Over at City Journal, Joanne Jacobs reviews Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, David Whitman’s book, and sees in it echoes of her own parenting. “Nagging is love,” she writes. ”If you care about a kid, you tell her what she’s doing right and what she’s doing wrong. You stick with her when she makes mistakes. You honor her successes. You nag.” Whitman’s book, the title of which was much debated in the edusphere over the summer, looks at successful secondary schools, like KIPP and Amistad.
Many of the students at these schools are being raised by single mothers (or grandmothers) who provide unconditional love at home. Maternalism they’ve already got. At the “new paternalistic” schools, authoritative, caring adults demand good behavior as a condition for approval, adopting the traditional father’s role. Paternalistic schools explicitly teach students how to walk in the halls, sit upright in class, listen to speakers, ask questions, take notes, collaborate with classmates, and study for tests. They also teach students to shake hands, tuck in their shirts, and speak courteously using standard English. Street slang is banned.
“In some cases, the schools support values that parents hold themselves but have trouble enforcing on their own,” Jacobs writes. It’s an important observation. People who have never taught in inner city neighborhoods often don’t appreciate just how traditional many families are. The methods and mindset described by Whitman are almost certainly more controversial among educators than among the parents of the children these schools serve.
I am curious to read Sweating the Small Stuff. The question of “maternal” and “paternal” influences takes me back to my experience as a counselor in San Francisco. One of my clients, a young man in his twenties, had been on the streets for most of his life and had an overwhelming array of problems. I found out that he loved toy cars and poetry, and so we began building a car model and reciting poems during our counseling sessions.
He had a case manager who seemed very gruff to me at first. “These young people need limits and boundaries,” he told me. Limits and boundaries! They need understanding! But it didn’t take me long to realize that young people on the streets needed both, and that one should not cancel the other.
I ended up working with this case manager to help the young man on our mutual “caseload.” I learned from the case manager’s strictness, and I think he appreciated my patience and compassion. Over time, the strictness became mine as well. I learned that the “limits and boundaries” were indeed essential; without strict rules, schedules, structures, our client and many others would fall prey to the chaos of the streets. I consider this case manager one of my true mentors.
When it comes to teaching, we must teach children how to behave. But we must also teach them why. Rules can become absurd when they lose their reason. For example, under Accountable Talk (now a trademarked product–yikes) students learn to speak in full sentences, to address the listener, to nod and make eye contact when listening, etc. Secondary rules often usurp the throne: “Always restate the question in your answer.” Such rules often turn sentences into heaps of words. We forget our primary purpose: to learn about a topic, to locate the questions within it, and to speak and write about those questions with clarity, specificity, and energy.
Thus the “specifics” (rules) and the “essence” (reasons) of what we do should always go hand in hand. Nagging about the rules makes the greater education possible. Which one is “paternal,” and which is “maternal”: rules or reasons? One could argue either way. In many cultures, “nagging” is the province of the mother; relaxed acceptance, of the father. But whatever we deem masculine and feminine, we need a measure of each, in varying proportions according to the situation at hand.
Comment by Diana Senechal — November 21, 2008 @ 11:08 am
Diane,
Well said.
Comment by john thompson — November 21, 2008 @ 3:08 pm