My Educational Autobiography

Getting an education is an important part of every child and teenager’s life, but not all get the same type of education. In Jean Anyon’s essay “From Social Class And The Hidden Curriculum Of Work”, she explains and talks about the four levels of education. According to Jean Anyon, the four levels of education are the Working-Class School, Middle-Class School, Affluent Professional School, and Executive Elite School. From my experience, I attended a working-class school named Santa Ana High School located in a low income and high crime neighborhood of the city of Santa Ana, CA. In the author’s words, a working-class school is, “A school for students with parents with low income jobs, and with an income at or below $12,000”(Anyon 138). I believe got a working-class education because we rarely used the textbooks in class, learned through common core, and taught an education from average standard courses. Also, I believe I attended a working-class school because my high school education just taught me the basic skills of attaining a minimum wage job, whereas in professional school, or elite school students are taught knowledge and skills that lead to higher wage jobs. My experience relates to author Jean Anyon’s essay because I felt the working-class school category matched my high school education. For example, in the essay she states, “In 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”(Anyon 140). Author Jean Anyon also states, “Available textbooks are not always used, and the teachers often prepare their own dittos or put work examples on the board”(Anyon 140). Both of these examples from the essay relate to my high school education because we would often do assignments created by the teacher rather than do assignments provided by the school textbooks. From my high school education, I received a working-class education because although we did have new buildings, new technology, and a clean school campus, the high school was located in a low income, and dangerous neighborhood, and students received an education from average standard courses. In my opinion, I received a working-class

My education started not long after I was born in 1989. I attended Ruth Washburn Nursery School, for 3 years, but I don’t have a lot of memories of what I learned. 3 things stand out to me. This was a place of great fun!! I learned how to love running. I could run for ages. Secondly the plecostomus’s were the coolest fish in the fish tank! Lastly I remember the song that goes, “Love is something if you give it away, give it away, give it away.”

Throughout my educational experience I noticed the discrepancies with regard to the advantages my peers possessed. In high school as I began exploring what career I wished to pursue, I experienced inferiority as my classmates who’ve taken the ACT three times, visited college campuses, and have had resumes ready since the 6th grade unintentionally mocked my lack of college-readiness. However, my ignorance wasn’t intentional, my parents never reached a high school education in Mexico, they couldn’t pass down SAT tips or acquire internship opportunities for me. I realized it's vital to pick up the pace to avoid being left in the dust akin to countless others in my situation. Henceforth, this statement resonates with my experience, I interpreted

Anyon gives specific examples of social classes and the curriculums of grade schools. In response to a comparison of the working class school and the executive elite school,

Despite students possessing a variety of needs and learning styles, the education system was designed for a “one-size-fits-all” in an attempt to meet every child’s needs and abilities. However, this is not the common perception by those who investigate further into the diverse environments of numerous, differing schools. Jean Anyon, in “Social Class and The Hidden Curriculum of Work,”argues that the style of education students receive is decided by the social class of their community and is not uniform when concerning students of all types. Instead, working class, middle class, affluent professionals, and executive elites experience significantly dissimilar school environments. Not only are they treated differently, and taught differently, but they’re prepared for a certain future that corresponds with their social class. Anyon’s synthesis is validated by my own experience at the Windham schools in Willimantic, where the demographics of the school corresponded with the confining, restrictive, and strict teaching style described by Anyon as ‘working class’. My account depicts the harsh reality of how my disadvantaged community suffers through a school system that does not prepare them for a future beyond a life of blue-collar jobs. However, my experience also disproves Anyon’s model through several details in the style of learning, such as going out of a textbook, or also being graded on a right answer.

Jean Anyon’s essay and study of “The Hidden Curriculum of Schools” argues that the quality of education you receive is solely based on your standing in the different levels of social classes in which you were born into. Mike Rose’s essay “I Just Wanna Be Average” confirms this hidden curriculum as he recalls his misplacement into vocational school in which the parents of the students that attended worked blue-collar jobs. Mike Rose’s essay confirms Jean Anyon’s study in showing that your education is heavily based upon the social class you are in. The lower you rank in social class the less of an education you receive whereas students that rank higher receive a more quality education. Both authors argue, correctly, that education should work

Ever wonder what kind of education we obtained or what kind of education children are receiving? According to Jean Anyon, “...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 skill in each social setting and thus contribute to the development in the children of certain potential relationships to physical and symbolic capital, to authority, and to the process of work” (151). Therefore, Anyon believes that schools are not focusing on giving children the proper education and instead they provide the education based on the community’s social-class. Based on “‘I Just Wanna Be Average’” by Mike Rose and my academic experience both stories give interesting points of views regarding the type of education that was given. In Rose’s story, Rose is a young man who lived in a working class community but attended a middle class high school. Rose received a working class education but soon a new teacher arrived and changed his academic experience. In my personal experience, I grew up in a middle class neighborhood and received a middle class and a few affluent professional schooling, but moved to a working class community and started to receive a working class education. Anyon’s claim would complicate based on Rose’s story and on the education I have received based on the areas where I have lived. Every

Through Anyon’s comprehensive research, she discovered that in a wealthy community, affluent professional institutions focused on educating and enlightening students towards career paths involving law, medicine or business as their families’ class is “predominantly professional” with an income between “$40,000 and $80,000”. Likewise, Anyon observed an educational institution in a working-class community and recognized that children were unambiguously instructed to grow into working-class citizens, following the same footsteps of their family to obtain an income “at or below $12,000”. Furthermore, throughout the article, Anyon provides several direct quotes from instructors and children. In fact, the methodology used by instructors and the behaviors of the children strongly support Anyon’s argument of a hidden curriculum according to class. For example, students apart of the working-class master “rote behavior, and very little decision making” whereas the executive elite schools shape students into “developing one’s analytical intellectual powers”.

Jean Anyon, author of the article “From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, spent one year observing a fifth-grade class in a socially middle class elementary school. In this year, she was able to determine that the teachers taught the students by textbook based lessons and would ask questions that would verify if a student had done his or her reading assignments before coming to class. The students would then receive grades based on the amount of right answers they had given. Through her observations she saw that teachers did not bring up concepts that could be considered controversial in fear that parents would become angry. Anyon noted that the students learned by being given directions that often required some decision making,

We could see some of the different types of teachers described in Anyon’s work could also be seen in an essay” I Just Wanna Be Average” written by Mike Rose. Rose experienced in his high school different teachers, who came from different socio-economic background is different in the way they teach and treat their students. To an extent, it is true that the socioeconomic background of a student could determine the quality or type of instruction a student will receive. It seems that Mike Rose’s essay tends to complicate Anyon’s claim that the socio-economic location the school is at is the reason on what kind of educational instruction a student can get. Indeed Rose’s experiences in high school receiving instruction from teachers that has the teaching styles classified in Anyon’s essay as working class, middle class and affluent professional, but it complicates the claim because all this method of teaching can be found in one school. Rose tells us the location of his school is at South Los Angeles, he describes that Our Lady of Mercy “relied on a series of test, mostly the Standford-Binet, for placement” (152). The score you receive here will determine what program you will be placed on either in College

Jean Anyon is a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University in New York and is an expert in educational policy. Her published works consist of Theory and Education Research: Toward Critical Social Explanation and Radical Responsibilities: Public Policy, Urban Development and a New Social Movement. Anyon’s article, “From Social Class And The Hidden Curriculum Of Work” was first featured in 1980 in the Journal of Education. Her essay regarding teachings in different socioeconomic classes, was published more than 20 years prior, to her other works (Rereading America Ninth ed., p. 164).

I remember the early years of my childhood when I arrived at school and was received by the warm greeting of my teachers, who seemed to have special abilities to perceive if I was angry, sad, or hungry. In the classroom, I felt safe and had the confidence to tell my dreams without fear that they would make fun of them, when I was a child, my teachers made me feel loved and protected.

Public school systems need to be more sensitive to their students. Parents play the major role in determining a child’s academic outcome, but the school system needs to notice children who don’t necessarily acknowledge their gift. These children need guidance -- I believe it is the schools’ responsibility to provide it to them. I have been through a situation that makes me feel strongly about the subject. My example is an indisputable case in point.

A lot of people think education is just something you get in school, but in reality education comes from different places and people not just school and teachers. For example, way before I started school I was already being educated by my parents, they taught me how to eat, behave, use the bathroom, talk, and a lot of other things that help out in life.

How does a person begin to write a narrative of their own life, relating events and ideas back to their own culture? Well, first, I’d like to give some baseline information about myself. I am a white, middle-class, educated, mid-western, Christian female athlete. I come from a traditional family with a mother, father, one brother, and two sisters. Taking those characteristics into account, I would say that I am a privileged member of society, and being privileged has been part of my culture. In addition, the largest influences on my life and worldview were my family, school, church, and the area I grew up.