Basically, kids seem to benefit from picking up certain bourgeois modes of behavior. Bourgeois kids generally pick them up from their parents. Poor kids can pick them up from their peers, but only if they go to a school with a relatively low concentration of poverty. Poor kids in a high-poverty school can also receive explicit instruction in bourgeois conduct. That’s the essence of the ‘No Excuses’ model, but it doesn’t make sense in a bourgeois context.
In response, Rachel writes:
I read the above as: All these poor kids have to do is "pick up" "bourgeois modes of behavior" by attending school with middle to upper class kids, you know, since poor kids don’t pick up acceptable modes of behavior from their parents. Oh, but that’s not really possible right now, so we’ll just have to "make it work" by putting poor kids in "No Excuses" schools where they will "receive explicit instruction in bourgeois conduct" until we can break up poverty. Then these kids with their newly acquired "bourgeois modes of behavior" can move on to bourgeois adulthood and work at think tanks and write uninformed nonsense […]
Poor kids and their parents don’t need to be schooled in the way of bourgeois values; they need jobs, healthcare, housing, and, yes, a rich and meaningful education. If KIPP offers that kind of education, then uniforms or not, kudos to them, but if KIPP doesn’t offer this, then they need to re-think their approach. All kids, even poor kids, should learn in an orderly but not rigid, developmentally appropriate, content-rich environment that fosters exploration, critical thinking, and creativity. All kids are worthy of the best practices and great curricula–that’s not bourgeois, that’s good education.
On some level, I think Rachel is talking past Matt’s point. I mean, of course all kids need rich curriculum and good instruction and jobs and healthcare, but there are a lot of obstacles to actually even teaching that curriculum in the first place in these really poor urban schools. These obstacles stem from poverty and from an absence of educational values instilled at a young age either by parents or other family members.
I don’t believe that this culture causes poverty, but I do think there are very real cyclical factors it contributes to and that complicate both how we talk about poverty and the possible array of solutions.
For instance, a lot of people on one side of the debate argue that poor educational outcomes and failing schools are the result of poverty. On the other side people argue that poverty is the result of failing schools. Of course, the truth of the matter is more complicated.
It’s a commonly held belief that educating the world’s women will lead to lower birth rates, less poverty and hunger, and less violence against women and children. By extension this would lead to more development and economic growth, more trade, and fewer wars and conflicts. In many circles, the push for women’s rights and education in particular is the number one global priority right now – in spite of the poverty these women face.
But a huge, huge barrier to educating women in many parts of the world are old cultural norms which frown upon educating women. So we’re left with this situation where in order to change the culture we need to educate women, but in order to educate women we need to change the culture. In order to alleviate poverty we need to educate women, but in impoverished places education is not a valuable commodity especially for women.
Take this concept back to America’s inner cities. Different cultural values have taken root in places of deep impoverishment here. They may not reflect exactly the situation with third world poverty and women’s rights (though that is still a major issue in the United States), but they’re similar in other ways.
Education is often not as valued by peer groups as it it is in middle class communities. In communities where entire generations of parents and grandparents never graduated high school or attended college, the material benefits of a high school or college education are much less obvious to school-aged children.
In places with very few job opportunities, it’s very easy to come to believe that education won’t make a difference since there are no jobs anyways. And these views are shared across generational lines. It’s not even that poor people don’t care about education so much as it is a lot of poor communities don’t have much reason to trust it in the first place.
In Native American reservations there are even more hostile cultural attitudes toward education, which can be seen as a way to erase or subsume indigenous cultural values. This is not an unfounded belief, either, since the Indian Boarding Schools set up by the federal government were designed to do just that vis-a-vis linguistic genocide and other means. The history of our inner cities, our treatment of minorities and the poor all lead to a deficit of trust in mainstream cultural institutions. This is a major hurdle for educators.
So when I read Matt saying that kids from poor communities benefit from bourgeois norms and from being around kids from the middle class or receiving direction in certain behavioral standards, I don’t read that as some sort of validation of cultural colonization so much as an admission that poverty is a driving force in failing schools, and that one way to tackle poverty is to instill kids with cultural and behavioral norms that they simply can’t get from peers or parents.
When you’re from the middle class and you already have these basic ideas instilled in you from a young age (early childhood education is vital, and many middle class kids simply get this at home in ways that people from less educated backgrounds simply do not) it’s easy to forget that many people simply don’t have any educational role models to begin with. They don’t have economic role models either. Adding these to a child’s experience is not a bad thing, and doesn’t have to be done absent a rich curriculum or a creative teaching approach.