GOING NORTH, THINKING WEST

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................vii1 Intersections..........................................................12 Social Class...........................................................16Absence of Class.........................................................16Ontology of Class........................................................23Objectivity of Class.....................................................253 Language, Class, and Codes.............................................28Working-Class English....................................................28Bernstein's Analysis of Class Codes......................................30Objections to Bernstein..................................................34Working-Class Students' Rights to Their Own Language.....................39Middle-Class English and Freshman Composition............................434 Critical Thinking......................................................49Historicizing Critical Thinking..........................................50Cognitive Strand.........................................................53Social Strand............................................................605 Arguing................................................................66Social Class and Argument................................................676 Cultural Studies and Composition.......................................86Central Contradictions...................................................91False Consciousness......................................................103Prescribing Critical Thinking............................................1057 The Teachers...........................................................112Critical Thinking in English 102.........................................115Difference and Diversity.................................................123Allodoxia: Putting the Blame Elsewhere...................................1288 The Professors.........................................................143Hubris or Humility.......................................................145Good Practice............................................................1529 Going West.............................................................159Making a Difference......................................................161References...............................................................166Index....................................................................175About the Author.........................................................177

Chapter One

This book is about teaching, which is far more than a simple act of transmitting knowledge from those who know into those who are learning—or even of initiating the young into our matrix of discourse communities. The classroom is where community happens, the site of cultural reproduction and revolution, of parroting and creating, of being and not-being. It is the site of power struggles between social classes through the agency of language, where we sort students and distribute privileges, where we train students to accept the kind of life they will most likely have as adults. It is also the place where we were trained to be teachers and where we are constantly being retrained through our praxis. Looked at this way, the classroom is a very interesting place.

This book is also about writing. Writing is a fundamental act of literacy, of naming the world and writing one's way into it. But writing, like teaching, is far from simple. Words, which form the fabric of writing, remove us from primary experience. They shape our understanding and identities. In a literate society, words are a primary agency of exchange. Words, even more than weapons, are consequently the tools of power. Words form webs of aggression and deceit. Through words, we sort people, create and maintain hierarchies, and distribute privilege. They are the way we do things—and they are the agency through which things are done to us. They are the vortex of culture, which is why words and literacies are also very interesting.

My interest in the intersections between writing, teaching, and social class is personal because I have changed my identities, allegiances, and ways of thinking as a consequence of my career. I was born into a rural, working-class family. I am now urban and excessively middleclass, although ineluctably carrying my working-class origins with me. I began working as a high school teacher; I now teach, research, and write in a doctoral intensive university. I used to think that educational institutions functioned to encourage students to learn. I now see them as functioning in part to create failure. The primary agency of failure is language. Although this conflicted interpretation of education may be obvious for postmodern language theorists with a liberatory bent, it is a far cry from what I imagined when I was a high school student, a college student, or an idealistic high school teacher who imagined writing as the road to satori.

I also have to consider that I am an agent of the social reproduction project institutionalizing failure for the majority of working-class students, a disproportionate percentage of whom are women, African-Americans, and Hispanics (Zweig 2000, 31-33). What's worse for me, writing plays an important role in that project. In some cases, writing leads to knowledge, but in others, it is one of the best ways of sorting people. This is not a particularly surprising claim when one considers some of the common ways in which we use language to identify ourselves and the social groups to which we belong. Consequently, an analysis of writing instruction as a sorting mechanism bends back to what I do. Although I do not consider myself to be a radical writing teacher hell-bent on restructuring society through the agency of my students, my sympathies lie in this direction, so I am particularly concerned about classroom strategies that I and other progressive teachers might be employing that contribute to the reproduction of social class relationships in spite of our intent to challenge them.

Marxist in origin, social reproduction theory has been expanded, refracted, and complicated by Althusser (1984), Gramsci (1971), Durkheim, and more lately, Freire ([1970] 1995), Berger and Luckmann (1967), Bowles and Gintis (1976), Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), and a host of other writers in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s (Shor 1980; Anyon 1980;Apple 1982; Katz 1971; Clark 1960; Aronowitz 1997, Gee 1997; Macedo 1993; McLaren 1989; Giroux 1993, Berlin 1987, to name some of the more widely cited). The foundation of social reproduction theory seems fairly commonsensical. Societies are framed by social structures that define and maintain the relationships among various groups within the society. Among industrialized societies, in particular, these relationships are characterized by a hierarchical distribution of wealth, status, and privilege. Some groups at the top of the hierarchy receive significantly more wealth, status, and privilege than those at the bottom. In the United States, this difference is bracketed by corporate executives whose average salaries (including stocks and other compensations) are about 10.9 million dollars a year (AFL-CIO 2009) compared to a minimum wage earner who makes about 14,000 dollars a year. For a variety of reasons and through different agencies, societies tend to reproduce themselves through myths, social relationships, and institutions such that the people who have the most keep the most—and in fact end up getting even more until the obscenity of the disparity sparks reconstruction or revolution. It stands to reason that those groups who have the most also have the most to say about how the society gets reproduced through legislation, leadership, religious and educational institutions—as Marx (1846) said, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." It also stands to reason that they will like social structures the way they are and will work to keep them that way.

Of course social structures aren't quite that simple. Thus, we have resistance theory. The roots of resistance theory lie in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (1971), in which he details the necessity for legitimating inequality through institutions, intellectuals, and politicians. The necessity for this legitimation lies in the contradictions contained within the democratic, capitalist system, such as when we pray to Christ and Carnegie in the same breath. Although obscured by ideological state apparatus (Althusser 1992), people intuit these contradictions; consequently, the social system, dominated by those who benefit most from the way things are, creates a series of narratives naturalizing the inequality and suppressing the contradictions. But not everyone goes along with the game. Pockets of resistance develop on both an individual and group level. Thus, there is constant friction within the social system. This friction leads to resistance and either change or repression.

Resistance theory in education has been present in educational narratives for some time; it was implicit in Charles Dickens' Hard Times ([1854] 1958) or Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1913). It is in the background of Michael Katz's (1975) reconstruction of the growth of mass education in the United States. It is more fully theorized in Paul Willis' (1977) ethnography of working-class students. Willis narrates the process and consequences of "the lads'" subversion of classroom instruction. We see classic strategies like dropping pencils, whispering, making fun of the teacher behind his or her back, flouting authority, swaggering, sneering, coming in late, lining up at the door ten minutes before the bell, and work refusal. The subversion works in complicated ways. On the surface level, it obstructs the educational process and severely constrains learning for other students. The lads by and large succeed in their goal of salvaging their integrity in the face of a system that derogates their working-class ethos. The salvaging is perhaps best symbolized by their fundamental goal of "having a laff" (29), generally at the expense of the teacher, who represents authority—i.e., the boss.

On the other hand, the lads play into the hands of the capitalist system that needs laborers. It could be argued—and this is the obverse side of resistance theory—that the lads are unwittingly supporting the overall structure of the system. The system needs failures, because the failures become the laborers. If the system works well, it will internalize in working-class people the responsibility for their own failure. Burton Clark (1960) in his seminal article, "The Cooling Out Function in Higher Education," describes how this kind of internalization works in the community college system.

Michael Apple (1982) in Education and Power brought into clear focus the complications that develop from reproduction and resistance theories in education. The lads, for instance, may be successfully educated into failure so that they will take their places as laborers, but they carry into the workplace resisting strategies that they learn in school; these strategies consequently undermine production—as workers, the lads will spend a good deal of time making fun of the boss or, as Stanley Aronowitz (1999) claims, smoking dope in the john (see also the poetry of Jim Daniels, 1985, "Factory Jungle"). So in fact, the social design that internalizes in working-class people the responsibility for their own failure also works against productivity and social coherence.

One has to consider not only the contradictions in the "education" of the lads but also in the education of the "ear 'oles" (the lads' wonderfully descriptive name for good students). Although the ear 'oles may meld into the dominant classes in adulthood, they never lose their working-class origins and the internal conflicts that arise from the past rubbing against the present (see Dews and Law 1995; Ryan and Sackrey 1984; Shepard, McMillan, and Tate 1998; Zandy 1994). As a working-class ear 'ole myself, I have internalized this conflict. All sorts of contradictions follow from working-class people who cross over. The crossing-over works in favor of the capitalist/democratic social structure by bringing into the dominant classes the supposedly more capable, aggressive, and intelligent members of the dominated classes (or at least this is the myth that the democratic capitalist narrative would have us believe and that ear 'oles like myself are only too happy to support); these ear 'oles, coming with perspectives different from the natives' will also have new ideas. To use a self-damning cliché, they might be able to think outside the box because they are never fully in it. And finally, such crossing over reinforces the meritocratic myth of social evolution—i.e., the cream will rise to the top.

On the other hand, the crossing-over works against the dominant class because the ear 'oles retain some allegiance to their origins, or as James Paul Gee (1996) has called it, to their primary Discourse. They may try to disrupt the dominance of the dominant classes. But to turn the table once more, by disrupting the old order, cross-overs may in fact be contributing to a future overall social coherence because immutable social structures ossify. Social structures—like languages and people—that maintain a dialectical relationship with new conditions survive. These cross-overs bring with them news of new conditions.

However, crossing over is tricky business. Not many make it—about 1 out of 15 students in the lower income quartile make it through college, compared to about 1 out of 2 from the upper quartile (Zweig 2000, 45). While acknowledging that not everyone starts from the zero yard line, the myth of meritocratic democracy, instantiated in the Horatio Alger narratives,1 lays the blame for this disparity on the shoulders of those who fail to "rise" above their origins. If students can't do well in school, it's their fault or the fault of their parents, who don't raise them right. This narrative is constantly supported by the media's spotlighting immigrant success stories, like Richard Rodriguez's (1982), Arnold Schwarznegger's, or more generally, comparing mobility statistics of successful immigrant groups to unsuccessful immigrant groups, relying on inductive fallacies to obscure the difficulties that working-class children face in school. In a sense, the American mythology has it right: the home conditions of working-class children is why they have such difficulty in school. But the disparity is not because of the inferiority of those conditions; it's because of the difference between behavior and values that are taught at home and behavior and values expected in school (see Brice Heath 1983; Lareau 2003). More than difference, the real problem lies in the conflict between the home and school ethos. James Paul Gee (1996) calls this the conflict between the primary and secondary Discourse—by discourse with a capital D, he is referring to all the habits, values, systems of relationships, and traditions through which a social group speaks itself; Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967) frame the conflict as one of primary and secondary socialization.

The problem lies not only in the conflicts between these two Discourses but also in the frame that privileges the school Discourse and marginalizes the home Discourse of the working classes. In The Social Construction of Knowledge, Berger and Luckmann (1967) include a fascinating discussion on general processes involved in moving from primary to secondary socialization—and at a higher level of generalization, from one social group to another. When the primary and secondary worlds are in relative consonance with each other, the child integrates the new world into her former world, re-reading herself in a way that maintains her former notion of the world. The new world may also present an alternative world, that is, the different ways of understanding reality do not cancel the old world, in which case the child is expanding the self, or adding to her old world. But when the new world cancels the old world, the child experiences identity rupture. Although Berger and Luckmann use as an example of radical disruption a Catholic who moves into a non-Catholic world, their description aptly describes any school child who finds herself in a new world that cancels her old. When she first entertains doubts about basic tenets of her primary world, she smiles at herself, internalizing the knowing smiles of others in her primary world. But as the "plausibility structure" of the old becomes less available, "the smile will become forced and is eventually likely to be replaced by a pensive frown" (155-156). Rather than re-read herself, the child has to step outside her old self, risking anomie, a no-self alienated from both worlds.

One thinks of the differences between the home and school selves of the children Shirley Brice Heath (1983) described in Ways with Words, her report on a ten-year ethnography of three social groups in the Piedmont Carolinas. With few exceptions, the children from the black working class were energetic, loved, and eager learners in their home communities, but by the time they had (or hadn't) finished primary schools, they had settled into the failure narrative. As Brice Heath describes their school failures (360), one imagines their frowns. What they had learned about being at home didn't work at school. Brice Heath's work made explicit the many ways in which the literacy practices of black and white working-class communities were in direct conflict with the literacy expectations of their white, middle-class teachers.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from GOING NORTH, THINKING WESTby IRVIN PECKHAM Copyright © 2010 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission of UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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