“Thirty Years Old and I'm Allowed to be Late”: The politics of time at an urban community college

Within recent years scholars in both sociology of education and curriculum studies have explored what it is about the school that reproduces class, race and gender relations that maintain an unequal social structure. While it has long been recognized that school outcomes differ along these lines, the role that the school plays in creating differential outcomes and forms of consciousness that sustain fundamental inequalities and antagonisms has been largely ignored. This is as much true for scholars like Bowles and Gintis as it is for earlier functionalists. This article begins to fill this void by focusing on the relationship between the 'hidden curriculum and student culture. Data presented here were gathered as part of a larger study on the ' lived culture of lower class black students in a community college (which 1 call Urban College) located in a large northeastern city in the United States. I argue that, rather than 'determine student culture in any simple sense, the hidden curriculum and student culture emerge in relation to one another. Each creates aspects of the other and neither can be discussed or analyzed separately. The way in which elements of the hidden curriculum combine in a concrete culture to produce aspects of student consciousness is also discussed.