Education and Class

In my last post, I wrote about the limitations of the ideal of the “heroic” teacher whose deep care will enable poor and working class students to engage in school in profoundly different ways.

That same afternoon, I was reading Stephanie Jones’ terrific book Girls, Social Class, and Literacy. She writes of the complicated relationships between children, their mothers, and teachers when mothers do not have access to the cultural, economic, or social capital to live up to the social construction of “ideal mother”. When poor and working class mothers have long been subject to the judgments of teachers, medical professionals, social workers, neighbors, or Child Protective Services, they have good reason to be wary of middle-class teachers who try to insinuate themselves into into the lives of their children.

Jones write that as a teacher, she had to come to understand that “students who walk into classrooms do not possess autonomy to build relationships and attachments with any concrete other. … The relationships educators build with children may continue to position them in tension-filled spaces between home and school if we don’t realize the necessity of building genuine relationships with caregivers as well”.

We seem to have come somewhat full circle, then. Loving children into learning can never be enough for poor and working-class kids. Yet, when teachers have too much to do in too little time, it will take an element of quiet heroism to also invest in the risky business of initiating relationships with wary parents across class boundaries.

In today’s New York Times, Tom Moore, a high school teacher, writes an opinion piece about the distortions inherent in movies like the recent Freedom Writers. He writes:

Films like “Freedom Writers” portray teachers more as missionaries than professionals, eager to give up their lives and comfort for the benefit of others, without need of compensation. Ms. Gruwell sacrifices money, time and even her marriage for her job.

Her behavior is not represented as obsessive or self-destructive, but driven — necessary, even. She is forced into making these sacrifices by the aggressive neglect of the school’s administrators, who won’t even let her take books from the bookroom. The film applauds Ms. Gruwell’s dedication, but also implies that she has no other choice. In order to be a good teacher, she has to be a hero.

“Freedom Writers,” like all teacher movies this side of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” is presented as a celebration of teaching, but its message is that poor students need only love, idealism and martyrdom.

I talk often with the teachers I teach about the popular portrayals of teachers in the media, about the inherent contradictions between the mythology of “hero amongst the rabble” and a more systemic understanding of the reforms that will be necessary to make schools work for poor and working class kids.

For a class taught by one of my colleagues, they read Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, and many are quite simply overwhelmed as first encounter the gross inequities in U.S. public schooling. I want my colleague to push them further, however, because as they grapple with reconciling their initial belief in schools as essentially good places for kids with the conditions they read about in Kozol, they almost inevitably settle on one central image: that of the Chicago teacher with the rocking chair in her classroom who loves her students and works impossible hours to make them and their families welcome in her classroom.

This is who they want to be.

This is a powerful image of a teacher making the best of impossible conditions.

And I get mostly blank stares when I ask my students why this terrific teacher should have to put up with the conditions within which she works in the first place.

For many, their decisions to teach are shaped by films like Freedom Writers. They’ll be the One True caring teacher, and their students will grasp their ankles begging for more at the end of each class section.

I work hard with them to press the questions of whether, in the long run, poor and working class kids might not be better served by schools populated by an entire teaching staff that had the resources and support to do their jobs well.

I want my students to become heroic teachers. I want them to have models of heroism beyond the solo, self-sacrificing, teacher whose self-identity depends at least in part on maintaining smug distance from one’s colleagues.