I am mildly freaking out, and more than a little disturbed right now.
So it occurred to me that a short way to say “the way students are organized into different courses and classes according to their abilities” is “a class system”.
Yeah, as in like, social status?
It disturbs me to no end that we, as students, are being essentially segregated into groups of “inferior” and “superior” according to the courses that we are taking–our class.
So, upon looking up the etymology of the word “class”, it come from the Latin “classis”, which essentially means a division, or group, or something akin to that. It was originally used in the context of separating people into different groups so that they could be taxed accordingly. In the 1600′s, it began to be used to describe educational courses. At this time, education was reserved people high on the socio-economic ladder.
I’m sorry for flipping out, I just find it incredibly frightening how intrinsically the English language links socio-economic status and educational courses.
The really awful thing is, I’ve experienced the results of this. I’ve been in tracked, advanced classes since fourth grade. We were told that we were smarter, brighter, better than people that weren’t. The people in these classes were hated by the kids in normal classes, because we stayed in our own self-important, superior bubbles. We had been told we were better, we thought we were better, we avoided interacting with those that we had been told were inferior. When you got put in the advanced program at my elementary school, you would eventually drift away from your non-advanced friends and join the advanced bubble. It was inevitable.
I am good friends with some of the people who were in the non-advanced classes now, and they are still bitter. They hated us, so much. We thought that we were at the top of the world, and nothing could stop us. We were essentially segregated by those that decided that some of us were smarter than the others.
I didn’t have any close friends who weren’t in advanced classes until probably eighth grade. This was partially simply as a result of never interacting with people who weren’t taking these courses, because we all existed in our own advanced bubbles of social circles. Even as the schedules were split into multiple classes per day, instead of only one teacher all year, it remained the same. You knew the people best who were in the same classes as you, so the social circles became divided by “intelligence”.
This continues to be true with the people I interact with today. It is nowhere near as extreme now (I am the one with the most insanely hard schedule out of my closer friends by a class or two), but it is definitely still there (all of them are taking at least one higher-level course, and all of them can have an extremely intelligent argument discussion on the pros and cons of classic literature).
So, in considering that most people probably have friends whom they consider of similar intelligence to themselves, do they do this because they want to have scholarly conversation, or because it is an idea intrinsic in our language?
I think I’ve made the point I wanted to make here (although I can’t remember exactly what it was initially anymore), but this is just sort of my freaked out rambles for today.
Good night, Internet. Hope that someday I will actually re-read this rant and pick out the typos.
