Camden’s Blog

I hear the teacher comments that Gorski lists in his first paragraph of this article all of the time at school.  In particular the one that goes something like “why don’t those people value education” which is the umbrella statement for all deficit thinkers.  His comments on classism and how people fall into the idea of having to “fix” poor people so that they will not have to take on the larger task of dismantling the systematic inequities that oppress them in the first place are right on target.  Moreover, I believe these classist ideologies serve another purposes for those of us in education.  It serves to distract us from the fact that we are so very close to being one of them.  If we engage in this way of thinking, we are able to create an Us vs. Them situation that serves to mask the fact that teachers are closer to being the working poor in our economy than we are to the middle class.  We further equate poor with uneducated far too generally for the same reasons.  Just because our students come to school from poor families does not mean we should assume their families lack or unappreciated education.   Gorski purports that we tend to fixate on saving our students than taking on the more difficult task of addressing societal issues that create poverty such as preventable illness, lack of health insurance, contaminated living spaces, sufficient food, and save living conditions.  Poignantly he says these conditions speak nothing at all to the culture of those who live in them but rather to the “values of a nation that can afford to eliminate these inequities but chooses not to.”  We would rather wait until our attention can be corralled by an entertainment package of stars like Idol Gives Back that plead with us to “send what we can” for children living in poverty than to “do what we can” on a daily basis to rid ourselves of the conditions that perpetuate poverty.  As teachers we need to post Gorski’s anti-classist plan of action or laundry list of changes on our white boards, in our lesson plans, on our share drives and in our lunchrooms.  It’s a question of action.  

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