“Cutting Class in a Dangerous Era: A Critical Pedagogy of Class Awareness” (2007) Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg (Eds.) in Cutting Class: Socioeconomic Status and Education by Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg.
Chapter 1
Cutting Class in a Dangerous Era: A Critical Pedagogy of Class Awareness
Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg
In the last years of the first decade of the twenty-first century educators observe the appalling results of a right-wing reeducation of the public, an imperial pedagogy of race, gender, and class that works best by feigning the irrelevance of class in the social, political, and educational spheres. The word, class, will rarely pass the delicately pursed lips of the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives who now control the socio-political and educational world. About the only time one hears them speak the term is in response to a critical analysis of the growing disparity of power and wealth and the suffering it inflicts on the poor around the world. “There they go again,” the right-wing talking heads repeat on script, “trying to scare everyone with their pathetic use of class warfare.” Such rhetoric works to position expressions of concern for poverty and human suffering as somehow a dangerous and traitorous act worthy only of punishment. A social cosmos where such concerns can successfully be represented in such a way is not a sane place to live—indeed, it’s a world gone mad. A critical pedagogy of class awareness challenges this world, exposing the reality of class stratification in the contemporary globalized society and analyzing its impact on schooling in general and teachers and students in particular.
In the new world in which we now live governments owned by private interests work to shield dominant power from accountability. Concurrently, their educational institutions with their standardized curricula promote political cynicism and conformity. Democracy as a concept atrophies in such an ideological matrix, as disparity trumps justice, corporate earnings take precedence over human needs, and the future becomes simply another commodity to be subjected to the logic of the unfettered market. (We will use the terms “ideology” and “ideological” frequently in this book. Ideology defined in a critical theoretical manner involves the construction of knowledge, the making of meaning, and the production of affect that support dominant power.)
Even among those who criticize such macro-arrangements, among those who speak out against racism, gender, and sexual bias there remains a blindness to class bias and the everyday micro-dynamics of classism. Thus, the poor face a double wammy of sorts: they are screwed by a structural system designed to pamper the needs of the wealthy while suffering the indignities of class at a lived, micro-level on a daily basis. The editors and authors of Cutting Class are concerned with both social levels, with the class pain that they evoke. Thus, particular chapters focus on the macro-structural dimensions of class bias and their impact on education, while others focus on the micro-level of lived existence, the autobiographical/phenomenological aspects of education and its intersection with issues of socio-economic class.
Along with issues of racism, sexism, homophobia issues of class are often ignored in classrooms. But unlike racism, sexism, and homophobia, class oppression has few advocates who “call it out,” who provide workshops and seminars to help fight against it. As bad and exploitative as some of the $10,000-per-day workshops can be around issues of racism and sexism, for example, this might once and while be viewed as a blessing. But, unfortunately, the silence about class tyranny usually works to extend the damage, to deepen the pain. Sans conversation the public is unaware of the grotesque—and growing—disparity of wealth in the U. S. and other Western societies.
When such absences are combined with the cutting of socio-economic class from everyday school and media conversations, a school and political environment is created that presents a worldview so bizarre to students from lower socio-economic backgrounds that the concept of education, of being educated becomes meaningless. “What world are these people living in?” my southern Appalachian friends and I (Joe) asked when school leaders and teachers would paint pictures of our school and world devoid of class differences. With such unrealistic portraits of the society in which we lived swimming in our heads, we found it difficult to take anything they said very seriously. In my adulthood I interact with students from poor backgrounds who express in their own unique ways the same sentiments. I intellectually and emotionally understand their dismissive attitudes toward schooling. Teachers who understand such class dynamics and work to empathize with and touch the lives of such students are in my book heroic figures.
The faux classless society—right-wing style: The contemporary corporatized politics of knowledge
One of the great phenomena of our era is that right at the time inequality is increasing, when the difference in per pupil expenditures for well-to-do and poor kids is expanding that the topic has for all intents has been erased from school curricula, teacher education, and the social unconsciousness. No doubt, many social, cultural, psychoanalytical, and political economic forces have come together to cut class from these domains—cutting class is an extremely complex operation. Of course, we use the word, class, incessantly—but in a different context and discursive universe than we are using it in Cutting Class. One would be hard pressed to watch a sporting event on television without the commentator proclaiming one player “ a class act.” It is not uncommon to hear news commentators or gossip television hosts speak of the low-class or classless behavior of a particular celebrity. For example, “Michael Moore’s classless injection of politics into the Oscar ceremony was an insult to the Academy,” Entertainment Tonight TV personalities proclaim to millions of viewers. “ 50 cent is a classless thug,” other commentators tell us. Examples abound. The use of “class” in this context contributes to the cutting of conversations about and explorations of socio-economic class oppression and its effects on schooling, work, health, and human well being in general.
Such use of “class” creates a situation where many individuals don’t know what we’re talking about when we use class in a way that involves social rankings, power relationships, and an axis of oppression. America, as many have argued, is a classless society. George Herbert Walker Bush elevated this sentiment to a quasi-official article of American faith in the 1992 election in response to criticism to policies that allowed for the loss of millions of factory jobs and middle management positions. Such a position set Bush and other right-wing politicians up to represent those who did employ the term in the sense used here as radical class warriors, Marxists, or other undesirables. This along with many other right-wing actions over the last thirty years in particular have worked to make it déclassé to talk about class. Such successful efforts made it far easier to recover policies, rebuild structures, and cultivate attitudes that allowed the wealthy more privilege and the unrestricted right to rule.
In the world-gone-mad, authentic compassion—not the media-friendly, duplicitious “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush—is the province of naïve weaklings. Real men and their women get what they can no matter who it hurts or what damage it does to the social and ecological fabric. In such a society greed comes to be viewed as good, while generosity is represented as a drag on the economy. “Don’t talk about class and economic oppression to me, dude, I’m getting mine while I can.” And amazingly all of this has taken place in a time of renewed religious fervor and the rise of Christian influences on the political fabric, on the market-driven ideological position that most zealously promotes the cutting of class awareness from public discourse and action. It is, indeed, a strange world (hooks, 2000; Aronowitz, 2003; Brantlinger, 2003; Quan, 2004). This is a book about that bizarre socio-political and educational landscape.
Much of the contemporary educational conversation, especially the discourse of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and test-driven curricula, take place in a discursive space where there is no connection between what happens in schools and the other major institutions in a society. The notion that drives our work and Cutting Class—that schools, classrooms, students, teachers etc. are located within and shaped by society at large—has been erased through a very carefully planned process. We must admit that we find it difficult to accept that we live in a world where many people have been induced to believe the fact that a child lives in dire poverty makes little difference in her educational life. But various analyses of the rhetoric of the public conversation about education and schooling seem to indicate the reality of such a perspective. Again, our difficulty accepting that this has happened is amplified by our observation of a class war being waged against the poor of the world by transnational corporations and their political allies. Class has played a central role in every society, but with the technological and communication innovations of the last century that function has morphed and intensified. Indeed, the ability of capital to regulate workers and shape information and, thus, consciousness has never been more pronounced (Bruner, 1996; Zweig, 2004).
Students of education understand that nothing we’re asserting here is remotely new. W.E.B. DuBois (1973) articulated these insights over a century ago; John Dewey (1916) pointed out the tendency for the U.S. and other nations to promote unique modes of selfishness that undermine democracy and democratic education; George Counts (1978) warned us about the impact of class on education during the Great Depression and beyond; and C. Wright Mills (1956) laid out a treatise on power and class in the conservative 1950s. These are just a few of the scholars who have asserted such positions over the last century—and, of course, there were many who warned us of the dangers of class stratification and inequality in previous centuries. A critical pedagogy of class awareness takes its cue from these and many other thinkers and educators from societies around the globe. In this multilogical, multicultural, and multiperspectival context such a view of education maintains that we must build relations of solidarity among the poor, working people, educators, those oppressed by race, gender, and sexuality, and our students. In this context we must learn the ways that class intersects with these other domains, in the process discerning how class bias and oppression plays out even among those who are intellectually aware of inequality and exploitation.
Historically contextualizing contemporary class oppression
Part of the explanation of why Western societies—the U.S. in particular—continue to ignore the admonitions of so many about the socio-cultural and educational damage of class oppression involves what Aaron Gresson (2004) calls the recovery movement. While we have written with Aaron about this topic in many other books and articles, it is worth mentioning again here in a class context. The last 150 years have in many ways been marked by insurrections against various forms of domination: racial, colonial, gender, sexual, and class in particular. A key goal of any critical pedagogy of class awareness in the twenty-first century involves developing a historical understanding of these insurrections, their successes and failures, and dominant power blocs efforts to “recover” the power perceived be lost to the challengers. This effort to recover dominant power has reached its apex in the last three decades. It is only in this Zeitgeist of recovery that the belief that poverty and education are unrelated could be successfully propagated. Only with a meta-historical consciousness can we begin to understand how cutting class from the world’s consciousness fits with a larger effort to promote regressive, oppressive, and anti-democratic political and educational activities.
The recovery movement cannot be appreciated outside of an understanding of European colonialism and economic development over the last 500 years—and over the last 100 years the American reformulation of these dynamics. Though it would rarely be heard in the mainstream world that cuts class, the socio-political, philosophical, psychological, and economic structures constructed by the last 500 years of Euro-American colonialism have a dramatic, everyday affect on education. After several centuries of exploitation the early twentieth century began to witness a growing impatience of colonized peoples with their socio-political, economic, and educational status.
A half millennium of colonial violence had convinced Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples around the world that enough was enough. Picking up steam after World War Two, colonized peoples around the world threw off colonial governmental strictures and set out on a troubled journey toward independence. Poor laboring people worked during the same time to secure the right to unionize and bargain collectively. In numerous industrial societies exploited workers gained work benefits and social protections—for example, social security—that helped move them toward the possibility of a more economically secure future.
The European colonial powers and their corporate allies, however, were not about to give up lucrative socio-economic and colonial relationships so easily. With the U.S. leading the way Western societies developed a wide-array of neo-colonial strategies for maintaining the benefits of colonialism. This neo-colonial effort continues unabated and in many ways with a new intensity in an era of transnational corporations and the "war on terror" in the twenty-first century. With globalization corporate power wielders are able to regulate labor in new and effective ways that trash previous worker rights and protections, in the process increasing their profit margins and executive salaries to levels unimaginable only a few years ago.