Individualism is a founding principle of American society, promising that each individual’s actions can have great impact and that each citizen can control their own destiny through their own choices and efforts. Individualism plays a number of roles in perpetuating systems of inequity, especially in current American society. The idea has been heavily promoted since the late nineteenth century when Horatio Alger’s “Ragged Dick” rags to riches story was published and distributed widely in schools (Matias, 2013). All students, but especially white wealthy and upper middle-class students, are told that by virtue of the hard work of their parents they enjoy their positions in life, and with hard work of their own, they will maintain or improve those conditions (Levinson et al., 2015).
More recently, this historic frame of individualism has been used as an argument against social action programs because for example, affirmative action conflicts with ideas of a pure meritocracy (Hunt & Seiver, 2018). The tenets of individualism form the base for the notion of participatory citizens as the ideal “good” citizens (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004a). While Tocqueville called America a society that put the whole ahead of the individual and this may still have been the case in the era of the New Deal, this is increasingly not the state of our nation (Seider, 2011). One need only look at the shift in tax brackets for the wealthiest Americans over the past decades to see a much-changed national focus; while tax rates for the richest individuals were ninety percent or higher in the two decades after World War Two, they fell to the seventies for more than a decade hence (Bradford Tax Institute, n.d.). Today the highest tax rate paid by any American individual is just thirty-seven percent (Berger, 2017). This fact alludes to a difference in political ideology promoting individualistic explanations for income inequality. Even though liberal and conservative teachers are equally likely to discuss (or more commonly not discuss) income inequality and its causes in class, conservative teachers are more prone to referencing individualist causes for wealth and poverty (Rogers & Westheimer, 2017).
The perceived validity of individualism is affirmed in what students see around them, and because class is “not discussed” in the classroom in “polite” society (hooks, 1994), the belief in our pure “Ameritocracy” as defined by Akom (2008) persists without an understanding of the institutional racism that supports it. In seeking to compile a review of the extant literature on social class and its role in adolescent identity formation, Carolyn Hunt & Machele Seiver (2018) affirmed that there is little work to be found. They rationalize this with the notion that Americans are less comfortable talking about class than even race or gender (Hunt & Seiver, 2018). Of course, if class isn’t being acknowledged in the classroom, class cannot possibly be critiqued in the classroom, and as a result an acceptance of our class norms becomes a natural part of the hidden curriculum in schools, reproducing age-old systems and further stratifying our society.
In regard to perpetuating racism, individualism drives an emphasis on racism as consisting of entirely individual acts committed with active personal malicious intent. Thinking of racism so narrowly leads many to stubbornly cling to the idea that because they as an individual have not knowingly committed an act of racism, they are not racist (Cabrera, 2014; Okun, 2010), and by the same definition most in their circle are not. This obscures the conversation and drives attention away from macro-level analysis of racism’s enduring role in shaping society by instead focusing on the responsibility of each individual to make change by being “personally responsible” (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004b).
Correspondingly, a devout insistence on the frame of individualism in looking at who has and does not have wealth masks the inherited nature of social class. This has repeatedly been shown to be true with students who enjoy class privilege themselves, who even when exposed to ideas of structural inequities retreat to legitimizing frames of individualism to rationalize their own position and familial wealth (Howard, 2010). As a part of legitimation, the cocoon of individualism often extends to the family unit (Howard, 2010; Seider, 2011) without any recognition of the passing of class privilege between generations that may have facilitated their continued success, and students attributing the financial comfort of their family to the individual hard work demonstrated by past generations (Howard, 2010; Seider, 2011). Even with introductions to systems of inequity, students are not able to connect their family’s past success with their own “luck in the birth lottery” to see unequal advantage or disadvantage based on their family’s income.
The idea of individualism as a backbone of our culture is perpetuated widely in the American education system and used as a hegemonic tool. One only needs to think of the emphasis at many schools on competition to see the focus on individual contributions that is so unlike collectivist culture in other societies (Faitar, 2006). As Adam Howard says, “in an environment where competition is the order of the day, there is little room for arousing collective concern for anything other than self-interest” (2008, p. 58). These individualist frames don’t start and end in the classroom; like all hidden curriculum many of them are brought from home, perpetuated by media, and pervasive across all social interactions. This commitment to individualism creates resistance to ideas of systemic injustice for students of privilege because it flies against a key narrative that their position in society at present and in the future is entirely based on their own achievements and accomplishments (Okun, 2010).
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