In my senior year at Pitzer College, I have been struggling with academic language and the exclusivity and ranking of knowledge. I am increasingly aware that I am entering the structure of the privately educated, and I will therefore be armed with some of the same secret handshakes and jargon that have at times been used against me to enforce social class reproduction. I have a very uneasy relationship with education. My formal education effectively ended in the eighth grade. I wandered in and out of alternative high school for a couple of years and did not cobble together enough credits to complete a freshman year. I did not return to school until my mid-thirties and my inspiration was a desire to "reform" education. As a product of poverty and the public school system, I knew there was something wrong, but could only see the outlines of injustice. I marched my way through six years of Community College, until 2 years ago I finally transferred to Pitzer College. By the time I graduate in May, it will be an almost 9 year journey to get my B.A. I used to see our education system as a viable road to the enactment of social justice. I see things differently now, I have come to believe that the education system in our country is one of the major agents in the institutionalized calcification of social class.