Brameld, Theodore. (1965) The explosive ideas in education: Culture, class, and evolution. The New Press: New York.
Brameld Text Excerpts: Nevertheless, Marx contends, some working people of both sorts gradually become critical of the system as a whole and of their own role in maintaining it. As they do so, they begin to become class conscious. They begin to realize that they have a different position in the order of culture from that of the controllers of the instruments of production. And as their class consciousness matures, they examine the intricate process by which profit is made and distributed, they may become dissatisfied and even aggressively hostile. [.…] As class consciousness develops, the worker asks himself, “is this fair? Is it reasonable that each day I should work an hour or more for which I am not actually paid?” At the same time, he may become aware not only of strictly economic deprivation, but of psychological concomitant such as lack of participation in the rules of work, separation from the product he helps to make, and so a kind of emotional dualism which Marx calls “alienation”—a term that has become recently influential in psychology. Such awareness, however, also stimulates him to talk with other workers who are thinking along similar lines. Eventually they decide to join in some kind of common agreement that the profit-making process is wrong because it is exploitative—that is, it takes advantage of the worker’s weakness, his lack of power and authority, in order to benefit a class that decides what proportion of his labor he shall be paid for. Here is the root of his discontent that eventually leads to the organization of trade unions. From a Marxian viewpoint, a union is nothing more nor less than a group of class-conscious workers who have united to protest, regulate, and obtain what they consider to be a fair share of the economic fruits of the industrial system. The union is, in a sense, the most fundamental of all economic institutions concerned with dialectal change, for it is chiefly through this organized means that the worker is able to develop control. (Brameld, 1965, pp. 96-97) […] teachers are overwhelmingly middle class in their value orientation. One of the consequences of this fact is that they do not typically view themselves as working people with the class interests of, lets us say, members of a labor organization. On the contrary, studies have shown that most teachers are, if anything, more hostile than friendly toward trade unionism […] (Brameld, 1965, p. 138) Thus far, only a small fraction of the teaching profession—perhaps 10 percent—is sufficiently convinced to take the concrete step of affiliating with labor (Brameld, 1965, p. 139)
Jigsaw Links: Group 1 (Teacher Unions): http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/friedman.unions.us Group 2 (Teacher Salaries): http://teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Dave%20Eggers&st=cse Group 3 (Social Class & Mobility): http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/14/national/class/15MOBILITY-WEB.html http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/