The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  The total cost of the GI Bill was $14.5 billion, which was serious money back then. However, the bill was not akin to today’s entitlements. Its benefits were contingent on the recipients’ having rendered a social service of the most serious sort—military service. And the bill was congruent with the broad social strategy described by Michael Barone in Our Country, his history of American politics from FDR to Reagan. It was a strategy of honoring “those who worked their way up in society” and of placing “society’s stamp of approval on their affluence and success.” It was a strategy “which aimed not at servicing a lower class but at building a middle class.”19 With the GI Bill, social policy sent strong cues to young Americans, telling them to stay in school, grind out good grades, defer marriage past the teenage years, defer children until the family income had begun to rise.

  At the end of the war, American confidence was at an apogee, in part because American society then was characterized by cultural homogeneity, buttressed by bourgeois judgmentalism. Social policy reflected a broad consensus about the proper behavior for facilitating socially useful aspirations. Twenty years later, however, liberalism, as it then still preferred to be known, became bifurcated between economic and lifestyle liberals. The latter despised as “repressive” all social policies that promoted behavior deemed worthy by “bourgeois values.” Lifestyle liberals sought to de-moralize policy. By the late 1960s, liberalism’s tone and content were deeply influenced by liberalism’s political base in the so-called “caring professions.” They served “clients” in the urban population who had been disorganized by behaviors, particularly involving drugs and sex, that were insuperable impediments to aspirations for greater equality of income.

  America’s social pathologies have multiplied during a burst of wealth creation without precedent in world history. America’s poverty problem is not one of material scarcities but of abundant bad behavior. Data demonstrate that there are three simple behavioral rules for avoiding poverty: finish high school, produce no child before marrying or before age twenty. Only 8 percent of families who conform to all three rules are poor; 79 percent of those who do not conform are poor. And recent social learning includes this: The trajectory of a child’s life is largely determined in the earliest years. “The human personality emerges early; if it is to be shaped,” James Q. Wilson wrote, “it must be shaped early.”20 And by far the best predictor of a child’s flourishing is the fervent devotion of two parents. Beyond the earliest years, the presence of two parents is also crucial to the success of primary and secondary education, as was disconcertingly learned half a century ago, when family disintegration was beginning to accelerate.

  “GUESS WHAT COLEMAN’S FOUND”:

  THE PROBLEM OF ESCAPE VELOCITY

  It was, appropriately, at a 1966 gathering at the Harvard Faculty Club that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was greeted by his friend Seymour Martin Lipset, the political scientist, with news that was a harbinger of trouble for the academic consensus about social policy: “Hello, Pat, guess what Coleman’s found: Schools make no difference, families make a difference.”21 Actually, James Coleman did not, of course, quite say that, but what he did find was dramatic enough to unsettle conventional thinking. When the baby boom generation began moving through the public school system like a pig through a python, policymakers of all philosophic stripes were agreed: Cognitive outputs would correlate with financial inputs, so the best predictor of a school’s performance is the amount of money spent on it. Postwar education policy was focused where the public education lobby wanted it focused, on such matters as teachers’ salaries, per-pupil spending, and pupil-teacher ratios.

  However, in the 1960s one benefit from social scientists being ascendant in Washington was a hunger for data. By 1966, an ambitious government study conducted by sociologist James Coleman had come to a conclusion so “seismic”—Moynihan’s characterization—that President Johnson’s administration considered not releasing it, and did release it on the Friday of the Fourth of July weekend, hoping the report would receive minimal attention. The conclusion was: “Schools are remarkably similar in the way they relate to the achievement of their pupils when the socioeconomic background of the students is taken into account.”22 That is, the crucial predictor of a school’s performance is the quality of the families from which the children come. Granted, some schools are heroic exceptions to this rule. Nevertheless, it is the rule.

  In 1989, a researcher reported in confirmation of Coleman that “variations in school expenditures are not systematically related to variations in student performance.”23 And later: “Researchers have tried to identify inputs that are reliably associated with student achievement and school performance. The bottom line is, they have not found any.”24 Paul Barton of the Educational Testing Service estimated that about 90 percent of the differences among schools in average proficiency can be explained by five factors: number of days absent from school, number of hours spent watching television, number of pages read for homework, quantity and quality of reading material in the home, and the presence of two parents in the home. That fifth factor is supremely important, not least because it is apt decisively to influence the other four. The importance of these findings for American education is in the 9/91 factor: Between birth and their nineteenth birthdays, American children spend 9 percent of their time in school, 91 percent elsewhere. The fate of American education is being shaped not by legislative acts but by the fact that, increasingly, “elsewhere” is not an intact family. Until the government finds a way to make Barton’s five variables change, positively and quickly, the government’s various announced goals about graduation rates and math and science achievements are airy puffs of legislative cotton candy.

  Pause for a moment to dwell on why “school comes too late for many children.” Schools are supposed to do what parents cannot do as well, such as teach algebra. Schools cannot, however, supplant families as transmitters of the social capital—habits, manners, mores—necessary for thriving. How are teachers supposed to do the work of the families from which seven-year-old children come to school not knowing numbers, shapes, or colors because they come from a home culture of silence, where no one, while making dinner, says, “Here are three round green grapes.”

  Consider what has been learned about the life-shaping importance of verbal interactions between parents and their very young infants, and the differences between those interactions in poor and middle-class households. The most important preparation for learning in school is learning at home in the years before school, beginning immediately at birth and continuing through age three. And the most important influence on early learning is being talked to by parents or other caregivers. In what has been called “the early catastrophe,” the life trajectories of poor and middle-class children begin to diverge radically during those years, in large measure because of the number of words to which they are exposed and the differences between the positive and negative reinforcements conveyed by the words. In terms of aptitude for learning, at age one a child from a poor family is already apt to be significantly behind a one-year-old from a middle-class family. Children raised in poverty are apt to hear 600 words per hour. Working-class children hear 1,200, and children of professional-class parents hear 2,100. The issue is not the substance of the chatter (“I am going to load the dishwasher with these dirty plates”; “Do you see that large yellow truck?”) but the torrent of verbal stimuli as the child’s brain is developing. By age three, children from poor homes have heard, on average, 30 million fewer words spoken at home than children in professional-class homes. It is not altogether clear why more affluent and educated parents talk to their children more, although fatigue might be a factor in the relative silence of poor homes. And people tend to parent as they were parented, so those who have reached or remained in the middle class are apt to have been raised in homes with verbal cultures.

  Furthermore, it is unclear how policymakers can make use of the data about the importance of language. Parents can be
encouraged to talk and read to their children, but the parents most in need of such encouragement might be the least apt to receive or respond to it. The depressing truth is that inequality has deeper, more complex origins than we have thought. And America’s foundational promise of equality of opportunity is far more problematic and elusive than we, particularly we conservatives, have thought. Equality of opportunity remains more aspirational than actual, and the challenge of rectifying this is becoming more daunting because of the increase in “assortative mating”—the tendency of the educated and upwardly mobile to marry one another—which deepens the “cognitive stratification” of society.

  Physicists refer to the “escape velocity” of particles circling in an orbit. Some particles spin, or outside intervention causes them to spin, free from the prison of orbit, onto their own long trajectory. Society’s challenge is to give poor children sufficient outward velocity from the orbit that imprisons them. The propensity of a child to flourish is established very early. The crucial variable is the child’s expectation that the world will be consistently interested, supportive, and encouraging. The absence of a propensity to flourish can be “read” in the behavioral language of even a nine-month-old. Doctors can read that language in such simple activities as elementary play with blocks. The grim message of some play is that the babies expect to fail for the rest of their lives. Handed two blocks, a baby who is at ease in the world—a baby probably already accustomed to the praise of interested adults—will manipulate the blocks vigorously, dropping one to see who retrieves it, and looking bright-eyed at any observing adult, expecting praise. A baby who expects to fail will have a more limited repertory of play, limited by the realization that no one will care. Poor children sense and acquire the helplessness of their parents—or, more likely, of a single parent.

  Progressivism’s ascent in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century reflected the new belief that government could and should confer capacities on individuals who were ill-equipped to cope with the complexities of modern life. Progressivism’s decline in the final quarter of the century reflected doubts about whether government has this competence to deliver capacities—and doubts about whether a tutelary government that is good at such delivery would be good for the nation’s character. One count in conservatism’s indictment of progressivism is that it takes too much for granted. According to conservatism, progressivism does not understand how its programs threaten those habits—thrift, industriousness, deferral of gratification—that make free societies succeed. Conservatives worry that the severest cost of solicitous government is not monetary but moral. This cost is measured in the diminution of personal responsibility and of private forms of social provision. This worry has a distinguished pedigree. Tocqueville warned of a soft despotism that “makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties.” The foremost victims of this robbery are the children of the poor. Today, as when Charles Dickens’ Mr. Jarndyce in Bleak House said it, “The children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up.”

  Three decades ago, I was shown an almost silent video that was as searing as it was short. At first glance, the scene the video captures is sweet: a mother feeding her infant from a bowl. Ten minutes later, at its end, you understand: The mother does not know how to mother. The video is from a steady camera focused on a twenty-two-year-old woman and her six-month-old baby. The mother feeds the baby, which sits on her knee, with a spoon. The spoon moves steadily; the baby makes no sound and neither does the mother. The only noise, every minute or so, is the soft sound of the baby vomiting. This occurs each time the baby turns with its hands extended, reaching for contact with the mother’s warmth. The mother reflexively—not unkindly, but stiffly—holds the baby away. Then the baby regurgitates the food swallowed since the last such rebuff. Vomiting is the baby’s tactic for at least prolonging the attention of feeding.

  Pediatricians serving some disadvantaged children see many babies with bald spots on the back of their heads, evidence that the babies are left for long stretches on the backs. A child-care—actually, a non-care—product is a pillow made to hold a bottle next to an infant so the infant can take nourishment without an adult in attendance. It is perhaps natural to think that parenting is a natural talent, a spontaneously acquired skill. It is not. It is learned, as language is, early, and largely by parental example. As the woman in the video fed her baby, she gave to it the sort of verbal stimulation she probably got from her mother: none. Depressed, unstimulating, or unavailable mothers produce in babies “maternal deprivation syndrome,” which suppresses their infants’ development. A mother reared in poverty is apt to have a barren “inner world” of imagination and emotional energy, a consequence of her own impoverished early experiences. And such a mother nowadays may be the only nurturing adult in an infant’s life. A study of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Massachusetts showed that 90 percent of households included three or more adults—two parents plus perhaps a grandmother, a bachelor uncle, a maiden aunt. Today many homes have but one adult, and infants are handed around to various caretakers. This can be disorienting and developmentally damaging early in life.

  Until the 1940s, it was widely believed that it did not matter who raised babies, if basic competence was assured. A good orphanage would suffice. Subsequent studies, however, documented the bewilderment, withdrawal, and depression of infants who begin but do not adequately complete bonding with their mothers. In too many homes today, says one clinical psychiatrist, “the lights are on but no one is home.” People are there, but not there. Inattentive parents are producing children who are like that: They seem normal but they are not what they should be, and will not become what they could have been, given better early nurturing. Verbal stimulation of middle-class infants produces in their babble the sounds of the phonetic alphabet much earlier than those sounds occur in the babble of lower-class children. Will children reared in poverty catch up in school? Probably not. They are not just behind; they are, in a sense, crippled. Animals reared in nonstimulative isolation have been shown to have less brain weight than those reared amid the stimulation of company. Those reared in a stimulative environment have a higher ratio of differentiated (specialized functioning) to undifferentiated brain cells. The chilling possibility is that an infant can fail to develop some early brain functions as a consequence of social deprivation. There is a critical period early in the developmental process of every infant: The merry-go-round goes around only once, and the infant does or does not get the brass ring of the full enjoyment of the potential that was his or her birthright.

  This should shock American sensibilities because it refutes the assumption that equality of opportunity is a fact as long as there are no obvious formal, legal, institutional impediments to it. Hence the vast—and increasingly misplaced—faith in schools as the great equalizers of opportunity for upward mobility in a meritocratic society. Studies of early childhood development indicate that school comes too late for many children. Before they cross their first schoolyard, severe damage has been done to their life chances. Even superb schools often cannot correct the consequences of early deprivation, and superb schools are not frequently found in the neighborhoods where children who are damaged by their social environment receive those damages. At least 15 percent of IQ points are experientially rather than genetically based, and the preschool experiences of some children can cost them a significant portion of those points. Studies of “failure to thrive” babies and their mothers suggest a strategy for combating the syndrome. Very early intervention, involving close and protracted supervision of young mothers, can “jump-start” their mothering skills. There are, however, too many single mothers who need this long, labor-intensive, and therefore expensive attention. An America in which a majority of mothers under thirty are not living with the fathers of their children is simply not going to be able to supply a so
cial policy that can compensate for the defects of fragmented families.

  In fact, it is arguable that the most molecular word in political discourse, the noun that denotes something on which all else depends and builds, is neither “justice” nor “freedom” nor “equality.” It is “family.” Without the nurturing and disciplining done in intact families, individuals are apt to be ill-equipped to exercise the freedom to become unequal, and therefore are handicapped in the pursuit of justice for themselves and others.

  THE COSTS OF DESTIGMATIZING DEPENDENCY

  When shattered family structure is not the negative determinant of life chances, America has made remarkably swift progress in reducing the malignant power of race to distort the quest for more equality of opportunity. Attitudes have undergone sweeping changes that have been precursors to behavioral changes. This has not been good news for those who have a professional and political stake in bad news.

  The Depression deepened Americans’ feelings of dependency, but when the postwar boom and the democratization of access to higher education increased Americans’ confidence in their social competence, the civil rights movement gave progressives renewed relevance by giving government a new mission. The mission was to improve the behavior, and by doing so to improve the character, of Americans regarding race. This was a resounding success and progressivism’s finest service to the nation. Then, however, the mission was redefined to give progressivism the unending—indeed unendable—purpose of orchestrating identity politics.