Yesterday in Dallas we had a great event: the inaugural Dallas Festival of Ideas, in which the (wholly remarkable) Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture brought in four nationally prominent speakers to join local authorities in talking about, well, ideas. I was asked to moderate the discussions involving David Brooks, who focused on the future of cities and suburbs. Of all the smart and interesting things that he said all day, one in particular stuck with me.
Someone from the audience posed a question, mostly to Ron Kirk, the former mayor of Dallas, who was on our panel, asking if he thought our woebegone, terribly administrated Dallas public school district should be broken up and decentralized to improve accountability (N.B., we'd been talking about the role public education plays in the health of cities and suburbs). I asked Brooks, who obviously doesn't know about Dallas's particular problems, if he thought the current public school model could be reformed, or if it should be blown up.
He replied that he's been writing about education since 1983, and he's come to the conclusion that there's simply no surefire method for producing educated children -- that structural reform is no panacea. He praised the KIPP charter schools for achieving results by giving poor kids, who tend to come from chaotic home lives, a lot of structure in their school day. In the end, though, it all comes down to love.
He explained this by saying he's writing a book now on neuroscience. It seems that science can now show that Aristotle was right: we are made to live in community, and that the experience of being cared for by one or more humans is critical to an individual's development. "Cared for" not in the sense of having one's needs met, but in being loved, and to be aware that one is loved. He gave a couple of examples, including the infamous, tragic one of the Romanian orphan babies, who were left permanently stunted by the lack of human contact during the early years of their lives. But he also told of a study done with college graduates, versus college dropouts. He said that college grads can almost always name one or more professors who took a real interest in them, or whose teaching lit the fire in their minds -- that is, a human being with whom that individual made a personal connection, one that was felt (I can name two professors from my own experience, right off the top of my head; one of those professors never even knew my name, but his teaching was so terrific, and his effect on my life by exposing me to new ideas so great, that I still remember his classes 22 years later). College dropouts, on the other hand, rarely can name a single professor with whom they bonded in some sense.
Brooks's point is simply this: in ways we're only now coming to understand scientifically, love is the sine qua non of human thriving. Children who don't experience a nurturing love will have a very steep hill to climb. Children who do experience that kind of love may have a difficult road for other reasons, but the nurturing they received, and do receive, gives them a measurable headstart.
It really is culture, after all, and not just the culture we live in, but the culture of families. Reform that matters starts not in the classroom or in the legislature, but in the hearts of individuals. I can't wait to read Brooks' next book.
Incidentally, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was there too, and he got choked up in his initial presentation.
He talked about Sudan, and of the experience of a young American woman he knows who went there to work with Darfur refugees. Kristof told about a town where the Janjaweed had come in and taken over. There was this one family in which the Janjaweed had made the family's two daughters into sex slaves. The father finally worked up his courage to approach the Janjaweed commander and beg for his girls' freedom. "Please," he said, "we'll do anything you want. Just let my daughters come back to us."
The commander ordered the girls brought before him. And there he made them watch as his men beheaded their father.
Kristof said the young American woman he knows had been in Darfur trying to help these Sudanese girls. At some point, she returned to America, and was sitting in her grandmother's backyard trying to get her head together after coming back from that hell on earth, where the Janjaweed would start bonfires and through babies into the flames. The American saw that her grandmother had put up a bird feeder in her backyard. The American woman realized that she had come home to a country where people have the freedom from fear and want to share some of their bounty with the birds of the wild. That epiphany caused the American woman to reflect on her own privilege. And she wept torrents.
In telling this story, Kristof got choked up. I couldn't do what that man does for a living, traveling to the world's hellholes and reporting on those who suffer in them. But I'm glad he's bearing witness.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
That college professor point is ridiculous. I went to a huge public university (UIUC) and never even spoke to any of my professors (because it was a huge public university). They probably didn't even recognize me a semester after I took their classes. However, I managed to not only graduate, but graduate Summa Cum Laude.
The reason why some people graduate college and others don't has more to do with strong family support and intellectual capabilities. It's mainly upper-middle class kids that Brooks is talking about. These kids have the smarts to navigate college and enough stability to keep themselves out of too much trouble. The fact that they're more likely to talk to professors is a result of the first two points, not a causation.
DeeAnn, my brief reference has many long conversations behind it. Your point is one I'm well familiar with. Thanks for the thought, and for your desire to promote community. I didn't mean to minimize those (so very few!) places where it survives. More power to them.
I like ChuckDFW's semantic shift to compassion. It covers the issue nicely for me.
There is a cognitive disconnect between a US with situations and locales that are bad -- not as bad as Darfur, to be sure -- which go unnoticed or ignored. I don't consider it a fatal disconnect, and I don't mean to start a moral explosion around accusations of hypocrisy (which carry a core of validity), but truly we can't seem to see our own reflections.
For much less than the cost of a peace-keeping mission, we could do a Habitat for Humanity gig on entire sections of some cities. For a fraction of the monthly cost of the Iraq mission, we could repair and as needed replace the entire physical plant of an urban school district. It is not about finger pointing, but it absolutely is about priorities.
Thanks, Franklin, you put into words some thoughts that were wandering vaguely around my head because I hadn't figured out how to make them specific. In spite of all our problems, the U.S. is still the place most oppressed and miserable people would like to go. That's a given. But I think both our moral authority and our practical ability to find solutions for others would be improved by more vigorously seeking such solutions at home. Even when we find something that we think works pretty well to solve problems--like small-scale entrepreneurial capitalism to alleviate poverty--we need to understand better how and why it works here before we can confidently export it. Otherwise, a smart person in one of those benighted regions might well look at us and say "Yes, but if it's so great, why--in the greatest supposedly free market in the world--do you have big areas full of poor people living on charity with absolutely nothing to do? Why can't you fix that?" And I'm sure others can come up with more examples. I'm not talking about the fact that individuals sometimes fail. That too is a given. I'm talking about places where there is clearly a massive system failure that we have not solved. I think both liberals and conservatives see such areas.
RJohnson: Many private schools do not have to jump these hurdles. They can afford to turn away students who are problematic.
Not always. Around here, many private schools have signs up, advertising for enrollment. Often the first thing to go in a family budget, when times get tough, is private school tuition. And I have personally known several people whose kids have *not* had easy times in private schools, precisely because smaller schools struggling to maintain enrollment do *not* always "just kick out" troublesome students.
Private schooling is fine for those who find one that's a good fit for their kids, and that the family can afford. It's not a panacea for every education problem.
In response to Rod's comment that "In the end, though, it all comes down to love," may I mention, and please forgive me if this is self-serving, a new book of mine was released last week from Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. The title is:
Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness.
I think it applies to the discussions under consideration in multiple ways, since reordered love reorders our lives personally, educationally, socially, vocationally, culturally, environmentally, etc, etc. See www.reorderedlove.com for more info.
David Naugle, Dallas Baptist University
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.