alterity

May 7, 2005

Penelope Eckert - "Jocks & Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School"

Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks & Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. Teacher College Press: New York.

Overview (Introduction):

When i first picked up this book, i crinkled my nose at the terms "jocks" and "burnouts" and made a rash judgment that the author was clueless - those terms are so outdated, so binary, so limited. But as i dove into her Introduction, i actually got where she was going with this and began to really appreciate her structure. I still loathe the terms but i appreciate what she did with it.

Eckert offers two categories to frame all of American high school life (although her ethnography is based on one school in Michigan): jocks and burnouts. She makes it very clear that jocks don't just refer to the sporty kids but the embodiment of "an attitude - an acceptance of the school and its institutions as an all-encompassing social context, an unflagging enthusiasm and energy for working within those institutions" (3). In other words, these are the goodie-tooshoes, the popular kids, the hall monitors, the band geeks, and anyone who collects activities like baseball cards. Burnouts are, not surprisingly, not just the drug crowd, but all of those burnt-out of the system "from long years of frustration encountered in an institution that rejects and stigmatizes them as it fails to recognize and meet their needs" (4). This includes the art kids, the ones sleeping through all classes, the ones who are always tardy, the ones with their headphones on between classes, etc.

My next self-focused !but! concerns the binarism. I collected activities while dating the town's drug dealer and skipping over 1/3 of the school year; i had straight A's but my teachers preferred if i slept because i was less disruptive. What about me? is not the way to read a book but i can't help it. Luckily, Eckert addresses this by saying that many kids fit somewhere in-between but recognize the existence of these categories in the process of trying to place themselves in-between. While you can break down each category even more, the binarism still stands and the desire to move between them is significant in the social life of teens.

The significance of these two camps is that, together, they achieve "hegemony in the social structure of the school... It is not the categories themselves, but the opposition between them that is hegemonic" (5). The reason for this is startling - it helps replicate the class system that exists throughout adult society. You cannot have mainstream without having resistant; both create hegemony, not simply the mainstream.

With hegemony being constructed by oppositional forces, Eckert moves on to deconstruct an prevalent assumption - "Jocks become involved in school because their families have instilled in them confidence, ambition, and academic skills, while Burnouts become alienated from school because their families have failed them. Burnouts' rebelliousness is seen as resulting from problems at home and from frustration at their lack of academic ability" (a.k.a. "theory of cultural deprivation") (7). "In actuality, the years that lead up to secondary school withness a multifaceted process of separation of children on the basis of class and (in many schools) ethnicity, in which children's beliefs are built on adults' beliefs and in which individual beliefs are built into group beliefs" (7). In other words, by middle school, we replicate the adult values in our schools and children are positioned in relation to their parents' positions - "the perpetuation of class inequalities through the funneling of children into their parents' place in society, and the enculturation of children into hierarchical social forms through explicit and implicit educational practices" (7).

Eckert shares Shirley Brice Heath's definition of mainstream - "literate, school-oriented, aspiring to upward mobility through success in formal institutions and looking beyond the primary networks of family and community for behavioral models and value orientations" (8).

In elementary schools, there is no educational differentiation for kids - everyone is in the same class. By the time kids hit middle/high school, those who have been primed for leadership roles get to take their places. In middle/high schools, kids are split based on their "skills" which are usually marked by what mainstream parents/teachers think are generalizable values. Of course, this means that kids who come from non-mainstream communities are immediately placed in "lower" classes. Of course disdain for school will come out of this. "It is no wonder that those who stand to lose power in this new comprehensive school context react swiftly to reject the context itself" (13).

Talcott Parsons (1942) introduced the term "youth culture" but all of this early work concerned a classless, homogenous adolescent culture.

Eckert uses Michael Brake's (1985) definition of subculture: "meaning systems, modes of expression or life styles developed by groups in subordinate structural positions in response to dominant meaning systems, and which reflect their attempt to solve structural contradictions arising from the wider societal context" (14).

Jocks and Burnouts are very much overlapping subcultures which, to Eckert, "weakens the notion of culture intended in the term" (16). She talks about different approaches to subcultures, include a differentiation between 'fun' and 'delinquent' subcultures. She then introduces "progressive" subcultures (i.e. those who have access to social contexts outside of the school like the Punks, Beatniks and Freaks) - they "pose a treat to the Jock-Burnout hegemony, not only because of their 'unpredictable' style but because of their opposition to the category system itself" (18).

Category: subcultures

Posted by zephoria at May 7, 2005 1:00 AM

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