What Kids Can Teach Us

Yesterday, I came across this article via metafilter, and it is easily one of the most interesting pieces I've read in a very long time. In it, two teachers describe how their elementary school-aged after school kids went from playing with legos to deconstructing capitalism over the course of a school year.

Certainly, the ethics of teaching social justice in an elementary school classroom are up for debate, but I'd rather not focus on that here. Instead, what I found striking was the amount that these 8-year-olds were already a product of their environment. I think elementary school interactions socialize kids in broader ways than merely helping them form interpersonal relationships. These kids were clearly savvy to their societal environment. By the age of 8, many were already products of capitalism, completely accultured to the socioeconomic system in which they were growing up. Moreover, as I read further into the article, I realized that they were speaking in terms that were already defined by that system. For American schoolchildren, inequality is a natural way of life.

Back to the ethics of teaching social justice. In college I took a class on the Cold War in which we read a number of texts relating to propaganda. One of the texts discussed how social values are promulgated in small children. One of the most striking examples was how math texts are used to surreptitiously convey values to children. Look at an American high school or grade school math textbook. Look at the word problems. They almost always talk about buying things. Even when people buy them together, they rarely split the cost evenly. This isn't the case everywhere, and it certainly wasn't the case in Soviet Russia, where most math texts involved sharing or producing. So regardless of what teachers do in the classroom, children are constantly being instilled with social values in the classroom.

Hawks, Doves, Jets, Sharks, what?

Lanier forwarded me a great article in Foreign Policy entitled Why Hawks Win. It deals with our psychological biases and how they feed in to our conflict resolution processes, including our inability to separate behavior and motives in others and our assumption, nonetheless, that our own motives are clearly visible:

"Imagine, for example, that you have been placed in a room and asked to watch a series of student speeches on the policies of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. You’ve been told in advance that the students were assigned the task of either attacking or supporting Chávez and had no choice in the matter. Now, suppose that you are then asked to assess the political leanings of these students. Shrewd observers, of course, would factor in the context and adjust their assessments accordingly. A student who gave an enthusiastic pro-Chávez speech was merely doing what she was told, not revealing anything about her true attitudes. In fact, many experiments suggest that people would overwhelmingly rate the pro-Chávez speakers as more leftist. Even when alerted to context that should affect their judgment, people tend to ignore it. Instead, they attribute the behavior they see to the person’s nature, character, or persistent motives. This bias is so robust and common that social psychologists have given it a lofty title: They call it the fundamental attribution error.

The effect of this failure in conflict situations can be pernicious. A policymaker or diplomat involved in a tense exchange with a foreign government is likely to observe a great deal of hostile behavior by that country’s representatives. Some of that behavior may indeed be the result of deep hostility. But some of it is simply a response to the current situation as it is perceived by the other side. What is ironic is that individuals who attribute others’ behavior to deep hostility are quite likely to explain away their own behavior as a result of being “pushed into a corner” by an adversary. The tendency of both sides of a dispute to view themselves as reacting to the other’s provocative behavior is a familiar feature of marital quarrels, and it is found as well in international conflicts. During the run-up to World War I, the leaders of every one of the nations that would soon be at war perceived themselves as significantly less hostile than their adversaries.

When I read this passage, my mind jumped to the New York subway system. More than once I've seen someone step into the subway car and block passage for anyone else, and my reaction has always been the same: what is WITH him/her? The context itself is lost. Nonetheless, on our drive back from Vermont I had an altercation with a young woman over a door. She and her children were moving very slowly through the door at an inconsistent rate. I misestimated their speed, and practically tripped over her son. The woman immediately started tearing into me, and I became angry with her, assuming she must have realized how unpredictably she and her brood were moving and thus must understand that it was irrational to think I was thoughtlessly ploughing through them. After all, he practically tripped me by stopping so suddenly. Back in the car, I started to think that something was wrong about the whole situation, and now I can locate it. I expected her to recognize something in me--good intentions--that I refused to recognize in her.

Another article, published in the New York Times in July, also refers to fundamental attribution error. We perceive our own actions as less hostile and less violent than those of others, and they view us in the same light.

So what's the evolutionary advantage, if any, to fundamental attribution error? What makes escalation appealing on the scale of millenia? Does it actually help survival? Or is it the neuroscience equivalent of an appendix?

The "din" of destruction

I just finished reading this article from the NY Times about an AP report (and the clamor that followed it) claiming that six Sunni worshipers were doused in kerosene and lit on fire by a group of Shiite attackers in Iraq.

I have to admit that for all my zealous pacifism, I've had trouble following many of the news details coming out of Iraq in the past few months. This quote from the article might explain why:

“And finally, as horrible as the alleged events in Hurriyah were, caches of dumped dead bodies are turning up in neighborhoods almost weekly, car bombs rip through markets and waiting lines and the death toll for American soldiers is approaching 3,000. No one is disputing those accounts.

But then, that may be partly the point. It is important to find out if this really happened in order to separate the hyperbole from the merely horrible in Iraq, so that the horrible will still have meaning. Otherwise it will all become din.

Part of the general political apathy in our generation stems, I think, from over-saturation. I used to think that referred only to the availability (or inevitability) of news information and sources, but I think that even within single publications the amount of coverage a single issue gets is enormous, and from day-to-day, very little changes.

I think this is why I've taken to long-form news magazines like New Yorker. They save the intermediary steps by collecting and analyzing the "facts" over an extended period of time (at least a week, often more), and as a result the articles identify problems, potential solutions, themes, debates, and "sides" of the issue or events at hand accordingly. But are they better?

One of the problems with long-form journalism, or any reporting that emphasizes the analytical over the immediate "factual" is that important elements that deserve attention are often dropped if they don't support the article's overall point. About two months ago, the New Yorker printed an article on the debate over string theory in contemporary physics. For weeks to follow, letters were printed in defense of string theory and its proponents, and identifying related-but-overlooked forms of physics sectarianism.

Another potential problem is, of course, bias. All journalism has bias, but in long-form journalism it's basically a necessity. Generally, I find long-form bias less disconcerting than short-form because it's marketed as "news analysis" and not just plain "news," so readers are at least informed that there's more to a New Yorker article than "the facts." There's no disguise. It becomes a problem for me, however, when I realize that I get all of some types of my news from left-wing long-form publications. The New Yorker has a "financial page" in most issues, and it's the only place I get any kind of financial news that isn't directly related to media/culture. But sometimes, as a leftist reading a notably leftist long-form publication, I start to wonder if I'm doing myself a disservice. It's not that I don't want to hear other views, it's just that I happened to read the financial page of the New Yorker once (with no prior interest in real-world economics) and I got hooked on its bite-sized-yet-long-form style.

To return to the issue of Iraq: the war itself is in a dangerous and precarious position, politically. At this point, the Iraq more seems more a symbol than a real-life event and it's used that way by all sides. John Kerry's idiotic joke seems an example of this--Kerry seemed to forget long enough to open his mouth that soldiers are people. The political right can be equally blind, by (among other things) insisting that it is the only reason many republican congressmen and women were voted out of office in the midterms.

The plethora of angry attacks and defenses of the AP report tells me the din is already there. It's not an issue of separating truth from fiction so much as separating ideology from reality. Will any more evidence to support or to refute the kerosene incident really affect how people think about it? One side will win. My guess is the other side will just ignore the after-effects.