzzled stares when I do tell my stories.

What will it take to generate broader public conversation about social class in America?