Keeping up with The Times: The "app gap"

I logged on to blog and what do you know?! I never posted this little screed on the "app gap." Give a hint of what a terrific couple of weeks it has been here in the land of 2 academic careers + 2 kiddos = 2 much 2 handle.

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At the moment, I am standing at the corner of Conference Paper Hell and Grading Nightmare, but of course, I have had my attention diverted.

StraightMan tells me last night that I ought to blog about this article in the NYT: "Screen Time Higher Than Ever For Toddlers." The article reports on a new study from the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Despite the American Academy of Pediatrics’ longstanding recommendations to the contrary, children under 8 are spending more time than ever in front of screens, according to a study scheduled for release Tuesday.

The report also documents for the first time an emerging “app gap” in which affluent children are likely to use mobile educational games while those in low-income families are the most likely to have televisions in their bedrooms.

The article then goes on to quote a survey researcher who notes that "parents increasingly are handing their iPhones to their 1 ½-year-old kid as a shut-up toy. And parents who check their e-mail three times on the way to the bus stop are constantly modeling that behavior, so it’s only natural the kids want to use mobile devices too.”

That, to me, is the problem that ought to be the concern here. Instead, the term "app gap" seems to problematize that children from lower income households have unequal (less) access to apps.

The article quotes parents who download apps for their kids, justifying the amount of screen time that they permit:

"I’ll lie to myself that these are skill builders,’” said his father, Keith Lender, who has downloaded dozens of tablet and smart phone apps for Jaden and his 1-year-old brother, Dylan. “No, I’m not lying,” he said, correcting himself. “Jaden’s really learning hand-eye coordination from the golf game, and it beats the hell out of sitting and watching television.”

I find it interesting that this parent both expresses awareness of the criticisms about whether or not screen time is building skills - then repeats the claim about hand-eye coordination that has floated in public discourse since every 6th grader I knew (except me) had an Atari game system at home. In a moment of resignation, he remarks that at least he is not letting his kids watch television. Which BTW the AAP reports is the dominant medium in lower income households.

I leave open the possibility that screen time involving apps might be qualitatively "better" than TV, but you will need to convince me. (Dadgumit, I am a scientist!)

Look, even the nation's chief technologists are not convinced, as the NYT also reported, in an article on the Silicon Valley school of choice - a Waldorf school (!):

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

iPad as a form of class warfare? You decide.

Making privilege

While reading sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan's Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School, the thought uneasily crossed my mind that this is exactly the kind of academic book Malcolm Gladwell might make more popular by turning its critical analysis of the making of privilege into a between-the-lines instruction manual for business-class tiger-parents.

It could be a chapter of Outliers 2.

In Privilege, Khan argues against the popular understanding in the United States that elites are people who are entitled - that is, that they simply were born into their privilege. Entitlement might have described the elite 100 or 50 years ago.

Today, however, he suggests that the "new" elites themselves share at least an ideal and rhetoric of having had to "work for" their privilege. Privilege has become not what you were fortunate enough to be born into, but what you were clever enough to "earn."

Up to this point, readers of Gladwell will be happy to recognize themselves - members of the new elite - in the pages of Privilege! However, Khan's point is that the new elite is as troubling as the old elite. There is no nostalgia here for a ruling (white) class based on exclusion, but Khan is equally skeptical of the current embrace of so-called meritocracy - a term that I was surprised to learn had been coined in Britain in the 1940s to criticize "the cold scientization of ability and the bureaucratization of talent" (Khan 2011:8). In fact, the new elite is based on assumptions that could prove to be even more insidious:

With "merit" we seem to have stripped individuals of the old baggage of social ties and status and replaced it with personal attributes - hard work, discipline, native intelligence, and other forms of human capital that can be evaluated separate from the conditions of social life. And the impact of the adoption of this approach has led to rather contradictory outcomes. It has undercut nepotism. It has been used to promote the opening of schools to talented members of society who previously were excluded. But it has also been used to question policies like affirmative action that taken into account factors other than performance on select technocratic instruments. It has been used to justify the increased wages of the already wealthy (as their skills are so valuable and irreplaceable). And most important for me, it has obscured how outcomes are not simply a product of individual traits" (Khan 2011:9).

For whatever reason, reading this passage called to mind a moment in "The Osbournes"* when Kelly describes how hard Ozzy worked for everything that he has today. I found it jarring to hear the tribute to hard work paid by a young woman who I got the impression has not had a lot of personal experience with it.

*I know. A dated reference to a TV show that I watched back when I watched TV! Sigh.

Khan argues that hierarchy remains as entrenched under the new privilege as it had been with the old entitlement. Hierarchy under the old elite represented ceilings. Under the new elite, it has become a ladder to climb: You just have to make the right choices, and do the right things.

Enter the guru, Gladwell, and other prophets of privilege and hard work: David Brooks, anyone?

The new elite purports to include the "best of the best" regardless of class or race / ethnicity - at least in theory. A point that Khan makes is that inequality persists even with growing awareness and acceptance of "openness" and "access."

As exploration of privilege, Khan's book is revealing about the state of the American Dream today.

I think about how many of us have a stake in the hope of "hard work." I stop short of calling it a myth, which reveals how high a stake I have in it, too.

Or as Khan observes: "Students learn to emphasize hard work and talent when explaining their good fortune" (Khan 2011:15).

Khan tells us that his own story is "familiar": A tale of immigrants who find opportunity and success in the United States and then give their children more and better than they had themselves. I think it would be worth telling his story in terms of how and why Pakistani doctors and Irish nurses were brought to the United States in the early 1970s.

Or for that matter, I could tell my own story as a tale of the sacrifices that my parents made and the hard work that bought our family a house in the suburbs and elite educations for my brother, sister, and me: Or I could tell it in terms of an American embrace of Koreans as anti-communist Asians and of a shortage of doctors and nurses that brought guest workers to the United States.

None of us arrives on our own merits only.

Post-post-race

If, and I am only saying if, we ever had that much celebrated post-race moment on a certain evening in November 2008, then the evidence keeps mounting that we have been living in a post-post-race moment ever since:

Last week, readers responded swiftly to evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa's piece, "Why are black women less physically attractive than other women," which had been posted on a blog at Psychology Today - then removed amidst the (justified) outrage. The anthropology blog Savage Minds posted a response, "Why are evolutionary psychologists less intelligent than other mammals." For me, this incident serves as a reminder (again) that it is not just about speaking out against racism, but explaining exactly how racism is "at work" - in this case, it is important and necessary to discuss the particulars of the research and the assumptions embedded in it.

My other favorite columnist at The Nation (in other words, not Katha Pollitt) is Gary Younge, who in the June 6th issue penned a piece called "The Paradox of Hope," which comments on an inconvenient truth of the Obama presidency: "But for all the ways black America has felt better about itself and looked better to others, it has not actually fared better. In fact, it has been doing worse. The economic gap between black and white has grown since Obama took power." Yet, Younge notes, black Americans generally continue to support Obama. Why? #1. Look no further than the spectacle of the Birthers: "In the face of such brazenly racist attacks, defending Obama's right to the office becomes easily blurred with defending his record." #2. "Racial advancement is increasingly understood not as a process of social change but of individual promotion," Younge observes, "the elevation of black faces to high places."

This might account for how and why the recent coverage in The New York Times' "Room for Debate" blog given to a study of racism in the United States turns out to be so wrong. Living Anthropologically picks apart the problems with the study, which the authors claim as evidence of anti-white bias on the rise from the 1950s to the 2000s. Except that "they don’t have historical data–the chart is deceptive":

What they have is a survey from today, asking people “to indicate the extent to which they felt both Blacks and Whites were the target of discrimination in each decade from the 1950s to the 2000s” (Norton and Sommers 2011:216). And, of course, whites today say anti-black bias was a problem in the 1950s but drops steadily, whereas anti-white bias is steadily on the rise. Blacks today say the same thing, although not to the same extent. But that does not actually say anything about what people in each decade actually thought! All it does is support the dominant U.S. mythology: the idea that racism was a problem back in the 1950s but it’s going away or gone now.

In other words, the study might tell us something about the perceptions of white and black Americans concerning the experience of race in the United States, but it is not what the authors themselves purport their research tells us.

Finally, I just started to read Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School, an ethnography written by sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan, who had attended, then later taught at St. Paul's. I was drawn to this book for a number of reasons, including what I admit to be a personal fascination with privilege. It never has been the wealth that dazzled me, but the confidence and ease with which the elite operate in the world: They can be some of the most charming, informed, and interesting people you ever met in your life - and I know this because I attended college with them. Khan articulates perfectly the question that has nagged at me:

One of the curiosities in recent years is how our social institutions have opened to those they previously excluded, yet at the same time inequality has increased. We live in a world of democratic inequality, by which I mean that our nation embraces the democratic principle of openness and access, yet as that embrace has increased so too have our levels of inequality. We often think of openness and equality as going hand in hand. And yet if we look at our experiences over the last fifty years we can see that that is simply not the case. This is most notable in elite colleges, where student bodies are increasingly racially diverse but simultaneously richer.

The headline in The New York Times on May 24th reads: "Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite."

Our So-Called Education

Living Anthropologically posted this brief item, commenting on two articles in The New York Times:

May 14: On the one hand, "Fast Tracking to Kindergarten." Meanwhile in college it's "Your So-Called Education." As a parent of young children, and a professor, these trends seem intuitively true, and wrong. Are they also related?

I think what we are witnessing now is the further constriction of what counts as education - and parents and everyone else concerned with teaching and learning, from primary school to college and university, ought to join forces to resist it.

Or as William Deresiewicz writes in an essay reviewing a dozen recent books on the state of higher education (published in the May 23rd issue of The Nation):

There is a large, public debate right now about primary and secondary education. There is a smaller, less public debate about higher education. What I fail to understand is why they aren't the same debate.... Education, it is said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket.... Learning isn't about downloading a certain quantity of information into your brain, as the proponents of online instruction seem to think.... It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time.

Deresiewicz cites Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's recently published book, Academically Adrift, which found that college students today are not in fact learning all that much in college. At institutions of higher education, the buzzword now is "assesssment," which is supposed to measure "student learning outcomes" - that is, how full are the buckets.

When students apparently fail to learn, the reflexive response of policy makers has been to blame the teachers. Witness the popularity of so-called reformers like former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, and the attacks upon public school teachers and their unions.

However, consider the conditions in which public school teachers today work. Austerity demands that they make do with less, teaching more children in their classrooms (not to mention having to manage the complexities of the lives of the children whom they teach), cutting "extras" like field trips or recess, preparing children to perform well on standardized tests that are taken as measures of the teachers themselves. How well can teachers teach - and students learn - under such conditions?

A point that Deresiewicz and Arum and Roksa (in "Your So-Called Education") all make is that there are now fewer full-time tenure-track faculty teaching at American colleges and universities: No more than 35 percent. Deresiewicz suggests:

If we're going to make college an intellectually rigorous experience of the students who already go - still more, for all the ones we want to go if we're going to reach the oft-repeated goal of universal postsecondary education, an objective that would double enrollments - we're going to need a lot more teachers: well paid, institutionally supported, socially valued.

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Another important reason to resist the narrowing of education is that it reinforces already existing inequalities. Narrowing what counts as worth learning serves the interests of people who know what Kumon is and can afford it. The only hope for democracy is a broad education.

Modernist Cuisine

Just finished reading The New Yorker's review (in the March 21st issue) of a cooking text called Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Reviewer John Lanchester notes that the text is comprised, in fact, five thick 11 x 13 volumes plus a ring-bond volume of recipes (2,438 pages). The price alone ($625) should clue us to the fact that this is not for the ordinary home cook.

The book apparently describes the science behind cooking, which itself sounds fascinating. After all, cooking depends upon manipulating, for example, temperature and provoking chemical responses to desired effects. Not only does this approach to cooking contribute to, say, smarter stewing, but it also makes possible the presentation of natural foods in forms that seem utterly unnatural to us, like "foams," "gels," "airs", "soils," not to mention magic tricks like "foods that change temperature when you eat them, a cup of tea that is cold on one side and hot on the other," and so on. The approach (and the resulting gimmicks) in Europe has been called "molecular gastronomy" and in this text is called "modernist cuisine."

I think it is interesting to note that even with science shaping this new approach to cooking, it is called "modernist cuisine," which seems to signal a break from "craft" to "art." As a cultural anthropologist, I thought we were living in post-post-modern times? Politically, what does it mean to claim a "modernist" cuisine? For sake of comparison, see this post on The Futurist Cookbook, published in Italy in 1929, which was notably anti-pasta, which artist F.T. Marinetti rejected as reactionary.

What I consider more important to ask: What does it mean - and what will it mean - that this new science / art of cooking emerges at a time when there is growing awareness and acceptance of farmers markets and local foods and "provenance" associated with food (e.g., chocolates labeled with their national and regional origins)?

Last time, I had posted on what I perceived as the elitism of "simple" eating. However, I also appreciated this reminder from Lanchester's review: "There was a time when that emphasis on ingredients seemed quaint; now it is at the center of what chefs do, and it also has had a big impact on the way ordinary cooks thin, shop, cultivate, and prepare food, from the elementary-school kitchen to the White House garden. Perhaps the best thing about this movement is that we can put it into daily practice for ourselves." At least the farm-to-table "movement" - if that is what to call it - makes possible a conversation about what is not fair about food and eating.

I worry that with "modernist cuisine," we are looking at a false sense that science will save us. Like, Green Revolution, anyone? I worry that "modernist cuisine" is the taste of things to come. Notably the further intensification of inequalities.

Harassed, bored, and miserable

Just followed a link to the Web site for a new documentary called "Food Stamped" that I might like to see. The tag line for the film is this: "Is it possible to eat healthy on a food stamp budget?"

I say that I might like to see this film b/c I also am a bit afraid of what the message of this film might be. I say this based on who is being quoted in the blurbs praising the film - two cookbook authors whose sincerity I do not question, but whose relationships with food are not like those of the people who live on food stamp budgets - and based on the Tips that the filmmakers offer on their Web site. Here is a sample:

# Plan, plan, plan – Creating a menu of meals before going shopping helps save you money at the checkout. Shopping with a list in hand also helps prevent lots of impulse buys.
# Buy in bulk – Many grocery stores have bulk sections, where you can get whole foods like grains, beans, nuts, and seeds by the pound. These are often cheaper than buying food in the package.
# Buy seasonal and local – Seasonal and local produce is often times more affordable (not to mention tastier and better for the planet)

Is it just me, or does this strike you as terrifically unhelpful advice for someone who actually might be living on a food stamp budget - which the filmmakers define as $1 per meal? For example, I think we need to remember that planning is a privilege that middle-class folks take for granted. Who else has the time and the assumption that the transportation is available on demand? Who else has the $ on hand to be able to pay a bit more upfront for the bulk goods - which btw, who else has the room to store?

The problem that I see here - and I allow for the fact that the film might be rather different from its marketing here - is that "bad" lifestyle and "wrong" choices are being discussed, yet again, as the culprits. Not the problem of inequalities the shape our experiences with food and eating.

BTW, if the film is rather different from the marketing, then I wish that the message here emphasized the structures that make food inequalities possible - and the institutions that benefit, frankly, from a Fast Food Nation. Certainly individuals have the ability to make decisions, but think about the ways in which the decision, say, to drive-thru McDonald's is made so easy for us.

I also just have to add: In conversations about how and why Americans might not be eating "better," I am struck always by the implication that "bad" lifestyle, "wrong" choices, and "bad" taste go hand-in-hand. In particular, "bad" taste equals what I have heard some college students call "lower class behavior." Which they feel free to say b/c they say that sometimes they do it, too. Which apparently demonstrates the security of their own class position (as not "lower") and at the same time absolves them of being snobs, judgmental, and biased ("class-ist").

To hear some college students talk (as I do in courses on cultural anthropology and medical anthropology), eating fast food is wrong not just b/c it is too many calories and not enough nutrition, but also b/c it exhibits lack of refinement!

Indeed, take a look at the Recipes on the Web site for this film: It smacks of the assumption that if only the lower classes would learn to appreciate how delicious and nutritious and affordable it is to eat "simply"* - like sauteeing a bit of kale in olive oil with garlic, then squeezing a bit of fresh lemon juice on it...

*Simple itself being a bourgeois aesthetic that can be rather costly to achieve: Real Simple, Simple Home, Simple Living, and so on.

The Economist led an editorial on malnutrition (with which I did not agree entirely) with the following:

AT THE depths of the Great Depression, George Orwell wrote of the English working classes: “The basis of their diet is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potato—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread? Yes it would, but the point is, no human being would ever do such a thing. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man does not. When you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want to eat something a little bit tasty.”

The issue today is not necessarily that people (at least in the United States) are underfed, but apparently not much else has changed since Orwell made his observations.

Educational credentialism

While grading exams and papers, I have been taking little "breaks" and reading anthropologist Peter Demerath's Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School.

The book is based on longitudinal ethnographic research - that is, Demerath conducted fieldwork over four years, engaging in participant-observation and interviews in order to follow a focal group of students from 9th to 12th grade - at Wilton Burham High School, a "good" public high school in the Midwest.

Much of the public discourse on schooling today is focused (rightly, I think) on disadvantages, so that we might talk about the effects of poverty.

As an anthropologist, however, Demerath also argues that advantages ought not be taken simply for granted - that they, too, should be examined carefully as socially created. He describes "the tight - almost seamless - linkages between class ideology, parenting practices, ideal notions of personhood, and accepted school policies and practices" that result in "1) positioning individuals to successfully compete in school and 2) leveraging community resources to support the schools, build up the confidence of individual students, and frame their efforts as successes" (2).

Exhibits A and B: At WBHS, building up the confidence of individual students and framing their efforts as successes can be seen in the school allowing up to 47 students to graduate as valedictorians, and distributing a special cord and "Medal of Excellence" to every graduate to wear with his or her cap and gown (in response to a parents complaining that their graduates might "feel bad" about not being designated members of the National Honor Society).

What especially concerns me as an anthropologist and a college professor who bears witness to this every day in my work is this passage that Demerath quotes from another book that I might place on my kindle wish-list, How to Succeed in School without Really Learning (1997):

David Labaree pointed out several years ago that market pressures and social exertions give rise to educational credentialism, at the heart of which is a tension between a view of education as a private good that facilitates individual advancement, and as a public good that provides society with collectively shared benefits. Furthermore, he showed how under credentialism, "teaching takes a back seat to the more socially salient task of sorting, and grading becomes more important for its social consequences than for its pedagogical uses (1997,2). Labaree concluded that social mobility goals have promoted the commodification of education in the U.S., which threatens to "transform the public educational system into a mechanism for personal advancement" (p.12).

I think Labaree might have been a bit optimistic: Commodification is no threat, it is what already has been happening. Now, I worry that higher ed / academia has sold itself too cheaply as a self-help program. Yet, I also hear how lamely platitudinous it sounds: To claim education as a public good. What does that even mean? I wonder whether or not there is a convincing way to talk about public good that does not on some level speak to the "pecuniary considerations" that sociologists claimed in 1929 (in the classic study of "Middletown") were changing the fabric of American life.

I wish it mattered not only to talk about a public good, but also to talk about the play and excitement that actually accompanies learning - which as a parent is what I wish for my kids to know.

Katha Pollitt is right as usual

From the February 28th issue of The Nation:

Are you a tiger mother, a soccer mom, a helicopter parent, an attachment mom, a permissive free spirit who just wants your child to be herself? Congratulations. Your kids have a good chance of turning out reasonably well. Not because you are a parenting genius who has hit on the perfect method but because you have the time and energy and cultural capital to give your child what he needs to be successful in today's world no matter what child-raising method you choose.... Your ex may have run off with your best friend, your apartment may be too small, you may hate your job - but you are still a white collar, college-educated, middle-class person. And that makes all the difference for your children.

The biggest barrier to educational achievement today is not any of the things the media talk endlessly about: poorly prepared teachers, badly run schools, too many tests, low standards. It's child poverty - which, like poverty in general, has just dropped out of the discourse....

The parenting wars look like they are about children, but really they are only about each parent's own child. That's why they serve such a useful social function. Without them we might have to think about the frightening place America is becoming for ever more millions of kids. Who knows? We might even feel that we should do something about it.

Keeping up with the Times

Tomorrow marks the first day of the fall term here at Central State University College, where I teach.

StraightMan will be sitting out the academic year. He is on sabbatical!

To mark the occasion, here are links to two Times features marking the start of the semester that caught my eye:

How American families pay for college today. I have been thinking about this quite a bit, as I had attended a presentation on children and finance during a visit with friends at the Chautauqua Institution. The audience clearly came from a privileged strata of American society: When the question was posed how much families should be saving for college, the rule-of-thumb figure suggested was $500 to $800 a month per child.

Another reason that I love StraightMan is that he is the kind of guy who, when I quoted him this figure, retorted that their kids would be heading to Hampshire and Bennington. Which is an elitist joke in itself, but still funny to me, as we are nowhere near saving what we are "supposed" to - I thought we were doing well just saving at all!

Redshirting in kindergarten. Look, I think there can be good reasons for why parents, in consultation with teachers, might consider delaying a particular child's entree into school, but at least some of the reasons for redshirting might be addressed more systematically - for example, I think the concerns about schooling boys ought to be addressed more broadly, for the good of more than a select few children who have especially engaged parents.

As an aside, Bubbie, age 3, just started his first week in the "pre-school" room at his child care - I feel a little like he is just too young (i.e., immature) for it, but the other boys (all 14! and only 2 girls...) seem equally too young.

Classing horses

As a parenthropologist, I am thinking about what it means for little girls today to be "horse crazy" - and of course, I am asking why American middle-class girls, like my daughter and her friends, read books that tell stories about girls and horses, play with toy horses, beg for horseback riding lessons (not to mention ponies), and so on. Here are my continuing notes on this topic.

Today, I am wondering about the classed dimensions of the horse world. Michael Korda, in his 2004 book, Horse People, notes that more than 5 million households in the United States own a horse or horses - and that the U.S. population of horses stands around 13.5 million. "That seems like a lot of horses in a country where most people had made the switch to the automobile by the end of World War I and in which horses – with a few exceptions like police horses, or carriage horses in places like New York’s Central Park, or among the Amish, are no longer working animals, strictly speaking" (1).

The number of horses suggests that the sociological reality of owning (or at least caring for) a horse involves a certain amount of diversity - but it also makes me think about horses as symbols of particular kinds of lives.

One kind of life that horses represent is an English aristocratic life, as Korda suggests:

“In England, you have to understand," Margaret says – giving me a look that means, Take this seriously! – “there’s a whole lifestyle that revolves around ponies, like the one in the Thelwell cartoons, full of cross-looking little girls in pigtails, with velvet hard hats and jodhpur boots, and tiny, fat Shetland ponies, each with a mind of its own. In the English countryside, a pony gets passed on from child to child as it gets outgrown, like clothes in a large family, so most of them don’t stay at one place all that long” (75).

From a child’s point of view, a pony in those days involved some of the same desires that center on learning to drive and owning a car today for teenage Americans – freedom to come and go as you please, responsibility (“You can have it, but you have to look after it”), a sense of power and control, on top of which, unlike a car, a pony is warm, furry, accepts – indeed expects – treats, and responds to love, affection, and attention (76).

The whole notion of a little girl and her pony is deeply entrenched in English life, and also provides an early statement about class, status, and athletic ability, very much part of the Diana the Huntress syndrome that permeates a certain stratum of English society when it comes to little girls (77).

An Anglo-American aristocratic life becomes represented in The Private Passion of Jackie Kennedy Onassis: Portrait of a Rider, by Vicky Moon (2005):

Almost every little girl dreams about owning a pony, but for Jacqueline Bouvier, it was a given…. In the privileged circle into which she was born, riding was a necessary social grace, as was playing a decent game of tennis, knowing which fork to use, and writing a proper thank-you note.

In other words, horses seem to represent the good life - and the accessibility of horses to the daughters of middle-class families (as well as aristocratic families) becomes a sign of social mobility.

Also, the riding ability of the girls themselves itself might serve social mobility: In Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1871), the poor-but-genteel March girls manage to become accomplished riders, even without their own stable of horses, and they are invited on riding parties, at which their skills are praised. Amy is mortified, however, when, on their round of calls to the wealthier families in their neighborhood, Jo reveals that they practiced on a saddle mounted on a low-lying branch of an apple tree.

In the 1940 film, "The Philadelphia Story," the aristocratic Tracy's "man of the people" fiance is shown to be lacking in class because he cannot ride a horse.

There is no "me" in "mommy"

This article on helicopter parenting, which was reprinted in our local paper from The Washington Post, has me pondering, yet again, this question:

How is it possible for there be a "me" in "mommy"?

The article, written by sociologist Margaret Nelson, reports on Nelson's research on the effects of hyper-involved parenting on the parents themselves. Nelson points out that a lot of the popular attention (like the Time magazine cover, above) has been focused on the effects on children: "Critics fret that the children of helicopter parents will lack maturity, self-reliance, self-esteem and good old-fashioned gumption."

As a college professor, I confess that I see this in too many students. Certainly not all - and those are the ones whose parents I want to meet at commencement - but still too many. As a parent, however, I feel that critics too often display little understanding about the pressures of parenting today. Esp. for women.

Nelson emphasizes that helicopter parenting is classed: "Compared with professional, middle-class parents, parents of lower educational and professional status are more likely to impose nonnegotiable limits on their children's behavior." In other words, strict rules and bans, including the use of blockers on their TV's and their computers, versus supervising and monitoring, which some parents might describe as exploring and discussing together.

A temptation might be to label middle-class parenting as misguided. However, I will counter that middle-class parents and children might likely see advantages and gains - for example, in school. Linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, in her 1982 article, "What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School," considered the classed differences in parent-child interactions around books and reading. Although in 1982, "helicopter parenting," at least as a term, had not been invented, Heath notes that middle-class parenting was oriented differently, with long-term consequences: "As school-oriented parents and their children interact in the preschool years, adults give their children, through modeling and specific instruction, ways of taking from books that seem natural in school and in numerous institutional settings such as banks, post offices, businesses, and government offices" (Brice 318). Working-class parents placed as much importance on books and reading and school as middle-class parents. However, middle-class parent-child interactions around books were not focused only on reading them, but also on talking about them. In fact, this might be the critical difference:

In doing the latter, they repeatedly practice routines that parallel those of classroom interaction. By the time they enter school, they have had continuous experience as information givers; they have learned how to perform in those interactions that surround literate sources throughout school....

They have learned how to listen, waiting for the appropriate cute that signals it is their turn to show off this knowledge (Brice 324).

The connection that I want to make here is that middle-class parenting appears, in fact, to "work": Brice found that middle-class children, overall, did better in school, which is seems a taken-for-granted truism today. On the children of working-class families, Brice found: "Their initial successes in reading, being good students, following orders, and adhering to school norms of participating in lessons begin to fall away rapidly about the time they enter the fourth grade" (Brice 331). Not being a specialist in education, I cannot say for certain, but if you believe what you read in the newspapers today, then this might be as true as ever in 2010.

So, we can decry helicopter parenting, but it seems hard to fix what apparently is not at all broken.

Is it not broken? Really?

The kind of involvement that exploring and discussing together is intense. Nelson observes: "Helicopter parenting is, to put it mildly, more time-consuming and more emotionally demanding than other parenting styles." She adds: "Mothers who try to live up to the new parenting standards of the professional middle class seem to have few options: They can overwork themselves, or they can leave the workforce."

Sister, you are singing my song.

Not only that, but having been brought up with a certain degree of benign neglect, I want to be less hovering as a parent, but I find it challenging to put into practice - and it is not just my own "psychology," a concept about which I will save my harange for another day... To start examining the structural reasons why, like the kinds of literal policing that surrounds parenting today, you might visit my friend Lenore Skenazy's blog, free range kids.

For me and for too many other parents, Nelson notes, the overwork means not less time with / for the children or at work - in fact, time studies show that working parents today spend more time both with their children and at work than in the past. Instead, it means less time with spouses and partners (not so good for marriages), other family members and relatives, and friends:

The time married parents spend visiting with friends and relatives outside the nuclear family has declined dramatically: Married fathers spent almost 40 percent less time and married mother spent almost a third less time socializing in 2000 than they did in 1965.... Parents seem to have few opportunities to pursue friendships unless they are friendships that take little extra time (as with co-workers or other parents on the sideline of a child's sporting event).

I found myself nodding as I read this last bit. For me, being able to maintain friendships with little extra time is part of the appeal of Facebook, and why I finally gave up my resistance to joining. Now, I can read the "walls" of friends from college and graduate school and past work lives, and they can read mine, and we occasionally can offer a "like" or a "comment" on each other.

Even in a relatively small community, like where I live now, too many conversations start with apologies for not being in better touch. However, as I walk Beanie to school or pick up Bubbie from day care or escort them to their various and sundry activities or just browse around, along with StraightMan, at the local farmers market, there is also the smile, the nod, the wave, and the brief exchange that I can share with the broad category of people whom I kind of know: Some friends and some friends-like. (Which the likes and comments on Facebook simulate...) All of us seem to be digging in, at least for the foreseeable future. Paradoxically, I might not have extra time for the active pursuit of friendships, but it seems that over time, people can become friends, too. Or at least I am beginning to appreciate and imagine the possibility.

The common touch

Or, how aristocrats manage to keep on being aristocrats - with the assent of everyone else. From the June 7th issue of The New Yorker, a description of Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats party in Britain, which recently formed a coalition government with the Conservatives (Tories):

He has also mastered one of the most important British upper-middle-class skills, that of seeming less entitled than he is. He has the nuanced understanding of class dynamics which comes from having a great-great uncle who was murdered by his own peasants.

Prep Personae

This might be a shameful admission, but I am delighted to learn about plans for an update to The Official Preppy Handbook.

I still have my copy of the original, which I bought when I was in 7th or 8th grade. Then, I had only the foggiest notion that the book was satire. There are actual check marks penciled in on page 59, “The Basic Reading List,” which listed “books about Prep schools, books read in Prep schools, books by Preppies, books about the joys and miseries of being Prep.” The two titles leading the list – The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, both of which I considered my favorite books at the time – seem to say more about being an adolescent and feeling out of place. I mean, I just knew that I would be much happier attending a boarding school in New England than mixing with the hoi polloi at a suburban high school in New Jersey. (I tell you, Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep captures truths that are not often spoken.) In New Jersey, I stayed.

By the end of my time there, however, I had become practiced in the kind of sarcasm and irony that occasionally rises to wit. Or at least I started to recognize it in other sources, like The Official Preppy Handbook. In my mind, I was Dorothy Parker stuck among mall rats. Or at least I knew who Dorothy Parker was. (Who was, I believe, not a preppy and certainly is not included in “The Prep Pantheon” features on pages 196 to 199.) Eventually, I attended one of America’s 20 preppiest colleges where I met actual preppies and still other wonderful, interesting, and clever people. (Including StraightMan, who other people assume is an actual preppy, in part because it is true that Brooks Brothers seems to have proportioned their trousers and shirts to fit him exactly.)

I think that my early interest in The Official Preppy Handbook alerted me to thinking about “class” in the United States as not wholly or even significantly defined by money – which I find that my students, as an example, will assume. To which the preppies raise their bloody Mary’s in agreement. On the other hand, I am not talking uncritically about that other notion of “class” as good breeding and so on.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu made the study of “class” and its reproduction in education and in language central in his life’s work. Is it possible to engage in a productive consideration of class in the United States a la Bourdieu?

Apparently, the new book, to be called True Prep, will include material on gay prep life and black preppies (e.g., the Obamas). I think it will be interesting to see what will be the so-called preppy take on changes in American life between 1980, when The Official Preppy Handbook was published, and today. It seems safe to say that there have been changes in the climate or environment of humor – I wonder how that will affect the production and consumption / reception of True Prep as satire? What can we say about "class"?

To be continued.