I feel nervous about my younger brothers sometimes, often the same times that I feel proud of them. I love them very much. I don’t feel 100% comfortable relating to them, because I’m not sure I’m good at it. I’m 9 and 11 years older than them, respectively, and I did a real lot of child care until I moved out. I’ve had to work to get over the “you’re a kid and I’m in charge of you” thing. I want to be a good influence which in part I sort of feel like means “don’t be like me” in some ways, as it’s not like my life is a roaring success. Mainly I don’t want them to get into inextricably bad situations, which is really nerve wracking because most of the world is made out of inextricably bad situations.
Both my brothers could be described as not being sufficiently cowed by authority figures. My youngest brother at around 11 or so got into an argument with a teacher. He told me about it then. He said “I got a detention.” Being all grown-up-ly I was like “why?” all tsk-tsk in my voice. He said something like, “well he was saying about how america was the best country and everything and I said that I didn’t think it was so great, it’s not so great if you’re poor in america.” His teacher got angry and he kept arguing and the teacher told him to quit arguing and he didn’t so he got sent to the principal’s office. The principal said “why are you here?” He said “I wouldn’t quit arguing with my teacher.” “Why?” “Because he was telling lies to the class.” So yeah, he stands up to authority figures. Which is great. Except it can have consequences. I get nervous I’m not sure he has a power analysis though or is calculating in his when-to-stand-up and when-to-not decisions. Like I said, I get nervous.
So tonite he calls me and he says “what do you think of this?” and I say “what?” and he says “do you think it’s okay to call a teacher by their first name?” and I say “sure it’s okay, but in school the teacher gets to call those shots” and he says “well I’ve started calling my teachers by their first name and I got a saturday suspension for it” I say something like “blah blah blah they’re in charge they’re not right but you need to blah blah blah something trying to raise the idea of power analysis” and he says something like “yeah I know but are they right?” and I say “no they’re not right” and he says “okay, well they sent me to the dean and I asked the dean why is it that it’s okay to call the janitors by their first names but not the teachers and the dean said well the teachers are on a different level and I said why is that and the dean said the teachers deserve more respect because they went to college and got degrees, isn’t that messed up?” and I agree it was messed up. He says “one of the janitors is a retired college professor” which isn’t the point of course. So yeah. Nervousproud.
Then he told me he has to write a paper for school about the american dream, including a short biography on someone who has achieved it. He said “I could do Rockefeller but he’s a bastard.” My wife and I eventually arrived at the suggestion of a paired approach of Carnegie and Debs, drawing on Dos Passos’ 42nd Parallel. He said, “that’s good. What about John Brown?”
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ps - unrelated, reading idears … Beyond Good And Evil, The Will To Power, Philosophical Investigations, Fear And Trembling. Need something dark and german to play in the background…
Hey Nate
Shortly before Keithie was born I was involved in discussions of child rearing with Sarah (ie Keithie’s mother). By now of course those discussions don’t get much further than deciding who is going to take care of Keithie when she wakes during the night, but at that time we decided that our desire was that by the age of maybe five Keithie would hopefully be totally capable of responding to our efforts at control by uttering a sentence along the lines of: “You are out of your fucking mind if you think for one minute I am going to pay attention to a ridiculous statement like that.” Not that we wouldn’t very directly give our views (”What are you talking about you want to be a model!” or some such I hope I never hear), just that she would be comfortable just responding with “Yeah, whatever” and walking off.
People have tediously and repeatedly amused themselves by telling us that Keithie will probably rebel by becoming some kind of right-winger, ha ha etcetera. But I figure if so she’ll be sharp enough such that by the age of maybe nine she will have gone through any such phase, probably tracked down her local ALP branch and joined up in secret, and by ten she’ll have resigned and be organising a campaign of terror against anyone she met in her time in the Party.
Unlike what apparently happens in the US if sitcoms are to be believed, the concept of “grounding” will not enter into some system of punishment.
Regarding school, surely the point is really that when you are a child, even rebelling, one actually has an exaggerated view of the importance of these authorities. If one can get to an appropriate understanding of the contempt in which such efforts at the assertion of control should be regarded, their essential triviality, and thus not be so upset at such petty stupidity, life gets easier. And it helps if you don’t do the tsk tsk thing I think, thus takig any anxiety out of the threat that the school will talk to family about “your behaviour”. For the vast bulk of the way through school, it is like: nothing these people can do matters, really doesn’t have any long-term consequences. I’m not talking ‘Learning To Labour’ style rebellion-into-downward-mobility (like she could get lower), just the irrelevance of it all now. Those detentions aren’t like criminal records following me around, neither is the expulsion, etcetera. Trying to communicate the unimportance of it and that we are automatically on her side would be the key thing I think.
Of course, my father had opinions about enforced conformity at school that ending up causing a younger brother some problems. My brother was at a state high school which enforced a uniform, and dad was against it, so Eddie wasn’t allowed to wear one. He had to go in something else, anything else just not that. Every day he’d get in trouble at school and come home and ask to be allowed to wear the uniform, and every day dad would explain that he wasn’t going to permit some school to push his kid around. Eddie would say he wanted to wear it, dad would say that wasn’t the point. Eventually Eddie had to change schools. Seriously. He seemed a bit upset at the time, but it did seem funny. Dad thought it was funny anyway.
Comment by benjamin rosenzweig — April 23, 2007 @ 5:01 am
hi Ben,
Yeah if I think about it I’m like “what’s the worst that could happen? He’ll be fine!” I try not to do the tsk-tsk thing anymore (the previous story was 5 or 6 years ago). I realize that my “I don’t want you to have unpleasant experiences” impulse, which is emotionally triggered easily because I have overprotective impulses, if acted upon, would be damaging and unpleasant. I don’t think authority figures in schools are absolutely powerless, though. My other brother quit high school due in large part to harrassment and disinterest from teachers - I think in large part racist (he’s latino) though his confrontational responses to teachers may have been a factor, I’m not sure. Quitting high school isn’t the end of the world, but that too is something that worries me. It probably should worry me less - he works harder than I do but definitely makes more money. It’s not so much “ooh don’t talk back to teachers, you’ll get in trouble” and it’s more that I’m not clear if they think about the consequences of their actions sometimes before taking them, then after the fact they might regret the actions. They lived in a small town on the east coast for a while that was very wealthy and very white. At one point (around the time of the “my teacher is telling lies” incident) they were stopped by the police on their bikes and the older of my brothers was basically like “I don’t have to take this, I’m going home” and the cops were like “actually, you do have to take this and you’re not going anywhere” and grabbed him. It ended up okay - they got a lecture and that’s all - but that one made me way more nervous and upset for obvious reasons. (It didn’t help that I was doing work in Chicago at the time about the ‘justice’ system and its treatment of youth of color.) They’re older and are more cautious/calculating now and really so I trust them more and of course they’re free to make their own decisions - that doesn’t stop the nerves though, especially when I can’t tell if an action is a decision or just an impulse. But like I said at the same time I’m really proud of both of them, I think many of their actions show a ton of character. I should tell them both that eventually.
take care,
Nate
ps- how old is Keithie? She’s so cute. Angelica and I want to have a kid ASAP. We’re waiting cuz of where I’m at in my program at uni, which is wicked ambivalent.
Comment by Nate — April 23, 2007 @ 2:38 pm
Keithie’s heading to six months and almost unbelievably lovable - that’s objective, not some parental bias. She wasn’t planned, and in fact we don’t know who the father is and have no intention of finding out. That’s my nose she’s sucking on in the top picture of the most recent post, Sarah holding Keithie three down, and Nick is with Keithie in a bunch of others, he’s the guy with the beard. To be honest I’m not sure how well I/we would have coped with just two people acting as parents.
I wasn’t trying to suggest that teachers have no power, or, more to the point, that interaction with school has no serious consequences. I suppose Willis’ book Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs is still the classic study, for all of its limitations. I just meant that the individual authority of teachers over kids is largely illusory, and regarding it with appropriate contempt doesn’t necessarily entail bad results in any sense the matters. Cops are by contrast always scarily threatening.
Comment by benjamin rosenzweig — April 23, 2007 @ 5:05 pm