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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) brooklynite | |
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Lots of folks are up in arms about David Brooks' weekend NYT column about the Duke gang rape case, and rightly so. There's one bit of the column that I want to focus on, though. He writes: How have these young men slipped into depravity? Why have they not developed sufficient character to restrain their baser impulses?
The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide. Others have noted how powerfully class-bound the "manners and habits" of gender relations in fifties America were, so I won't belabor that point. Others have noted how creepy it is that Brooks thinks that all men have the impulse to rape, and that the best of us are taught to restrain it. But there are a couple of things I'd like to add, as a historian of American higher education. As it happens, I recently acquired a copy of the Berry College Handbook for Women from 1956-57, published by the college's women's student government. Berry was (and is) a co-ed college in rural Georgia, exactly the kind of place that you'd expect to find this "formula for character building" in action. And what does the handbook say about dating? It says this: DATES -- Girls may have dates on Sunday afternoons from 2:45 to 5:00 PM, at parties, movies, and other social events and also at the college store between classes. When girls are coming from the college campus, boys do not escort them farther than the 'parting of the ways' which is on the road between the Recitation Hall and Mother's Building. There must be no dating in out of the way places. Petting is not permitted. Self-imposed restraints? Hardly. This was a world of strict gender segregation. At Berry College in the fifties, male and female students weren't permitted to be alone together, ever. On today's campus, students are given near-total freedom to socialize in private. That freedom is grounded in the belief that college students have sufficient character to use that freedom responsibly. It is also grounded in the belief that people learn how to regulate their behavior when they are given the opportunity to regulate their behavior. On the typical American campus of the fifties, students were not taught self-restraint --- they were restrained, and they were punished when they were caught circumventing their restraints. If they learned anything about how to behave behind closed doors, it was at great risk, and in defiance of the mechanisms employed to keep them apart. If a woman student was treated badly in such circumstances, she was vanishingly unlikely to speak out. And there wasn't even any way to have an open discussion about what it meant to be "treated badly" --- there was no public dialogue about sexual ethics, no communal understanding about how to behave and how to expect your partner to behave, no opportunity to forthrightly compare expectations and experiences. The world that Brooks pines for is a world of stifling rules and unequal punishments. It's a world of shame and exploitation. It's a world of ignorance and silence. Tags: education, essays, gender, history, politics
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| From: (Anonymous) |
Date: April 11th, 2006 05:27 pm (UTC) |
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Conscience
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I can't speak for Brooks directly, but I can hope that his vision of the past is the one that president of Dartmouth rallies for in his article for the Atlantic Monthly of April 1955 called "Conscience and the Undergraduate". [you can find it here (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/95nov/warring/conscien.htm) if you are registered with The Atlantic Monthly Online]
Dickey also sees the need for character building, although his is not necessarily restrained through manners, habits and self-imposed restraints as Brook purports. Rather, its to raise their awareness of the trials and tribulations in the world:
The undergraduate on the other hand must make his peace with the moral purposes of an institution during four hectic years when his appetites and powers are at flood tide and before he has had much, if any, experience with what can happen. The lack of intimate personal acquaintance with trouble and tragedy is not, of course, a condition peculiar to modern youth, but it is the impression of many of us that most undergraduates today have seen far less of these things than had their grandfathers or even many of their fathers at the same age.
Mitesh (http://forty-sixandtwo.blogspot.com) |
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You speak of the "world of ignorance and silence," and I think that's very important.
It seems to me that part of the problem lies not in getting the male and female students to act in particular ways, but to get them to see each other as people, and not as some class of being that is different from them. The separation of male and female students, as was done historically, only makes sense if they must use some arbitrary set of special rules to deal with them, rather than understanding them via simple human empathy.
If the girl you take out on a date is not an Other, you can relate to her feelings about being mauled or pawed, and won't think of doing it. If the guy you take out on a date is not an Other, then you won't be calculating what he deserves to do to you, despite your lack of interest, as a "return" on his payment for dinner.
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