A VERY CONDENSED VERSION OF

Finn, P. (2014). Unrest in Grosvenor Square: Preparing for Power in Elite Boarding Schools,
Working-Class Public Schools, and Socialist Sunday Schools. In J. Zacher Pandya & J. Avila, Eds.
A NEW LOOK AT CRITICAL LITERACIES: THEORIES AND PRACTICES ACROSS
CONTEXTS. Routledge: NY.
Patrick J. Finn
Meritocracy and The Logic of Deficit versus Structural Inequality
Most American teachers are firmly committed to the belief that our school system constitutes a
meritocracy where students start kindergarten or first grade on a nearly equal footing regardless of
the social status of their parents. As they progress through the grades those who are smart and
work hard earn good grades, are placed in high-status school programs, enter high-status, highpaying professions, and end up with a lot of money, status, and political power regardless of the
social status of their parents. Students who are not smart and/or do not work hard earn poor grades,
are placed in low status school programs, enter low-status, low-paying occupations, and end up with
little money, status, and political power regardless of the social status of their parents. [Gentle
Reader, are you laughing yet?]
However, children of elite parents tend to wind up elite adults and children of working-class
parents tend to wind up working-class adults, and so one cannot accept the concept of meritocracy
without believing that most children of elite parents become elite adults because they are intelligent
and hard-working, while most children of working-class parents become working-class adults
because they are intellectually deficient and/or lazy. This is the logic of deficit. Without the logic
of deficit the concept of meritocracy does not work.
But there is a more plausible explanation: The way society is put together (structured)
facilitates school success for children of elite parents (as a group) and inhibits school success for
children of working-class parents (as a group). This is referred to as structural inequality.
In this paper I will argue that the concept of meritocracy is deeply flawed and that the
relationship between social class and school success is more plausibly explained by examining the
structure of society that results in structural injustice. Structural injustice suggests an approach to
working-class education that benefits the working class as a group but leaves room for individual
upward mobility. That approach is called critical literacy or critical literacy education.
Critical literacy, High-status Knowledge, Cultural Capital,
Social Capital, and Essay-text Literacy
Critical literacy is an explicitly political classroom agenda for the education of working-class
students. It is devoted to changing the relationship between the working class and the rest of
society in ways that are advantageous to the working class (Luke, 2011).
Critical literacy teachers encourage their students to become class-conscious, to feel
confidence and pride in working-class values, knowledge, and beliefs; to feel important and entitled
as members of the working class; and to strive for working-class solidarity. Their goal is to teach
working-class students to use the same tools that more affluent classes use to gain and defend their
status, power, and economic well being. Those tools are high-status knowledge (not business
arithmetic, but algebra; not "adolescent literature," but Shakespeare e. g.), cultural capital (highstatus art, music, theater, dance, literature, and sports e. g.), social capital (networks of friends and
acquaintances whose collective resources can be mobilized to protect and assert group and
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individual interests) and essay-text literacy (the ability in reading to evaluate, analyze, and
synthesize written texts and in writing to make assertions and examine, develop, and defend them.
Essay-text literacy is the literacy of argument and negotiation. It is the literacy upon which
powerful institutions are built). These tools are valuable in themselves, but more to the point, they
are sources of power in the social-political-economic arena.
In this paper I will compare the ways the concepts of social-class consciousness,
meritocracy, and structural inequality are treated in three kinds of schools: 1) Elite boarding schools
2) Working-class public schools and 3) American Socialist Sunday schools that were conducted
between 1900 and 1920. I will propose that if our working-class schools were to engage in critical
literacy, they would look very much like the Socialist Sunday schools of the early 20th century.
Elite Boarding Schools, Realpolitik, Working-class Public Schools, Oppositional Identity,
Informational Literacy, and Border Crossers
In todays elite boarding schools student bodies are more racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse
than they were 30 years ago, but one thing remains the same: They are overwhelmingly children of
the very wealthy.
Elite boarding schools recognize social class as a fact of life. The schools mission is to
produce leaders who are confident that what they know and believe is unimpeachable. Parents
understand and approve the mission of the school.
Stately grounds nurture feelings of privilege. Expansive course offerings and extracurricular activities enable students to acquire cultural capital. School friendships and campus visits
from important people (often alumni) provide graduates with social capital. Essay-text literacy is
demanded of students.
Students are encouraged to negotiate with teachers regarding their conduct and class
requirements. A good student is defined as one who is inquisitive and assertive.
Students learn to cloak power relations in moral authority. The exemplary graduate is one
who speaks like a man or woman of God but will settle a score without flinchingone who can
simultaneously enunciate high ideals and practice Realpolitik (politics based primarily on power
and practical considerations, rather than ideology or ethics) with a refined vengeance.
Students in working-class public schools come from households whose breadwinners are
employed and make less than the national median household income (about $50,000). This is about
half the population of the country. Many working-class students see high-status knowledge as
useless and even antithetical to their working-class identity. They develop oppositional identity,
that is, they define themselves as not like schoolteachers and not like the social class that
schoolteachers represent. Students resist teachers attempts to teach, and so teachers stop
attempting to teach high-status knowledge and provide cultural capital. Students put forth just
enough cooperation to maintain the appearance of conducting school. A good student is defined as
one who is docile and obedient rather than inquisitive and assertive.
Individualism and individual achievement are held up as American ideals. Social classconsciousness is deemed un-American. Teachers tend to be authoritarian. Only Informational
Literacy (the ability to read school textbooks and to write answers to questions based on textbooks)
is demanded. Students are presented with an idealistic, meritocratic, Disneyland picture of
democracy in America. To question this vision is considered unpatriotic. Working-class and labor
history are considered too political.
The schools ignore any sense of importance or entitlement students may have as workingclass children and young adults. The concept of meritocracy and the logic of deficit are fully
endorsed. In brief, working-class students are offered domesticating literacy. Most Americans view
exemplary graduates of working-class public schools as the small number of border crossers
(students who are 1) academically talented 2) anxious adopt middle-class values, tastes, and
interests, and 3) very lucky). Many working-class students who have 1 and 2 are thwarted by
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structural barriers.
Socialism, Social rights, Capitalism, Freirean (Machiavellian) Motivation,
Attitudes Toward Meritocracy, Just Literacy or Critical Literacy
Socialism is predicated on the belief that citizens have not only civil and political rights; they also
have social rightsrights to livable wages, a decent education, and adequate housing and
healthcare. These rights are obtained by collective action such as unionism, community organizing
and political party politics. Capitalism is predicated on the belief that citizens have civil and
political rights but not social rights. Access to livable wages, a decent education, and adequate
housing and healthcare should be determined solely by market forces: Those who acquire
marketable skills and work hard at their jobs will have good wages and can buy decent education,
housing, and healthcare on the open market. There is an affinity between the concepts of
individualism, meritocracy and capitalism as there is between the concepts of collective action,
critical literacy and socialism.
Socialist Sunday schools were conducted for children between age 5 and 14 by the
American Socialist Party in many cities in the United States between 1900 and 1920. They were
perhaps the most unapologetic and enduring experiment in critical literacy for school aged children
in American history.
Socialist Sunday schools were not meant to supplant public school education. On the
contrary, students were urged to cooperate and work hard in public school to acquire high-status
knowledge, cultural capital, and high levels of literacy 1) for their intrinsic value and 2) as sources
of power in the social-political-economic arena. This has been referred to as Machiavellian
Motivation and as Freirean Motivation.
The aim of Socialist Sunday schools was to produce intelligent champions for the workers
cause. Teachers were either working-class or they had a strong allegiance to the working class.
Students were introduced to labor, community, and political leaders through campus visits (social
capital), and they were exposed to an abundance of working-class poetry, music, theater, and dance
(cultural capital).
Lessons resembled Freires culture circles. Provocative questions like Are strikebreakers
bad men? and What forces men to cross picket lines? were often the basis of discussion.
Students learned 1) that capitalism without an organized, powerful working class produces
poverty, unemployment, unsafe work, and child labor, for example. 2) that these phenomena are not
caused by individual behavior and cannot be solved through individual effort. They are societal
(structural) problems that demand societal solutions. 3) that working class champions were not
people who arose from nowhere with super-human giftsan idea that valorizes individualism. On
the contrary, they arose out of mass movements that changed the course of historyan idea that
valorizes collective responses to social ills. 4) that the working class can find allies outside its
ranks, but it is primarily up to themthose hurt by structural injusticeto demand change.
While many present-day conservatives seem to view the working class as individuals who
want to whine about their privations and beg for unearned rewards (Romneys 47%), Socialist
Sunday schools subscribed to Frederick Douglasss understanding that power concedes nothing
without demand. They educated their students to understand structural injustice and how it
affected them, and they prepared them to organize and take claim the power needed to demand a
just share of the nations wealth and the fruits that accompany it.
The Socialist Sunday schools endeavored to produce 1) Workers who are prepared to
participate in collective action to change the relationship of the working class to other classesones
who understand that power concedes nothing without demand. 2) A particular kind of border
crossersones who originate in the working class and acquire middle-class status as adults but do
not abandon their working-class loyalties or commitment to social and economic justice, and 3)
Organic intellectualsmen and women who are educated to do intellectual work, but who have
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working-class sensibilities and who can simultaneously enunciate high ideals and practice
Realpolitik with a refined vengeance.
Socialist Sunday schools were like elite boarding school in every way but two: 1) Socialist
Sunday schools challenged the concept of meritocracy. They challenged the belief that individual
social class mobility should be the primary purpose of education. They challenged the belief that
students success in school was primarily dependent on intelligence and hard work. Students
school success is effected by unemployment, low wages, inadequate health care and housing, and
poor schoolsproblems that cannot be fixed by individual effort, but can be ameliorated through
collective action by unions, community organizing, and party politics.
2) In both elite boarding schools and Socialist Sunday schools students are/were motivated
to work hard to acquire high-status knowledge, cultural capital, and essay-text literacy but in elite
boarding school it is to maintain the status quo. In Socialist Sunday schools students it was to
challenge the status quo and change the relationship between the working class and the rest of
society. In elite boarding school literacy is just literacy. In Socialist Sunday schools literacy was
critical literacy.
Conclusion
If students in our working-class public schools are to acquire critical literacy, they will look like the
Socialist Sunday schools of a century ago.