give some aid & comfort to the idea of Educational Segregation or at least Non-Integration? That if white kids & black kids learn differently, maybe it’s a mistake to try to integrate classes & instead we should go to classes in which each group is educated in they style it learns best from?
And how do most successful black educators respond to the learning-difference theory?
This is a jumping off from the Rev. Wright quote in RachelW’s post-
It might be of interest to dig up the old debate about sex-segregrated schools, to look for related arguments and similar a sad lack of empirical data.
Wiki has no page on it, but as a feminist, I remember the debate from about 30 years back in the Netherlands. At first sex-segregation was an anti-sex thing, to keep boys from mixing sexually with girls. All same-sex schools were run by prietst of nuns. Then feminist nuns argued that girls did better academically in girls only schools, because they wouldn’t feel the need to act feminine, hide their talents and let the boys shine. I don’t know if at the time the left-right brain discussion was used, I don’t think so. But the left-right brain meme has been used extensively to argue why girls are better verbally and boys are better spacially and with music.
So to see Wright apply the left/right brain meme to black kids without the sex differentiating looks a bit funny to me.
What he describes about kids not doing well in school, but knowing whole rap-songs by heart, is not at all limited to black kids. All kids who are under stimulated intellectually satisfy their need for rote learning outside of school. If they aren’t stimulated to memorize French verbs, they will memorize song lyrics, sportsresults and the entire rules of World of Warcraft. That is also creative and right brain learning by Wrights rules, isn’t it?
IMHO there is still so much to be gained from improving schools and facilitate learning in poor (so, mainly black) neighbourhoods in American cities, that this appeal by Wrigth only serves as a red herring. It is a speech to make the black community proud, angry, and clamoring for “The Man” to change the system, instead of getting their own act together. And we had enough of that attitude going around already, I believe.
>…give some aid & comfort to the idea of Educational Segregation or at least Non-Integration? That if white kids & black kids learn differently, maybe it’s a mistake to try to integrate classes…
Maybe it suggests one argument in favor of segregation, if you accept that the theory can be trusted as correct, and that it describes innate differences in the learning styles such that the students would not acquire other learning styles and do well with them.
But, first of all, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence supporting and contradicting and confusing theories about innate learning styles and cognitive styles in general. The simple question of nature vs nurture is still poorly understood. It has never been easy to study it either by the study of people as they are (because disentangling nature from nurture in real lives requires so much judgement and interpretation) or by the study of people experimentally (because sufficiently isolating people to have total control of nature and nurture would be repugnant). Moreover, there are new fields of inquiry such as epigenetics that suggest there are effects that can’t really be separated into nature or nurture. In the case of epigenetics, there’s a protein coat around the DNA molecule that changes over one’s lifetime, and influences how the DNA-encoded information is acted upon, so for instance the diet of teenage males later has a measured influence on some apparently innate characteristics of their eventual grandchildren.
Secondly, none of these theories would describe anything more than statistical trends, if they are true. Similarly, there is certainly a statistical trend saying men can lift bigger weights than women on average, but if you want to hire somebody to lift things you don’t know that some random man will be able to lift more than some random woman. It’s only a trend. So, if you want to match people’s learning styles, you need to sort the people through some kind of evaluation that accurately measures their individual styles, not on the basis of ancestry.
Thirdly, maximizing the transfer of understanding and knowledge isn’t the only benefit of schooling. Certainly, one other benefit is expanding student’s abilities by letting them experience and try other learning styles. Another benefit is letting them work with people having different cognitive styles, and learning ways of working effectively with them, for example by appreciating in others the inclination and proficiency they will have for some thing we dislike and do badly, and appreciating how the same is apparent to them as they look at us.
So, I don’t think this theory provides much evidence that segregated learning would be useful.
If the differences in learning styles between black and white kids result in cultural-environmental rather than genetic factors (and I recall nothing in Wright’s speech to suggest the latter), that’s an argument for school integration; gives the differences a chance to rub off.
Like the right-brained, creative oral culture of the Celts? Where hundreds of years of history and law, as well as current events, music, poetry, mythology, etc., were kept in oral tradition? Where a poet-scholar-musician (aka Bard or Ollave) was revered and publicly supported, his person inviolate, and his presence welcomed everywhere, all on the basis of his knowledge?
I guess that means I must be right-brained and unable to learn in an American school, being Irish/Welsh/Scottish and all.
not that this really follows your question but since schools cant even teach the way kids learn the best as a general rule and even though they have known this for decades but still havent changed the curriculum’s to reflect that knowledge I would have to say that any call for this kind of change is pointless at the least, stupid at the worst.
Even accepting all of the elements as true, isn’t it only an argument for a return to segregation if we view the sole purpose of schools as to educate? Don’t they also play an important social function in preparing individuals for playing an active role in society, and isn’t that role separate from a narrow view of “education”?
If society at large is integrated, teaching people in a segratated microcosm of society may not be long term beneficial, even if the test scores of those students are higher, as they may be less prepared to function in the world at large.
It could equally well be argued that the noticable racial divide in testing is evidence that the schooling segregation that still exists is a problem that needs to be addressed. It is evidence that the average black student doesn’t get as good an education as the average white students does.
Except when you look at examples of districts that have completely integrated schools, from K-12, and still show vast differences in academic performance. Check the “details for subgroups” links half way down the page.
This happens to be my school district. The district uses a “magnet” system, (since the late 70’s) there are no neighborhood schools. The black students and white students are not in separate schools, they are spread out across the schools using a system designed to achieve racial balance in all the schools.
Yet, there is still an achievement gap. Even though the students sit in the same classrooms in the same schools from the first day to the last day, there is a gap, and a big one.
There is a problem, and it isn’t just that black kids go to bad schools, and white kids go to good schools. When you focus on that, you start to think you can fix it by throwing money at it. It doesn’t work, and the kids still don’t learn.
There was no one nation-wide system for teaching students in the 1970’s. I was a classroom teacher during that time.
The study that Wright quotes is over thirty years old. He should be looking a more recent data from Peabody/Vanderbilt, Stanford and other reputable institutions of research into learning and education.
The Rev. Wright is not an authority on the subject of how the mind learns.