Is your education depicted by your social class?

Kylie Kohut
September 23,2015
Proffessor Young
English 1100

       

A frequent topic up for debate is if your social class molds you in your education for future jobs. Jean Anyon wrote an essay on the topic stating that if your poor, rich, or from a middle class family your education is depicted because of your class, called “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. In the essay it discusses the fact that she believes that your life is planned out already from your current money situation, I don’t believe that is true. I went to what is considered to be a lower or middle class school system for the grades Kindergarten to 8^th. During these years I found out that the amount you learn depended on the teacher you had. I had mostly good teachers and could easily retain the information and memorize it while friends in other classes could not. But, after 8^th grade I went to a local private school for high school and learned that the education level was much higher than the education level for my public high school. With that being said though I was still well prepared in the material from the public elementary school and the public high school. The only difference I found in the curriculum in the schools was that in my private school our standard classes were taught the same information as the AP classes in the public high school, and even at a faster rate than the public high school. I also figured out that the social class your born into does not mean you will be taught at the standard of that social class, instead the teacher and your work ethic will decide the “social class standard” that you would be taught at. Coming from an area of mostly working class people or blue-collared jobbed people when reading Jean Anyon’s article this sentence stuck out, “the procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps meaning or significance.” In the schools in my area I found this not to be true because we were always explained what the project was and why we were given it. In my opinion your social class does not make your value of education.