Sex, and Sex Education

I'm reading Kristin Luker's book When Sex Goes to School (Amazon link), which reviews the history of sex education in the US all the way back to the "social hygiene" movement of the early 20th century, but mostly focuses on what's been happening since the sexual revolution of the 60s. She is a sociologist who spent years interviewing people in towns having controversy about sex ed in their schools, and she does a good job of listening and representing various people's positions.

One of her purposes is to try to understand the differences between sexual "liberals"--who tend to favor inclusive, extensive sex education--and "conservatives," who tend to favor abstinence-only education. A section I've just read talks about the different hopes and expectations each group tends to have for their children, and how this shapes their preferences. For instance, conservatives tend to expect their children to marry relatively early. On the other hand, liberals often didn't marry and have kids until their late 20s or early 30s. One reason they are uncomfortable with the idea of expecting young people to wait until marriage to have sex is that, because they also expect their kids to start a career, "get to know themselves," and have adventures before they marry, asking them to wait until their wedding night condemns them to a decade or more of adulthood during which they have no outlet for their sexuality.

I like that Luker portrays people's doubts, internal conflicts, and uncertainties as well, because, as a parent, I have plenty of those. On the one hand, I'm a classic liberal as Luker describes them: David and I got together when I was 27, and had our first baby when I was 35; I believe in more than one healthy way for people to express their sexuality; I tend to think that anything that happens between consenting adults who are ethically concerned for their own and each other's physical and emotional well-being is probably OK for them (even if what they're doing makes me want to avert my gaze and cry, "Oh, my heavens, no!"); I think that a well-informed child is a child who is better prepared to make healthy decisions.

On the other hand... I am concerned when I watch TV and movies that present teenagers having sex as the next logical step after "liking each other," with no presentation of it being a decision they had to make, or something one or both of them might have doubts about. I'm ambivalent about sex education in schools because I suspect that no matter how they did it, I'd be unhappy with it. I actually share with sexual conservatives the idea that parents should be the ones to teach their kids about sex, I'm concerned about schools taking on too much ("mission creep"), and I'm absolutely sure that no matter how hard a school tried for the liberal mission in sex ed, something in there would fall short or offend me or feel like them telling my kids something I didn't want my kids to hear.

I'm also the somewhat-hypocritical parent who wouldn't necessarily want my own kids to be as sexually active as I was. I remember when my niece got to be 13 or 14, looking at her and thinking about how young she seemed, and how uncomfortable I would be with the idea of her doing some of the things my friends and I were doing at that age.

I recently came across a survey of sexual attitudes and experience among Americans, and was surprised to learn that I've had about 2.5 times the number of sexual partners as the average American woman. I never felt all that promiscuous, but when I think that I packed all that activity into the eight years between when I lost my virginity and when I got involved with David, it does seem a bit excessive. The list of "people I'd just as soon, in retrospect, not have slept with" is long enough that I'd like my kids to be a bit more cautious.

(I remind myself of an episode of Roseanne in which Jackie realizes she's had an average of two lovers a year since she was 16--and that this means she's slept with about 40 guys. My number isn't that high, but they do add up over time!)

On the one hand, I wouldn't want my kids to have as much bad sex with frat boys as I did. Or as much second-date sex with women they're only going to end up going on four dates with. On the other hand, I want them to know that bad sex with an asshole isn't the end of the world, and that no choice they make about having or not having sex makes them bad people. And I want them to know that experimenting and making mistakes is part of how people learn about their sexuality and what they want from relationships. At least, making mistakes seems to have been a really big part of the learning process for me.

The thing that conservative and liberal parents have in common is that they seem, like me, to want things to be easier and smoother for their kids. Some conservative moms, for instance, got that way after being abandoned by male lovers when they got pregnant, and they want their sons to be more ethical and their daughters not to be left holding the bag; some liberal parents talk about feeling like growing up in a more conservative setting gave them twisted and damaging views of sex that they had to overcome in order to have satisfying sexual relationships. In this, I think, we're all the same: we want the path to healthy, satisfying adult sexual relationships to be a safer and simpler one for our kids than it was for us. To all of us I say with loving sarcasm: Good luck with that.

Yes, folks, I know there was a blank post up for awhile--it accidentally happened when I started my draft, and not only could I not see the blank post when I looked at my blog, but I couldn't figure out how to delete it without losing my draft. Sorry.

The Explosive Child

I recently recommended the book The Explosive Child to a friend who has one, and then got a copy from the library and re-read most of it because I wanted to make sure I'd recommended the right book.

The subtitle of the book really fits Eric (and me, when I was a kid, I have realized. Sorry, Mom): A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children. This book has been far and away the most useful resource David and I have had (besides unschooling books and discussion lists) for working productively with Eric on these issues.

Most books about dealing with strong-willed kids (and believe me, I've read them all) focus on discipline as a tool: you make a list of expectations, you create sticker charts, you develop a system of rewards and punishments, you assert your will consistently all the time until your kid learns there's no point in resisting.

I can't imagine.

I have a kid with so much "counter-will" that recently when I suggested--gently--he do something, he said to me, "Aww, Mom, I was about to do that, but now that you told me to, I can't! [huffs and sits down with arms crossed] Now I have to sit here until I forget you told me to do it and it can be my idea again." Adding additional discipline to the mix doesn't make things better; it just means he hardens his resistance and we fight more.

Ross Greene takes a different approach that is very welcome to me, and that, over the past few years, has really allowed Eric to blossom into in a kid who understands himself pretty well, who sees the value of being flexible, who very rarely gets "stuck" anymore, who can help us problem-solve. He has gone from a kid who wouldn't look at or talk to adults--or tolerate them talking to him--to a kid whose social skills I hear praised. He is good at creative problem-solving, and is often the one who comes up with the solution we choose when we're not in agreement about what to do.

Some of this is definitely developmental--the year he was seven he blossomed dramatically, and really began to be able to put into effect the stuff we'd been talking to him about and trying to do for the previous several years. But I suspect if we'd taken a more top-down, rewards-and-punishment, heavy discipline approach, as so many experts recommend, it would have been much harder for him. He might very well have hardened his resistance and continued with constant challenging behaviors.

So what is Ross Greene's approach?

First, he asks parents to accept this premise: That children will do well if they can. In other words, your kid isn't out to manipulate you or "get you" or make your life miserable. He's doing the best he can. This is absolutely contrary to most parenting theories, even "gentle" ones, which seem to assume that kids are a bundle of badness that will get out of control and ruin your life if you don't nip it in the bud. But it has been key to peaceful parenting for me and David, this idea that they're doing the best they can, and if they're "misbehaving," it's because they have a need they're trying to meet and they don't know a more functional way to meet that need.

Greene also suggests that it takes two to make a tantrum: it's not enough for a kid to be inflexible. The parent has to be, too. (I would only modify this to say, "In most cases, it takes two to make a tantrum." Really, every now and then one is coming like a summer storm and you just have to go to the cellar to wait it out and hope it doesn't pull the roof off the house.) He asks parents to consider whether it is more in their control to change themselves and their expectations and reactions, or to expect their five-year-old to.

The main tool he offers is the idea of apportioning your expectations for your kid into three "plans": Plan A is things you are just going to let go of for now, in the interest of reducing conflict. Plan C is things so important that you're willing to impose your will even if it means a tantrum. And Plan B are things you practice "collaborative problem-solving" on.

(I may have Plans A and C reversed...but you get the point.)

He encourages parents, especially in the early stages of dealing with things, to put as much as possible into Plan A. Things that are Plan A for us with Eric include: Changing clothes. Bathing. Trying to get him to try new foods. Going to group activities where someone is going to try to teach him something.

Plan C are things so important that you're willing to risk a tantrum: we generally limit this to life-threatening things ("No, you may not drink that hemlock!"). Off the top of my head, I cannot think of anything David and I routinely treat as a Plan C item.

Plan B is where we spend a lot of our time, working with him to find solutions that are respectful of his needs, the other kids', other people's, and ours. Plan B solutions might include things like us helping him brush his teeth when he's feeling tired and can't do it himself otherwise; agreeing that I'll do most of my errands on Saturday so he can stay home with his dad, if he'll go with me so I can get this one very important one taken care of today; agreeing that he doesn't have to take a whole bath to go to so-and-so's house, so long as he changes into a clean shirt and lets me brush his hair; agreeing to fix him an alternative to a dinner he doesn't like if he'll give me time to eat first.

I know--because they say so--that other parents often think I give in to Eric too much, or let him "get away" with things. To them I can only reply that they must not have a kid like him. I know that other kids are different because I have Carl, who is much more flexible and easy-going, and will actually do things when you tell him to, even if he doesn't really want to. "Okay, Mom," he'll say in a dejected voice, as he goes off to do whatever it is. So different! Had we wanted to use time-outs, we actually could have with Carl! He would have sat in the little chair or on the little rug or whatever! Not Eric. Oh, good Lord no. Never Eric.

Because I have Carl, I believe you when you tell me that X technique worked great with your kid. In return, please believe me when I tell you that it would be a disaster with Eric.

I cannot recommend this book and its approach strongly enough to any parent dealing with a kid like Eric. You won't get a transformed kid by next week, like so many discipline-based books promise. In our experience, it was more like, "Three long and challenging years to a blossoming child!" Which I understand never put a Ph.D. on the New York Times bestseller list. But the payoff is much greater. I think Eric has better self-esteem, feels more successful, and sees himself as an active partner with us because we took this approach. We also had more peaceful days along the way than we would have if we'd tried for more control.

I also would recommend it to parents who don't have a kid like Eric. Perhaps it will give such parents more sympathy for kids and parents like us; perhaps it will encourage them to withhold judgment. Also, considering what you're asking your child to do and your own tendency to want to be in control and assert your will, and how you respond to conflicts with your child, could be useful for any parent who wants a more peaceful and respectful relationship with his child.

(little thing in the interest of truth: Eric doesn't actually have "tantrums" per se. But I've used "tantrums" as a shorthand for a constellation of behaviors it would otherwise be too much of a derail to go into.)

A Little Musing about Race & Class

This post on pink science equipment for girls at Love Isn't Enough (formerly the Anti-Racist Parents blog) touches on the intersection of race and class, and the way that racial segregation is at least partly class-based segregation as well. It reminds me that I was thinking the other day about a book I read a few months ago, Paula Penn-Nasbrit's book Morning by Morning: How we Homeschooled Our African-American Sons to the Ivy League.

Penn-Nasbrit's book was fascinating to me because her family suffers from racism but has a great deal of class privilege. She and her husband both attended Ivy League schools after secondary education at elite prep schools; she comes from at least three generations of professors, lawyers, and doctors--one of her uncles was one of the lawyers who argued Brown v. The Board of Education before the Supreme Court. So when she talks about homeschooling her kids into Ivy League schools, she's not talking about someone like me doing that, someone who went to a highly-ranked state college but was only the second in the family to earn a bachelor's degree (dad was the first) and who would be in many ways culturally out of place at an Ivy League school. She and her husband grew up and lived in that environment; she was wanting to find places for her children in an educational culture she was already very familiar with.

On the other hand, it was primarily issues of racism at the private prep school her kids were attending that led her and her husband to decide to homeschool. The local public schools were not a good place for black children, and when they decided they could no longer stay with the private school, they didn't see other options.

Examples of the kinds of things they experienced included her being called on the rug for organizing a Back-to-School picnic for African-American families at the school; problems with her sons being blamed for problems they didn't create, or being held to higher standards of behavior than white students; and an administrator asking her what she was doing to provide "male role models" for her sons. She was taken aback; what did he mean? Turns out he assumed, because she was black, that she was a single mother.

She was concerned about how these assumptions and expectations would damage her boys and hold them back. So she decided to homeschool.

I wished Penn-Nasbrit had talked more about the complex intersection of class and race in her family's life; she didn't really tackle it in depth at all, and seemed in some ways as oblivious to her class privilege as she was sensitive to the careless racism of white people at the school. On the other hand, though, she describes her family's commitment, over several generations, to not just good education but the best education as a direct response to American racism, a deliberate decision made somewhere along the line not to settle for less than the very best.

Penn-Nasbrit's book was hard for me to read because as a parent and a homeschooler my values, my goals for my kids, and my expectations, are so different from hers--I would never push my kids academically, against their will, as hard as she did, and it was hard to read sometimes about the steps she took to get them to comply with her educational plan. At the same time, I think my willingness to be on the very relaxed end of the homeschooling continuum is partly an expression of how confident I feel of my place in middle-class culture--as was my own approach to college, which was very intellectual and liberal-education focused.

My dad, on the other hand, tends to see college as a really good vocational school where you can educate yourself into a good job that won't break your back and ruin your health, and my mom saw his college education as a means to being able to buy her kids shoes that fit and get their teeth fixed. Their very pragmatic approach to college reflects their own upbringings, and my dad's early adult years working as an auto mechanic and seeing the toll that work took on men's bodies as they aged.

So, even as I found Penn-Nasbrit's values and approach somewhat distasteful, I thought I understood something about why she was making the choices she did. If I were raising black boys, I think the insecurity of their position in American culture would be on my mind too--especially if I'd already seen them treated as if they were likely to explode into misbehavior if not carefully watched and tightly regulated.

Penn-Nasbrit also gave me a gift in one of those small, unexpected passages that opens things up. She was called to the school to talk about a problem with two of her sons, who were (I think) two years apart in age. It seems that the two of them were seeking each other out during recess, and when one was sent to the principal's office, the other went with him. She was told that her boys needed to seek friends outside their own family.

"Nonsense," she replied. "In a Black family, there is no such thing as siblings who are too close."

This was a fascinating tidbit for me. I have at times fretted over how close Eric and Carl are, even as I celebrate it, because I have this nagging notion that it is more "healthy" to socialize outside the family. I don't mean to suggest that I think the kids need no outside friends, but her matter-of-fact statement in favor of siblings being friends to each other reminded me of how culturally-bound my assumptions still are.

But a Bonnet Would Cover Up My Shaved Head

Got up this morning, played a little Animal Crossing in bed with the boys, and then made up my daunting to-do list for today and tomorrow. Extra-daunting because what I have really been wanting since I got back from my trip a week and a half ago is a day off, and there's no prospect of one until...well, until Yehva is a teenager, really. But in the current-world sense of "day off," until at the very earliest March 13. March 20 if David and I follow through on a casual plan to take the kids to Brickworld Indy.

So, having made the daunting list, I have decided to ignore it for the moment and write a blog post that has been taking shape in my mind for a few days.

I was poking around the links at QuakerQuaker the other day, and found my way to Quaker Jane's blog. She is a Quaker who wears plain dress, and I've read her before, but looking through her blog again reminded me of my own thinking about plain dress over the years.

I have been drawn to plain dress from time to time in the years I've been a Quaker. I know several men who wear, or have worn, plain dress. Not in my local meeting, but through my yearly meeting or from bumping into each other at FGC Gathering or FLGBTQC events. I don't personally know any women who wear plain dress.

Religious witness is one reason I've been attracted to the idea--being more visible in the world as a Quaker. I have really struggled over the years about how be present and visible as an individual Quaker with a religious conviction. That Quakers could and should be more visible in the world is not something I question much; I was once in a college classroom where the professor told the class that there were no more Quakers. Clearly our public relations arm has fallen down on the job.

I have also been drawn to plain dress as a clear statement that I have stepped outside mainstream fashion. Quaker Jane says--and I can't re-find the quote this morning but will slot it in if I come across it later--that when she wears plain dress to, say, her husband's business functions, people seem to understand that she is not "underdressed," but that she has stepped outside the whole system, and they seem to accept that.

In some sense, I do dress "plainly." I used to dress a little funky, but as I've gotten older and had kids, I find that I have even less time and patience for thinking about, buying, and maintaining a wardrobe than I had in my youth--and I never had much. So my closet tends to have a few pairs of pants in black and navy blue (and in the summer, lighter blue and maybe light khaki) pants, and about twice that many solid-colored shirts. I like bright colors, so I have a lot of purple, red, and bright blue, and one or two single-color tie-dyes that I'm very happy with.

But that's just "style," however non-stylish. I certainly couldn't show up at, say, my brother's wedding in my black pants and dirty sneakers and a blue t-shirt and have anyone think I was anything but underdressed and possibly rude. Nobody would see that as a religious witness (though they might, if I did it at enough family weddings over enough years, come to accept it as my own eccentricity).

When I have tried to imagine what plain dress would look like for me, I have been stymied. Quaker Jane has chosen plain dresses, and a traditional shawl and bonnet. I find that a darn cute look, but can't see it on me. And, given that in my early child-rearing years I have drifted away from skirts, which I used to wear all the time, I can't see myself coping with the impracticalities.

But I am definitely female, and not much gender queer, and adopting something like men's plain dress--dark pants, light collarless shirt, suspenders, hat--just also feels wrong. (Besides, it would look terrible on me. I know, part of the point is supposed to be stepping outside that system--but I'm not out yet, am I?)

At least one woman I know has chosen to "cover"--wear a cap--with whatever other clothes she happens to be wearing. This works I think on the set-apart, religious-witness level, but for me, covering was always the part of plain dress I was least drawn to, as having a very specific connotation about women's role relative to men, and their place in the church.

(I like Quaker Jane's description, though, of "giving someone the bonnet"--turning her face just enough that the deep side of her bonnet blocks them from her view. Like the Quaker version of "the hand.")

Then, too, plain dress like Quaker Jane's doesn't just say "religious witness." It says, "Conservative Christian religious witness." Quaker Jane took up plain dress as part of a leading that included conservative Christian Quakerism. It's a path I can respect, but not one I can walk down.

And ultimately, that's the answer there: Quaker Jane adopted plain dress because she was led to. I never adopted plain dress in any way because I was never led to. I had an interest in it, and have had off-and-on--but then, I'm interested in everything! If I did everything I was interested in enough to try it once, or read up on it and think about it, I'd be a sky-diving geologist/linguist who does financial planning on the side when not teaching math to fifth graders. Or a quilt-making economist who consults with schools on collaborative problem-solving when not baking birthday cakes for friends and loved ones. Or a newspaper columnist who manages political campaigns, and vacations by kayaking down remote wilderness rivers with my 14 foster children.

I guess God does not need me in plain dress. God prefers me as a frumpy middle-aged mom. Probably the world has some very specific need for a frumpy middle-aged mom, and I'm meeting that need in ways I can't see. (Or God just doesn't care, because whether I am in plain dress or not doesn't matter to my wholeness.<==note to self: future blog post on answers and non-answers to questions asked of God.)

On the other hand, though, I have found in shaving my head some of what I thought I might find in plain dress: a sign that I have stepped away from questions of fashion, just removed myself from it for now. I have been interested to find that, although my shaved head clearly draws attention, it has removed a huge piece of my self-consciousness. I have become so unself-conscious since shaving my head that when I catch people staring at me in public, I check for "toilet paper stuck to shoe," "food in teeth," "something on face," "forgot to wear bra," and so on, before it occurs to me they might be staring because of my head.

Shaving my head has, for whatever reason, largely freed me from thinking about my appearance. Since thinking about appearance can be a huge burden for women in our culture--both those who measure up, and those like me who mostly don't--you can imagine what a relief this is. I suppose plain dress also brings this kind of peace to some people. It certainly did for Quaker Jane--but I have drifted to talking about a kind of worldly peace, and while she certainly experiences that (she enjoys not having to get haircuts or worry about how her hair looks on any given day) the peace she experiences from plain dress is also, and most importantly, the peace that comes from being in harmony with God's will as you understand it.

So Far, So Good

At the Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Concerns Midwinter Gathering last weekend, I got to talk briefly with two friends who are also white parents of black children, though both of them have children much older than mine. One thing we talked about was the reaction of black people in public places to our having black children.

This is something I've heard a lot of stories about, about strange black people saying negative things to white parents. All three of us had heard the stories. But none of us had experienced it.

In my experience, black people either ignore us, or, if they're baby-lovers, admire and chat with Yehva without necessarily saying much to me, maybe tossing a "she's cute!" or "have a good day!" at me as they move on. This is comparable to how white people treat us in public.

Once in a restaurant, two black women took a picture of baby Yehva because they thought their mother would want to see how cute she was.

I've never had a black person comment on how well--or poorly--I've done Yehva's hair.

I got the most direct commentary from black women at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival last year. One woman spent most of a shuttle ride giving me unsolicited advice about how to care for Yehva's hair; I knew most of it already because there are a lot of resources for adoptive parents these days, including my favorite e-book, Her Special Hair, written by a black woman specifically for white parents who might not have experience with black hair at all.

At the same time, I appreciated this woman taking the time to talk to me about hair care, especially since she did it in a very friendly and non-judgmental way. My friend Ahavia was saying that there just weren't the resources available when she first took custody of her daughter, or when she was doing foster care. She didn't even know what "ashy" meant, she said, or how to plait hair! A bus ride with a friendly, informative black woman would probably have been very welcome to her.

This same woman ended our shuttle ride by taking me aside for a big squeezy hug and saying, "Thank you for loving her." Which is a crazy thing to be thanked for. "As if I could help myself," I said back, but I know she didn't just mean love. She meant care for, I think, in all the meanings of that phrase.

She hadn't asked me anything about how Yehva came to us, and didn't know any of the story or the situation of Yehva's birthparents. So I know she wasn't judging our specific situation relative to where Yehva would have been if her birthmother hadn't placed her for adoption. But it also seemed to me that she thought of Yehva as belonging in part to her; this is why she could thank me for my love of Yehva, because her own concern and caring for a little black girl made her grateful to see that girl being loved. She felt she had a stake in Yehva's well-being (and in the condition of her hair).

That hug meant a lot to me. I think that, even if I sometimes get negative reactions from some black people, that hug will help me deal with them more lovingly. Because I think the negative reactions and the hug come from the same place: the concern that black people have for the community's children, and for the well-being of the whole community; the hope that they have for strength, wholeness, happy lives.

If one black person looks at us and says, "Thank God that little girl found her way to a loving mother in a healthy family," and another one looks at us and says, "That is an example of how the black community is weakened by the adoptions of children of color by white families," they're both expressing the same care and concern, for Yehva, for all black children, for black communities.

And, you know, I think they're both right. I am glad Yehva found her way to us, both for her sake and ours. But I would be glad to see the black community in Chicago--where Yehva was born--so strong and functional that every child born there was already in a loving, healthy family.

A Quaker Thinks about Lent

I am a liberal unprogrammed Friend (Quaker), and we don't do holidays. We don't have a liturgical year (though there's an old joke about the Quaker high holy days being Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday and Hiroshima Day). We don't celebrate the sacraments of baptism or communion. We don't all join together in celebration or mourning or atonement at set times.

We do trust that, at our best, communion with the divine will come to us, that we will find ourselves together in celebration or mourning. In my meeting, we recently experienced the death of a valued Friend; this spring we will celebrate together the wedding of a beloved couple, and anticipation is already building. My meeting tends to get giddy at the birth or adoption of a child, and I was astonished and comforted by how deeply people in the meeting shared our terrible months of uncertainty during our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather.

So, it's not that we're not in there together as we pass through the inevitable joys and sorrows of life.

But we don't, for instance, celebrate the birth of Christ together at a certain time, or join together in repentance. For good and ill, we believe all days are equally holy, and if that sometimes means we forget to treat any of them as holy, well, that's one of our challenges as modern Friends. But sometimes I catch a glimpse of what we're missing. I think modern Quakers tend to focus on the happier aspects of our faith: "We celebrate That of God in everyone!" we chirp. We don't wrestle with that which is not of God the way early Quakers did. We think of the Light in which we walk as something warm and full of love. We forget it's also a searchlight, a firebrand, something that sears when it shines so brightly we can no longer pretend not to see our failings. We like to quote Margaret Fell, convicted by the preaching of George Fox, pulled to her feet in church to cry, "We are all thieves!" But I'm not sure any of us wants to experience what she did. We are thieves, too--we let her experience the pain and regret of empty ritual and false religion for us.

I could comfortably not think about these things, except that among my dearest friends are a Jewish family, and a Lutheran pastor. So these little hints come my way: my kids have Hannukah gift boxes their friend Noah gave them, that I'm pretty sure still have some gelt in them; a few weeks ago, I asked my friend Carla what she was planning for the next day, and she said, "Well, it's Tu B'Shevat, so we're going to spend some time outside with the trees." And every 10 Tishrei, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, invites Jews to fast and repent of their sins.

On the Christian end of my ecumenical spectrum of friends (for whom I thank God quite sincerely), Pastor Julie has been talking about Lent on her blog. On Facebook, she linked to a friend's blog post about Lent that I found very interesting, even if it was aimed at Lutherans.

What I have been hearing in this talk about Lent is less about the usual trite notions of self-denial ("should I give up chocolate or coffee?") than about bigger notions that resonate with me as a Quaker. Julie titled her post, "Lent is a journey toward unconditional love," and her friend wrote, "Lent is one of the penitential seasons of the Church year, meaning that it's a time where we get real with God and ourselves about what things keep us from a fuller relationship with God and with others, and try to make Godward changes." In other words, it's about toning down the warm full-spectrum Light of God we bask in, and turning up the searchlight a little bit.

On her blog, Julie wrote, "Lent is an opportunity to work on relationships." In her work as a pastor, she has resolved to increase her visitation during Lent, to take her presence and her cute little traveling communion kit and the word of God and her bubbling joy-filled personality and her "laugh you can hear in the next county" and her willingness to let her own failings be visible, and be with people.

Julie is a searchlight, darn her. Because I have been out of right relationship with my Monthly Meeting since last May, when I got a clear message from God in worship that said, "you don't need to be here for awhile," after a couple of years of struggle with the things that are hard for me about being in that meeting with those people, things that have to do with social class and with my being a quirky outlier in my notions about how children should be treated and with my wish for a more religious religion.

I heard "you don't need to be here" as a gift of rest, a respite from struggle. But I heard "for awhile" just as clearly, and I left feeling sure I'd be back. But the "while" has lasted longer than I expected it to, and it has been hard to trust that, as we Quakers say, way will open in good time.

I experienced an opening last weekend at the Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgenger and Queer Concerns Midwinter Gathering. At a panel during which a transwoman, a gay man, and a lesbian spoke about their monthly meetings' responses to and support, or lack of support, for their relationships, I was powerfully reminded of times when my monthly meeting has gotten it right. A few years ago, for instance, when a lesbian couple sought clearness for marriage, and the straight people on their clearness committee were so distressed to learn about how little legal support there would be for their relationship, or for the non-biological mother's relationship to any children they might have, that they brought a concern to the monthly meeting about what we could do as a body to support families that do not have full legal recognition.

Straight people! Bringing a concern for the well-being of gay and lesbian families! One reason why I do love my meeting so very much.

I came home from the midwinter gathering thoughtful, prayerful, deliberate, still not sure whether that was enough of an opening for me to return to worship with my meeting.

And then Julie writing about Lent reminded me that sometimes claiming to be thoughtful, prayerful, and deliberate is a code for "dithering." That "waiting for Way to open" can be code for "I can't be bothered to get off the couch, but if the answer falls into my lap, so be it." That not every door is an automatic one; sometimes you have push on it.

If Lent is an opportunity to work on relationships, perhaps attending Meeting for Worship could be a Lenten discipline for me. Do I feel sure about that? No. Do I feel nudged? Yes. Am I afraid of failing? Oh, you bet--just four or five days ago I sat in my seat in a terrible popcorn meeting at the midwinter gathering, literally praying to God for the patience to make it to the end--and I failed. I got up and left with ten minutes left. So I'm not making any promises just now, not to God and not to you. But I'm doing my best to face the question squarely.

More Charles Murray: Real Education

After The Bell Curve, I didn't think of Murray as an author I would seek out again. I just didn't pay any attention to what he was up to. Then someone mentioned his book Real Education on a website I hang out at, saying that they were surprised by it after expecting to hate it. Since I have a reflex that causes me to seek out and read any book a person mentions in my hearing (this could be exploited to great humorous effect by loved ones, it occurs to me), I put it on my list and eventually got a copy from the library.

I also didn't expect to write more about Murray after yesterday's post on The Bell Curve, but I find myself thinking about it this morning, and the only way to get that out of my brain is to write it down.

Real Education is Murray's attempt to outline the solution to our educational problems. His subtitle is "Four Simple Truths For Bringing American's Schools Back to Reality," and his four simple truths are that children have different abilities; that half of all children are below average; that too many young people go to college, and that our future depends on the gifted.

Under the rubric of the first three of those, he takes progressive education to task for its naive belief that all children, under the right circumstances, can achieve in a certain way, academically. He draws on Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, identifies the ones that best correlate with academic success, and says that our academic system attempts to force all kids to achieve in the ways that kids with that particular academic bent can do. This is a waste of resources, and it is self-esteem destroying for children who spent 13 years being pounded into a square hole.

He includes what was, for me, a very striking image: he asks his readers who were not good at gym class to remember what it was like to be in a class where you were constantly asked to do things you couldn't do, at least not well; to know that you couldn't do them and be expected to do them anyway; to receive low grades even though you were achieving at your best level.

OK, he says, that sucked for you. But gym class was never held up as the class that defined your school success. Once you suffered through the required credit hours, you were free to fill your schedule with classes that were a better fit.

But imagine you are a child for whom the standard ways of teaching and learning in schools are just as bad a fit. You're not only trapped in a great many more classes that are the psychic equivalent of that horrible gym class, and for a lot more years, but you're told that your future success in life depends on you being good in these classes; that you could succeed in them if you just applied yourself; and so on. He wants these kids, who are smart and able but just not necessarily smart and able in that particular way, to get a better deal.

He wants educators to let go of an idealized vision where all children are above average, where all children just need the right supports to succeed academically, where a four-year college degree is the path to success for everyone. I don't think he's necessarily wrong about that. (I don't have the energy to go into his alternative vision for post-secondary education, which would allow for multiple paths, more two or three-year programs, more credentialling exams, rather than forcing everyone through a four-year baccalaureate model that was only ever a good fit for a certain small subset of people, but I found it intriguing).

On the other hand, this is a much smaller, more focused book than The Bell Curve, and so it's easier to see what Murray decides to overlook. When he talks about multiple educational models for different kids, and an educational setting where one model isn't exalted over another, where the kid being excellently prepared for the skilled trade he's gifted at is not stigmatized versus the kid on the AP college fast track, you can almost see him holding his hands up beside his face like blinders chanting "La la la tracking I don't see it; la la la social class doesn't exist."

This great leap over the realities of how social class plays out both in our current system and in his idealized replacement system was especially glaring to me because at about the same time I read Literacy With an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in their Own Self-Interest, which describes the ways that education can be different for kids of different social classes even in the same classroom, with the same teacher.

One thing that stuck out to me from that book was its discussion of different styles of speech, and different ways of relating to adults and authority, which kids have adopted even before entering school. Researchers observing first-grade classrooms were able to observe how these different styles led, as time passed, to, for instance, reading-group assignments that tracked closely to children's social class, and in which teachers related to children differently, and sent them very different non-verbal messages about their place in the classroom and their abilities.

For instance, in the "A" reading group, children were allowed to group loosely, outside the teacher's reach, and given simple verbal instructions like "Get your book and open it to page 7." The group at the other end of the spectrum were often physically led to their reading group; books were placed in their hands and opened for them; they were seated so that the teacher was within physical reach of every child; much more of the teacher's speech during the group was about behavior than with the higher-level groups. Teachers, if they even noticed they were doing this, would have said they were responding to the reality of each group's abilities. But by halfway through the year, middle-class kids who had ended up in lower groups had been moved up, and working-class kids who started in higher groups had been moved down. Middle-class kids learned to read; they also learned that they were allowed a certain level of autonomy, that they could be trusted, that what they had to say was of interest to adults. The working-class kids learned--from the very same teacher--that they needed to be guided to do certain tasks, that behaving a certain way was more important than the content of the lesson, and so on.

Murray doesn't seem to want to really wrestle with these kinds of issues in Real Education, perhaps because he believes that, by and large, by being sorted into social classes children have already been sorted by intelligence. But I reject that notion.

I am sympathetic with some of his criticisms. I grew up with a brother, for instance, whom nobody could think was anything but very very smart, but for whom academics was a bad fit. Gary might say something different about this, but from my view, his transition to young adulthood was much harder than it had to be in part because of the assumption that a four-year academic degree was the only path to take. I would embrace a system that could have better identified my brother's enormous strengths and gifts, and without stigma, helped guide him to make the most of them. (While at the same time doing a better job of not putting very academically gifted kids like me on such a pedestal that it was, for me at least, damaging in a different way.)

But I don't think Murray's solutions, especially at the K-12 level, wrestle sufficiently with these realities.

And don't even get me started on Reality #4, which basically says that we should do a better job of identifying those who have certain kinds of gifts, and instead of neglecting them as we do now, intensively train them for leadership. Here, he invokes reality: he says that our leaders always have, and always will, come from the highest tiers of whatever it is that is measured by IQ, and we should recognize this and do a better job of preparing them for their leadership roles.

OK, maybe, because that might include the old-fashioned notions of stewardship, servant leadership, ethics, which our leaders certainly seem to lack.

On the other hand, this was, for me, Murray at his most distasteful. Philosopher-Kings, hello? I wanted to hold the book at arms length and say "ewwww." I'm pretty sure I skimmed, and tossed the book into my library bag to be returned with perhaps more than usual vehemence.

I like Murray's questions: How do we recognize the different abilities of different children? How do we nurture and guide them to the best use of those abilities? How do we de-stigmatize the less academic gifts, so that spending 13 years in our school systems doesn't leave so many kids feeling like failures?

I like his willingness to take progressive educators to task for naivete and utopianism.

But I am more interested in other people's solutions to these problems.