This article was hard to read because of who I am… a woman, a student, a teacher and soon to be a single mother. Could my soon to be single-parent family be defective in comparison to the “normal” family? Will the preknowledge of my daughter be questioned because of it?
Quotes that made me think:
“A key component of this engine of inequality is an educational system that relies on supplementary unpaid work in the home to produce its curriculum objectives” (Smith, 1998, p. 24).
“An engine of inequality has been described, interlocking the unpaid labor of (middle-class) women in the home and the local practices of schools. What a teacher can achieve in the classroom depends on the general level of the background educational work contributed by the home” (Smith, 1998, p. 24).
“Reassembled or retooled, the pieces of the old engine pull parents who have time, resources, and skills into intensifying their unpaid labor to supplement the work of schooling while dumping the children of those who don’t into an educational underclass” (Smith, 1998, p. 27).
References:
Smith, D. (1998) The Underside of Schooling. Restructuring, Privatization, and Women’s Unpaid Work. Journal for a Just and Caring Education, 4:1, 11-29.
