Social Class: The Forgotten Identity Marker in Social Studies Education

Abstract

This chapter asks why it is that so many students enter high school without any class consciousness and graduate without any either. Yet, whether one defines social class in terms of social status or in more strictly Marxian terms, there can be no denying its existence in Canadian and American societies. Much of this chapter is based on the analysis of two data sources: the evolving formal British Columbia Social Studies Curriculum and interview transcripts with veteran high school social studies teachers. It includes a discussion of how political ideology has influenced the curriculum developers and the teachers. It demonstrates how omission as a hegemonic strategy is used to further entrench corporate interests in the United States and Canada. For example, topics such as taxes and the social welfare state had virtually disappeared from the British Columbia Social Studies Curriculum in the 1980s – could this be a factor in the recent rise of the tax cut discourse in both countries? Apple's (Ideology and Curriculum, New York: Routledge-Falmer, 2004) contention of how power and ideology is embedded in the formal curriculum is made clear here. There appears to be a conscious attempt on the part of the curriculum developers to destabilize the hegemonic middle-class norm from recent versions of the curriculum. This has coincided with more focus on the individual. The attitudes of almost all of the teachers mirror this emphasis on the classless society. A taxonomy of social class in education developed by Ontario educators helped guide the discourse analysis of the formal curriculum and the teacher interview transcripts (see Curtis et al., Stacking the Deck: The Streaming of Working-Class Kids in Ontario Schools, Toronto: Our Schools Our Selves Educational Foundation, 1992). This chapter makes the case that all students, regardless of class background, should be given the opportunity to understand economic issues that affect their past, present, and future lives. End-of-chapter questions address this philosophy for social studies education.KeywordsSocial ClassPolitical IdeologyFormal CurriculumClass ConsciousnessUnited Auto WorkerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.