In the Spring 2005 issue of the City Journal, Kay Hymowitz has a piece on the sluggish attainment of Black students. Her conclusion is that class is a strong componant of the problem. The core of her argument is that middle class parents have a mission that provides clear means and ends reagarding learning. I'll place it in the terms of the eighteenth century world of ideas.
John Locke described human beings as capable of forming a social contract in which ultimate soveriegnty lay with the people: "Men being, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subject to the will of another, without his own consent." In the individualistic, democratic, and commercial societies that took Locke to heart, there was a new problem that confronted society. This problem was obvious to and acute in the newly formed American republic. How do you raise virtuous republicans capable of maintaining a free people in their independence?
Middle class families, the commercial class, throughout Western Europe were struggling with this problem and the cultural solution in America and Europe was the Cult of Domesticity. [note: be warry of descriptions of the Cult of Domesticity which often admix other ideas from Victorian societies into their descriptions. They also tend to be written from a modern feminist perspective and ignore men's domesticity.] This idea held that the family was the center of training for civic virtue and that both mothers and fathers had duties to attend to the proper upbringing of children. Women were clearly seen as taking a strong role in this upbringing of children, and indeed early feminists argued that mothers , well educated, had just as vital a role in the preservation of civic virtue as men. Men were summoned to attend to their families and to be good fathers, not just disciplinarians and providers. It was this movement that played a vital role in creating a modern sexual culture that condemned male homosexuality, whoring, and other kinds of infidelity as these activities took men and their affections out of the house. The family was not to be just an economic unit, but an affective enviroment for the raising of children, and consequently a happily married couple. By the end of the eighteenth century you can find many examples of men arguing that true happiness is to be found only among close friends and within the family and explicitly rejecting and active public life.
Hymowitz cites something sociologist Brigitte Berger, the author of The Family in the Modern Age, identifies as a middle class educational "mission" and traces how the nuclear family was employed to achieve this mission. Such a program to educate children for an individualistic, democratic, commercial society, to uphold civic virtue, and in America, preserve the achievments of the Revolution, required not only an affectionate domestic enviroment with attentive mothers and fathers, but a new kind of education. It may not be surprising that the theorist of the liberal social contract, John Locke, is also outlined the program for such education. Locke's ideas are found in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Locke regards people as possessing animal instincts, and having different talents, but the larger share of our makeup is based on our experience. Unlike our human inheritance, or particular family inheritance, experience is subject to control and manipulation. So that the enviroment in which is child is raised is important and what a child is exposed to is important.
Hymowitz looks at some critics of what they call "hyperparenting," but she does not locate this theory as a different in kind from the "mission." Locke imagined a capable human who is self-governing and educable. The idea of hyperparenting, imagins a less capable human, at least as a child. Indeed, this model seems to have more in common with Thomas Hobbes Leviathan as the controlling master of the incapable subject. Much of the theory that the state should be an all powerful controling entity was indeed based on the 17th century patriarchal family. (See Filmer) So let us recognize that the notion that parents should govern their children in such a fashion, what in modern use looks to be hyperparenting, is in fact the parent being the Leviathan to their children.
Consider Locke's Section 73 of Some Thoughts Concerning Education.
"None of the things [children] are to learn, should ever be made a burden to them, or imposed on them as a task. Whatever is so proposed presently becomes irksome, the mind takes an aversion to it, though before it were a thing of delight or indifferency. Let a child be ordered to whip his top at a certain time every day, whether he has a mind to it, [...] and see whether he will not soon be weary of any play at this rate."
Locke advocates a skilled tutor who introduces subjects to his student in such a way as to win his excitement and curiousity, to utilize what we call "teachable moments,"and to emphasize character education. In his theory of learning, Locke identifies all knowledge as being reflection on sensory experience. And so we can say of the Lockean model, that parents will seek out useful experiences, read to their children, buy educational toys, and help them develope a couriosity about the world and an interest in learning, as well as an understanding that learning is important. What Berger called the "Mission."
Hymowitz also makes mention of the work of Annette Lareau, an ethnography of class and child rearing. In Unequal Childhoods, Lareau identifies a theory of "natural growth" which she desribes as prevelent among the poor and the working poor. This brings us to Rousseau. Rousseau argued that children were good by nature, and that education was corruption. Therefore, we should let the child express himself, and develop according to his unfolding nature without the interfearance of teachers or parents. Look to his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences to see his rejection of the civil for the natural. He doesn't use the phrase "noble savage" but the term is linked to his name because he does embrace a rejection of the corruption of civilization: "See how luxury, dissolution, and slavery have in every age been the punishment for the arrogant efforts we have made in order to emerge from the happy ignorance where Eternal Wisdom had placed us." See Emile to discover how the purpose of education is the restoration of this "happy ignorance." (Or rather, don't, I advise the gentle reader to avoid Rousseau except as a study of error.)
So we have now identified three theories of childcare and education, corresponding to Hobbes, the hyperparenting leviathan; Locke who proposes that with good education whe shall be self-governing; and Rousseau, who believes children are better left to their own natural development. Lurking in the background is a fourth theorist: Decartes. Here Hobbes saw man's nature as savage (his life therefore nasty, brutish, and short), Rousseau as good and pure, and Locke as a blank slate, Decartes saw man possesing an innate knowledge of God and right and wrong. Decartes is therefore a naturalist, in so much as he regarded the knowledge of God and other ideas to be innate. Yet, unlike Rousseau, Descartes did not believe that goodness itself was innate. The ability to discover this was possible by reflection from first principles according to the practice of rationalism.
Locke rejected Cartesian rationalism and was a leading proponant of empiricism. Empiricism argued that knowledge was aquired more reliably not by reflection and deduction, but by experiment. An experiment is a controlled observation to address a specific question. In fact, Locke's education is an application of empiricism. Students don't recieve a set of thought provoking questions to ponder, the contemplation of which constitute education, but rather Locke begins with guided experience, spontanous opportunities for teaching, and finally, some reflection.
The middle class, with its mission, is predominatly Lockean. What struck me about Hymowitz' article was its connection of poor parents and a Rousseauean theory of learning. "Natural-growth believers are fatalists; they do not see their role as shaping the environment so that Little Princes or Princesses will develop their minds and talents, because they assume that these will unfold as they will. As long as a parent provides love, food, and safety, she is doing her job." The notion of developing the child is Locke. Rousseau can look to the casual observer to be a program of development, but it is in fact a sophistocated neglect. Rousseau places his fictional student Emile in a situation where he breaks a window and then learns that with its loss, he is cold. So we see how Emile's will has not been disciplines so that he goes about breaking things, and that second, he is supposed to learn that a broken window is a state to be corrected. This fantasy imagines that Emile will put together some complex ideas and draw the kind of sophisticated conclusion that leads to Home Depot. Instead, as James Q Wilson has demonstrated, the lesson actually learned re broken windows is that nobody cares about this stuff, and I can break it with out consequences.
Bart Landry suggests in Black Working Wives that Black women rejected the Cult of Domesticity for the virtues of a broader commitment to community, including work and family. But this ideology seems to have missed that the purpose of domesticity was the Lockean mission of educating children. John McWhorter has suggested that Black Americans were denied a sense of a tradition of education by the heritage of slavery, in which 1) slaves were denied education by law, and 2) the seperation of people from culture groups undermined an oral history, so that Blacks were unaware that they had a tradition of learning. (See his Explaining the Black Education Gap in the Summer 2000 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, subscription required)This might explain why Black working wives might have seen no need to embrace "the mission" of domesticity, and settled their ideology on the community. The poor as a class have not embraced the ideologist of the middle class, Locke, in any of his facets. That Blacks should have an additional reason to have failed to embrace Locke, at least his educational theory, and the mission that stems from it, seems well explained by McWhorter. How it manifests is well explained by Annette Lareau.
Too often I find Locke condemned as if he were Hobbes, and Rousseau's ideas praised when the descriptions of the ideas are those compatible with Locke and the others ignored. When I see someone advocating ignoring the teaching of literacy until a child has need of it (Rousseau supposed 12 years of age) then I'll say we have a real Rousseau. In the mean time, let us know Locke and be able to recognize his program for education.
I found Kay Hymowitz' City Journal article via Joanne Jacobs.
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