Students internalize class position so deeply they choose lower tracks voluntarily

Evidence

Among the ways that a culture rooted in domination helps maintain tracking is by normalizing the situation: The assumption that some should be raised above others leads many people to see tracking as normal and necessary, and blinds them to the clear reality that tracking is fundamentally unequal. This also helps explain why even when students are given a choice of track placement, working class students usually tend to choose lower tracks. Not only do they want to be with people like them, they often don’t believe they belong in the higher track. As we have pointed out throughout this book, value hierarchized thinking is an internalized psychological condition that gets created as these meanings circulate, get exchanged and create the very structure and processes in our institutions. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1034

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Shows domination reproducing itself through the oppressed person’s own self-assessment rather than external coercion—a genuinely unsettling mechanism worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Classroom interactions act like root metaphors, transmitting power-laden assumptions students internalize. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 761; Some marginalized students want hierarchy inversion, not genuine disruption — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 378; Subordinate classes’ belief in their incapacity helps sustain their subordination. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 498 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Some marginalized students want hierarchy inversion, not genuine disruption #complicates (0.82) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 378
• Merely resisting school can reproduce the class system it aims to escape #responds-to (0.80) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1062
• Subordinate classes’ belief in their incapacity helps sustain their subordination. #complicates (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 498