Friday, August 22, 2008

Schools where you can belong
   Beginning with values

David Whitman has created some buzz among the ed pundits with his new book, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. 

He describes six “no excuses” schools that dramatically boost academic achievement among inner-city adolescents using methods that differ substantively from the romantic approach to education advocated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his American follower John Dewey. Instead of believing that “students should be free to explore, to cultivate a love of learning, and to develop their ‘critical thinking’ skills unencumbered by rote learning,” Whitman says, the new schools are staffed by people who believe that “disadvantaged students do best when structure and expectations are crystal clear, rather than presuming that kids should learn to figure things out for themselves.”

According to Whitman, the new paternalistic schools “devote inordinate attention to making sure that shirts are tucked in, bathrooms are kept clean, students speak politely, and trash is picked up.” And they go further than this:

Paternalistic schools teach character and middle-class virtues like diligence, politeness, cleanliness, and thrift. They impose detentions for tardiness and disruptive behavior in class and forbid pupils from cursing at or talking disrespectfully to teachers. But the new paternalistic schools go further than even strict Catholic schools in prescribing student conduct and minimizing signs of disorder. Pupils are typically taught not just to walk rather than run in the hallway—they learn how to walk from class to class: silently, with a book in hand. In class, teachers constantly monitor whether students are tracking them with their eyes, whether students nod their heads to show that they listening, and if students have slouched in their seats.

It’s heartening that the book so far has had mostly a positive buzz. The main trouble with education today is not that the budgets are too low or that today’s kids are unteachable. It’s that so many educators in places high and low have their heads filled with cant. If a few simple principles of effective teaching could penetrate enough minds to make simple and effective practices widespread, I believe we could make huge strides forward while doing things that are both easier and more pleasant than much of what we do now.

It’s interesting, though, that the main controversy about the book so far has revolved around the use of the word “paternalistic” to describe the approach. In his Washington Post review, Jay Mathews mused that “maybe there was a time when paternalistic was a useful term with no pejorative spin, but now it carries one of the heaviest loads of negativity I can imagine. This convinces me it is time to get these great schools a label they deserve.” He’s even invited readers email him suggestions for a different label.

In some ways, I think he’s right. For example, his point that “the label makes these inner-city successes sound like a guy thing, when in fact many of their principals and most of their teachers are women” is well taken. Still, I can’t help but think the instinctive negative reaction toward “paternalistic” is a symptom of the main problem the schools are trying to overcome. The romantics who’ve made such a mess of many schools react negatively to all the words that suggest a world in which young people have things to learn from their elders. They have bad feelings toward authority, hierarchies, obedience and conformity, and so when in practice they are confronted with disorder, slovenliness, and boorish self-indulgence they often lose confidence, managing to meet ignorance only with weakness.

Boys, especially, would do better in a world less skittish about using the word “paternalistic” in a positive way--a world that taught them the duties and nobility of paternalism rightly understood. It’s no secret that boys are doing worse than girls in the schools we’ve built, and Leonard Sax in Boys Adrift has argued that a major reason for this is the way we’ve devalued masculine roles. “Forty years ago we had Father Knows Best,” he says. “Today we have The Simpsons.”

So although I think paternalism is a good and necessary thing (being the father of five and the grandfather of sixteen), it is true that maternalism is equally important in schools. And after my huffing and puffing I am quite willing to agree with Matthews that a different term might work better. My suggestion would avoid gender references. Maybe “authoritative” would do.

I know that those who dislike “paternalism” will probably also dislike “authoritative,” but part of the work the good schools are doing and that we need to acknowledge is they are recovering the distinction between “authoritative” and “authoritarian.” We need to stop wincing at any assertion of authority, and assist young people in better understanding not just the dangers of unjust authority but also the necessity of good and just authority.

“Authoritative” was the word chosen by the Commission on Children at Risk in their report, Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities.

The report--sponsored by the YMCA, Dartmouth Medical School, and the Institute for American Values--was written by 33 doctors, research scientists and other professionals and it addressed many growing problems among American’s children and adolescents. They found that a major cause of the problems was the lack of connectedness experienced by many of today’s youth, and that their disconnect had come about because of the weakening of social institutions where people live out the sort of connectedness that students increasingly lack.

The social institutions kids need but are failing to find are “groups of people who are committed to one another over time and who model and pass on at least part of what it means to be a good person and live a good life.” The researchers called such institutions that worked “authoritative communities.”

To some degree, the schools that Whitman describes have reached the same understanding of what young people need as did the Hardwired to Connect researchers. Among other things, they need the structure of strong communities with clear values that teach right ways of acting, and they need to be held accountable within a set of standards that are linked to clear moral purposes.

They need to encounter good, sincere, hardworking adults who speak and act with authority on behalf of the civilizing virtues.

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Update: David Whitman himself responds to the little tempest over his use of “paternalism” to describe the method of effective urban schools:

The “new paternalism,” as I detail in a 33-page chapter, is a movement that social scientists have been writing about for more than a decade. In fact, in 1997, the Brookings Institution-no bastion of reactionary thought-published a 350-page volume entitled The New Paternalism in which various luminaries explored the reach of the new paternalism in welfare offices, prisons, schools, and other areas of public policy.