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182 Language Diversity in the Classroomsap motivation, decrease expectations, reinforce low self-esteem and soon. This is clearly true, but later research has added another possibility:low academic motivation may also stem from a view of education thatsees it as unimportant and/or unattractive. (The two possibilities areobviously not mutually exclusive.) Graham et al. (1998) used a ‘peernomination’ procedure to investigate this; that is, they asked students totell them who among their classmates they admired and respected.Among white pupils, both boys and girls valued others who were doingwell at school. The choices made by African American and Latino boys,on the other hand, suggested a devaluation of academic achievement; seealso Taylor and Graham (2007). Similarly, Fryer and Levitt (2004a) havenoted that studious black pupils had fewer friends than did poorerstudents, that working hard may attract accusations of ‘acting white’ andthat as a summary in The Economist (2008: 34) put it it seems to be‘cool to be dumb... it would be hard to imagine a more cripplingcultural norm’.Graham et al. (1998: 606) go on to note that all participants in theirstudy boys and girls, white, black and Hispanic associated ‘academicdisengagement and social deviance with being male, a low achiever, andan ethnic minority’. There seemed to be a general negative stereotype atwork, one that viewed low-achieving minority-group boys as not tryinghard at school, and not following school norms and rules. Theresearchers continue:We suspect that the African American and Latino boys in ourresearch are well aware of how they are seen in the eyes of others andthat this awareness may have influenced what appeared to be theirrelative indifference to those who display achievement behaviors thatare valued by the larger society. Steele (1997) has written poignantlyabout how coping with negative stereotypes about their academiccompetence has led many African American students to academicallydisengage and discount the importance of school success.(Graham et al., 1998: 618)The more interesting questions are ‘underneath’, as it were: how andwhy does lack of interest arise in the first place, and how and why is itmaintained when there is so much evidence of its negative lifeconsequences? For the answers here, we have to look far beyond theschool gates.In all of this, of course disidentification, oppositional identities,resistance to ‘talking white’ (see Chapter 8) or doing well in school wemust remember that we are not dealing with monolithic categories of