The comments are great.  I’m still deciding whether to join in.

But I need to take a deep breath first.

During the Q and A, I sat on my hands for awhile and then asked what the middle-class students said about learning for learning’s sake.

But the study wasn’t about them.  So no one had asked. The assumption seemed simply to be that if students from working class backgrounds expressed frustration with courses, curriculum, or the relevance of what they were required to do, it was evidence of a flawed values system.

But someone else on the panel then spoke up. “It’s money that they value”, she said.  She cited studies of the value that middle-class kids place on their college education. For them, she said, the intellectual took a backseat to the  earning potential that a degree would confer.

The middle class didn’t value learning for learning’s sake, either.

I haven’t seen those studies, but am still somewhat amazed when Ph.D.s who often are in it for the love of learning are surprised that anyone else isn’t.

And when I see studies like this recently released report on the alarming rates of cheating among high school students, I wonder how anyone can still think that students anywhere are driven primarily by a hunger of the mind.

But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:  Middle class kids know how to intellectualize their complaints, how to feign interest, how to just stay quiet when it’s in their strategic interest to do so.  Working class kids may well wonder often and loudly why the hell they’re borrowing hundreds of dollars for a course on the history of pop music.

But learning what we’re teaching purely for the love of learning?

In my dreams.

Because if we really value learning, we have to value the learners, even when what we’re teaching isn’t self-evidently interesting to them, even if they’ve grown up within cynical times, even when they’re from backgrounds very different from our own.

…even if we have to be willing to look past the surface level differences to see the complicated lives withn which all of our students now contextualize their education.

The exercise that Will Barratt and his colleagues developed that morphed into that “privilege meme” a few months ago was one take on developing a parallel class privilege list.

In the Building Bridges newsletter, the Class Action people offer another take on a middle class privilege list, They acknowledge that this list is far from definitive, given the many ways that race and gender complicate class privilege.

Thus, they invite others to contribute their own lists at <privilege at classism.org>. I’d invite you to cc me in the comments below.

Middle Class Privileges

1. The “better people” are in my social class; I know this because they are the ones reported on and valued in the media and in school.
2. People appear to pay attention to my social class; we set the standard.
3. When I, or my children, are taught about history, people from my social class are represented in the books.
4. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the laziness, poverty, or illiteracy of my class.
5. The neighborhoods I can move to, where I feel “at home”, typically have better resourced schools.
6. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization”, I am shown that people of my class made it what it is.
7. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their class.
8. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my class.
9. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my class.
10. I am never asked to speak for all people in my class.
11. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of poor and working class people who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my class any penalty for such oblivion.
12. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people in other classes.
13. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection of my class.
14. I can worry about classism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
15. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my class.
16. If I have low credibility as a leader, I can be sure that my class is not the problem.
17. I can read recipes and purchase whatever ingredients or appliances they might call for.
18. I can invite my friends out for an evening and not have to think about whether they can afford it or not.
19. I don’t need to worry about learning the social norms of others.

What else might you add as a manifestation of middle class privilege?

Anytime the media wants to cast aspersions upon Obama, to diminish his chances to be elected, to give voice to smears against him, to suggest that he is a Muslim, or a black-nationalist, or a socialist, or a Eunuch, or some Chameleonesque mixture of all of those things, suddenly these concerns are put in the mouth of “the working class.”

Read the whole essay. It is worth the effort of a mouse click, and once you’re there you’ll keep reading.

Trust me.

I was interested, then, in Larry Bartels’ column in today’s NYT.   Bartels, the director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton, writes, for example, that:

It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.

While so many of us have been gratified by the more open and frank discussions about race that have been generated by this campaign, I wonder: what it will take to get to more informed deliberations about class?

The article spurred excellent discussion among Dave, a sociologist; Wes a musician who wrote here and here; and Nathan, another musician, all of whom reflect on their own working class roots and their current work.

The life stories told in the posts and in comments that follow each are well worth a careful read.

It’s a brave, important, and fascinating conversation.

I didn’t lecture.

I didn’t hiss.

I did tell a story about a student in my course a few years ago who argued the same thing — that his high school kids from working class families didn’t “care” about learning the way that his middle class kids did. In class that day, I told another story about some research that I’d done in a private high school and the very creative but pervasive cheating that the kids told me about. I asked my student “so, how does an elaborate culture of cheating support your idea that middle class kids care more about learning for the sake of learning?”

My skepticism over whether differences in academic engagement can be explained by deep differences in the value placed on intellectual life is reinforced by this article from the SF Chronicle documenting rampant cheating among the highest achieving students in high school and college, and the students’ justifications of their cheating.

Similar articles are published fairly often in newspapers and education publications. I don’t think that it’s a secret anymore that many highly-ambitious kids casually cheat. Yet I have yet to hear any teacher or college faculty member talk about “them” and “their culture” as being sadly anti-intellectual, as they so often speak of working-class kids.

To justify class advantage, the respectability of the poor and working class must be denied.

My student’s response that day? He said that cheating at least showed that the middle-class kids valued the goals of education, and that made them better than his students who just didn’t bother to do their homework.

I didn’t lecture any more. I didn’t hiss.

My colleague’s response to my story about that high school teacher? A polite smile, and then a move to change the subject. I smiled back, and moved on.

But I do continue to marvel at the myths about class that are sustained in schools and colleges.

And then, Inside Higher Education, one of the most widely-read education websites in the country, published a cartoon that was among the most classist things that I’ve seen in a long time, and when many of us objected, many well-educated people jumped in to defend it.

The cartoon is no longer available. I’d posted it here for a time after the cartoonist, Matthew Henry Hall, announced that in response to the reaction he’d gotten to the original, he’d created an alternative, which IHE published later that day. I believed — and still do — that having the original available would enable dialogue about the classism that IHE and Hall missed.

But both Matthew Henry Hall and the editor of IHE have contacted me to ask me to take down the original cartoon because I have no right to publish it. I pick my battles carefully, so have taken it down.

Here is what’s been changed from the original: The “101% Redneck and proud” t-shirt has been replaced by an “American Idle” t-shirt. The beer cans have been replaced by soda cans. The “Monster Trucks” and “Girls” and “More Girls” magazines have been replaced by “Star” and “People”. The beer spill is gone — apparently soda drinkers have better housekeeping skills. I’m not clear about the significance of his clothing, but he’s traded shorts for long pants, and is now wearing a different style shoe.

And, the mullet is gone.

We have (canned) beer, trucker magazines, a “redneck” t-shirt, and a mullet.

And we have a professor calling this student to thank him for not showing up in class.

And here’s what Hall, the cartoonist said in the message that he posted after getting many emails and after seeing the comments that were posted with the cartoon:

I in no way, ever intended the character in the above cartoon to be emblematic for working poor students. That’s a reading I’d not considered. I simply wanted to depict a fictional character who was a difficult student. That’s it. His level of wealth, be it high, low or somewhere in the middle, wasn’t something I’d even considered.

I’ll take him at his word.

But I’d guess that I’d much rather than he (and the editors of IHE who decided to publish this cartoon) were fully aware of how, when he wanted to depict a student that readers would immediately recognize as “difficult”, he chose a particular set of cultural markers that clearly signaled working-class. Right down to the mullet.

And I wish, too, that Hall and the editors of IHE had any sense of how many of us had no idea what we were getting into when we we aspired to college, how naive we were in our beliefs that it was going to be about big ideas and a love of learning and doors opening before us. I wish that they had any idea how often we instead sensed that our professors, the people in the financial aid office, our roommates, and those other carefully-groomed students in our classes were thinking exactly what the professor in this cartoon at least said out loud: That we didn’t belong, that we were annoying, that college was, essentially, for those who already “got it” and the rest of us deserved the snickers that we just knew trailed behind us — whether we actually heard them or not.

But they didn’t, and neither did a number of people commenting on the IHE website, who felt compelled to teach those of us who did object that we were “morons”, humorless, “wusses” and in the same camp as radical Muslims who objected to Danish cartoonists’ depictions of them.

For example, “ST” completely missed that people were objecting to classism and took it upon himself to teach the rest of us why we were wrong to think that this was “reverse racism”. He went on to teach us that “rednecks” were responsible for the history of oppression of blacks.

Two posters established their “cred” on the subject by tracing their southern roots, but missed completely that this cartoon was about class, not geography.

A number of posters reminded us all that we’ve all had difficult students, and this was just tapping into that experience. They’re right, of course. There are students that we’d wish into the sections of our colleagues. And any number of my difficult students have been wealthy, privileged, and entitled, but no one would *ever* create a cartoon about them. The latest announced on the first day of class that he was gifted and to then pointedly ignored me for the rest of the term.

Others talked about how students like this — who we see, by the way, engaged only in out-of -class endeavors–was obviously choosing to be anti-intellectual and therefore didn’t belong in college.

It seemed pointless to remind these folks that fraternity keg parties, the term-paper mills, the cheating rings at ivy-league colleges are hardly evidence that the middle-class comes to college for intellectual enlightenment alone.

IHE didn’t recognize the classism. Hall didn’t recognize how he was drawing on particular stereotypes as a cheap shortcut to “difficult student”. The rabid commentors didn’t even get that this was about class.

Ironically, I’m spending my time this week reading a collection of essays by people who were the first in their families to attend college. What strikes me about this collection is this: In these times when we promise kids that the world will open to them if only they do well in school, the authors of these essays had to go to exceptional lengths to get themselves to college, and once there, to find the means to stay. To a person, they had to fight teachers, counselors, peers, and sometimes family for the right — a right that they never, ever took for granted — to get a college education. Had they simply conformed, smiled, and played “nice”, they’d never have made it.

And we have the data (IHE itself regularly publishes notices of such studies) that many of them don’t make it, in spite of strong academic credentials and an initial will to become highly educated.

But I guess that the very idea many of the newcomers to college so often find themselves facing obstacles that require that they constantly question whether the fight is worth it, whether they do really deserve to be there, whether they’re selling out to stay — those ideas are, are in the end, too complicated to depict in any simple line drawing.

But certainly, there’s room to talk about this somewhere?

update: Matthew Hall, the cartoonist, has posted a message that he’s changing the cartoon to remove offensive elements, so here’s the original for those who want to make sense of the commentary that followed:

update 2: Matthew Henry Hall and the editor of IHE each emailed me this week asking me to take down  the cartoon because I had no “right” to publish it.  I choose my fights carefully, so took it down but have blogged about it here.