Difficulty paper #3

“Wow, that’s really discriminating.” That would be my initial reaction to Jean Anyon’s Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. In the article, she goes on to talk about working-class, middle-class, affluent professional, and executive elite schools. She gave them these titles based on the children’s parents’ income and occupation. The first difficulty, other than the vocabulary and style of wrting (it was geared toward professional educators) that you are warned about in the beginning, is the year this was conducted and written. 1980? That’s 29 years ago! Is this still valid? Granted, if it indeed is, then I really wouldn’t be all that surprised. However, if it is, and 29 years have passed, then why hasn’t anything drastic been done to improve these matters?

This thing is way long, and kind of depressing, especially reading the “working-class” school section. I like to believe my 5th grade experience was pretty well rounded. As far as it’s social class, I think it was “middle-class” but a lot of the things Anyon describes that was about the teachers shouting commands at the students just made me think about those types of teachers I had while going through my public education adventure. But she was so detailed that it painted a very real, if not exact duplicate, of situations I’ve faced. It bummed me out and made me not want to continue reading for fear of “oh no, what could possibly go on at the next school?”

I mainly had difficulty with this because of it’s length. But it helped that she was so thorough with her examples, I just think it was a little too much. Anyon, I get it, schools are worse for the poor and better for the wealthy. You provide ample examples for that. I did think it was rather interesting, and somewhat funny/ironic that the cases she studied were parallel to what Gatto had said about the children being bored with the subject matter. Like what she says about the “middle class” school that the majority of Americans fall in to, “There is little excitement in schoolwork for the children, and the assignments are perceived as having little to do with their interests and feelings.” Hello, public education? Yah, it’s me, Brian, we also had an identical relationship that these kids in the 80s had while I was under your wing a decade later, and I think it’s time you change things up a bit!

Every child should get the same type of public education opportunity, not just the rich. For all you know, some kid going to a “working-class” school may be some sort of savant that could come up with the cure to cancer, but instead is discriminated upon and expected to not do any better than his/her parents.