ABSTRACT
A description of a first-grade class in a Black ghetto in New York City follows. It is not a school in the poorest of the districts. It was considered typical for the grade.
As Gerry Rosenfeld, who taught in a Harlem school and did an anthropological field study there, pointed out, the schooling of these children is already patterned for them at the age of six or seven. “Not much is expected from them,” they are from poor families, they are Black, and they are “disadvantaged.” By high school many of them will be dropouts, or “push-outs,” as Rosenfeld terms them. As they get older they become less docile than the children described above, and some teachers in ghetto schools have reason to fear for their own safety. The teachers of this classroom did not have reason to fear their pupils, but they were ignorant about them. Their preparatory work in college or in teacher training had not prepared them for a classroom of children from a poor ghetto area in the city. The student teacher knew nothing about the neighborhood from which the children in her class came. She
knew only that she “did not want to work with ‘these’ children when she became a regular teacher” (Rosenfeld 1971:170).
