The national conversation that is not being had

The New York Times reported last week on gaps in achievement - as measured in reading and math tests administered in 4th and 8th grade - that exist between black and white boys:

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

What I find interesting is the prevailing acceptance of the idea that "poverty" is the problem here - and the consternation being churned because "poverty" appears not to be the answer, or at least not the only answer:

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”

To be honest, I was surprised that the "sociological and historical forces" and the "conversations that people are unwilling to have" referred to "early childhood parenting practices."

From where I perch, the chatter about parenting sounds like a deafening roar.

Has it become more comfortable for we the Nacirema to discuss "poverty" because we will not discuss race?

Girls will be boys...

So, between replying to student e-mails and prepping classes, I just read this article in the NYT, intriguingly titled, "Afghan Boys Are Prized, So Girls Live the Part."

The piece describes, in Afghanistan, a practice of families enabling or encouraging daughters to live their childhoods as sons. I started reading it b/c I thought it might be interesting to assign in ANTH 100 to discuss the construction of gender and expectations that surround women's fertility and preference for sons.

It might be just me, but I find the tone / language in this piece a little bit off: The girls are described as "masquerading" and "disguised." There are "real boys," and then there are the bacha posha, which we are told means "dressed up as a boy." Yet, the author describes how the bacha posha live as "both" boys and girls, wearing the clothes of boys and having the freedoms associated with them, but also socializing with girls. (We are told that this all changes abruptly with puberty, and the expectations of marriage that accompany it.) Not only parents, but the community at large, including school administrators, participate in allowing for bacha posha. So, I find unconvincing the characterization that this is a masquerade and a disguise.

In fact, I feel like the story is even more interesting than as told here. What I find wanting is a consideration of gender beyond the it-sucks-to-be-a-girl-especially-in-Other-Cultures perspective that is taken here.

The author quotes an historian who observes: “Segregation calls for creativity. These people have the most amazing coping ability.” Which I think expresses a stance that I hope to cultivate in ANTH 100 students: Recognize the conditions and constraints - in fact, the inequalities and injustices - surrounding gender, but also the capacity of human beings to devise solutions to the problems that they also create.

A whole new cultcha

My friend, DoulaK, is spending the year in Prague. Her husband, SustainableK, is on sabbatical, and they have two boys. Recently, she posted the following on Facebook:

Playgrounds here have a serious Lord of the Flies edge to them. We've seen kids throwing pebbles/stones/sand at each other with impunity on at least three occasions. The third time [the boys] were the targets. Our fear, in this environment, is that B is going to get bullied. And G will become a bully.

***

It's not that [parents] are not watching, they just don't seem to care. In the worst incident we saw, some bigger boys (~7-8 YOs) were throwing pebbles down at a little boy (4-5?), who finally started crying. Karl and I (way on the sidelines) had already vowed not to do anything b/c we'd intervened at another site and the adults looked at us like "what are you so uptight about?"

After the little boy cried for 20 seconds or more, a woman (who had been very close by the whole time) finally stood up and sauntered over to pick him up and soothe him. Mom? Babysitter? Random court-appointed guardian? We have no idea.

When B&G got pelted it was kind of comical. It was by a girl (~7 or 8) who felt the boys had encroached on her territory and weren't playing the way she wanted. (BTW, B had knocked her off the zip-line platform 15 mins earlier. He stopped immediately to apologize, and we ran over to help ... but she may have held a grudge!)

Anyway, when she started complaining to them about the pulley system they'd all gathered around, B stood up to her and said, "you're not the only one who's playing with it!" She gathered a handful of large pebbles, threw them at the boys, and yelled "Bye bye!" B&G looked at each, kind of shrugged and went back to the pulley thing. SustainableK and I, mouths agape, chuckled and shook our heads.

It's a whole new cultcha.

What followed DoulaK's status updates were comments from her friends offering sympathy (and luck) with her concerns about bullying, also observations about differences in cultural and social expectations about what parents ought to do (or not) - for example, if Czech parents are less and American parents more "interventionist," then what does that mean?

In previous semesters of ANTH 100, I have assigned an article titled, "Our Babies, Ourselves," which is an excerpted version of biological anthropologist Meredith Small's 1999 book of the same title. Small's perspective, which she calls ethnopediatrics, is that practices of child care ought to be understood both in terms of their diversity across culture and, especially, in terms of their contribution to child health and well being (in other words, survival and adaptation). A point that I like for students to discuss is that it can be challenging to consider child rearing practices with a stance of cultural relativism. In fact, I find that ANTH 100 students can be harshly judgmental about parenting. Not so different from parents themselves, I think.

Putting aside the issue of bullying (at least for the moment), in future posts, I plan to consider what anthropologists can tell us about parental "intervention" or "mediation": The point being not that parents in some cultures do less / more, but that there might be much more to understand about when and how adults do or do not involve themselves in children's interactions.