Lies My Teacher Told Me (30 page)

social class played a major role in determining who fought in the Vietnam War: sons of the
affluent won educational and medical deferments through most of the conflict.13 Textbooks and teachers ignore all this.

Teachers may avoid social class out of a laudable desire not to embarrass their charges.
If so, rheir concern is misguided. When my students from nonaffluent backgrounds learn
about the class system, they find the experience liberating. Once they see the social
processes that have helped keep their families poor, they can let go of their negative
self-image about being poor. If to understand is to pardon, for working-class children
to understand how stratification works is to pardon themselves and their families. Knowledge of the social-class system also reduces the tendency of
Americans from other social classes to blame the victim for being poor. Pedagogicslly,
stratification provides a gripping learning experience. Students are fascinated to
discover how the upper class wields disproportionate power relating to everything from
energy bills in Congress to zoning decisions in small towns.

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly
middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow
construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl
lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of
her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty?
Since history textbooks present the American past as 390 years of progress and portray
our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what
they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin
inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps,

Within the white working-class community the girl will probably find few
resources-teachers, church parishioners, family memberswho can tell her of heroes or
struggles among people of her background, for, except in pockets of continuing class
conflict, the working class usually forgets its own history. More than any other group,
white working-class students believe that they deserve their low status, A subculture of
shame results. This negative selfimage is foremost among what Richard Sennett and
Jonathan Cobb have called “the hidden injuries ofclass.” Several years ago, two students ofmine provided a demonstration: they drove around
Burlington, Vermont, in a big, nearly new, shiny black American car (probably a Lexus
would be more appropriate today) and then in a battered ten-year-old subcompact. In each
vehicle, when they reached a stoplight and it turned green, they waited until they were
honked at before driving on. Motorists averaged less than seven seconds to honk at them in the
subcompact, but in the luxury car the students enjoyed 13.2 seconds before anyone honked.
Besides providing a good reason to buy a luxury car, this experiment shows how Americans
unconsciously grant respect to the educated and successful. Since motorists of all social
stations honked at the subcompact more readily, working-class drivers were in a sense
disrespecting themselves while deferring to their betters. The biting quip “If you're so
smart, why aren't you rich?” conveys the injury done to the self-image of the poor when
the idea that America is a meritocracy goes unchallenged in school.

Part of the problem is that American history textbooks describe American education itself
as meritocratic. A huge body of research confirms that education is dominated by the class
structure and operates to replicate that structure in the next generation.20 Meanwhile, history textbooks blithely tell of such federal largesse to education as the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed under Pres. Lyndon Johnson. Not one
textbook offers any data on or analysis of inequality within educational institutions.
None mentions how school districts in low-income areas labor under financial constraints
so shocking that Jonathan Kozol calls them “savage inequalities.”21 No textbook ever suggests that students might research the history of their own school and
the population it serves. The only two textbooks that relate education to the class system
at all see it as a remedy! Schooling “was a key to upward mobility in postwar America,” in
the words of The Challenge ofFreedom The tendency ofteachers and textbooks to avoid social class as ifit were a dirty little secret only reinforces the reluctance of working-class families to talk about it. Paul Cowan has told of interviewing the children of Italian immigrant workers involved in the famous 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, mill strike. He spoke with the daughter of one of the Lawrence workers who testified at a Washington congressional hearing investigating the strike. The worker, Camella Teoli, then thirteen years old, had been scalped by a cotton-twisting machine just before the strike and had been hospitalized for several months. Her testimony “became front-page news all over America.” But Teoli's daughter, interviewed in 1976 after her mother's death, could not help Cowan. Her mother had told her nothing of the incident, nothine of her trip to Washington,

f &CQ nothing about her impact on America's conscienceeven though almost every day, the daughter
“had combed her mother's hair into a bun that disguised the bald spot.” A professional of working-class origin told me a similar story about being ashamed of
her uncle “for being a steelworker.” A certain defensiveness is built into working-class
culture; even its successful acts of working-class resislance, like the Lawrence strike, necessarily presuppose lower status and income, hence connote a
certain inferiority. If" the larger community is so good, as textbooks tell us it is, then celebrating or even passing on the memory of
conflict with it seems somehow disloyal.

Textbooks do present immigrant history. Around the turn of the century immigrants
dominated the American urban working class, even in cities as distant from seacoasts as
Des Moines and Louisville. When more than 70 percent ofthe white population was native
stock, less than 10 percent of the urban working class was.JJ But when textbooks tell the immigrant story, they emphasize Joseph Pulitzer, Andrew
Carnegie, and their ilkimmigrants who made supergood. Several textbooks apply the phrases rags to riches or land of opportunity to the immigrant experience. Such legendary successes were achieved, to be sure, but they
were the exceptions, not the rule. Ninety-five percent of the executives and financiers in
America around the turn of the century came from upper-class or upper-middle-class
backgrounds. Fewer than 3 percent sratted as poor immigrants or farm children.
Throughout the nineteenth century, just 2 percent of American industrialists came from
working-class origins." By concentrating on the inspiring exceptions, textbooks present
immigrant history as another heartening confirmation of America as the land of
unparalleled opportunity.

Again and again, textbooks emphasize how America has differed from Europe in having less
class stratification and more economic and social mobility. This is another aspect of the
archetype of American except!onalism: our society has been uniquely fair. Jt would never
occur to historians In, say, France or Australia, to claim that their society was
exceptionally equalitarian. Does this treatment of the United States prepare students
for reality? It certainly does not accurately describe our country today Social scientists
have on many occasions compared the degree of economic equality in the United State? with
that in other industrial nations. Depending on the measure used, the United States has
ranked sixth of six, seventh of seven, ninth of twelve, or fourteenth of fourteen." In
the United States the tichest fifth of the population earns eleven times as much income as
the poorest fifth, one of the highest ratios in the industrialized world: in Great
Britain the ratio is seven to one, in Japan just four to one.27 In Japan the avetage chief executive officer in an automobile-manufacturing firm makes 20
times as much as the average worker in an automobile assembly plant; in the United States
he (and it is not she) makes 192 times as much.28 The Jeffersonian conceit ofa nation ofindependent farmers and merchants is also long
gone: only one working American in thirteen is self-employed, compared to one in eight in
Western Europe.29 Thus not only do we have far fewer independent entrepreneurs compared to two hundred years ago, we have fewer compared to Europe today.

Since textbooks claim that colonial America was radically less stratified than Europe,
they should tell clieir readers when inequality set in. It surely was not a recent
development By 1910 the top 1 percent ofthe United States population received more than
a third of all personal income, while the bottom fifth got less than one-eighth.50 This level of inequality was on a par with that in Germany or Great Britain. If textbooks acknowledged inequality, then they could describe the changes in our class
structure over time, which would introduce their students to fascinating historical
debate,

For example, some historians argue that wealth in colonial society was more equally
distributed than it is today and that economic inequality increased during the presidency
of Andrew Jacksona period known, ironically, as the age ofthe common man. Others believe
that the flowering ofthe large corporation in the late nineteenth century made the class
structure more rigid. Walter Dean Burnham has argued that the Republican presidential
victory in 1896 (McKinley over Bryan) brought about a sweeping political realignment that
changed “a fairly democratic regime into a rather broadly based oligarchy,” so by the
1920s business controlled public policy.35 Clearly the gap between rich and poor, like the distance between blacks and whites, was
greater at the end of the Progressive Era in 1920 than at its beginning around 1890.H The story is not all one of increasing stratification, for between the depression and the
end of World War II income and wealth in America gradually became more equal.
Distributions of income then remained reasonably constant until President Reagan took
office in 1981, when inequality began to grow.1 Still other scholars think that little change has occurred since the Revolution. Lee
Sokow, for example, finds “surprising inequality of wealth and income” in America in
1798. At least for Boston, Stephan Thernstrom concludes that inequalities in life chances
owing to social class show an eerie continuity.36 All this is part of American history. But it is not part of American history as taught in
high school.

To social scientists, the level of inequality is a portentous thing to know about a
society. When we rank countries by this variable, we find Scandinavian nations at the top,
the most equal, and agricultural societies like Colombia and India near the bottom. The
policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations, which openly favored the rich, abetted a
secular trend already in motion, causing inequality to increase measurably between 1981
and 1992. For the United States to move perceptibly toward Colombia in social inequality
is a development of no small import." Surely high school students would be interested to learn that in 1950 physicians made two and s. half times what unionized industrial workers made but now make six times as much. Surely
they need to understand that top managers of clothing firms, who used to earn fifty times
what their American employees made, now make 1,500 times what their Malaysian workers
earn. Surely it is wrong for our history textbooks and teachers to withhold the historical
information that might prompt and inform discussion of these trends.

Why might they commit such a blunder? First and foremost, publisher censorship of textbook
authors. “You always run the risk, if you talk about social class, of being labeled
Marxist,” the editor for social studies and history 3t one of the biggest publishing
houses told me. This editor communicates the taboo, formally or subtly to every writer she
works with, and she implied that most other editors do too.

Publisher pressure derives in part from textbook adoption boards and committees in states
and school districts. These are subject in turn to pressure from organized groups and
individuals who appear before them. Perhaps the most robust such lobby is Educational
Research Analysts, led by Mel Gabler of Texas. Gabler's stable of right-wing critics
regards even alleging that a textbook contains some class analysis as a devastating
criticism. As one writer has put it, “Formulating issues in terms of class is
unacceptable, perhaps even un-American.” Fear of not winning adoption in Texas is a
prime source of publisher angst, and might help explain why Life and Liberty limits its social-class analysis to colonial times in England1. By contrast, “the colonies were places of great opportunity,” even back then. Some Texans
cannot easily be placated, however. Deborah L. Brezina, a Gabler ally, complained to the
Texas textbook board that Life and Liberty describes America “as an unjust society,” unfair to lower economic groups, and therefore
should not be approved.w Such pressure is hardly new. Harold Rugg's Introduction to Problem ofAmerican Culture and his popular history textbook, written during the depression, included some class
analysis. In the early 1940s, according to Frances FitzGerald, the National Association of
Manufacturers attacked Rugg's books, partly for this feature, and “brought to an end”
social and economic analysis in American history textbooks.

More often the influence of the upper class is less direct. The most potent rationale for
class privilege in American history has been Social Darwinism, an archetype that still has
great power in American culture. The notion that people rise and fall in a survival of the
fittest may not conform to the data on intergenerational mobility in the United States,
but that has hardly caused the archetype to fade away from American education,
particularly from American history classes. Facts that do not fit with the archetype, such as the entire literature of social
stratification, simply get left out.