Julio Flores
Professor Frazier
Englsh 102
2/19/15

From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum focuses on the vast gap of education that divide four different social classes. Jean Anyon, the chairperson of the Department of Education at Rutgers University, and the author of the essay Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work, which first appeared in the journal of education in the fall of 1980, says that a child’s social class reflects the kind of schooling that he or she receives. After reading article on public education and carefully examining the different levels she calls the working class, the middle-class, the affluent professional, and the executive elite. Anyon has stated that “It will be suggested that there is a "hidden curriculum" in schoolwork that has profound implications for the theory - and consequence - of everyday activity in education....” (Anyon 258). Anyon believes that a student’s educational perseverance will not be enough to place them on top of the ladder. She believes that one’s economic background determines their educational success and future. The first and lowest class is the working class. The working-class school is made up of nearly 40 percent of the population in the United States. Anyon observed that “In this class parents have an average income of about twelve thousand dollars or less. They hold jobs like stockroom workers, foundry men, and semiskilled and unskilled assembly-line operatives. These are jobs that require little or no critical or analytical thinking” (Anyon 261). They are given a job that forces them to work in a machine like manner. They are given instructions and are looked upon to obey them. Such as an assembly-line worker that is supposed to follow a routine way of working, the students that attend school in this social class are also looked