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12. CLASS—DÉCLASSÉ
- State University of New York Press
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12 CLASS—DÉCLASSÉ George W. Noblit This book is devoted to a rethinking of social class in education. The other authors offer perspectives on how social class is useful, and in what ways, for understanding how education works to produce a stratified population both within schools and in the wider society. As coeditor of this volume, I have read and reread these pieces many times and find them all compelling if in rather different ways. Yet when the authors of the chapters in this volume began this discussion several years ago, we were compelled by how the new understandings of race and gender made social class (of the trilogy : race, class, and gender) seem, well, déclassé. Neither academics nor those they studied were using it as an analytic category. In part, this is because the concept of social class had been captured twice: once by Karl Marx and once by status attainment studies (Aronowitz, 2003). It remained central in neo-Marxist critical theories if only to be challenged by feminist and critical race theories. Social class also remained embedded in the abstracted empiricism of status attainment studies (Karabel and Halsey, 1977). Creating a conception of class that might reengage both social science and public discourse meant that we, as authors, had to do so in the context of these competing conceptions of class. Nevertheless, we realized that we had to also imagine beyond these existing formulations of class if we were to address the failure of class: . . . class is a largely absent category in American public, private or scholarly discourse. Its elision is due in part to the lingering legacy of the Red Menace, Marx and the Evil Empire, but also to shared beliefs that (almost) everyone is “middle class” and only a residual category of nonpersons qualify as the “underclass.” Class in the American context is seen primarily as the product and consequence of individual enterprise 313 rather than that of a complexly configured historical, social and political economic location. The lack of class analysis also is attributed to American “exceptionalism” as defined by the absence of a strong labour movement or socialist party. . . . (Ferguson and Golding, 1997, p. xvi) Class analysis also has had its problems in England as well. As Margaret Somers (1997, pp. 73–74) writes: Was there a class struggle in the industrial revolution? The questions remain unresolved. . . . Indeed “why the peculiarities of the English?” has been an intellectual complaint since the birth of the theory of class. Paradoxically , however, the yardstick used to measure the English working class and find it “peculiar” was constructed by classical sociological conceptions of class formation for which English working people served as the putative historical model. Surely something is amiss when the original historical actors whose lives were appropriated for a theoretical schema of class formation are subsequently judged deviant by that same theory. Regardless of the interpretive and theoretical problems with class, many theorists, including ourselves, realize that social class affected our lives. At one point, theorists collectively reasserted the race, class, and gender trilogy with the clumsy phrase: the nonsynchronist parallelist position (McCarthey and Apple, 1988). This assertion was to signal the move away from the sense that class was the ultimate category, that all difference was reducible, in some senses, to an economically structured stratification. In this phrase we wished to signal that class continued to work both analytically and in the lives of people, but also to signal the lesson from critical race and feminist studies, that race and gender could not be reduced to social class analytically. Each contributed something unique and all worked together to mark and construct status and relative power in the United States. Ultimately, however, this reassertion of the trilogy was unsatisfactory because it did not reinvigorate the conception of social class. Something was terribly wrong with how we thought about social class and many began working on rethinking the concept (i.e., Aronowitz, 2003; Hall, 1997. Mahony and Zmroczek, 1997. Walkerdine , 1990; Wright, 1987). Patrick Joyce (1997, p. xi) in his forward to the Hall volume argued that the collections of essays “. . . resuscitates a concept that was almost dead.” While this is surely hyperbole, it does demonstrate that there is much to be done. Perhaps more dramatically, Stanley Aronowitz (2003, p. 1) describes the response to his recent work: When I tell friends that I have written a book on class, especially class in the United States, the news is received with either incredulity or cheer314...