Education is a social movement rather than a social class characteristic that inevitably replicates the prior generation.
There was a theory bandied about for many a year to explain why the social classes replicate themselves rather than are like a lottery whereby children all who went to school chose their situations and developed their abilities each on their own. In fact, the children of a social class emerged as the social class of their parents, the exception being ethnic groups where when introduced to the American mix rose to the level they might and then afterwards replicated themselves. Immigration push gets you just so far. The theory was that of “material culture”, which meant that the social classes had differential opportunities to get the material resources and opportunities to hone their minds. That included buying mobiles to hang over cribs so that the ever changing shapes intrigued the babies, or buying books and magazines and going to cultural activities or getting the experiences of having gone to summer camp. The more your family bought stimulation, the more you grew intellectually. I was dubious about this theory because even if I noticed that Teddy Kennedy showed up at the Met to hear “La Boheme”, as I once saw him do, I didn’t think he was particularly intellectual, just a politician, however good and celebrated he was. He was just doing the culture his social class did, and the dances done by the rich to the music of Lester Lanin were the same popular ones that existed throughout a teenage cohort, but never mind.
There were other explanations for class replication. The most usual was that more money was spent on the schools of the rich than of the poor, which was so, and that is the explanation Liberals still prefer because it offers a quick fix, but a lot of school budgets are devoted to things like ball fields and team sports and fancy auditoriums and building accouterments rather than to learning which, while these pleasant surroundings provide the school experience, they do not add to learning. I remember the movie starring Molly Ringwald which was about a teenage girl who was sent to morning detention for some infraction to a well stocked and well appointed high school library and I thought her spoiled because the elite high school I had gone to was dilapidated. Another explanation was that poor kids were unruly or didn’t care about learning because they were not culturally encouraged to do so and because by the time they were three years old had been exposed to hundreds of thousands fewer words than those of middle class or upper class children, and that may be so, especially if you consider less the number of words than the tone of them, which might be to convey anger rather than information, and so the children became, early on, less adept at learning. So that explanation was more or less just “cultural” without the modifier of “material”.
A clever way of summarizing a theory of replication was that lower class students wanted their parents to make their kids orderly so that they could manage to hold a job, that middle class parents wanted the schools of their children to be disciplined so that the children could manage routine work, up to and including being an accountant, while professional parents wanted their children to be creative and think for themselves because that is what doctors and lawyers had to do. The problem was that “creativity” is an easy enough term to enter the prospectus of a school and that getting into medical school meant learning the grind of mastering organic chemistry rather than being creative, doctors lamenting that new doctors had no gift for diagnosis. Why should they? That was not what they were selected for.
I consult my own life to see how to sort these matters out. My parents had little education. They did not talk about politics or literature around the dinner table while my own children had been exposed to both from early ages and were showered with words by both their parents. Maybe I got my relative smarts because of the inbreeding of my parents. But there seems to be something more. My father was studious even if uneducated and my mother was verbally acute and both wanted me to succeed and material culture was readily available in radio and movies and then in television and newspapers and ever since the fourth grade, every year my Bronx public school took my class to an excursion to the Museum of Natural History where I liked the dioramas and the whale hanging from the ceiling, and scared by the paintings on the wall of the pterodactyls rooked throughout high rocks and giving me a sense of an eerie world without people, forever too primitive to contemplate for very long. I preferred the exhibits that showed the Hudson Valley, first as the forest primeval, then as all cut down and abundant with its harvests, and then, after that, the emergence of the second growth that still then obtained until in my lifetime it was inundated but not completely triumphant with urban sprawl and housing developments. You can learn if you are already prepared to learn, which begs the question of what makes the cycle of ability and learning enhancing one another start. Biology? Prenatal care? These may also be quick fixes, but maybe true.
My parents had ever since I could remember a glassed in bookcase below which were drawers. It was a furniture piece and I never saw them to consult the books in them. Maybe they were sold by door to door salesmen who convinced my parents that these were the books people should have. Included was Dr. Morris Fishbein’s “Home Medical Advisor” where I read about the anatomy of reproduction which I felt was very informative and bereft of any emotional baggage which at my age was fine with me. A lot of people were enlightened by similar books and so I thought it proper that my son had sex education in elementary school. He found the plumbing fascinating. There was also a ten volume encyclopedia which I found so badly written that I could not go on consulting it And there were some novels, I think left there by my Aunt Esther, including Harold Fast’s “Freedom Road”, about an ex-slave during Reconstruction, but I didn’t read that though when I started going regularly to the library I read a lot of Howard Fast. He was so patriotic, emphasizing that the spirit of America was liberty and equality, ideas to which I still subscribe. I later found out that Fast was a Communist and a regular contributor to “The Daily Worker”.
There were other objects of material culture. People had coffee table books of one of the Life Magazine series of a photographic history of World War II and I read them there. As soon as my allowance managed it, I subscribed to Look Magazine, the cheap version of Life, full of pictures and news coverage. I soon afterwards got a subscription to Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post and read Max Lerner and Murray Kempton and kept up with McCarthy shenanigans. The only magazine my father brought in was the Reader’s Digest and I got a taste for short non fiction. In the tenth grade I cribbed a report on Uganda, a very underdeveloped nation, from that and the teacher thought I portrayed Uganda as so optimistic about its future. Well, that was the Reader’s Digest talking.
When I got to public elementary school, which is a collectively purchased rather than an individually purchased cultural service, I really loved it. Maybe it was because I picked up reading quickly and shined, my first grade teacher shifted seats on the basis of having been fastest in completing the weekly reading exam and I was always ranked first or second. Maybe it was because the teachers were calm and rational while my parents were always screaming at one another. Maybe because my fourth grade teacher carried a folded New York Times under her arm when she came to school. I don’t know if she ever read it, but it struck me as what an accomplished person did. She played the piano at the school play she produced and I played the sandman in Humperdinks’ musical version of “Hansel and Gretel”. Those things mean a lot. They were quite cultural while age appropriate. Mrs. Golden also had me write plays that she showed off years later when a cousin of mine was in her class as the way to do things. She introduced to me how to read maps, not just world or United States ones, but also of the five boroughs. She had also vacationed with her husband in far off Acapulco, Mexico. I did not know it was a resort community for visiting Americans. I would have been impressed anyway. This was before Las Vegas and it was farther away than Miami.
Mrs. Golden was my teacher in the fourth and fifth grade and many of our students including myself were deeply disappointed to be assigned to Mr. Weiss’ sixth grade class. He was the only male teacher in the elementary school and his bad reputation was amply justified. He explained nothing. He would assign on the blackboard in the morning the pages to be read and the exercises to be done and did the same when the afternoon session commenced. People did their work at their own pace. I graded the next day after his daily quizzes. I thought him a poor teacher but it was a great boon to me. I finished the morning session in an hour and the afternoon one on half that, which meant I had time to read books I had taken from the public library. Every Friday afternoon after school I would bring back a shopping bag filled with books, return them, and fill the bag with books for another week. Under Mr. Weiss’ lack of auspices, I read books on the Harlem Renaissance, including Paul Laurerence Dunbar, how cleverly he spelled Negro dialect words, and down to Langston Hughes, and also the volumes in paperback distributed by the New York City Board of Education, including “Tom Sawyer” and “Le Morte de Arthur”. I was on my own to proceed as I cared to, but it was largely without science and the math was not challenging. I remain uncertain of whether theMrs. Golden or Mr. Weiss was the better teacher, either for me or for most of the class, where the methodical application of a workload in Mr. Weiss’ class might engrain students to the idea that cumulative assiduous work paid off. Education may more be about students taking advantage of the opportunity rather than the method the teacher uses.
My father had brought me at an early age to get a library card, though there were any number of people who found their way there to this other collective purchase of a cultural service. The library branch was a two story brick and stone freestanding structure where the top storey was the children’s part with sun through the large windows. It was a very inviting place. I borrowed and read through Harry Altschuler’s series on the French and Indian Wars and then his series on the Civil War. I can still remember young men still in their teens tramping through the Appalachians to go to a place that was historically important in that first series and reading of how, in the second aeries, Stonewall Jackson marched back and forth to combat with Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah, Jackson able to move his troops much more quickly than his opponents. I also read Thomas Costain’s “The Black Rose” about an English girl kidnapped by the Turks, I loved war and adventure and shied away, as all boys did, from Clara Barton or Nancy Drew and still find “Little Women'' insufferable, though my granddaughter says girls still find it liberating, while that book to me wasn’t enough about the Civil War. I tried to read my way through the alphabet but was still on “B” when it was time to graduate to the adult library downstairs.
The main library held a number of cases that included books in French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Hebrew and also a room with plenty of newspapers and periodicals to peruse, and also there were the main stacks. The philosophy books were low down under the Dewey Decimal System and seemed to include in a number of branch libraries Schopenhauer and Willliam James, but also nearby were books on religion. I also read Thomas Wolfe and Stephan Vincent Benet and the periodicals room included newspapers and magazines and an old New Yorker that included Hersey’s “Hiroshima”. I also, all the way through college liked to read New Yorker ads so as to see how swanky people lived. New Yorker type people were sophisticated because if the world was coming to an end, I thought, they would have prepared a new batch of martinis. I still think that if given a choice, the government should cut down on money for schools rather than cut funds for the library because people who go to libraries are only getting what they want while schools do a lot of things just to be sure that the students will come and be reasonably docile.
It should be added that libraries are a very effective and efficient way of delivering cultural capital. Libraries are places where, generally, people want to go to make use of cultural capital. The people who go there are self motivated so as to read newspapers and borrow books. Schools, on the other hand, require considerable expenses to attract people to attend them. They have to provide proms and football teams so they will attend and may resist what is offered in classrooms. I would cut funding from schools before I cut funding from libraries.
The Bronx was to me a cultural wasteland because, I discovered, there was only one small bookshop I could find. It was on the Grand Concourse and only sold best sellers. There was also the Fordham University bookstore and I went there and I also went to the Bronx Research Library, more extensive than the local branches. But the great cultural resource to me and many others were the movies. They were everywhere, with giant chains like Loew’s that had first, second and third run palaces, which showed MGM movies while the Skouras chain did RKO and independent theaters that showed what it could after the chains had done their runs. You could just look in the newspapers and see how far along a run was and check the times. Louis B. Mayer was a great movie mogul who was awful to women but had great aesthetic taste. He saw the American people through the Second World War and for a few decades afterwards. There were Bette Davis and Jane Wyman melodramas and westerns and war movies, culminating in “The Best Years of their Lives”, which went over the adjustment to civilian life after the war ended, and topical movies like “Gentleman’s Agreement”, which was about antisemitism, and “Pinkie” about a Black girl who could pass as white in the segregated South and the problems of young coeds in “Protect Your Darling Daughters”. Gangster movies showed what working class people who became tough guys were like, some crazed, like “Scarface”, and some entrepreneurial, as in “Little Caesar” and, much later, in “The Godfather”. Everyone who went to movies had a common curriculum and got an education. I think that their decline of movie quality wasn’t the invention of streaming whereby it seems every project is greenlighted because Mayer is no longer available to oversee the entire process, but because since about 2000 movies don’t do wars and other current events. People used to keep up. Movies were part of the cultural capital most people were very happy to purchase even if they would avoid the museums that were free.
So there is a problem. Maybe some people do not avail themselves of the abundant cultural capital that is available and that is why the social classes replicate themselves or maybe it is that the social classes do not always replicate themselves but rather rising ethnic groups like Hispanics and Appalachian whites are, in fact, raising their social class, as did J. C. Vance, even if within the parameters of social classes generated by the occupations to which they rise. That is because the major forms of cultural capital are available in the collective purchase of schools, libraries and settlement houses. America and education are not keeping people down. Education is not a way to repeat what was the case impervious generations but is a social movement, though not thought it as a political one, that occurs when a cohort of people take on a common ambition to do something different to raise themselves just as happened when mostly middle class women in the Fifties and Sixties decided, as I have described, to get professional educations even though they had largely not done so before.
Annette Lareau, the author of the well known “Unequal Childhoods”, who is a prominent scholar of the replication theory, does not consider the replication to be functional, whereby children get the kind of education which each of the social classes need so as to fit into their adult jobs, as I suggested before when outlining it, but treats differential patterns of educating children across the social classes as a cultural matter, and so some groups can decide to care about education when they had previously thought the struggle of education as an unnecessary burden, burden it certainly can be. In education, the Jews at the turn of the twentieth century filled the libraries of the Lower East Side in New York City and in the past few generations Asian children assiduously engaged in education, even their parents spending their hardwon income on cram courses so as to enter elite high school and collegiate institutions. The same has happened for a part of the black community that has produced lawyers and doctors and cabinet officials, though underclass black children have not done that, perhaps because the quality of the schools are so poor or because those children are already behind the educational preparation for success by the time they enter school. In all of these cases, education is seen as an ethnic choice, and so people can be blamed for not partaking in it in that education is a matter of history rather than inevitable social processes.