ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the problem as it appears in the experience of the functionaries of a large urban educational institution, the Chicago public school system, discussing the way teachers in this system observe, classify and react to class-typed differences in the behavior of the children they work with. It analyzes the way the public school teacher reacts to these cultural differences and, in so doing, perpetuates the discrimination of the authors's educational system against the lower-class child. The analysis is based on interviews with sixty teachers in the Chicago system. As these cultural differences produce variations from the image of the "ideal" student, teachers tend to use class terms in describing the children with whom they work. The author takes up three problems that loomed largest in the teachers' discussion of adjustment of their students: the problem of teaching itself, the problem of discipline, and the problem of the moral acceptability of the students.
