Baa, Ram, Ewe

Coming soon to a theater near you, Lisa Delpit's adaptation of Babe.  Here's a preview: 

Farmer Hoggett:  "That'll do pig."
Babe:  "You know why 'that'll do'?  Because I got the damn password from the sheep!  That's right.  Otherwise you, with your veiled, "liberal" herding commands, would have looked like a moron in front of all these people.  Do you really think that by treating me like a sheep dog I was all of the sudden able perform like a sheep dog?  No.  Fly ran all the way home to the farm to get the secret password so I could do it.  You don't want to acknowledge that you have the power in this relationship, do you?  It's ok, you're supposed to have the power, and I'm fine with it.  Stop thinking you're going to offend someone and just tell me explicitly how to herd sheep.  It actually makes me feel worse when you attempt to deemphasize your power and act progressively, because it makes me feel like I'm missing something that I should already know.  It's makes me feel inferior, not equal.  I don't know where I'd be if I didn't have that password.  My guess is the dinner table."

Delpit argues in The Silenced Dialogue, that a "culture of power" exists in classrooms and that, "if you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of taht culture makes acquiring power easier."  The problem is, she continues, "members of any culture transmit information implicitly to co-members.  However, when implicit codes are attempted across cultures, communication frequently breaks down.  Each cultural group is left saying, 'why don't those people say what they mean?' as well as, 'what's wrong with them, why don't they understand?'"
Delpit also says that even when those well-intentioned "liberal" taechers, swho strive towards maximum individual freedom and autonomy, attempt to deemphasize power they, "remove the very explictness that the child needs to understand the rules of the new classroom culture." 
Not all students go home after school and have the same experiences.  They may have very caring parents who "would transmit those codes (of the culture of power) to their children, (but instead) they transmit another culture that children must learn at home in order to survive in their communities."  These families don't fit into the "priviliged (as Johnson would call it) ideology" (Delpit addresses "whiteness" here) and those that are priviliged need to realize that (my favorite quote in the reading from Massey, Scott, and Dornbusch, p 45) "oppression can arise out of warmth, friendliness, and concern."  It will be painful for (us) "liberal" teachers but we need to "learn to be vulnerable enough to allow our world to turn upside down in order to allow the realities of others to edge themselves into our consciousness," and have meaningful interactions and conversations with ALL teachers in order to balance the culuture of power that exists in classrooms.  Good intentions are not enough. 



***the "scientist" (i'm not really a scientist) in me feels I should point out a rebuttal by Stephen Jay Gould-- Harvard zoology professor, author and supreme evolutionary biologist --to The Bell Curve (referenced by Delpit on page 31 (I assume)).  An excerpt from the article "Curveball" published in teh New Yorker, November 28, 1994:  He writes, "Herrnstein and Murray's second claim, the lightning rod for most commentary extends the argument for innate cognitive stratification to a claim that racial differences in IQ are mostly determined by genetic causes—small difference for Asian superiority over Caucasian, but large for Caucasians over people of African descent. This argument is as old as the study of race, and is most surely fallacious." and, "The authors omit facts, misuse statistical methods, and seem unwilling to admit the consequence of their own words."

GK