Academic Failure and
Democratic Schooling:
Some Autobiographical
Reflections
Benjamin Day[1]
I
have zealously guarded my failing report cards from the 10th grade,
which was to be my last year of secondary education in a traditional
school. And Ill admit, I have a bit of pride in them still. One of them reads as follows: Competitive
Team Sports: His grade to date is an F; His poor attendance affects
his performance. English 111: He is not working up to his capabilities; He lacks
initiative and commitment to master material; He has not completed major
projects; He does not make up missed work. Biology 1: His grade to date is an F; He does not make up missed work; His
homework needs attention; He lacks initiative and commitment to master
material. And so on.
Although
I am afraid to think of what my teachers might have said had they been given a
bit more discretion in articulating their comments, it is still my belief that
the schools repository of pre-drafted explanations for academic
failure could have used a few important additions. To begin with: He despises
most of his teachers, He has no
interest in school material, and the all
important He would prefer hacky-sacking and smoking pot on the
corner with his friends to classroom exercises. Of course, some teachers did
offer choice words (off the books) to my parents, and occasionally to me. These amounted mostly to the notion that I
was hanging out with the wrong crowd, a crowd that would surely erode my
intellectual and moral fiber, a process they had seen before so many times that it would be in my familys best interest to immediately wage war on my choice
of social circles. (My parents,
thankfully, did not attempt this.) In a
way these teachers were right, though.
My choice of friends was closely related to my growing belief that
school work was not worth my time. And
again, this was a dangerous crowd; perhaps the worst sort that a student
can fall in with these or any days: the working class.
We
didnt call ourselves the
working class. In fact we
didnt call ourselves anything, unlike the much hipper
counter-school cultures described in any number of ethnographies of student
resistance.[2] But hip or no, we were a mix of greasers and
pot-heads, most of whom above the age of sixteen had been tracked into our
otherwise affluent suburban schools
vocational program, or who had renegotiated the terms of their stay to include
an extra year or two, along with dramatically reduced academic expectations and
enrollment in the Upward Bound program.
It wasnt until I read Paul Williss Learning to Labour almost a decade later that
it even occurred to me that the class background of my friends was different
from that of other students, or might have something to do with my declining
engagement with high school. I would
like briefly to discuss this literature as it relates to my own experience in
high school, as it provides a point of departure (and comparison) from which to
discuss my unusual experience with democratic schooling at a place called
Sudbury Valley School, where I finished the last two and a half years of my
secondary education.
Student Resistance and
Academic Knowledge
The
story of resistance theory
has been told by now by a large number of anthropologists and sociologists.[3] What they have found is that relatively poor
school performance is typically a function neither of lesser ability, nor of bad families or
some tragic shortage of cultural capital, but rather of students rejection of competitive academic regimes, and their
opposition at some level to school authority and what they perceive as imposed
norms, values, and expectations.
Subsequent ethnographies have found mixed evidence on students desire to succeed in school, and to move into
middle-class jobs.[4] In particular, blue-collar students have
been found more willing to reject even the aspiration of class
mobility. But more common, and
understandable in situations where well-paying industrial jobs are not readily
available, is a desire to succeed in school and to gain access to better-paying
jobs, but an unwillingness to comply with the academic regimes imposed by
schools, or to adopt the value systems and orientations in particular towards
individual competition necessary for success.[5] As Everett
Hughes has commented: It is one thing to want to go to school and another to
want to do the things one must do to succeed there.[6]
What
are these things that one must do to succeed in school? The visible motions are innocuous enough:
attending class, paying attention, not disrupting the teaching process, doing
homework, actively absorbing the information deemed relevant for passing, and
perhaps to some degree engaging with the material through class participation
and writings. But it is the beliefs and
value systems that support this set of activities that lend them a gate-keeping
function, through which social class and unequal job access are reproduced.
Authority
in the classroom is based on the recognition of academic achievement as a mark
of social status that the teachers
place at the head of the class is earned by virtue of his or her knowledge, and
students complicity with this authority structure is based on
the opportunity to gain access to this base of knowledge. However, ethnographers have found that working
class, marginalized students often challenge the importance of their teachers academic knowledge, considering other types of
know-how more important. They chafe at
a classroom hierarchy that is predicated on the transfer of academic knowledge
from teacher to students, and sometimes mobilize almost every conceivable means
of safely disrupting this process. Most
importantly, counter-school cultures such as these are strictly enforced by
peers, who will taunt or ridicule any friends who appear too eager to succeed
in class work, who seem interested in actively participating in school work,
who attend school a bit too regularly, who seem actually interested in academic
material, or who in any way appear to be brown-nosing or sucking up.
This
is much as I remember my high-school experience. Although status within my group of friends was mostly based on
physical size, fighting prowess, and fortitude in the consumption of drugs
(none of which put me terribly high in the pecking order!), my few marks of prowess
involved the sheer number of classes I was willing to skip, along with some
skill at shoplifting cigarettes. You
were only truly accepted by the group after having faced significant
persecution by teachers or house masters, which was a sign that your priorities
were in order. We all shared these
priorities, but courage was measured by the extent to which one would
flout the schools requirements and disciplinary system. Creativity and
audacity in ridiculing school authority figures were typically valued more than
unimaginative disengagement. In other
words, simply extracting ourselves from the school system wasnt as important as trying to dislodge teachers and
house masters from their positions of control and respectability.
Id like to quote from some of the students interviewed
by ethnographers, and briefly review different explanations as to why different
degrees of counter-school cultures and sentiments are found among working-class
and minority students, before discussing my subsequent experience at Sudbury
Valley. I want to draw out three major
themes here that will be interesting in relation to my experience with
democratic schooling. The first of
these is the way in which students in traditional institutions view the age
expectations of their schools, and how students who have had to assume
extensive responsibilities for people around them and usually worked jobs on
their own, resent being treated like children under the school regime and its authorities. The second theme is the way in which working
class students are often impatient with the theoretical or academic
knowledge they are expected to learn in order to succeed in school, but which
they often neither value nor consider relevant to their circumstances. Lastly, Id
like to note students reaction to the institutionalization of competitive
measures of status and achievement in traditional schools, and the way in which
competition is mobilized as a mechanism of control.
The Lads of Paul Williss study regularly contrast the real life
they experience, with what Willis terms the oppressive
adolescence of school.
Many of the resistance ethnographies turn up this sentiment: that
working-class students consider school work, and the imposed activities of
teachers, to be childish. They also
consider students who conform to the school regime to be more naļve and
generally less mature. The importance
of drinking and smoking for counter-school cultures for example is valorized as an act of insurrection before the
school by its association with adult values and practices. The adult world, specifically the adult male
working class world, is turned to as a source of material for resistance and
exclusion.[7] Angela
McRobbie has noted how working class girls in England use sexual maturity as a
form of classroom resistance:
A
class instinct finds expression at the level of jettisoning the
official ideology for girls in the school (neatness, diligence, appliance,
femininity, passivity, etc.) and replacing it with a more feminine, even sexual
one. Thus the girls took great pleasure
in wearing make-up to school, spent vast amounts of time discussing boyfriends
in loud voices in class and used these interests to disrupt the class.[8]
We
can see this as a similar attempt by students to resist imposed expectations of
youthful
behavior, by establishing closer relations with the world of working class
adults (in this case women). The girls
of McRobbies study ridicule the sexual naļvete of their middle
class classmates in the same gesture as they deride their orientation towards
academic competitiveness. As 14
year-old >Maggie comments: They all think theyre
brainy but theyre not. I mean
Karen and me, we do no work but if we wanted to we could be top of the
class. Were just interested in other things.
They just want to be top, theyre
not they dont
like boys or nothing. And aged 15
Meg: They suck up to the teachers, never do a thing wrong.[9]
This
relates to working class students
sense that their teachers dont understand
the real world in
which they live, and in which they have gained a form of maturity and depth of
knowledge not acknowledged by the schools
criteria. Commenting on students at
their school getting As, several of the Hallway
Hangers interviewed by Jay MacLeod state:
Slick: Because theyre smarter in some areas just like were smarter in some areas. You put them out here, right?
And you put us up where theyre living they wont be able to survive out here.
Shorty: But wed be able to survive up there.
Frankie: See, what it is theyre smarter more academically, because theyre taught by teachers that teach academics.[10]
Both
conformist students and their teachers are seen as privileging abstract,
theoretical modes of knowledge. This
orientation towards academic achievement blinds them to the realities of their
students lives. As
Shorty comments later:
Responsibilities. See, thats what I mean.
Now, the teachers will not understand. He aint got no father, right? The father aint living there, just like me.
Hes the oldest kid now.
And he has big responsibilities at home because his brothers are growing
up and his sister hes got to keep an eye on >em. Now you gotta do all that,
and you got teachers giving you a hard fuckin time?[11]
The
students at a working class community college interviewed by Howard London
similarly show an impatience with excessive intellectualizing, and in particular react strongly to condescension
towards students based on their poor academic performance, or disinterest in academic
work. London quotes from his field
notes:
Pete: Just before our big English exam, remember when
Dumont [the teacher] said, >And dont insult me with any of your poor spelling.
George:
She said that? Man if I was there I would have said, >Fuck you. He stands up and raises his
middle finger.
Laura: I felt like saying, >And dont you insult us either.
Mea: They do insult us. Look, we all know were not the best students in the world, but who wants to hear a teacher
explain the difference between there, their, and theyre. [Laughter]
I cant stand that.
Who wants to listen to a dissertation on punctuation? Thats why I dont go to class anymore.[12]
I
remember specifically this cycle: resistance to school work typically generates
greater and greater condescension from teachers, which made me less and less
interested in doing work for them. The
classes in which I first began failing, were exactly those in which conflicts
with a teacher were sharpest. London
notes that the more theoretical and abstract courses are singled out especially
for disruption and disengagement. Rote
memorization and cheating are also strategies of disengagement used by the
community college students. There is
intense pressure not to appear too attached to academic performance: At one point Len said it wasnt >cool to go to class as much as Don did. I ask what he means and he tells me that if
you go to every class youre seen as a >brown-nose, trying to curry the teachers favor. [13] Or, in commenting to London that he is
well-prepared for an upcoming exam, Jerrys
friend Roberta comments to him, Pretty
proud of yourself, huh? Jerry
responds: For what?
Memorizing this? Anybody could
do it. One student
when asked why cheating on tests is so common, tells London, Because if you did everything they wanted you to do
youd have to spend too much time studying. Youve
seen the stuff we have to do. Does it
look interesting to you?[14] Claiming to
only have memorized material, or cheating on tests, are both ways that students
do academic work,
while at the same time disassociating themselves from it, and displaying a
distance towards academic knowledge as the legitimate basis of a world-view or
as a measuring rod for personal achievement.
Willis
notes that competition in the form of grading systems is the schools
primary mechanism for controlling reservation or disengagement: in individual competition for approval the
possibility of any private reservations becoming shared to form any
oppositional definition of the situation is decisively controlled.[15] But more
importantly, the grading system by which students compete along lines of
academic achievement, is how graduates (or dropouts) are filtered into the
labor market. The threat of being
punished by the labor market is the means by which conflicts with working class
students and attempts to coopt them into a regime of individual competition are
justified as a struggle for the students
own good (students, by virtue of their youth, not yet knowing what is
best for them). The teacher is given formal control of his pupils by
the state, but he exerts his social control through an educational, not a
class, paradigm.[16]
And
yet it is just this competitive ultimatum that we see students resisting,
particularly through peer pressure: friends are urged not to attempt to
out-compete their peers, not to work too hard, not to go to class too much, or
talk too much, or show much interest.
Much like the practice of soldiering on the shop-floor in
which workers in a chained production process attempt to maintain a reasonable
work pace by preventing fellow workers from speeding
up the line
working class students are urged to keep the bar at a reasonable level, beyond
which working too hard is seen literally as a betrayal of ones peers. Lois
Weis in a study of a predominantly black community college, drawing here on the
work of Carol Stacks, notes that:
Within
domestic networks, women and men maintain strong loyalties to their kin, and
kin exert powerful internal sanctions upon one another to further strengthen
the bond Attempted social mobility involves a precarious risk
in contrast with the relative security provided by the kin network. Ones day-to-day survival demands the sacrifice of upward
mobility.[17]
The
way in which individual competition is seen as a middle class, or upper class
value, is vividly illustrated by several of MacLeods interviewees:
Slick: What it is, its a brotherhood down here. Were all fucking brothers. Theres a lot of backstabbing going on down here, down in
the streets. But were always there for each other. No shit.
Theres not a guy in here that wouldnt put out for one of the rest of us. If he needs something and I got it, Ill give it to him. Period. Thats the way it works.
Its a brotherhood.
Were not like them up there the rich little boys from the suburbs or
wherever. Theres a line there.
On this side of the line we dont fuck with each other; were tight.
Frankie: Wed chump them off [rob] on the other side, though.
Slick: Fucking right.
If hes got four hundred bucks in his pocket, theres more where that came from. Fuck him. But they also
chump each other off; only they do it legally.
How do you think they got rich by fucking people over. We dont do
that to each other. Were too fucking tight.
Were a group. We
dont think like them; we think for all of us.[18]
Virtually
all of the ethnographies of student resistance recognize the cultures of
solidarity and interdependence that characterize counter-school groups of
students, and the extent to which counter-school peer pressure stems from
internal enforcement of anti-competitive norms: success in the academic sense means abandoning ones class; the very community upon which these students
rely heavily in their everyday life. As
Howard London has eloquently described the dilemma:
The
essential problem for students was that intellectualizing implied upward mobility and this status change was also translated into a
statement about oneself and was both feared and welcomed [A]cademic activity was a problematic feature of
community college life as it was bound with issues of ones fate, of ones nice in the social world, and hence of what
membership in a status group implied about ones self and ones social honor.[19]
Democratic Schooling and
the Path of Least Resistance
As I
was doing more and more poorly in school, and, frankly, becoming more and more
miserable there, my parents agreed to transfer me to a radically alternative
school in nearby Framingham, Massachusetts, called the Sudbury Valley School
(SVS). I knew very little about SVS
when I agreed to switch there: all I really knew was that I was escaping the
institution in which every day was a small, protracted struggle, and escaping
into a new setting in which there were no grades and no classes. This much at least was accurate: there were
no grades, and no classes, and students at SVS did whatever they wanted all day
long, every day of the year. There was
more to SVS, though, as I was to learn.
The entire school was run by a democratic School Meeting, in which each
student and each staff member had one vote.
The School Meeting decided on everything from the hiring and firing of
staff members (who do not like being referred to as teachers, as
they dont teach); to setting the rules of the school; all the
way through drafting annual budgets for routine and specific outlays (grounds
and building maintenance, computers, office materials, etc). The school housed almost 200 students at the
time I was there, ages four through nineteen.
There was no power behind the School Meeting; no real authority that
would override the decisions students made as to how the school should be run,
or how important situations would be handled.
All administrative positions were elected, and could be held by either
staff or students; most were held by students.
All of the schools rules applied equally and identically to student and
staff members of the community; rules were enforced through a Judicial Committee
populated mostly by students. SVS was
close to thirty years old by the time I left there, making it a rare survivor
in the world of alternative schools, many of which sprouted particularly during
the late 1960s, but few of whom have survived to tell the tale.
One
of the things that strikes me now is the extent to which the schools philosophy by
which I mean the way its students and staff members talk about it and
distinguish it from other schools
embodies many of the values found in counter-school cultures, like the one I
had come from. In the first place,
members of the school community are not treated differently by age. Sixty year-old staff members and
four-year-old students are bound by the same set of school rules and both have
exactly one vote in the School Meeting.
Informal social groupings were not strongly stratified by age. No student was expected to fill a discrete
role in the school community that had been chiseled out for youth of any age,
and every student and staff bore the same responsibilities towards themselves
and others.
Why
does age-stereotyping seem to be so closely related to conformity or resistance
in these different schools? The first
and most basic reason has to do with control and dependency. Social constructs of youth expectations of youthful behavior, narratives of personal development
encasing judgments of the capacities of youth are the specific ideologies through which control relations in schools
are justified. Students rejecting the schooling system in which they find
themselves run up against ideologies of youth, and are forced to confront them
in order to establish their right to challenge institutional and curricular
norms. Many of the anthropologists and
sociologists researching school failure have noted the close parallels between
student resistance and shop-floor resistance in highly prescribed and
micromanaged work-places.[20] The work
ethic is one ideology that supports relationships of
control. Youth is another.[21]
Founding
staff members of SVS have written of the parents who began the school in 1968
that: The starting point for all our thinking was the
apparently revolutionary idea that a child is a person, worthy of full
respect as a human being.[22] I am struck
now by how mature younger students at SVS appear when compared to their
age-cohorts in traditional schools: their ease of expression and interaction
with others of any age, their directedness in organizing their own activities
and aspirations. I have vivid memories
of new students arriving at SVS in states of complete introversion and
isolation. One student, for example,
sat under a tree by a large rock fifty meters from the school building all day,
everyday, for weeks, perhaps months; the scars from the sort of daily torment
and virtual terrorization by ones
peers in traditional schools, worn like a badge. But all of the nightmarish experiences that most of us recall
from attending traditional schools
the harassment, the badgering, open discrimination, and victimization are facilitated primarily by the imposed adolescence of
the school system. All SVS students who
come from other schools shed this adolescence in the process of trying to
figure out what to do with their time, and with their life. Being recognized as a person at SVS entailed
being conferred the absolute right not to suffer abuse at the hands of other
members of the community.
The
second theme I mentioned in relation to counter-school cultures was impatience
with academic or theoretical
knowledge, and the sense that school material and the teachers who taught it
were several degrees divorced from real
life or the problems of the real world. There are no
classes at SVS. The closest thing to
one that I ever encountered was a history seminar that Daniel Greenberg would
sometimes give, only when a group of students organized themselves and asked
for it, and then he would go over topics requested by the students in the
group, week-by-week. The fact that SVS
students can do anything they want with their time doesnt in itself mean that they will be free from pressures
to achieve academically. This sort of
freedom is very much built by the values of the school community itself, and
not written into any rule book.
The
much older and well-known Summerhill school in England is an example of an
institution in which students dont have
to do anything, but where an academic imperative is still imposed. School founder A.S. Neill, for example,
writes that most students avoid attending Summerhills optional classes for a while after leaving their
previous schools, but almost inevitably join in the classroom work
eventually. Clearly, Neills aspiration is not that students will do whatever
they want, but that they will choose voluntarily to do academic
schoolwork, and graduate into respectable middle-class jobs.
He writes of students avoiding classes that:
This
sometimes goes on for months. The
recovery time is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them. Our record case was a girl from a convent.
She loafed for three years. The average
period of recovery from lesson aversion is three months.[23]
He
remarks apparently with pride on the schools
record that:
Summerhill
is a place in which people who have the innate ability and wish to be scholars
will be scholars; while those who are only fit to sweep the streets will sweep
the streets. But we have not produced a
street cleaner so far.[24]
At
SVS on the other hand, there is clearly no academic bias assigned to
students choice of activities. Not doing academic work is not considered loafing, and proper
loafing is considered an important activity for people when they need to do it
(sheltering, as apparent loafing often does, thinking). The absence of an academic bias is, I think,
one of the most important features of SVS.
In the United States, only one out of every four citizens earns a
college degree. This number has been
stable for decades, and correspondingly, not more than one of every four jobs
in the country require college graduates.
And yet our schools are designed essentially to shame anyone who fails to achieve
academically achievement often measured by whether one graduates
high school or not, and whether one attends or graduates from a college. Sudbury Valley spokespeople (those who tend
to write books and articles, or speak with the press) have been very
hard-pressed to show that SVS students can and do make it in
the labor market and in the world at large: they attempt to reassure parents
that all young students eventually learn to read at SVS, that graduates wishing
to attend college can and do, and that they dont suffer from not having been exposed to employment-like discipline or
forced to learn mathematics, a second language, and classic literature.[25] However, as I look back on my experience and
recall the group of students I attended school with, I am most struck by how
diverse our class backgrounds were, and also the great variation in our later
work or career trajectories. A number
of my friends at the time came from blue-collar backgrounds, while others
hailed from independently wealthy families; one worked her way through SVS
(paying tuition from a job working at a convenience store), while anothers parents were lawyers. A 1992 survey conducted by SVS of several cohorts of graduates found
that 41 had worked in management positions, 18 as professionals, 44 in the
trades, 18 in high tech, and 62 in unskilled jobs at one point or another.[26] None of these tracks earned one denigration
as a student at SVS, and for many students (as for most students who fail at traditional
schooling) an occupation was not so much their goal as the means towards doing
what they wanted in their lives.
This
came out often in the schools optional
graduation process. Although very
controversial within the school, SVS does grant valid high school diplomas for
those students wishing to go through the process. When I was attending, this consisted in drafting a short
presentation on why we felt we were ready to enter the world at large as
responsible citizens a presentation that we would deliver before the
School Assembly, which would then vote on whether to grant a diploma or
not. Students most often focused on
what they were planning to do after graduation in such presentations, and these
varied from career-oriented goals, to short-term travel plans, enrolling in
college, work plans, or the equally acceptable I have no idea what Im doing next! Very few
students have been denied diplomas, but those who I saw seriously challenged in
this defense process faced criticisms for their conduct while at SVS (such as
patterns of irresponsibility or immaturity), rarely for their stated plans.
What
the graduation process does not do
which traditional graduation criteria are based on is to screen for specifically academic value
orientations or competitive careerist aspirations. This is precisely the school function around which counter-school
cultures form, and that generates school
failure in traditional settings. To use the language of Lois Weis and Howard London, the dilemma
of class mobility is delinked from the issue of school performance at SVS. This is not the case at many other
alternative schools such as Summerhill, where pressure from the community and
shared standards that value scholarship and denigrate street sweeping play the role that
grade systems do elsewhere.
Whither Academics in a
Democratic Setting?
Many
progressive teachers face a difficult problem: enforcing school performance by
academic criteria seems to be the means through which working class and
minority students are screened from extended educational opportunities and
better-paying jobs. Teachers have usually attained their position because they
value academic knowledge, which I would define loosely as the organized,
disciplinary study of physical and social phenomena. Whether or not we privilege the knowledge of academics, we are
institutionally prohibited from recognizing other standards within a classroom
setting. Teachers in traditional school institutions are the gatekeepers
of social mobility, but teaching is not experienced in this light. It is experienced as an attempt to engage students in
the material, to provide them with a broader perspective and understanding of the world around
them, and to fairly assess students
progress and achievement. Student failure, although regrettable, results within
a relatively fair framework from the perspective of the teacher fair by virtue of the equal expectations and
equitable assessments of all students.
One
approach has been to advocate for a more relevant curriculum for working class
students: to address in the classroom issues of social inequality and the
history of working class and minority peoples, facilitating a critical
awareness of social relations. This is
how Paulo Freires work has largely been applied to formal educational
settings (although he developed it in the setting of rural literacy
initiatives), and a substantial literature on critical pedagogy has evolved around this theme.[27] This literature has a tense relationship
with resistance theory. As Paul Willis
notes, these are essentially attempts to reintegrate students into the school
system, and to achieve the teachers
imperative of engaging students in academic material.[28] In the language I have been using, they
still embody an academic bias: assuming (hoping?) that students are resisting
not the authority exercised over them, nor academic knowledge per se, but only
the type of academic knowledge often taught in traditional schools.
Once,
when describing my strange and twisting educational background to a professor,
he asked me whether I felt that SVS had something to do with my success.
Although there is some sense in which I feel that Ive succeeded insofar as Im doing what I love to do, working with the labor
movement and doing research on working conditions the professor clearly wanted to know how I, a failing
high school student, had turned myself around, climbed an occupational ladder, and made may way towards a
professional middle-class career. He
could have asked me instead what role I felt SVS played in preventing me from
failing, again. The question grated
like sandpaper. Ive never felt that I am a success as
an academic in any way that I would not have been in a working class job, or
that I am any more successful
than my friends from high school who have not completed college degrees.
I
could never have come to academics through such a value orientation as the one
embodied in my professors well-meaning statement. Indeed, I was a failure at becoming this sort of an
academic, as are so many failing
students who buck under the weight of condescension heaped upon their families
and communities, and who snub academic imperatives as an imperious waste of
time. I have the utmost respect for
such gestures, and nothing but disgust with the working conditions one often
must labor under in maintaining ones
integrity in this way: working-class and minority identities are maintained at
a high cost in this country.[29] And yet, I found myself able to approach
academics at SVS without sacrificing many of the values and commitments that
had set academic knowledge beyond the community to which I belonged and who
shared my values. I distinctly remember
rediscovering many of the books I had refused to read while in high
school, or had read as little of as was conceivably possible. I deplored these artifacts of academic
expectation at my previous school, but the reason I hated them was because they
constituted the primary battleground of a struggle over who would control my
own activities, and whose value system would prevail (although the outcome was
not much in doubt). To read those books
or to enjoy them would be to capitulate.
I rediscovered academics in a context where intellectual study had been
disentangled from any system of control over my activities justified on the
basis of my youth. I had no more
obligation to engage with these texts at SVS than I did with video games or
basket-weaving.
I
would not suggest that democratic schooling is a road through which working
class kids can somehow be reintegrated into an academic paradigm, or catapulted
into middle-class trajectories.
Although SVS publications have not that I am aware of explored the relationship
between graduates class background and subsequent employment patterns,
I strongly suspect that the occupational diversity of graduates reflects the
class diversity of its entering students.
In other words, SVS is not likely an engine for either systematic upward
or downward mobility, and class reproduction does happen even without
formal schooling. SVS graduates whose
interviews I have read, and certainly those with whom Ive spoken, learn extraordinarily different lessons
from their SVS experience depending on what sort of jobs they move into. This gives us a glimpse into how
reproduction functions within a democratic school; a process whereby students
from different backgrounds experience the school as playing dramatically
different roles in their lives. One SVS
graduate who went on to own his own small business comments that, of the
important things he learned from the experience of democracy in the [SVS] School Meeting, one is that:
everythings going
to run itself fairly reasonably with or without your presence. Once you have a
fundamental trust in the reasonableness of the society youre in, you dont have to attend to every detail I have a certain faith in the government, in the
country, in the overall will of the American people. I can pretty much sleep easy... So I dont find myself super politically involved. I find myself the opposite. I find myself
realizing that democracy guarantees me a certain reasonableness in society and
that I dont have to worry about that aspect of my life.[30]
This
former student comments that this justifies, for him, the low voter turnout in
U.S. elections. A number of graduates
who went on to entrepreneurial careers refer to their experience at SVS in
controlling their own education, directing their own activities, and pursuing
individually articulated goals as formative.
In stark contrast, I know that a number of us have gone on to become
involved with community and labor organizing, or other movement activities,
taking our SVS backgrounds as training grounds in collective action and community
mobilization. Similarly, as an SVS
graduate I found myself more emboldened to make claims on the rights of
communities political, regional, or work communities to participate in their own governing structures.[31] Drawing these lessons from SVS would
probably seem as absurd to future entrepreneurs as their drawing lessons about
individualist competition and political disengagement seem to me. There is, in short, a very different system
of class reproduction at work at SVS
involving probably an interaction between ones family and cultural background with how one uses ones time at school, and leverages this experience in the
labor market after graduation.
So
what is different, then? There are at
least two crucial differences in how class reproduction is experienced at SVS,
both of them closely intertwined.
Perhaps most importantly, students at SVS graduate into working-class jobs without the status markings
of poor performance, and with the full support of their community. Social conflict within SVS does not play the
systematic role that it does in traditional schools of buttressing a particular
value system or achievement paradigm.[32] School failure is not a meaningful category at SVS, and my own
experience has been that staff members measure the success of
the school more by the happiness or self-satisfaction of its students and
graduates than by any occupational or income-oriented criteria.
Secondly, those who do go on
from SVS to become academics, or who pursue a college degree for middle-class
work, do not achieve
their academic careers, but rather choose them. By this I dont mean that going on to higher education is an arbitrary or totally
free choice: family background at least will play an important role in shaping
the desirability of such choices. What
I mean is that academic work at SVS isnt
supported by an achievement ideology, or by competitive, disciplinary
achievement regimes at the school level.
No one pursuing academics at SVS will feel exceptionally productive or
successful relative to those who do not.
Academic knowledge has become
so deeply embedded in traditional school institutions that it is almost
difficult to think of what academic study might look like without competitive
grading, hierarchies of student advancement (freshmen, sophomores, and so on),
and teacher-student relationships. The
very term discipline,
used to organize different fields of academic pursuit, hails from the vertical
relationships between master and disciple (as in the verb, to discipline). It is the chance of joining an academic
community that draws many SVS students into college[33]
settings, but the type of community we actually find is riven by layers of
control and coercion both between and among students and faculty layers so minute as to lay shame even to military
hierarchies. It is tempting to cut and
run with the observation that academic politics are so bitter because the
stakes are so low (A quote I have seen attributed to Winston Churchill, Wallace
Sayre, and Henry Kissinger). But can we
extract the idea of an academic community from the historically specific
institutions that have housed them?
What would a democratic academic community look like? My time at SVS tells me that democratic
schooling transforms not only the experience of students who might have failed in traditional
schools, but also the nature and social role of intellectual study for those who follow an academic course. I generally agree that school reform or
greater access to education is not a means by which inequality or poverty can
be significantly affected.[34] But in a society in which working-class work
does not earn one dignity or respect, and in which academics plays a privileged
role in defining class boundaries and policing their boundaries, I cannot help
but see democratic schooling as a possible means of liberating academics from
its shamefully undemocratic social life in traditional schools of all sorts,
and as a way of freeing working-class people from the libel of social failure.
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3. A very partial reference list: Anyon 1981;
Dei, Mazzuca, McIsaac, and Zine 1997; Fine 1991; Fordham 1999; London 1978;
MacLeod 1987; McRobbie 1978; Solomon 1992; Weis 1983 and 1985; and Willis 1977.
4. This is in particular something that some
researchers have argued differentiates black and white student counter cultures
(Weis 1983 and 1985; and in a different sense Solomon 1992).
5. For examples of students thus pulled in two
directions, see London 1978; Weis 1985; and Solomon 1992.
20. For example, Willis 1977, chpt. 4; MacLeod
chpt. 5. Reading through the accounts of blue-collar and service workers in
Studs Terkels book Working, on the heals of reading
ethnographies of student resistance, frames the truly remarkable similarities
(Terkel 1974).
21. These two intersect, of course, in the
category of youth work. I would refer the reader to Stuart Tannocks fantastic treatment of the constitution of youth in service
industry stopgap jobs (Tannock 2001, Chpt. 4).
25. For such defenses of SVS graduates
record, see in particular Gray and Chanoff 1986 and Greenberg and Sadofsky
1992.
26. From tallying tables on Greenberg and
Sadofsky 1992, pp. 29-31, 71-73, 113-117.
A number of reported occupational categories are left out of my list.
27. Take Apple 1996 and 2000; Darder ed. 2002;
Giroux 1983 and 1993; Henricksen and Morgan eds. 1990; Kanpol 1994; Leistyna
ed. 1995; McLaren 1995 and 1998; Shor 1992; and Trifonas ed. 2000.
29. There is sometimes criticism of resistance
theory authors that they glorify student resistance and the consequences of
school failure. There is no question,
as a growing literature in working-class studies have shown (including but
extending well beyond working-class students), that working-class people often
shun class mobility. Treating this as a
meaningful social norm that fills an important function in working-class
communities that is, not treating it as a mistake or
a case of poor judgment on the part of individuals does not amount to glorifying the conditions
of working-class life, I dont believe.
31. See ibid., p. 75 for students comments regarding entrepreneurialism and p. 41 for
those who became politically active.
33. One SVS graduate who became a professor of
mathematics said I felt it was something that would be really different
from Sudbury Valley in the sense that instead of being one person interested in
something I figured that there would be lots of other people
around who were interested in it too.
There would be lots of people to talk to. (Greenberg and Sadofsky 1992, p. 51.)