Summary Of Social Class And The Hidden Curriculum Of Work By Jean Anyon

Within her essay, “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, Jean Anyon observes how the school systems are organized by the capital of it’s social classes, a hierarchy of industry. Subsequently, guiding Anyon to categorize her observations into four distinctive types of schools; working-class, middle-class, affluent professional, and executive elite. Each one, having a set of intricately lined methods as is to how their facilitators are to channel student’s cognition in regards to the perceptions of the manufactures. Subsequently, leading Anyon to conceive that the instutions amongst the social classes is economically selective about whom, and what, an individual will become. They divide them into colonies; spaces where obedience fuels control, and the limitations of a social class

are counted out in dead presidents.

Work has an agenda, it is automated, and associates routine actions with limited options. The laws of industry mark these as accomplishments for students; obey the laws.

In kind, Anyon would detail, “- work is following the steps of procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. Most of the rules regarding work are designations of what the children are to do; the rules are steps to follow” (173). Hence, the mechanics of order ignites no emotions within students by labeling what section of industry a student is capable of achieving, and to what principles their pursuit abides by. Yet, the capital of a social class influences how industry contains a single reflection, one that depicts the ideas of a relevant system within a guarded program. As Anyon reveals, “Work involves individual thought and expressiveness, expansion, and illustration of ideas, and choice of appropriate method and material” (179). Thus, industry models it’s standards in accordance to the capital of social classes. An individual’s value is then expanded, they are permitted to acknowledge critical thought. Industry has modified education to reflect the different levels of social class. Consequently, specific connections are associated with the actions of students as it pertains to

their placement within industry. In turn, Anyon establishes that, “Differing curricular, pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices emphasize different cognitive and behavioral skills in each social setting and thus contribute to the development in the children of certain potential relationships to physical and symbolic capital, to authority, and to be process of work” (184). Ergo, schools are factories patterned after the financial force of a social class. Facilities that estimate an individual by the values she/he embodies within the power of manufacturing. A worker’s skills are valued as that of a student’s knowledge, and those values are supplied by a wealth. The premium price of whom will become the inhabitants of a social-class, a mechanics of industry that has become the wheels of education; a perpetually grinding machine.