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Survey Responses:
Last year I was co-president of the PTO (Parent Teacher Organization) at a small private school - one of our class reps came from a low-income family and she made it to meetings despite having no car and having to arrange child care for an autistic nephew in order to come. She came consistently and was very helpful. However, at the end of the year, the wife of the Chairman of the Board of Trustees came to a PTO meeting (the class rep was not present) and asked that in the future we get class reps with better education as this woman did not make a good impression on the phone. I was very upset, and got out of the PTO leadership position as a result, but it took me 6 or 7 months to understand that what had happened was classism as I was not used to thinking in those terms. I think this website did help me to frame my understanding of what happened. I wish that I had been more articulate at the time and hadn't been silent in response to this example of classism.
As the founder of a Working Class Students Group at a private NYC college, my experience with classism in the educational system has been a long ongoing battle. I was the first of my siblings to graduate high school let along go to college, and I as a current PhD student I still don't know how I decided to do it. All I know is that I took a bus to the library, found a book about colleges, begged my mom for money to apply to two, and was able to get a full scholarship. Upon arriving to NYC from small town Michigan, I first learned what classism was. Although I grew up ashamed of my house, my clothes, my vocabulary, etc. I never knew how explicitly classist a college experience could be. Other students referred to poor people as, ""those people,"" and teachers didn't realize that I was actually walking an hour to school every day because I couldn't afford the subway. My new friends were confused about the fact that I didn't get an allowance, and there was no understanding of the fact that working-class students had to actually work and therefore couldn't participate in many out of school activities, or couldn't afford to buy every book; behaviors that were interpreted as being uninvolved or ""lazy."" For the most part, there is little cultural understanding of class in higher education, and no support system for students who are from a working-class background. I have rarely heard or seen discussions of social class used as part of the greater discourse on diversity, and have been underwhelemed by the amount of research dedicated to the topic. Working-class students are both overlooked, yet highly stereotyped, in higher education.
As the founder of a Working Class Students Group at a private NYC college, my experience with classism in the educational system has been a long ongoing battle. I was the first of my siblings to graduate high school let along go to college, and I as a current PhD student I still don't know how I decided to do it. All I know is that I took a bus to the library, found a book about colleges, begged my mom for money to apply to two, and was able to get a full scholarship. Upon arriving to NYC from small town Michigan, I first learned what classism was. Although I grew up ashamed of my house, my clothes, my vocabulary, etc. I never knew how explicitly classist a college experience could be. Other students referred to poor people as, ""those people,"" and teachers didn't realize that I was actually walking an hour to school every day because I couldn't afford the subway. My new friends were confused about the fact that I didn't get an allowance, and there was no understanding of the fact that working-class students had to actually work and therefore couldn't participate in many out of school activities, or couldn't afford to buy every book; behaviors that were interpreted as being uninvolved or ""lazy."" For the most part, there is little cultural understanding of class in higher education, and no support system for students who are from a working-class background. I have rarely heard or seen discussions of social class used as part of the greater discourse on diversity, and have been underwhelemed by the amount of research dedicated to the topic. Working-class students are both overlooked, yet highly stereotyped, in higher education.
Read earlier survey responses:
October 2005: Tell us about a time you've either been an ally to someone or had someone be an ally to you around issues of class.
September 2005: What are the ways you see the race and class divisions exposed by Katrina?
August 2005: What class did you grow up in? What was good or bad about your class experience growing up?
July 2005: What are your strongest memories connecting race and class?
June 2005: The New York Times and Wall Street Journal each ran their own series on class. What is your response to the recent press on class?
May 2005: The good, the bad, and the ugly of cross-class relating
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