Source Three: Elementary schooling and distinctions of social class

Brian Okoye

03/23/13

English 1103

Anyon, J. (1981). Elementary schooling and distinctions of social class. Interchange, 12(2), 118-132.

Jean Anyon, in her paper, argues that the role of education in industrial societies is to reproduce an unequal system of social classes. Through her ethnographical study, she investigates how distinctions of social class are produced and reproduced in five elementary schools. When Anyon address reproductive education and how elementary schools can reproduce distinctions of class, she creates assumptions of her own about fifth graders in a working-class school and in an affluent professional school of her own. She models her paper after notions of contradictory social consciousness, the dialectic of cultural activity and social change, and the importance of situated, class-specific, transformative professional teaching. Moreover, she briefly applies the model to reproductive characteristics of the working-class and affluent professional classrooms. Her assumptions informing her work on production and reproduction in classrooms is based on the argument that “while students and teachers certainly produce meaning in classrooms, these meaning are produced within boundaries and multiple constraints that ordinarily over determine their general form and substance. One major point that Anyon argues, is that educators can do a great deal to transform cultural expression of resistance into direct political action to change the economic and social system.

            Anyon argues that we have very little understanding first-hand of the mechanisms by which curricula and classrooms actually contribute to the production and reproduction of distinctions and relations of social class. According to Anyon, having over determined classroom productions produce “social actors who, in their behavior in society, produce and reproduce the “system”.” She suggests that power and domination determines what is produced in classrooms and that social actors reproduce the system largely by their everyday productions. For example, when a person produces a sentence in Standard English, they contribute to the reproduction of the language. Anyon explains that though the production and reproduction of social distinctions exemplifies over determination, social actor’s knowledge of society and its multiple constraints does not promise change. Instead they can be held accountable for their actions. Through everyday activities of social reproduction, she implies that people who challenge these ideas can contribute to struggles against cultural and economic reproduction. The five schools Anyon contrasted were in social-class settings, working-class, middle-class, affluent-professional, and elite communities. In interpreting the importance of their differences, she argues that they contribute by emphasizing work skills and capacities in different social classes appropriate to the reproduction of the division between manual and mental labor in American society. Additionally, Anyon argues that they contribute by transmitting class-based curriculum knowledge and dominant reproductive social ideologies. Anyon concludes by arguing the creation of institutional arenas in which children may develop indirect (cultural), rather than direct (political), responses to resisting oppression and resolving contradictions.

            Through Anyon’s studies, I will discuss how the production and reproduction of distinctions in social class creates constraints in society. Also, in my inquiry paper, I will argue how power and domination determines what is produced in classrooms and how that creates a reproduction of everyday productions. By contrasting social-class settings in working-class and middle-class communities, determine and discuss the emphasis on the different social skills, the transmission of class-based curriculum knowledge and dominant reproductive social ideologies, and propose how children may develop indirect responses to resisting oppression.