Education researchers continue to cite Bernstein's 'Education cannot compensate for society', while Bernstein's own focus on 'in-school processes' was echoed by Michael Gove's insistence that there are 'no excuses' for low working-class achievement in schools. Bernstein's ideas illuminate the relationship, within education policy, of…

"Welcoming Blue-Collar Scholars Into the Ivory Tower" is the first volume in a new book series designed to explore how institutional policies, practices, and cultures shape learning, development, and success for students who have been historically underserved or given limited consideration in the design of higher education contexts.…

This essay considers the intellectual engagement of rural people in the context of their schooling. It argues that rural schooling shares the miseducative purposes common to American schooling in general (i.e., purposes associated with sustaining American global economic dominion). It frames rurally appropriate education as an on-the-ground…

The goal of this paper is to understand, by way of a life history of one low-income working-class youth, how globalization impacts the working class in a developing nation. The concept of globalization and the method of life history seem diametrically opposed. Globalization is an idea about large social forces that impact the economic and material…

This paper examines the inexorable rise of "health" as regulative discourse, highlighting its class and cultural dimensions. With reference to the policy content of recent obesity reports, analysis suggests that contemporary concerns around obesity are but a modern variant of earlier eighteenth and nineteenth century child saving crusades whose…

Public higher education has undergone a process similar to that in the national polity: a one-sided struggle by those with power to shape the institution to be more market driven, more focused on what will generate (non-state) revenues, more dominated by top administrators, and less concerned about the working class and people of color. This…

Children of 10-11 years of age were interviewed while undertaking a range of mathematic problems, most of which embedded mathematical operations in textually represented realistic settings. One problem, concerning a lift moving people in the morning rush, comprised a division-with-remainder problem in which children are required, conventionally,…

Students at Elmont Memorial Junior/Senior High School in a working class neighborhood of Nassau County, Long Island, can count on graduating on time with their friends and going on to college. So can students at the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem. Students at both schools take the PSAT early and often, visit colleges each year, take Advanced…

This paper draws on in-depth interviews with five working class women who work/have worked as schoolteachers in inner city settings. The paper explores their subjective and continuing engagement with their class origins--their footprints in their past--as well as the way in which social class is implicated in their professional contemporary…

This book describes the classrooms and homes of working class children struggling not only to learn to read but also to deal with the kind of subjectivity that literacy simultaneously holds out to and refuses them. One theme threaded throughout the book concerns the ways in which students' engagements with literacies are connected with their own…

Smoking among students in a suburban high school appears to be part of a complex, symbolic process that is associated with a system of social differentiation between working class and middle class students. To be effective, anti-smoking programs should consider the social dynamics of smoking. (Author/MJL)

Discusses the origins of university adult education and the motives of the Oxford and Cambridge teachers who organized and taught the first classes. Surveys the history of university adult education by examining four phases, each associated with a particular form of political commitment. (CMK)

In summarizing earlier arguments for privileging a class perspective on adult education, this chapter considers that perspective's practical relevance and suggests resources for further reading.

Explores the many roles that the theater played within the settlement houses in Toronto (Canada) from 1910 to 1930. Demonstrates that settlement workers in Toronto attempted to use the power of the theater to influence, inspire, and inform both their clientele and the broader community. (CMK)

Social class has strongly influenced the development of social policies about adult education. Present policy discourses are a result of weakening working-class interests.