the minnesota review n.s. 61-62 (2004)

Renny Christopher

What About the Dumb Kids?

I was a smart kid. I was officially identified as a smart kid by the IQ test I took in the fourth grade, in 1966, during the Cold War, when the United States' hysteria to keep up with the Russians fueled lots of money into science education and IQ testing in grammar schools to identify the smart kids who would help defeat the communist menace. And while I never did help defeat the communist menace, my life was shaped by that identification of me as a smart kid, an identification I swallowed hook, line, sinker and fishing pole when I was a kid. Being smart made me different. Made me special. Made me better than all the dumb kids around me, destined to working-class drudgery, while I was clearly on my way to.... well, who knew, but somewhere that had to be better than where I was.

Hah. Now I wish I could go back and kick my nine-year old self in the butt and say "don't fall for that crap!" This special issue of minnesota review is my belated kick to my younger backside.

The idea for the issue arose over lunch at the MLA in New Orleans, at a very frou-frou restaurant with a bunch of very smart people sitting around a table chowing down on overpriced, but oh-so-properly presented Louisiana cuisine. Jeff Williams had just given a paper called "Smart" and he, Lillian Robinson, and I started talking about what our experiences as "smart kids" had been like. As I recall it was Lillian who turned to Jeff and said, "That would make a great issue of minnesota review," and then turned to me and said, "and you should edit it." I thought it sounded like a smart idea.

But then when I described the idea to my friend Barbara Jensen, a psychologist of working-class origin who didn’t take any IQ tests in grammar school and was most definitely not identified as a smart kid, her immediate response was "What about the dumb kids?" And I thought, wow, what a good question.

That exchange took place at the Youngstown Center for Working Class Studies conference in 2003. Barbara was on a panel titled "Experiencing Class Cultural Differences: A Dialogue Across the Class Divide." Fred Rose, a community activist of middle-class origin, was another of the panelists. He said that his first experience of class difference was seeing how, in elementary school, he noticed that he and other children from his neighborhood were treated differently than the poorer students—he and his peers were treated with more trust and respect. Barbara Jensen then told a story about how she, as a working-class kid, won the respect of other working-class kids in her school—by rebelling and sassing the teachers. Once, a teacher literally picked her up by the arms, carried her out into the hall, and slammed her against the lockers. When she told that story, another of the panelists, Betsy Leondar-Wright, an organizer of middle-class origin, visibly winced and shook her head in horror. But I, I was thinking, wow, that's so cool, and envying Barbara for having had the balls to defy authority like that, to be a bad kid, rather than the disgusting little conformist that I was, respecting teachers' authority over the authority of my parents, playing by their rules, wanting approval from those authorities, being the perfect little fascist subject, not the brave, defiant little revolutionary that Barbara was.

And it made me wonder if my life would have been better after all if I'd been one of the dumb kids, instead of one of the smart kids, getting citizenship awards in the classroom and then getting beaten up in the bathroom by girls like Barbara. Maybe they had it right all along.

On another panel at the 2003 Youngstown conference, Gail Verdi reported on her study of four working-class women who had gone through higher education. Verdi said of herself, "In high school I stopped studying. I learned to play dumb and I made a conscious decision to do so. I was in the commercial track." She had no sense that knowledge would pay off. She described herself as "pissed off all the time" in response to the forms of control the school exercised. She saw the dominant group as the enemy, while I saw them as the group to be emulated.

Is this the pivotal difference between the Smart Kids and the Dumb Kids? The Dumb Kids saw "them" as the enemy, while the Smart Kids saw "them" as the goal to be achieved. And so the dumb kids resisted assimilation to middle-class values, while the smart kids were swept up in those values. As Jeff Williams points out in his essay, "smart" is a term useful for maintaining class hierarchy, is "an assurance of our intrinsic merit, to explain our class distinction to ourselves, perhaps to explain why our brothers and sisters or the people we grew up with and went to high school with might be waiting tables, or driving trucks..." or serving as 911 dispatchers for the fire department, as my brother, who has a high school education and a few community college classes, does. He is clearly intelligent and capable, but he never qualified as a smart kid in the same way I did. Smart, Williams asserts, "dispels our class guilt, providing a rationale for why we have attained and deserve our class position," a rationale that I now officially and publicly renounce, and declare my readiness to do penance for having so enthusiastically and unthinkingly (and dumbly?) accepted the smart kid mantle.

Williams points out that smart is an individual descriptor, "therefore fostering our thinking of ourselves atomistically, as individual brains, rather than as part of a social group or institution." I wish someone could have explained that to me when I was nine. I wish someone could have taught me how to question what my education was doing to me.

That questioning is exactly what Carolyn Whitson does in her essay, "Why Does the Lance Bleed? Whom Does the Grail Serve? Unasked Questions from a Working-Class Education." Whitson claims that while education teaches critical thinking, it fails to ask students to be critical of the education itself. Examining the holy grail myth from her perspective as a medieval scholar of working-class origin, she presents the idea of Perceval as a "smart kid," but not a good kid, and compares her education to Perceval's in order to build a critique of education and what it does to us in terms of instilling class values.

Like Whitson, Diane Kendig insists of bringing knowledge and perspectives from the working-class world which are not valued as "smart" in the realm of higher education into that realm to alter our perspectives on both worlds. Her essay, "Now I Work in that Factory You Live In," insists that working-class life has value in and of itself, and is not necessarily unbroken grimness, but rather possesses its own valid culture, and that "it can be ugly on both sides of the divide" between the working class and the college-going class.

John Kirk's "Crossing the Border" blends autobiographical narrative about his experiences with the class system in Great Britain and theoretical analysis and argues, very persuasively, that class experience is not something that can be left behind—that the term "escapers" is a misnomer and that the "Smart Kids" who undergo class mobility remain working class even as they become middle class, because the narrative that identifies them as entering a "classless" state merely accepts the ideology that tells us that middle-classness is really "classlessness" because it is the norm. He further argues that what we have been taught to read as (bourgeois) narratives of upward mobility are really (working-class) narratives of collective experience. Kirk's essay makes me feel better about having been a "smart kid." I believe I have remained working class even while I became middle class, and it is because of that that Barbara Jensen, the once-dumb kid, and I, the once-smart kid, can meet here on the ground of class mobility and class maintenance and joke about how she would once have beaten me up in the bathroom at school—and both understand what we're talking about.

Luckily for both of us, it's no longer necessary for her to beat me up for me to get the point. I was sufficiently beaten up in graduate school by the classism and prejudice I encountered there that I came to recognize who was really my ally, and who wasn't.

In "That's Why They Call it Work," Michelle Kaminiski talks about her experiences as a labor educator. Her essay raises important questions about the value conflicts between people of working-class and people of middle-class origin in the academy. She points out that while upper-middle-class people say they value individual achievement, in fact there is unacknowledged collective action among upper-middle class people.

My underlying value conflicts in the various worlds I've moved in have often been made visible by popular culture. When I was a smart kid, I thought I was way too smart to listen to the "dumb" country music listened to by those around me. (And though now I'm ashamed of my youthful snobbery, I never have been able to learn to listen to country music.) Once, in a graduate seminar, I said something about Bruce Springsteen, and one of my upper-middle-class fellow students opined that he had no interest in taking someone who behaved "like a garage mechanic" seriously. Both of my grandfathers were mechanics, thank you very much. Nadine Dolby's essay "Ruminations on Radio" uses the types of radio programs listened to by various branches of her family to trace the interesting mixed-class situation of someone with cultural capital but no material capital. People in mixed-class positions such as this are positioned in such a way that class becomes very visible to them, when it often remains invisible to those who are firmly placed, and remain, in one class or another.

Kirsten Dinnall Hoyte also talks about a complicated class background in her West Indian immigrant family, a background complicated also by the seeming contradiction of being a "smart kid" and being black. Hoyte uses Amy Tan's story "Two Kinds" as a springboard to talk about her own experience as a good daughter/bad daughter in a situation with the demands of affiliation and familial ambition could not have allowed her to be wholly one or the other.

The issue ends with Jeffrey Williams' last word on "smart." One of the things he points out is the etymology of the word: it is not only a noun, but a verb, "to smart," as to experience pain from a blow. For me, as for others writing in this issue, being smart did smart—that is, being a "smart kid" carried with it pain as well as reward. When I was called a smart kid, that term hid more than it revealed. Here, in this issue, those hidden dimensions are brought forward.

So what about the dumb kids? Perhaps an issue focusing on them might be even more revealing.

Renny Christopher, Professor of English at CSU Channel Islands, is working on an autobiography, A Carpenter's Daughter: A Working-Class Woman in Higher Education. Before she earned her PhD, she worked as a printing press operator, typesetter, carpenter and horse wrangler.