"Waiting for 'Superman'" is Mostly Right

The talk of education world these days in the documentary "Waiting for 'Superman.'" It shows the terrible state of the worst public schools, and some of the successful alternatives that prove that things could be better. The KIPP academies and the Harlem Children's Zone schools produce tremendous improvements in terrible neighborhoods. They succeeded where the local "dropout factories" failed.

Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim has made a powerful ideological indictment of intransigent mediocrity, especially in urban poor schools. His overall conclusion is that good teachers are the heart of good schools. This is mostly right. However, what his account of the KIPP and Harlem Children's Zone schools shows is that the culture of the whole school is vitally important - more important, on the whole, even than the quality of individual teachers.

You need both, of course. However, really great teachers - really great anything - will always be in short supply. A school can succeed with a few really great teachers, and the rest decent teachers willing to work hard - as long as it ruthlessly weeds out the few bad teachers. This creates a climate of achievement that can lift everyone's game, and improve learning for children.

Centre College: Scholars, Gentlemen, Christians

I am pleased to announce that my history of Centre College will be released today during Homecoming.

The Elite of Hard-Working Generalists

The New York Times reported on a gathering of scholars of the Elites Research Network. They are trying to figure out how, exactly, the richest people got that way.

The most sensible view was offered by Sudhir Venkatesh, moderately famous for his turn as "gang leader for a day" that was profiled in Freakonomics and in his own book of that name. He said

“You have to come in accepting that there will always be poor people in society and there will always be wealthy people in society, and neither of the two reached that status by their own efforts.”

The most interesting substantive finding in the article comes from Michael Lindsay's interviews with top corporate leaders. He found that most did not come from big money, nor did they start with a large inheritance. They were likely to have attended top colleges, and a significant proportion went on to Harvard Business School. Lindsay's big finding, though, is that they were generalists who got a big break early.

By being generalists, and looking for opportunities to understand how the whole business worked, they put themselves, I believe, on the path to be presidents. This is the path that Jim Collins identified in the excellent Good to Great of what makes for the best leaders. People who understand the whole operation are more likely to become the head of any organization, large or small. Those who understand the largest and most profitable companies thereby also become, whether they aim to or not, part of the national elite.

Are Fear and Mistrust at the Root of the Culture of Poverty?

The New York Times has a fine article on the return of "the culture of poverty" as a concept in sociology. The very idea was suppressed by liberal academics who thought it meant blaming the victim of poverty. Yet culture matters for everyone, and eventually the empirical strikes back.

The article cites Robert Sampson's studies in various Chicago neighborhoods. He concluded that

Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.

Cynicism and disorder, fear and mistrust - these are the things that create the dysfunctions of the culture of poverty.

I think fear and mistrust are what creates dysfunctions in any culture. Promoting fear undermines the functional elements of the culture of any class. Fear and mistrust are endemic in some poor neighborhoods. They are also endemic in some non-poor subcultures, not quite so geographic. Fear-promoting ideological subcultures create social dysfunction on a larger level.

The culture of poverty may only be the most concentrated form of the culture of fear.

Class Differences in How Parents Use Surveillance and Control Technology

The most original findings of Margaret Nelson's Parenting Out of Control are class differences in how parents think about technology to connect with, control, and monitor their children.

Professional-class parents strongly embrace connection technology - baby monitors when the kids are little, cell phones when they are bigger. On the other hand, these parents do not want V-chips and software filters that control children directly, and strongly reject tracking devices for cars and computers that secretly spy on kids. Professional parents, as we noted yesterday, most value their close relations with their children. Direct and overt monitoring is fine, because parents see that as part of a close relationship. But controlling and spying on their kids violates the basic trust with their children that these parents most cherish.

Middle-class and working-class parents, on the other hand, see it as part of their job to set clear limits for their children. They accept these kinds of technology as potentially helpful in doing that job. They are more likely to decide on a technology based on cost, and on whether they think a particular child needs a higher level of surveillance and control.

Moreover, middle- and working-class parents want their kids to operate within firm limits to free the parents from endless negotiation about the rules - something parents and kids in the professional class do endlessly.

Class Differences in What Satisfies Parents Most

Margaret Nelson, in Parenting Out of Control, found an interesting class difference in what gives different parents their deepest satisfaction.

Middle class and working class parents take the most satisfaction in their children's accomplishments.

Professional class parents take the most satisfaction in their close relationship with their children.

The Arrogance of the Educated Angers Everyone Else, Even If We Are Right on the Facts

In my church's Sunday School we have been considering creation and evolution. We are having the kind of conversation that you get up in the most highly educated congregation in any town - say, the Presbyterian Church in a small college town, or the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship in a bigger city. We studied the details of biological evolution with a scientist. We studied the details of theological attempts to reconcile religion and science with a philosopher. In each case, we follow, and largely accept the increasingly esoteric nuances of the argument. We take for granted that our religious dogma has to fit within our scientific dogma.

Deepak Chopra recently put it in a clear way typical of this view:

The modern world is willing to throw out any number of beliefs about God if the facts don't fit. Science isn't willing to throw out a single piece of data, however, to satisfy an article of faith.

My job as the sociologist in this discussion was to bring in this inconvenient truth: If you ask most Americans "did God create the universe pretty much the way it is now within the last 10,000 years?" 45% say yes. The illustration I used was that every time we go to Walmart (the biggest store in our small town), assume that someone in the aisle with you is a young-earth creationist.

Deepak Chopra takes if for granted that the 45%, our fellow Americans in the Walmart aisle, are not members of the modern world. The arrogance of that assumption really ticks them off. That does not make them right - I don't think they are right. I think, though, that the reaction to that arrogance is what is really behind the political anger that we see now.

Stanley Fish is Craven and Unashamed

I try to concentrate on the up-building at The Gruntled Center, but today I have to offer a criticism of a fellow professor.

Stanley Fish is an English professor and a famous critic of the Western canon of what is best to teach in English and related fields. He recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times about the "crisis of the humanities," sparked by the decision of the State University of New York at Albany to abolish their French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater departments. Fish recognizes that SUNY's conclusion that the humanities are not really necessary is, in part, the fruit if radical criticism like his. And yet Fish still opposes SUNY's decision. Why? I will let him explain:

I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum — that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said — but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.

Professional Parents Spend More Time With Their Kids Than Working Class Parents Do

I am working through Margaret K. Nelson, Parenting Out of Control: Parents in Anxious Times. She contrasts parents in the professional middle class (professional and management jobs, post-college education) with parents in the working class (blue collar and lower white collar jobs, less than college graduate education).

The professional middle class parents of the title, who are the intensive "helicopter parents," spend more time with their children, even though both mothers and fathers are likely to work outside the home, and work long hours. Even the at-home moms in both classes, though, show the same kind of imbalance.

Here are the time ratios:

Professional to Working Class at-home moms: 1.55: 1

Professional to Working Class working moms: 1.72: 1

Professional to Working Class dads: 2.16:1

Men's and Women's Positions in Society Will Never Be Equally Distributed

The New York Times has an article on women in France entitled "Where Having It All Doesn't Mean Having Equality."

I believe you could write an article with this title every year, in every country, in perpetuity. The idea that if women have equal opportunities with men that will result in equal outcomes is just false. Men and women, as a group, have different preferences. In a free society, they should be allowed, indeed, should be encouraged, to make the choices they want to. It is not merely wrong to expect that men and women will be equally represented in every position in society. It is oppressive to try to make the results come out equally.

Why Conspiracy Theories and Ignorance are Connected

It is easier to "connect the dots" if you don't have many dots.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Creates the Disenchanted World

We have been studying dour old Max Weber. Unlike many early sociologists, he was not an atheist. But he was, as he famously wrote, "religiously unmusical."

The driving principle of modernity, he argued, was the relentless rationalization of all institutions and practices, including religion. He thought the world was "disenchanted," that moderns found it hard to hold on to a belief that there were personal, unrationalized forces lying behind this world, guiding it.

When I look at the survey research, more than a century later, I find that most people have no trouble believing in God and a whole array of quite personal and unrationalized forces. Yet it is a central myth of intellectuals that secularization is inevitable as people make the world more rationally ordered.

The gap between the intellectuals' personal disenchantment and their faith that everyone will eventually follow is filled, I think, by the doctrine of "the hermeneutics of suspicion." Paul Ricouer developed this approach on the model of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. He articulated what is, I believe, a common notion among intellectuals that what most people believe should not be believed. Instead, we should look for a reality underneath the surface reality. This, on the face of it, is exactly what religious people say.

The difference is that religious people believe God is under the surface appearance of this world, guiding it in a mysterious way on a positive and meaningful path. The suspicious intellectuals believe that material self-seeking is under the surface appearance of this world, twisting it in a not-so-mysterious way on a negative and possibly meaningless path. Both are doctrines, beliefs, leaps of faith.

The hermeneutics of suspicion is not an intellectual response to a falsely enchanted world. It is a doctrine that makes a disenchanted world, at least for intellectuals.

Joining in Other Peoples' Civic Projects Is Good For Me. Case in Point: The World Equestrian Games

The World Equestrian Games have been going on in at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington for the last two weeks. They are a Big Deal, the biggest deal in Kentucky in decades.

I spent a lovely day there today. As I told my class, I am not interested in horses, but I am interested in crowds. I watched "driving" all day, about which I knew nothing when the day began. That was interesting and lovely.

As I reflected on the entire massive event, I was glad that I had done my tiny civic part to help Kentucky put on a world-class event, even if it was not in one of my little areas of normal interest.

Civic participation is itself up-building, both for the commonwealth and for me.

What is a Good Work of Macrosociological Feminist Theory to Teach?

For two years I have been trying to find the right feminist book to teach in my "Macrosociological Theory" course. It has been surprisingly hard to find the right thing. This year I am using Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. It was an important book, and the students have found it the most accessible of anything we have read so far. Nonetheless, it is not really a theory book.

I looked at Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering. This is more theoretical, but is not really macrosociology.

I have consulted with a number of people far better read in feminist theory than I am. To all of our surprise, it has been hard to find a book that really fits the bill. We can think of several calls for developing a macrosociological feminist theory - Heidi Hartmann's and Patricia Hill Collins' have been named several times. But I have yet to find a work that weaves together feminist theory and some kind of empirical analysis of society at the macro level.

I think the main reason is because the movement that made clear that "the personal is political" has done the bulk of its work thinking about the micro level.

I am open to suggestions for works to teach, and analyses of why they are so hard to come by.

College and Kids Have Switched Positions

Continuing our class discussion of The Feminine Mystique.

For the feminine mystique women in the '50s, marriage and children seemed obligatory, while the substance of college education, or even a college degree, were optional.

Now, the women in class agreed that a college education was essential, as they viewed their lives. Marriage and children, though desired by most of the women in the class, were optional.

I think this says as much about the changing class mores of the middle class as it shows a revolution in women's options.

Since children are not really optional for society as a whole, and smart educated people know that marriage is the best institution to raise children in, I expect that there will be another swing of the pendulum.

What we will try to think through and model, starting with my social theory class, is a view of life in which both college-and-career AND marriage-and-children are equally valued core aims in life.

The Feminine Mystique Made Unfemininity Seem Too Weird

A woman in my theory class had this excellent insight on reading The Feminine Mystique:

I had always thought that women, in this time period, were just being oppressed by men, but it turns out they had opportunities to rise above and stand out. But it is the idea of standing out that scared them away. They did not want to be seen as weird or unfeminine.

It has been helpful to us, as I noted yesterday, to see the feminine mystique as a brief interlude, not the eternal condition of women prior to 1970.

What today's insight adds is a psychological mechanism that makes sense to me. Women are more likely than men to place a high value on equal social relations, on doing what other women are doing. If the feminine mystique became the established norm for a time among critical female opinion leaders, I can see how it would spread powerfully among other women - especially if there were other structural forces backing it up.

Feminine Mystique as Summer Vacation

We are reading The Feminine Mystique in my social theory class. We were considering Friedan's point that the feminine mystique was an abrupt shift from the more public role that educated women had had during the Second World War. Knowing that the mystique period was brief, followed by the second wave of feminism, one imaginative student suggested that the feminine mystique was like summer vacation. She said that as summer vacation approaches, students look forward to no more books, seeing their friends, staying home, sleeping late. After a few months, though, they can't wait to get back to their studies.

I think this is a nifty analogy.

Social Networks Are Like Coffee Houses

Social networks are shot through with coffee house metaphors. The connection is natural. I am a big fan of both. But we should understand what they are good for, and not good for.

In my coffee house class, my summary idea is that coffee houses are places where strangers can become acquaintances. Coffee houses are not places for building strong friendships. Some friendships may, of course, grow out of coffee house connections. Indeed, I know marriages that began in coffee houses. But a relationship that is born in the coffee house, and stays there, will not grow beyond a weak tie.

Weak ties are very important in real life. Many good things come from weak ties. It is your weak ties that are likely to lead you to a next job, not your strong ties. Weak ties are best for spreading and bringing you new information.

Malcolm Gladwell has a fine article in the New Yorker on the difference between social networks and hierarchies. Gladwell's core point: "Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances." It is not made of the strong ties that can make a revolution.

Some Group Differences are Due to Privilege. Some Are Not.

If diversity means anything, it means that different groups differ at least a little in what they want and in what talents they bring, as well as in how they are treated by others.

Privilege is real - some groups have unearned advantages over others, which does increase the chance that people like that will be disproportionately represented among those in power.

But it is also the case that different groups want different things, or more exactly, the proportions of people who want some outcome will not be identical in each group.

It is also true, but harder to pin down, that different groups bring a different mix of skills and talents to life. This difference has to have some effect on the proportion of people from each group who end up doing one thing or another.

It is certainly the case that the group of people in positions of power are disproportionately from privileged groups. But privilege is only part of the reason. To say otherwise, to say that all groups have an exactly equal desire and exactly equal ability to achieve all outcomes is simply false. Worse, it is condescending and imperialist to assume that all groups - all cultures and subcultures - desire exactly the same things equally.

In the discourse about privilege, to assume that the privileged are disproportionately powerful solely because we are privileged is itself an act of unwarranted privilege.

The QUESTIONS in the Pew Religion Survey

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life just released the result of a survey on religious knowledge among American adults. As with most surveys of the knowledge of American adults, the results were pretty sad. The headline finding is that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than religious people do. This is not so surprising to me - atheists and agnostics tend to be more educated than the average believer about everything.

If you are like me, you perhaps wanted to try you own religious knowledge against this survey. As a public service, I have extracted all the questions from the survey. Pew does not provide an answer key, but I expect Gruntled Center readers will do pretty well. I think I got all of them, so ask me.

PEW FORUM ON RELIGION & PUBLIC LIFE

2010 RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONNAIRE

When does the Jewish Sabbath begin? Does it begin on…?

1 Friday

2 Saturday

3 Sunday

Is Ramadan…?

1 The Hindu festival of lights

2 A Jewish day of atonement

3 The Islamic holy month

Do you happen to know which of these is the king of gods in ancient Greek mythology?

1 Zeus

2 Mars

3 Apollo

Do you happen to know the name of the holy book of Islam?

Which of these religions aims at nirvana, the state of being free from suffering?

1 Islam

2 Buddhism

3 Hinduism

In which religion are Vishnu and Shiva central figures?

1 Islam

2 Hinduism

3 Taoism

Is an atheist someone who believes in God, someone who does NOT believe in God, or someone who is unsure whether God exists?

And is an agnostic someone who believes in God, someone who does

NOT believe in God, or someone who is unsure whether God exists?

What is the first book of the Bible?

Will you tell me the names of the first four books of the New Testament of the Bible, that is the Four Gospels?

Where, according to the Bible, was Jesus born?

1 Bethlehem

2 Jericho

3 Jerusalem

4 Nazareth

When was the Mormon religion founded?

1 Before the year 1200 A.D

2 Between 1200 and 1800

3 Sometime after 1800

The Book of Mormon tells the story of Jesus Christ appearing to people in what area of the world?

1 The Americas

2 Middle East

3 Asia

Which of the following best describes Catholic teaching about the bread and wine used for communion?

1 The bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, or

2 The bread and wine are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ

Which of these religious groups traditionally teaches that salvation comes through faith alone?

1 Only Protestants

2 Only Catholics

3 Both (Protestants) and (Catholics)

4 Neither (Protestants) nor (Catholics)

Please tell me which of the following is NOT one of the Ten Commandments:

1 Do not commit adultery

2 Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

3 Do not steal

4 Keep the Sabbath holy

Which Bible figure is most closely associated with remaining obedient to God despite suffering?

Is it …?

1 Job

2 Elijah

3 Moses

4 Abraham

Which Bible figure is most closely associated with leading the exodus from Egypt?

Is it …?

1 Job

2 Elijah

3 Moses

4 Abraham

Which Bible figure is most closely associated with willingness to sacrifice his son for God?

Is it …?

1 Job

2 Elijah

3 Moses

4 Abraham

Would you tell me if Mother Theresa was …?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Would you tell me if the Dalia Lama is …?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Would you tell me if Joseph Smith was …?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Would you tell me if Maimonides was … ?

1 Catholic

2 Jewish

3 Buddhist

4 Mormon

5 Hindu

Which of the following statements best describes what the U.S. Constitution says about religion?

1 Christianity should be given special emphasis by the government

2 The government shall neither establish a religion nor interfere with the practice of religion, or

3 The Constitution does not say anything one way or the other about religion

According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to lead a class in prayer, or not?

According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to read from the Bible as an example of literature, or not?

According to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a public school teacher permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s religions, or not?

Do you happen to know what religion most people in India consider themselves? Is that…?

1 Buddhist

2 Hindu

3 Muslim

4 Christian

Do you happen to know what religion most people in Indonesia consider themselves? Is that…?

1 Buddhist

2 Hindu

3 Muslim

4 Christian

Do you happen to know what religion most people in Pakistan consider themselves? Is that…?

1 Buddhist

2 Hindu

3 Muslim

4 Christian

What was the name of the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant

Reformation?

1 Martin Luther

2 Thomas Aquinas

3 John Wesley

Which of these people developed the theory of evolution by natural selection?

1 Charles Darwin

2 Sigmund Freud

3 Clarence Darrow

And which of these court trials focused on whether evolution could be taught in public schools?

1 The Scopes trial

2 The Salem witch trials

3 Brown versus Board of Education

Which one of these preachers participated in the period of religious activity known as the First Great Awakening?

1 Jonathan Edwards

2 Charles Finney

3 Billy Graham