Education and Class

Stick with a Nose weighs in on “class warfare”, writing

What I find most frightening is how fragmented the US population is already. The sad reality is that the various social classes live drastically different lives and remain so very isolated one from another… geographically, economically & socially [and legally].

His post is spurred by Scott McLemee’s post on Crooked Timber about a network (Late Night Shots) of wealthy young power brokers in D.C. Scott writes:

The point of a club like Late Night Shots is, in large part, to keep other people out of it. That’s obvious. But those other people have to (be imagined to) want in.

The greatest terror is not that they will try to overthrow you—or even that they might somehow break through the barriers of exclusivity. It’s that the outsider might laugh at the exclusivity.

Perhaps, instead of teaching kids to imitate or even to internalize the values, behaviors, and tastes of the wealthy and powerful, we can teach kids to laugh at their claims of superiority. Metaphorically, of course. We wouldn’t want to encourage snarkiness.

How else do we even begin the conversations about the vast social distances between the classrooms in which the children of the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the entitled are being educated?

How else do those on the margins even get on the radar screens of the wealthy? Moral arguments seem not to work. Perhaps incisive disregard might?