Name: Dr. Michael

Email:

Bio: I'm a sociologist at Athabasca University where I coordinate,amongst other things, the introductory sociology courses (Sociology I and Sociology II). FYI I did my dissertation in the political economy of scholarly communication (you can read it if you want). It's not that bad. My current interests lie in the area of scholarly communication and pedagogy, the sociology of spirituality and religion, consciousness research, entheogens, inequality and stratification, and the revolutionary potential of authentic spirituality. The Socjourn is my pet project. It started as the Electronic Journal of Sociology but after watching our social elites systematically dismantle the potential of eJournals to alter the politics and economies of scholarly communication, I decided I'd try something a little different. That something is The Socjourn, a initiative that bends the rules of scholarly communication and pedagogy by disregarding academic ego and smashing down the walls that divide our little Ivory Tower world from the rest of humanity. If you are a sociologist or a sociology student and you have a burning desire to engage in a little institutional demolition by perhaps writing for the Socjourn, contact me.

Posts by Michael Sosteric:

Socjourn Demystifies Sociology

February 10th, 2012

Dr. Mike Sosteric believes that it’s time to bring sociology out of the ivory tower — and he is doing so through a new media journal called The Socjournal, which is attracting a million hits [editor’s correction, that’s close to five million hits in January 2012) a month.

Sosteric is an assistant professor of sociology in Athabasca University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. A couple years ago, he became frustrated with traditional modes of academic communication such as scholarly journals and academic conferences.

“I felt it just created bulkheads between professors and the real world,” he said. “This is a particular problem in sociology where there are no journals designed to raise awareness of sociological research and discussions.”

Sosteric wanted to do something that would create a broader awareness of sociology and its contribution to society as a whole. He also wanted to invigorate the sociology program at AU.

The Socjournal, founded in 2010, functions “by providing content interesting to students, in a language students can understand, in ways students can relate to, in forms easily accessible to them,” he says.

With a million hits a month, The Socjournal is proving extremely popular. The readership is made up mostly of students but also includes some professors. In addition to those in humanities and social sciences, there are also readers from fields such as the natural sciences, agriculture, law, business and the military.

Content includes articles contributed by students and faculty members from both AU and other institutions. Sosteric also posts student papers from his advanced sociology courses that he thinks might be of interest to Socjournal readers.

“I turn down a lot of material written by academics,” he says, “because it is in traditional form (e.g., scholarly paper, etc.). We are not a peer-reviewed journal, and some academics have a hard time seeing past the publication blinders they wear.”

Since The Socjournal first appeared, registration in AU’s Sociology 287: Introduction to Sociology I has increased by 30 per cent, Sosteric says. While he acknowledges that other factors are contributing to the increase, he says, “I suspect a large part of the increase is a result of the efforts I’ve taken with The Socjournal to point potential students toward our sociology program.”

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Good Science Trailer

February 7th, 2012

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The emotional abuse of our children: Teachers, schools, and the sanctioned violence of our modern institutions.

February 6th, 2012

I want to start this article by doing a little thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that you are in a group of twenty people. In that twenty people there is a defined leader and that leader is responsible for motivating you teaching, you, and otherwise organizing group activities.  Things are going along OK but then at some point the group leader decides that they aren’t happy with the activities of the group. Some of you are going to the bathroom too much, some of you are too easily distracted, and others are simply not following the rules. You, in particular, are a problem for the group leader and so in an attempt to control your behavior and enforce “the rules,” the group leader singles you out and forces you to sit in the middle of the group on the floor for a week.

Forms of emotional abuse: ISOLATION - Physical confinement; limiting freedom within a person’s own environment;

The group leader says it is for your own good and that it will teach you life skills, but for you it is an emotional horror show. I mean, can you imagine the emotions that you’d feel? Singled out in a group of twenty, publicly labelled as a loser too stupid to follow the rules, the subject of derisive and degrading attention, isolated, even terrorized by the psychological horror, you’d be traumatized for a long period of time. And this would be true even if the group you were in was relatively supportive. Even if they downplayed the social isolation and public shaming, you’d still feel it at a deep level. We are social beings after all and as the great Robert Merton said, we get our self image in part by the way others see us. And if we think others are seeing us as some stupid loser (which is actually the intent of socially isolating someone in this fashion) then that is how we are going to see ourselves. And that can’t help but have a negative, disturbing, impact on us.

Forms of emotional abuse: REJECTION - Refusing to acknowledge a person’s presence, value or worth; communicating (by word, deed, or example) to a person that she or he is useless or inferior; devaluing her/his thoughts and feelings.

Of course the sad thing is, it is a lot worse then just your own personal feelings about it. The reality is most groups would not be supportive. A lot of psychological research in the sixties (look up Zimbardo’s prison experiments) show very clearly just how ugly it can get for people who are publicly separated and isolated. People, even close friends and family, turn on you when an authority figure labels, isolates, and rejects. There can be a snow ball effect. First you sit in the middle of the room and feel bad. Then the people around you start to treat you differently. They laugh and point fingers and find other ways to isolate and exclude you. They avoid you at coffee break, talk behind your back, titter and laugh and generally extend the boundaries created by the visual isolation.  Pretty soon you become a bonafied social pariah, avoided by all and excluded by many. Of course from a social control perspective the whole things works very well because having experienced that kind of trauma once, you’ll never want to go through it again, and so fer sure you’ll jump into line and tap along with the tune provided. But of course once you’ve been labelled and humiliated, the emotional damage is done.



Talking about it now you can see, it just can’t be a good thing and as an adult experiencing something like that you’d probably (hopefully) recognize the abuse for what it was and leave the group. I’d certainly encourage it.  Research (see below) shows that people who experience emotional abuse have problems with anger, attachment, bonding,  emotional responsiveness, have problems applying even basic social skills. How damaging would that kind of public isolation and rejection be for you if you actually put up with it? So if you’re experiencing something like that, get up and walk away.

Forms of emotional abuse: PUBLIC HUMILIATION – Exposing a person to unwanted attention; using social exposure to manipulate and control. Encouraging others to exclude and harass.

Now of course, saying it like this makes a solution to the problem seem relatively easy, just get up and walk away. But now imagine that the team leader has authority over you. Imagine that your group leader actually had the power to confine you to that “box” in front of twenty of your friends and colleagues. It would be bad enough to begin with, but it would be even worse under conditions of force and duress. Not only could you not get up and leave no matter how you were feeling, but all the negative emotions would be amplified to that point that even a tough, independent, adult might succumb to the damaging effects of the abuse. It is not even too much to say that a sensitive adult may experience post-traumatic stress. After all, being shamed in a public space is a traumatic event by any standards.

Outcome of emotional abuse: Emotional abuse of children can result in serious emotional and/or behavioural problems, including depression, lack of attachment or emotional bond to a parent or guardian, low cognitive ability and educational achievement, and poor social skills. One study which looked at emotionally abused children in infancy and then again during their preschool years consistently found them to be angry, uncooperative and unattached to their primary caregiver. The children also lacked creativity, persistence and enthusiasm. Children who experience rejection are more likely than accepted children to exhibit hostility, aggressive or passive-aggressive behaviour, to be extremely dependent, to have negative opinions of themselves and their abilities, to be emotionally unstable or unresponsive, and to have a negative perception of the world around them.

So, if you are following along with me now you are probably thinking that this form of bald faced abuse of power and authority is something that we, as a civilized modern society, should be able to do without. There’s lots of way to motivate people without resorting to either physical or emotional abuse. In fact, as anybody with a clue will tell you, physical and emotional abuse are horrible motivators leading to far more problems than they solve. So imagine now that we take this box thing and do it to children in school. Imagine you have a twelve year old daughter and imagine the teacher has threatened that child that if they don’t behave and live up to expectations, they are going to have to sit on the floor for a week. You remember what school is like, and how horrible children can be to each other. I imagine that a psychologically and emotionally defenseless child would be TERRORIZED by even the thought of that sort of public display and humiliation. You can imagine the damage done should the child actually be forced, by the teacher, to submit to the public humiliation. Self esteem would take a hit, their social network would probably crumble, and the effects would no doubt trickle out into the schoolyard in ways to innumerable to enumerate in this short article. Schools have a hard enough time dealing with bullying to begin with without teachers painting a target on a child’s back in this fashion.

Now I know what you are saying, no school would ever do something like this. I mean, we now know that emotional abuse is bad, and we know that isolation, rejection, and public shaming is emotionally abusive, and we would never allow our teachers to engage in it. Shockingly however, emotional abuse is a problem in school. As a parent I have had to go to bat for my kids several times. For example, my son’s teacher put his name on a board and publicly humiliated him for not doing his work properly. When I told her that her public humiliation was making him feel bad all she should could say was that if he wanted to avoid the bad feelings, he’d have to perform to her expectations. I was shocked that she seemed so unconcerned about his feelings, and when I pointed this out to the principle, and when I said that as an adult post-secondary teacher it was against the law for me to even post student numbers in a public space because I was not allowed to violate their right to privacy and safety (in Alberta FOIP laws protect adults from this sort of public exposure, so why not children??), he said that the classroom was hardly a public space. Of course, it is a public space. Not only does everybody in the school get to see how my son is doing, but parents of the kids that go to the school can have a look as well, so I don’t know where he got his “not a public space” comment, ’cause clearly it is. And that’s not even the worst of it you know. Last week my daughter came home and said that her teacher told her that if she didn’t perform as  expected, she might lose her desk “privileges” and have to sit on the floor for a week.

I’m not kidding.

If my twelve year old daughter can’t “make the rent” in her classroom, her teacher is going to identify, isolate, ridicule, and publicly humiliate her by taking away her desk and forcing her to sit on the floor in the midst of thirty of her school age peers. And while her teacher says that it probably won’t be a problem for my daughter, I am horrified nonetheless that even the threat has been issued. I mean, this same teacher, and this school principle, would never ever in a million years think they could pull a stunt like this with adults (can you imagine how upset the teaching staff of the school would be if I put their names and pictures here, put them in a box in public, and held them up for public shaming and ridicule? Furious they’ll be. I’m sure it will be bad enough that I’ve just pointed at them in this fashion), so why are the feelings of our children so irrelevant that they do not even register on their radar? Frankly I feel sorry for the three kids she’s done it to in the past. I mean, I’ve read the research, I am counselor by trade, I am aware of how profoundly damaging something like this can be, and frankly I am shocked that professional teachers seem unaware of basic psychological research. I hate being such a boisterous critic but this is important. The research shows this kind of thing undermines creativity, damages productivity, and causes social problems. As a society we’re always looking for ways to save money so if these practices undermine our global competitiveness and cost us in terms of damaged creativity, lower productivity, and the cash dollars it takes to deal with social problems, then on those grounds alone we should be up in arms over this kind of nonsense. If you ask me though, protecting our kids from emotional harm is reason enough.

Bottom line?

If our education system is turning out teachers and principles who don’t think twice about emotionally abusing our children, and if as parents we can’t see that abuse, and don’t stand up to stop it, then we as a society, got a problem.

 

Sources and References

Brendgen, Mara, Wanner, Brigitte, & Vitaro, Frank (2006). Verbal Abuse by the Teacher and Child Adjustment from Kindergarten Through Grad e6. Pediatrics, 117: 5.

Hyman, Irwin & Snook, Pamela (1999). Dangerous Schools. What we can do about the physical and emotional abuse of our children.

Krugmen, Richard D. & Krugman, Mary K (1984). Emotional Abuse in the Classroom: The Pediatrician’s Role in Diagnosis and Treatment. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. 128: 284-286.

Moeller, James R. (2002). The Combined Effects of Physical, Sexual, and Emotional Abuse During Childhood: Long-term Health Consequences for Women. Child Abuse and Neglect, 17(5): 623-40.

• http://kalimunro.com/wp/articles-info/sexual-emotional-abuse/emotional-abuse-the-most-common-form-of-abuse
• http://www.findcounseling.com/journal/child-abuse/emotional-abuse.html
• Zimbardo Documentary

 

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Six myths about the foundations of modern education, and six new principles to replace them

February 4th, 2012

We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.

David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International’s excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.

If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.

It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: “It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.”

The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival – the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.

SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS

What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, who says “All my means are sane, my motive and object mad.” In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.

Historically, Francis Bacon’s proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo’s separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes’ epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.

First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask “what does this substance do to what?” until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.

A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. “Managing the planet” has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.

What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.

A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.

It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we’re losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:

“[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities…. In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling.”

In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and “In itself it will never make us ethical [people].” Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.

A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.

Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that “if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.” His advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful” people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:

“Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul.”

WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR

Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.

First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.

A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student’s mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.

Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.

Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to “disinvest” in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the “bottom line.” But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.

My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of “minute particulars” and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.

Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the “real world.” Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.

AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS

If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four propsals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry’s words, “itinerant professional vandals”? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?

My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.

Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?

Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:

• the laws of thermodynamics
• the basic principles of ecology
• carrying capacity
• energetics
• least-cost, end-use analysis
• how to live well in a place
• limits of technology
• appropriate scale
• sustainable agriculture and forestry
• steady-state economics
• environmental ethics

Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold’s words, know that “they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust.” Leopold asked: “If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?”

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And V for Victory it is…

January 23rd, 2012

Here is one for the Sociology textbooks. On Jan 18, 2012 the largest online protest in history took place forcing American legislators to permanently shelve controversial bills that would have given old world players the power to crush Internet freedom.  I have to admit, I’m a critic of the superficiality and panoptic potential of social media but even I have to admit, this was impressive. You can read more by clicking any of the following links:

• Harry Reid Cancels Debate
• Largest Internet Protest in History is a game changer (really!)
• The numbers are impressive.

Now, if we could just mobilize that kind of sentiment to end poverty and world hunger, then I’d have something to tweet about.

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National Academy of Science

January 23rd, 2012

In Good Science, Tim McGettigan argues that the pursuit of truth has often radically transformed conceptions of the cosmos while also instigating profound transformations in social reality. From Galileo, to Darwin, Einstein and beyond, landmark achievements in science have transformed the way that we perceive and live in the real world. While science has certainly been blamed for many problems (e.g., overpopulation, pollution, global warming, nuclear waste, nuclear Armageddon, etc.), McGettigan also insists that science has also created far more advantages, comforts and opportunities than anyone could have imagined even a generation ago. Therefore, McGettigan concludes that, if we want to create a better, brighter future, then we will need good scientists to continue to pursue more challenging problematics that will, in turn, transform today’s fantasies (such as: artificial intelligence, immortality, and, yes!, even 100 Year Starships, www.100yss.org) into tomorrow’s realities.

Down the podcast.

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Smashing the Boundaries of Science

December 9th, 2011

Science is about boundaries — the building of boundaries, and the smashing thereof. Indeed, it is true. Science was born when Galileo, Copernicus, et. al. smashed the epistemological and ontological boundaries of Christian gatekeepers (i.e. the priests and cardinals and popes of the Church).  Before Galileo the peeps and popes of the church claimed to be the only ones who could speak the Truth.  Back in the bad old days, only priests, and only if you were worthy, and only if you had been called, and only if you followed tradition, only then could you speak. Priests claimed epistemological and ontological supremacy and would justify it by saying God had chosen them for that, or that they actually spoke for God.  Of course, as Galileo pointed out, it was a pile of steaming caca. Priests, demonstrated Galileo, did not even understand the most basic astronomical facts (e.g., that the earth revolved around the sun) so how the heck could they claim to be speaking the Truth about cosmology and God? Of course, the priests didn’t like that and threatened excommunication (had he not been so famous in his own lifetime they might have simply burned him, like they did the pagan women (see film The Burning Times)), but the damage was done. After Galileo showed the world just how foolish they were being, after he smashed the epistemological and ontological boundaries of Church ideology, priests and popes had not an epistemological leg to stand on. And then, the questions began. Whereas before Galileo it would have been considered heresy to question the authority of the priest, after Galileo people did it all the time and there was nothing that the priests could do to stop it but cry “have faith [in us] for we know the truth.” Several centuries later the questions culminated in the basic Sociological realization that the priests of the “dark” ages were simply protecting the interests of the rich people who built for them their churches, cathedrals, and Vatican centers.

It’s true!

The priests were, for the most part,  working  for the nobility!

They helped the nobility ease their consciousness by providing “spiritual” justifications for wealth and privilege (“divine right of kings” it was called), but they also suppressed the anger and resentment of the peasants by saying “follow the king” because “God wants it that way.” The priests, it turned out, where in bed with the nobility, sometimes literally I imagine, and they served in the interests of wealth and privilege. Personally, I doubt it was always that way. I’m not a Catholic but I know enough about Jesus’s supposed life to know he wasn’t to fond of greedy people (he threw the money lenders out of the temple, didn’t he?). Based on his example people probably became “Christian” for the high moral standards and general compassion of its leader. But time passed and corruptions entered and eventually the Church was built (with the funding of the only people who had cash back in those days), inquisitors were appointed, and infidels and heretics where tortured and murdered…

But I digress…

The point is, the intellectual and emotional boundaries that had protected the opinions of the Church, that had made the words of the priest seem like the holy gospel of the Lord, and that had justified horrendous levels of torture and abuse were, during the “enlightenment” smashed and the modern scientists, champion of Truth and defender of all that is philosophical, empirical, and natural, was born.

Yay the scientist!

Taking the moral and intellectual road the scientists followed the example of Galileo and began searching after the Truth and nothing but. This new breed of person didn’t care that the priests said this, or the pope said that, or the bible said creation was only seven days long, they wanted to know the Truth and they set out to find it themselves!

And, if the technological world that surrounds you now is any indication…

If the spread of democracy (however flawed) in the world is any reflection…

The Truth did set them (and us) free.

And I think we should acknowledge that contribution.

But I also think we have to examine the limitations, and question the foundation, and admit to some error because frankly, from where I’m sitting, modern day science has become co-opted in service of wealth and privilege just like the ethical and emancipatory spirituality of Christ had been co-opted before.

Don’t believe me?

Watch this movie (GenerationRx).

From the atomic bomb to the dopamine droplet science now serves in the interests of power and privilege. And it’s not just that we serve in the interests of power and privilege, we justify it as well. We coin erroneous phrases (phrases used to justify the hierarchy and the domination of the weak as “natural”), develop erroneous indicators like “IQ” and the bell curve (which help “explain” why some people have more than others), and force people into irrelevant gender boxes. It is like we don’t understand the basic facts of life, and before you huff and puff, read this. Our entire North American culture is based on the erroneous concept of the alpha male, a concept used to justify male domination of women, corporate domination of peasants, and managerial domination of employees.

How embarrassing is that?

And while we do not torture people who do not submit and obey, we do medicate them.

Can’t sit in class?

Can’t follow the rules.

Don’t believe our truths?

Well Mr. “The problem is with you,” we have a pill that will help with that.

It is true.

We provide technology for the industrial  mill, armaments for the economic wars, justifications for the status quo (with more or less awareness of our role), and chemical straightjackets for those who don’t fit.

So what is a unsatisfied scientist to do?

Well, rather than participating in the the miscalculations, falsifications, and error, and rather than waiting for a new Galileo to come along and point out the steaming piles of horseshit we maintain, we can do what Galileo did and smash the boundaries that prevent us from seeing the truth. The communication-technology hammer is in place, and the writing is on the wall. The epistemological and ontological foundations are crumbling and rather than reinforcing the foundations, something that can only delay the inevitable, we should jump on the boat and do what needs to be done now before before somebody else comes along and embarrasses us to the point where we will never recover from the embarrassment. I don’t know about you but as a scientist the last thing I want to be reduced to is the lonely “you must have faith in us” lament of our spiritually discredited forefathers. I got into this to discover the Truth and I want to be known for that.  I want us to correct our errors, expose the ideology, undermine the justifications, and take  back the scholarly and scientific highroad. There are no excuses. Modern communication technologies have advanced to the point where we can now speak without mediation, outside of classrooms, and without worrying about the stodgy gatekeepers who police the boundaries of our discourse, and we should do so. I don’t think we should wait. If we do we just might find ourselves in the same boat as the priests before us, struggling to maintain legitimacy, and begging those who trusted us to “just have faith.”

 



 

 

 

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Definition Indigenous – The Politics of Indigeneity

November 24th, 2011

Provocative and original, The Politics of Indigeneity explores the concept of indigeneity across the world – from the Americas to New Zealand, Africa to Asia – and the ways in which it intersects with local, national and international social and political realities. Taking on the role of critical interlocutors, the authors engage in extended dialogue with indigenous spokespersons and activists, as well as between each other. In doing so, they explore the possibilities of a ‘second-wave indigeneity’ – one that is alert to the challenges posed to indigenous aspirations by the neo-liberal agenda of nation-states and their concerns with sovereignty.

Timely and topical in its focus on global indigenous politics, and featuring a variety of first-hand indigenous voices – including those of indigenous activists, scholars, leaders and interviewees – this is a vital contribution to an often contentious topic.

 ‘This book is based on an engagement with indigenous peoples across the globe, which starts with listening to what they have to say on the subject. The authors do ask questions, occasionally challenge, but with respect and sensitivity and thus an attitude so different from underlying mainstream academic discourses in which the claim of objectivity too often is but a disguise for arrogance.’ Dr Christian Erni, Social Anthropologist, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs.

‘This path breaking volume exploring the exciting emergence of a new ”second wave” of indigeneity and activism is a must read for all those interested in contemporary indigenous politics.’ Jeff Sluka, Associate Professor, Social Anthropology Programme, Massey University

 

The Politics of Indigeneity:
Dialogues and Reflections on Indigenous Activism  

by Sita Venkateswar & Emma Hughes

is published by Zed Books,

priced £18.99/$34.95, ISBN 9781780321202.

For more information or to request a review copy please contact Ruvani de Silva on 020 7837 8466 or ruvani.de_silva@zedbooks.net.



Define first person. Define indigenous

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To Student Loan or Not to Student Loan – That is The Question

November 22nd, 2011

It might be strange for some to consider, especially since my graduate degrees are in sociology and therefore I am a Sociologist and not a Psychologist, but I run, along with my wife, a successful psychological counseling practice. In that practice we deal with all sorts of issues from eating disorders to depression to OCD to domestic abuse and relationships and even schizophrenia and bipolar.  We have even been successful with some extremely difficult cases that traditional psychologists (i.e. psychologists without a sociological background) have been unable to treat.

The reason for our success?

Social context!

Despite what the psychologists want to tell you, we have found that the primary cause of most psychological distress is to be found in the toxic parental/social/work environments of the clients we treat, conditions that hurt the individual and that often require the development of pathological mechanisms of coping and defense. It is not pretty, and it is not simple, but it is, we have found, always treatable especially when the client is motivated, open, and willing to listen to advice and guidance.

So why am I telling you this? Well, for a couple reasons. Reason one is to point out one possible career path for people interested in Sociology. It is true that I have an undergraduate degree in psychology, but with my sociological expertise and insight I make an extremely effective psychological counselor. So if you are a Sociology student, or if you are interested in becoming one but have held back because you’ve also got an interest in psychology, never fear! You can combine both.

The other reason I’m telling you this is motivational. We often get people in our psychological practice who want more out of their life. They are working in this job or that job, find it oppressive and stultifying, want to get out and move up, would like to get post-secondary training of some sort, but can’t seem to find it within them to make the move forward. The are stuck not because they are stupid or incompetent, but because their developmental background has left them without the psychological foundations and self confidence to take on what (for them) are seemingly insurmountable goals. And it’s not just that they feel they can’t do a university course! They also feel they can’t handle the debt burden of the student loan, or the lost income, or the time away. From the absence of basic study skills to the black-emotional-pit of low self-esteem to the insurmountable walls of student finance, it’s just too much, too soon, too fast.

So what do we do? Well, I’d like to say treatment is simple but it is not.  Treatment involves a gentle process of undoing repressions, rebuilding self esteem, helping with study skills, even pointing out the financial, political, and social class realities of this planet that are oppressive and stultifying (for example, did you know that the education you get in K12 is different depending on the social class background of the school you are in?). It is one part career counseling, one part psychological counseling, one part sociological sophistication, one part parenting (to replace notable absence of good parents in their own life), and one part guidance and support. It does pay off, if the clients that we’ve had who have moved onto post-secondary work are any indication, but it does take work, effort, and trust.

And the biggest obstacle?

Not the abuse, not the damage, and not even the misconception. The biggest obstacle is the belief, instilled by parents and teachers, and perpetrated by our own popular culture, that it all comes down to genetics, karma, grace, or talent. Truth be told it has nothing to do with any of that and everything to do with you believing in yourself.

 

References

Anyon, Jean (1980). Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. Journal of Education, 163: 1. [hhttp://www.sociology.org/?p=680]

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Stock in Trade: Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work

November 22nd, 2011

From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work

JEAN ANYON This essay first appeared in Journal of Education, Vol. 162, no. 1, Fall 1980.)

It’s no surprise that schools in wealthy communities are better than those in poor communities, or that they better prepare their students for desirable jobs. It may be shocking, however, to learn how vast the differences in schools are – not so much in resources as in teaching methods and philosophies of education. Jean Anyon observed five elementary schools over the course of a full school year and concluded that fifth-graders of different economic backgrounds are already being prepared to occupy particular rungs on the social ladder. In a sense, some whole schools are on the vocational education track, while others are geared to produce future doctors, lawyers, and business leaders. Anyon’s main audience is professional educators, so you may find her style and vocabulary challenging, but, once you’ve read her descriptions of specific classroom activities, the more analytic parts of the essay should prove easier to understand. Anyon is chairperson of the Department of Education at Rutgers University, Newark;
  

Scholars in political economy and the sociology of knowledge have recently argued that public schools in complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes. Bowles and Gintis¹ for example, have argued that students in different social-class backgrounds are rewarded for classroom behaviors that correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in the different occupational strata–the working classes for docility and obedience, the managerial classes for initiative and personal assertiveness. Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michael W. Apple focusing on school knowledge, have argued that knowledge and skills leading to social power and regard (medical, legal, managerial) are made available to the advantaged social groups but are withheld from the working classes to whom a more “practical” curriculum is offered (manual skills, clerical knowledge). While there has been considerable argumentation of these points regarding education in England, France, and North America, there has been little or no attempt to investigate these ideas empirically in elementary or secondary schools and classrooms in this country.³

This article offers tentative empirical support (and qualification) of the above arguments by providing illustrative examples of differences in student work in classrooms in contrasting social class communities. The examples were gathered as part of an ethnographical⁴ study of curricular, pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices in five elementary schools. The article attempts a theoretical contribution as well and assesses student work in the light of a theoretical approach to social-class analysis.. . It will be suggested that there is a “hidden curriculum” in schoolwork that has profound implications for the theory – and consequence – of everyday activity in education….
The Sample of Schools

… The social-class designation of each of the five schools will be identified, and the income, occupation, and other relevant available social characteristics of the students and their parents will be described. The first three schools are in a medium-sized city district in northern New Jersey, and the other two are in a nearby New Jersey suburb.

The first two schools I will call working class schools. Most of the parents have blue-collar jobs. Less than a third of the fathers are skilled, while the majority are in unskilled or semiskilled jobs. During the period of the study (1978-1979), approximately 15 percent of the fathers were unemployed. The large majority (85 percent) of the families are white. The following occupations are typical: 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. Less than 30 percent of the women work, some part-time and some full-time, on assembly lines, in storerooms and stockrooms, as waitresses, barmaids, or sales clerks. Of the fifth-grade parents, none of the wives of the skilled workers had jobs. Approximately 15 percent of the families in each school are at or below the federal “poverty” level;⁵ most of the rest of the family incomes are at or below $12,000, except some of the skilled workers whose incomes are higher. The incomes of the majority of the families in these two schools (at or below $12,000) are typical of 38.6 percent of the families in the United States.⁶

The third school is called the middle-class school, although because of 5 neighborhood residence patterns, the population is a mixture of several social classes. The parents’ occupations can he divided into three groups: a small group of blue-collar “rich,” who are skilled, well-paid workers such as printers, carpenters, plumbers, and construction workers. The second group is composed of parents in working-class and middle-class white-collar jobs: women in office jobs, technicians, supervisors in industry, and parents employed by the city (such as firemen, policemen, and several of the school’s teachers). The third group is composed of occupations such as personnel directors in local firms, accountants, “middle management,” and a few small capitalists (owners of shops in the area). The children of several local doctors attend this school. Most family incomes are between $13,000 and $25,000, with a few higher. This income range is typical of 38.9 percent of the families in the United States.⁷

The fourth school has a parent population that is at the upper income level of the upper middle class and is predominantly professional. This school will be called the affluent professional school. Typical jobs are: cardiologist, interior designer, corporate lawyer or engineer, executive in advertising or television. There are some families who are not as affluent as the majority (the family of the superintendent of the district’s schools, and the one or two families in which the fathers are skilled workers). In addition, a few of the families are more affluent than the majority and can be classified in the capitalist class (a partner in a prestigious Wall Street stock brokerage firm). Approximately 90 percent of the children in this school are white. Most family incomes are between $40,000 and $80,000. This income span represents approximately 7 percent of the families in the United States.⁸

In the fifth school the majority of the families belong to the capitalist class. This school will be called the executive elite school because most of the fathers are top executives (for example, presidents and vice-presidents) in major United States-based multinational corporations – for example, AT&T, RCA, Citibank, American Express, U.S. Steel. A sizable group of fathers are top executives in financial firms in Wall Street. There are also a number of fathers who list their occupations as “general counsel” to a particular corporation, and these corporations are also among the large multi-nationals. Many of the mothers do volunteer work in the Junior League, Junior Fortnightly, or other service groups; some are intricately involved in town politics; and some are themselves in well-paid occupations. There are no minority children in the school. Almost all the family incomes are over $100,000 with some in the $500,000 range. The incomes in this school represent less than 1 percent of the families in the United States.⁹

Since each of the five schools is only one instance of elementary education in a particular social class context, I will not generalize beyond the sample. However, the examples of schoolwork which follow will suggest characteristics of education in each social setting that appear to have theoretical and social significance and to be worth investigation in a larger number of schools.
The Working Class Schools

In the two working-class schools, work is following the steps of a procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps meaning or significance. Available textbooks are not always used, and the teachers often prepare their own dittos or put work examples on the board. Most of the rules regarding work are designations of what the children are to do; the rules are steps to follow. These steps are told to the children by the teachers and are often written on the board. The children are usually told to copy the steps as notes. These notes are to be studied. Work is often evaluated not according to whether it is right or wrong but according to whether the children followed the right steps.

The following examples illustrate these points. In math, when two-digit division was introduced, the teacher in one school gave a four-minute lecture on what the terms are called (which number is the divisor, dividend, quotient, and remainder). The children were told to copy these names in their notebooks. Then the teacher told them the steps to follow to do the problems, saying, “This is how you do them.” The teacher listed the steps on the board, and they appeared several days later as a chart hung in the middle of the front wall: “Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring Down.” The children often did examples of two-digit division. When the teacher went over the examples with them, he told them what the procedure was for each problem, rarely asking them to conceptualize or explain it themselves: “Three into twenty-two is seven; do your subtraction and one is left over.” During the week that two-digit division was introduced (or at any other time), the investigator did not observe any discussion of the idea of grouping involved in division, any use of manipulables, or any attempt to relate two-digit division to any other mathematical process. Nor was there any attempt to relate the steps to an actual or possible thought process of the children. The observer did not hear the terms dividend, quotient, and so on, used again. The math teacher in the other working-class school followed similar procedures regarding two-digit division and at one point her class seemed confused. She said, “You’re confusing yourselves. You’re tensing up. Remember, when you do this, it’s the same steps over and over again–and that’s the way division always is.” Several weeks later, after a test, a group of her children “still didn’t get it,” and she made no attempt to explain the concept of dividing things into groups or to give them manipulables for their own investigation. Rather, she went over the steps with them again and told them that they “needed more practice.”

In other areas of math, work is also carrying out often unexplained fragmented procedures. For example, one of the teachers led the children through a series of steps to make a 1-inch grid on their paper without telling them that they were making a 1-inch grid or that it would be used to study scale. She said, “Take your ruler. Put it across the top. Make a mark at every number. Then move your ruler down to the bottom. No, put it across the bottom. Now make a mark on top of every number. Now draw a line from…” At this point a girl said that she had a faster way to do it and the teacher said, “No, you don’t; you don’t even know what I’m making yet. Do it this way or it’s wrong.” After they had made the lines up and down and across, the teacher told them she wanted them to make a figure by connecting some dots and to measure that, using the scale of 1 inch equals 1 mile. Then they were to cut it out. She said, “Don’t cut it until I check it.”

In both working-class schools, work in language arts is mechanics of punctuation (commas, periods, question marks, exclamation points), capitalization, and the four kinds of sentences. One teacher explained to me, “Simple punctuation is all they’ll ever use.” Regarding punctuation, either a teacher or a ditto stated the rules for where, for example, to put commas. The investigator heard no classroom discussion of the aural context of punctuation (which, of course, is what gives each mark its meaning). Nor did the investigator hear any statement or inference that placing a punctuation mark could be a decision-making process, depending, for example, on one’s intended meaning. Rather, the children were told to follow the rules. Language arts did not involve creative writing. There were several writing assignments throughout the year but in each instance the children were given a ditto, and they wrote answers to questions on the sheet. For example, they wrote their “autobiography” by answering such questions as “Where were you born?” “What is your favorite animal?” on a sheet entitled “All About Me.”

In one of the working-class schools, the class had a science period several times a week. On the three occasions observed, the children were not called upon to set up experiments or to give explanations for facts or concepts. Rather, on each occasion the teacher told them in his own words what the book said. The children copied the teacher’s sentences from the board. Each day that preceded the day they were to do a science experiment, the teacher told them to copy the directions from the book for the procedure they would carry out the next day and to study the list at home that night. The day after each experiment, the teacher went over what they had “found” (they did the experiments as a class, and each was actually a class demonstration led by the teacher). Then the teacher wrote what they “found” on the board, and the children copied that in their notebooks. Once or twice a year there are science projects. The project is chosen and assigned by the teacher from a box of 3-by-5-inch cards. On the card the teacher has written the question to he answered, the books to use, and how much to write. Explaining the cards to the observer, the teacher said, “It tells them exactly what to do, or they couldn’t do it.”

Social studies in the working-class schools is also largely mechanical, rote work that was given little explanation or connection to larger contexts. In one school, for example, although there was a book available, social studies work was to copy the teacher’s notes from the board. Several times a week for a period of several months the children copied these notes. The fifth grades in the district were to study United States history. The teacher used a booklet she had purchased called “The Fabulous Fifty States.” Each day she put information from the booklet in outline form on the board and the children copied it. The type of information did not vary: the name of the state, its abbreviation, state capital, nickname of the state, its main products, main business, and a “Fabulous Fact” (“Idaho grew twenty-seven billion potatoes in one year. That’s enough potatoes for each man, woman, and…”) As the children finished copying the sentences, the teacher erased them and wrote more. Children would occasionally go to the front to pull down the wall map in order to locate the states they were copying, and the teacher did not dissuade them. But the observer never saw her refer to the map; nor did the observer ever hear her make other than perfunctory remarks concerning the information the children were copying. Occasionally the children colored in a ditto and cut it out to make a stand-up figure (representing, for example, a man roping a cow in the Southwest). These were referred to by the teacher as their social studies “projects.”

Rote behavior was often called for in classroom work. When going over 15 math and language art skills sheets, for example, as the teacher asked for the answer to each problem, he fired the questions rapidly, staccato, and the scene reminded the observer of a sergeant drilling recruits: above all, the questions demanded that you stay at attention: “The next one? What do I put here?. . . Here? Give us the next.” Or “How many commas in this sentence? Where do I put them . . . The next one?”

The four fifth grade teachers observed in the working-class schools attempted to control classroom time and space by making decisions without consulting the children and without explaining the basis for their decisions. The teacher’s control thus often seemed capricious. Teachers, for instance, very often ignored the bells to switch classes – deciding among themselves to keep the children after the period was officially over to continue with the work or for disciplinary reasons or so they (the teachers) could stand in the hall and talk. There were no clocks in the rooms in either school, and the children often asked, “What period is this?” “When do we go to gym?” The children had no access to materials. These were handed out by teachers and closely guarded. Things in the room “belonged” to the teacher: “Bob, bring me my garbage can.” The teachers continually gave the children orders. Only three times did the investigator hear a teacher in either working-class school preface a directive with an unsarcastic “please,” or “let’s” or “would you.” Instead, the teachers said, “Shut up,” “Shut your mouth,” “Open your books,” “Throw your gum away-if you want to rot your teeth, do it on your own time.” Teachers made every effort to control the movement of the children, and often shouted, “‘Why are you out of your seat??!!” If the children got permission to leave the room, they had to take a written pass with the date and time….
Middle-Class School

In the middle-class school, work is getting the right answer. If one accumulates enough right answers, one gets a good grade. One must follow the directions in order to get the right answers, but the directions often call for some figuring, some choice, some decision making. For example, the children must often figure out by themselves what the directions ask them to do and how to get the answer: what do you do first, second, and perhaps third? Answers are usually found in books or by listening to the teacher. Answers are usually words, sentences, numbers, or facts and dates; one writes them on paper, and one should be neat. Answers must be given in the right order, and one cannot make them up.

The following activities are illustrative. Math involves some choice: one may do two-digit division the long way or the short way, and there are some math problems that can be done “in your head.” When the teacher explains how to do two-digit division, there is recognition that a cognitive process is involved; she gives you several ways and says, “I want to make sure you understand what you’re doing-so you get it right”; and, when they go over the homework, she asks the children to tell how they did the problem and what answer they got.

In social studies the daily work is to read the assigned pages in the textbook and to answer the teacher’s questions. The questions are almost always designed to check on whether the students have read the assignment and understood it: who did so-and-so; what happened after that; when did it happen, where, and sometimes, why did it happen? The answers are in the book and in one’s understanding of the book; the teacher’s hints when one doesn’t know the answers are to “read it again” or to look at the picture or at the rest of the paragraph. One is to search for the answer in the “context,” in what is given.

Language arts is “simple grammar, what they need for everyday life.” The language arts teacher says, “They should learn to speak properly, to write business letters and thank-you letters, and to understand what nouns and verbs and simple subjects are.” Here, as well, actual work is to choose the right answers, to understand what is given. The teacher often says, “Please read the next sentence and then I’ll question you about it.” One teacher said in some exasperation to a boy who was fooling around in class, “If you don’t know the answers to the questions I ask, then you can’t stay in this class! [pause] You never know the answers to the questions I ask, and it’s not fair to me-and certainly not to you!”

Most lessons are based on the textbook. This does not involve a critical perspective on what is given there. For example, a critical perspective in social studies is perceived as dangerous by these teachers because it may lead to controversial topics; the parents might complain. The children, however, are often curious especially in social studies. Their questions are tolerated and usually answered perfunctorily. But after a few minutes the teacher will say, “All right, we’re not going any farther. Please open your social studies workbook.” While the teachers spend a lot of time explaining and expanding on what the textbooks say, there is little attempt to analyze how or why things happen, or to give thought to how pieces of a culture, or, say, a system of numbers or elements of a language fit together or can be analyzed. What has happened in the past and what exists now may not be equitable or fair, but (shrug) that is the way things are and one does not confront such matters in school. For example, in social studies after a child is called on to read a passage about the pilgrims, the teacher summarizes the paragraph and then says, “So you can see how strict they were about everything.” A child asks, “Why?” “Well, because they felt that if you weren’t busy you’d get into trouble.” Another child asks, “Is it true that they burned women at the stake?” The teacher says, “Yes, if a woman did anything strange, they hanged them. [sic] What would a woman do, do you think, to make them burn them? [sic] See if you can come up with better answers than my other [social studies] class.” Several children offer suggestions, to which the teacher nods but does not comment. Then she says, “Okay, good,” and calls on the next child to read.

Work tasks do not usually request creativity. Serious attention is rarely given in school work on how the children develop or express their own feelings and ideas, either linguistically or in graphic form. On the occasions when creativity or self-expression is requested, it is peripheral to the main activity or it is “enriched” or “for fun.” During a lesson on what similes are, for example, the teacher explains what they are, puts several on the board, gives some other examples herself, and then asks the children if they can “make some up.” She calls on three children who give similes, two of which are actually in the book they have open before them. The teacher does not comment on this and then asks several others to choose similes from the list of phrases in the book. Several do so correctly, and she says, “Oh good! You’re picking them out! See how good we are?” Their homework is to pick out the rest of the similes from the list.

Creativity is not often requested in social studies and science projects, either. Social studies projects, for example, are given with directions to “find information on your topic” and write it up. The children are not supposed to copy but to “put it in your own words.” Although a number of the projects subsequently went beyond the teacher’s direction to find information and had quite expressive covers and inside illustrations, the teacher’s evaluative comments had to do with the amount of information, whether they had “copied,” and if their work was neat.

The style of control of the three fifth-grade teachers observed in this school varied from somewhat easygoing to strict, but in contrast to the working-class schools, the teachers’ decisions were usually based on external rules and regulations–for example, on criteria that were known or available to the children. Thus, the teachers always honor the bells for changing classes, and they usually evaluate children’s work by what is in the textbooks and answer booklets.

There is little excitement in schoolwork for the children, and the assignments are perceived as having little to do with their interests and feelings. As one child said, what you do is “store facts up in your head like cold storage – until you need it later for a test or your job.” Thus, doing well is important because there are thought to be other likely rewards: a good job or college.¹⁰
Affluent Professional School

In the affluent professional school, work is creative activity carried out independently. The students are continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts. Work involves individual thought and expressiveness, expansion and illustration of ideas, and choice of appropriate method and material. (The class is not considered an open classroom, and the principal explained that because of the large number of discipline problems in the fifth grade this year they did not departmentalize. The teacher who agreed to take part in the study said she is “more structured this year than she usually is.) The products of work in this class are often written stories, editorials and essays, or representations of ideas in mural, graph, or craft form. The products of work should not be like anybody else’s and should show individuality. They should exhibit good design, and (this is important) they must also fit empirical reality. The relatively few rules to be followed regarding work are usually criteria for, or limits on, individual activity. One’s product is usually evaluated for the quality of its expression and for the appropriateness of its conception to the task. In many cases, one’s own satisfaction with the product is an important criterion for its evaluation. When right answers are called for, as in commercial materials like SRA (Science Research Associates) and math, it is important that the children decide on an answer as a result of thinking about the idea involved in what they’re being asked to do. Teacher’s hints are to “think about it some more.”

The following activities are illustrative. The class takes home a sheet requesting each child’s parents to fill in the number of cars they have, the number of television sets, refrigerators, games, or rooms in the house, and so on. Each child is to figure the average number of a type of possession owned by the fifth grade. Each child must compile the “data” from all the sheets. A calculator is available in the classroom to do the mechanics of finding the average. Some children decide to send sheets to the fourth-grade families for comparison. Their work should be “verified” by a classmate before it is handed in.

Each child and his or her family has made a geoboard. The teacher asks the class to get their geoboards from the side cabinet, to take a handful of rubber bands, and then to listen to what she would like them to do. She says, “I would like you to design a figure and then find the perimeter and area. When you have it, check with your neighbor. After you’ve done that, please transfer it to graph paper and tomorrow I’ll ask you to make up a question about it for someone. When you hand it in, please let me know whose it is and who verified it. Then I have something else for you to do that’s really fun. [pause] Find the average number of chocolate chips in three cookies. I’ll give you three cookies, and you’ll have to eat your way through, I’m afraid!” Then she goes around the room and gives help, suggestions, praise, and admonitions that they are getting noisy. They work sitting, or standing up at their desks, at benches in the back, or on the floor. A child hands the teacher his paper and she comments, “I’m not accepting this paper. Do a better design.” To another child she says, “That’s fantastic! But you’ll never find the area. Why don’t you draw a figure inside [the big one] and subtract to get the area?”

The school district requires the fifth grade to study ancient civilization (in particular, Egypt, Athens, and Sumer). In this classroom, the emphasis is on illustrating and re-creating the culture of the people of ancient times. The following are typical activities: the children made an 8mm film on Egypt, which one of the parents edited. A girl in the class wrote the script, and the class acted it out. They put the sound on themselves. They read stories of those days. They wrote essays and stories depicting the lives of the people and the societal and occupational divisions. They chose from a list of projects, all of which involved graphical presentations of ideas: for example. “Make a mural depicting the division of labor in Egyptian society.”

Each wrote and exchanged a letter in hieroglyphics with a fifth grader in another class, and they also exchanged stories they wrote in cuneiform. They made a scroll and singed the edges so it looked authentic. They each chose an occupation and made an Egyptian plaque representing that occupation, simulating the appropriate Egyptian design. They carved their design on a cylinder of wax, pressed the wax into clay, and then baked the clay. Although one girl did not choose an occupation but carved instead a series of gods and slaves, the teacher said, “That’s all right, Amber, it’s beautiful.” As they were working the teacher said, “Don’t cut into your clay until you’re satisfied with your design.”

Social studies also involves almost daily presentation by the children of some event from the news. The teacher’s questions ask the children to expand what they say, to give more details, and to be more specific. Occasionally she adds some remarks to help them see connections between events.

The emphasis on expressing and illustrating ideas in social studies is accompanied in language arts by an emphasis on creative writing. Each child wrote a rebus story for a first grader whom they had interviewed to see what kind of story the child liked best. They wrote editorials on pending decisions by the school board and radio plays, some of which were read over the school intercom from the office and one of which was performed in the auditorium. There is no language arts textbook because, the teacher said, “The principal wants us to be creative.” There is not much grammar, but there is punctuation. One morning when the observer arrived, the class was doing a punctuation ditto. The teacher later apologized for using the ditto. “It’s just for review,” she said. “I don’t teach punctuation that way. We use their language.” The ditto had three unambiguous rules for where to put commas in a sentence. As the teacher was going around to help the children with the ditto, she repeated several times, “where you put commas depends on how you say the sentence; it depends on the situation and what you want to say. Several weeks later the observer saw another punctuation activity. The teacher had printed a five-paragraph story on an oak tag and then cut it into phrases. She read the whole story to the class from the book, then passed out the phrases. The group had to decide how the phrases could best be put together again. (They arranged the phrases on the floor.) The point was not to replicate the story, although that was not irrelevant, but to “decide what you think the best way is.” Punctuation marks on cardboard pieces were then handed out, and the children discussed and then decided what mark was best at each place they thought one was needed. At the end of each paragraph the teacher asked, “Are you satisfied with the way the paragraphs are now? Read it to yourself and see how it sounds.” Then she read the original story again, and they compared the two.

Describing her goals in science to the investigator, the teacher said, “We use ESS (Elementary Science Study). It’s very good because it gives a hands-on experience–so they can make sense out of it. It doesn’t matter whether it [what they find] is right or wrong. I bring them together and there’s value in discussing their ideas.”

The products of work in this class are often highly valued by the children and the teacher. In fact, this was the only school in which the investigator was not allowed to take original pieces of the children’s work for her files. If the work was small enough, however, and was on paper, the investigator could duplicate it on the copying machine in the office.

The teacher’s attempt to control the class involves constant negotiation. She does not give direct orders unless she is angry because the children have been too noisy. Normally, she tries to get them to foresee the consequences of their actions and to decide accordingly. For example, lining them up to go see a play written by the sixth graders, she says, “I presume you’re lined up by someone with whom you want to sit. I hope you’re lined up by someone you won’t get in trouble with.”…

One of the few rules governing the children’s movement is that no more than three children may be out of the room at once. There is a school rule that anyone can go to the library at any time to get a book. In the fifth grade I observed, they sign their name on the chalkboard and leave. There are no passes. Finally, the children have a fair amount of officially sanctioned say over what happens in the class. For example, they often negotiate what work is to be done. If the teacher wants to move on to the next subject, but the children say they are not ready, they want to work on their present projects some more, she very often lets them do it.
Executive Elite School

In the executive elite school, work is developing one’s analytical intellectual powers. Children are continually asked to reason through a problem, to produce intellectual products that are both logically sound and of top academic quality. A primary goal of thought is to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving a problem. Schoolwork helps one to achieve, to excel, to prepare for life.

The following are illustrative. The math teacher teaches area and perimeter by having the children derive formulas for each. First she helps them, through discussion at the board, to arrive at A = W X L as a formula (not the formula) for area. After discussing several, she says, “Can anyone make up a formula for perimeter? Can you figure that out yourselves? [pause] Knowing what we know, can we think of a formula?” She works out three children’s suggestions at the board, saying to two, “Yes, that’s a good one,” and then asks the class if they can think of any more. No one volunteers. To prod them, she says, “If you use rules and good reasoning, you get many ways. Chris, can you think up a formula?”

She discusses two-digit division with the children as a decision-making process. Presenting a new type of problem to them, she asks, “What’s the first decision you’d make if presented with this kind of example? What is the first thing you’d think? Craig?” Craig says, “To find my first partial quotient.” She responds, “Yes, that would be your first decision. How would you do that?” Craig explains, and then the teacher says, “OK, we’ll see how that works for you.” The class tries his way. Subsequently, she comments on the merits and shortcomings of several other children’s decisions. Later, she tells the investigator that her goals in math are to develop their reasoning and mathematical thinking and that, unfortunately, “there’s no time for manipulables.”

While right answers are important in math, they are not “given” by the book or by the teacher but may be challenged by the children. Going over some problems in late September the teacher says, “Raise your hand if you do not agree.” A child says, “I don’t agree with sixty-four.” The teacher responds, “OK, there’s a question about sixty-four. [to class] Please check it. Owen, they’re disagreeing with you. Kristen, they’re checking yours.” The teacher emphasized this repeatedly during September and October with statements like “Don’t be afraid to say you disagree. In the last [math] class, somebody disagreed, and they were right. Before you disagree, check yours, and if you still think we’re wrong, then we’ll check it out.” By Thanksgiving, the children did not often speak in terms of right and wrong math problems but of whether they agreed with the answer that had been given.

There are complicated math mimeos with many word problems. Whenever they go over the examples, they discuss how each child has set up the problem. The children must explain it precisely. On one occasion the teacher said, “I’m more–just as interested in how you set up the problem as in what answer you find. If you set up a problem in a good way, the answer is easy to find.

Social studies work is most often reading and discussion of concepts and independent research. There are only occasional artistic, expressive, or illustrative projects. Ancient Athens and Sumer are, rather, societies to analyze. The following questions are typical of those that guide the children’s independent research. “What mistakes did Pericles make after the war?” “What mistakes did the citizens of Athens make?” “What are the elements of a civilization?” “How did Greece build an economic empire?” “Compare the way Athens chose its leaders with the way we choose ours.” Occasionally the children are asked to make up sample questions for their social studies tests. On an occasion when the investigator was present, the social studies teacher rejected a child’s question by saying, “That’s just fact. If I asked you that question on a test, you’d complain it was just memory! Good questions ask for concepts.”

In social studies–but also in reading, science, and health–the teachers initiate classroom discussions of current social issues and problems. These discussions occurred on every one of the investigator’s visits, and a teacher told me, “These children’s opinions are important – it’s important that they learn to reason things through.” The classroom discussions always struck the observer as quite realistic and analytical, dealing with concrete social issues like the following: “Why do workers strike?” “Is that right or wrong?” “Why do we have inflation, and what can be done to stop it?” “Why do companies put chemicals in food when the natural ingredients are available?” and so on. Usually the children did not have to be prodded to give their opinions. In fact, their statements and the interchanges between them struck the observer as quite sophisticated conceptually and verbally, and well-informed. Occasionally the teachers would prod with statements such as, “Even if you don’t know [the answers], if you think logically about it, you can figure it out.” And “I’m asking you [these] questions to help you think this through.”

Language arts emphasizes language as a complex system, one that should be mastered. The children are asked to diagram sentences of complex grammatical construction, to memorize irregular verb conjugations (he lay, he has lain, and so on …), and to use the proper participles, conjunctions, and interjections in their speech. The teacher (the same one who teaches social studies) told them, “It is not enough to get these right on tests; you must use what you learn [in grammar classes] in your written and oral work. I will grade you on that.”

Most writing assignments are either research reports and essays for social studies or experiment analyses and write-ups for science. There is only an occasional story or other “creative writing” assignment. On the occasion observed by the investigator (the writing of a Halloween story), the points the teacher stressed in preparing the children to write involved the structural aspects of a story rather than the expression of feelings or other ideas. The teacher showed them a filmstrip, “The Seven Parts of a Story,” and lectured them on plot development, mood setting, character development, consistency, and the use of a logical or appropriate ending. The stories they subsequently wrote were, in fact, well-structured, but many were also personal and expressive. The teacher’s evaluative comments, however, did not refer to the expressiveness or artistry but were all directed toward whether they had “developed” the story well.

Language arts work also involved a large amount of practice in presentation of the self and in managing situations where the child was expected to be in charge. For example, there was a series of assignments in which each child had to be a “student teacher.” The child had to plan a lesson in grammar, outlining, punctuation, or other language arts topic and explain the concept to the class. Each child was to prepare a worksheet or game and a homework assignment as well. After each presentation, the teacher and other children gave a critical appraisal of the “student teacher’s” performance. Their criteria were: whether the student spoke clearly, whether the lesson was interesting, whether the student made any mistakes, and whether he or she kept control of the class. On an occasion when a child did not maintain control, the teacher said, “When you’re up there, you have authority and you have to use it. I’ll back you up.”

The executive elite school is the only school where bells do not demarcate the periods of time. The two fifth-grade teachers were very strict about changing classes on schedule, however, as specific plans for each session had been made. The teachers attempted to keep tight control over the children during lessons, and the children were sometimes flippant, boisterous, and occasionally rude. However, the children may be brought into line by reminding them that “It is up to you.” “You must control yourself,” “you are responsible for your work,” you must “set your own priorities.” One teacher told a child, “You are the only driver of your car-and only you can regulate your speed.” A new teacher complained to the observer that she had thought “these children” would have more control.

While strict attention to the lesson at hand is required, the teachers make relatively little attempt to regulate the movement of the children at other times. For example, except for the kindergartners the children in this school do not have to wait for the bell to ring in the morning; they may go to their classroom when they arrive at school. Fifth graders often came early to read, to finish work, or to catch up. After the first two months of school, the fifth-grade teachers did not line the children up to change classes or to go to gym, and so on, but, when the children were ready and quiet, they were told they could go–sometimes without the teachers.

In the classroom, the children could get materials when they needed them and took what they needed from closets and from the teacher’s desk. They were in charge of the office at lunchtime. During class they did not have to sign out or ask permission to leave the room; they just got up and left. Because of the pressure to get work done, however, they did not leave the room very often. The teachers were very polite to the children, and the investigator heard no sarcasm, no nasty remarks, and few direct orders. The teachers never called the children “honey” or “dear” but always called them by name. The teachers were expected to be available before school, after school, and for part of their lunchtime to provide extra help if needed.
The foregoing analysis of differences in schoolwork in contrasting social class contexts suggests the following conclusion: the “hidden curriculum” of schoolwork is tacit preparation for relating to the process of production in a particular way. Differing curricular, pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices emphasize different cognitive and behavioral skills in each social setting and thus contribute to the development in the children of certain potential relationships to physical and symbolic capital,¹¹ to authority, and to the process of work. School experience, in the sample of schools discussed here, differed qualitatively by social class. These differences may not only contribute to the development in the children in each social class of certain types of economically significant relationships and not others but would thereby help to reproduce this system of relations in society. In the contribution to the reproduction of unequal social relations lies a theoretical meaning and social consequence of classroom practice.

The identification of different emphases in classrooms in a sample of contrasting social class contexts implies that further research should be conducted in a large number of schools to investigate the types of work tasks and interactions in each to see if they differ in the ways discussed here and to see if similar potential relationships are uncovered. Such research could have as a product the further elucidation of complex but not readily apparent connections between everyday activity in schools and classrooms and the unequal structure of economic relationships in which we work and live.

NOTES

1. S. Bowles and H. Gintes, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). [Author's note]
2. B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 3. Towards a Theory of Educational Transmission, 2d ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977); P. Bourdieu and J. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1977); M.W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (Boston: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1979). [Author's note]
3. But see, in a related vein, M.W. Apple and N. King, “What Do Schools Teach?”Curriculum Inquiry 6 (1977); 341-58; R.C. Rist, The Urban School: A Factory for Failure (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973). [Author's note]
4. ethnographical: Based on an anthropological study of cultures or subcultures-the “cultures” in this case being the five schools being observed.
5. The U.S. Bureau of the Census defines poverty for a nonfarm family of four as a yearly income of $6,191 a year or less. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1978 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 465 ,table 754. [Author's note]
6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Money Income in 1977 of Families and Persons in the United States,” Current Population Reports Series P-60, no. 118 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 2 ,table A. [Author's note]
7. Ibid. [Author's note]
8. This figure is an estimate. According to the Bureau of the Census, only 2.6 percent of families in the United States have money income of $50,000 or over. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports Series P-60. For figures on income at these higher levels, see J.D. Smith and S. Franklin, “The Concentration of Personal Wealth, 1922-1969,” American Economic Review 64 (1974): 162-67. [Author's note]
9. Smith and Franklin, “The Concentration of Personal Wealth.” [Author's note]
10. A dominant feeling expressed directly and indirectly by teachers in this school, was boredom with their work. They did, however, in contrast to the working-class schools, almost always carry out lessons during class times. [Author's note]
11. physical and symbolic capital: Elsewhere Anyon defines capital as “property that is used to produce profit, interest, or rent”: she defines symbolic capital as the knowledge and skills that “may yield social and cultural power.”

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