In Patricia Hinchey’s book Finding Freedom in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction to Critical Theory, the author takes on issues that are absolutely fascinating to me. My undergraduate background is in Cultural Studies and a lot of the chapter is a dianoetic discussion about the role authority and cultural capital play in the American public education complex. Authority, as first argued by Marx and later a long string of Marxist and Keynesian thinkers like Hall, Gramsci, Delpit, Giroux and Sontag, is granted through accumulation and retention of cultural capital. Cultural capital is the life story of an individual. It includes, but is not necessarily limited to, one’s education, rearing environment, ethnic heritage, metaphysical belief system(s), and social and/or economic class.
Quite often in the United States, especially in academia and public education, what is first idolized and later studied as fact are a set of values, mores, norms and personal ethos that perpetuates bourgeois control over labor and monetary capital surplus. Marx and Engels, in their infamous Manifesto of the Communist Party, argue that all social systems are designed from the top down to, not only replicate and enforce but, also manufacture consent for bourgeois-capitalistic control over brick and mortar capital (i.e., property) and human capital (i.e., labor).
“Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property,” Marx-Engels say in their Manifesto. They go onto to say, “your jurisprudence (written human law) is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined conditions of existence of your class.” It is this described selfish misconception that induces the majority—as Hinchey points out that most “average” people have never lived the lifestyle portrayed as “average” by their respective media—to participate in “social forms springing from” present modes of production (Tucker, 487). This phenomenon, as it presents itself in contemporary American culture, is well illustrated by popular rhetoric that says to have a plush office and give orders to others means you are more worthy than others of your position. The wealthiest and most powerful (the cultural, economic, and political elites) are generally assumed to be our “smartest and most hard-working citizens (Hinchey, 75).” This is sometimes referred to the Horatio Ahlger myth.
Myth is powerful and, perhaps one of the most fascinating things about myth, is that it is not perpetuated by the elites. The masses perpetuate myths whereas the elites create the rituals, customs, etc… that give rise to myth; this is almost a cultural universal. As a culture, more narrowly American culture, we have tacitly and discursively absorbed a “particular template” or ideal of “average” and have come to accept certain facets of that template as “part of the way things are (Hinchey, 80).”
American schools have become a battleground between mediated average and the vibrant and, for lack of a better term, dynamic reality of most Americans. Hinchey, throughout her book, discusses the goal of American schools to function as a melting pot or means of erasing cultural differences among individuals “by processing them in the mold of standardized public schooling involving not only academics but Americanization (Hinchey, 81).” American public schools, since their earliest contemporary conception, have served as the membrane between elites and the masses across which what it “means” to be American is diffused. Public education enforces and manufactures consent for the elites’ (or bourgeois) ideals or template of what Americans eat, how we sound, what we wear and value and any deviation from that template is considered un-American (Hinchey, 81). This template is well illustrated by the recitation of pledge of allegiance to the American flag every morning at the High School in Chicago were I was employed. It is also illustrated by the refusal of many public school systems to publish multilingual lunch menus and the abhorrent lack of ethnic and cultural diversity and perspectives found in many (if not most) textbooks at all grade levels.
The prevalence of positivism, religion, dogmatic science and hypersexulized mass-media in the Western-American worldview has led to a “sense of moral superiority;” American culture believes that “we alone have identified the one ‘right’ way to live, to act, to believe (Hinchey, 80).” There are, of course, historical contexts for this contemporary American ethos including the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny and, very recently, the xenophobic and reactionary Tea Party movement. Hinchey says:
So strong is our commitment to the ‘rightness’ of our vision that we have all but wiped Native American [as a Native American I prefer the term “First Peoples”] culture from the face of the Earth. And, in another spectacle of national hubris, we once forced Puerto Rican schools to celebrate American holidays and Puerto Rican teachers to teach Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican children in English. [The idea being that] Even if you’re not living in America, we [the political, economic and cultural elite] believe you are a lot better off if you act more “American” than whatever you are (Hinchey, 81).
The positivist duality that there are only correct and incorrect answers to everything has resulted in the focus on the places where children show deficiencies in their grasp or understanding of the bourgeois American template of what it means to be an American (Hinchey, 83). This positivist approach to education is, again, very clearly illustrated by the way we as teachers obsessively correct student work, grammar, and behavior. There are the right or American way and the wrong or the un-American way of writing, speaking and behaving. This diametric is based on those values that best suit the needs of the elite. Anyone who does not conform to what is presented as the only right way is categorized as not having a right to belong; anyone who deviates from the template is forced into the group without power (Hinchey, 80). In order to successfully climb the American socio-political and economic ladder one must possess a life story—the cultural capital—that is congruent with that of the ruling elite. Hinchey says:
In our national template, the use of standard English is generally thought to signify intelligence. Speak the “right” way, and you are deemed smart enough to enjoy responsibility; speak any other, and you are deemed stupid and pushed back to the bottom of the ladder, where you obviously belong (Hinchey, 83).
This standardized English, what Hinchey calls “cash English,” is touted as the “correct” English by the American public education system as a means to enforce the bourgeois American template. It is the idea that there is a correct form of any language that is detrimental to our students and forces us to ask the question: Is content or syntax more important? Is it more important that students regurgitate and formulate incorrect answers in proper, modern New World English or that that are giving the correct information in a dialect or patois that is their own? I’ve struggled in my tenure as a special educator in the Chicago Public School system with this problem. An amicable solution does not seem to exist or, more accurately, the elites refuse to allow one to be found. I’ve had students on my caseload and whom I privately tutor fail not just exams but whole courses because they have spelling cognition problems, are English language learners, or write in what I’ve coined “write-speak” where students write essays in the same way they would verbally tell a story in the environment in which they were reared and return to after the last school bell rings.
By first creating thresholds that must be met, the ruling elite dictate who can and cannot enter their world. Then, by denying access to the privileged information required to meet those thresholds through ambivalence, encouraging “success myths” or “the American Dream” and ritual, they oppress people they’ve deemed unworthy of ever possessing the “right” cultural capital. The American intellectual template is an easy way to hide our societies much deeper paradigms of being racist, punitive and regimented.
