This is the first of what I expect to be a series of posts on The Hidden Injuries of Class, named for the 1973 book of that title by Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett.
It is obvious that education is one of the primary institutions that reproduces social inequality; that is, it is one of the main reasons there is so little social mobility in the United States. Most commentators attribute this to two reasons.
- Since public schools are financed primarily by local property taxes, there are big differences in the per capita spending on education of richer and poorer neighborhoods, resulting in schools of substantially different quality. This funding gap has grown over the past decade.
- Working class (WC) children enter the educational system less prepared to learn due to both economic and cultural differences. For example, poor children may come to school hungry; upper middle class parents (UMC) may read more to their children or spend more time teaching them basic concepts such as numbers.
The current research focuses on a third possibility—class differences that emerge from within the classroom. Since UMC children are more familiar with classroom norms, more “education-ready,” the classroom is not a level playing field, but rather one in which UMC children perform better while WC children appear more withdrawn and less intelligent. One classroom tradition that elicits these class differences in behavior asking students to raise their hands. Hand-raising introduces competition and social comparison into the classroom environment, which can be detrimental to the self-esteem of WC kids.
Sebastien Goudeau and Jean-Claude Croizet conducted three experiments with fith and sixth grade French school children. Children were divided into those with WC and UMC backgrounds according to the status of the parent with the highest occupational level. In the first study, 953 students responded to a reading comprehension test in which 15 questions were read and posted on a screen and the children wrote their answers is a notebook. The number of correct answers was scored. In a randomly determined half of the classes, students were instructed to raise their hands when they thought they knew the answer. In the other classes, this instruction was omitted.
The results showed that hand-raising interfered with the performance of the WC children but had no effect on the UMC kids.
In the other two experiments, the children’s actual social class was not a variable. Instead, the authors attempted to create a cultural advantage for half the children. The students performed a coding task in which they were asked to write down symbols that had been associated with certain letters. Half the students were given fifteen practice trials to become familiar with the coding task, while the others were given only five practice trials. Each class contained a mixture of students who were more or less familiar with the coding task.
As before, in half the classes, the kids were asked to raise their hands when they knew the answer, and in the other half, they were not. The results showed that hand-raising disrupted the performance of the students who were less familiar with the task, but had no effect on those more familiar with it.
Part of the reason social class differences are so discouraging to WC children is their hidden nature, which creates the illusion that there are real differences in ability between WC and UMC children. In the third study, all classes were instructed to raise their hands when they knew the answer, but an additional variable was introduced. Half of the classes were correctly informed that some students had had more opportunity to practice than others, while the other classes were not. When the students who were less familiar with the task were informed that others had this advantage, hand-raising no longer disrupted their performance.
Godeau and Croizet propose that UMC children enter school with more cultural capital than WC children. Parents provide their children with social capital when they teach them the skills and attitudes they need to succeed in school. Certain classroom practices, such as asking children to read aloud in front of the class, will serve to increase these differences. Asking teachers to avoid these activities is unlikely to be successful, and might deny WC kids an opportunity to overcome their deficits. More promising might be a preschool experience in which WC children are familiarized with educational culture. They should be told often that their unfamiliarity with these behaviors does not mean that they are stupid.
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