Home Advantage Annette Lareau Analysis

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One theme common to Annette Lareau’s ‘Home Advantage,’ and the articles, ‘Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work’ and ‘Schooling in Capitalist America’ is social class and parents involvement in school. Family and school relationships are typified by separation between the different classes. In all three texts we see how social class shapes students’ experience in school
In ‘Home Advantage’, Lareau shares her experience observing two schools, an upper-middle-class and a working class. She relates that both working and upper middle class parents care about how their children do in school. However, the working class do not have the skills, resources nor the confidence that the middle class parents do to help their children. The working class …show more content…

She shares her experience observing in schools of different social classes. Like Lareau, Anyon talks about how social class affects what children learn in school. She distinguishes among four classes, the working class, middle-class, affluent professional and the executive elite. Working class children, Anyon shares, are being prepared for wage labor. Middle class children are being prepared for white collar jobs, that is work in an office or other administrative setting. Affluent professional children are being prepared to develop skills like their parents, such as linguistics and artistic skills and the highest class on the social ladder,, the elite executives, are being prepared to become owners of physical capital and production in society (p. 88-89). Basically, what Anyon is saying in her article is that the hidden curriculum of work prepares children to attain and remain within their social class. In other words, children of the wealthy are taught the skills required to become rich, while the children of working class parents are taught to be semi-skilled for waged