Culture and Success on Tests and in School
[Please read Part I of this post first, and note asterisked aside about the Bell Curve book, below, lest you scorn or doubt my moral fiber.]
In Part I, the roles of nature and nurture were parsed. Although the children of professors and other affluent professionals enjoy a favorable nurture, in the form of affluence and higher socio-economic position, I argued that on the probabilities, they would also enjoy a favorable nature, in the form of inherited personal qualities conducive to success on tests and in school.
The remainder of Part I proceeded as a classic “third variable” argument, in which I disassembled the bivariate correlation between parent socio-economic status and child performance on the SAT. I proposed a third variable, correlated with each, that rendered their measured association moot. Heritable personal qualities of the parent, I argued, could explain both parent socio-economic status, and child performance on the SAT.
Here I want to begin by splitting nurture in two. Affluence, education, and social position are one aspect of nurture, and were the focus in Part I; but culture—habits of mind and heart—is a separate aspect, and will be the focus here in Part II. The two aspects are far from independent, in the world; but they are readily separable, in concept.
Consider again the child of the professor married to the engineer. She observes each parent to wake early, via an alarm clock; and often, to work long hours. She observes that much of that work is done seated at a computer; and that virtually all of it is performed at a desk. During leisure hours, she often observes Mom and Dad parked in front of a book, magazine or newspaper (or tablet or audiobook, if the parents are young enough).
After the child enters school, she senses their pleasure whenever she picks up a book on her own. As she gets homework, particularly math homework, she absorbs osmotically her parents’ interest and excitement: math is cool, and important, she learns. As she earns good grades, which she is likely to do (if only because of grade inflation), she picks up on her parents’ praise and warm regard.
She learns that school is a place where she wins. School feels like home.
You don’t need professor and engineer parents to get to that same place. The child of a DMV clerk, with a high school degree, married to an office manager with a two year AA degree, will be exposed to many of the same attitudes in her early environment. But her family is unlikely to have the same engagement with school, with books, and especially with math as do the families headed by professor and engineer, attorney and doctor, MBA and scientist. Nor will the clerk have been as successful in school, or as comfortable there; and that too will be conveyed to his children. Only if his child benefits from the random shuffle of genetics, and is born with high native academic aptitude, will she get to the same place as the engineer’s child, who was born with only moderately high aptitude, but benefitted from an outstanding cultural milieu.
*I left out an intermediary group: the white collar worker with a four year degree, married to another individual with a four year degree—perhaps the clerk’s manager, married to the manager of a bigger office. I believe them to be in all respects intermediate between the professor-engineer family and the clerk family; hence, uninteresting compared to the contrast between the clerk’s family and the next group.
Next, drop down further: consider the auto mechanic married to a store cashier. Except, this will not be a drop down in socio-economic status; this will be a drop away from deskwork culture. The mechanic and cashier may earn more money than the clerk and office manager; quite a bit more, if the clerk’s spouse works only part time, or intermittently. But the mechanic’s daughter will not grow up in white collar culture. Her parents will not regularly read for leisure; she will not see them spend hour after hour at a desk. Dad will be slumped in front of the television, tired to the bone; Mom will be in motion about the house. School was probably not a place of winning and triumph for her parents. This child will be expected to do her homework and turn it in on time—you do your job!—but no one at home will convey to her, in language and deed, that math is cool.
Finally, drop down closer to the bottom: to the chronically unemployed, to the broken family, to the school dropout hanging at the street corner. Or go rural to a county where physical labor and extractive industries predominate. In either case, school will be distant from daily life, and unimportant, and often incompetently run. You have to assume the street corner or the mine, and family problems, to get to the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder in America; two steadily employed parents in a suburb, at whatever jobs, will leave you somewhere up in the middle. High native intelligence is always possible, here at the bottom, no less than up on the country estate; all humans share in that birthright.* But, absent cultural support, and two decades of daily fostering, at home and in school, how well will that native intelligence fare when faced with an SAT exam, to be taken over four hours at a desk, designed to probe the most minute conceptual distinctions?
*This was the major error of the infamous Bell Curve book: the assumption that raw birth intelligence varied systematically by socio-economic and ethnic grouping (debunking here). Raw birth intelligence does vary through a substantial range; but it varies through the human range. What varies socio-economically (and ethnically) is the nurture provided that native equipment, in social setting and in culture. No test ever captures birth intelligence alone, but only the conjunct of nature and nurture.
Next, a caveat: every statement in this essay has the tacit preface, “on average,” and “ceteris paribus.” If the DMV clerk married a schoolteacher’s daughter, it’s not the same family culture; and if the mechanic was forced to drop out of high school to support his widowed Mom, and has since acquired six certifications for the repair of automobile electronic systems, it’s not the same family. Likewise, if the auto mechanic were to be a recent immigrant, who had been a technician or engineer back in the home country.
When critics decry the correlation between socio-economic status and SAT score, what they protest is unfair advantage: they see a rich kid who bought his way into a strong performance, without earning it; and a poor kid shut out because he couldn’t afford, as it were, the bus ticket over to the testing center.
The gist of this essay: how shallow and over-simplified is that model! Under the simple model, we could throw money at the one, and tax the other, and put them on an equal footing. Or just abolish the role of testing in college admissions—then everyone would automatically be on an equal footing again. (No one has to take tests in college, do they?)
Nonsense. Underlying the delusion is a fantasy of pervasive social mobility, a peculiarly American illusion. Everyone came over on the boat with nothing but the clothes on their backs, right? Land was there for the taking (well, they did take it from the indigenes). Anyone willing to work hard could go in one generation from destitution to landed gentry. And any child with enough gumption to go West could repeat that journey, from having nothing to owning something. Complete social mobility: everybody moves up.
It was never true, and it isn’t true today. But it’s a durable myth.
The difficult facts: (1) socio-economic status in the parent’s generation rests partly on ability, favorably nourished by decent socio-economic status in the grandparent’s generation; and (2) partly on heritable personality qualities of grit and drive; and (3) partly on cultural proclivities, married to heritable temperament, which favor desk work and cerebral focus: things you can do indoors and sitting still. When these factors are all present, the parents tend to do as well or better as the grandparents, and set the grandchildren up to do as well or better yet; who set the great grandchildren up the same, on and on. Social position is sticky. Some students are set up to succeed in school and career, others less so.
Conversely, remove any one of these factors, and the whole engine stalls. If the grandparents are dirt poor and uneducated, the kids struggle. Maintaining employment, for their children, the second generation, becomes enough; not much education is expected. Which means the grandchildren in the third generation struggle to maintain a decent living; which leaves the great grandchildren stuck in the same place, in the lower middle on the odds, but never far above the floor. Poverty produces poverty of (book) culture, which leaves native academic ability to wither, unsupported by either income or culture. Generation after generation is not set up for success in school.
There will still be mobility; there are always heroes, children of unusual ability who break the mold and catapult themselves to the top of the heap in a single generation, and then marry well enough that the family can be sustained in that new position. But these are heroes, exceptions.
Next, cross this generational dynamic with a societal dynamic: the ever-greater socio-economic returns to book learning and to a cerebral temperament. Native intelligence is a universal human endowment, wired deep in the DNA. But the proclivity to sit still at a desk, and focus all one’s time and effort onto the tiny symbols on the page there, and do it again tomorrow and the next day—and enjoy it and be nourished by it—is that proclivity universal across the human DNA? Or was that proclivity, in the groups and extended families where it exists, forged in history over centuries, and transmitted and reinforced culturally, generation after generation—or not at all?
The Immigrant Confusion
“My grandparents came over from _____ in 19xx, with nothing but the clothes on their back, fleeing persecution. They landed in the worst slum of _____ City, and were scorned by the respectable citizens. But nevertheless they put my father, aunts and uncles through high school, and my cousins and I are now successful college graduates. It was the same for all the families in my neighborhood. So why can’t _____ (=ethnic-group-to-be-disparaged) pull themselves out of that same slum today? What’s wrong with (ethnic-group-to-be-disparaged)? Maybe it’s a genetic fault with (ethnic group to be disparaged) …”
No it is not genetic difference or fate. There will often be a huge cultural difference between a European or Asian immigrant, temporarily impoverished, but literate and heir to a developed culture hundreds of years old, versus a native born member of a group chained to rural poverty and illiteracy for those same hundreds of years. No comparison. No cultural comparison, that is.
We are not free from history; and history takes a long time to build and set.
The Intractability of Culture
Deskwork didn’t use to be so pervasive. Reading, writing, and arithmetic weren’t always the royal road toward a good job and financial success. Sitting still for hours wasn’t always so necessary for advancement.
The mechanic doesn’t want to work at a desk. The coal miner never has. The dropout on the corner despises the notion: that’s not living.
Sitting still, do reading, writing, and figuring, is one part cultural, one part nature. When the parents have the temperament for it, and succeed at it, their children receive a double bonus, inheriting the temperament, and soaking up the habits of mind and heart which that temperament supports.
In medieval France, once a knight had built a castle he was nearly impossible to dislodge, whether by king or peasant. If he had a male heir, that son easily held the castle, and passed it on to his son. The peasants stayed peasants; there was no way up or out. The lord in his castle was better fed and better housed than the peasants below; his son was taller and stronger, with the leisure to train at the sword. No possibility of social mobility there.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called it “reproduction.” Parents attempt to reproduce their social position for their children, and if successful, their children go on to reproduce it for the grandchildren. Over and over.
Absent revolution or conquest from without (1789, 1066, 476), the well-off groups in society can stay well off, for as many generations as that society endures. Social position reproduces.
Immobility is never total. There is always Brownian motion, a churning at the margins. Maybe the knight does not produce a male heir; maybe the heir is killed in war.
*Even in the knightly caste system of the Middle Ages, attrition has been estimated at 20% per generation (see Dewald, p.17). At that rate, half the nobility disappears after three generations.
Entrance to the upper group is similarly haphazard. A particularly hale peasant becomes a military retainer in the knight’s service; his son eats well and marries well; the grandson grows up with the sword; in the next war, another knight is made from that first man’s grandson.
Switching to contemporary times: one day the endless shuffling of the genome produces a very bright kid with unusual pluck. Despite his broken home in the slums, one grandmother had been a teacher, and against all odds, this kid goes to and makes it through college. His child will grow up in the suburbs; his family line gets a fresh start. If his children go to college too, and marry other college graduates, the family will stay up; their new social position will reproduce.
Meanwhile, a family which had been “up” for generations dies without issue; or the last scion marries poorly; or mental illness strikes in its random way. An opening is created for the bright kid from the slums.
But absent these random shocks and sports, families reproduce their position, through an intractable combination of nature and nurture, favorable position but favorable culture too.
If you are a parent, would you want it to be any different? If you have been fortunate, you want the same for your children. You want to reproduce your position. You don’t want your children to start at point zero.
But if the supply of “up” positions is limited, there can be no mobility up without mobility down. And if most families who have an “up” position today succeed in raising their children to follow them, then there can be little upward social mobility, net.
Social position is different from economic well-being. We can all live better in narrow material terms, this decade versus last, this generation versus the prior one. And something like that rising tide has been seen over the past 200 years, for the first time in human history (Deidre McCloskey writes eloquently on this topic; people quite naturally forget how incredibly richer they are than their great-great-great-grandparents, and she provides a needed corrective).
But we can’t all move up to better social position: that’s the Lake Woebegone fallacy, where all the children are above average.
You may not be convinced; you may still be wedded to a model of unjust privilege, in which affluent kids grab way more than their share of slots in elite colleges, plum jobs, nice neighborhoods, and all the rest.
If so, you might benefit from the thought experiment in Part III of this post. What would total social mobility entail, in a society like 21st century America?
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