Current mood:	rejuvenated
Current music:	The Clash, "The Guns of Brixton"

Beat on the Brat
There's an old rhetorical trick apologists of capitalism like to use: blame the poor for their own poverty. Poor people are lazy. Poor people are stupid. Or both. This blame-the-victim approach is a perennial favorite, and is constantly cropping up in new forms. Plenty of people have taken it upon themselves to answer this charge, especially in its straightforwardly economic form. But I'd like to take a moment to look at another version of what I think is the same basic argument.

Even those of you who don't believe the statement "poor people are poor because they're lazy" might still believe it in this form: "Poor students are (academically) poor because they are lazy." It will seem that we have slipped into metaphor. It will seem as if I am equivocating. Economic poverty isn't the same thing as academic poverty, after all. But does this make the argument any more valid?

To my mind, one of the best explorations of this issue is also one of the first: Immanuel Kant's 1784 essay, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" Kant declares that enlightenment is a mental maturity; the ability to understand and think critically without guidance. Everyone automatically matures physically; why not mentally as well? Kant pulls no punches, and the second paragraph of his essay begins thus:

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature.

In reference not just to poor students, but to all those who fail to think for themselves, Kant says, yes: it's an issue of both laziness and cowardice. Thinking for oneself is both difficult and scary. "Ah!" you exclaim. "See? I told you it wasn't just a knee-jerk, blame-the-victim answer! Poor students are lazy students--and in fact, the mentally poor as a whole are simply lazy cowards." Indeed. And yet--not wanting to be lazy ourselves--we cannot help but finish reading this paragraph (it is, after all, only the second paragraph of the essay); and what do we find? Kant's analysis takes a rather important turn:

The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts.

Before jumping directly to the tempting conspiracy theory (The government is making us stupid! They're keeping us docile and easily governable! Wake up sheeple!!), let us first take a moment to register what Kant is suggesting: Laziness and cowardice may in fact be the major motivations behind mental laziness. But these are not natural attitudes, some result of an inherently ignorant nature. These are conditioned, nurtured states. The question is not, "Why are some people so lazy and/or cowardly?" Instead, it should be, "Why do laziness and cowardice present themselves as options here in the first place?" That is to say: We are only lazy in the face of things that we regard as difficult. We are only cowardly in the face of things that we regard as intimidating. (When was the last time you said, "I'm too lazy to watch t.v."? Or perhaps, "If I wasn't such a coward, I'd anonymously post my thoughts on the internet!") Why, then, do we regard independent, critical thinking as being scary and hard?

Think about it this way. Almost as soon as children become verbal, one question ranks highest in their minds: Why? The question "why" aims past the empirically observable level of fact (this is "what") toward the deeper level of understanding (this is why Kant defines enlightenment as not simply "thinking for oneself," but instead the ability "to use one's understanding"). For children, thinking critically is neither hard nor scary--quite the opposite. As any exasperated parent of a three year old will tell you, it's not understanding that children seem to find the most infuriating! And yet, by the time these same children are in elementary school, perhaps moving into middle school, most of them will find the pursuit of endless questioning to be tiresome, difficult, and even intimidating (and the rest will be dismissed as "nerds").

With the problem more properly motivated, it's perhaps time to return to those conspiracy theories...Now, I think that Kant only has his tongue half in cheek when he uses the word "benevolent" to describe the "guardians" who cultivate the idea that thinking for oneself is both difficult and dangerous. After all, said guardians include not only "the Man (who Keeps Us Down)," but also good old Mom and Dad. And while no family is free of a certain amount of disfunction, Mom and Dad don't necessarily have to be evil oppressors in order to inculcate a certain attitude of...permanent immaturity. This happens in a variety of ways; an exasperated parent invokes parental authority to circumvent a lengthy debate ("Why do I have to eat my vegetables?" "Because I said so!"); Mom and Dad pass along their own values and prejudices (social conformity; financial security; pragmatism over open-ended inquiry; etc.); or Mom and Dad simply love us enough to step in and do everything for us. Point being: there need be no ominous, shady power working behind the scenes to keep us dumb and docile. We are already doing this to ourselves.

Were this a lengthy academic paper on the subject, this would be precisely the point where I'd transition to an analysis of ideology and ideological state apparatuses. I'd pull in Paolo Freire to give an account of the ways in which the educational institutions work to quash critical thinking--and thus, be able to wrap the analysis back to show that schools help create the very issue of "poor students" which they then use to label and condemn so many students. But this is just a sketch, a place to work out an idea or two. And so instead of working through a thorough analysis here, I want to simply draw a connection between Kant's analysis of mental immaturity and a passage from Duncan-Andrade and Morrell's The Art of Critical Pedagogy:

Students will sometimes find even the most engaging critical pedagogy uninteresting. To stay true to critical pedagogy does not mean that students are permitted to misbehave; instead, educators should engage in a deeper analysis of the source of the students' resistance. Critical pedagogues must resist the temptation to fall back on institutional norms that permit teachers to punish or tolerate student resistance. (33-4)

Though it may in fact be a slight case of equivocation, the linking of the problem of "poor students" to the more general problem of poverty can help us as critical educators to better understand our role. The social activist does nothing to fight poverty when (s)he either blames the poor for their poverty or attempts to make excuses that suggest that poverty is okay. The social activist is not reassured by those who say that "there will always be poverty," or that "someone has to be poor..." or that "anyone can become rich." Social justice is better served by analysis of the ways in which certain groups are kept systematically poor; by understanding the ways in which our actions are sometimes complicitous with the maintanence of inequalities; and by working towards a world without poverty. Mutatis mutandis, why is it any different for teachers?