Talking Points 10 - Shor

1. “The students’ most inmost morality remains fundamentally directed toward obedience rather than autonomy.” According to Anyon, a students’ inclination toward obedience or autonomy is dependent on that student’s socio-economic background. The upper-class students are allowed the autonomous learning, while the lower classes are forced into the obedience training. Shor is suggests that students learn best in a class that focuses on participation, leading to autonomous learning; unfortunately, most teachers, especially in lower socio-economic schools, are not based on a participatory model, and thus perpetuate the classic obedience training.

2. “Through day-to-day lessons, teaching links the students’ development to the values, powers, and debates in society.” This is fundamentally why we go to school. However, depending on where we go to school, we will learn these lessons differently. I have two more thoughts about this quote. The first is that the development of the “values, powers and debates,” will assimilate all students (rich or poor) into Delipit’s culture of power. The second is that the upper and lower class students learn different values. The upper class students learn to communicate with their superiors (their teachers); while poor students learn that they need to be subservient.

3. “While schools may in fact serve the interests of many individuals, empirically they also seem to act as powerful agents in the economic and cultural reproduction of class relations.” “Schooling supports existing power and divisions in society by sorting students into a small elite destined for the top and a large mass destined for the middle and bottom.” These quotes echo the conclusions that I made after reading the Anyon piece. Schools are currently designed to perpetuate current social statuses, and vehemently protect the status quo. As it stands, the elite are destined to get richer, while to poor are destined to remain so.



I thoroughly enjoyed this reading. It was perhaps my favorite of the entire year. This reading can be connected to so many of the others that we have worked with. It is essential to interweave everything that we have read, in order to understand how education and society is constructed all around us. When pairing this article with Anyon and Oakes, it becomes obvious how students are divided. The rich and powerful elite are allowed to participate in the classroom, and get a better education, while the poor students are forced to attend schools that teach them to do nothing but obey. Bringing in Johnson, it becomes obvious that white privilege helps students get into the better schools, where they are taught in a participatory setting, which Shor claims is the best for educational purposes. Delpit tells us of the culture of power, which is constructed by the elite, who get to go to the better schools. The lower socio-economic students, who go to the lesser schools, get their dialogues silenced their entire lives, because they are not high ranking enough in the culture of power. This process repeats itself in a vicious cycle. People born into the elite culture, are destined to grow up, building copious amounts of cultural capital, and remain at the top of the social hierarchy, while those born into a poor socio-economic family will be destined to go to sub-standard schools, build little to no cultural capital, and grow up to work in menial jobs. The industrial complex system is designed to perpetuate the current social structure.

In this country, there is a shrinking middle class, and a growing gap between the rich and the poor. At this point in time, the average white family makes a median income of nearly $125,000 per year, while a black family has a median income of $17,000 per year. This is one example of how the current system is failing. If all schools offered the same level of education, as Shor suggests in a participatory classroom, then perhaps we can change the cultural deficit in the country. This is our purpose, to educate students on a level playing field, preparing them to enter the ‘real world.’ We could pour buckets of knowledge on students, making them memorize facts, or we can operate discussion based classrooms, giving more respect and responsibility to the students, as Shor and Anyon suggest, giving all students, regardless of their cultural or economic background an equal opportunity to succeed in this white, elitist, culture of capital world.