Human Curriculum

In the context of the recent suicide of a victim of bullying and subsequent criminal charges filed against her antagonists, Matt Steinglass has a great bit of commentary in the Economist. He writes refreshingly about his first reaction to the story, and then goes about unpacking it:

I have to confess that I've often taken a skeptical attitude towards the new prominence of anti-bullying campaigns. Kids have always bullied each other, and with little data to suggest the problem is any worse now than it has been in the past, other issues seemed more pressing.
But I'm pretty sure my instinctive hesitancy on this point is wrong...

It is always important to challenge common sense, especially our broad ideas about human nature and history.  I've been reading Orwell and am struck by this passage from Coming up for Air, in which he describes the magic of a childhood growing up in the early 20th century England:

We were cruel little beasts and sometimes we'd just knock the nest down and trample on the eggs or chicks.  There was another game we had when the toads were spawning.  We used to catch toads, ram the nozzle of a bike pump up their backsides and blow them up till they burst.  That's what boys are like, I don't know why.

The context is wonderfully Orwellian (in a truer, maybe ironic sense of the word): he embraces a sentimental view of childhood not as beautifully whitewashed, but beautifully real.

Yet I can't help but disagree with his view of adolescent morality.  I think it's fair to say that the behavior he describes would be foreign to modern children, yet he thinks it normative.  And likely it was 100 years ago.  Many other things were going on in society then that would appall us today.  I think it is fair to say that we, as relatively large, wealthy, democratized and industrialized societies, have made great progress towards broadening our view of human rights.  I can't help but think that this would have some effect on child-rearing. 

So, what I'm really saying is that as a whole we are more moral.  But specifically we are more empathetic.  Because what are human rights but a recognition of our own humanity in others?  When we are treating women, minorities and gays as equals, we are acknowledging their humanity. 

But although the result is human rights for all, the important lesson is the process that brought them.  We didn't arrive at the conclusion that women deserved to vote because some switch flipped.  It was a slow and arduous process of introspection and imagination which required us to step into the shoes of the "other" and rectify logical inconsistencies.  It is this process that then becomes a part of our cultural tradition.  For if we do this with one group, we begin to do this with all groups.  Once value structures that inhibited the deconstruction of gender bias were overturned, it became easier to deconstruct race and sexuality.

We could no longer take for granted traditional patterns of interaction.  Academic research in these areas exploded in the post-war period and data began to pour in uncovering just how beholden we are to cultural patterns.  We could no longer take tradition for granted, as if it expressed some sort of natural order.  Instead, theories were developed that tried to explain how and why cultural evolved.  Many were controversial or conflicting, but all agreed that culture didn't necessarily form around a moral trajectory, but instead according to a tangled web of multiple social, political and religious pressures.

While no consensus has emerged on any perfect, final cultural morality, there are some basic rights that we have agreed upon.  And more importantly, we have embraced the notion that humans are creations of the world in which they live.  A great deal of research has been done focusing specifically on early childhood and human development.  We now know just how impressionable children are.

Literally beginning in the womb before they are even born, developing embryos respond to the mother's stress levels.  After birth, children are immediately absorbing the surrounding environment.  Cognitive and language development can vary immensely depending on quantity and quality of exposure.  Children's television programming has taken this principle to heart and childhood development research is driving content.

Unfortunately, schools are considerably behind the curve in this area.  Just as wide academic disparities exist across socioeconomic levels, so too do variances in emotion and behavior.  While much work has been done in the area of academic preparedness testing, less work has been done in emotional development.  Content standards have been developed, but to my knowledge no schools district has adopted any, and curriculum is scatter-shot.

We know that children are not yet fully developed cognitively.  In this way they haven't changed.  They will continue to make errors of judgment, and their capacity for cruelty will always remain high due to a reduced capacity to empathize.  But this does not mean that there is some magic level of development at which they all must remain.  In general, students who possess higher degrees of emotional and behavioral maturity have learned it.  They have been exposed to quality parenting and peer relationships, have received emotional nourishment and the skills to process social discourse in a healthy way.

To the extent that schools can, they need to begin approaching social development with the seriousness that they do academics.  They may not be able to correct for a disadvantaged home life, but they can offer a great deal of support to children in need.  Simply expecting the students to behave in the classroom is not enough.  For many, this will amount to little more than a momentary and external repression of impulses that they they do not possess the skills to manage on their own.  As soon as the authorities are gone, the child is at the mercy of his own incompetent devices.

I think we've clearly made great progress in understanding human development, and its anachronistic precursor "human nature".   There is still of course a great deal to discover.  But there is also a great deal more we could be doing now to provide all children the skills they need to become the best they can be.

Flogging Will, P.1: following logics

(from a thread but became so substantial I couldn't bear not to share!)

I'd like to chime in here. I think I mentioned in a prior post that what originally led me to question whether something such as free will existed was my desire to get to the root of a difference between modern liberal and conservatism. Very crudely: liberals feel that society should intervene on behalf of the less fortunate, while conservatives feel that they should be held to greater account.

In following these logics, I realized that the difference lay in how the two philosophies viewed human behavior. When seeking to explain personal circumstance, liberals saw it as greatly dependent upon biology and environment, while conservatives frequently deferred to the concept of individual "free will".

My undergraduate background is in social sciences, so I spent a good deal of time studying social research, which unfortunately, has been essentially the domain of the left since the civil rights era (what was basically being examined was the "history of inequity", not something conservatism is generally concerned with - one could almost say is "defined against".) But that is somewhat beside the point. What I want to emphasize is the degree to which inequality not only exists but is strikingly predictable based on a plethora of very simple factors such as race, income-level, parent education level, etc.

The immediate question is begged: why do these inequalities persist? If it is true, as the conservative argument goes, that everyone is just as capable of success, than why the predictive difference in equality across demographics? If it were merely a matter of individual choice, having nothing to do with biology or environment, than would we not see similar results across the board? There are many other events that occur with relatively similar frequency amongst different races or economic backgrounds. Although in fact, it is difficult to find a human behavior that cannot be correlated in some way with a socio-cultural demographic. I think advertisers have known this for years!

Which finally brings me to your original post:

""If you could take the same child and put him into completely different circumstances he would make completely different choices in life. This is common sense. We may have free will in a limited sense. But the circumstances we are born into and raised in have a huge impact on decisions we make in life."

Is there any way to know that for sure? We have no real way of testing, so would it *Really* be the "same" child?"

While you couldn't possibly give the exact same child different experiences, you can make valid inferences. You can take a group of 10,000 children, say, try and eliminate as many variables as possible, and look for patterns. The results are complex, as the variables are tough to pin down. But some pretty big themes will emerge. Things like family environment, nutrition, peer grouping, violence, education have strong correlations with levels of success.

There was quite a powerful study that came out in the 90's (published in book form as Meaningful Differences, by Hart & Risley), that came out of the 60's war on poverty, itself part of the broader civil rights movement, that examined what role language development played out at various class levels. Three socio-economic groups (high, working & low) were studied, with home observers recording language use amongst family members, coding it, and measuring its correlation with early-childhood language development. The results were striking: the differences between the high, working and low were large. Kids were simply getting very different experiences at home, which were then correlating with different levels of success in school.

Now, this is all actually pretty common sensical. Would you rather your child have a safe, healthy, richly stimulating and positive childhood, or one that was unsafe, unhealthy, etc.? The answer is obvious.

In your following comment, you made a very common argument to support your position - that either you or someone you knew indeed lived a disadvantaged childhood yet managed to find success. In logical terms, this is an appeal to anecdotal evidence. If the question was whether it is possible to succeed at all despite the odds, your example would provide falsification. But the proposition is different in critical way. M. Zehnder wrote:

"....the circumstances we are born into and raised in have a huge impact on decisions we make in life."

Notice that he is only claiming that those circumstances have a "huge impact", not a definitive role. We will never be able to gather data on every single thing that has happened to a person, but we can develop pretty good theories as to what type of environments do what to a person, drawing from sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.

Yet even then we will still be missing the internal, biological nature of the individual. Fortunately, people are pretty similar, again, from psychology, anthropology, neurology, etc. we have pretty good data on baseline human nature. In fact, much of what we know about the human brain has only come about in the past 30 years, coinciding interestingly enough with the civil-rights era push into social studies.

Now, removing all of that, what we are left with is what one might call free will. Somehow all of that data is not enough, and we must still resort to that mysterious, scientifically dubious proposition.