Civilization is a race
between education and catastrophe.
–H. G. Wells
The master’s tools will never dismantle
the master’s house.
–Audre Norton
Unfinished Business
We were learning about the brain when the topic of equity came up.
“For approximately the first five years of life,” I told my AP class. “Your brain grows as many neurons as possible in response to its environment. Then from roughly five years to early adolescence, it takes all those new neurons and makes as many synaptic connections as possible in response to its environment. And finally, starting roughly around thirteen or fourteen until your early to mid-twenties, the brain starts systematically destroying any underused synapses and some actual neurons, again in response to its environment.”
A hand went up, and I pointed to Devon.
“Mr. Brock, what do you mean by ‘in response to its environment’?” She asked.
“You recall how we’ve discussed that different parts of the brain are responsible for different functions, different tasks?” I said to her.
She nodded.
“You also remember.” I continued. “That we’ve talked about how expensive the brain is? That it’s the number one consumer of energy in the entire body?”
Again, she nodded, and I glanced quickly around to make sure the rest of the class was following along as well.
“Well, when a newborn brain enters this world,” I said. “It is going to need to build extra capacity in the parts that need extra capacity to cope with the particular environment it finds itself in; while not wasting energy growing extra neurons in those parts that are used less in that environment.”
There were still some confused looks.
“Here, let me give you a ridiculous example.” I said. “Imagine that for some reason, the ability to play piano had survival value in a particular environment, and so from the moment you are born, your environment forces you to start the struggle to learn how to play the piano. Your brain would therefore need additional neurons in the parts of the brain responsible for that process.”
Several hands all went up at once.
“Is that why nearly all Olympic gymnasts start when they’re, like, four?” Annie asked after I pointed at her.
I nodded. “Yes, in fact, you all are too young to remember this.” I responded. “But I can recall a toddler Tiger Woods with his dad on a TV show ‘wowing’ everybody with his putting. Dad had created an environment that told Tiger’s brain: ‘this is important; make the additional neurons to be good at it’ and so his brain did.”
I pointed at another hand.
“Is that also why we take so many different subjects in school?” asked Libby.
“And why our parents played all those games with us when we were little?” Elizabeth added.
They were all beginning to make the connections, and I nodded.
“Right,” I told them. “Even if your parents didn’t know the biology behind it, they knew that reading to you regularly, playing counting games with you, building blocks with you…all those things would make you better at school.”
I turned to Libby. “And yes,” I told her. “Part of why you took so many different subjects in elementary school was to make your brain make the extra connections in lots of different parts of it, and it is why you are still taking so many things now: we’re attempting to convince your brain that all those extra synapses are important to your survival and therefore worth all the extra energy it costs to keep them.”
Serene’s hand shot into the air. “But Mr. Brock,” she protested. “Knowing how to do calculus is not actually critical to my survival. I’m not going to die if I can’t integrate!”
“Yes and no.” I replied. “You’re right that you can certainly survive perfectly fine without knowing how to solve a differential. But the problem-solving neurons you are preserving by learning how to do so make you smarter and that does give you advantages as an adult in this world.”
I noticed a hand I had not called on yet and pointed at Maggie, who had a thoughtful, worried expression on her face.
“Mr. Brock, if what you are saying is true, then what about all those kids in a bad environment or one without any resources?” She asked. “From what you just said, the most significant damage may be done before you’re even five! I tutor girls struggling to read for my community service at one of the city schools. What if your parents don’t have time to read to you when you’re little simply because they have to work in order to survive?”
Maggie was clearly distraught, but all I could do in response was nod sadly.
“You’re right.” I told her. “Children who grow up without the resources most of your parents have provided you quite literally have their brains put at a disadvantage—at least when it comes to learning in schools. But that’s also why,” I added. “Government programs such as Early Head Start for low-income children are so critical to helping fight the poverty gap in this country; it provides brains with the environment to grow the necessary extra neurons for better success in school.”
“Do we have any of those here in Baltimore?” She said eagerly.
“Probably,” I replied truthfully. “But I don’t know for sure.”
“There are nine.” Devon interrupted, looking up from her laptop.
Standing in front of the class, it was impossible not to show my reaction.
“Nine.” I mused, shaking my head. “In a city of more than 600,000 people, with nearly a quarter of them living below the poverty line and way more than that who are low-income, and we have a total of nine.”
There was now a fire in Maggie’s eyes, and with that absolute indignation that only a teenager can achieve, she pounded the table where she sat and declared loudly, “That’s not fair, Mr. Brock! All my girls deserve to have their best brains, too!
The Dilemmas for Schools
Throughout its history, a core tension in the United States has always been the struggle between our professed egalitarianism (“all men are created equal”) and our pursuit of privilege (“may the best man win”). We want the social justice and political stability that come with the former while we want the material abundance and personal fulfillment of the latter, and in our pursuit of both these potentially mutually exclusive ends, we have traditionally relied on education to resolve their differences. The myth goes that if we simply provide the means for all children in every school to achieve at their highest possible intellectual levels, then any consequent differences in status are simply the results of variable levels of biological talent (“he’s a natural”) and/or personal will (“Charlie hustle”)–both of which an individualist culture like ours believes society can neither dictate nor should control.
The problem with this myth is that it ignores reality. Systemic racism and class privilege have always played a significant role in determining an individual’s socio-economic status in our society regardless of his, her, or their degree of access to education, and “if we know the social class and racial background of a child before he or she enters school, then we can successfully predict his or her achievement in school and his or her likely success in society after he or she becomes an adult.”1 Hence, where a child grows up or to whom she, he, or they is born has had far more impact on their, his, or her ultimate place in our culture, and frankly, any notion that schools are not simply “institutions designed to maintain the status quo and reify the social hierarchies in our society”2 is seldom more than empty rhetoric.
Part of what is at issue is that both the myth and the rhetoric ignore some challenging and inconvenient brain science. As my student recognized in class that day, the genes controlling the developmental process of the brain help contribute to the perpetuation of the socio-economic divisions in our society (and their frequent racial corollary) as the “haves” can provide the resources to maximize this process; while the “have-nots” regularly can’t. The consequent impacts on an individual’s success in school then plays itself out in the eventual jobs and careers (and even health!3) of adulthood, and the cycle repeats.4
What has an even greater impact, though, than differences in opportunities for brain development is the human brain’s instinctive hard-wiring for bias. The simple truth is that back on the savannah when we were evolving, stereotyping had survival value: “tan-with-black-spots” equaled “bad” because the vast majority of the time “tan-with-black-spots” equaled leopard. The human who’s brain automatically learned this association erred on the side of running from anything “tan-with-black-spots,” surviving to reproduce, and the brain that didn’t was eventually lunch. Likewise, in a clan-based hunter-gatherer social system, “us vs. them” served a survival value, and “the brain, it turns out, [actually] engages two [entirely] different clusters of neurons in thinking about other people, and which cluster gets activated depends on the degree to which one identifies with those others.”5 It is a problematic and uncomfortable truth, but we are simply wired for bias.
Unfortunately, the consequence of this for schooling is that all the implicit/hidden biases everyone in our society has about race, wealth, and privilege are, in fact, actively contributing to the erosion and undermining of the professed purpose of our so-called egalitarian educational system, and without deliberate self-conscious interventions (that seldom occur), our schools are actually helping perpetuate the disparities in our society instead of counter-acting them. Indeed, the science on implicit/hidden bias shows that “even in the minds of those who would be disadvantaged by the bias they carry…[their brains] in fact are willing to sacrifice their self-interest for the sake of maintaining the existing social order.”6 Therefore, in spite of implicit/hidden biases being “yet another instance of a hard-wiring that has lost its relevance [in the modern world],”7 their ubiquitous character continues to make our current school systems—along with the rest of our culture—essentially a self-replicating organism.8
Yet, this same research shows that once a person is made aware of a hidden bias—what Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald of Harvard’s Project Implicit call a “mindbug”—that individual is fully capable of taking conscious, deliberate, and self-aware steps to “enable [his, her, or their] brain to outsmart the mindbugs that reside within it.”9 What’s more, the research has now made it possible for all of us to begin identifying our own individual “mindbugs” (see note 9 for details), and therefore, it possible for each of us to fight the implicit biases found in our educational systems that hinder those systems from effecting positive social change for everyone.
So why are those of us in schools not doing a better job at this?
Light a Candle 