This article describes the disparity in political instruction found in six government classes from three demographically diverse high schools during the 2008 Presidential Election. In general, students from working-class households or those in lower-level classes were rarely given opportunities to discuss politics at a national level or engage in analytical discussions of the election; stodents in middle-to-upper-class schools and those in advanced-level classes were privy to rich discussions of politics on a regular basis. Using Foucault's (1991) notion of governmentality as a guide, these findings are then discussed as symptomatic of a neoliberal approach to education in which students are trained for the presumed roles they will play in the nation's political economy as adults.
