Education and Class

Writing of upwardly mobile women from the working class, Valerie Walkerdine speaks of young professionals grappling with the conditions in which their parents still live. :

To leave is to get out, but social mobility is no cure for social injustice. There is nothing wrong with wanting to leave pain, nor are those who cross the borders responsible for the horrific and painful effects of poverty and overwork, written on the minds and bodies of workers. Why would they not want to leave for the pleasures of another life and the fantasy of the absence of pain and oppression of the old one? It could be understood to be masochistic to want to stay, and yet, what a dilemma. They get out and leave their parents in pain. Watching parents in pain for children who are looking for safety can be very hard.

She goes on to say:

It is precisely the complex relationships between the old and the new inscriptions, simultaneously cultural and social, semiotic and psychic, that are so important to understand”.

Yet in almost twenty years of formal schooling, no one ever, ever talked to me about such transitions, about the double-edged experience of moving forward while grimacing as we looked back, about the particular “dual consciousness” that we might bring to deliberations about justice and equity.

Schools talk endlessly about “making it”. What will it take to also begin talking about the costs?

Walkerdine, V. (2006). Workers in the new economy: Transformations as border crossing. Ethos, 34, 10-41.

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.

In a thoughtful and carefully reasoned post, amike, writing on the TPM Cafe, wonders about what it means to be working class, since we all work. I’m intrigued by his divergence from the much more common insistence that we’re all just middle class.

He quotes Wikipedia as defining the working class in part by the nature of work done and the lack of influence held that lead many to conclude that they are working class. He then writes:

I wasn’t entirely happy with this: professionals, after all, work. How would I parse the idea “Working Class?” More particularly, could I parse it in a way which didn’t create a hierarchy? I settled on a division of the working class into two subsets: the articulate working class and the dexterous working class.

I recalled Andrew Sayers writing of the “combination of shame, guilt, and pride that are commonly associated with class”. He writes:

The embedded nature of class differences presents middle-class egalitarians with a dilemma: on the one hand, to attempt to ignore the fact that someone has little economic or cultural capital can be highly insensitive; on the other, to acknowledge their lack of such capital can seem patronising, as reinforcing (’rubbing it in’) rather than countering inequality. It is arguably responsible for the failure of equal opportunities policies to address class.

I agree with amike, as far as he goes, on the blurred boundaries between skilled manual labor and the intellectual labor of many middle class workers. I agree, also that inherent dispositions (being inherently dexterous, or uniquely articulate) may well shape life trajectories in equally interesting, if divergent directions.

Yet to speak of barbers who live in our neighborhoods and plumbers with well-paying specializations is really not to speak of the working class. Call-center workers, hotel housekeepers, night shift workers at the convenience store out by the highway, long-haul truck drivers, home health-care workers, the people who stuff envelopes at Netflix: the millions who do this work are valued for neither their dexterity nor their articulateness. Many, in fact, were likely educated in schools in which they had little opportunity to learn to write well, to speak persuasively, to believe that anyone would be interested in the circumstances of their lives should they attempt to explain such things anyway.

They are valued, instead, for their willingness to do relatively unskilled labor for relatively low wages. They are valued, often, to the extent that they have internalized the belief that they deserve little more. They do not experience the envy of others.

amike wonders of the “dexterous” workers come to read his blog and if they’d be welcomed if they were. He cautions that on the TPM Cafe blog, “articulate workers” too often speak on behalf of the “dexterous workers”.

I think that there is wisdom in this caution, because the the internalized sense that we are entitled to do so speak on behalf of of class “others” is at least partly why class will never just be about work, about the value ascribed to dexterity, or even about wages.

Sayers, Andrew. (2005). The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge University Press.

I grew up in a small town in the middle of dairy farm country. On still mornings, you could smell the cows from my house. The tallest structure in town is the feed mill; the biggest employer is the state prison.

When I was growing up, there were two family-owned bakeries on Main St., two hardware scores, two “dime stores”, two jewelry stores, a shoe store, a few clothing stores, and lots and lots of bars.

The bars are all still there.

One jewelry store is still open. The storefront that was a bakery is now a tanning salon. A few stores have been given over to serial , seemingly doomed, small businesses (a scrap booking supply store just opened). A developer has opened a sales office for the new subdivision out on the edge of town. In three years, he has sold 3 lots.

Out of my graduating class of almost 400, about 30 of us went to college. A few went to private church-affiliated schools in the next state; the rest of us to state schools. A few went to the flagship state university, but at least of few of those got lost in the crowds and dropped out before graduating.

Most of us figured out how to get to and pay for college on our own. Our guidance counselor saw her work as essentially clerical: handing out brochures when we asked for them, mailing out our transcripts, writing formulaic letters of recommendation. She was very proud of those of us who aspired to college, but it never occurred to any of us that there were possibilities beyond the University of Our State -Hyphen schools. We talked among ourselves about which school had the best business or education programs, as if we had access to such information, as if there were substantive differences among any of them. Somehow, we just knew that we were supposed to have those sorts of conversations about picking colleges.

I Googled my high school yesterday. On the school website, you can sign up for email updates on the athletic schedule with one click. You can get the “hot lunch” menus. You can link to each of the 12 student clubs (Future Farmers of America, Future Business Leaders of America, a French Club and a Spanish Club) and find photos of students working on homecoming floats.

But you can’t find a syllable about the curriculum, the resources available to families with college- bound kids, the scheduled visits of college reps, about any connection between the school and the lives that graduates might pursue.

You can link to teacher profiles, and here you can find lists of courses that each teaches.
In these individual teacher pages, I did find three that the school now offers three AP courses.

AP History is taught by the social studies teacher that I had for two years. He must be near retirement now. We had a great time in his class. We learned almost nothing about history. I remember how easy it was to goad him into fury by simply disagreeing with him in our “Current Issues” class. He told me where to find ethnic restaurants in the town where my boyfriend was going to college. I felt terribly sophisticated, knowing such things, even though I never made it to any of those restaurants.

AP Calculus is taught by the second wife of a distant relative of mine. None of their kids has gone to college.

I don’t know anything about the man who teaches AP Calculus. His webpage mentions that he also coaches several sports.

Every single teacher is a graduate of one of those Hyphen state schools that my classmates selected from years ago.

The nearest bookstores for kids in my high school is small Walden Books in a small mall about 20 miles away (but of course, they do now have Amazon). If people who live there were interested in live music of any genre, they’d have to drive about an hour, unless some arts group brought their summer tours to the slightly-larger towns a half hour away. Live theater? An hour, minimum, and people speak with some trepidation about the traffic, the crime, and the size of that distant city. Any films beyond recent-release adventure or horror blockbusters (three small screens, at that mall with Walden Books) would have to come in the mail, if people even knew about them.

Does any of this matter?

It does if we continue to talk of level playing fields, of hard work being the only thing separating the successful and the stilted, of the new opportunities in a global economy when so much of even mainstream American culture has bypassed places like this.

I’m sure that kids in my high school are tested more often now (Learning Goals under NCLB are linked there to that website).

But it’s not clear that they’re learning how to sustain family businesses when Walmart opens in the town just down the highway, about entrepreneurship models less dependent upon storefronts on Main St., about the range of ideas out there for thinking about their place in the world, about what it might mean to become educated in ways very different from what even their own teachers imagined.

In essence, they’re not learning anything more about class that I did when I lived there, believing as I did then that those A’s in Current Issues and English were my ticket to the world just over the horizon.

I had no idea.

While I’ve been away, I’ve been catching up on reading the ever-growing stack of books on my desk. I have been reading and re-reading sections of Telling our Lives: Conversations on Solidarity and Difference, a remarkable and complex account of a multiple-year conversation among three women from the working class: One African-American, one Jewish-American, and one Irish-American. One is lesbian, the other two straight; all are now academics who have been meeting around kitchen tables to record their many-layered conversations about their lives and work.

They each talk about early engagement in school, the development of a keen competitive edge, the centrality of early literacy in their identity development. They write:

For all three of us, public presentation of self, enacted within and through the discursive regimes of the school, would become extremely important. At the same time, however, outstanding academic performances indicative of high levels of public literacy do not tell the whole story. The flip side of our overachievement (and to some extent, its motivation) was marginalization — primarily class based, although other factors contributed. The houses we built of words always had shaky foundations.

I come back again and again to these questions of how to best serve children poised at the boundaries of class divides that they can’t possibly understand, sensing the precariousness of their footing, floating between the joy of accomplishment and the quiet sense of unease that they cannot name.

Certainly, we can educate the teachers of these children that so much is going on beneath the high test scores and competitive treks through the classroom library.

Yet I know of few teacher education programs that come even close to engaging in such work.