Mechanisms of Discipline in a 21st-Century Caste Education System

• In Event: 60.042 - W. E. B. Du Bois and Caste Education: Racial Capitalist Schooling and Caste Formation From Jim Crow to Neoliberal Reconstruction

Abstract

W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most influential thinkers in educational theory, is unfortunately largely ignored in discussions on how compulsory schooling continues to produce racial and economic inequality in society. Du Bois’s (1935; 1999) extensive work on education charts the development of Black schooling in the US and shows how it serves a particular purpose within the United State’s larger economic system. In particular, he provides meaningful critiques of how schooling functions as a tool to maintain the caste system within the US. According to Du Bois, one’s race/class becomes critically defining signifiers that determine the type of education students receive. The purpose of this paper is to use the work of W.E.B. Du Bois on caste formation to examine how technologies of discipline today are used to maintain what he as called caste education within the compulsory schooling of the U.S. Du Bois used mixed methods to prove the existence of a caste education system through a charting of the amount of funding that goes into black schools, who funds these schools, what purpose these schools serve for black bodies, what type of curriculum students of color are exposed to, and what type of labor these students are being prepared. For Du Bois, schooling was not the ultimate equalizer in US society but rather was designed to maintain a racial and class hierarchy in the US.

Fast-forward to today and we find clear connections and elements of a caste education system still functioning within compulsory schooling in the US. In our current neo-liberal colorblind society a key technology maintaining caste education has been policies that establish hyper-disciplining mechanisms that monitor, track, and demarcate students of color. I use a historical materialist approach grounded in policy analysis to uncover how discipline policies over the past 30 years have been created to intentionally target students of color to maintain a historical caste education system. Out of these hyper-disciplining mechanisms, punishment is unevenly distributed within schooling based on race/class.

Evidence of current examples of caste formation in schools is provided through not only the uneven distribution of punishment but also how school handbooks at title-1 urban schools frame students. Furthermore, my analysis of title-1 school handbooks and zero tolerance policies show how discipline is understood at the ground level and shapes how educators function around the idea of “safety” which has become a racially loaded term that hides how caste education functions today. The significance of this project is in how it reframes the reactionary policies of zero-tolerance and forces us to rethink these practices not as unintentional outcomes of school “safety” but rather place them in a historical conversation with caste education in the US.

Author

• Robert Unzueta, University of Utah