Jean Anyon

Jean Anyon
Dr. Jean Anyon in 2011 at Occupy Wall Street; image by Dr. Noah Asher Golden

Jean Anyon (July 16, 1941 – September 7, 2013), was an American critical thinker and researcher in education, a professor in the Doctoral Program in Urban Education at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, and a civil rights and social activist.

Anyon was born on July 16, 1941, in Jersey City, New Jersey. She attended the University of Pennsylvania (1963), earning a bachelor's and a master's degrees in education, and completed her doctoral work at New York University (1976). She spent much of her early career at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and in 2002 joined the faculty at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, where she mentored students and taught courses in social and educational policy and critical social theory. She was the recipient of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division G (Social Contexts of Education) Lifetime Achievement Award (2010 )and was named an AERA Research Fellow the same year.

Anyon’s work examines the intersections of race, social class, education policy, and the economy. In the 1970s and early 1980s, she, along with others, laid the foundation for the field of critical educational studies. Her early articles on social reproduction, social class and the hidden curriculum and her now classic 1997 book, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform, were groundbreaking and changed the way a generation of educational scholars viewed the relationship between urban schools and communities. Her later work made important contributions to social and educational theory and provided a powerful illustration of the need to connect urban school reform to social and economic policy and grassroots, community-based movements.

Anyon is renowned for her creative use of historical political economy as a method of analysis. In much of her work, she combines political economy and social theory with qualitative methods, such as direct observation and interviewing, making her work uniquely rich.

In 1980, Anyon published her seminal article, "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work." In 1981, she followed up with another foundational contribution: "Social Class and School Knowledge." These are among the most widely cited articles in education and among the first to animate the processes of social reproduction through empirical work in the United States.