Learning Privilege: Lessons of Power and Identity in Affluent Schooling

290 Pages·2007·2.92 MB·English

by  Adam Howard

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LEARNING
Privilege
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LEARNING
Privilege
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LESSONS OF POWER AND IDENTITY IN
AFFLUENT SCHOOLING
ADAM HOWARD
New York London
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Routledge Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
270 Madison Avenue 2 Park Square
New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon
Oxon OX14 4RN
© 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑96082‑3 (Softcover) 978‑0‑415‑96081‑6 (Hardcover)
No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming,
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the
publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data
Howard, Adam.
Learning privilege : lessons of power and identity in affluent schooling / Adam
Howard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978‑0‑415‑96081‑6 (hb) ‑‑ ISBN 978‑0‑415‑96082‑3 (pb) 1. Upper
class‑‑Education‑‑United States. 2. Children of the rich‑‑Education‑‑United States.
3. Social status‑‑United States. I. Title.
LC4941.H69 2008
371.96’20973‑‑dc22 2007009023
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
http://www.taylorandfrancis.com
and the Routledge Web site at
http://www.routledge.com
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For my sister, Dianna
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
1 Teaching the Affluent 1
2 Revisioning Privilege 15
3 In Pursuit of Excellence 33
4 College-Oriented Desires and Expectations 59
5 Trust 85
6 Honoring Traditions 111
7 Giving Back 141
8 Outsiders Within 171
9 Privileged Perceptions of the Subjugated Other 199
10 Interrupting Privilege 215
Notes 231
References 239
Index 257
vii
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Preface
When I entered kindergarten, my family lived without a home but was not
homeless. We lived in a church basement located in a small, poor community
in Kentucky. My dad preached at this church when he felt well enough, but
rarely received pay because the congregation was nearly as poor as we were.
Both of my parents were unable to work on a regular basis because of poor
health and disabilities. My dad had been sick since he was a child. I never
knew exactly what was wrong with him; all I knew was that he had stomach
problems and every once in a while he had a “spell” that nearly took his life.
Unable to afford proper health care, he received medical treatment only when
he had one of these spells. Even then, we could not afford the proper medical
attention he needed. Most of the time during these spells, he remained bedrid-
den, curled in a fetal position for days, and at times, for weeks. Dad was never
really good at hiding his pain from us. We knew how much pain he experi-
enced; his illness engulfed our living space.
My dad met my mom as a traveling evangelist. He began preaching at 13
and traveled from one small town to another across Kentucky and Tennes-
see preaching everywhere he could. One year he was invited to be one of the
preachers at a weeklong tent revival meeting in a small town about 40 miles
south of Louisville. My mom lived with her mother, stepfather, and six broth-
ers and sisters in a three-room house located just outside this town. She was
the only churchgoing Christian in her family and went to church as often as
she could; it was the only time when she escaped the everyday realities of her
alcoholic, abusive stepfather and her responsibilities as the oldest child to raise
her brothers and sisters.
My mom was 16 and my dad was 20 when they met at the revival. Mom had
planned to attend only the first night but met my dad and stayed the entire
week. By the end of that week, they were dating, and 5 months later they were
married. They had my sister, Dianna, 11 months later. After Dianna was born,
doctors told my parents they would never be able to have other children. My
arrival 7 years later, therefore, was a surprise—to say nothing of Jason’s arrival
a year after I was born.
No two people I have met in my life were more opposite than my parents.
When my dad was not at the pulpit preaching about hell and fire and brim-
stone, he was a quiet, small man. His lifetime of illness had left him thin and
fragile. He barely spoke, and when he did you could barely hear him. Quite
the opposite, my mom was large, sassy, and loud. She was also confident in a
strange way. The reason that I say strange is because she spent her life battling
ix
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x • Preface
an untreated, undiagnosed psychological illness that revealed itself, in one
way, by her inability to be around people. Mom rarely left the basement. “I just
want to keep to myself,” she told us. With windows covered with aluminum
foil, it was always dark in that basement. She spent most days and nights in
bed. Dad and the rest of us did not worry that much about my mom sleeping
so much, because when she was awake, she seemed so alive and present. Mom
was also a diabetic and had developed heart disease as a result, which she
eventually died from in her early forties.
Mom was not one of those parents who kept the details of living in poverty
from us. My sister, brother, and I knew how difficult it was for my parents to
make ends at least come close enough to each other for us to have clothes on
our backs and food on the table. We also were aware of how difficult it was for
them to deal with their health problems enough to take care of us. These early
experiences taught me to survive on as little as possible, to be a child of parents
who were ill, and to become accustomed to uncertainty. These lessons that I
learned from living in poverty, however, did not prepare me adequately for a
school environment. Similar to what has been reflected in years of research
on emergent literacy (e.g., Clay, 1975, 1991; Dyson, 1983; Heath, 1983; Purcell-
Gates, 1988, 1995), I had not been exposed before I entered schooling to the
many critical ways in which young children learn about reading and writing by
being a part of a literate home environment where people (e.g., parental figures)
read and write for various reasons. Therefore, I had not developed the neces-
sary preliterate behaviors or skills to make a smooth transition to schooling.
Ignoring the fact that most adults in our community could barely read or
write, the school, even at the kindergarten level, expected us to be able, for
example, to recite the alphabet, count up to a certain point, be able to write
our names, and hold books the right way. Although my parents had a higher
level of literacy than most in the community—that is, my dad had graduated
from high school and my mom had completed 10 years of formal schooling—
they did not read to us and did not spend time with us rehearsing the alphabet
or teaching us our numbers. Although reports commissioned by government
agencies published around that time (e.g., A Nation at Risk) would claim that
my parents were not doing their job at parenting, they taught us different les-
sons about knowing and doing. They taught us lessons about life that come
from living in poverty. These learning experiences had no value in transition-
ing to formal schooling. At school I was known as the kid from a poor family
without the intellectual abilities or family support to learn what they thought
I needed to learn. I was labeled unable to learn.
The lessons that I had learned from my family also consistently conflicted
with the lessons I was taught at my school. One moment of being caught
between these conflicting lessons occurred during kindergarten. I do not
remember much about my teacher other than her giving us a lot of oppor-
tunities to paint. The other students in my class loved painting. None of us
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