Elephants Seem to Like It This Way

[Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>]

In an op-ed in today's New York Times titled "Teaching the Elephant," David Brooks makes this rather extraordinary statement: "Many of today's most effective antipoverty institutions are incredibly intrusive, even authoritarian."

Wow, I thought. Brooks, the conservative, might make a sensible argument for a change.

But then the other shoe dropped when Brooks concluded with this: "Up to a point, elephants seem to like it that way."

He cites the example of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools, and admits that KIPP is an authoritarian institution, citing the anecdote from Paul Tough's recent essay from The New York Times Magazine in which KIPP pupils were trained to nod along as people talked. Up to a point, according to Brooks, elephants seem to like it this way.

Up to a point? Which point exactly? The concept is familiar: those who are held captive long enough, effectively enough, seem to like it that way.

At what point does such authoritarianism become totalitarianism? The safest, most efficient forms of government in the world -- and throughout history for that matter -- have been totalitarian dictatorships that leave nothing to chance, that control every aspect of society, even reality.

Michel Foucault's chapter on discipline in Discipline and Punish keeps coming to mind, "the body as object and target of power" and the notion of "docile bodies" that are "subjected, used, transformed, and improved."

These docile bodies in KIPP schools are uniformly brown and black. No white body is subjected to this same kind of disciplined transformation. Indeed, the school motto is "Be nice, work hard." What white, suburban, middle-class parents would want this to be the goal of their child's education?

Yet according to Tough and Brooks, KIPP works because it brings a kind of suburban, middle-class milieu to an urban, working-poor milieu. But let's imagine the implications of this for a moment. KIPP students spend exponentially more time at school -- from 7:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. during the week, four hours on Saturdays, and for a month during the summer. They put in roughly 70% more time in class than typical public school students. So KIPP is basically charged with raising these children. That in itself may or may not be a good thing, e.g., should a publicly-funded educational institution overseen by the state be charged with unofficially raising children? Maybe yes, maybe no. But if yes, what kinds of parents are these KIPP schools? And whose interests do they have in mind? Biological parents have an investment in the well-being of their children that differs on several different orders of magnitude from the interest that a state-controlled parent might have. In some instances, the KIPP parent might actually be better than the biological parent. But in other cases, the biological parent might do a better job inculcating in the child the values that are important to his/her family, race, religious tradition, and practices of ethnic origin.

If we leave it to KIPP to raise poor black children, how will they raise them? With what outcome in mind? As many social dominance theorists have suggested, the most stable societies are those in which historically oppressed groups accept the legitimacy of the hierarchical structure, thus internalizing their oppression by rationalizing to themselves their place in the order of things.

Up to a point, according to Brooks, elephants seem to like it this way.

Left to choose its own priorities, surely the state (through the mechanism of KIPP) will choose stability over something else. The effect and impact of this choice can only be guessed at, but I'd venture an educated guess and say that stability means more phonics and less Malcolm X. Again, this is by no means a consciously-constructed plan to exert racial dominance. It is, in a word, efficient. It raises test scores. And, according to the KIPP people, what these children need.

Elephants seem to like it this way.