Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [224]
21. See Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red, as well as U. S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2001.
22. See William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River.
23. See Donald Barlett and James B. Steele, America: What Went Wrong? and Arne Kalleberg, Barbara F. Reskin, and Ken Hudson, “Bad Jobs in America.”
24. For example, only 51% of children of high school dropouts can recognize the colors red, yellow, blue, and green by name, but the figures for high school graduates is 78%, for parents with some college it is 92%, and for college graduates it is 95%. For knowing all of the letters of the alphabet, the respective figures are 9%, 19%, 29%, and 42%. U. S. Department of Education, Condition of Education 1995, p. 182.
25. See U. S. Department of Education, Condition of Education, 1995 and Entwhistle et al., Children, Schools, and Inequality. At the same level of parental education, white students generally receive higher scores than do Black students. See also Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap.
26. In 1995, 61% of high school graduates enrolled in college; for children of high school dropouts, the rate was 27%, for children of high school graduates 47%, and for children of college graduates, 88%. U. S. Department of Education, Condition of Education, 2001, p. 147.
27. As Paul Kingston has noted (personal communication) the relationship between parents’ educational level and occupational level is far from automatic. There is a considerable amount of downward mobility. Also, there is variation among brothers and sisters in the same family. Still, parents’ social class position remains one of the most powerful predictors of children’s educational success and life outcomes. See Paul Kingston’s book The Classless Society for an elaboration of this position as well as Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality, and Who Gets Ahead?
28. Kingston, therefore, does not deny the existence of inequality: “Beyond question, huge inequalities exist and Americans recognize them.” Nevertheless, in his book The Classless Society, he is particularly adamant in asserting that cultural habits—as manifest in family life or childrearing, for example—are not associated with different economic groups: “My thesis is that groups of people having a common economic position—what are commonly designated as ‘classes’—do not significantly share distinct, life-defining experiences” (p. 1).
29. Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, The Death of Class, p. 4.
30. For examples within this tradition see Paul Willis, Learning to Labour, and Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes, and Control.
31. It is true, of course, that people do not generally see themselves as anything but middle class. Nevertheless, I am not asserting that powerful patterns of class-consciousness exist.
32. My debt to Bourdieu is enormous, especially regarding his preoccupation in the transmission of advantage. Although some have critiqued his model of social reproduction for being overly deterministic, a close reading of his theoretical ideas makes clear that Bourdieu sees a great deal of indeterminacy in how life trajectories unfold (see Marlis Buchman’s book The Script of Life for a particularly lucid description of Bourdieu’s model). Still, there is one key way that I have parted company with Bourdieu. As Elliot Weininger has noted in his article “Class and Causation in Bourdieu,” Bourdieu has a gradational (rather than categorical) conception of class structure. In addition, Bourdieu is deeply interested in fractions or divisions within a social class, an issue that space (and sample size) does not permit me to develop here.
CHAPTER 3: THE HECTIC PACE OF CONCERTED CULTIVATION
1. Recent national data also suggest that children of highly