No war but the Class War

"...public schools in the complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes. Bowles and Glintis 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."

I think it's important when thinking about a topic like this to consider what is being labeled "working-class" I say this because especially when you listen to political discourse it seems that everyone who isn't taking in at least a million dollars is "middle class" (example bush tax cuts for the "middle class") In Jean Anyon's study the working class of this New Jersey school district have an average family income of 12,000$ 15% are at or below the federal poverty income line. Less than 1/3 of fathers are in skilled labor, 15% are unemployed with 30%+ having working mothers. The school studied as working class had an 85% white population. I think its a fairly reasonable definition of working class especially with the statistics showing a majority of parents in unskilled labor. Now the quote itself is what I was rantingly happy about the Mclaren reading, the focused and critical equivocation that the system of organization which is the ideological base for the state-business power infrastructure has a direct impact on almost every structure branching off of it. So as when a Capitalist system in which the top 22% of the population own 87% of the capital income of the national economy the system they erect to indoctrinate children into this social structure is designed to maintain this stratification. The majority of the reading goes on to justify this point.

The working class-school: "work is following the steps of a procedure. the procedure is ussually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making and choice... One teacher explained to me, "simple punctuation is all they'll ever use."
It's interesting how threatening and scary it could be to teachers and other power holders to see a young white child talking to a black child about the autobiography of Malcolm X they just read. Imagine that they were inspired to be educated, organized, and active like Malcolm X, why, they might actually change something.

compared to 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 (emphasis added) quality."

When they define academia and control its easy for them to indoctrinate their children into it. Then when the children of the lower classes make an attempt to confront them intellectually and their told they can't even participate in the argument unless they know the "proper" vocabulary it shuts down discussion in much the same way as the "silenced dialogue