Successful Failure

The School America Builds

Herve Varenne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429976681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this controversial work, Herv Varenne and Ray McDermott explore education as cultural phenomenona construct of artifice and reality we impose upon ourselves. Questioning how the American education system defines and measures success and failure, Successful Failure is a must-read for anyone interested in educational reform, the American educational system, and the anthropology of education. }In this controversial work, Herv Varenne and Ray McDermott explore education as cultural phenomenona construct of artifice and reality we impose upon ourselves. The authors discuss in five case studies how the American education system defines and measures success and failure, why there is polarization between suburban schools and urban schools, and what about our system leads us to focus on the negative. Their exploration focuses not on the people or the activities of the system, but on the institutions themselves: who decided what was a success or failure? How was the identification done, and with what consequences?This important and timely book is a must-read for anyone interested in educational reform, the American educational system, and the anthropology of education.

Part One
The Makings of Some Educational Facts

1 Adam, Adam, Adam, and Adam: The Cultural Construction of a Learning Disability

Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne

If maturity and development mean attunement to context, then . . . evaluation can be done only by the grandchildren of our grandchildren.

—A. L. Becker, Writing on the Tongue (1989)

When Adam started school he had a difficult time reading the same three-stroke "I" that made life difficult for Maxine Hong Kingston. There was no confusion with the seven-stroke Chinese character or with the demands of a culture that made "I"— every individual's very own "I"—a constant focus of conversation. Adam was born and raised in a well-to-do family. He had no trouble with America, at least in the all-important sense that he was comfortable with the details of American culture. When not reading and writing, he seemed perfectly competent in handling the minutiae of everyday life. In the first grade, he had trouble only with reading and writing. By age eight, he had been fully documented, by test after test, as having a severe Learning Disability (LD). Also by age eight, the problem was leaking into other areas of his life.

Just about the time Adam was turning nine, we gathered together the seventeen children in Adam's classroom and interviewed them for their opinions on various moral issues.¹ They were given a story about a boy who was sent to camp, couldn't swim, and was teased by the other children. They were asked if this was right or wrong. They responded with the expected options: It was not right to tease because teasing would make the boy feel bad; it was OK to tease because it would motivate him to learn to swim so well that he could return and tease everyone else. Most of the children were heard from, but Adam was silent. From teasing, our discussion went to a second dilemma story and a third, again with Adam remaining quiet. Finally, Adam raised his hand and said, "Remember the boy who couldn't swim and everybody was teasing him. Well, they shouldn't do that, cause sometimes, if you try harder and harder, it will just get worser and worser." Not knowing how to read and write is one kind of problem; looking at life as if everything is about to get "worser and worser" is another. Adam's problem with reading was spreading to other areas of life; he was becoming a well-defined Learning Disabled child.

By the common sense of all those around him, Adam's problem seemed inherently psychological: When faced with the task of caking print from a page or writing even a simple word, his brain did not seem to work up to par. In any comparison of individuals by competence in reading and writing, Adam would perform at the bottom of his class. The verdict was unanimous: Because of a serious problem with the mental machinery he brought to the task, Adam could not learn to read or write with the speed or skill of others his age.

By the standards of this book, Adam had a cultural problem. The details differed, certainly, from the problems faced by Maxine Hong Kingston or the other students discussed in the chapters that follow, but he had a cultural problem nonetheless. He was not alone with it: His parents suffered his pain, and so did the reading specialist who seemed to inflict it, the teachers who tried to work around it, and the children in his class who grappled with understanding it or sometimes used it to soothe them in their own difficulties. Simply because others experienced his problem and responded to it, we can say that Adam's problem was cultural, and even in this weak sense of the term we could demonstrate that Adam's problem was more than a mishap in his cognitive development. But we are struggling toward a stronger sense of "culture." Culture has to do with fabrication and artifice. It has been characterized by Plath (1980) as a "parliament of prodigals" to emphasize the multiplicity of those involved in the evolution of its institutions and the florescence of what they make together. Murphy and Murphy (1974) talk about culture as of a "collective illusion," and many talk about the "arbitrariness" of cultural forms. What is sure is that the prodigal parliamentarians of America can make of LD a fact that is totally real in its consequences. We could say they collude in keeping its institutions alive even as they try, or worse precisely because they try, to alleviate the suffering of the children labeled Learning Disabled (McDermott and Tylbor 1983; McDermott and Varenne 1995). We are trying to capture this by showing how many persons struggled to develop sophisticated, replicable, and consequential ways to establish that Adam could not read. We are trying to demonstrate how sensitive Adam himself was to the cultural demand that he surrender himself as not knowing how to read (if only by attempting, for example, to escape being caught and called Learning Disabled).

Adam could not be disabled on his own. He needed others to recognize, document, and remediate a disability that had to be made "his." More important, without a culturally well-organized apparatus identifying a certain percentage of American children as officially Learning Disabled, Adam could simply have been what he was, namely, a person who learned differently or on a different schedule than others. The term "culture" traditionally refers to concepts, symbols, and beliefs found among a people, but we insist that an adequate cultural description must show such concepts, symbols, and beliefs in use and legitimately enforced in local situations populated by real people. America was ready for Adam to be Learning Disabled.

Maxine Hong Kingston was given a complex cultural menu: Chinese, American, and Chinese American, each according to a schedule organized in great part by those around her. Adam was confronted by a related cultural menu, and one option was that he could be identified as Learning Disabled. Other options were even less kind, for example, retarded, emotionally disturbed, or brain damaged (for the social history of these terms, see Coles 1987; Sarason and Doris 1979). Since "World War II, there has been an onslaught of special education designations for children in American schools, and it is Adam's fate to be acquired by one of them. In a previous generation, he might have been called stupid for his slow pace, and he would have been finished with schooling early in life. Learning Disabled may be a better label than stupid, and there is the hope that with an appropriately protective education, those called Learning Disabled might be able to stay for the full duration of school and perform, however differently or belatedly, on a par with others (Rawson 1968). This fervent hope can be no better than the cultural framework in which it both emerges and must be put into action.

Adam a generation ago, Adam now, and Adam a generation from now each encounters a quite different set of pressures and designations with which a life must be shaped. We cannot observe Adam at work in the past or the future. We cannot observe him alive in the world of poor whites in Appalachia or in an aristocratic family in England. Nonetheless, we are quite sure the seemingly biological problem that made it difficult for him to read would have had different consequences for his life in other circumstances.

Guesswork about faraway times and places aside, we were able to observe Adam in different moments of his everyday life as a student in a liberal Manhattan private school. To extend the metaphor we introduced earlier, we can say that we looked at Adam in four of the rooms he occupied: in settings around New York City unmarked for any particular activity, in a weekly after-school cooking club, in various classroom lessons, and finally, in a one-to-one testing environment. Adam's behavior varied remarkably across the four settings, and so did the behavior of those around him. Adam, we might just as well say, appeared as four different people: Adam, Adam, Adam, and Adam, as we suggest in our title. More commonsensically, we might have said that he was a single person in varying contexts. We suspect that it would be more helpful to think of him as a radical

who, like the rest of us, was viewed through multiple lenses, each making something different of him and thus preventing him, as

, from ever being directly accessible. When taken together, these four versions of Adam tell us less about him than about the patterning of the diverse positions available to persons reading and writing in America. To the extent that Adam's problems with print varied with his circumstances, we can talk about the interactional organization of his disability, and to the extent that his circumstances were well-structured versions of each other, we can talk about the cultural organization of his disability.

Three Accounts of the House Adam Inhabits

In unmarked moments of his everyday life, Adam was quite invisible as a child with problems. If he needed information, he asked for it. If he needed to read or write, he could do a little on his own, and whether he did it well seemed to be of little concern to him or to those around him. If the task was beyond what he could do, he simply organized others to do the job; nothing seemed to lead to an evaluation of his intelligence or competence in the way such issues showed up in the more school-based settings. Adam was a great storyteller, and he was a popular raconteur in his mixed third- and fourth-grade classroom. Time spent with Adam outside of school showed only the Adam the other children adored. In addition to being the classroom bard, he was a good drummer, and he had started to use his big size to gain some respect at basketball. If he had problems learning how to read and write, they were not to be found in the daily round outside of school.

Away from everyday life, at the opposite end of a continuum of freedom and school-induced constraint, was Adam in the testing environment. We gave the children tests to learn how they performed on traditional tasks of the type used in experimental cognitive psychology. We hoped the test results would give us a base to compare how the children handled analogous tasks in more spontaneous settings, such as cooking clubs, where tasks were defined and redefined from one moment to the next in situ and without the illusion of experimental control. If psychological studies were filled with accounts of the importance of children attending, remembering, and problem solving, we should have been able to find something like those activities while the children were making cakes. To compare cooking-club thinking practices with more-controlled laboratory performances, we brought each child to a one-on-one testing environment where he or she was administered questions from IQ tests and some more interesting probes we had taken from the experimental literature.² Because we were too close to the children to take an objectivist stand, we hired a professional tester to administer the tasks. Most of the children did well on the tests, and many seemed to enjoy being asked to do hard things without recourse to adult help.

It was in this situation of individual child against a well-defined task that Adam most often displayed his differences. The tasks were designed to show individual differences, and they did their job well. Adam performed miserably, almost randomly, as if he were wildly guessing at answers without giving them any thought. A careful look at the videotapes indicated that he was thinking a great deal, although mostly about matters only tangentially related to the tasks presented. Mostly Adam was searching for ways to get the answer from the tester, a well-documented strategy among children expecting to get too many questions wrong when left to only their own thoughts (Cicourel 1974; Thomas et al. 1971). The tester was professionally nonreactive, but Adam would diligently wait on the tiniest cue.

One question had only two possible answers: cup or spoon. It was an easy question with a limited range of answers, and all the other children had picked the right answer. As the tester finished presenting the situation, Adam threw his head back and said "Oh! That's easy." We were relieved when we watched the tape, and even the tester reported she was looking forward to him feeling good about one task. After a closer look, it was not even clear Adam had heard the content of the question. He followed with the beginning of the wrong answer, found the smallest twitch in the behavior of the tester, and then changed his answer: "Cu-uhm-spoon." In this case, Adam primed the environment for the "right" answer. Other questions were less amenable, and the tester worked hard not to give away crucial hints. Adam struggled most painfully with the test of digit-span memory, a hallmark of Learning Disabled children, getting at most a string of four, whereas others in his class were handling six and seven digits.

There is a paradox hiding in this rather commonsense account: The formal organization of the testing session was designed to produce the most neutral and objective circumstances for Adam to reveal his true unique individual self, the culture's "objective" version of Adam's

. Ironically, the test used the most artificial and inflexible circumstances to deliver its portrait of Adam. It was a setting that framed tightly what the two protagonists could do. Tests leave little room for negotiation, play, resistance, or transformation. Rather, any evidence of attempts to negotiate, play, resist, or transform can be taken as prima facie data for only one kind of evaluation, the specialized one for which the test situation was designed. Everything is scripted by a long tradition of professional development by culturally designated specialists: testers, counselors, social workers, and therapists who can find in almost anyone's behavior evidence of the kinds of problems they know how to look for and record in ways that still others can use (Becker, H. 1963; Cicourel and Kitsuse 1963; Wieder 1974; Poll-ner 1978). While Adam was in the test setting, all behavior was relevant to only one thing: the revelation of whether he was Learning Disabled. All other possibilities opened in Adam were canceled and thus, from our point of view, his

escaped, as it must always do in any culturally constructed attempts at capturing it.

On its own, the test setting revealed little about the full complexity of Adam's life, but it did use his behavior to highlight the specifics relevant to a cultural portrait of disability. To this extent, it is our point that the trait Learning Disabled was not his; it belonged to the test, its developers and interpreters, and the school systems that had little choice but to take it seriously.³ Adam "borrowed" the trait or, rather, since we cannot assume that he did it willingly, Adam was acquired by those in charge of preserving the facticity of LD.

It is not enough to say we saw different Adams in the four different settings. We must also give an account of the organization of these settings. One account is all too familiar: Everyday life is "easier" than tests, and the continuum from everyday life through clubs and classrooms to testing settings is to be understood in terms of cognitive difficulty. There are other possibilities we must explore. The continuum can also be conceived in terms of constraint, from the apparent freedom of everyday life to the specialized, artificial, strongly framed, or scripted constraints of the test setting. Finally, the continuum can also be understood in terms of institutional visibility and thus in terms of individual vulnerability to being intelligible only in terms of the setting at hand. Figure 1.1 offers a view of the continuum of settings for Adam to be Adam, Adam, Adam, and Adam and three ways of thinking about how he could have been so different across the settings. The three different ways of thinking about the continuum, namely, increase in difficulty, constraint, and vulnerability, have different implications for how we think about Adam. As the world got harder, more artificial, or socially threatening, the less well Adam performed and the more he was noticed, documented, and remediated. It makes a difference which version of the continuum one takes most seriously.

FIGURE 1.1 A Continuum of Settings and Three Ways of Thinking About Them

If the continuum captures cognitive difficulty, then the tasks require more mental effort and ingenuity as one moves from the ease of everyday life to the taxing questions of the psychometric test. Most psychologies of cognition are united in assuming that everyday life is simple and that it is necessary to press subjects with difficult questions to locate the structure and limits of their competencies.⁴

The continuum can capture specialized constraints in the sense that in much of everyday life, one has access to whatever can be used to get a job done, but at the other end of the continuum, on tests, one is severely limited (with classrooms and after-school clubs, depending on the moment, taking up the middle ground). In everyday life, if one needs to remember a phone number, it is possible to memorize it, work out a mnemonic, look for a pattern in the touch-tone number display, or simply look it up in the phone book; on a digit-span test, however, no aids are allowed. In everyday life, the task is to have the number when it is ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Schooling and Cultural Fact
• Culture in Question
• Culture and Context
• Adam, Sheila, Joe, and Others at Cultural Work
• Education in America
• PART ONE The Makings of Some Educational Facts
• PART TWO Education and the Making of Cultural Facts
• Appendix A
• Appendix Β
• Appendix C
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index