![]() Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Studentsreviewed by Gad Yair - 2002 ![]() Author(s): Denise Clark Pope Publisher: Yale University Press, New Haven ISBN: 0300090137, Pages: 240, Year: 2001 Search for book at Amazon.com "Excellent", I said to myself, "here is the missing piece I've
been looking for. I now have a fuller and more realistic
picture of the puzzle of students' lives in classrooms." This
was my first reaction upon reading Denise Clark Pope's book,
Doing School. I was fortunate to have been
asked to review this book, and the timing of its arrival on my desk
was perfect: I had just begun teaching a course on American
school reform, and Pope's book fit neatly into the introduction
section. It nicely complemented Theodore Sizer's classic
Horace's Compromise, published two decades ago. In
that book, Sizer perceptively described a series of contradictory
expectations that his fictive teacher, Horace Smith, faced while
teaching in high school. In like manner, Pope has provided us
with five real-life portraits of ostensibly successful high school
students. The five high school students who Pope shadowed
during a year-long study were selected by the school's staff.
As one guidance counselor told her, "these students represent some
of our best and brightest" (p. 2). In a penetrating style,
Pope has echoed Sizer's lead and systematically deciphered the
compromises that these kids made on a daily basis. Positioned
in a "sociologically ambivalent role" (Merton 1976), these students
face contradictory norms and expectations. Their minds
constitute a battleground between non-school pressures and
temptations and within school demands and requirements. They
are in a constant tug-of-war (Yair 2000). To survive this
context, they manipulate the school system. They master the
school's rules and excel academically. However, Pope shows that to
be the best and brightest and outperform their peers, these
students overdo their schoolwork and sacrifice their youthful
pursuits and inner wishes. They dislike learning, at times
cheat, and act "chameleon-like." Yet they also become sick,
stressed, and neurotic. Nevertheless, they do prove to be the
school's best and brightest. Kevin, Eve, Teresa, Michelle, and Roberto (each gets a chapter)
are very different adolescents. They come from different social
backgrounds, have different learning styles, and exhibit very
different skills and preoccupations. Their families differ,
as do their cultural and social capital. Nevertheless, they
all aspire to reach the highest possible socio-economic position
and income level. Like many other adolescents their age, they
are members of "the ambitious generation" (Schneider and Stevenson
1999). In an honest statement, Kevin openly acknowledges: "...
grades are the focus. I tell you, people don't go to school
to learn. They go to get good grades which brings them to
college, which brings them the high-paying jobs, which brings them
happiness, so they think" (p. 11). Chapter by chapter, Pope
consistently shows how her five students embrace the American dream
of success. She also acutely describes how these kids sacrifice
their childhood to achieve their dream. They all seem like little
adults: Serious, hard-working, focused, rational, calculating.
While they know that life can have a pleasant side to it,
especially during adolescence, they also know that their peers are
equally competitive. As a result, they ‘do
school’ seriously. Compete and get good grades, that is
what it's all about. Though they at times penetrate the
ideology that they – and their encouraging/pushing parents
– steadfastly cling to, they rarely pause to resist the
school's creed and pressures. Instead, these kids do school;
they go through the motions, pretend to be engaged, and manipulate
the loosened school organization. They satisfice.
During the 1970s and 1980s, sociologists analyzed schools as
"loosely coupled organizations" (Ingersoll 1993; Weick 1976).
Scholars have shown that while schools adopt symbolic means and
rituals (e.g., exams and grades) to gain legitimacy from their
environment (Meyer and Rowan 1977), they do so halfheartedly.
They argued that the actual life of teachers and students in
classrooms is rather disconnected from societal requirements.
To the extent that this depiction was correct at that time, Pope
suggests that the 1990s prove that it is no longer so. The
elite school and the best and brightest kids that she studied are
tightly coupled to their extant environment and aspired-to
future. From the book we learn that "Faircrest High" accepts
capitalism's competitive ethos, and uses different means to convey
the competitive ethos to its students. It places excellent
students and their achievements on public pedestals, and
strategically limits the number of students who can be the best and
brightest. Thus, the school can be likened to a small
firm. Though it (still) lacks the capacity to pay students by
results, it does remunerate them covertly with non-monetary means.
For the elite, then, schools are tightly coupled to adults'
economic environments. However, as Pope suggests, doing school for future's sake may be
‘non-educational’, and students may grow up
“miseducated.” The values and rationales that
motivate students at Faircrest High are extrinsic and
non-educational. However, if learning was the basic value and
schooling regarded as its own aim – the school would be
different, as would the students' experiences. Pope addressed
this issue in the seventh chapter – largely capitalizing on
knowledge gained through the literature – but left me
ambivalent about the sociological ambivalence of Faircrest High and
the five students I followed throughout the book.
This final chapter, “The Predicament of Doing
School,” has proved to be the least aspiring in the
book. After a short introduction and five descriptive
chapters, I expected this one to challenge existing theories of
student engagement and open new theoretical questions about the
experience of schooling. It seems, though, that Pope chose to
sidestep this important endeavor and selectively engaged extant
literature in an attempt to tie in Horace’s compromises with
those exhibited by her five students. In a sense, it was no
more than an echo. Nevertheless, Denise Clark Pope has written an
important book. Personally, it served to fill in a missing
descriptive piece in my puzzle of schooling and students'
experiences. However, after completing the 185 pages of the text,
and having read the extra 20 pages of notes, I was still left
ambivalent. Take the book's subtitle, for example, which
reads "How We Are Creating A Generation of Stressed Out,
Materialistic, and Miseducated Students." Yet the book
reports the experiences of only five exceptional students in one
exceptional high school. The talk of "a generation" is
overshooting the data. Furthermore, Pope's style adopts
positivistic, quantitative language even though her study
exemplifies a neat qualitative case study. For example, she
writes that "many of the students had...", or that "most of the
students..." (p.158). But, again, there were only five students. To
talk about them as "all" or "most" is simply meaningless.
Note, though, that besides the theoretical oversights mentioned
above, these are my main criticisms of the book. Not much,
really. To summarize, if you are teaching about high schools and
students' experiences – Pope's Doing School is a must
read for you and your students. If you are about to embark on
a study of student engagement in school, Pope's book will be
necessary for forming hypotheses and developing insightful research
tools. However, if you are to send your kids to high school,
Pope's book may encourage you to rethink – at least to pause
and reflect on yourself, your kids, and Faircrest High. Come
to think of it – if you have Pope's courage, the book might
make you rethink American society and its educational ethos. Not a
small endeavor, indeed. References
Ingersoll, Richard M. 1993. "Loosely coupled organizations revisited." Research in the Sociology of Organizations 11, 81-112. Merton, Robert K. 1976. Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays. New York: Free Press. Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. 1977. "Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony." American Journal of Sociology 83, 340-363. Schneider, Barbara, and David Stevenson. 1999. The Ambitious Generation: America's Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless. New Haven: Yale University Press. Weick, Karl E. 1976. "Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems." Administrative Science Quarterly 21, 1-19. Yair, Gad. 2000. "Educational battlefields in America: The tug-of-war over students' engagement with instruction." Sociology of Education 73, 247-269.
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