Teaching the Elephant
This way of dividing the self is beginning to have a powerful influence on education policy and urban policy, and across a whole range of other practical spheres.
For example, last Sunday Paul Tough had an outstanding article in The Times Magazine about how to improve urban schools. In one scene, Tough was standing in front of a music class at a KIPP Academy. The teacher was explaining Tough’s presence to the class, when he suddenly pointed to Tough and asked, “Do you notice what he’s doing right now?”
The class called out, “Nodding!”
The teacher was using Tough’s unconscious nodding to reinforce a lesson: that when you listen to a person you should look at the person, and you should actively listen. Later in the class the teacher told the students to adopt the “normal school” pose. The kids slouched low in their chairs and gazed off into space. Then the kids snapped back to the KIPP-approved posture: upright, every head swiveling toward whoever was speaking.
In short, KIPP is taking skills that middle-class kids pick up unconsciously and it is rigorously drilling them into students from less fortunate backgrounds. KIPP Academies, like many of the best schools these days, don’t just cram information into brains. They educate the elephant. They surround students with a total environment, a holistic set of habits and messages, and they dominate students’ lives for many hours a day.
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Teaching the Elephant
Human beings have divided selves. Some philosophers emphasize that people have a cool, rational side and an unruly, passionate side. Some theologians emphasize that people have a loving, virtuous side and a selfish, sinful side. Freudians used to emphasize the divisions between the ego, the superego and the id. But lately some brain researchers have another way to conceptualize the divided self. They distinguish between the conscious, intentional parts of the mind and the backstage automatic parts.
posted by Whitney Tilson at 1:39 PM
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