Jean Anyon Social Class And The Hidden Curriculum Of Work Summary

Jean Anyon’s article, “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” (1980) has been powerful guide for me in thinking about differentiated instruction, especially when considering the instruction of variance learners in the classroom. Her important contribution notes that the way in which urbane students are typically instructed is through rote memorization by a strict and dominating teacher. While this style might work to get worksheets completed or to get students to behave properly, it does nothing to foster a natural growth of their selves into learning – thinking individually. This does little to foster high-level thinking or intrinsic motivation toward learning. As a current educator in South Los Angeles – Global Education Academy

In his article “Against School”, John Taylor Gatto satirically poses several questions concerning the purpose, structure, function, and need of the current educational system in the United States. Utilizing anecdotes from his thirty years of teaching experience and extensive research on the historical origins of many modern school customs to justify his tantalizing arguments, Gatto rhetorically inquires about the true motives and rationale behind an outdated institution system which continually steals more than a dozen years of precious life from millions of Americans in the pursuit of furthering a prejudicial class-separation bound together by conformity.

Obama’s “Race to the Top” policy would destroy the greatest asset of the Adjustment Class, a teacher who the students respect and enables the preservation of their street identities. When the Hallway Hangers struggled in school, they attributed their failure to individual inadequacies, rather than a failed system. This is because they, like many lower class

James Loewen begins his argument by establishing that students are leaving high school without knowing the basic inner workings of the class structure. He goes on to attribute some of the ignorance concerning class structure to have stemmed from a lack of labor history and class system information in high school history books. Loewen continues to describe the shortcomings of history books on topics such as social stratification, the realities of social classes in colonial America, and social class inequalities. He then goes into great detail about the continuous inequalities between those in higher and lower social class. Overall, the author of this piece argues that a person's social class influences too many aspects of their life. He claims

Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol explains the inequalities of school systems in different poor neighborhoods. Kozol was originally a teacher in a public school in Boston. This school didn’t have very many resources and was unable to keep teachers for very long. After pursuing other interests, Kozol took the time from 1988-1990 to meet with children and teachers in several different neighborhoods to better understand issues relating to the inequality and segregation in the school systems. Kozol writes from his own perspective as he visits six different cities and the poorest schools in those cities. These cities consist of East St. Louis in Illinois, the South Side of Chicago in Illinois, New York City, Camden in New Jersey, Washington

Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools is an intense expose of unjust conditions in educating America’s children. Today’s society of living conditions, poverty, income, desegregation and political issues have forced inadequate education to many children across the country. Kozol discusses major reasons for discrepancies in schools: disparities of property taxes, racism and the conflict between state and local control. Kozol traveled to public schools researching conditions and the level of education in each school. He spoke with teachers, students, principals, superintendents and government officials to portray a clear picture of the

What does social class mean? Social class means a division of a society based on social and economic status. Now, what does hidden curriculum mean? Hidden Curriculum means a side effect of education, such as norms, values and beliefs in the classroom. Accordingly, Jean Anyon’s, author of “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” claims that each and every social class has it’s own very different way of teaching in schools. Anyon states a plethora of strengths and weaknesses in this article. She believes that all children have been taught to learn, comprehend, and behavior in plenty of different ways due to the social class’s they have been thrown into. Anyon examined each social class which have been named The Working Class, The Middle Class, The Affluent Professional Class, and lastly The Executive Elite Class. An educational perspective came well from her work view point and based off it - I have thrown in my own opinion by agreeing with her during this essay.

The article “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” by Jean Anyon is about research conducted in five different schools of four different social classes; the Working Class, the Middle Class, the Professional Class, and the Executive Class. In the data collected, Anyon discovered the various ways that these five schools teach the children. First, the two Working Class Schools taught the children really poorly, often telling the children to follow steps to get the right answer, and always yelling at them when they’re out of line. The Middle Class School teaches the kids a little better, by making the children actually work to get the right answer. The Professional School sought to get the children to be more creative with their work. And finally, the Executive Class school will tell the children that they are fully responsible for their work, and they will not keep up with children if they miss assignments.

Anyon establishes pathos in her research paper as well, in order to make administrators, teachers, and scholars feel angry and sympathetic towards the curriculum of lower class schools hindering students from elevating themselves out of their poor social class. Anyon reviews her overall experience with the working-class school teacher’s attitude towards the students and explains, “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 teacher said, ‘Shut up,’ ‘Shut your mouth,’ ‘Open your books,’”(Anyon 259). Anyon conveys the oppression that children from lower-class schools face compared to how amazing the education is in

In the article “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” by Jean Anyon. She argues that there is a serious gap in quality and level of education in the public school system. The gap widens as you progress up from working class to middle class and on through affluent professional to executive elite. Based on her research I would have to agree with her.

In “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” Jean Anyon theorizes about the role education plays in society. Anyon’s central thesis is that public schools in complex societies like our own make available different types of education experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes. Jean Anyon performs a study on different elementary schools’ where the children come from different backgrounds, the parents had different incomes, occupations, and other relevant social characteristics. The method’s Anyon used to prove her point was gathering data in classroom observations, interviewing students, teachers, principals, and district administrative staff; and assessment of curriculum and other materials in each classroom and school. After careful analysis of Anyon’s model and my personal experiences in Windham High School I can confirm that I attend a school Anyon would identify as the working class. Anyon’s model about the working class is valid. For example on the demographics, Windham High School classifys’ as working class society and most families make less than $12,000 and face financial struggles. Anyon characterizes the working class as 85% white however the majority of the working class in my community are composed of Puerto Rican, Asian or African American groups.

The purpose of this study is to provide empirical evidence of the existence of what the author calls a “hidden curriculum” in schools by observing the types and differences in school work across a spectrum of social classes (Anyon, 1980, p. 67). The rationale for this study is lies in a body of research suggesting that the type of curriculum offered to students is dependent upon their social class (Anyon, 1980). The curriculum variants observed include: behavior expectations and types of knowledge and skills offered. Consequently, the curriculum differences work to prevent movement across social class and prepare students only for the types of employment typical of their social class (Anyon, 1980). Anyon attempts to draw attention to this topic in the United States, as it had been largely ignored at the time (1980).

Prior to this class I thought that all schools were taught the same. However, I soon learned school are not taught equally. From Anyon’s article “From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” she studied five different schools. Two of the schools that she studied were working class school where the students families worked blue collared jobs where one third were skilled fathers and the other two thirds worked unskilled jobs. One of the other schools that she studied were what Anyon called the middle class school where the parents came from a mix of blue collared “rich” and the medium working class. The next school that she studied was the affluent professional school where the parents are at the upper income of

One way to see how education erects such barriers for the lower classes, we can start with the schools that actually teach the students. In Jean Anyon’s academic paper, she selected four elementary schools in New Jersey based on class and investigated how they operated throughout the day. In the working-class

My dad has been a teacher for the past 23 years, the only provider in our household of six for 20 of those years, and the sole reason my siblings and I were fortunate enough to attend the middle class, wealthiest school in the area. Jean Anyon makes the argument that a school’s location largely determines the quality of education. For example, if a school is located in a predominately working class neighborhood that school will probably have far less resources, will have mostly children of working class families enrolled, and generally lower quality teachers. This all creates a cycle of the poor remaining poor because the students attending the working class school will not have the resources to better themselves at school or at home. Luckily, my dad taught at the Houghton school district, and because of this we got to ride with him to work and he would drop us off. If he wasn’t able to do this, because we lived slightly