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Landover Job Corps Center / 171 yet an even more pervasive dimension of passivity prevails in this privatized school where the vast majority of Landover’s youth in their daily life at the center face the void. Conclusion: The Veil of Ennui Oh, the shame I feel inside for being a taxpayer in a country that allows companies to use and abuse government programs, misleading and abusing our children, and profiting from their misfortune of having been born lower class. I would like to say that in all the time I have spent as a residential advisor not a day passed without me asking myself this question: “Does the Job Corps program really work?” —Alfred Richards, Over a Million Kids Sold—On What? The Job Corps Story Don’t try to make this a building; it’s a basement. It’s a foundation from which you might try to find different types of gainful employment. —Electrical vocational instructor to his students Student 1: So, what do you think of [Landover] Job Corps Center correctional facility? Student 2: It’s like a jail. Student 3: You might as well connect us with chains. In the educational institutions of the middle and upper classes, students are encouraged to relate their academic work to the world around them. They have a sense that there is an established stage on which they will successfully perform as they enter the world. They often are encouraged to believe they are “gifted” and have the potential to take charge of the world. While students hold differing views of their access to such possibilities or even feel alienated by the presumption that they should want worldly success, children of the middle and upper classes are surrounded by messages that their happiness is only as limited as their vision and ambition. For Job Corps students, their sense of alienation stems from immersion in institutions that define their world as a harsh and limited place where survival must be greedily protected.29 While the degree to which this Darwinian sense of struggle permeates Job Corps students’ lives varies, theirs are often worlds of painful strife. For having already encountered varieties of schools, welfare agencies, juvenile incarceration bureaucracies, and other institutions that process lower-class youth, they know what institutional dependency and submission mean. They have been continually exposed to a psychology of limitations and a litany of humiliation rituals that Landover all too often sustains—an experience of continuous uncertainty and endless waiting. 172 / Part III While life at Landover is occasionally punctuated by emergencies or riots, it is more often characterized by long periods of boredom. In hotel/motel vocational training, students sit at desks for months operating under the institutional assumption that they are working at their own pace on material on which at some point they will be tested. They shift in their seats, pass notes, read comic books, whisper, eat, sleep—anything to get through the day. One teacher explains that Landover classes do not function traditionally with a teacher giving a central lesson because students in the same class are at different levels and new students continually arrive. This laissez-faire system allows students within the social-ecological restrictions of the classroom to continually distance themselves from the Landover curriculum and exercise their options. Students mostly bide their time, waiting for the next crisis to explode or the next opportunity to switch vocations or get a bathroom pass. Though the staff claim that they are overworked and underpaid, the students are nevertheless left stranded on their own to stay out of trouble and present the appearance of striving toward “certification” in whatever vocation they have chosen to study. The consequence of this noninterventionist pedagogical policy is that students develop their youth culture in the classroom stymied by directionless concentration, pressed together in seemingly purposeless activity to fill time. In nursing class, this atmosphere prevails with students in various states of disconnection from their studies; many complain their progress is stymied by the faculty’s lack of attention. During two weeks of observation, two substitute teachers run the nursing class. Students say this creates a directionless feeling in class. The first substitute assures one of the authors that the class is not usually so disjointed. The second substitute seems disconnected, lost, and keeps repeating within earshot of the students that he feels students need to be more mature for a place like this to succeed. One dissatisfied student explains, “I’ve been in it for six months...

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