Kiara Shuford
Megan Keaton
English 1102
25 February 2013
Education
and the Social Class
We all have to go to school for at least 9 years and you would
think that each and every one of us received the same education. According to
the authors of “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, “On the Uses
of Liberal Education”, and “Women without Class” believe that students that
belong to different social classes receive very different educations that are
based on the social class and occupation of their parents.
In the “Social Class
and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, the Author Jean Anyon describes her experience
as she travels and observes students and teachers in four different social
classes. From the lowest of the social classes to the highest Anyon describes
it as, “shocking, to learn how vast the
differences in schools are – not so much in resources as in teaching methods
and philosophies of education”(Anyon 1). Working class students were being taught their
material straight from the book, while the highest class, Executive Elite,
students were learning critical thinking skills, how to voice their opinion,
and they were given more responsibility than any other students from the
different classes. Because the teaching
methods were so different the author thought that these “practices emphasize
different cognitive and behavioral skills in each social setting and thus
contribute to the development in the children of certain potential
relationships to physical and symbolic capital, to authority, and to the process
of work (Anyon 10).” Anyon argues that the children are being taught to remain
in the same occupations that their parents currently hold and because the
students of a higher class have more of an advantage in these aspects because
of the teaching methods and resources she calls this the “hidden curriculum.” She
suggests that many of these students won’t be able to break this
cycle and will eventually in the same social class that they grew up in.
This harsh cycle also
shows up in “The uses of Liberal Education.” The author, Earl Shorris, of this
article also believes that the lower social classes don’t receive the education
they need to escape their social class.
He exclaims, “ Numerous forces—hunger, isolation, illness, landlords,
police, abuse neighborhoods, drugs, criminals, and racism among many
others—exert themselves on the poor at all times and enclose them, making up a
“surround of force” from which it seems they cannot escape. I had come to
understand that this was what kept the poor from being political and that the
absence of politics in their lives was what kept them poor.(Shorris 188)” Unlike
Jean Anyon in “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, Shorris didn’t
plan to just observe he wanted to teach lower class people some of the things
that they never had the chance to be taught. He taught the homeless, drug
addicted, and disease stricken things like, “philosophy, poetry, art history,
logic, rhetoric, and American history”(Shorris 192). Being taught these things
made these lower class people act differently, “more politically” in their
everyday lives. Whether it was discussing a problem for class or holding back
their anger in their work environment. By the time the students had graduated
this course they were still facing there problems, but had completed the course
and had actually received college credit. As they graduated Shorris knew what
he set out to do was completed, the fourteen people that completed the course
would continue their life and be more aware of the politics that they were so
blind to before they had taken the course. In the case of “On the uses of
Liberal Education”, the lower class was educated with the things that only the
upper class were taught in “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” and
in both cases the students that were taught “politics” excelled.
A majority of the lower class students
in all the articles were racially diverse. In How Working-Class Chicas Get
Working-Class Lives, Latino women were treated differently in their high school
by the students and faculty then what the author called the “prep”. These girls
were treated differently not only because of their ethnicity, but also because
of their gender. The faculty degraded these girls because they thought that the
only thing that they were going to do after high school was become “pregnant
and barefoot” and gave up on these students and didn’t teach them like what
they needed to learn. Some of these students fell victim to the stereo types
that the teachers and community had put on them, but most of them wanted to
make something of themselves and not become a part of the of those stereotypes.
The Latino girls were put in the same predicament as Shorris’ student , Abel
Lomas, who had to choose to get help from the government to feed his family or
become a drug dealer just like his brother. In both of these cases a young
person had to overcome what other people thought that they would fall victim
too and do something for themselves. Most of the Latino women’s in “How
Working-Class Chicas Get Working-Class Lives” parents were strict about their
children getting an education and they would blame the teachers if their
students weren’t doing well. This goes back to “Social Class and the Hidden
Curriculum of Work” where the working class, the same class these Latino women
were in, doesn’t have enough resources for their students to reach their potential.
So the women wouldn’t make it to college, but besides end up working “low-wage
clerical or retail jobs, In comparison to mothers whose work was less than
glamorous and sometimes dirty, working in an office or behind a cash register
in retail can indeed appear as mobility.”(Bettie 82)
These articles really highlight the lower/working
class and how they don’t receive as much as a higher class of people. The
authors of the articles believe that this class of students deserve the just as
much of an opportunity as the higher classes and they try to show the readers
of their articles this.
Works Cited
Anyon,
Jean. “Social Class and the Hidden
Curriculum of Work” Journal of
Education. Vol. 162, no. 1(1980): 1-11. Print.
Bettie,
Julie. Women without Class: Girls, Race and Identity.Chapter 3. Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2003. 57-94. Print.
Shorris,
Earl. “On the Uses of a Liberal Education” Reading about Learners. Vol. 2
(2006): 187-200. Print.
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