Reading Finn’s Literacy with an Attitude was like getting a cold bucket of water thrown on my head. It was a startling reality because it’s true - and I know it’s true because I have lived it. I am an embodiment of this. I studied nursing, a field that requires study, like Finn put it, where we are “rewarded for knowing the answers, for knowing where to find answers, for knowing which form, regulation, technique or procedure is correct.” I maintained the status quo, I grew up middle class, I stayed middle class. Like the teachers of Finn’s middle class school, I attended state school, I live and work in the community in which I grew up. I thought I made the conscious choice to do so, but if you think about it, our education may have groomed us to stay where we are. My parents were products of the same system.
If you asked me about my school and where I grew up, I would have said in a town where it is a mix of working and middle class. My school certainly had those students who were resistant, defiant, the ones who seemed like they didn’t care, and then you had others, like myself, that were doing the work because, as my dad would put it, when I would stress about school, “it is a means to an end”, follow the rules, get it done, so we can get into college to get jobs to support ourselves. My family, myself, my peers, are products of this system. When reading about education in “middle-class” schools, I realized my education was just like this. “The teachers in the middle-class school varied from strict to somewhat easygoing, but for all of them, decisions were made on the basis of rules and regulations that were known to the students. Teachers always honored class dismissal bells. There was little excitement in the school work, and assignments did not seem to take into account the student’s interests or feelings, but the children seemed to believe that there were rewards: good grades lead to college and a good job.” As a child, and teenager, I had the assumption that if I worked hard enough, I could be whatever I wanted, but I always knew I wanted to do some sort of public service, a teacher, or a nurse, like the family tradition. But I truly thought if I wanted more, this is America, and it was possible. “The dominant theme in the middle-class school was possibility. There was widespread anxiety about tests and grades but there was a pervasive belief that hard work would pay off. These students viewed knowledge as a valuable possession that can be traded for good grades, a good college education, and a good job.” When I think about what most of my classmates are doing now, most of us went to our state schools, like the teachers in the middle class school referenced by Finn, and work in the industries associated with the middle class, which, as Finn describes, are “ paper work, technical work, sales and social services”. What this text describes, what Finn argues, is that your social class, the social class of your school and education, determines your social mobility. As the title says, students get “an education appropriate to their station”. “The working class were learning to follow directions and do mechanical, low-paying work in ways sanctioned by their community. The middle-class children were learning to follow orders and do the mental work that keeps society producing and running smoothly. They were learning that if they cooperated they would have the rewards that well-paid, middle-class work makes possible outside the workplace. The affluent professional children were learning to create products and art, “symbolic capital,” and at the same time they were learning to find rewards in work itself and to negotiate from a power position with those (the executive elite) who make the final decisions on how real capital is allocated. The executive elite children? They were learning to be masters of the universe.” So I think this begs the question, can the American dream truly be fulfilled? A classist system is a system of oppression, and while we may not think that truly exists in American because in America, people theoretically have the ability have upward mobility, but the educational system, as it stands is institutional oppression - oppressing students from upward social mobility by preparing and teaching them “to stay in their lane”.
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