Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [132]
To make matters worse, “the school,” vested with an overbearing authority, often seems as likely to get things wrong as right. In Ms. Driver’s experience, school nurses not only exaggerate nonexistent problems but fail to recognize real emergencies. When Willie, for example, was in a collision at school, the nurse said “not to worry” and that she thought he would need “some butterfly stitches.” But Willie had a huge gash over his eye that required twenty-eight stitches. For Ms. Driver, the conclusion is obvious: school nurses are not to be trusted. They fuss too much over minor matters and do not accurately convey the severity of major matters. In lumping into a single unit nurses in two different schools, ministering to children of different ages and sexes, Wendy’s mother demonstrates a common tendency among working-class and poor parents to merge authority figures into one indiscriminate group. Thus, classroom teachers, resource teachers, librarians, and principals are usually all referred to as “the school.”
Ms. Driver resents having to take Wendy to the hospital for what she believes is a ridiculous complaint. It is, however, her only sure way to stave off possibly arbitrary and capricious but nevertheless very real threats of coercion from professionals in a position of power. The inconvenience and expense of the hospital trip is small compared to the huge risk that “they” might come and “take your kids away.” Other working-class and poor parents voiced similar anxieties and shared the same feeling of distrust with school officials.
DISCUSSION
Daily life for Wendy Driver (and her brother) followed much the same pattern we observed with Tyrec Taylor, Katie Brindle, and Harold McAllister. The Driver children had vast amounts of leisure time that they spent hanging out with cousins, watching television, helping with household chores, and visiting grandparents. There were firm directives that shaped their actions but also much room for autonomous decision making. The overall cultural logic of child rearing in the family seemed to be the accomplishment of natural growth. The only significant deviation was that Wendy’s mother had enrolled her in three organized activities. But this seemed less an effort on her mother’s part to expose Wendy to a range of life experiences than a means of protecting her from the street. Although Wendy enjoyed two of the three activities, these did not dominate her leisure time or alter the rhythm of her family life.
Wendy’s school situation was extreme in some respects, since even at Lower Richmond, where test scores are routinely in the bottom quartile nationally, most children have learned to read by third grade. In other respects, however, her situation was not unusual. Ms. Driver, like other working-class and poor parents, believed she was doing all she could to help her daughter succeed in school. Wendy’s teachers, however, defined the meaning of parental support differently. The educators advocated a version of concerted cultivation. They longed for an idealized world wherein parents were energetic and took a leadership role in monitoring their children’s schooling but always stopped considerably short of the kind of intervention the Kaplans undertook when they objected to the music teacher’s choice of songs for the school holiday program. Teachers like Mr. Tier and others did not want parents to be deferential and reactive. They sought an approach that was a contradictory blend in which parents were actively involved and consciously responsible for guiding their children’s school experience but were still polite, compliant, and supportive of educators’ programs. It would be only in situations where differences of opinion arose that parents would immediately defer to the wisdom of educators.
Although the Lower Richmond staff did not acknowledge (and may have been unaware of) the role of social class in shaping their ideal vision of how parents should interact with the school, their wishes amounted to a mandate