Educational tracking; Its like caste but with more paper work.

Caste:

A social class separated from others by distinctions of hereditary rank, profession, or wealth.

Tracking:

The placing of students in any of several courses of study according to ability, achievement, or needs. Also called ability grouping.

The Myth of Meritocracy:

"Ones life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtue of their own." Peggy McIntosh (white privilege, S.C.H.W.A.M.P.)

In the studies of both Jean Anyon and Jeanie Oakes demonstrating both tracking and pedagogical methods as proof of the modern education system functioning as a means of social status reproduction. Anyon shows that pedagogical methods vary drastically upon the determinate of class. Thus the working class, middle class, affluent professional, and executive elite schools as Anyon classified them showed a distinct trend in educating towards social class expected professions. As Anyon says, "rewarded for classroom behaviors that correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in different occupational strata-- the working classes for docility and obedience, the managerial classes for initiative and personal assertiveness." She goes on to justify this conclusion upon the basis of her and her colleagues research in various schools in New Jersey. To me the quote is a wonderful synthesis of critical theory concerning education. Peter Kroptkin once said of schools in his day as "super-ficial, parrot-like repetition, slavishness and inertia of words." The fact that in our modern day this epidemic of capitalist controlled social reproduction through public education has still not been addressed is a statement on the progressive degeneration of social class conscience in our country. Oakes emphasises this and broadens it in her explicit prosecution of tracking as a failure of education and a means of socializing class expectations. In "Tracking, Why Schools Need to Take Another Route" she says, "In low-ability classes, for example, teachers seem to be less encouraging and more punitive. Placing more emphasise on discipline and behavior and less on academic learning." Because when your poor and the cops are beating you or the boss is stealing your wages quoting John Locke doesn't tend to help very much. But learning to sacrifice your dignity, autonomy, and individuality can be useful in avoiding the sting of a baton or the indignation of the modern workplace. However, if your a child in what Anyon labels as Executive Elite schools, the children of the ruling oppressive minority, then education's "primary goal of thought is to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving problems." Why? Because when these students grow up they can rest assured that they will be the ones to make the rules and theories that the working class students will slave under. So what do we do? how do we effect drastic social change in the route to a more egalitarian existence? We must educate the working and lower classes as these Elite schools are educating their students, empowering them and ingraining in them a sense of unrelenting autonomy. Parallel to this we must teach upon class consciousness and Democracy as a social model rather then a government and political buzz word.