Jean Anyon Social Class

Rhetorical Analysis: Jean Anyon, Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work Jean Anyon is a professor of educational policy in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She wrote this essay for the Journal of Education in 1980 with the main audience being professional educators. Through this essay she portrays his observations of five elementary schools in which he concluded, over a full school year, that fifth graders of different economic backgrounds are already being prepared to occupy particular rungs on the social ladder. There are three types of schools: working-class, middle-class, and affluent professional. Anyon begins by giving us general stereotypes of each of the “classes”; statistics and average income of families of different social status. In working-class families with low social or economic status, the children are more likely to become assembly line operatives, auto mechanics, and stockroom workers. These children are taught in a very mechanical way, one thing after another simply to retain the necessary requirements to graduate.
The teaching style of these schools is relaxed but structured; the teachers expect the very best of students but give free reign. It is geared towards project based learning styles, where the children are given a task and a direction in which to go but they can choose the way they go about it. This provides the children with their own thinking skills, through trial and error, on how to get things done and to do them right to the best standards. Children from this class are the law makers, and the people the other two groups strive to become. Through this education, a life of gratification and indulgence comes into