This article discusses the extent to which middle-class Christians, many of whom were progressive liberals, involved themselves in the Moral Instruction League (MIL) to intervene in 'improving' the moral character of the English working class. It considers how they reconciled their motivations and underlying theology with secular goals that sought…

Kappan editor Rafael Heller interviews Annette Lareau about her research into different experiences of childhood and family life. In her observations of families of different social classes, she learned that upper-middle-class families approach parenting as an act of "concerted cultivation" requiring ongoing attention, making them more…

Much of the literature on social class and language study in schools argues that for middle-class parents and their children, languages are chosen for their capacity to offer forms of distinction that provide an edge in the global labour market. In this paper, we draw on data collected from interviews with parents and children in middle-class…

The author argues that the debate on declining social mobility has neglected the role of the examination and testing system. At all levels of education working class children are failing and middle class children achieving whatever ability levels are involved. The article focusses on the A-Level examination and the controversy over the way the…

This article presents Allan Ornstein's response to highly respected scholar, Bruce Cooper's review of Ornstein's 2007 book, "Class Counts: Education, Inequality and the Shrinking Middle Class." Here Ornstein attempts to elaborate on a few points that he felt Cooper missed in his review.

In this article, I argue for a closer read of the daily "class work" of teachers, as posited by Reay, 1998. In developing exploratory class portraits of four teachers who occupy distinctive social positions (two from working-class homes now teaching upper-middle-class children and two from upper-middle-class homes now teaching poor children), I…

In Central America the Cold War support of the elites by the United States was designed to ward off the communist threat. At the same time social and economic demands by the working and middle classes created revolutionary movements in the face of rigid and violent responses by Central American governments. Issues of social justice pervaded the…

In this article, the author reflects on his feelings as a working-class transplant into academic culture and the middle class. He draws on his feelings of alienation from the people who surround him and his observations of the cultural subordination necessary to succeed in the middle class world to explain his desire to do more to help other…

An attempt is made to opine on the vexation of class. Nick Tingle admired the article "Inventing the University" and found it vexing and used his vexation with inventing as a catalyst for rumination on his social trajectory, which is intimately related to his passage from the working to the middle class.

Introduces a special issue that is positioned against the backdrop of the current "boys in crisis" debate. It focuses on how the articles address embodied identities and material inequalities; social mobility and working class femininities; resisting individualism and rationality; power and responsibility; masculinity and the middle class; and…

In this paper, the author describes his own understanding of the process on how he moved from being a working-class boy who experienced school as a digression from his real interest--sports--to someone who had made education his life work. In particular, he describes his own changing gender, race, and class identity within the context of an…

Discusses the importance of teachers' awareness of students' backgrounds and cultures and cites research conducted in Great Britain by B. Tizard and M. Hughes and in the United States by S. Heath to support this belief. (DF)

Educated Black women are often wrongly viewed as a homogeneous group, obscuring important differences of social class. Black women of different social classes do not face the same route to college. Both race and class operate within urban settings to either create or limit the options and strategies available to Blacks for attaining educational…