Prep School Education Means Never Having to Feel Uneasy

Every so often I try to deconstruct my own education by reading the newest examination of the prep school experience.

The latest entry into this category is Shamus Rahman Khan's Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School (2001).

Khan is a Paulie, a former instructor, and now a sociologist. He's got some interesting insights here, although he occasionally muses too much, too academically.

What struck me was his observation that preppies learn to be physically at home in their surroundings, and carry this trait with them to all settings. Khan calls this state of being ease. He says that being at ease in all situations is one of the key benefits of this elite education. (Others are "supreme indifference" to amazing experiences and benefits as well as a talent for producing academic glibness without actually doing academic work....)

Khan discusses "ease" and "embodiment" at some length throughout the book. (Khan cites the work of Pierre Bourdieu as source of the embodiment concept, p. 196.) Here's the passage:

Embodiment is a fancy word for a simple idea: we carry our experiences with us. Our time in the world becomes imprinted on our bodies themselves . Time in elite space matters, and by definition elite spaces are ones that are exclusive. The importance to embodiment is that once social experiences become embodied, they begin to seem natural. It's just how your [sic] carry yourself. We all have to act in some way; your embodiment is yours. The particular form of embodiment of the new elite is ease. This ease is enormously wide-ranging. As they have integrated those who have been excluded, the elite have adapted many of the cultural markers they previously shunned. And so the new elite are at ease in a wide range of areas (pp 196-197).

Khan goes on to say "embodied ease is a physical manifestation" of "openness", that is elite's ability to play anywhere with anyone and blame others for not being able to do so (p. 197). He uses these concepts to deconstruct the current version of how preps are still elite and more hierarchical and exclusive, even while admitting a greater variety of people from a variety of background than ever before. Of course, as Khan explains, the main people who benefit from the experience are white males of the socioeconomic elite, because they are the ones for whom the experience has been shaped. The other kids find the societal gateway (drug) of prep school to be much more uneasy. And the gap between those can have these experiences and those who cannot afford them is growing.

How Khan explains embodiment is to the point. His equation of ease, embodiment, and privilege is powerful. His observations confirm many of my own experiences (as student and as teacher) in private schools. Not all. But how a student reassures a teacher that they belong in particular classroom can be how the kid inhabits that space.

Khan's thinking also connects to museum studies about school visitors and visitor experiences -- those who feel most comfortable in most museums are the people who grew up going to museums.... Hmmm, who would that be?

So, in this week as many of us go back to school, let us ask: For what purpose, and in what ways, are we shaping our students' environments? In what settings will they feel at ease? Where do you feel comfortable?

Me, I'm back to walking through halls with hundreds of teenagers flowing through them and feeling like it's normal...sorta.

Is returning to the sensory "short-circuiting evolution"?

In an op-ed piece for the NY Times on August 8, 2011, Diane Ackerman reports on a recently reported study in the Journal of Consumer Relations by Dan King and Chris Janiszewski called "Affect-Gating," which will appear in the Journal of Consumer Research in December, 2011.

A JSTOR press release summarizes their findings: "Animal instincts: Why do unhappy consumers prefer tactile sensations?"
(link to press release published online June 7, 2011 here)
[Note -- the article has yet to appear]

Apparently, when we feel bad, we want the comforts of touch and looking around at the wide, wide, scary world has less appeal.

Well, no duh.

Not only does most personal experience confirm this, but a combination of cognitive research about emotion and behavior and standard psychological studies do too. (Antonio D'Amasio and Harry Harlow's baby monkeys may come to mind here.) The study authors link primed visual sensory systems with emotional confidence and tactile priming with negative emotive states.

In other words, "I'm writing a paper and I want my binkie!" (Seriously, this blog was typed while a paper was due... at least the sensation of typing was soothing...)

But, of course, modern marketing, along with behavioral economics, has taken using the results of such research in a new direction.

Thus King and Janiszewski correlate their mammalian research to consumer behavior -- a product's sensory attributes need to feel just right to the buyer, and that depends on how the shopper feels.

(Ok, how do they know how Consumer Goldilocks is feeling when she's shopping? What if her shoes are pinching? How would the store try to control for emotional state? What about other cultures, when gaze is conditioned differently? Just wondering...)

As Ackerman explains, making comfort foods and other consumer materials just right is terribly important in order to increase sales.

This also makes sense.

Ackerman's connection to evolution and how humans override it, however, isn't terribly well-made. If she's trying to score a point in the ongoing nature vs. nuture debate, or the mind-body controversy, or the intellectual vs. capitalist games, it went past me. She seems to be saying that we are at the mercy of our bodies, emotionally and physically. Hmmm.

Well, this may explain why I -- and other academics -- want to eat nonstop when writing research papers...

Potato chip anyone?


Originating article:
Evolution’s Gold Standard
By DIANE ACKERMAN
Published: August 8, 2011
"Why we humans seem to want for little but are craving nonstop."

Bodily Memory with FOOD

Last Monday (August 8, 2011), two stories from two sources converged. The topic? How food can shape the offspring. Or, the power of bodily memory...?

First, NPR reported on how the flavors a mother eats while pregnant can influence the child's reactions to foods later in life.
Baby's Palate And Food Memories Shaped Before Birth
by Gretchen Cuda-Kroen.

While not fool-proof, greater exposure in utero can increase acceptance of a greater variety of foods while growing up. The story reports some other interesting findings.

Then CBS's the Early Show had a segment by Marysol Castro about Marje Vongerichten's examination of her adopted past called "The Kimchi Chronicles." The point for us here is Vongerichten's account of having a 'flood of memories' return to her once she ate the food that her biological mother had cooked for her. Below is the video of the interview:





The website for "The Kimchi Chronicles" click here.

Two stories on the same day about the how food can shape someone converge.

So, yes, in a way, we are what we eat... and the body has memory...

No wonder I can crave grits, huh?

Museum Boxes -- This is SO cool!

One of the benefits of working with teachers is that I get to learn, too.

Most recently, I learned about an interactive website called Museum Boxes.

This virtual box is basically a portable cabinet of curiosities which allows the creator to display representations of key objects and ideas. It is based on an actual portable box of representative items which an abolitionist speaker used in the course of his lecture tour.

Inside the box are "drawers" into which one can play virtual "cubes" which have sides on which these representations may be places. These representations could be images, video, weblinks, Word documents, or other items that are digitally attachable. The six sides of the cubes will be displayed as the visitor clicks on them. It is possible to have up to three layers of cubes in the box.

The display of the cubes is somewhat kinetic. It doesn't replace actually turning over the cube while gazing in wonder, but it's a start.

The box, like most museum exhibits, seems to be more focused on maker-centered display rather than visitor use, however.

It would be great if the cubes could be rearranged by the user/viewer into an order that makes sense to them. This would be a way to have the cubes be building blocks of an argument/synthesize of the information presented on the cubes. This also raises the question of whether multiple sides of a cube should be duplicated or if each cube should be assigned a major concept so that the user would have to make a forced choice when arranging the cubes for herself.

When I taught United States History I did something similar to the Museum Boxes but with brown paper bags and note cards. Students had to select cards, put them into the bags (grouping), and then take out the cards to synthesize further when writing an essay. They liked the process of physically sorting, and there was audience participation. For another activity, I used a brown paper bag into which I have placed representative items, had students withdraw the items, and puzzle over the significance of each and connection between all.

Museum Boxes is intriguing in that is digital -- this makes for new and additional media possibilities, and for portability. I wish it had more kinesethetic functionality, but it's a great start!