STAGES IN HEGEL’S MATURING PROCESS

In the last posting this writer focused on the idea of becoming, per se, and attempted to tie it to the developmental view of phenomenological psychology/philosophy.  This emphasis looks at how individuals go through life experiences and asks whether that person grows and matures by closing the gap between his/her lifeworld (how that person views reality) and what reality is.

          This posting assumes the reader has read that previous posting (if not, he/she is invited to click on http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2018_11_13_archive.html or just keep scrolling down to see the next posting dated November 13^th and give it quick read).  At the end of that posting, a preview of this posting was given in that it promised this entry would share what Philip Selznick[1] had to report regarding this view.  And the specific role Selznick plays is his review of G. W. F. Hegel’s thoughts on human development.

          Apparently, Hegel provided a model describing and explaining the chief dispositions humans experience through their personal, perceptional development.  According to the philosopher there are three major stages.  Upon reading the description of these stages and reflecting upon his own experiences, this writer thinks Hegel’s model makes sense.  It also does not contradict any major developmental theory of which this educator is aware.

          The first stage is one in which the individual has a disposition to accept the external world with little or no interpretation or critical eye.  Selznick uses the word naïve to describe this consciousness.  A youngster has a good reason to be so disposed.  He or she simply does not have the experiences by which to compare what he/she is seeing and feeling during those years. 

In terms of the gap between the subjective self and the objective reality in those years:  “… subject and object are separate; they deal with each other at arm’s length.  From the standpoint of moral development, [for example,] this is a time of uncritical acceptance of parental authority or, as adults, of whatever is demanded by conventional morality.”[2]

What is telling about this quote is that by referring to adults, the model does not guarantee that generally or in each concern, the individual matures and progresses to another stage.  There are “child-like” consciousnesses among the adult population.  Perhaps the reader can identify people in his/her social circles that demonstrate that lack of maturing.

In stage two, the person enters a more challenging consciousness.  Here the person strives and experiences a heightened self-consciousness.  These accompanying thoughts and feelings become a critical awareness sensitive to those aspects of life that places limitations on his/her freedoms while the individual is formulating ideas and ideals as to what that person can become in life. 

The restraints are defined as possible obstacles to those goals.  Selznick here uses the word “unhappy” to describe the general emotional state of mind.  And in dealing with these challenges, reason takes a back seat.  As one can probably guess, this second stage is destined to be a phase of life noted for a recurring succession of frustrating experiences. 

With enough of that, reason sneaks back into a person’s calculations and, by so doing, stage three becomes potentially available to the maturing person.  And that epiphany occurs when the individual accepts what needs to be accepted; i.e., a realization that satisfaction must accommodate both the desire for individual freedom but within a communal reality.

This is probably initially seen as necessary compromises but can grow to an understanding that happiness relies on what a community can provide in terms of that person’s emotional needs or wants.  The communal aspect, in a mature person, is not a limiting aspect of life, but a liberating one.  If nothing else, it opens physical and emotional resources previously not available or not recognized.

In terms of the language of phenomenology, in this stage the subject and object are reconciled.  “Reflective persons make peace with their community, and give it new vitality, by formulating and accepting the rational principles that underlie a distinctive tradition.  People can finally feel at home in a world from which they had become estranged.”[3]  The social landscapes that are particularly rich in these opportunities are the family, the work space, circles of friends, and the neighborhood.

So, the individual, through these three stages, have their own form of a dialectic development reflecting the dialectical ideation for which Hegel is famous – most people are introduced to Hegel in that he influenced the thinking of Karl Marx in the development of the political/economic theory, dialectical materialism.  Here, that theory of conflict is conducted within each person’s maturing process, but one must remember, the development within any person can be cut short. 

Adults, as stated above, can be immature and surely there are ample examples of this all around.  An inadequate, civics program probably adds to those numbers.  In the following posting, this blog will get into the implications of this Hegelian model and how maturity or immaturity provides resources or obstacles in the formulation of a healthy commonwealth.

[Note:  With the completion of the next posting, this blog will begin a break – a respite of a month or so – to allow the writer to conclude another writing project.  In the history of this blog, on the 400^th posting, the blog took a break that lasted about six months.  This upcoming break will be much shorter.  Hopefully, the reader will not judge this break too harshly – heck, he/she might yell hallelujah!  This break will begin upon the completion of the 800^th posting of this blog.  The years do go by.]

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[1] Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth:  Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1992).

[2] Ibid., 66.

[3] Ibid.

BECOMING, A MORE NUANCED CONCERN

Former First Lady, Michelle Obama, has written a memoir and it is currently being released.  The title is Becoming.  This title evokes an image; it is an image of a person changing over time.  Hopefully, the change is toward a more productive, self-satisfying definition of who a person is.  In psychology and philosophy this emphasis has been bolstered during the twentieth century.  To some, this view, in a more self-centered version, was used to advance the natural rights view of politics.

The neuroendocrinologist, Robert Sapolsky, makes the flat-out claim that conservatives tend to simplify social realities – at least as compared to liberals.[1]  One way that simplification manifests itself is how baseline conservatives accept a crude behavioralist view of social interactions.  This is part of this oversimplification.  As such, people are viewed, by these conservatives, as simply calculating beings, measuring rewards and punishments and behaving to maximize anticipated rewards and/or limiting anticipated punishments.

And further, those calculations have a limited time dimension; i.e., limited to what is seen as rewarding or punishing in a current time frame.  The natural rights construct, the political perspective in which most conservatives believe, favors this crude behavioralist sense of the self.  Yes, the natural rights’ advocates like the “self” aspect of the image, but not what others, who have opted this self-image, have added.

That is a wholistic sense of the self, a more complex image.  Namely, those who have advanced a phenomenological psychology/philosophy argue a nuanced view.  That view includes that to understand oneself and others, one needs to appreciate the subjective sense of one’s experience – one’s lifeworld – but, at the same time, see that what one perceives, through life, is an objective reality.  Growth or “becoming,” essentially, consists of coming to terms with the gap between one’s lifeworld and the real world.

This blog addressed this sense of “becoming” before.  Here is what a prior posting reported:

With descriptions of behavioral and cognitive psychologies presented over the last three postings, this posting will present, in a rudimentary fashion, a “psychology” that not all in [that] discipline recognize as a psychology.  That would be the humanist/phenomenology psychology.  Yet despite this reluctance by fellow educational psychologists, it has had an observable influence on many teachers and curriculum developers. 

Some have called it the “third force” – another way to visualize psychological factors that affect how and what a person learns.  It is criticized as being a “soft relative” of the more “scientific” approaches to educational psychology.  The practitioners who engage in this approach’s research do not depend on sophisticated experimental designs to gather their data, but on testimonials and interviews. 

The information, gathered by these qualitative techniques, ventures into personal accounts of what the “I” experiences are in learning and/or in handling other challenges.  Those who adhere to this psychology place great importance on self-definition – how we view ourselves.  They see this introspective determination as highly influential in how one will function in life, generally, and in the classroom, more specifically. 

This is true both for students and teachers and even administrators.  And this self-awareness, or lack of it, is not a quality that is abstracted out of one’s psyche, but instead a quality that takes in the whole person and the whole environment in which that person is situated. 

Perceptions become central:  does the person perceive him/herself as a learner, a scoundrel, a lover, a hater, a leader, a follower, an actor, or a dropout?  These are various self-inflicted titles that then evolve into illustrative behavior that manifests their meanings.  An actor will act and a self-perceived dropout will, more than likely, be a dropout in real life. 

This describes the phenomenological aspect of this psychology.  And these perceptions are not of a temporal nature, but instead define the whole person – a summary of who the person is through his/her own eyes.  The longer and more established these perceptions exist, the harder they are to dislodge.

Therefore, an educator, in order to be successful, needs to be conscious of this reality, be able to plan for it and, in a humanistic way, account for it as the educator interacts with the student.  The aim, of course, is to encourage and enable a person to perceive him/herself in ways that are rewarding to the person, not debilitating or self-destructive in any way or to any degree.

With this approach, the emphasis is not on how one responds to this or that stimulus or how the brain’s structure processes information.  The emphasis is on the Gestaltic aim to see and understand the total interaction between the individual and his/her environment – less analysis and more synthesis is this psychology’s orientation. 

This view is particularly sensitive to the interpersonal relations that mark a person’s space.  In this, humanistic psychology leads teachers and curriculum developers to be more attuned to communication qualities such as connotations, symbolism, and configurations of interactions among subjects of a given “field” (a field being those aspects of a space that provides any effect on an interaction).

Learning, therefore, is viewed as complex.  There are mental processes that take in what a field has to offer; the elements have to be analyzed in order to identify any problem(s); the mind has to discriminate and tease out what is important from what is not, and it has to see and understand the consequential relationships among the people and things present or potentially present.

Curriculum is not seen as a set plan, but an evolving concern which is better designated by the verb, currere, than the noun, curriculum.  This is the central ideal of reconceptualism which is usually associated with more recent expressions of reconstructionist philosophy.  [This aspect highlights the “becoming” sense emphasized above.]

And by referring to the people and things present, the concern is not only with the physical proximity to the situation in question, but also includes those elements that can have an influence from afar.  All of this is a dynamic reality which calls on the person to accommodate to the changes that are constantly taking place. 

Nothing is set in stone, making all perceived knowledge or beliefs unreliable and subject to questioning and critique.  [The subjective meeting the objective.]  But what is maintained, throughout the instructional interchange, is framing the teaching effort toward addressing the whole, the whole person and the whole environment. 

Truth is not only in the detail, but also in the entirety of the situation, not just in external elements (rewards and/or punishments) or in internal mental elements (the structural processes of the mind and brain), but in the whole interactive reality.[2]

With that reminder, this posting will leave it at that and promise that the next posting will pick up this topic and report what Philip Selznick, with the help of Georg Wilhem Fredrich Hegel, add to this view of self and becoming.

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[1] Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave:  The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York, NY:  Penguin Press, 2017).

[2] “The Whole Is Greater Than Its Parts,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics – a blog, September 6, 2016, accessed November 12, 2018, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2016_09_06_archive.html .  The rendering of this prior posting has been further edited. 

DISADVANTAGES BEGET DISADVANTAGES

The last posting made the point that the historical treatment of African-Americans in this country has posed that group many disadvantages.  To anyone who is familiar with the social/political history of the US, they might react by thinking, “what else is new?”  But what many seem to overlook are the logical consequences of such treatment.  That previous posting left the reader with a riddle.

          The riddle is:  Why is it that African-American students do not benefit in terms of their school performance, to the degree other racial or ethnic kids benefit, by being children of higher income parents?  Yes, they do benefit, but only to a roughly thirty percent level as compared with white children.  They also don’t benefit to the degree Hispanic or Asian children do.  This has led researchers to point out cultural factors as the possible reasons for this shortfall.  In turn, these reports have been highly controversial.

          To begin, distasteful information, if true, needs to be addressed.  Now, one can argue that even if true, it is misplaced, not directly related to the problem at hand, or taken out of context.  But if correlational studies point out a relationship between or among certain factors and when there are ample historical reasons for those factors to be related, policy-makers, wanting to address the related problem, cannot ignore the apparent causal factors.

          Here is what Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom report:

Today most social scientists agree that growing up in a single-parent, female-headed family “is almost always associated with lower educational attainment and more behavioral and psychological problems.”  Those behavioral and psychological problems, the data indicate, include getting into trouble both in school and with the law, dropping out of school, and early pregnancy, as well as depressed academic performance.

          We can expect large racial differences in all of these things, because racial differences in family structure are huge.  Currently, only 37 percent of black children live with two parents, as compared with 77 percent of whites, 65 percent of Hispanics, and 81 percent of Asian Americans.[1]

Also, the Thernstroms report that African-American households have on average three children; while white households have one.  Young black women, 18-years-old or less, have children at a two and a half times more rate then white women of that age and 50 percent more often than Hispanic young women.  Yes, historical disadvantages or, better stated, injustices have their consequences, and many are not direct, but indirect.

Indirect in that they set up the social conditions, seen around the world, that take on such behavior patterns that produce these types of results.  They are not exclusive to African-Americans.  But are the Thernstroms correct; are their numbers duplicated elsewhere?  One commentator who received some criticism – or controversy – was Don Lemon, a TV news opinion show host on CNN.

He reported the negative version of the above numbers; i.e., African-American households have children out of wedlock at a greater than a 72 percent rate.  Just to report what seems to be a related fact, Dom Lemon is an African-American.  This caused a fire-“shower” of criticism.  Noting the controversy, the online news site, Politifact, looked into this claim.

Using data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2010, that online site reported the rates of births in non-marital situations as follows:  Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, 17%; non-Hispanic whites, 29%; Hispanics, 53%; American Indian and Native Alaskans, 73%; and non-Hispanic blacks, 73%.[2]  But “out of wedlock” does not necessarily mean single-parent.

The 2011 Census Bureau with the Annie E. Casey Foundation looked at data that narrowed the above purview.  They looked at “children in single-parent families” – kids under 18 in households with single parents (with perhaps a cohabiting adult).  They found the following:  non-Hispanic whites, 23%; Hispanics, 42 percent; American Indian and Native Alaskans, 53%; non-Hispanics blacks, 67%.  While these numbers are slightly lower, they follow the same pattern.

Of interest to this writer is the comparison between Hispanic and non-Hispanic blacks.  As groups they share some historical factors.  Hispanics are mostly immigrants from lesser developed countries, they initially lack English skills, and their political/economic background are less than ideal when measured against democratic standards.  But their background does not begin to compare with the disadvantages, blacks have faced in American society. 

This writer has had first-hand experience with this, given he is a first generation American from immigrant Hispanic parents.  He along with his parents did have it tough during his early years, but by the time he went to school he can honestly say he did not face any discriminatory treatment.  Perhaps he was fortunate, but from what he saw African-Americans had to go through (a drive through the South of the 1950s was eye-opening); there was no comparison.  And look at the numbers, Hispanics rank high in these two charts.  Conclusion, tough socioeconomic conditions have their consequences.

And to the extent they do, a federated society with its governmental/political institution has a responsibility to issue those policies that effectively address the entailed disadvantages.  The reason Lemon got in “trouble” was he seemed to put the whole onus on blacks and did not address the systemic factors hard enough.

The system – the polity – needs to regulate the economic/political realities these disadvantaged populations have imposed upon discriminated groups.  And no institution needs this type of regulation more than the educational institution, the key to economic success.  One place to start, where it is relevant, is the civics curriculum.

This writer is not an expert in this area; he is an expert in the field of curricular studies, especially civics curriculum.  He is open to being convinced he is wrong in the above argument.  The readers of this blog are invited to express any disagreement with what he expressed in this posting.  For example, the argument does not yet explain the underperformance of blacks within higher income households, but if the above is true, it does provide a context for this issue.[3]

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[1] Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom, No Excuses:  Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (New York, NY:  Simon & Schuster, 2003), 132.

[2] “CNN’s Don Lemon Says More Than 72 Percent of African-American Births Are Out of Wedlock,” Politifact, July 29, 2013, accessed November 7, 2018, https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/29/don-lemon/cnns-don-lemon-says-more-72-percent-african-americ/ .

[3] This issue will be taken up in a future posting.

RACE AS A FACTOR IN SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT

In the last posting, this blog made the case:  parental income affects – at least as correlational studies show – how well their children will do economically as adults years later.  Rich parents tend to have children that will be rich; mid-range income parents will see their children follow suit; and the same can be said for low income parents and their children.  So, one can conclude, class is a factor in determining success.

          How about race?  Does race have an effect, and if so, how much?  Before attempting to answer this question, one should consider:  why ask?  One asks because if race does affect success rates and one supports the federalist value, regulated equality, then that affect should be subject to some regulation.  But this question of race and its effect is not so easy to answer.

          Muddling the effort is how the economy – and the nation’s history – has posed so many obstacles to various minorities.  Of course, that disadvantage has been pre-eminent among African-Americans.  Their history in this nation has been a long string of horrendous mistreatment with slavery, Jim Crow policies, institutional discrimination, deprivation of decent schooling and lack of life-fulfilling employment opportunities. 

And to support such treatment, among the white majority there has been the common belief that blacks are inferior, especially in terms of intelligence.  Given that backdrop, how does one, who believes in federalist values, think or act on the findings of Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom?[1]  They demonstrate the challenge that exists in figuring out what is affecting student success when race is a factor.

First, it is no surprise, given the above outlined history of injustice, that African-Americans, as a demographic group, do not do well when it comes to schooling, key to success.  Of course, there are exceptions of note, but compared to other demographic groups, e.g., whites, Hispanics, Asians, etc., African-Americans rank low.  But, then again, they rank low in income and wealth.  Does that mean the income/wealth factor cause blacks to rank so low in education?  That is, is it race or income that is affecting school performance?

What happens when black kids are compared with white kids, for example, when income is controlled?  That is, how do higher income black kids compare to higher income white kids?  By higher income, of course the reference is to their parents’ incomes.  And how about mid-range income kids and lower income kids from the two demographic groups?

In terms of higher income kids, here is a summary statement by the Thernstroms:

The majority of African-American students are stuck in inferior big-city schools.  But [collected] data … suggest a more sobering conclusion.  Increased movement of black families into suburban communities [where higher income families live] – as desirable as that is – will not solve the problem of black academic underperformance.  It’s not that black kids in suburbia don’t do better than their urban peers [of lower income parents].  They do.  But suburban whites also outperform urban whites, and the gap – the difference in scores between the two racial groups – remains almost unchanged.[2]

In general, among income brackets, the gains whites make as they go up in those brackets, blacks only experience thirty-three percent of those gains.  Or as those writers state it:

The data available to us were not in a form to permit an analysis that would reveal exactly how great the overlap is [among socioeconomic variables[3]], but a number of sophisticated studies of the black-white achievement gap have found that controlling for all the standard measures of socioeconomic status [like residential location] together cuts the black-white gap by only about one-third.[4]

This then is a riddle.  Why don’t African-Americans students experience, as compared to white students, the same upshot in school performance when income and residency has experienced an “upgrade” from lower income levels and inner-city living conditions?  This posting leaves the reader with this question; next posting will further report on the Thernstroms’ findings.

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[1] Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom, No Excuses:  Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (New York, NY:  Simon & Schuster, 2003).

[2] Ibid., 128.  These determinations are based on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing scores and that deserves further comment, perhaps in another posting.

[3] Variables include parental education attainment, urban-suburban-rural residencies, religious affiliation, age, and the like.

[4] Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom, No Excuses:  Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, 129.

“SUGAR DADDY” OR “MOMMA”

The last posting of this blog addressed the myth that successful people are totally responsible for their success.  Successful people are advantaged by a variety of factors; some are “hidden” advantages and this luck goes unnoticed or unrecognized by them or other people.  But some factors are more visible and have recognized effects.

          Two factors come readily to mind, although some will even refuse to accept their viability in advancing or hindering success.  They are class and race.  This posting looks at the first of these factors, class.  The first question to be addressed is:  does parental income affect or correlate with their children’s ability to garner reasonable income levels?  By reasonable, one can see it as an income level associated with a middle-class lifestyle.

          The Pew Charitable Trust and the Russell Sage Foundation funded research in this area at Stanford University.  Their overall finding, as a result of this research, can be summarized as follows: 

… approximately half of parental income advantages in the United States are passed on to children, which is among the lowest estimates of economic mobility yet produced.  The research also finds that the degree to which income advantages are transferred from parents to children differs across the income spectrum, and that parental income differences benefit children from higher-income families more than those from lower-income families.  The results indicate that opportunity for economic success are far from equally distributed.[1]

One statistic that this study reports demonstrates this lack of opportunity; i.e., children from the 90^th percentile of the population (the top 10%) can expect to make as adults, with their own families, incomes three times greater than the children from the 10^th percentile (the bottom 10%).

          How would one know that this advantage did not exist as an element of this nation’s economy?  Well, if the next generation’s income distribution shows no relationship with the previous generation’s distribution, then one could not attribute parental income as a determining factor.  If this lack of correlation existed, the poor would emanate from families across the income spectrum, the same for those who make mid-range incomes, and the same for those who make high incomes.  

This study calls this measure intergenerational elasticity (IGE).  IGE is expressed as a number from zero (no generational advantage/disadvantage) to one (total generational advantage/disadvantage).  Therefore, any number above zero (and below 1) indicates some level of parental income effecting their children’s eventual income level.

As the result cited above indicates, half parental income advantage is passed to their children and is indicated by the IGE scores of .52 for males and .47 for females.  And these number varies according to the income levels of parents.  The IGE scores shoot up to the lower .60s for parents in the 50^th to 90^th income percentiles.

There seems to be in this study’s findings a gender difference.  Men benefit or are disadvantaged more – i.e., they have higher IGE scores – than women.  When comparing their own incomes, men have 40% higher IGE scores than women.  What also affects women from higher income parents and their IGE scores is their likelihood of marrying men of high-income status; a factor that does not affect men nearly as much.

As often mentioned in this blog, the federalist value, regulated equality, calls for proactive governmental policies to meet these obvious inequalities that, given the above findings, indicate systemic causes.  In that light, this blog favors what the president of the Russell Sage Foundation said in reaction to this study:

The report documents that public policies must do more to level the playing field so that children from low-income families have greater opportunities to compete in the 21^st century economy.  Over recent decades, the rising income and wealth of affluent parents have allowed them to increase investments in their children, from day care through college.  At the same time, wages have stagnated for most workers and low-income families have struggled to pay for routine expenses …[2]

And as for a civics’ national program, it should make sure that students appreciate what consequences result from casting a blind eye to this source of inequality.  If history is any indication, one result is those nations so characterized have experienced extreme politics – segments of the population taking on extreme rightest or leftist beliefs and accompany motivations to act in radical ways.  Sounds familiar?

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[1] “Parental Income Has Outsized Influence on Children’s Economic Future,” Pew, July 23, 2015, accessed October 31, 2018, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/about/news-room/press-releases-and-statements/2015/07/23/parental-income-has-outsized-influence-on-childrens-economic-future .

[2] Ibid.

THAT’D BE ME

A personal note:  to start this posting, this writer wants to share a conversation he had with a relative.  He, the relative, voiced the opinion that he was responsible for the success he has achieved.  It wasn’t government, it wasn’t community, it wasn’t even family (maybe except for his wife).  He was responsible. 

He was expressing an extreme version of an argument that a person who is well-ensconced in the natural rights persuasion loves to espouse.  That view focuses on the virtues and potentials of the individual – that is a powerful message, an appealing message to many.

          This blog has argued that the natural rights view has become prominent in the American political culture.  While this relative might be expressing the more extreme take on this bias, generally, Americans today have a serious inability to see the error contained in this line of argument. 

This writer, trying not to start a serious disagreement with the relative, did point out that his business interests depended on government services concerning traffic, security, the financial system, on and on.  He responded that that’s why he pays taxes – too much of them – and so, these benefits are well paid for; they are a transaction. 

Yes, he loves his country, but that does not necessarily include the government and, given the general tenor of his comments, that institution is seen as holding an anti-American character.  He expressed these opinions with conviction and confidence – there was little to no doubt in what he was saying.

The writer, Malcolm Gladwell,[1] has something to report regarding this view:

…I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work.  People don’t rise from nothing.  We do owe something to parentage and patronage.  The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves.  But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.  It makes a difference where and when we grew up.  The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.  It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words.  It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.[2]

          Gladwell begins his support for this conclusion by pointing out a usually overlooked correlation.  That is, those who succeed in sports that are played during certain parts of the year – e.g., hockey or baseball – are apt to be born during certain stretches of dates.  In terms of hockey those are the months from January to April. 

Why?  Because, it seems, they are older than their cohorts as they grow up and learn to play the sport.  That gives them an advantage relative to the others; their mental and physical development is marginally better but in a competitive environment, that can mean a lot. 

They demonstrate, early on, higher skill levels; they are then on starting teams, get better coaching, and develop more productive emotional dispositions toward the sport, toward practice, toward the discipline greatness demands.  In other words, in this seemingly innocuous twist of fate, certain athletes have a consequential advantage and they had nothing to do with its occurrence.  Does it guarantee success?  Of course not.  Hard work is essential, but it is not all there is.

A person who has studied this phenomenon, Paula Barnsley, proposes that this type of skewed age advantage works if three conditions are also present:  early selection of the advantaged, separation of those deemed talented from the untalented, and the “talented” are afforded superior training or other experiences to enhance the talent.  If the three coincide with or are caused by the age advantage – people who are born just before the cutoff dates of the various sports – these lucky ones have meaningful advantages.

Now apply this advantage in sports to education; does it transfer to a scholastic endeavor?  Yes, it does.  And as with sports, the advantage is not just a matter of the first year or the first few years of schooling, but it extends for many years.  And education, as the gateway to many other opportunities, helps determine many of the successes one experiences through life.  This initial advantage shows itself in testing and advancements toward higher education accomplishments – from acceptance to higher education programs to further academic successes.

No, birthdates do not totally determine who succeeds.  Differences in correlation studies varies from ten to twenty percentage points.  But, one cannot deny an effect exists and, one should remember, is a totally random variable; no one schedules his/her birthdate.  In addition, this birthdate factor is only offered as an example of how a non-determined, accidental condition can affect how successful people are successful.  The famous sociologist, Robert Merton, gives this type of advantage a name, the “Matthew Effect.”  The Matthew refers to the Gospel of Matthew.

“For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.  But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”  This excerpt from that gospel sounds un-Christian, but it does ring true given the finding Gladwell is reporting.  The point is: 

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.  It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks.  It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention.  And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice.  Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”[3]

So, what does all this mean for educators, for civics teachers?

          The first step to address this obvious, anti-federated reality is for people to become aware of these unwarranted advantages that undermine fulfilling the federalist value, regulated equality.  How does these conditions relate to regulations?  Institutions – government, schools, youth organizations, and the like – can regulate differently how they treat age or other determining factors.  This needs definite and serious study.  This posting does not have the answers or is it proposing a set of regulations.  It just wants to add its voice to this topic.

          As for the relative, he has worked hard; he did not receive a good education; he immigrated to the US from a Central American country in his teens and was the product of a broken home.  He does deserve credit, along with his wife, for achieving a comfortable retirement, three successful children with their own families, and an extended number of years on this earth – he is in his eighties. 

But he did not do it alone.  For one thing, he was able to live his life in post-World War II America with all the advantages the sole industrial power during many of those years could provide.  The relative had nothing to do with that, but had the advantages flowing from an unparalleled economy.

This blog has previously pointed out this unequal distribution of advantages.  It has cited the work of the late John Rawls, the philosopher and social commentator.  In part, this is what this blog has reported:

[Rawls] two main relevant ideas regarding equality are (1) the notion that justice is the product of a people/group establishing the basic rules of their arrangement when no one knows beforehand what his/her status will be once the arrangement is formulated and (2) that once one analyzes the reasons for anyone’s success, one can only attribute limited attribution to a person’s effort for said success.  Both of these factors lead one to limit any compensation one [should] … receive relative to market determinations.  Last, Rawls argues for assistance for those not so privileged under the consideration that life can and does visit misfortune on potentially anyone – “there but for the grace of God go I.”[4]

Rawls’ ideas have influenced the development of the federalist moral code this blog has proposed.[5]

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[1] Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, (New York, NY:  Little, Brown and Company, 2008).

[2] Ibid., 19 (emphasis in the original).

[3] Ibid., 30.

[4] See Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls:  A Theory of Justice and Its Critics, (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1990).

[5] See posting, “Changing Times,” March 13, 2015.