I have been trying to untangle and decompress everything that I have learned from my first year on the front lines of a public school in a challenging neighborhood. The first thing that comes to mind as a lesson learned is the importance of a secret I didn’t know I knew until this year: The Code of Power in American society.
From day one I have wondered what the purposes of the public school system ought to be. What is it that we really need students to know, understand, and be able to do at the end of each successive grade level, and finally upon exiting the public school system? While I don’t think any short answer is sufficient; independent, functioning, upstanding, contributing citizens in American society is certainly one of the products that our public schools aim to produce. There are many schools that are systematically failing in this regard year after year. Of course, the question why is an important one, one that desperately needs an answer. I have read several enlightening authors and thinkers who highlight The Code of Power as a key lever in probing these questions.
From my reading and own ideas on the topic, here are four fundamentals about the Code of Power followed by three problems I have observed this year that I believe trace their cause to these four ideas (borrowing and adapting mainly from Lisa Delpit).
1) There are codes that govern how we interact with each other.
2) The degree to which we know these codes of interaction is proportional to our ability to get what we want.
3) These codes are culture and context specific; they reflect an amalgamation of the beliefs, tastes, habits, values, and traditions of those in power in any given locality or institution.
4) To ignore or to be ignorant of these codes is to perpetuate the societal or institutional status quo. Those in power are often oblivious to the existence of these codes because they learned them gradually and inexplicitly and because understanding of these codes is widespread enough to be assumed ubiquitous.
Problem #1: How authority is attained and communicated
While teaching summer school in LA’s Watts neighborhood, I had a very rough first few days with a tall 14 year old African American student named Keiwan. I felt that he simply had no respect for me as a person or teacher. I complained to an advisor that Keiwan usually did exactly the opposite of what I asked him. My advisor replied by asking if I ever yelled at him, I responded that of course I did not. He recommended that I yell at him to show that I am an authoritative person. The next day when Keiwan refused to stop talking after several requests I shouted “Keiwan shut up and get on task!” Much to my surprise, he did exactly that.
First this highlights the different understanding that Keiwan and I had of how one attains authority. I feel that I have authority in the classroom because I am the teacher. Similarly I think the police officer who pulls me over has authority because he is an officer, and the President has authority because he is the president. Keiwan’s cultural code held a different rule for how authority is distributed. In his mind the authoritative person has authority, thus the authoritative person gets to be the teacher, or the officer, or the president because they are authoritative. Once I showed Keiwan that I am an authoritative person, then he was happy to co-operate. In a twisted irony, Keiwan’s code frankly makes a lot more sense from an anthropological lens, but his code isn’t the one that governs power on main street or high street in America.
This anecdote also illustrates how the American code communicates authority. Our American culture of power is structured to de-emphasize power through indirect communication. Consider the way we make requests and even commands… in my inbox of emails from my superiors asking me to do one thing or another here are the words used: “maybe you could”, “perhaps”, “when you have time”, “it would be a good idea”, “If I were you I would”, “when it is convenient”, etc. These are coded commands. As early as I can remember my mother said to me “What do you think about cleaning up your toys” of course she didn’t want my thoughts on cleaning up, she was de-emphasizing the power inherent in commanding me to clean up my toys. The codes are different however in Keiwan’s house. His mother is likely to have told him “Boy, clean up your toys this minute!” Ironically, both of our mothers meant exactly the same thing. My mother used a code the de-emphasized the power issue at hand, while Keiwan’s mother probably used a coded phrase that emphasized this power. This doesn’t mean that my mother loved me more or less than Keiwan’s loves him, it is simply a different code. The problem for Keiwan is that most of the teachers, principals, public officials, employers, and customer service reps that he will interact with will use the same code my mother did. If Keiwan doesn’t learn the Codes of Power, he simply won’t be able to get things that he wants from the aforementioned groups of people.
Problem #2: Teaching critical thinking and problem solving without basic skills
This problem is certainly worsened and perhaps even caused in part by the previous one. The culture of power in America is uncomfortable exercising or acknowledging that issues of power are enacted in everyday interactions, thus we hide it behind indirect communication. This spills over to our teaching and classrooms, where a lot of our teaching is very top down. Starting from reasonably early ages, although admittedly not right away, our teaching focuses on problem solving and critical thinking much more than on direct instruction of skills. While no longer widely popular, the whole language approach that taught my generation to read exemplifies this idea. This program taught students to read by reading, first with the teacher, then in small groups, and finally independently. There were no phonics lessons or skills lessons, rather these were taught indirectly. For many students this worked well but for many, especially minority and immigrant populations, (read those less versed in the current American culture of power) it didn’t work at all. Top down indirect teaching has produced high school seniors who can’t read, write, or perform basic arithmetic operations – the very skills our culture of power most values and discriminates on. Instead many graduates have learned to problem solve and think critically but since they don’t have the skills required to participate in the culture of power their logical alternative is to turn to the underworld where the barriers for cultural entry and the codes of power are different and more familiar for many.
Anecdotally, I was baffled at first as to why my brightest thinkers and best problem solvers in class seemed to be those most attracted to and recruited into gangs. I quickly discovered that most of these students were lacking the most elementary reading and writing skills, and thus felt like failures in school. The underworld gives a sense of validation to their intelligence despite their inability to learn the building blocks of the Culture of Power.
Problem #3 Rules to basic societal interactions will wait for another article, as this one is getting rather long. Instead I want to address a simple solution: Direct, explicit teaching to students about different codes, and how to code switch from one to the other. To survive in their neighborhoods my students need to be well versed in their own codes and cultures of power, but to survive at school, they need to learn a new code. They will have a much better chance of learning it if it is taught to them explicitly. I teach my students how to shake hands, how to appropriately express dissent, how to fill out a job application, how authority is distributed in the culture of power, etc.
