This book addresses race, class, and gender in education in the United States. It debates the issues of institutionalized power and privilege, and the policies, discourses, and practices that silence powerless groups. At the center of the silence are the most critical and powerful voices of all -- children and adolescents with their relentless desire to be heard and to survive. Weis and Fine go beyond examining policies, discourse, and practices to call up the voices of young people who have been expelled from the centers of their schools and our culture to speak as interpreters of adolescent culture -- among them, lesbian and gay students who have been assaulted in their schools, adolescent women burying their political and personal resistances the moment their bodies "fill out, " young men and women struggling for identities amid the radically transforming conditions of late twentieth-century capitalism, and Native American college students almost wholly excluded from the academic conversation.