ABSTRACT
Silencing signifies a terror of words, a fear of talk. This chapter examines such practices as they echoed throughout a comprehensive public high school in New York City, in words and in their absence; these practices emanated from the New York City Board of Education, textbook publishers, corporate "benefactors", religious institutions, administrators, teachers, parents, and even students themselves. It explores what does not get talked about in schools: how "undesirable talk" by students, teachers, parents, and community members is subverted, appropriated, and exported, and how educational policies and procedures obscure the very social, economic, and therefore experiential conditions of students' daily lives while they expel critical "talk" about these conditions from written, oral, and nonverbal expression. The chapter focuses on silencing primarily at the level of classroom and school talk in a low-income, "low-skill" school. The silencing process is but one aspect of what is often, for low-income students, an impoverished educational tradition.
