Social Class And The Hidden Curriculum Of Work

6 Pages 1577 Words

Mellisa Richardson
Showlater W130
2-25-2003

“Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work.”
Jean Anyon, the chairperson of the Department of Education at Rutgers University, and the author of the essay “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work,” says that a child’s social class reflects the kind of schooling that he or she receives. After reading Anion’s article on public education and carefully examining the different levels she calls the working class, the middle-class, the affluent professional class, and the executive elite class, it is recognized that Anyon’s main point is how, in most cases, despite your educational perseverance, your economic background determines your educational success and future.
The working-class school, the lowest class, takes up about 38.6 percent of U.S. families. In this class parents have an average income of about twelve thousand dollars or less. They hold jobs like platform, storeroom, and stockroom workers; foundry men, pipe welders, and boilermakers; semiskilled and unskilled assembly-line operatives; gas station attendants, auto mechanics, maintenance workers, and security guards, waitresses, barmaids, and store clerks that require little or no critical or analytical thinking. They are given a job that allows them to work in a mechanical manner. They are given instructions and are looked upon to obey them. Such as an assembly-line worker that is supposed to follow a routine way of working, the students that attend school in this society are also looked upon to follow a certain set way. The goal in the working class school is to get the work finished in a mechanical way that requires the children to do very little decision making and thinking (such as there parents.) While doing division problems in math class, the teachers went over examples, told the students the correct procedure, and rarely require them to really think about the problem. The teacher merely ...