Ruby K. Payne is a teacher who thinks that middle class teachers often fail to understand poor children because they don’t understand that the poor operate by different rules than the middle class.
In her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, she says that holding on to poverty’s survival rules will hamper you if you try to function in the middle class.
It is not that one is good and the other is bad. It is that their situations are different. If you don’t know from one month to the next whether you’re going to be able to pay the rent, for example, you aren’t likely to be planning your career goals for 10 years from now.
Social class is a taboo topic among Americans. So long as we can see somebody below us on the social and economic scale, and somebody above us, we think of ourselves as middle class, even if we’re in the lower 10 percent or the upper 10 percent of income earners.
Thinking of ourselves as all “middle class” binds us Americans together. As Ruby Payne points out, it also blinds us to real differences.
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