Reflection on Nancy G. Patterson and Renee Speed’s

“Urban Education: Moving Past the Myth of Structure”

Written on the back of a photocopied copy of Patterson and Speed's article

As I read the Patterson article, I was struck by how different Renee’s experiences were as a child. She went from a middle class school which was, as she said, “preparing me to be somebody” to an urban school that was focused on “finishing” stories and lessons, not learning them (32). When Renee somehow found her way to college, she was struck that other students “could look for ways to disagree, or listen for ideas that they could connect to another idea” (33). Renee did not know this type of literacy, having only been previously taught to “fill out a worksheet, but there were no worksheets to do” (33).

In the margin, I noted that Renee, like the other students in her class in the urban district, was never expected to go to college. Thus the experiences that they were given, the way that they were taught, was explicitly done in order to prepare them for the structures their teachers expected they would find in their lives. Those worksheets and formulaic responses that fit into neat bubbles and boxes on a form are preparation for the stereotypical adulthood of an inner-city child. What “practical” skills do they have to know? Is it enough to know how to fill out forms (DMV, Welfare, tax forms), and write well enough to get a job?

Along the same vein, why is there a myth that urban students “’need more structure’”? (31). Why in middle class schools are untraditional classroom arrangements (circles, project based, student-created schedules) encouraged and valued? Patterson and Speed cite research by Jean Anyon which argues that “schools where serve children in this stratum provide lessons and assignments that are designed more to control students and prepare them for their jobs where they have to follow directions and carry out directives from those who hold supervisory positions” (qtd. in Patterson 32).

I argue that is slightly more diabolical than that, a theory that was inspired by Podis’s discussion of Foucault’s insights into the unequal power relations within institutions: “Foucault did in fact theorize the existence of connections between prisons conditions and everyday life situations, particularly with respect to institutionalized behaviors” (Podis 128). Are we teaching urban students to be ready for prison with that sort of emphasis on structure and establishment of schedule and authority?

I think it important to note that the unspoken antecedent in my use of the pronoun “we” is meant to be all educators—regardless of district, race, age, theoretical alliances, and socioeconomic class.

Think about it. What two places in society are our lives minutely scheduled and ruled by the bell? Jail and school. Where do you threaten to send an unruly student? The office where they are put in in-class suspension. Isn’t that similar to (in a minor way) solitary confinement in jail. With our emphasis on structure, are we preparing –either consciously or subconsciously– our urban students for the structure they will encounter in jail? Do we, somewhere in our darkest regions, believe that our urban students are destined for a life of crime?
It calls to mind an anecdote Regan relayed this morning during our discussion. She had been carjacked in Manchester. When the cop arrived, he had asked her “Approximately how old was this African American male?” He was floored when Regan negated his unspoken assumption that it was in fact an African American by saying that she actually was carjacked by a middle-aged Caucasian male.

Putting this aside, why are urban students not taught to be critical thinkers? Is there more to it than just the fact that we presume that these students will not need these skills in their destined professions? Renee’s experiences in her high school and college classroom has a strong point on this, which is validated by Lisa Delpitt’s book Other People’s Children: “Let there be no doubt: a ‘skilled’ minority person is not also capable of critical analysis becomes the trainable, low-level functionary of the dominant society, simply the grease that keeps the institutions orchestrate his or her oppression running smoothly (Delpitt 19). Through our focus on structure and skills are we passively depriving urban students of the critical thinking processes that would make them, to continue Delpitt’s metaphor, a squeaky cog in the machine of the dominant culture? In a diabolical-political theory, do we as a society ruled by the middle-class want to hold our political place in the world? Is this why institutions refuse to teaching these higher-order skills and instead argue that “a critical thinker who lacks the skills demanded by employers and institutions of higher learning can aspire to financial and social status only within the disenfranchised underworld” (Delpitt 19).

There are no comfortable answers to these questions. It involves looking critically at underlying currents of education that very few people are comfortable acknowledging exist. The implications of changing this system are far reaching and puts the stability of the dominant culture in a shaky position. It also involves critically looking at our own values and stereotypes and what we implicitly assume and propagate through our teaching styles. This is no easy task because much of it is unspoken. Harvard University professor and noted contemporary American scholar Stanley Cavell calls “hidden literality,” words (and actions) which “strew obscurities across our path and seem willfully to thwart comprehension; and then time after time we discover that their meaning has been missed only because it was so utterly bare—totally, therefore unnoticeably, in view” (119). In other words, society is so used has become so used to these expectations and permissions that we fail to recognize its political and educational implications.

Works Cited

Cavell, Stanley. “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame.” Must We Mean
What We Say? A book of essays. New York: Scribner, 1969. 115-162.