ABSTRACT
During my interview with those Year 12 students discussed in the previous chapter they compared their classroom to the workplace in various ways. So if they were workers, I asked, what were they producing here? One boy answered unhesitatingly, ‘Like, our own grades, and stuff.’ He went on to add that they were also producing knowledge; but here in his first response put so baldly is the economy of the mainstream secondary classroom, which in some ways operates like those of capitalism. To oversimplify somewhat: student-workers compete with one another to produce goods, usually in the form of written pieces; these are offered to the consumer (the readerteacher), who assesses its worth by assigning a letter or number. In this symbolic exchange economy the grade carries a power equivalent to dollars: the capital so acquired can be put to work for the owner’s economic and social advancement.
