Classroom decorum rules covertly enforce bourgeois values on working-class students

Evidence

As silence and obedience to authority were most rewarded, students learned that this was the appropriate demeanor in the classroom. Loudness, anger, emotional outbursts, and even something as seemingly innocent as unrestrained laughter were deemed unacceptable, vulgar disruptions of classroom social order. These traits were also associated with being a member of the lower classes. If one was not from a privileged class group, adopting a demean or similar to that of the group could help one to advance. It is still necessary for students to assimilate bourgeois values in order to be deemed acceptable. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 353

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on earlier claims that tone, silence, and emotional display carry class meaning — extends hooks’ treatment of the oppressor’s tongue and decorum-as-domination from ch13 and ch12. — connects to: Professors can teach radical content while enforcing bourgeois classroom decorum — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 358; Order-obsession and fear of losing face silence dissent in classrooms — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 354; US schooling founders aimed at social control amid capitalist inequality, not equality — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 363 (+12 more)
• ADDENDUM: Echoes the dress/moral-panic article’s theme of class signaling through apparently neutral norms — classroom ‘decorum’ is sumptuary law in another register.

Broader Connections

• Civility functions as a form of class rule by privatizing social order #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 232
• A school’s social character comes from perpetuating a group’s class function #exemplifies (0.82)
• Differentiated schooling reproduces rather than abolishes class divisions #corroborates (0.80)
• Bourgeois class behavior explains the subjective key to fascism #complicates (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1421