True Story 1.07
Cross-cultural contrasts surface
in an Illinois town’s high school
The setting for this story
In the high school of an Illinois town, teachers noticed a curious pattern during study hall periods. Students who didn’t study came from two contrasting backgrounds. One included underperforming students from a working-class neighborhood with many unemployed adults. The other included top students from an upper-middle-class neighborhood. Jocelyn, one of the teachers, picks up this story.
A story of misaligned minds8
I attended a course at our local college that an anthropologist was offering for teachers. During class, I shared my curiosity about the non-studiers during study hall periods. The anthropologist suggested that, for my seminar project, I link up with colleagues to find the explanation for this pattern.
The research my colleagues and I completed revealed the explanation. Our findings were, first, that almost none of the non-studiers was just being ornery or deliberately trying to disrupt.
Students in the group from the working-class neighborhood were under social pressure from their peers to deliberately not do well in school. Getting good grades was viewed as knuckling under to the expectations of the oppressive elite society. Being seen to study was bad.
Students from the upper-middle-class neighborhood were being pressured by their parents and extended family to excel in school. Being seen to study was good. They didn’t want to study during study hall because then there would be less to do at home, where they would be seen to study by family members.
Jocelyn’s question
I thought cultural differences of this type occur only when people are from different nations. No?
Critique of story 1.07
Every one of the seventy-six stories in this book involves a person or group behaving or thinking in a way that does not align with the accepted values, norms, or patterns of thought of another person or group. It doesn’t matter if the two are from opposite sides of the world or opposite sides of the track. What matters is that one person or group finds the activities of another person or group to be socially unacceptable, against the rules, or morally repugnant.
We’re often quick to attribute another person’s undesirable behavior to an internal disposition such as ignorance, apathy, ill will, greed, or a personality flaw. Often, though, that’s not accurate. For example, Jocelyn’s research showed that “they were just being ornery and deliberately trying to disrupt” did not explain the non-studying of either group. She discovered that, instead, students in the two groups were responding to locally-generated external pressures brought to bear by family members and/or friends.
For thought
In my critique of each story, I try to answer, “Why do they behave that way?” by pointing to external forces. The force I’ll usually point to will be culture, best defined as “how we do things around here.” When a group’s established ways of “doing things around here” are contradicted by outsiders who behave or think differently, complications usually result. In this case, the “outsiders” were people living in another neighborhood of the same Illinois town.
Related stories
Story 7.01 describes another instance in which both protagonists were from the same community.
Return to Chapter 1 Quick-Links | Go to Chapter 4 Quick-Links | Go to Chapter 7 Quick-Links | Go to Chapter 10 Quick-Links
Endnotes:
8 Bohannan, 187.
All full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.