Of Human Bonding
Brooks is right on here,until his proposed solution in the last paragraph:
While I'm all in favor of encouraging parents to "develop secure bonds with their own infants" (who could oppose that?!), I'm skeptical of the massive government program that would be required to do this on a large scale. Instead, the solution is to improve our schools so that we have great school leaders and teachers who understand -- and implement -- what Brooks is talking about.And so maybe it's time to focus a little less on individual capacities and more on nurturing attachment. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Over the past few decades federal and state governments have spent billions of dollars trying to improve high schools. Much of the effort has gone into trying to improve individual math and reading scores. But the effects have been modest and up to 30 percent of students drop out — a social catastrophe.
The dropout rates are astronomical because humans are not machines into which you can input data. They require emotion to process information. You take kids who didn't benefit from stable, nurturing parental care and who have not learned how to form human attachments, and you stick them in a school that functions like a factory for information transmission, and the results are going to be horrible.
The Gates Foundation recently sponsored focus groups with dropouts. The former students knew how detrimental dropping out would be. Most were convinced they could have graduated if they wanted to. But their descriptions of school amounted to a portrait of emotional disengagement: teachers were burned out and boring; discipline was lacking; classes weren't challenging; there weren't enough tutors and wasn't anyone to talk to; parents were uninvolved.
If school is unsatisfying but having a child or joining a gang seems as if it would be emotionally satisfying, then many students, especially those with insecure attachments at home, are going to follow their powerful drive to go where the attachments seem to be.
If I had $37 billion, I would focus it on the crucial node where attachment skills are formed: the parental relationship during the first few years of life. I'd invest much of it with organizations, like Circle of Security, that help at-risk mothers and fathers develop secure bonds with their own infants, instead of just replicating the behaviors of their own parents. I'd focus on the real resource crisis that afflicts the country. It's not the oil shortage. It's the oxytocin shortage.
This is an underappreciated key to KIPP's success. Most people focus on KIPP's high-quality teachers, extended school day and year, firm discipline, etc., but I've heard Dave Levin say many times that (from my memory -- not a direct quote): "I view my competition as video games, television and gangs. Our goal is to make school more fun and more cool than their other attractions." In a million different ways, KIPP makes students feel part of a team -- a WINNING team -- which, when fully harnessed, is the strongest human motivator of all. Look at the greatest companies like Apple, JetBlue, Wal-Mart and Home Depot (at least in their early days), the Marine Corps, etc.
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Of Human Bonding
If I had $37 billion to give to charity, I'd give some of it to a foundation that would invent an Oxytocin Meter. That way we could predict who is headed for success and who for failure. We could figure out which organizations are thriving and which are sick...
posted by Whitney Tilson at 10:38 PM
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