the children at well-to-do campuses really do believe you are their to serve them and their parents will say things like, "I paid 30 grand for that A." not exactly like that, but the meaning was clear. Once, when a friend busted a bunch for plagiarism, the parents were outraged that anyone dare give them a F for the assignment. Rules be damned!
i used to hand out a survey at the beginning of the semester, for every class. the most stark difference between students was located in the answer to the question:
"It's ____ you know, not ____ you know, that matters."
The well-to-do _overwhelmingly_ said that it was who you know -- because that was patently obvious. It wasn't their work that would land them jobs, it was their connections, greek org, school name, school ties, family ties, etc.
The state college kids, and the poorer their backgrounds, the more likely they said it, the opposite: "What matters is what you know, not who you know." And this, too, obviously fit with their life. It wasn't their experience mind you, it was, for some, a palpable need to believe that. They could find in the wider culture, lots of places where they were taught the opposite. They were well-aware that a lot of life revolves around, "It's who you know, not what you know."
But they *had* to believe in the myth of the american dream of upward mobility as the reward for hard work and talent, otherwise where would they be. they sure as shit didn't hang with people who bought newspapers.
so in that sense, they cling more tightly to ideology, they are its true believers.
another data point, and this is proprietary so i have to mince around it, but based on an ethics game that was and is taught in high schools, there has been a large amount of data collected about high schoolers moral decision making.
when you go to the well-to-do schools, overwhelming the point of the ethics game is to rward those who are cheaters. what ever it takes to win. i was asked to interpret that result once and it is, in my view, because if it's about who you know and if your competition's social capital matches your own, then there's nothing to distinguish either of you save for who is most clever about the cheating and lying, doing whatever it takes to win. basically, they believe that both are qualified, so you need something else to distinguish them. so, it's about the cheating and lying.
In contrast, when the game is played at schools in poor districts -- decidedly not even middle class, it's the opposite. The winners of the game are the honest people who don't cheat, aren't only out for themselves, etc.
This is getting long, but whatever similarities there are in striving to "make it" I think there remain some difference. Note here that I'm not valorizing the poor and manual laboring classes as having superior morals, whether by nature or nurture. Rather, if you look closely, what's unpacked here is the way the groups police the boundaries of the moral order and contradictory ideologies that undergird american life. if that makes any sense.
there's more but i have a buttload of job hunting to do because i'm a striving capitalist tool!
shag
At 05:13 PM 7/22/2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
>On Jul 22, 2008, at 5:02 PM, Joseph Catron wrote:
>
>>But in my experience, that's generally what the majority of students
>>from every class have in mind when they head off to college.
>
>It's been a long time, but my memory of arriving at UVa for grad
>school was that the products of less prestigious colleges treated the
>faculty with deference, calling them "Professor" and "Doctor," while
>the products of more prestigious colleges treated the faculty as
>equals or less, preferring first names to their faces and disparaging
>nicknames at other times. But that was 30 years ago.
>
>Doug
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