I have spent my adult life defending workers, organizing workers, teaching workers, organizing my own workplaces. Among the workers I have taught, and defended in arbitration hearings, are public school teachers. I have been an invited speaker to local teachers' unions conventions. I have never bashed teachers, and, in fact, defended them every time I taught auto workers in Pittsburgh, who bashed them nearly every class. However, I have studied schooling in the United States and elsewhere and reflected on my own schooling experiences. I agree with Bowles and Gintis that one thing schooling does is reflect the capitalist workplace and prepare students for the class hierarchies they are going to experience. Not perfectly, of course, and with many exceptions. Perhaps it was my nascent grasp of this that made me experience school as tortuous (the physical violence of some male teachers helped too). Schooling helped to dampen down expectations, that is for certain. We were destined to be factory workers, or soldiers, or secretaries, or homemakers. A few of us, for reasons difficult to unravel, escaped these fates. What sane person would hold my teachers personally responsible for an insane system? They were just workers, some decent, some not. They heroically formed unions. A good thing, now under attack. We must support whatever they do to defend themselves. And oppose all of the bad things that are being done to education today. What is the contradiction between doing these things and at the same time trying to understand what schooling in capitalism is and what its connection to the class structure are? And at the same time, working class people experience a slew of "hidden injuries of class," to use Cobb and Sennett's phrase. I know about these, and it is not possible sometimes to not personalize these and remember with anger the hurtful things that happened to me and my classmates. I was just a child, and I wish more adults had noticed that.