So at TMAO’s Teaching in the 408, I stumbled over his bludgeoning of a recent San Jose Mercury News article on how the attitude of “school is uncool” may be culturally transmitted, specifically by Latinos. And I said to myself: now here’s a nice, relaxing topic to blog on over Spring Break.
Some disclaimers before I continue. I have some experience in this area– I teach in the most racially and economically diverse district in our county outside our city, and have been an ESL teacher for some years—but I’m not even going to pretend this compares to TMAO’s teaching situation. So there’s that.
Nevertheless.
So someone says: it’s not cultural. It’s not in our students’ DNA, or in their baseline assumptions, or transmitted through Cinco de Mayo.
And someone else says: of course it’s culture, you idiot. What else do you call a communally and generationally propagated set of beliefs?
The blows begin, and the conversation ends. And I find myself wishing heartily that Socrates were around.
In his spirit, let’s start with a challenging statement from Gloria Ladson Billings, the former president of AERA and an educator I revere: that most teachers (and by extension, news reporters?) use the word “culture” as a catchall explanation for any anti-school behavior they cannot explain from their students. Dr. Ladson-Billings goes on to suggest elsewhere (and TMAO and his commentator Rebecca Bell agree) that the domino effects of socio-economic status should not be defined as “culture.” And it’s useful, and in many ways accurate, to narrow the definition of “culture” in this way, I think.
However, I now think about European Jews coming out of the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust. To say that such an experience did not become a part of Jewish culture, uniquely shaping their shared sense of history, priorities, and challenges, would be patently ridiculous. And while I would never wish to generalize the Holocaust’s unique horror, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that aspects of what many of our poor minority kids experience are analogous: the socioeconomic deprivation, the ghettos, the pervasive violence, the discrimination. Is it possible to state that the effects of a mass, long-lived injustice such as this are not, or don’t become, cultural for them? I wonder.
Next, consider TMAO’s important point in his post that culture is not a monolith, has dozens of facets and overlapping layers, and can not be treated as a singular thing via one or two quotes from kids who say what you want them to say so you can print your newspaper article. Right on.
However, now consider the flip side: the theory that among these many overlapping cultures, the young people we work with do have, in fact, an undeniable culture that is all their own. What is the community, after all, in which they physically spend most of their waking hours? It’s their peers– in school. (Linda Perlstein’s Not Much, Just Chillin does a lovely job of investigating a particular local kid school culture in Maryland.) Is it inaccurate, then, to suggest that kid-driven microculture—particularly ones in disadvantaged schools– might propagate school-negative attitudes? I wonder.
And I keep wondering. I wonder if the question is not, in fact, whether the attitude that “school is uncool” is “cultural”. For twist the arbitrary lens one way, and it is cultural; twist it another, and it isn’t. Given this, I wonder—truthfully, for the first time—if the whole debate of “what is cultural” is at base merely rhetorical slight of hand. And as such, with all due respect to the brilliant minds involved, I wonder if it is a waste of time.
I wonder if it begs for reframing: the asking of a much deeper, broader, harder question.
I wonder if the deeper question is this: whether the students and/or the communities who might take such anti-school attitudes are doing so by choice— and if so, whether that choice is justified.
The axis of that question, of course, being one of responsibility. And isn’t that the heart of hearts of any question of social injustice? Who is responsible?
Simple questions. Massively complex answers, involving a rubric several miles deep and wide. Getting into it would take a whole other conversation, involving a multiplicity of cooperative disciplines, each willing to pull no punches– especially on themselves. But I guess that’s my point.
For just one example, instead of throwing their muckrakes around, I’d like to see the San Jose Mercury News take on the American mythology of individualism, “hard work”, and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-against-all-odds success, and how that crashes up against the daily lived truths of our poor kids– especially non-native ones.
I’d like to see TMAO, in turn, take on the idea that this very mythology might inaccurately color his perspective on what might be accomplished for these kids by decent schools– or a talented, caring teacher such as himself—independent of much more sweeping socioeconomic change.
I’d like to see Gloria Ladson-Billings write a book specifically on whether there’s any truth at all to this dominant paradigm mythology, and where and how demanding its fruits of our students—and ourselves– is warranted.
And I’d like to see all of us junk any conversation that smacks of a soundbyte or a silver bullet, and talk about how we in public education might address, fruitfully, the entire nexus of influences that make up our children: individual responsibility; media; family; community; ethnicity; economics; nationality; history.
It ain’t pretty. It sure is harder than deciding whether “school is uncool” is “cultural.”
But it’s the only way we’re going to get anywhere.
