Joe Sixpack goes to college

I have been to two pedagogy workshops in the last several weeks that touched on (to me) a very disturbing set of beliefs that some college professors have about their students.

The assertion is made that our students are predominantly from Working Class families and thus have been socialized much differently than we have been as the Professorial Class. Therefore, it behooves us to understand the habits of The Working Class and how they affect students' ability to adopt the (desired) behavioral norms of the college environment.

I have so many problems with this line of thinking that I scarcely know where to start. First, I find the terms "working class" and "middle class" problematic these days. The speakers tended to use them as metonyms for particular lifeways, somewhat (although not totally) independent of household income. Thus a Working Class family stresses the importance of family, obedience to authority, no interest in their children's development as thinkers, and no focus on enriching their children's cultural or intellectual lives through family trips to museums and the like. The Middle Class family, on the other hand, values the intellectual growth of its children; they "perform" at the dinner table by reporting on their day, and the parents validate, probe, question, show interest. They are taken to museums and given other cultural opportunities that connect them to a wider world of ideas and diversity. And so on.

All this strikes me as wildly stereotypical and not a little bit elitist. Second, since class distinctions usually relate to income levels, it's curious that at my institution, the median family income is over $90,000 a year, not really very working-class in my opinion.

Third, these faculty members seem undecided about the degree to which they should be pushing students to adopt traditional collegiate values over the ones they've supposedly grown up with. There's a sort of awkward cultural relativism at play: on the one hand, these professors profess to believe in open inquiry, questioning authority, pushing for social change, celebrating cultural difference and the like. On the other hand, their left-leaning inclinations make them not want to privilege these elitist values over the proletariat's values of family, obedience and all that. But they can't have it both ways: what values SHOULD they be teaching?

Fourth, there is something very patronizing about the notion of a bunch of college professors sitting around looking down from on high at the proletariat they deign to teach, and talking about what backgrounds they have to "deal with" and what values they should be inculcating, and that REALLY bothers me.

Fifth, this business of generalizing by the unclear marker of "class" reduces students to known, simplified (and simplistic) categories and encourages faculty to deal in abstractions rather than the flesh-and-blood reality of the student in front of them. While I know it's the business of the so-called social sciences to categorize in order to explain, I don't find the categories persuasive or useful.

The offending professors are quite a bit younger than I, so this isn't some ivory tower rose-colored dream about "how students used to be." Rather, it's a bizarre manifestation of some grad-school-learned radical ideas run amok.