Teachers, parents, and older students need to understand the mechanisms that have subverted honest efforts to give working class children in the United States a decent education. This book discusses why this has happened and suggests ways to develop a pedagogy that makes progressive methods, education that empowers, and powerful literacy possible with working class students. These methods, based on the work of Paulo Freire, help teachers support each other for equity and justice. The chapters are: (1) "Title, Author, and Hard-Bitten Schoolteachers"; (2) "A Distinctly Un-American Idea: An Education Appropriate to Their Station"; (3) "Harsh Schools, Big Boys, and the Progressive Solution"; (4) "Oppositional Identity: Identifying 'Us' as 'Not Them'"; (5) "The Lads"; (6) "Changing Conditions--Entrenched Schools"; (7) "Class, Control, Language, and Literacy"; (8) "Where Literacy 'Emerges'"; (9) "Where Children Are Taught To Sit Still and Listen"; (10) "The Last Straw: There's Literacy, and Then There's Literacy"; (11) "Literacy with an Attitude"; (12) "Not Quite Making Literacy Dangerous Again"; (13) "Making Literacy Dangerous Again"; (14) "Taking Sides"; and (15) "Mad as Hell, and Not Going To Take It Any More." (Contains 22 endnotes and 116 references.) (SLD)