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

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

Why should control of the environment have been differently important for Ben than for me? There are simple answers, like the greater relative chaos of my household (if I remember right, Ben had just one sibling in his enormous house) and the greater relative power of his family to gain a measure of control over things like pants. But I craved control, too; the move to buy the sneakers on clearance was itself an effort by my parents to control their economic options. Are there meaningful distinctions among social classes in terms of their approaches to control?

I propose that one such distinction may manifest itself in our relationship to institutions like schools. My experience as a working-class kid was that institutions were "other" than us, were always assumed to be "against" us, even if blindly so. Our lives were out of control: we lived paycheck to paycheck or, before my stepfather moved in, welfare check to welfare check. When my mother was told I was "gifted," this was like being told I'd been hired for a job, or fired from a job: it was done to us by some nameless, faceless monolith. It was a chance, a precious economic opportunity, but not something generated by me or for me. It was done to me, to us, and we had to cling to it while we could and make the most of it. Had I not been selected for this program that my mother hadn't even previously heard about, notions like complaining to the school board or challenging the assumptions behind a magnet school for "gifted" children would never have entered her mind. No wonder Pine View continues to function as a publicly-funded segregating tool to this day.

But this school, for Ben and others like him, belonged to them. Had Ben somehow failed to test in, I have little doubt he would have retaken the test until he made it. If he hadn't, I also have little doubt his parents would have brought their opinion of Ben's test results to administrators. I don't fault them for this; like my family, they were responding to controlling forces. But the crucial difference is that Ben's family seemed to presume that good economic decisions meant staying in control, putting institutions to work for you, protecting your investments. Institutions, for the upper classes, exist to maintain control, to protect wealth from dissipating. Institutions, for the lower classes, for my family, exist to control us, and it is we who need protection from them.

Old news, perhaps, for readers of Marx and Steinbeck, but I believe this perspective on institutions extends to schools, and persists in teachers and scholars from working-class backgrounds. When I stand in front of a classroom, I know in every cell in my body that I am there on borrowed time, that the institution has temporarily lent me its authority but it can snatch that authority back at its whim. When I submit a prospective article I do not assume that editors or readers can or will adjust to my working-class sensibilities; I am the one who must adjust my vocabulary, my thematic analysis, if I want to make sense. Otherwise, that rejection letter will be done to me; I will read it the way I read the letter that invited me to a magnet school I'd never heard of, with bewilderment and not with entitlement.