Houston, Texas is unlike most cities. It wasn’t founded near a plentiful river or a bountiful forest that had tempted local tribes into settling roots. It wasn’t a convenient point for trade, or set before a stunning vista of natural beauty. It was 6000 acres of swamp. It had almost nothing to recommend it as a future metropolis; its heat produced a fetid cauldron in the summer and it was miles from the nearest port. Nevertheless, two entrepreneurs from New York City came to the area with some big ideas, purchased some land and founded a city from scratch.
That was 1836, and today it’s the fourth largest city in America, and one of its wealthiest. It’s not only the center of America’s oil industry, but also home to NASA and the Texas Medical Centre – the world’s largest concentration of medical research facilities. Although I wouldn’t recommend visiting in summer, when it’s hotter than an Apple product launch, it’s an attractive, cosmopolitan city... at least by Texas’ standards. Like most cities, there’s also an ugly underbelly, with 20% of its population living below the poverty line.
Into this community in 1991 strode two entrepreneurial teachers, one from New York City. Like the founders before them, they had a practical swamp to dredge and very little reasons to suggest this was the right place to do it. But they followed their instincts with some big ideas and, although they didn’t know it yet, they were destined to set up a modern Spartan agoge from scratch.
In Part 2 of this blog, we looked at the agoge precedent – that from the age of seven Spartans taught their children how to be adults, that neither our culture nor school systems do this, and yet science shows us that neurologically children are ready and that seven is a pretty good age to start.
In contrast, our society promotes a protected life for kids, hoping that by minimizing or delaying their exposure to certain things we develop good citizens. This makes sense. I don’t want my kids exposed to pain, disease, the Saw movie franchise, Big Macs, foul-mouthed hooligans, or rampant sexual innuendo… hell, quite a lot of things. In fact, I don’t want my kids exposed to anything that might sully the absolute perfection of their little lives.
The problem with what I want, as a dad, is that it isn’t always good for my kids. For instance, the human immune system’s ability to develop antibodies tails off as we age. Antibodies are the cells that ward off disease, one reason why vaccines are given to children and not adults. It is genuinely good for them (from about 30 lbs).
The parents that are forever sterilizing their counters or prevent them from eating food that’s been on the ground are unwittingly weakening their kids’ immune systems. Kids need germs! Of course, we understand the motive – who wants a sick and miserable child? And the companies that sell these cleansers are curiously absent in mentioning the biological sabotage they’re promoting. Their ads play on the emotions of parents, especially mothers. Yet the simple fact is that when we, as loving parents, are guided by our emotions when dealing with germs we sometimes hinder the development of their immune systems.
It’s not just their biological development that needs provocation to develop. And I believe it’s this void that’s a pretty good reason why we have the levels of apathy, depression and obesity in young people that we discussed in Part 1.
So why do we have this emotionally led and protective approach to raising our children in the first place?
For this, we must visit Dr Benjamin Spock and his book, Baby and Child Care, published in 1946. Its central tenet said, for the first time ever, it was ok for mothers to love their children - mothers should listen to their instincts.
What’s extraordinary to our modern ears is that this was a revolutionary idea less than 70 years ago. Until that time, the more common refrain of parenting was, “spare the rod, spoil the child.” Spanking was not only positively encouraged, but childcare in general was impersonal and regimented. Mothers loved their children, of course, but Old Wives Tales held that this love was a weakness, bound to produce fat, lazy and downbeat children.
Dr Spock rode in to the rescue of anxious mothers. He taught parents to treat each child as an individual, and pay heed to their emotions by catering to their desires. For Dr Spock, promoting standards of behavior or instilling expectations into them was a form of manipulation. Children should be free to develop however is best for them.
Western society largely adopted the ideas promoted by Dr Spock, and his book is easily the best selling book on childcare of all time. It is with some irony that we now face widespread apathy, depression and obesity in children – the very thing the mothers who criticized Dr Spock predicted would happen.
Personally, I don’t think a return to pre-Spock parenting is the answer, but I’m also deeply skeptical of basing my parenting technique on a child’s emotional feedback. Everything I’ve learned in life outside of parenting suggests that a) things I don’t want are often good for me; b) my mood is a horrible barometer of right-ness and c) having standards often raises performance.
The agoge seems to have been an ancient way to raise standards. So the challenge was whether this modern agoge in Houston could effectively raise the standards for a group of kids despite our culture’s broad adoption of Dr Spock’s ideas?
Before we return to the agoge, let’s look at their challenge. Instead of dredging the physical swamp of Houston, our neo-Spartans were dredging the swamp of American education. Instead of creating warriors, their agoge was meant to create college students. See, these pioneers confronted an American tragedy – that despite its freedom and affirmative action programs, if you were a black or Hispanic kid from the wrong neighborhood, you had virtually no chance of climbing out of the gutter. Despite federal programs and billions of dollars – the average child from these communities had a greater chance of going to prison than college. Even after tripling the money spent over the last three decades, children born into poverty had a higher chance of living in poverty as an adult than their parents. This problem was getting worse and, despite lots of effort, nothing had worked.
In 1991, this began to change. Two recent college graduates, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, joined a program called Teach for America. This program connected recent college graduates, many of whom might be destined for lucrative careers in banking or law or technology, with under-funded school systems for a 2 year teaching stint. It was the kind of altruistic program that is often imagined, but rarely gets off the ground. Mike and Dave went to Houston.
Once they’d completed their two years, they had a vision for a different kind of school. The Houston school board was skeptical, so the pair had to go knocking door-to-door to recruit their first students. It you’re interested to know more, watch this link– it’s one of those really lovely, inspirational stories.
Fast-forward 20 years and our two Spartan educators have become world-renowned. Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin set up a school called KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), and although they don’t call it an agoge, it has been an extraordinary success. It now has 109 schools in 20 states educating 32,000 students. They are all free, state-run schools, located in the lowest-income areas of the cities they serve, and their admittance is based solely on a lottery – no cherry picking of the brightest students. Over 95 percent of their students are African American or Hispanic/Latino, almost 30% have English as a second language, and more than 80% come from homes that receive financial support from the state. These kids have all the normal baggage you expect in disadvantaged communities; while many are from stable, happy homes that happen to be poor, there are lots that are from broken, abusive, single-parent or otherwise challenged homes.
Within this framework, these KIPP schools are among the best performing schools in the country. Not just state-run schools. They routinely out-perform the finest private schools money can buy. A jaw-dropping 95% of their students get admitted to an American university, and because of their financial situation, many of them receive a free ride scholarship.
The story is one of breathtaking beauty, and I encourage any interested reader to watch this link, this link or this one to learn more. But this blog is about parenting, not education, so let’s look at what this has to do with middle class kids and their parents.
To answer that question, we have to look briefly at how they’ve achieved these results and its, I suspect, unintentional homage to its Spartan agoge predecessors. KIPP schools operate from 7:30am – 5:00pm, six days a week. It is a total immersion process. It requires a life choice into which the entire family commits – there is even a signed contract for both the children and the parents! The homework keeps children busy until 10 or 11pm, when they collapse in their beds for a few hours sleep. They expect an incredibly high standard of behavior; hell, even Spartan kids might find it a bit Spartan! The utterly overwhelming indoctrination of KIPP students creates a modern day aura of the ancient system that produced the legendary Spartan warrior.
You’ll quickly notice what a complete departure this is from Dr Spock’s approach. The children are not asked what they think. They are told the minimum that is expected of them, and treated as if they’re capable of it. Every single child, in every single year, is expected to do well. And they do.
Numerous observers have lauded the system, its founders and the extraordinary teachers who contribute to the story, and rightly so. They’ve praised how the KIPP program works, and what the schools achieve.
I think there’s an additional story here, one that goes to explain why KIPP is so effective when others aren’t, and that can help you and I become better parents, and it’s probably not the one you think.
The easy message to take is to that we must have high standards in our homes and families. Makes sense. But I think that’s incomplete.
To explain why, let’s look at some upper-income schools where they have high standards, without the results. In his brilliant documentary, Waiting for Superman, David Guggenheim tracks the results of Woodside High School in Redwood City, CA. In the film, Mr Guggenheim shows how Woodside is reflective of most upper-income high schools. The average home price in its catchment area in 2010 was $1M. Woodside was ranked by Newsweek in the top 6% of American High Schools. At Woodside they have amazing facilities and very few problems with the police; students are well-behaved, mostly, and the vast majority go to college. However, they are inculcated with Dr Spock’s view that choices should be led by the child’s dreams and desires.
Therefore, as insecure teenagers, many are taking courses that leave them ill-prepared for college. Due to streaming, which places the highest-achieving students in separate classes, and sends the message to the rest of the student body that they’re less capable, many students don’t think they’re clever enough for advanced math and science. KIPP proves this is rubbish – 95% of their inner-city kids are doing it. But these kids, in a wealthy, educated community, aren’t. They are recommended that they take courses to ‘improve their confidence’, or what we called an ‘easy-A’.
Once they arrive to college, according to a board of California University officials, only 32 out of 100 students from the top 10% of high schools are intellectually prepared for college courses. Almost 60% have to take remedial courses on their arrival! So this story is only partly about standards. It’s also about which standards are chosen.
It still doesn’t fully explain why kids with successful, college-educated parents and an amazing school resource at their disposal are aiming so low. Why are companies like Apple, Oracle and Microsoft being forced to recruit from India and China? Because the American and British counterparts aren’t qualified to do the job. Understanding why the American and British children think they’re performing well, while doing poorly compared to the Indian and Chinese kids, requires one more story.
For the final part of this puzzle, we return east to more troubled communities. A recent study of poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh tracked a variety of factors. They compared crime rates, divorce rates, single-parent homes, church attendance, abusive family situations, alcoholism, parental involvement with homework and reading, parental discipline style and a partridge in a pear tree.
While doing this, they noticed that in some neighborhoods, there was almost no crime, none of the black-male-teenager-in-prison syndrome. In the past, most studies had been focused on the problem, but these scientists looked more deeply at these good neighborhoods where nobody was going to prison. Why and how was this happening?
What they found was shocking. The single, solitary factor as to whether a child from any community was likely to go to prison was whether other kids in his school were going to prison. This outweighed every other variable. Nothing else was even statistically significant! This is so mind-blowingly big – allow me to spell it out.
Compare two kids. The first child is black, from an alcoholic, drug-addicted, single-parent family in which that child is abused. No future, right? We know this don’t we? The second is also black, from a loving home where the parents are married, go to church every Sunday, and help the child with his homework daily. What this study found was, if the first child is in a low-crime community, and the second kid is in a high-crime community, the second is much more likely to go to prison. Whether your friends are breaking the law has a much bigger impact than anything your parents do. Nothing else even comes close.
And here, finally, we come to the uniting lesson from all three examples – the impact of our kids’ peer groups. Clearly, the standards set in the KIPP schools are amazing and produce amazing results, but the standards are only part of the equation. The kids themselves are in a classroom of other kids going through the same thing, so high standards combined with a supportive peer group proves to be a bigger factor than the troubling household situations these kids endure when they return home at the end of the day.
In Woodside, the kids have highly-educated, successful parents who teach them to have high standards. But these standards are inspired by Spockian beliefs, and a peer group which supports limiting beliefs (unlike at KIPP), so the kids aim low and are shocked to find how unprepared they are later in life.
Finally, in Philadelphia, no matter what home life is provided by the parents, no matter what the parents do, if you happen to be in a high-crime community, you’re up to 10x more likely to go to prison.
As a dad, I’d always thought I was clearly a bigger impact on my kids than their peer group. I knew peer pressure was a big deal, but as Jabba the Hut might say, only for weak-minded fools. Kids may smoke a cigarette because someone else was doing it, but they wouldn’t be smarter because other kids were smarter, they wouldn’t have lower expectations of themselves because others had low expectations of themselves, and they certainly wouldn’t commit a crime because someone else was doing it.
However, the standard and type of behavior expected in a child’s peer community seems to have a far bigger impact on that child’s choices and the kind of life they have than any of us would have thought. Disturbingly, it seems to have an even bigger impact than the kind of home we create.
Growing up, I went to a state school. My plan was for my children to go to state school. Because of these studies, we've moved them to private school.
Growing up, I went to a state school. My plan was for my children to go to state school. Because of these studies, we've moved them to private school.
Part 4 of this blog is going to examine a series of studies into this very issue. Where is parental influence biggest, and where does it wane? When is it pointless to exert our authority, and what can we do to make sure that the authority we choose to exert has maximum impact?
For this study we’re going to meet an elderly and chronically ill woman who, by all rights, should have never made any impact on serious thinking about raising kids. She failed out of graduate school, had no university system to support her research and was unable to carry out any studies into her theories. But I think you’ll agree that making an impact on ideas about children is exactly what Judith Rich Harris has managed to do.
