No I Won’t. The Refusal of a Proffered Value.

August 6th, 2008 Posted in Education, Resistance

It may be that the student who persistently falls short in acquiring reading skills is not so much unable as he is unwilling. “Read” says the teacher. “I won’t,” says the student, “You can’t make me.” And he proves it over twelve long years. Think about it–all those lessons over all that time with so little accomplishment. Unlikely. Something else is going on here.

Similar to the situation of Dick Gregory who after sitting-in at a segregated restaurant and winning his point was presented with an unappetizing menu. He was proffered a food value but he refused to eat.

But the not accepting may be more than a casual waving-off, more than indifference; it may be a very active resistance. Not accepting literacy for self might be a fantastically heroic action against a despised social order.

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Speculation. We are into speculation. The socialization-education nexus is full of politics and culture that sets a limit on what we can see. We speculate to shake loose of the blocking conventions. Resistance is only a small piece of the puzzle. It does not imply refusal of other theories and explanations. In the concrete case all the pieces are in play.

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Reading is only one of a large variety of skills we learn through life. So some of us have had the experience of learning to play the violin, to shoot baskets, to construct and repair automobiles or shoes or clothes. Some of us study the arts–from poetry through sketching, painting and sculpting to dance. And so on. Some topics are more intellectual, others more physical.

Take the study of any foreign language. It is almost exactly parallel to the learning of English–and the reading, writing and speaking thereof. In the American educational effort a large number of students volunteer to take a foreign language and carry on studying it for several years. Some few succeed and can follow the new way, but others fail (maybe not in the school tests but in the practical and ordinary use of the new way.) It is a commonly accepted observation that Americans–not all but some–are notoriously poor students of foreign languages.

With physical education we get a similar result. Some excel in athletics and gymnastics, others stumble. Achievers, underachievers and the mob in the middle who are the average go along, get along gang where most of us usually fit. In every learning process some students can not learn the new tricks. It can happen whether the student elects the course or is confronted with a required course that he might not desire.

Some of the underachievers may simply lack the talent. The physical-intellectual capacity has a limit. Only a few of us can follow the mathematical reasoning of Wiles in the solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem. The vast majority of us are challenged in one way or another. But it is those who can understand or enact but won’t who are at issue. These are the resisters.

A possible model of the process: The teacher and student represent distinctive and separate cultures and social orders. The information that the teacher offers or the trick the teacher demands is a sign for a larger cultural and social package that may be alien to the student. To accept the proffered concept is a first step toward the acceptance of the whole. To the student it feels like what is offered is conversion. One learns and becomes a different social being. To not learn the new way is to preserve the old.

Some might trace refusal to a rebellious psychological type but it might also be located within a group’s special culture–supported by family, gang, or ethnic grouping. That is a question for investigation in each concrete case. There are some hints. Disparaging remarks among students about studious colleagues. Emphasis on loyalty to kin and gang. Suspicion of teacher’s motives.

There is usually a know history. The two ethnic groups for which teacher and student are agents had a previous relationship (for example the caste system of the old south in which one group was demeaned and exploited by the other.) To convert is to risk encountering the residue of this system–to enter the enemy’s camp. For another example, to work the parallel bars might be to risk injury for no purpose. The conflict of values is here. The instructor trades the risk to accomplish the trick, the student doesn’t.

Meanwhile the student’s family, kin and neighbors have found a survival social order that isolates them as much as possible from the hated status quo ante (the way things were). They have, at their best, love and acceptance, a secret patois, a faith and ideology and they have evolved a way to exist that has a value in itself. It makes sense not to give it up.

To accept the new form feels like negating one’s valued base for a possibly destructive-of-self world. No thanks, teach! Keep your parallel bars, your French lessons, your classical music, your reading and writing and speaking an official English. I’m alright, Jack, just as I am.

Meanwhile this violent repressive and demeaning old system has also generated an aggression and competition within the recipient families–the victim trying to project outward on others the horrifying personal negation to which the whole ethnic group has been exposed. Again not everyone has been so affected but enough to explain the violence and disruption and exaggerated need to dominate and demean the other in the same classroom where the more docile are resisting in their own positive way.

Meanwhile the whole society is under pressure and in process of change. The old south no longer exists. The old caste system is gone. There is a mat under the parallel bars. One person can entertain two languages. To know Chinese doesn’t mean that you must give up English or vice versa. The cultural and social orders of distinctive ethnic groups in contact can and do change–even in benign directions.

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Cheer up. The one gaining on you may be carrying your lunch.