Another word on HGD
One way of thinking about some of the opposition to WSD's new Human Growth and Development curriculum
[Note: Sorry for the delay. I usually try to send these on Thursday morning, but I got tired.]
At one point near the end of last week’s school board meeting, Board President Dr. Eric Jessup-Anger has just finished explaining how community members can access the Human Growth and Development course materials online and reach out to district staff with any questions. The angry man mentioned last week responds:
I like the way you guys talk with these eloquent words. But when you guys go home tonight, whoever voted this in—this is my final word—when you guys go home, look yourself in the mirror and say ‘I voted for this.’ If you voted for it. Look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I have no decency.’
You’re going to teach—I'm afraid that my 3-year-old granddaughter is going to learn about sex education. She might be shown an inappropriate picture. If I stand up here right now and drop my shorts, you guys would be calling the police on me. I’d be going to jail. Are you going to show this to my granddaughter?
Preamble
I like writing about local government not necessarily because I have an inherent interest in the weekly goings-on of the common council and school board (I would probably rate my intrinsic interest as moderate to strong-ish) but because of the way disagreements and problems at a local level can often reflect and inform our perspective on broader debates.
For instance, the City of Wauwatosa has old and outdated infrastructure that will cost a lot of money to replace. It has a shortage of affordable housing, and the community is often divided on whether and how to fix it. It’s important to be aware of these things because they affect my taxes and perhaps my quality-of-life, but they are doubly interesting to me because they are also very tangible examples of a nationwide problem with aging and inadequate infrastructure and the sclerosis that seems to have fundamentally degraded our country’s ability to build and do big, complex, and important things.
One reason to look for similarities and draw analogies between national and local issues is that all the smart, well-credentialed people across the country thinking and pontificating about the “big problems” in society might have some good ideas that can be applied locally. I think this can sometimes lead us astray, but the intuition is sound.
Conversely, too much time with your head in the clouds can leave you increasingly detached from reality. For instance, Thomas Friedman made a name for himself with his on-the-ground reporting from the Middle East during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the early-80s. But since then it seems like the only traveling he does is on the direct flight from DCA to Davos, and I’m not sure he’s said anything important or interesting in 20 years. So it’s often useful to simply listen to real, living, breathing Americans because their opinions and perspectives are often more complicated and nuanced than the caricatures we might get from CNN, Fox News, or even the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times.
So, I’ll first take a wide-angle lens on a particular broad, somewhat abstract issue that interests me, then I’ll use some historical examples to motivate a simple framework for understanding this issue, and then I’ll apply it to a local problem. I realize I sometimes try people’s patience with my long articles, but maybe you’ll find it interesting. I’ll also note that I think what follows is a little one-sided, and that I can think of some legitimate counterarguments that should be addressed. But I’d need to think about them a little more.
I.
If you read the news, it’s mostly bad. I won’t name all the bad things, but when it’s not the possibility of nuclear war, the latest pandemic, or why this year’s extra heavy rainfall was because of climate change, journalists eventually return to their usual domestic rotation on modern society becoming atomized and lonely, everyone under 18 being depressed and anxious, fraying community ties1, and something called “Deaths of Despair” (though see important statistical caveat that undercuts headline claim here).
If you wonder what might be causing all this, you can probably find about 10,000 articles—including some of those linked above—with an answer. I’ll save you the trouble of reading them all and just say: Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, and opioids. I mean, maybe they’re not wrong, but I think we can go a little deeper.
One thing I’m interested in are the ways in which society has become more complex, both for experts to manage and for most people to understand and function successfully within. Work has become increasingly specialized and highly skilled and the government has created an increasingly complicated and professionalized apparatus to monitor and manage various aspects of our lives.
At an individual level, this might look like a society where a large percentage of the population may not know or be capable of understanding and balancing work, relationships, and family in the ways required by modern society, and who struggle mightily because of it.2 When I lived on the west coast, this was one theme of the research I did on Uber and Lyft drivers in Los Angeles.
At a national level, it might look like the citizens of a modern democracy bedeviled by the task of simply identifying the relevant problems facing their community and understanding those problems well enough to vote in experts who can solve them. We have government, regulations, policies, programs, and subsidies finely tuned by mutant geniuses carefully bred in our finest kindergartens, magnet schools, and Ivy-league universities and yet few things work at all like we intended them.3
At a historical level we have the Enlightenment, humanism, and classical liberalism that have unleashed amazing technological progress, fed the world, pulled billions from the brink of starvation, and doubled our lifespans. And yet we still live in a society with poverty, where the individual feels disconnected and unhappy, where stark inequalities persist, and where solutions to those problems seem impossible and out-of-reach. Oh, and people are kind of down on liberal democracy these days.
It sometimes makes for a difficult world to live in and derive meaning from. One of the main takeaways I took from the psychologist Roy Baumeister’s book Meanings of Life is that while modern society is quite good at supplying sources of purpose, self-worth, and efficacy—all important to feelings of fulfillment and meaningfulness—it has a harder time supplying a source of value—something traditionally supplied by religion—and that one of the difficulties of modern life is that people have a lot of choice in deciding what goals to pursue and the manner in which they measure and evaluate their own success. Not only must people determine how to achieve their goals, they must determine what those goals are in the first place, and frequently weigh this choice against a multitude of other possibilities they could otherwise pursue. This is historically unusual, and it seems likely that there are a great many people who are either not inclined to do this, fail to do this successfully, or both.
Traditionally, this sense of disorientation has been mediated and choices have been constrained by family, community, and church. But of course, all these things are fraying too. How does this happen? I have one suggestion, but first a few examples that I think illustrate a common failure mode in the modern world.
II.
Niacin
Niacin, also known as vitamin B-3, helps your body turn food into energy and keeps your skin healthy. It’s found in foods like yeast, tortillas, many cereal grains, and milk. Almost nobody in the U.S. worries about their niacin intake these days, because most get more than enough from their regular diet. However, for many of the world’s poor in less developed countries, severe niacin deficiency leads to pellagra, a pretty ugly conditions whose symptoms include things like inflamed, thickened, or bleeding skin; diarrhea; dementia; and, if left untreated, death.
In Secrets of Our Success, Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist and current chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, talks about the peculiar human capacity to transmit accumulated knowledge through culture and how we are much more intelligent as a society than any one individual in that society might be on his own.
Especially when it comes to eating corn. Corn has lots of niacin but it’s mostly in a form that the human body can’t make use of. New World cultures long ago developed ways of preparing it to make the niacin inside chemically available which involves soaking it in some kind of alkali like burnt seashells, the ashes of wood, or naturally occurring lye. Fail to do this, and you end up with pellagra.
When the conquistadores learned about corn, they were really excited and quickly introduced it to all their friends back in Europe. Unfortunately, the part about soaking it in the ashes of burnt seashells didn’t catch on quite as quickly, and by the mid-1700s after cornmeal had been introduced to Europe and become a staple in Italy and Spain, many, mostly poor, Italians and Spaniards began falling ill and dying of this mysterious and horrific disease. Of course, they didn’t know it was pellagra. They thought it was some kind of leprosy spread through spoiled corn.
It wasn’t actually until the 20th century that the mechanism was understood. But even then, it took a while. A clever doctor put on demonstrations to prove it wasn’t an infectious disease, but everybody thought he was a crank and no one took his ideas seriously until after he’d died. PBS attributes it to “the medical world’s obsession with infectious disease, newly understood and in some cases treatable, and the political world’s resistance to hearing that poor social conditions could cause disease.” The cause of pellagra was finally recognized by medical science in the late-1930s. But of course Native Americans had figured this all out long before.
Tanzanian Villagization
Previously, I talked about James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed and his idea of legibility. A prime objective of the central state is to take a messy reality and make it easier for administrators and bureaucrats to manage, usually by imposing scientific and “rational” forms of organization or production. Compare the twisty and confusing road layout of a medieval European city to the square grid of Chicago. While the intent is usually to improve people’s lives, it frequently makes them worse in hard to anticipate ways.
One case study he looks at occurred in the 1970s when the new nationalist government of Tanzania forcibly relocated 5 million widely dispersed small-scale farmers and pastoralists onto more densely arranged new plots of land and told them to form villages and collective farms to achieve President Julius Nyerere’s socialist vision for the country—but also to cultivate cash crops that would be more profitable and useful for export.
Seen as an effort to “overcome the habits and superstitions of a backward and obstinate peasantry,” these new plots of land were, unfortunately, not always well-suited to agricultural production or for supporting the lives of the villagers assigned to tend them. Some were too far from firewood or sources of water, and many of the villages were simply miles of houses arrayed on either side of major roads, not because this land was best for cultivation or because they thought the villagers would like that layout, but because it made it easier for central planners and administrators to reach them by car. While initially the resettlement program was voluntary, uptake was low. When the state decided to forcibly move people to their villages, police would frequently burn down their old homes to motivate them. Many fled at the first opportunity. Scott concludes:
What is significant, however, is that the modern planned village in Tanzania was essentially a point-by-point negation of existing rural practice, which included shifting cultivation and pastoralism; polycropping; living well off the main roads; kinship and lineage authority; small, scattered settlements with houses built higgledy-piggledy; and production that was dispersed and opaque to the state. The logic of this negation seemed often to prevail over sound ecological or economic considerations.
Agricultural productivity collapse after the forced “villagization,” and the country had to import large quantities of food between 1973-1975 to keep from starving.
Umoja House
In the 1970s, gang murders in certain areas of Philadelphia were out of control and the city had earned the unenviable moniker of “Youth Gang Capital of America.” After one of their sons became involved in a gang, Falaka and David Fattah started Umoja House in West Philadelphia. Umoja, a Swahili word for “unity within the family,” reflected the organization’s ethos: to provide a disciplined, somewhat authoritarian and hierarchical family structure to boys involved or at risk of becoming involved in the gang violence plaguing the city.
The kids were required to wake up at 6 a.m. and eat breakfast at 7 a.m. There was a family conference run by David Fattah each morning to discuss goals and resolve problems, and the boys had to work or go to school with their earnings put toward mortgage payments for the group house or toward administration expenses. Each Friday, David convened an Adella, a sort of tribal council similar to group therapy but more...authoritarian?, where the youths could discuss disagreements, identify violations of rules, and decide on individual punishments.
They had certain practices that many probably considered unkind then and that would probably be considered retrograde and psychologically damaging today but which nevertheless leveraged important aspects of gang culture toward more useful ends. Like nicknames:
Names among gang youths are extremely important. Most youths who enter Umoja have street names such as Shotgun, Killer, or Snake which usually reflect some customary action by the person during battles or a concise statement of his personality. Nicknames are also used to identify some physical or mental handicap, such as a lame leg or a harelip. Labeling the youngsters in this fashion has the effect of minimizing the harassment the child may undergo. Constant reference to the malady detracts from any physical or psychological difference. If a youngster who is lame is constantly referred to as "Crip," it is forgotten that the name refers to a deformity, and thus the youth’s difference is minimized.
Word spread quickly, kids would arrive spontaneously to join the family, gang violence in the city declined, and the organization eventually purchased a total of 22 properties for at-risk youths using funds received from local churches and from what the kids could earn on their own.
They established such a reputation for success in transforming youths that other state welfare agencies and the juvenile detention system had found to be untreatable that the state of Pennsylvania wanted to provide Umoja House with funding to run their operation, rehab new houses, and support the program. The Fattahs were worried that state funding would lead to interference in their program but eventually reached an agreement with the state.
They were not wrong. While the state promised that interference would be minimal, new government requirements soon created problems. The state’s child welfare laws required “each program funded by the state to have on its staff a full-time trained social worker.” While the Fattah’s agreed to this, the new social worker immediately tried to get rid of the Adellas and run his own group therapy sessions. He created suspicion and resentment by suggesting to some of the youths that they should agitate for higher wages.
Because state funding was tied to the specific individuals it referred to the program and not to the home or organization, a participatory system where everyone had worked together and was treated equally was deformed by state-mandated pay scales:
Other members became less responsible and enthusiastic about carrying out work assignments. Much of this was attributed to the fact that they were now being paid with state funds for what used to be considered service to the family. There were also disputes among members over salary scales since, by regulation, some were paid more than others. Another disruption that arose from state intervention was that youths officially referred from the state agency remained wards of the state and could never be “true” family members. As a result, several of them perceived Umoja as just another state-run facility, and they initially expressed no obligation to conform to the principles that governed others at the house.
These issues created tension, resentment, and eventually drove some of the residents away.
III.
Although only one of the above examples is from James C. Scott’s book, he makes a distinction that I think helps to explain what is going on in all three. It is a distinction between what he, and the Greeks, call métis and epistêmê.
Métis is knowledge that is contextual, localized, and contingent. It makes use of rules of thumb, relies on practice and experience, and is difficult or impossible to codify. Think of learning to swim, fighting fires, or trying to raise your kid. If you asked someone to explain why they were doing what they were doing, it might involve the recitation of a pithy phrase (“spare the rod and spoil the child”) that they heard from their parents or community members, references to a God or religious authorities, or them simply saying, “this is the way I’ve always done it.”
In contrast, epistêmê favors universal principles, generalizability, the scientific method, logic, and something, something, randomized controlled trials. It appreciates uniform measurement, quantification, and solutions that can be applied in most or all situations and is skeptical of rules of thumb for being imprecise, unquantifiable, and not subject to peer-review.
In each of the cases above, there was a base of contextual knowledge derived from an accumulated cultural experience, experimentation, and close observation of the local environment that was ignored in favor of something more precise, generalized, rational, and scientific with frequently terrible results. I sometimes come across, in more left-leaning regions of the internet, articles extolling the virtues of “indigenous ways of knowing” in contrast to that imperialist and colonialist Western-scientific tradition. I have always been faintly skeptical of these claims, but I think Scott gets at some of the ways in which this is a legitimate and meaningful contrast worth taking seriously.
One implication of this distinction between métis and epistêmê is that language, standards of proof, and what arguments are considered reasonable, relevant, and persuasive, diverge. When Enlightened conquistadors ask the Aztecs why they mix their corn in ash water and the Aztec women reply with something like, “To appease the god Chicomecōātl,” they laugh and ignore them because obviously God’s name is God and not Chicomecōātl. When David Fattah says he needs be the run one to run his Adella each week, the state welfare agency asks, “But, like, where’s your Master’s Degree in Social Work?”
Similarly, I suspect that many arguments from concerned parents and residents opposed to the new HGD curriculum and that were articulated in the language of métis were not persuasive to the doctors, mental health professionals, and PhDs arrayed before them.
Like the dad in a flat brimmed baseball cap and t-shirt who didn’t “disagree with any of the stats,” but nevertheless thought most of this curriculum was “garbage,” and doesn’t know why the school district insists on teaching some “brand new science” that is just a “theory” anyway.
Or the older man who came to express skepticism about these “new-age,” “dicey and controversial topics,” who railed against the unrestrained “educational elite”, and who suggested that rather than teaching pronouns in sex ed. that they teach “nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and pronouns in English class” instead. Who proclaimed proudly and defiantly, in his peroration, that he hoped “the students will not be turned into fragile butterflies but rather be turned into Wisconsin badgers.”
Or the man who grew up poor and occasionally homeless on the south side of Milwaukee but had managed to move his wife and children to a home in Wauwatosa and informed the board that “I’m a Christian, and I’ve been a faithful member of my church for the last 20 years. My faith is the bedrock and foundation for our family” and that the district should reject the new curriculum because it “violates our faith.”
And of course, the man from last week quoted at the top who said if he dropped his shorts, they would call the police so why is it alright to show similar images to his granddaughter.
I’m fairly certain that exactly zero members of the school board thought to themselves, “You know, we would call the police if he dropped his shorts, and that is a lot like the new curriculum we just approved.”
Even when the language is the same, there seems to be a difference in understanding. For example, during a period for public comment at the August 26th meeting, many parents expressed worry that the new curriculum would in some way destroy their child’s innocence, that we shouldn’t be teaching these topics to kids at such a young age, that it would be better if we “let kids be kids,” “enjoy their childhood,” and protected their innocence.
To which a nurse and member of the external committee charged with developing the curriculum calmly explained why it was nevertheless useful for young children to learn medically-accurate names for their body parts:
This knowledge not only does not destroy their innocence, this knowledge is protective. Students that are taught, including young children, the accurate names for their body parts including their genitalia are less likely to be sexually abused, are more likely to report sexual abuse if it happens, have a positive body image, and have higher self-esteem.
Yet, I’m pretty sure that parents worried about their child’s loss of innocence weren’t primarily concerned about lowering the probability of sexual abuse. That certainly may have been part of it, but I imagine that it was also about maintaining for their child some difficult-to-articulate sense of optimism, cheerfulness, and guile, a feeling that when their kid wakes up, he or she thinks the world is benevolent and that adults aren’t out to take advantage of them. These are all things that are more difficult to measure than rates of sexual assault but that aren’t less meaningful or worthy of concern for that reason. In fact, there are lots of important concepts—like happiness, to use an example—that are hard to measure and that are worth trying to measure. But it doesn’t mean vast edifices of research tell you anything useful about them.
In summary, I think one view of this debate is that in yet another sphere of traditionally autonomous activity, regular people are once again asked to defer to state expertise, to offload their authority to an impersonal organization or bureaucracy something that had previously been the purview of parents and family because really it’s all quite complicated and have you seen the research? And once again they lose some sense of efficacy at the expense of efficiency, and over time and in aggregate they are deprived of those feelings of agency and competence and control that go some way towards making their lives meaningful.
IV.
Peter Berger, in his preface to Robert Woodson’s case study on “Umoja House” that I referenced above, spoke of the importance of “mediating structures” that exist between the individual and the impersonal and sometimes byzantine central state and which make men and women feel as if they were part of a community that was legible and understandable and small-scale.
Similarly, Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, talked about the “superstitions” that often held communal life together, “the multitude of small bonds, of tiny solidarities that prevent the individual from being ground down by the overall society and the latter from being pulverized into anonymous and interchangeable atoms” and whose “links integrate each person into a mode of life, a home ground, a tradition, a form of belief or of unbelief.”
Finally, there’s Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer’s book—The Limits of Social Policy—written in 1988 as a reflection on his experiences during the prior 30 years of social policy in the United States, a period of very intense and optimistic social engineering on the part of the federal government and on behalf of the American public to eliminate poverty, improve education, and reduce crime. One of the key insights that he draws attention to is that government policy affects culture which affects the impacts of policy, and that while American social policy has frequently attempted to deal with the breakdown of traditional ways of handling distress it often ends up making them even weaker in the process:
[T]he simple reality [is] that every piece of social policy substitutes for some traditional arrangement, whether good or bad, a new arrangement in which public authorities take over, at least in part, the role of the family, of the ethnic and neighborhood group, of voluntary associations. In doing so, social policy weakens the position of these traditional agents.
So I think it’s reasonable for people to be concerned about these things. A new sex education curriculum is nothing on the scale of LBJ’s Great Society but I think it generates similar, if attenuated, types of worries. Of course people will have a variety of reasons for their opposition, and what I’ve described above certainly doesn’t represent everybody, but I think it explains at least one aspect of it. And I think taking a complex set of discomforts, visceral reactions, and not-always-super-articulate arguments and rounding them down to “bigotry” and “transphobia”—as a petition signed by about 50 teachers in August did—makes people’s concerns too easy to dismiss and risks misunderstanding the actual dynamics of what is occurring within the community.
Although Robert Putnam is not actually a journalist, he’s a political scientist
This is the main thrust of Robert Kegan’s In over our heads: the mental demands of modern life.
This is the main argument in Jeffrey Friedman’s Power without knowledge: a critique of technocracy.
An interesting perspective.