The Enacted Curriculum: Teaching Self-Discipline to Promote Social Mobility

• In Event: 435 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 16. Schools, Social Class, and Educational Attainment

Abstract

Sociologists of education argue that schools reproduce social inequalities by reinforcing social class differences in children’s cultural skills. Through routine school structures and social interactions, schools implicitly teach conformity and submissiveness to working-class children, while encouraging middle-class children to assert themselves and negotiate with authority. In this paper, I argue that this hidden curriculum is no longer hidden—on the contrary, I argue that teachers in a high-achieving, urban school explicitly teach working-class students working-class skills as a pathway to college and the middle class. Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a no-excuses school, I show how teachers appropriate social science research to exert social control. In so doing, I identify a new, potentially more insidious form of cultural reproduction and reveal the unexpected ways in which social science research translates into everyday practice.

Author

• Joanne Wang Golann, Princeton University