Social Class

Manly Johnson
Bob Willis
23 September 2010
Prompt #2 – Social Class and Education
Social class is best defined as how one relates to a system of ownership, how one relates to other people within the system, and how one relates to the content that they produce within that system. This essay intends to show how three authors have shown the strong correlation between one’s social class and the education that they receive in America. The articles being linked in this essay are: “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” by Jean Anyon, “Still Separate, Still Unequal” by Jonathan Kozol, and “Class in America – 2003” by Gregory Mantsios.   While each of these authors has similar views on the relationship between class and education, each of them offers an important component to the discussion.
The first article is “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” by Jean Anyon. In this essay, Anyon attempts to present a sample of the teaching styles of the different schools across the country that fall into different categories on the economic spectrum by observing the procedures of the 5th grade classrooms. Anyon divides the types of schools into four main categories. They are the “Working-Class” schools, the “Middle- Class” schools, the “Affluent Professional “schools, and the “Executive Elite” schools.   In the Working Class schools, students are encouraged to only follow the simple procedures handed down to them by their instructors. This means that these students are offered very little opportunity to flex their decision-making muscles. In math, which is a very conceptual subject, students were not taught why they would arrive at a specific answer, they were just taught to accept it and move on. “…the investigator did not observe any discussion of the idea of grouping involved in division, any use of manipulables, or any attempt to relate two-digit division to any other mathematical process” (Anyon, 400). The Middle-Class schools emphasized getting the... [continues]

Read full essay