formation, and organized only by immediate association, the learning task would be impossible. Instead, there is order in a multi-level, hierarchial system. The organization of human communication in any culture is the template for the organization of knowledge or information in that culture. We know a great deal more about the structure of language than we know about the structure of non-verbal communication. We teach language performance throughout the formal education of children, but we do not teach communication competence in the sense that we cannot teach a person to be friends or to love another person. This comes about, when it does, between two people and is not something that one person learns to perform and which he then performs for another. So it is with human communication. It happens between peo ple and the competence required is that gained throughout life by participating in communication with other people. There are, clearly, cultural rules of communication: rules of language use, of mathematics, of manners, politeness, and social deportment in general-even rules that make the institution of marriage work for those who share them and fail for those who do not. The rules are not to be judged by the criteria of right and wrong but by the extent to which they enable the participants in a conversation, a marriage, or a whole culture to be predictable to each other and hence to cooperate. Whether we are concerned with children, college students, or members of an excluded minority, the extent to which people can be (and see themselves as) members of a culture is the extent to which they can participate in the culture. Participation is communication taking place between them. It is not the messages that pass from one to the other. The fact of talking together is, itself, more humanly significant than the messages exchanged. The authors believe that the special lessthan-adult behavior that is called "children's behavior" in any society (apart from obvious developmental factors) is determined by the nature of the adult participation in communication with children in that society. And, of course, the same view can be taken for college "children" or members of an excluded minority. Learning a skilled performance or accumulating knowledge is not a substitute for acquiring competence in managing human relations. When this is applied to the education of children, we believe that the only way nonverbal communication is learned is through the full participation of the adult, the parent or the teacher, with the child. To talk to, read to, lecture at ... these are not participation. These are performances by adults for children. In order for a child to acquire competence in the full range of human communication, some adults in his world must share their competence with him by direct human involvement. Only then can a child discover the meaning and value of the messages and the subject matter he is being taught and only then can he discover himself in the world of people. As Alan Lomax has written in Folk Song Style and Culture, "In the end a person's emotional stability is a function of his command of a communication style that binds him to a human society with a history." EARLY CHILDHOOD INTERVENTION: THE SOCIAL SCIENCE BASE OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM * By STEPHEN S. BARATZ, National Academy of Science and * To understand the present political and academic furor over the efficacy-and therefore the future of such early-intervention programs as Head Start, it is necessary first to examine the basic concepts and assumptions upon which these programs are founded and then to determine whether existing data can support such an approach to the problem of educating children from black ghettoes. This paper attempts (1) to present an overview of the interventionist literature with particular emphasis on the role of the social pathology model in interpreting the behavior of the ghetto mother, and (2) to illustrate how the predominant ethnocentric view of the Negro community by social science produces a distorted image of the life patterns of that community. The importance of this distortion is that, when converted into the rationale of social action programs, it is a subtle but pernicious example of institutional racism. This paper is concerned with the goals of intervention programs that deal with altering the child's home environment, with improv ing his language and cognitive skills, and most particularly with changing the patterns of child-rearing within the Negro home. These goals are, at best, unrealistic in terms of current linguistic and anthropological data and, at worst, ethnocentric and racist. We do not question the legitimacy of early childhood programs when they are described solely as nursery school situations and are not based on the need for remediation or intervention; nor do we question such programs when they increase chances for the employment of economically deprived Negroes. Finally, we do not question such programs when they are described as opportunities to screen youngsters for possible physical disorders, even though followup treatment of such diagnostic screening is often unavailable. We wish to examine in more detail, however, the social pathology model of behavior and intelligence in Head Start1 projects. We shall attempt to demonstrate that the theoretical base of the deficit model employed by Head Start programs denies obvious strengths within the Negro community and may inadvertently advocate the annihilation of a cultural system which is barely considered or understood by most social scientists. Some thirty years ago, Melville Herskovits *This paper is based on a paper presented to the Society for Research in Child Develon ment, March, 1969. Santa Monica, California. The work of the first author was done while he was Executive Secretary, Center for Study of Metropolitan Problems, National Institute of Mental Health. The work of the second author is supported in part by funds from NIMH Grant MH16078. 1 We recognize that no two Head Start projects are exactly alike. Head Start is used here as a generic term for intervention programs designed for under-privileged pre-school cEdren. (1938-39) made the following insightful observation when talking about culturally related behavioral differences: [We need to recognize the existence of] . . . the historical background of the... behavioral differences . . . being studied and those factors which make for . their . . . existence, and perpetuation. When, for instance, ones sees vast programs of Negro education undertaken without the slightest consideration given even to the possibility of some retention of African habits of thought and speech that might influence the Negroes' reception of the instruction thus offered-one cannot but ask how we hope to reach the desired objectives. When we are confronted with psychological studies of race relations made in utter ignorance of characteristic African patterns of motivation and behavior or with sociological analyses of Negro family life which make not the slightest attempt to take into account even the chance that the phenomenon being studied might in some way have been influenced by the carry-over of certain African traditions, we can but wonder about the value of such work. (Herskovits, 1938-39, p. 121) It is one of the main contentions of this paper that most, if not all, of the research on the Negro has sorely missed the implications of Herskovits' statement. Rather, research on the Negro has been guided by an ethnocentric liberal ideology which denies cultural differences. and thus acts against the best interests of the people it wishes to understand and eventually help. SOCIO-POLITICAL IDEOLOGY AND STUDIES OF THE NEGRO Though it has seldom been recognized by investigators, it has been virtually impossible for social science to divorce itself from ideological considerations when discussing contemporary race relations. As Killian (1968) has pointed out with reference to the social science role after the 1954 Supreme Court Decision: Because of their professional judgment that the theories were valid and because of the egalitarian and humanitarian ethos of the social sciences, many sociologists. psychologists, and anthropologists played the dual role of scientist and ideologist with force and conviction. Without gainsaying the validity of the conclusions that segregation is psychologically harmful to its victims, it must be recognized that the typically skeptical, even querulous attitude of scientists toward each other's work was largely suspended in this case. (Killian. 1968, p. 54) Social science research with Negro groups has been postulated on an idealized norm of "American behavior" against which all behavior is measured. This norm is defined operationally in terms of the way white middle-class America is supposed to behave. The normative view coincides with current social ideology-the egalitarian principle— which asserts that all people are created equal under the law and must be treated as such from a moral and political point of view. The normative view, however, wrongly equates equality with sameness. The application of this misinterpreted egalitarian principle to social science data has often left the investigator with the unwelcome task of describing Negro behavior not as it is, but rather as it deviates from the normative system defined by the white middle class. The postulation of such a norm in place of legitimate Negro values or life ways has gained ascendance because of the pervasive assumptions (1) that to be different from whites is to be inferior and (2) that there is no such thing as Negro culture. Thus we find Glazer and Moynihan (1963) stating: "The Negro is only an American and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect" (Glazer, N. and Moynihan, D., 1963). Billingsley (1968) has taken sharp objection to the Glazer and Moynihan statement, pointing out: The implications of the Glazer-Moynihan view of the Negro experience is farreaching. To say that a people have no culture to say that they have no common history which has shaped and taught them. And to deny the history of a people is to deny their humanity. (Billingsley, 1968, p. 37) However, the total denial of Negro culture is consonant with the meltingpot mythology and it stems from a very narrow conceptualization of culture by non-anthropologists (Baratz and Baratz, 1969). Social science has refused to look beyond the surface similarities between Negro and white behavior and, therefore, has dismissed the idea of subtle yet enduring differences. In the absence of an ethno-historical perspective, when differences appear in behavior, intelligence, or cognition, they are explained as evidence of genetic defects or as evidence of the negative effects of slavery, poverty, and discrimination. Thus, the social scientist interprets differences in behavior as genetic pathology or as the alleged pathology of the environment; he therefore fails to understand the distortion of the Negro culture that his ethnocentric assumptions and measuring devices have created. The picture that emerges from such an interpretive schema may be seen as culturally biased and as a distortion of the Negro experience. Liberals have eagerly seized upon the social pathology model as a replacement for the genetic inferiority model. But both the genetic model and the social pathology model postulate that something is wrong with the black American. For the traditional racists, that something is transmitted by the genetic code; for the ethnocentric social pathologists, that something is transmitted by the family. The major difference between the genetic model and the social pathology model lies in the attribution of causality, not in the analysis of the behaviors. observed as sick, pathological, deviant, or underdeveloped. An example of the marked similarity between the genetic and the social pathology perspectives can be found in the literature concerning language abilities of Negroes. LANGUAGE ABILITIES OF NEGROES Language proficiency is considered at length in both the social and the genetic pathology models. This concern is not accidental, but is the result of a basic assumption shared by both the social pathologists and the genetic racists that one's linguistic competence is a measure of one's intellectual capacity. Thus we find Shaler (1890), who believed in the genetic inferiority of the Negro, writing: Iis inherited habits of mind, framed on a very limited language-where the terms were well tied together and where the thought found in the words a bridge of easy passage-gave him much trouble when he came to employ our speech where the words are like widely separated steppingstones which require nimble wits in those who use them. (Shaler, 1890, p. 23) And later, Gonzales (1922) describes the language of the Carolina coastal Negroes called Gullahs in a similar manner: Slovenly and careless of speech, these Gullahs seized upon peasant English used by some of the early settlers and by the white servants of the wealthier colonists, wrapped their clumsy tongues about it as well as they could, and. enriched with certain expressive African words, it issued through their flat noses and thick lips as so workable a form of speech that it was generally adopted by other slaves and became in time the accepted Negro speech of the lower districts of South Carolina and Georgia. With characteristic laziness, these Gullah Negroes took short cuts to the ears of their auditors, using as few words as possible, sometimes making one gender serve for three, one tense for several, and totally disregarding singular and plural numbers. (Gonzales, 1922, p. 10) Hunt (1968) provides a similar description, but from the social pathology perspective, when he writes of the parents of Negro children: These parents themselves have often failed to utilize prepositional relationships with precision, and their syntax is confused. Thus, they serve as poor linguistic models for their young children. (Hunt, 1968, p. 31) And Deutsch (1963), writing on the same subject, states: In observations of lower-class homes, it appears that speech sequences seem to be temporally very limited and poorly structured syntactically. It is thus not surprising to find that a major focus of deficit in the children's language development is syntactical organization and subject continuity. (Deutsch, 1963, p. 174) Green (1964) gives us another example of the deficit orientation of social pathology thinkers: The very inadequate speech that is used in the home is also used in the neighborhood, in the play group, and in the classroom. Since these poor English patterns are reconstructed constantly by the associations that these young people have, the school has to play a strong role in bringing about a change in order that these young people can communicate more adequately in our society. (Green, 1964, p. 123) Finally, Hurst (1965) categorizes the speech of many Negro college freshmen as: . . [involving] such specific oral aberrations as phonemic and sub-phonemic replacements, segmental phonemes, phonetic distortions, defective syntax, misarticulations, mispronunciations, limited or poor vocabulary, and faulty phonology. These variables exist most commonly in unsystematic, multifarious combinations. Because of their ethnocentric bias, both the social pathologists and the genetic racists have wrongly presumed that linguistic competence is synonymous with the development of standard English and, thus, they incorrectly interpret the different, yet highly abstract and complex, non-standard vernacular used by Negroes as evidence of linguistic incompetence or underdevelopment (Baratz, J., 1969). Both share the view that to speak any linguistic system other than standard English is to be deficient and inferior. Since as early as 1859, when Müller (1859) wrote the History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, the racist contention has been that languages (and their cognitive components) could be hierarchically ordered. Müller himself offered German as the "best" language for conceptualization, but it will not surprise anyone to learn that at various times and according to various writers, the "best" language has been the language of the particular person doing the thinking about the matter. Thus, the ethnocentrism of the social pathology model, which defines a difference as a deficit, forces the misguided egalitarian into testing a racist assumption that some languages are better than others. THE LOGIC OF INTERVENTION It is important, then, to understand that the entire intervention model of Head Start rests on an assumption of linguistic and cognitive deficits which must be remedied if the child is to succeed in school. |