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Late to Class: Social Class and Schooling in the New Economy
b>Winner of the 2007 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association
Late to Class presents theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical perspectives on social class and schooling in the United States. Grounding their analyses at the intersections of class, ethnicity, gender, geography, and schooling, the contributors examine the educational experiences of poor, working class, and middle class students against the backdrop of complicated class stratification in a shifting global economy. Together, they explore the salience of class in understanding the social, economic, and cultural landscapes within which young people in the United States come to understand the meaning of their formal education in times of changing opportunity.
Late to Class presents theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical perspectives on social class and schooling in the United States. Grounding their analyses at the intersections of class, ethnicity, gender, geography, and schooling, the contributors examine the educational experiences of poor, working class, and middle class students against the backdrop of complicated class stratification in a shifting global economy. Together, they explore the salience of class in understanding the social, economic, and cultural landscapes within which young people in the United States come to understand the meaning of their formal education in times of changing opportunity.
376 pages, Paperback
First published April 23, 2007
About the author
Jane A. Van Galen
5 booksDr. Van Galen's research focuses on social class and social mobility through education. Most recently, she has focused on ways in which new forms of participatory digital media enable the inclusion of more voices in deliberations about civic and cultural life. She is currently guest editing a special issue of the journal Excellence and Equity in Education on bridging new digital divides in uses of social media as a means of supporting civic engagement and agency.
(from http://www.bothell.washington.edu/edu...)
(from http://www.bothell.washington.edu/edu...)
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 28, 2015
I actually enjoyed and learned a lot from all of this – but this is an edited collection of essays, and I’m not really going to cover all of them here. The essays are about schooling and social class in the US – a nation that often assumes that it doesn’t actually have social classes (bizarrely enough) which goes some way to explaining the title. All the same, the bits of this that you should read if you were of a mind to, but didn’t want to read the whole thing would be/should be:
Chapter One – Growing Up as Poor, White Trash. A really lovely chapter that personalises the issues associated with social class while also explaining some of the complexities of that lived experience. As the author makes clear, education does change people, but that is not at all an 'easy' idea and there are complex emotions associated with that change. For instance, a sense that one has left one’s family, that one doesn’t quite belong anywhere - not in the new world nor in the one left behind. But my favourite bit of this was the author was talking about her best friend at primary school who was middle class and so had what Bourdieu would refer to as the educational habitus to breeze through school in ways the author never could. Where even with all the effort in the world, the author could never do what seemed effortless and easy to her best friend. We need to be reminded of the harm we do when we forget that morality and wealth are not synonyms - and that poverty places hurdles in the way of some that aren't even understood as existing to others.
Chapter Four – Marginalisation and Membership. This chapter looks at a school in California that has a large Mexican population and what this then means. Basically, it means hard work for the kids of Mexican descent as their language problems are hardly acknowledged, but rather made an issue as if speaking Spanish was an act of petulance on their part. These students are made to feel unwelcome in many of the spaces in the school, particularly spaces in the school-yards. Something that is a bit of a constant theme at the moment in things I’ve been reading has been how frequently white people project onto people who are racially different from them their own fears and insecurities and then often go out of their way to punish those other people. Obviously, this is most often used against black people, but I found it particularly interesting how space is occupied in this school by white people and that there were virtually no ‘no-go’ areas for them, but that this was quite the opposite for the other kids, as there were lots of areas where kids of Mexican descent felt they had to rush through and avoid for fear of white students. This, of course, is also true of the way boys occupy space in school-yards too when compared to the spaces girls are left with. And yet, we only ever seem to hear of spaces where white people don’t feel safe – in their walking through ghettos or areas of shopping centres that are deemed ‘feminine’. The fear that people feel when entering places that are designated as white male somehow don't count here – only the fear white males feel ever seems to matter. And such fear often means non-white people, male or female, are punished (often with their lives) due to this fear white males feel and too often this fear is seen as justified and excused.
Chapter Six – High School Students’ Exploration of Class Differences in a Multicultural Literature Class. This was a fascinating chapter. Basically it starts off asking why it is that working class people in the US seem to have so little class-consciousness. That is, why is it that working class people in the US are so likely to vote Republican (something clearly against their own interests) and even to support the Republican Party with such gusto? This isn’t exactly a question that can be answered simply, but then again, it also isn’t a question that is impossible to answer either. There is a complicated interplay of racial identity and national myth in the US that goes some way to helping to answer these questions. The whole notion of ‘affirmative action’ has been cleverly used by the right to construct poor white people as ‘disadvantaged’ – but rather than this meaning that they too should be given opportunities to succeed, that is, the opportunities that others have been given (or even only supposedly given as in the case of people's of colour in the US) these 'advantages' are rather to be taken away from everyone. The myth of a meritocracy in the US is so all-pervasive that even the most gross inequalities have been glossed over allowing breathtakingly disadvantaged people to end up doing the dirty work for those most likely to benefit from the caste system that exists. The US remains one of the truly remarkable examples of the power of myth over reality – but then, the US is hardly an island alone on that score.
Chapter Seven: Social Class and African-American Parental Involvement. Goes some way to complicate the story of school and school success for African-American parents and students. This reminded me more of Anyon’s work on social class, but it was heavily indebted to Laurau and her work on how different social classes prepare their children for school. In the main the African-American parents that are interviewed here, from various social classes, are all heavily involved in their children’s schooling. However, social class plays an important role, even when parents are equally prepared to ‘put in the effort’ to help their children to succeed. The point being that certain parents have a better idea of what this might involve and what they can best do to help. And this means that the higher class parents not only reinforce what their children are learning at school – as the working class parents tend to do – but they are also able to literally extend what their kids learn, that is, beyond mere ‘reinforcing’.
Chapter Nine: (Re)Turning to Marx to Understand the Unexpected Anger Among ‘Winners’ in Schooling. I’ve read a couple of books by Brantlinger recently and they have been among some of the more interesting books I’ve read all year. This is similarly very interesting. In a way it relates back to what I said earlier about white spaces. We not only think that white people are the only people who are allowed to be afraid – despite everyone else being much more likely to be victims of white violence – but also we sort of think that people clearly ripped off by the system ought to be the angry ones and so also to be the ones to kick up a fuss. And yet when you look at the mass-killings that the US has basically made their own recently, the mass killings that seem to happen every other week, almost invariably these are committed by white, middle class young men. That is, essentially the ‘winners’ in US society. So, why? The problem as Brantlinger constructs it is that there are no ‘winners’, at least not winners in the usual sense, but rather that everyone ends up being damaged by the competitive nature of capitalism. Again, I’ve been reading an awful lot lately, particularly about elite schools in the US and how parents seek to position their kids to best take advantage of this insanely competitive system. The one thing that comes through loud and clear is that this system damages people. And not just the people who are on the wrong side of this mass-attrition process. But it also goes a long way to wrecking the lives of those who make their way though the system as 'successes'. In fact, those who enter the system with a sense of entitlement and who then get smashed by it despite all of the ‘advantages’ they started off with are likely to have the hardest time of all. Our modern world has created a system where anxiety is normalised and fear of failure is ubiquitous. Why this should be conceived as the 'best of all possible worlds' really is something we need to begin questioning.
Chapter Eleven: Intersections on the Back Road: Class, Culture, and Education in Rural and Appalachian Places. I really loved this chapter, and found it insanely interesting. I’ve been interested in the Appalachian mountains for years, but what I found most interesting about this chapter was the idea that this is a life that is virtually a zombie existence. As the US has de-industrialised the working class jobs that existed in these places and sustained the kind of life most readily associated with them have gone to god. However, social identity is deeply embodied in people and is linked to place and to the ways of the past - ways told in stories and carried in bodies and accepted as simple common sense. And those embodied ways in Appalachia are associated with hard work, independence and, unfortunately, jobs that simply do not exist anymore. To have any hope at all the kids who live in these places should run for the nearest exit – but to do that would be to rip huge lumps of flesh from their bones. They are literally embodied in these places, fixed by familial ties and obligations. But also condemned to never be able to ‘live up to’ the hopes of those around them as the jobs needed to self-actualise in this environment simply no longer exist. And this cascades throughout the whole of the society, impacting gender relations as well.
There wasn’t really a chapter in this that I didn’t like or didn’t learn something from, Chapter Ten, for instance, on shifting our focus from the poor to the non-poor and the part the non-poor play in creating poverty (in much the same way that ending racism needs to become a ‘white’ problem, rather than a ‘black’ one) was a really important read – but I think that if I was to encourage you to read any of this at all, the chapters I’ve mentioned here (and also the preface and introduction) would be well worth your while.
Chapter One – Growing Up as Poor, White Trash. A really lovely chapter that personalises the issues associated with social class while also explaining some of the complexities of that lived experience. As the author makes clear, education does change people, but that is not at all an 'easy' idea and there are complex emotions associated with that change. For instance, a sense that one has left one’s family, that one doesn’t quite belong anywhere - not in the new world nor in the one left behind. But my favourite bit of this was the author was talking about her best friend at primary school who was middle class and so had what Bourdieu would refer to as the educational habitus to breeze through school in ways the author never could. Where even with all the effort in the world, the author could never do what seemed effortless and easy to her best friend. We need to be reminded of the harm we do when we forget that morality and wealth are not synonyms - and that poverty places hurdles in the way of some that aren't even understood as existing to others.
Chapter Four – Marginalisation and Membership. This chapter looks at a school in California that has a large Mexican population and what this then means. Basically, it means hard work for the kids of Mexican descent as their language problems are hardly acknowledged, but rather made an issue as if speaking Spanish was an act of petulance on their part. These students are made to feel unwelcome in many of the spaces in the school, particularly spaces in the school-yards. Something that is a bit of a constant theme at the moment in things I’ve been reading has been how frequently white people project onto people who are racially different from them their own fears and insecurities and then often go out of their way to punish those other people. Obviously, this is most often used against black people, but I found it particularly interesting how space is occupied in this school by white people and that there were virtually no ‘no-go’ areas for them, but that this was quite the opposite for the other kids, as there were lots of areas where kids of Mexican descent felt they had to rush through and avoid for fear of white students. This, of course, is also true of the way boys occupy space in school-yards too when compared to the spaces girls are left with. And yet, we only ever seem to hear of spaces where white people don’t feel safe – in their walking through ghettos or areas of shopping centres that are deemed ‘feminine’. The fear that people feel when entering places that are designated as white male somehow don't count here – only the fear white males feel ever seems to matter. And such fear often means non-white people, male or female, are punished (often with their lives) due to this fear white males feel and too often this fear is seen as justified and excused.
Chapter Six – High School Students’ Exploration of Class Differences in a Multicultural Literature Class. This was a fascinating chapter. Basically it starts off asking why it is that working class people in the US seem to have so little class-consciousness. That is, why is it that working class people in the US are so likely to vote Republican (something clearly against their own interests) and even to support the Republican Party with such gusto? This isn’t exactly a question that can be answered simply, but then again, it also isn’t a question that is impossible to answer either. There is a complicated interplay of racial identity and national myth in the US that goes some way to helping to answer these questions. The whole notion of ‘affirmative action’ has been cleverly used by the right to construct poor white people as ‘disadvantaged’ – but rather than this meaning that they too should be given opportunities to succeed, that is, the opportunities that others have been given (or even only supposedly given as in the case of people's of colour in the US) these 'advantages' are rather to be taken away from everyone. The myth of a meritocracy in the US is so all-pervasive that even the most gross inequalities have been glossed over allowing breathtakingly disadvantaged people to end up doing the dirty work for those most likely to benefit from the caste system that exists. The US remains one of the truly remarkable examples of the power of myth over reality – but then, the US is hardly an island alone on that score.
Chapter Seven: Social Class and African-American Parental Involvement. Goes some way to complicate the story of school and school success for African-American parents and students. This reminded me more of Anyon’s work on social class, but it was heavily indebted to Laurau and her work on how different social classes prepare their children for school. In the main the African-American parents that are interviewed here, from various social classes, are all heavily involved in their children’s schooling. However, social class plays an important role, even when parents are equally prepared to ‘put in the effort’ to help their children to succeed. The point being that certain parents have a better idea of what this might involve and what they can best do to help. And this means that the higher class parents not only reinforce what their children are learning at school – as the working class parents tend to do – but they are also able to literally extend what their kids learn, that is, beyond mere ‘reinforcing’.
Chapter Nine: (Re)Turning to Marx to Understand the Unexpected Anger Among ‘Winners’ in Schooling. I’ve read a couple of books by Brantlinger recently and they have been among some of the more interesting books I’ve read all year. This is similarly very interesting. In a way it relates back to what I said earlier about white spaces. We not only think that white people are the only people who are allowed to be afraid – despite everyone else being much more likely to be victims of white violence – but also we sort of think that people clearly ripped off by the system ought to be the angry ones and so also to be the ones to kick up a fuss. And yet when you look at the mass-killings that the US has basically made their own recently, the mass killings that seem to happen every other week, almost invariably these are committed by white, middle class young men. That is, essentially the ‘winners’ in US society. So, why? The problem as Brantlinger constructs it is that there are no ‘winners’, at least not winners in the usual sense, but rather that everyone ends up being damaged by the competitive nature of capitalism. Again, I’ve been reading an awful lot lately, particularly about elite schools in the US and how parents seek to position their kids to best take advantage of this insanely competitive system. The one thing that comes through loud and clear is that this system damages people. And not just the people who are on the wrong side of this mass-attrition process. But it also goes a long way to wrecking the lives of those who make their way though the system as 'successes'. In fact, those who enter the system with a sense of entitlement and who then get smashed by it despite all of the ‘advantages’ they started off with are likely to have the hardest time of all. Our modern world has created a system where anxiety is normalised and fear of failure is ubiquitous. Why this should be conceived as the 'best of all possible worlds' really is something we need to begin questioning.
Chapter Eleven: Intersections on the Back Road: Class, Culture, and Education in Rural and Appalachian Places. I really loved this chapter, and found it insanely interesting. I’ve been interested in the Appalachian mountains for years, but what I found most interesting about this chapter was the idea that this is a life that is virtually a zombie existence. As the US has de-industrialised the working class jobs that existed in these places and sustained the kind of life most readily associated with them have gone to god. However, social identity is deeply embodied in people and is linked to place and to the ways of the past - ways told in stories and carried in bodies and accepted as simple common sense. And those embodied ways in Appalachia are associated with hard work, independence and, unfortunately, jobs that simply do not exist anymore. To have any hope at all the kids who live in these places should run for the nearest exit – but to do that would be to rip huge lumps of flesh from their bones. They are literally embodied in these places, fixed by familial ties and obligations. But also condemned to never be able to ‘live up to’ the hopes of those around them as the jobs needed to self-actualise in this environment simply no longer exist. And this cascades throughout the whole of the society, impacting gender relations as well.
There wasn’t really a chapter in this that I didn’t like or didn’t learn something from, Chapter Ten, for instance, on shifting our focus from the poor to the non-poor and the part the non-poor play in creating poverty (in much the same way that ending racism needs to become a ‘white’ problem, rather than a ‘black’ one) was a really important read – but I think that if I was to encourage you to read any of this at all, the chapters I’ve mentioned here (and also the preface and introduction) would be well worth your while.
April 5, 2012
Perused is more the right word. I only read a few chapters that I was assigned. However, I left with the impression that schools are not built for the needs of America's lower class. Neither do schools promote social mobility as we are wont to believe. Echoing what Gladstone's Outliers suggests, success is often a result of opportunity, practice, positioning, or time-frame windows than it is hard work and courage. How can we redesign education in America to reflect and support ALL our citizens?
December 29, 2009
For school - we read most of it - it was ok.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews