Two Fridays ago I tried to lead a group of sixth- through eighth-grade girls through a discussion of a few documents about the Civil Rights movement, including a poem and Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. My idea was to get them thinking about how writing could change people's minds. The week before, in our first meeting, many of them had written that their dream was to improve their neighborhoods, so I figured this week we would start talking about how, as writers, people had tried to change the world, and how we could do the same.

The word "Birmingham" proved mortally humorous for the discussion, for reasons that escaped me. They giggled and repeated it - "Burrrrrrminghayam"-- until I threatened to make them sit quietly with
their hands crossed in front of them. One of the girls, Catherine, was
hell-bent on getting out of the class by hook or crook. She talked over me
so many times that I sent her down to the afterschool director. Just what
she wanted. He sent her back with a mischievous blush beneath her
bottle-bottom glasses.

We made it through another paragraph, and then Catherine cut me off, blowing a steam jet of a question to the ceiling and nobody else in particular. "Why teachers don't talk ghetto?" she asked.

I remember sixth grade history class, where we used to compete to see who
could sidetrack the teacher the longest. We loved Mrs. Tuck for it.
Distraction provided some of her most teachable moments. So I pushed on for a
moment, finishing a paragraph, and then circled back to the question.

"Why do you think teachers don't talk ghetto?" I asked. Julia, who always wears an evening-dark look of
composure, responded. "Teachers have to be professional," she said.

"Good point," I said. "But what does professional mean?"

The girls sought answers for a moment. Catherine came out with it first.
"It means, like, you like have to talk like rich people," she said,
masking her Bronx pout for a moment with an accent. Unmistakeably, a
Valley Girl accent.

I was surprised. When I was her age, at a private school in the affluent
Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena, we exaggerated a Valley accent to connote
a class difference: it was stupid, tacky. Not from our curvy tree-lined
streets; from white-trash suburbs. We were no, however, immune: our own Valley taint came and went
depending on the situation. I still have friends from college who are
alarmed at the invasion of "like" and "totally" into my speech after I've
gone home for vacation.

Where did Catherine learn this about professionalism? I know a little
about her family: she and her chubby little brother, who is also pale,
with thick glasses and lurid scars on the backs of his hands, are apparently in a foster home or living with cousins. Because of this I
suspect most of her ideas about employment don't come from her parents.
Employers also seem to have some kind of prejudice against hiring people
from the South Bronx into the kind of job where you have to wear tailored
suits and keep your fingernails and hair drab, so it's not surprising that
she doesn't have the clearest sense of what most people mean by
professional. Probably, she learned this version of
"professionalism" from television.

I don't know whether one should expect any eighth-grade girl to understand
the nuances of the word "professional." Heaven knows their attention is
elsewhere. I was able to draw out of the other girls a more nuanced
response: professional means you don't use slang, you speak respectfully.

But this was a moment of revelation for me. I think Catherine was unintentionally letting me know that when she was speaking with someone who demanded that
all-important quality, respect, that underlying the code shift would be a
plain and simple response to the ongoing race dynamics in our society.

Before the writing workshop I had just come from another workshop
downtown, one aimed at preparing my fellow sufferers in government service for their
transition back to the working world. The workshop was led by an
immaculately-groomed, slightly accented Chinese-American woman from a
Manhattan temp agency. Her job was to give us pointers on resume writing
and dressing for interviews, an art more complex and nuanced than
Victorian fan signals. We were to follow strict instructions about paper,
font use, paragraph bullets, earrings, and fingernail length. Some of the
stuff - the rule about no-fingernails-over-half-an-inch provoked surprised
murmurs - was new to some of my compatriots, who are themselves from the
South Bronx. Some of it raised my own unplucked brows. (Apparently an old
rule has been reinstated since I was last in the market: despite over a
century's struggles by feminists, I still have to wear a skirt to an interview if I am really serious about the job.)

Having worked the past year in a welfare-to-work agency, though, I'd been
steeping in these instructions for a while. We were instructed in my
workplace to "dress professionally as an example for our clients," who were
coming off the welfare rolls. What this provoked in the way of uniform
among my co-workers is a range from stickpinned ties and three-piece-suits
to slit-up-to-lordamercy skintight miniskirts to sweatpants. I'd
personally gotten veiled comments from the administration about "the
return of the gypsy look." (Fsck them. As I've said before, anyone
looking to me for fashion cues is yanking the rhino's tail.)

Regardless. Dress was a big focus of my agency's welfare-to-work program, as were workshops about speaking properly to an employer, sidestepping questions
about the shadier parts of your employment history, and not fighting with
your co-workers. While we gave people other kinds of help -- counselling, drug abuse treatment, help with their welfare cases, housing
and child care assistance, and even entrepreneur training -- this and
motivational speeches are about all that the bulk of people coming through
get in the way of preparation for work.

There is a whole industry that has been created out of preparing people,
like welfare leavers and recent college graduates like myself, for jobs. I
wonder if the industry lobbied for welfare reform legislation when it came
on the table. They're cleaning up now. Hundreds of thousands of dollars
which once went to families so they could put food on the table are now
going to motivational speakers who are required to corral the family heads
into miserable classrooms for days on end. They come out and grumble in
the lunchrooms.

Elsewhere, there are prisons, which also take a lot of money to run.

And next door at the school, there is Catherine, who wasn't listening as I shared the commandments of skirts and bond paper (there was a second round
of giggles about Burrrrrrrminghayam while I droned on about hairstyles and
fingernail mores), and who will try to escape from my class again next
week.

I'm sorry. I can't help but think America needs to make up its mind about
what education is needed to make citizens. We can do a great deal of ex
post facto social education in welfare reform classrooms; that kind of
socialization is normally done through folkways outside of class. (Will
the job training movement end up looking like the "civilizing" of Native
Americans which went on in boarding schools in the 1880s? They are similar
in their attention to changing personal habits.) We can give people enough
rope to hang themselves with, send them to jail, and then either leave
them there or expect that even though dialog about the reformist mission
of prisons has entirely disappeared from the public consciousness, people
will come out as better citizens. We can continue to pump juice into the
Frankenstein public education system we've created, with its weird vestiges of training for future factory workers and its vague memories of
creating an enlightened citizenry capable of upholding democracy. Or we
can sit down and start looking at the whole damned picture, and make
something else.