“You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.”

— Paul Klee

There are numerous ways that we adults hand down the world we have created to the children who are waiting to receive it. On the obvious side, we hand the world down through how we prioritize our time — do we visit a neighbor just out of surgery, or do we watch the season finale of Friends? Maybe equally obvious, we hand it down through the beliefs we espouse, though a surer indication of what we believe lies less in how often we go to church and what lands in the collection box than in chance remarks children overhear in our conversations. In general, we hand the world down through the behaviors we model.

A narrative poem by Anne Winters, in her small and brilliant volume The Key to the City, tells the story of two children in New York who watch a stabbed and dying prostitute across the street, and what they learn from the adults’ refusal to offer her any help:

She’d worked to please the ones inside

that house

And now the stiff pageboy lay tumbled

— black threads of it

Wetted red — her cheek on the place

where shoes

walked, dogs stopped — this was what

was, other things

what people said.

As anyone who is a parent or works with children knows, it takes children almost no time to absorb what we’re offering, to internalize every lesson, and to incorporate it into their own world, a microcosm of our own. This is so whether the situation is tragic, as in Winters’ poem, or mundane and everyday, as when we cut someone off in traffic because we’re in a hurry.

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with my daughter and her fourth-grade class in their school cafeteria. At one long table sat the children with freshly washed hair and nice clothes. At the other table sat the children who had neither. I observed that the seated children were not uncordial to one another, but that there was simply little intercourse between the two tables. Clearly, all the children knew where they belonged. They had begun to understand the lessons they were being taught, and so they already knew who was expected to do well in life, and who was not. They were only 9 years old, but the adult world (and I do not mean their teachers) had wasted no time in communicating to them what their place was, what was allowed them, and what was prohibited. By 9 years old, they had recognized the message and had begun to act on it. At the well-dressed and hygienic table, the children act on the message by saving a seat for the other kid whose “I Love New York” shirt was actually bought in New York. They save a seat for the kid whose lunch box changes with each new blockbuster kid movie — one month the lunch box stars Frodo Baggins; the next month it’s Hermione and Harry. Or they save a seat for the kid whose homework is always completed neatly and on time, and is held together with charming paper clips in the shapes of moon and stars, $9.95 a box at Barnes & Noble.

And who does not get a seat at the “good” table and so winds up with the other unkempt children at the “lesser” table? Well, the kid whose homework is never completed because her single mom works nights and there is no one to make her do it. Or the kid whose parents’ fighting creates a simmering anger manifested in the kid’s own explosive temper. Or the kid whose mother is in “rehab,” whose father has never been in the picture, and whose clothes, provided by the overworked social services system, are cheap and considered “babyish.” These are the kids at the other table.

In America, we love to claim that we have left behind the archaic European class system. But we know, even as we say it, that this isn’t the case. To talk about class is, of course, considered as tacky (or “low class”) as talking about money. Nonetheless, powerful class divisions do exist in every aspect of what passes for culture in America, and those divisions begin their existence among the youngest members of our society and what is supposed to be the most egalitarian of our institutions — the public school.

This isn’t news to anyone who remembers what it’s like to be a kid and a student, nor is it news to anyone who spends time in the classroom as an adult. Within the walls of a classroom exist invisible walls that are equally impassable, and it is these walls that create perimeters that are quietly and painfully observed by almost everyone. Even in economically poor Swain County, the third poorest county in North Carolina, (which I’ve pointed out in previous columns, maybe ad nauseam), there are definite economic divisions. These divisions manifest themselves not only in the community, (where there are generally three classes: the middle class, the working class, and the welfare class), but also in the classroom.

I often divide my students into groups for projects I’ve devised, and I base the groups’ composition on academic strengths and weaknesses. Other than that, I try to allow students to sit with friends. It’s always worthy of note that when I rearrange these friends and ask them to sit with unfamiliar students outside of the self-imposed order, an outcry goes up. A student with an Abercrombie & Fitch turtleneck (with the logo subtly emblazoned across the faux pocket) finds himself seated next to a kid in a Faded Glory T-shirt (read Wal-Mart). And it’s dirty. And the Faded Glory kid has a bad haircut. Then another kid wearing an Old Navy sweatshirt moves in, and you pretty much have all three economic classes present in one disgruntled group. However, since the group’s roster is not based on finances, but on academics, I leave it as is and live with the grumbling. At one point last semester, four students (whose appearance indicated little money) were so vocal and so persistent in their begging to be seated with one another during a discussion of a novel, that I relented. In less time than it took to push their desks together, they had labeled themselves the “losers” group and begun to behave accordingly.

I suppose there are many ways to look at how we divide ourselves as a society. One might simply embrace the ideas of social Darwinism, accept that “like groups with like,” and justify it all with the survival of the fittest philosophy. But there is something in me that despises these artificial boundaries. (Or to say it better, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” according to the much quoted and much misunderstood poem by Robert Frost.) And so I continue to fight what I know is a losing battle. Sometimes I see little successes and my classes percolate with energy created by dissonance and discovery. Maybe the Abercrombie kid sees that the Faded Glory kid has a brain, and the Faded Glory kid offers fine insights as to the motivations of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Or maybe the Faded Glory kid recognizes that the Abercrombie kid also has a heart, and the last scene in Life Is Beautiful brings tears to both their eyes. Then again, sometimes my groupings are disastrous, especially when one considers what I’ve set out to accomplish. Abercrombie gets upset when Faded Glory doesn’t bring in the three assigned Internet sources for the PowerPoint presentation. Faded Glory is embarrassed to admit that there is no computer at home, and the school bus was the only means home, hence, no access to the public library. Abercrombie’s biases are confirmed, particularly the deeply ingrained, “Poor people are poor because they don’t work hard enough.”

In America, we love to believe that. It’s comforting, and it justifies gloating over our new SUV, our Bose sound system, our Oriental rug that is beginning to look fashionably thin and faded (as if it were handed down from a long line of ancestors who were widely traveled). The belief that the poor get what they deserve also justifies the pleasure we take in looking down on those who have little or nothing. We speak unkindly of the families that can’t afford college savings for their children yet manage to pay for cable television. What we fail to understand is the ethos of the poor, who value the television more than education because they tend not to hold out hope for the future (as represented by a college education), whereas entertainment is an escape here and now. And besides, having good TV makes people feel they are middle class. It makes them feel they are part of the group that is most visible, and therefore increases their sense of esteem. Is this value system wise? Who are we to say? As a teacher, I must believe knowledge is power, but I also know that knowledge is painful.

Part of being American is accepting the construct handed down from the Puritans as to who is among the “elect,” those destined for admittance inside the Pearly Gates. One can identify the elect because they are blessed financially by God ... right now. The elect wear Abercrombie, and they’re going to heaven in first-class seats. Old Navy is a little iffy, but they’ll probably get there, though it may be in economy class. Faded Glory, however, is going straight to hell, in a hand basket, in a hurry. Or so we teach our children.

I am aware that this is a gross oversimplification. The topic deserves more time and space than what a column in a newspaper can provide. I also know that there are numbers of remarkable people who are either oblivious to differences in humans and who recognize only a shared humanity, or who work hard to overlook those differences and embrace only the shared humanity. My husband is one of those remarkable people who doesn’t notice societally imposed boundaries. And I also have some students like that — the trailer park kid whose personality is so vibrant and whose intellect is so strong that few boundaries exist for her. Or the kid who travels in Europe, could have gone to an expensive private school, but instead chose public, and whose Christian principles and genuine compassion draw respect, admiration, and friendship from other students with backgrounds nothing like her own. But these students, like my husband (who not only picks up the derelict hitchhiker, but also takes him back to his burnt-out trailer, has a beer with him, and encourages him to talk about his three tours in Vietnam) are the exception, never the rule.

I hear parents talk about fighting the war against brand names. But it’s a war that can’t be won as long as there are advertising agencies created to study child demographics and that specialize in selling to kids (see Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation). To go even further, it’s a lost war as long as we’re a credit card culture, with children closely watching us as we get our high from the discount outlet mall. It’s a lost war when we tell our children not to pursue friendships with the offspring of “rough” parents, and our children easily see the parallel between “roughness” and poverty. What we really teach them with this bombardment is that we are what we can afford to buy — no more, no less. Lewis Lapham, Harper’s editor, is a lonely voice in a vast consumer wilderness when he cries, “To know something is more fun than to own something.”

When those of us who are aware of what we are doing do not question assumptions and stereotypes about economic classes, we hand down a system that has kept much of the world’s population in bondage, whether literal or figurative, for thousands of years. We limit our children’s experience with our embrace of a world peopled only by those like ourselves, and we limit their capacity for compassion. As a teacher, when I base my expectations of a student on his or her dress, or dialect, or piercings, or body odor, I limit myself to a narrow bias, and I miss getting to know the person beneath the surface. Worse, I limit my student to my own small and petty expectations (and study after study bears out the importance and effects of these expectations).

The ideal parent would hand down to her children a world without caste or boundaries. The ideal teacher would hand down to his students a world limited only by those students’ potential. If we were ideal adults, we wouldn’t do what we do now — hand our children a paint-by-number world, limit them to the use of a broken paintbrush and only a few colors, and then judge the sad painting we force them to create.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young lives in Cullowhee and teaches in Swain County. She can be reachd at youngericyoung@csl.com)