n. Working-class children are not as well prepared for primary school as more affluent children, and they often attend different schools or are assigned different classes. And those who have high SAT scores do not have the same access to higher education as more affluent students with similar or lower test scores.
These are fairly apparent instances of structural inequality, but there are less obvious structural phenomena at work. Many working-class students see high-status knowledge and cultural capital as useless and even antithetical to their working-class identity. They develop oppositional identity, defining themselves different from schoolteachers or people like them. At the same time, the schools generally ignore any sense of importance or entitlement students may have as working-class people. So the students resist teachers’ attempts to teach, and unlike most other students, they often find affirmation for their resistance in their homes and communities.
A modified teaching paradigm ensues. Teachers give easy assignments and provide step-by-step directions. Classroom control becomes a paramount concern; teachers refuse to negotiate with students in fear of losing authority. Many teachers of working-class students see their mission as producing border crossers—students who believe in meritocracy, are academically inclined, and willingly adopt middle-class values, tastes, and interests. But many working-class students who have these qualities are defeated by structural barriers, while those who succeed are held up as proof that meritocracy works.
Since the 1930s, progressive educators like George Counts have insisted that we cannot have a real democracy so long as we have domesticating education for half the nation’s school children—children of the working class. Counts referred to empowering education for children of the working class as “progressive education,” but today many teachers who consider themselves progressive educators buy into meritocracy as a valid concept and strive to produce border crossers, rather than empowered working-class men and women.
In 1970 Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed popularized the term “critical literacy” (so called because of Freire’s adherence to Marxist critical theory). Freire’s literacy programs for adults in Brazil’s slums started with raising students’ consciousness of the structural inequalities that oppressed them and preparing them, largely through literacy, to strive for justice. Critical reading (recognizing the author’s bias and so on) has been standard reading instruction for at least fifty years. It is sometimes referred to as critical literacy, but it falls a little shy of education based on critical theory. Following Allan Luke, critical literacy as an explicitly political classroom agenda for the education of working-class students, devoted to changing class relations in ways that are advantageous to the working class. It brings Mother Jones into the classroom, not as a benign topic of study but as an inspiration and model of good citizenship.
The most enduring experiment in critical literacy for school aged children in the U.S. took place not in public schools but in Sunday schools operated by the American Socialist Party. Socialist Sunday schools served children between age 5 and 14 in many cities, between 1900 and 1920. Students were exposed to an abundance of working-class poetry, music, theater, and dance. Visits from labor, community, and political leaders provided them with social capital and encouraged students to have confidence and pride in working-class values, knowledge, and beliefs. Like Freire’s literacy campaigns, the schools aimed to raise students’ consciousness regarding the structural inequalities that oppressed them and to prepare them to strive for justice. Students were encouraged to cooperate and work hard in public school to acquire high-status knowledge, cultural capital, and high levels of literacy, not simply for their intrinsic value but as sources of power in the social-political-economic arena. This was later dubbed Machiavellian M