Young people, ages 8-13, who grow up in the most deprived neighborhoods in Britain are seven times less likely to think they are “clever and good at school work” when compared to those in the least deprived areas.[i]
Those growing up in these most deprived situations are also on the order of twenty times less likely to think that their own actions, rather than external forces, determine outcomes for their lives. “Outcomes” include such things as whether one will go to prison.
What are the chances these differences in attitudes matter in educational success?
Extremely high, as it happens. Data from Britain show that low-income whites from economically deprived post-industrial regions, places that include the “most deprived” areas referenced above, do by far the worst of any ethnic group in the main standardized test, the GCSE. The GCSE is a key benchmark because it’s important both for those going on to further education and for those leaving for work since employers generally care about the results.
Low-income British whites do worse on the GCSE than low-income minorities from Asia, Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, and only about half as well as low-income Chinese.
Because low-income whites tend to be clustered in comparatively isolated former manufacturing and mining towns, there has been a great deal of thoughtful British research on the relationship between community culture and educational achievement. The results suggest that negative community attitudes about the value of learning and about whether you control your life’s outcomes strongly affect young people’s world views and subsequently their success in education. The depressingly fatalistic title quote cited in the title above emerged from this research.
The work in Britain synchronizes with recent international studies which demonstrate that it’s the attitudes of the surrounding culture, not the characteristics of the schools, that have the greatest influence on educational success.
Generalizing about nationalities is dangerous if you want to apply a particular characteristic at the individual level. There will always be millions of exceptions. But generalizations have their place for larger populations, not least because they correlate with overall information on educational achievement.
Keeping these caveats about generalizations in mind, it’s revealing to look at the list of the most educationally successful nations with an eye toward how history shapes attitudes.
The Asian nations that cluster at the top of the charts are all influenced by Confucianism, a two thousand year old philosophy that strongly values education and learning. Parents in areas influenced by this school of thought all know the story of Mencius, a leading Confucian, whose mother’s decision to move to live next to a school is seen as the reason for her son’s success.
A second key characteristic when looking at the top nations in education is what I’ll call defensive nationalism—Finland, Poland, and Korea are all countries that have been threatened with extinction by external powers. As a result, becoming an educated person is seen as a patriotic duty in these cultures and young people from all three are high scorers in international tests.
A nationality I find especially interesting in the context of attitudes is Russia. Russians are known for a strong sense of fatalism—in this case a belief that others control their destiny. Of course, when you look at the history of the Russian people, this attitude isn’t really surprising. For nearly all of their history, just a tiny proportion of the population has in fact made all the decisions.
Russian fatalism doesn’t apply to education, though. The communists were in many ways foolish ideologues (redundant, I know), but they were savvy enough to realize that they needed as many highly educated people as they could get to compete with the West (later, also with China).
Education in the USSR was highly meritocratic and in some areas, notably science, mathematics, and engineering, quite good. Everyone was encouraged to learn and told they could be successful if they worked hard.
Like other peoples, Russians certainly believe that native intelligence varies among individuals. But, assuming a foundation of hard work, they see high IQ as something that separates successful in education from extremely successful, not successful from unsuccessful. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that, despite its strong educational foundation, today’s Russia is struggling in the market economy. A main reason is that average people are loath to become entrepreneurs—or even innovators—because they fear that after they’ve made a huge effort some external force will crush them without any chance of recourse.
Unlike Russians, Americans don’t have a fear of being wiped out by nameless external forces and will sail ahead to start new businesses and try new things. But, very much unlike Russians, a great many Americans believe they can’t learn math well, much less ever master a science like physics.
The big difference here is that the Russian attitudes are much more rational than the American.
People are in general reluctant to take risks, including dedicating their time, when they believe there’s no reasonable chance of a commensurate reward. This explains the frequent case in the U.S. where a young person will dedicate hundreds of hours in pursuit of athletic success but put forth almost no effort as a student. It isn’t a question of intelligence or willingness to work hard, it’s a question of perceived effort/reward ratio. The fact that the perception is often subconscious doesn’t make it any less important.
Like the low-income whites in Britain, many Americans suffer from what I’ll call “culturally transmitted educational fatalism.”
Despite overwhelming evidence that culturally-derived attitudes matter enormously in educational success, we in America aren’t doing anything about it. Partly, that’s because we’re focused on other things, notably our three-decade old, almost completely failed effort to “fix the schools.”
Mostly, though, I think the lack of attention to the role of culture is itself very much a kind of fatalism: we aren’t working to change educational culture because we don’t think we can do it.
People quickly respond to international comparisons of educational success by saying things like, “Americans aren’t going to become Confucians” or “there’s no chance we can get the public to think like Finns or Koreans.”
Valid points but, fortunately, these two paths don’t exhaust the list of possibilities for change.
As it happens, there’s strong evidence that you don’t need a two thousand year-old cultural tradition to create positive attitudes about education. Consider, for example, U.S. farmers.
For the first five generations or so, farmers in the U.S. were no different from anyone else in education—completing basic schooling was seen as sufficient for democracy and religion. This changed with the scientific revolution in agriculture that began in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.
Free farmers quickly learned that college-based knowledge could be a central factor in their economic success. Having no reason to believe that hard work in school wouldn’t have any different outcome than hard work on the farm, they sent their children to the schoolhouse with a lot of positive sentiments about education and strong confidence in their ability to learn. Soon, these young people started graduating from high school and going on to college in large numbers. This happened despite the fact that losing a worker for a significant period of time can cause a significant short-term loss of income to a farm family.
Also in the context of rapid, non-Confucian change, I should note that after Sputnik the U.S. succeeded in at least temporarily improving attitudes about science and math. The quality of urgency diminished over a decade or so, but Americans’ sense of the importance of science, mathematics, and engineering was appreciably ameliorated (though it’s still low).
Breaking away from culturally transmitted educational fatalism won’t be easy because it will involve what the intelligence community calls “walking back the cat.” We’ll have to energize the same cultural process that created the problem to undo it. Easy to say, hard to do. Particularly because there’s nothing like a template or even a well-blazed path to follow.
A couple of points about what will not be involved.
First, changing educational beliefs and attitudes won’t be like brainwashing. Think of it as educating about opportunity. Also, there won’t be a government propaganda campaign because research shows that, when applied to deep beliefs, such efforts are ineffective if not actually counter-productive. For affected populations, culturally transmitted attitudes about education and learning will change through peer to peer communication or not at all.
Second, an effort in the area of educational culture won’t be a condescending program just focused on ethnic minorities. As in Britain, the majority white culture of the U.S. is very much affected. Moreover, no group is being singled out as being lazy or stupid. It’s a question of unlocking potential, not trying to compensate for something that isn’t there.
So what to do? Well, I don’t see that many of our existing institutions are amenable to new thinking. They’re all currently invested either in management-based attempts to “fix the schools,” or in grass roots and union efforts to resist those same efforts. American education is doing a whole lot of running just to stay in the same place.
To make a difference, we need an agile, untethered entity to step up. Like a wealthy foundation, one of those places that’s dedicated to ensuring that everyone has an equal chance in life. An organization that hates the fact that some young people grow up with little chance for anything but a destitute existence in and out of prison.
Did I mention that I love Windows 8?
[i] Cabinet Office, Social Exclusion Task Force. “Aspiration and attainment amongst young
people in deprived communities. Analysis and discussion paper
December 2008. Page 38.
