The Achievement Narrative and Alienation in School: A Typology of Academic Disconnection

Abstract

Previous work on student alienation in schools has emphasized alienation as either a source or consequence of students’ lack of achievement. We show, in contrast, how alienation is common to a wide range of students’ experiences in school, including among “high-achieving” students. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two disparate suburban high schools, we show how students’ experience of alienation is linked to an exacting achievement narrative in U.S. schooling. We describe four forms of alienation: precarious character, unsound settings, impossible plots, and someone else’s story, with the first three each connected to a different narrative element (character, setting, plot) and the fourth a more existential sense of narrative disconnect. We highlight the importance of alienation as a reason to de-emphasize schooling in solutions to inequality, making space for more radical politics of redistribution.