Immobility in Mobility: Narratives of Social Class, Education, and Paralysis

Educational Foundations, Summer 2003 by Nainby, Keith, Pea, John B

I argue that the relationship between schooling and media representations of vocational and cultural aspirations has become symbiotic [...] so school learning is organized around behaviors required by types of bureaucratic work, as well as the rewards offered by consumer society forperformance according to established corporate norms. [...] The student remembers little or nothing about the content of knowledge... but remembers how to succeed in receiving good grades, gaining admission to a decent college, or university, and how to curry favor with authorities-teachers, counselors, employers. Workingclass kids often fail to get the message right. [...] The result [...] is cultural homelessness.

-Aronowitz, Politics 201-02

Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames

-Springsteen, "Adam Raised a Cain"

The two passages above both present images of working-class people confronted with crushing doubt-doubt about whether accomplishing their goals, goals that have seemed worth working for, goals that much of society has framed as noble and necessary, will ultimately prove liberating or even rewarding. These passages also suggest that a major consequence of this doubt is alienation, not only from the society that has apparently betrayed a person from the workingclass but also from her or himself. In this essay we propose that working-class kids who grow to become permanent members of the academy, as we figure out how to "make it" as professors and as professionals, have also learned other, bleaker lessons about our society, our colleagues, and ourselves. These lessons, we contend, can be profoundly damaging, even immobilizing, on at least three levels for people in the category of "critical education scholars and teachers from poor and working-class backgrounds." On a personal level, we may be learning to despise ourselves or dismiss some of our core values in the process of learning to succeed in the academy. On an interpersonal level, we may be learning that we are communicatively incompetent, or at least significantly less competent at the outset of our careers, and that this incompetence will always constrain our ability to effect change through established scholarly channels. On a societal level, we may be learning, simply in an effort to survive academically, cultural codes and patterns of behavior that cut us - we potential theorists of working-class experience - that cut us off from our working-class roots and thereby further weaken the almost nonexistent fiber of class solidarity in this country.

Authors such as Gloria Anzaldua, Molefi K. Asante, and bell hooks have discussed the ways in which scholarly standards and cultural assumptions in academic institutions in the United States persist in their long tradition of devaluing and marginalizing scholars of color, women scholars, gay and lesbian scholars, and anyone else who does not conform to established (though often unacknowledged) norms. Our purpose in this project is to offer three sets of thematically linked, dialogic narrative accounts of the confusing and complex paths of social mobility and immobility that these institutions have provided us: two straight-identified, white-appearing American men from working-class backgrounds who are now critical education scholars and professors of communication. We are not suggesting that our working-class childhoods can or should give the two of us a right to claim a posteriori a minority status; instead, our hope is that our positions of relative privilege can become a meaningful vantage point for reflecting on the unique interrelationship of social class and higher education - specifically in our cases, of working-class histories and academic lives.

Personal Narratives

Keith: "Easy"

Whenever my partner and I have a big disagreement about anything, I clean like a maniac. I clean the floors, the backsides of long-undusted furniture, the crevices of coimtertop corners that no one will ever see. Cleaning that stuff is hard work, you see. I think I clean like that because I want my partner to love me for working hard, for not taking it easy when our relationship is at issue. I now believe, after years of reflection on the insights offered to me by critical educational scholars, that I do this because of an important difference in what schools have valued in me and what I learned, through my working-class family life, to value in myself.

My schooling history, from fourth through twelfth grades, was uncommon in this country: I attended a public school with a private school culture. It goes without saying not only that we could never have dreamed of affording a private school, but that it would never have occurred to my mother (I was in a single-parent family during elementary school) to look for options like scholarships or to question the merits of the district ' s public schools. Everyone in our family (my mother was a thirdgeneration American, her grandparents were Eastern European Jews) had long assumed that, while education was valuable as a chance for upward mobility, the American public school system was the only meaningful site of such barelyconceivable nascent middle-class success. What the teachers and administrators told my mom became the uncontested truth in our house about school, about achievement, about possibilities - the only relevant path toward social mobility for me, her oldest child. What they told her, in my case during my third grade year, was that I had tested into the district's "gifted" program and therefore I'd been selected to be bussed - more than thirty miles away - to a magnet school that housed "gifted" students from across the county.