 Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called First Person Plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. Traditionally, in Western cultures, middle class and upper middle class women have stayed home taking care of children, and men have been breadwinners. Because children are the keepers of the culture to the extent that they will continue traditions and cultural norms, this traditional arrangement seems to provide a pretty powerful position for women to occupy. However, traditionally, women have taught children to occupy gender roles in which men are powerful and women are domestic. Domestic work remains unpaid work, and usually evokes dependency upon the person or persons in the family who are paid. So while it would seem that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, history has shunned this knot to be true. In the 1960s and 70s, a number of women in North America and Europe began questioning their roles as homemakers and mothers. These women rejected the tradition and went into the workforce, becoming no longer dependent upon men, including their husbands, for their livelihoods. For a while, these women concentrated on sisterhood and daughterhood and their analyses of society. They saw motherhood as holding them back in the quest for equality. But what if the power to change the world really were in how one reared a child? What if equality could be achieved by bringing up boys who were less violent, boys who saw their sisters as equals, boys who nurtured their sensitive sides as well as their protective sides? What if equality could be achieved by bringing up girls who were more assertive, girls who developed to their potentials, girls who were honest with their brothers rather than passive-aggressive and manipulative in their struggle for power? What if the hand that rocked the cradle really could change the world? As part of her dissertation research, Christine Buble, now an assistant professor of women's studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, spoke with a number of mostly middle-class women who could be out on the workforce earning money and chosen not only to stay home and take care of the children, but to take care of them in a particular way. These women strove to be organic in their child-rearing, often providing vegetarian and whole foods, a simpler lifestyle, a social conscience, and homeschooling. Buble called these women natural mothers. We talk with Chris about her book, The Paradox of Natural Mothering, this week on First Person Plural. As we explore how parenting and education have the potential to create social change and social justice, in an episode we call The Mother of All Socialization. All right, so tell me a little bit about your research. We'll start with you telling me the name of your book and how you went about doing the research and writing this book. Okay, the book is titled The Paradox of Natural Mothering, and a little later on I can explain to you why I chose that rather strange title. I interviewed, ultimately I interviewed 32 mothers who I defined as natural mothers. I spent time, what sociologists and anthropologists call in the field, beforehand getting to know women so that when I approached them for interviews they'd be more inclined to say yes. So I spent about a year and a half to two years attending potlucks, hanging out in food co-ops, going to clay groups, and just getting acquainted with my local community of mothers who were practicing what I called alternative lifestyle, which involved home birthing, homeschooling, extended breastfeeding, the use of natural medicine, consumption of natural foods. And so, like I said, after I spent a period of time getting to know folks and establishing some trust and sort of getting a little clear about who exactly I was interested in studying, then I approached moms. Almost all of them said yes, they'd be interested in being interviewed, which was, you know, a great thing. And so I sat down and talked with them, most of them in their own homes, with their children, you know, circling around, and many of them nursing their babies as we spoke. And I talked with each of them for at least an hour and a half, some of them two or two and a half hours, about their lives. And the interviews were extremely open-ended. I decided that I would approach things very organically, sort of like the mother's lives, and not ask very pointed or directive questions. I opened every interview with, so tell me how you got to this place. And so their lives unfolded. I didn't collect demographic information. I didn't have them fill out surveys or questionnaires. So I had to do a lot of, you know, guessing about, okay, she said she was born in 1963. That means she's 39. And so it made the research, I hope, let me back up, I think it produced an interview that was more sort of authentic and less sort of my agenda being shoved on their throats and more of them telling me what was important to them and their lives. And I take it that this had kind of a narrative approach to it. The idea was that you were collecting their story. That's exactly right. And I approached it that way. When I approached them for interviews, I said, I'm interested in your story of how you chose the parent in this relatively unconventional way. So they would, some of them started with childhood, some of them started with that two years they spent in the Peace Corps, started with, well, you know, I became a mother and everything changed. So they all had different starting points. So I didn't hear a different, I didn't hear the same pathway for everyone. You said something I think is interesting. You said that this is an unconventional parenting, but in some ways it's very conventional, isn't it? I mean, these are women who are basically choosing over a career to be with their children and to nurture and provide for their children and so forth. I'm assuming that the word paradox is going to show up here. You're absolutely right. That's a real good point and one that is raised often. They're unconventional only in this contemporary context, only in the setting in which most women of their privilege, most of these women, all of the women were white, most of them are partnered, many of them own their own home. They were college educated by and large, so they enjoy an awful lot of social and economic privilege. And women of that peer group, if you will, tend to combine, if possible, career and family, sort of go for that have-it-all lifestyle that so often talked about, you know, at personal and public levels. They rejected that. Instead they were doing what their grandmothers did and some of their mothers, by being all-time stay-at-home mothers, rejecting the paid workforce, relying on their partners, as I said, most of them are partners, most of them married, relying on their partners to earn the bread. And they poured all their creative and intellectual energy into parenting. And so you're right, in a lot of ways, what's unconventional about that, that sounds very traditional, but it was untraditional in that, well, number one, that they were not doing what many of their peers were encouraging them to do, like, gee, you've got a college degree, many of them had advanced degrees. Why are you at home full-time with your children? Aren't you turning the women's movement back, you know, a century? And it's unusual because the way they were mothering, they were not choosing caesareans when caesareans are, you know, climbing in current. They're not choosing bottle feeding. They're not choosing convenience foods. They're not even drying their clothes. They're hanging them up on the line. They're organic gardening rather than going to stop and shop or Kroger. And so in all those ways, it's very unconventional. It's very radical. Radical to breastfeed your child until she or he is three, four or five years old, when only about half of American women, at least, even initiate breastfeeding. So that's how it's unconventional in those two ways. I'm also thinking that this compares to, and I'm not sure if you address this in your book, you might be able to address it on the cuff, compares to some of the commitment that women on the far right are doing. I mean, I know of women who, you know, stay home and take care of their kids in order to make sure that they have a certain kind of religious upbringing, that they're not exposed to public schools and so forth. And so they end up doing a lot of the same kinds of things, homeschooling, devoting a lot of time to their children, that these women that you interviewed to. So can you kind of maybe compare and contrast those two kinds of mothering as well? Yeah, that's a really good observation and one that struck me as well. In fact, when I give you a brief story, I went to a La Leche League meeting, which is another place that I met a lot of these mothers. La Leche League is an international breastfeeding organization. And I went to a meeting and I sat down. It was winter and a woman next to me, I think on my left, took off her coat and she had on a pro-choice t-shirt. And I thought, oh, very interesting, you know, forever the sociologist. Oh, very interesting. The woman to my right takes off her coat and she had on a very virulent anti-choice t-shirt. I thought, oh, very interesting. And I saw this often where these sort of unlikely bedmates sort of find themselves in the homeschooling group and the breastfeeding support group and the food co-op and so on. The same ones at the homeopathic medicine 101 workshop, you know, sponsored by the local natural health clinic. What interested me about the moms I studied is I intentionally chose moms who didn't cite religion as their motivation because I thought, and maybe this was naive. I'm sure any scholar that studies religious motivation would tell me I'm being naive. But I thought that their motivations were a little clearer and I was interested in women who didn't cite the Bible or God's teachings or their faith as the reason that they were doing this very sort of gender-conventional lifestyle. I was interested in women who identified as feminists. Most of them did identify as feminists. As sort of liberal feminists, maybe not radical feminists, but definitely at least at one point in their life felt very, very attached to the women's movement. And I thought, well, that's an interesting population to choose this, you know, dependent on male breadwinner kind of lifestyle. What's going on for them? You know, is it about back to the land? Is it Neo hippie? Is it using your motherhood as a site of social change? Is it radicalism in a new form once you have kids? You know, you're going to live that life radically too. You know, what's going on for them? But there is an awful lot of connections between the, if you will, the religious right natural moms and the moms I studied, which are harder to sort of name. And that is that they rely on nature to guide their practice. So they both believe that mother nature, whether that's, you know, shaped and endowed by God or by, you know, mother nature herself, is a better guide for social practice and parenting practice than anything else. That you're better off listening to your body than you are hooking yourself up to a fetal monitor during labor and delivery. You're better off writing that cold out and just giving yourself good organic food than dosing yourself with over-the-counter prescription medicines. That nature is going to show you the way. And that's shared in both communities very clearly. Did you find among the women that you talked to that they were citing a kind of affecting social change by rearing children in a particular way as one of the reasons that they were doing what they were doing? I mean, I've often thought, and I was intrigued when I saw your book, because it's something that I had thought about before, that it's women who sort of get first crack at socializing children. And that that could be a spot, a place, if you will, that could turn into a very radical place in which we kind of teach our children what we had hoped we had learned when we were young and protect them from a lot of the, pardon my French, but crap that we were taught when we were young. And here's, I mean, are these women motivated that way? Are they thinking in those kind of terms? Yes, they are. It's variously in terms of their self-consciousness. I mean, I heard from women ranging, I had these kinds of responses. One, everything I do is political, one woman said. Another said, when I posed the question, do you consider your lifestyle moving toward social change in any way? She said, well, I hadn't thought about it, but now that you mention it, yes, I guess so. So I heard that, that was sort of a gamut, but no one denied that what they were doing was radical in some way. They may not use that word. They might say challenges in mainstream, swims upstream, but they all, they all acknowledged that what they were doing had some consequences socially. Not only for their individual children and their family, but for the culture at large, many of them spoke in terms of witnessing, which is a religious concept of what, you know, missionaries do, communities where they are doing their work. They live the lifestyle that they profess, and that is supposed to be the strongest teacher of all. Kind of walking the talk. Exactly. So by homeschooling, you are witnessing to your neighborhood that there's another way to educate your children. You don't necessarily have to march on Washington or lobby your legislature, but you need to live that lifestyle, you know, congruent with your values, and that's a powerful tool of social change. They all believed that their lifestyle was changing the world one child at a time, one family at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and they opted for that style as opposed to what many people think is more conventional social change, you know, like, you know, rallying and lobbying and picketing and so on, because they thought this was a more powerful means to make change, and it was one in which they could exert control, because, hey, you know, they're in charge of their children, they're in charge of their families. That's one place that they can actually make a difference. You're listening to First Person Plural on CFUV 101.9 FM, Victoria. Do you think they were being successful? You know, people ask me that all the time, and it's so difficult to answer. I have to say that, you know, I got to know their families, many of their families, relatively well, because I did spend so much time getting to know folks before we actually had the interview. The interview was kind of the end of this time in the field. And the kids were, by and large, really delightful, well-adjusted. The family seemed very cohesive. I mean, I didn't live with them like some sociologists do, you know, hang out for hours and hours, so it's sort of hard to say exactly. But it did seem, at least, and I took that snapshot, that things were going pretty well. Kids farewell that are homeschooled, they actually test very well on different various batteries of academic indicators. The kids and the families tended to release speak of self-confidence and self-esteem. They weren't caught up by sort of conventional social, measuring rods of social success. They were wearing what they wanted, when they wanted. The clothes didn't match, the hair wasn't combed, and that was fine. They were reading crazy books and doing wild projects, and we're proud of that. Most of the homes didn't have televisions. Many of them didn't have internet access. They used the library instead of, you know, Disney, and they seemed comfortable with that. But I didn't do a study that looked at them down the line, and many people have said, please do that, and I want to know how these families turned out. And I think that would be very interesting to examine. Yeah, we did a radio show a few weeks ago with a woman who is actually the sister of a sociologist, and she was raised as a red diaper baby. Mm-hmm. And are you familiar with that term? I am. And it was interesting in talking to her, and I mean, she's, you know, in her mid-50s now, and has lived a life of activism to a certain extent in one way or another. It was interesting in talking to her and researching the red diaper babies to see how many of these children who were, you know, children of families who suffered because of their beliefs and because they were trying to affect social change went on to grow up and instead of rebelling against their parents' values, were actually leaders in pursuing many of the values. I mean, not all of them identify as communists, but they do identify with social change and social justice issues. Well, that's helpful. So there is one little case study that's indicative. Well, that's interesting. Yes, I wonder, because many people have asked, do you think these kids are going to rebell, and as soon as they can, they're going to have, they're going to eat exclusively McDonald's, watch only Disney films, you know, where Nike and Tommy Hilfiger every chance they get, you know, certainly didn't look like that with the trend. I mean, not only are the parents teaching their children to resist, but they're teaching them to think for themselves. So I think that certainly lends itself to an alternative adult life. One of the differences, I guess, between them and their more conservative counterparts, I would speculate might be because the agenda is not so much to instill certain agendas in the kid, but rather to teach the kids to find their own agendas. That's exactly right. Are you familiar at all with unschooling as opposed to homeschooling? I've read a little bit about it on the Internet, but go ahead and tell me about it. Yeah, well unschooling deviates from homeschooling in that unschooled children don't follow a curriculum. Many homeschooled children are schooled in the home much like they would be in an institution. It's almost as if school comes home. Mom, usually about 90, over 90% of homeschooled families are homeschooled by mom. Mom is now the teacher, and there is a curriculum that is used, and we sit down after breakfast at nine, and we have school till three, and then we break. Unschooled children are encouraged to develop their own interests and follow their own passions, and parents operate or the homeschooling facilitators, let's say, usually parents, facilitate that. So they follow the children's interests. So if the child finds that they're very interested in insects in the spring, then they do projects on insects, and they go out into the wild, and they go to the library, and maybe they go on some sort of field trip to study them more in depth. And if the interest shifts then to contemporary art, then that's what they do next. And so it's very free-flowing. It's very child-driven. The idea is that children are natural learners. They're naturally inquisitive, and if you give them space, time, and resources, they will learn. And so unschooling, that sort of philosophy, is very indicative of the philosophy of natural mothering, which is to let the child let it develop naturally. That's very different than maybe a more right-wingish natural mother derivative, I think, because it's not as rigid and prescribed. It's much looser than that. And I would suggest, too, that there might be other, even not to rail too much on the right, that there might even be leftist agendas that still try to train a child up in a certain way. Oh, sure. And the idea here, from when I hear what you're telling me, is that children are given a chance to think for themselves, find their own agendas, and that that's the way that it's radical, rather than radical in the sense of teaching them a certain politic. That's very true. In fact, the interesting side note about the word radical, when I was casting about for language to describe these moms, I originally settled on radical mother. So when I started interviewing moms, I'd say, how do you feel about this language? And I heard, repeatedly, I don't like that at all. That sounds too strident. That sounds too militant. That's not me. So then I settled on natural mom, and it was obvious after a while, gee, why didn't I think of that first? This nature-drives practice theme is so prevalent. That's what it's got to be. And people felt comfortable with that, Monica. The notion of radicalism or political-driven parenting, that didn't really resonate for them. Some were more politically-driven than others. But I'd say, by and large, they were driven by nature in their own sense of intuition to parent differently, and they hoped that that would make the world a better place. They were sure it would make their families healthier. Do you think that these kids, I mean, I can kind of hear an argument in the back of my head, like a devil's advocate argument, that says, well, you know, this is all well and good, and they create this nice little world for them, and then they go out into the real world. And get eaten alive. Yeah. Do you think that these kids are being prepared for adulthood well? Well, that's a great question. And the defense of the, and by the way, not all the natural mothers' homeschool, but most of them do. There's all sorts of variations, but I'd say if I wanted to stereotype a natural mother, I'd say she's homeschooling her kids. And in those cases, the homeschoolers defend themselves very easily. They say, you know what, my kid is not isolated. We, you know, Susan's and the Girl Scouts and John's on the skating team, and you know, they're very much integrated into the social fabric of our local community. They just don't go to an institution for school. And they're developing such strong self-concepts and such great critical thinking skills, and they're so self-confident that they're ready to manage the world. And there is data that tracks homeschooled kids, and they do fare well. Did the mothers talk about addressing that kind of pressure from the outside? Daughter comes home from Girl Scouts and announces that she's discovered, you know, beanie babies or Barney or whatever, yeah. Exactly. Well, one of the strategies is that the moms often joined groups to support one another. So there'd be a homeschooling group or a breastfeeding group. One of the groups I studied, everything of course has pseudonyms, and I gave a pseudonym to a group that was very important in my study, and I called them Creating Stronger Families. And it was a group of families who many of them homeschooled, not all of them, but all of them identified with aspects of this alternative parenting lifestyle. And they got together regularly, and they supported each other, and they talked about things like, how do you deal with the love of Barbie? Do you really just tell, or a topic that comes up with all kinds of parents, what do you do when your kid wants to play a gun? Do you say absolutely not, and then they, of course, covet it? Or do you say, okay, bring it in the house, and then you feel like you're living a double life? And so what they did is they spent a lot of time talking to each other and supporting one another and trying to connect with other families that were like them, so the kid didn't feel so weird, so they weren't the only vegetarian, organic family in their lives. They weren't the only ones without a television or the only ones that had dinner together every night at six, no questions asked, and so that seemed to help some. And many of them had very honest conversations with their families, with their children about those kinds of things, so they tried to create an open dialogue where it's okay to come home and say, you know what, I'm the only kid that doesn't have a Nike sweatshirt. Sometimes they'd make confessions like, okay, one Nike sweatshirt, but we're buying it at the thrift store. Right. So I heard all different kinds of strategies, but no one pretended that there wasn't another world out there that you're having to compete with. Let's take this to a more theoretical level for a minute if you don't mind. Sure. We'll be sociological together. Oh, I'd love to. What do you think that this, we'll call it a case or these cases, teach you about how social change is affected? I mean, I think that we're talking about people making choices on a very micro level, doing a lot of constructing of their lives in a certain way, and then having to deal with something at a social level that kind of intrudes on that in terms of advertising, in terms of, you know, all sorts of ways in which the culture kind of seeps into the situation and doesn't go away just because they wish it. Is there something that we can learn as sociologists from looking at the ways in which these women are trying to do what they're doing? I think there's lots we can learn. One thing that was really clear to me and the work of Barbara Katz-Rothman, who's a sociologist, helped me a lot. I actually shared with her my early interest in this population and as somebody who studied midwifery for years, she knew exactly who I was talking about. And she said, you know, Chris, they get capitalism and technology and they resist both of them vehemently, but they don't seem to get patriarchy. They don't resist conventional gender script. And that helped me understand why this movement felt to me paradoxical, that it was progressive and that it resisted quite directly the ideology of capitalism, of materialism, of consumerism, of careerism and the ideology of technology, which is, you know, the more high-tech, the better life through more technology. But they did not challenge or question how gender structures social reality. And so to me, that suggested a movement that resisted but not too much, kind of pushed but not too hard. And so it kind of took a couple of steps forward and one step back. And that's why it's paradoxical to me. It's simultaneously progressive and regressive, kind of gets it in some ways and gets it in another way. And the moms defended themselves. In fact, many of the moms that, you know, read the book and they responded to me, they said, you know, I really don't like your conclusions because I don't feel like I am conforming to conventional gender script. I feel very rebellious in the way that I'm living. So they may not see it that way, but I'm as a sociologist, of course, interested in how the culture sees this style of parenting. And if it professes to be an agent of social change, then it needs to be read that way by everyone. And many people regard this lifestyle as very regressive. Like, well, gee, you know, bottom line is is that you're modeling to your children that mom stays home and dad works in the public realm. One wonders if it doesn't model at least, well, actually to both gender children, there is this model here that this is what mom does and that this is what dad does. Right. Yes. And no matter how much they try to explain what they meant by that, they still are seeing this model and that model is reinforced in the greater culture. Indeed. The other lesson about social change is that we have to pay attention always to who's constituting the movement and what kind of privilege do they enjoy. In other words, do you have to be privileged with natural mother? And I would argue, yeah, that it takes money, it takes race privilege, it takes cultural capital, a term that probably many of your listeners are familiar with, that means the social and often economic resources sort of move fluidly through the culture. And so, you know, many of these families turn their backs on much material privilege by having only the one income, they have one rusted out car, they dispense with a lot of the sort of social trapping, but they do that by choice and they could, if they wanted to, beat the dual earner families and live in a big house or live in an SUV, if they chose, they have the material resources to do so or access to the material resources. Again, remember, many of them are college educated, many of them grew up middle class, they're partnered, they're white, they're heterosexual, so they have all this status at their disposal and they turn their back on much of it to live a particular lifestyle, but they could also turn right around and claim it. And you can't do that if you're poor or you're of color or you're queer. So, I believe it's very important to look at how far can a movement go, if it depends on only privilege to make it work. Right. And so, I challenge the notion that this is sort of the next wave because if it's the next wave then it needs to sweep more folks into it. And at this point it really looks very exclusive. I know, I grew up in a working class family and I always got a kick out of feminist rhetoric in the 70s talking about women going to work, every woman I knew worked. Absolutely. Right. It's like, stay home, work. Absolutely. And that's been the big blind side of the feminist movement is to recognize that women of color and poor women have always worked. And in fact, privilege to them means not having to work. And so, looking at it through a different lens is really important. I think that's the case here is that if we're talking about natural mothering, we have to pay attention to who's natural mothering and how it's possible that they do so. I did interview some less privileged women including a couple very poor women who natural mothered and they talked explicitly about how much harder it is for them to do it. One woman talked about taking her child to the emergency room when he had an injury and she didn't want to give him the antibiotics because she felt very strongly that antibiotics were unhealthy in the long run. But she felt pressured by the ER doc and she was afraid that if she resisted too hard he might report her to social services as an unfit mother. A privileged woman with a husband, her shoulder would not feel that way. But this woman did. She also talked about working in a food co-op and people making assumptions about her lifestyle because she worked there and consumed the goods there. And she said, you know, sometimes I felt like, screw you all, you have no idea what it's like for me to have to make sacrifices to buy this expensive organic food. I have to work here to buy the food here. Oh yeah, it's much more expensive. Sure, and if you want to use herbal medicine, that's all out of pocket. Your HMO is not going to pay for that. Sure, going to the naturopath and seeing the chiropractor and all of that often isn't covered by any kind of insurance. So who can do that? Well, people with privilege, people with resources. Well, Chris, I very much appreciate your time. Thank you for asking me to talk about this work. And good luck on the book and we will put links up on the website so that people can get a chance to check your book out. Thank you, Patty. And I look forward to talking to you further in the future. Great, and I look forward to seeing you at an SWS event. And thanks again. Yeah, thanks and thanks to Carl too. Okay, I'll tell him. Bye-bye. Take care. Okay, let's start with this idea. Culture is invented by human beings. We like to think of cultures happening before us and before any particular human being it is. I mean, we're all born into a history. We're all born into a society. We don't come out of the womb, figure out what we think the best world would be and then create it. On the other hand, we then create the world for the next generation. We don't do it from scratch, obviously. We do it within the context of our history and the context of the resources that are handed to us. But nonetheless, it's human beings who are doing this as a group. It's people who are creating culture and culture has its advantages. Okay, you're setting up a model of culture here that relies on culture being collected and being collectively subjective and iterative and marked by one's tendency not to reinvent the wheel in all cases. Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's the beauty of culture that we don't have to reinvent the wheel in all cases. I mean, it's the way that history gets collected and remembered and it's the way in which we could learn from the past. This is one that has always been a point of confusion for me personally. On one hand, you can learn things from books. On the other hand, books sometimes lie. Moreover, those who accumulate books from my perusal sometimes do so with less than pristine motives. Yes. And that's hard to reconcile. Only if you are a vacuous receptor that is stuck with whatever goes in. Well, I must be quite vacuous then because I see no way of reconciling the conflict. No easy way anyway. I disagree with you. I see you reconcile the conflict all the time. You have a great critically thinking mind which assesses the truth value, the legitimacy, the believability, the usefulness. The implications. As long as we're saying good things about me, let's throw in the implication. Yes, of what you read. I'm very good at deciding what is feasible. I think that analytical ability is possible, at least to the extent that one assesses what one is told and notes the contradictions that ensue and does something about it. I think that that kind of development is possible and I think to assume that everyone does develop is misleading. There are people in this world who swallow every damn thing they're told and never realize that contradictions can ensue. Yes. There are also people who believe the first thing they're told and simply reject everything they hear after that that contradicts it because they quote, just to know better, close quote. Right, they grab hold on to the first idea and that's the standard by which they judge everything else. And the latter type do understand what contradictions are. They're just not very picky about where they get their axioms. And that's the danger of culture. So I'm telling you that, yes, I think culture is a wonderful invention, but if culture becomes too rigid, if people take the ideas, the first ideas that they hear and judge everything else in the world based upon those first ideas, those first exposures, then culture's not doing what it was intended to do. Intended? That sounds teleological. Don't worry about being too picky about the jargon. Well, at some point or another, some human being started all of this. Maybe not in a direct sense, but certainly in a, hey, you know what, I think if we write this down, we're going to remember it since. Or if we tell this to each other or to our children who remember it, written language has only been around for about a 20th, I think, as the figure as long as spoken language. So that leads us all to where parenting fits in and all of this. Westerners, especially in North America, regard parenting as the place where culture is passed on from one generation to the next. And I would guess that in order for organic parenting to work, you have to start with that assumption. And I think that's an assumption that we're wondering about right now. I mean, we've talked about you would have to cut yourself off from the rest of the world if you're going to homeschool your children in more radical ideas or ideas that are counter to the mainstream culture. And that sort of suggests that kids get a lot of ideas from other places and not just from their parents. It establishes that what we're really dealing with and the assumption that parents and culture at their children is a presumed right or privilege by parents in Western culture. Yeah, in fact, the language their kids is a really important part of that. Parents own children in Western society. Yes, it's probably an exaggeration to say that children are slaves. But if it is an exaggeration, it isn't much of one. Not on a de facto practical level. And people talk a lot about raising their children properly and making sure that they get the best chances in life. But then they would say that, wouldn't they? There are very few people who are willing to come out and say, my children are my property. I hit them because they can get away with it and they'll do whatever I tell them because when you get right down to it, it's convenient having slaves. It's damn convenient. And because I know I can get away with it, surprisingly, yet quite a few parents act as if that were the case. When push comes to shove, they regard not just the children, not just the physical person that is the child, but the right to inculturate that child, to program that child any damn way they wish as immutable. Yeah. Which is one of the things that encouraged me about the women that Chris interviewed because a lot of them didn't say, I want to inculturate my child. I want to teach my child a certain type of thinking, but rather they were interested in teaching them a certain style of thinking. And that is critical thinking, getting them to question things. You don't spend a lot of time telling your kid what he ought to know. You spend a lot of time telling your kid how to find out what he wants to know. I think it would start even further back than that. I think it must start with the realization that the parent is not the only one who inculturates the child. Certainly parents have a tremendous influence on them, but they're not the only ones and they are going to be. And I think that that has to be the basis of all intelligent parenting and indeed all intelligent public policymaking about parenting. And not just about parenting, but also about education. We keep talking about this as if parenting is the only influence and I know we're recognizing that there are other influences, but there are other influences that are directly aimed at children. Like we can talk about advertising and we can talk about the children's programming on television. We can talk about their peers, who they meet and who they talk to. But you have this whole other institution besides parenting that is directed towards kids that has a philosophy and definitely has a public policy to it. And that's the education system and it interests me that one of the things that this natural parenting does is it looks at the educational system and it says I don't want my child to go there. And so in a way it's suggesting that the educational system needs some serious reform. You know, Chris mentioned no schooling and I remember reading about some of this last year when we were talking about some education stuff. The no schooling concept is in part a parenting concept and it's also in part an education concept because it's arguing that schools are too directive, that they are regimented and that this regimentation and routine is aimed at creating good little workers who don't think very well rather than good citizens who understand how to think critically for themselves. Okay, if I could be hypersensitive about the terminology here, you're using the word intent or the word intention and I don't think intention is pertinent. It may be, well, noteworthy for other reasons but what's pertinent here is the effect. Sure, now we're doing role reversal, aren't we? I'm the one who's always saying it doesn't matter what they thought they were doing. What matters is what they are doing. I suppose so. But yeah, you're right. I know a lot of teachers who intend well but when push comes to shove, they have limited resources or they believe they have limited resources and they get into routines that are much easier for them than they are for the kids and even though they intend to do well by the kids, it ends up that the kids are still being rootinized, being regimented, being controlled. We could blame a number of people for why Johnny's teacher can't read and resent Johnny trying to learn to do so. We could blame teachers, parents, the children themselves, school administrators, governments. We could blame them all. And you know how I am. I'm a sociologist. It's some combination of all of that. First person plural, your source, pursuing sounds of sociological sagaciousness. The police state is using its phallocentric organ, the corporate media, to control ordinary people like you and me. I want to pick on one of the things you said. You're talking about people pulling their kids out of schools as evidence that the school system needs to be reformed? No, I meant evidence that they believe that the school system has to be reformed. Okay, I still don't agree. I think it's the opposite of that. I think it's evidence that they believe that the school system is not worth the time in trouble to reform and they rather just start their own system. Oh, well, I'm not sure that that's antithetical to what I was saying. Mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I am old enough to remember how the middle class whites in the southeastern United States screened a bloody murder when integration came into being. And we're talking about, I don't need school integration. I'll learn my kids at home, that sort of thing. And that still gives me chills. On the other hand, I feel that other school systems have to be developed. Your terminology bothers me because you're saying the school system. And that's not because your terminology is imprecise. On the contrary, it's quite precise. The is the keyword here. Yeah, and it's not any singular thing. And it's why I read a report by a group out of Harvard last week that says that public schools are more segregated than they were in 1954. And this is because of the realities of race and socioeconomic levels coupled with the realities that whites are pulling their kids. Many white families can afford to do this and they're pulling their kids out of public schools and putting them either in private schools or homeschooling them in order to avoid contact with people of different classes and people of different races. And what is being left over is an impoverished public school system with impoverished people. Brown versus Board of Education changed the separate but equal law not on the basis of legal precedent because there was plenty of precedent for separate but equal in the United States at that point. By the 1950s, there had been something like 80 years of precedent in the law. But because a sociologist did a study that demonstrated that segregation was in fact leading to an unequal opportunity for the students who were in the poor schools. And it still holds true today. And as the public schools in the United States are becoming more segregated again and especially as they are becoming more economically segregated, what you have is the same system being perpetuated over and over again. That kind of brings us back to one of the problems with the organic mothering that Chris was talking about towards the end of the interview and that is that there is a definite socioeconomic dynamic to this. And these are privileged people who are pulling their kids out of public school and even though their intent may be very good, one wonders if just the act of pulling them out of public school and away from certain parts of the population will not teach the kids a lesson that wasn't intended. Well they're pulling them away from certain parts of the population but they're also pulling them away from the influence of certain other parts of the population not to put too fine a point on it. Yeah but one, I mean you could work for education reform rather than pull your kids out of school is what I'm saying. I mean the choices, they've made a choice. The choice is I'm going to take my kids away. That presumes that they haven't already tried to work for education reform and found it to be a thankless task. I'm sure it is a thankless task. I'm not arguing intent. Okay. Remember, you brought this up, not me but I love the topic. That's fine, I don't resent your saying so. There is a good intent on the part of the parent. They're saying okay, I don't want, I want to set up filters of my kid before they're exposed to this kind of bullshit that goes on in public systems. I want my kid to have this more organic life instead of this regimented life and I want them to have a chance to think critically instead of being turned into an automaton but they're also withdrawing their kid from certain parts of the world. They talk about how they give him a social world but do they give him a social world with multiple colored people who come from multiple socioeconomic levels? And can they give them a freestanding social world, one that can in fact be put together in a de facto contextual vacuum or are they conversely stuck with the influences of the monoculture that they are trying to flee? Well, I can't answer that obviously, but that's the question. That's the problem at hand and because it is a phenomenon that only a certain kind of family can afford it brings with it all that baggage. So it's definitely contextualized by class in ways that I think that the homeschooling in this organic mothering have no basis to address with their kids. That's the beauty of the reason that public school, I mean I'm old enough to remember rhetoric about public school that talked about how this was where citizens were made not workers but citizens and that whole idea just seems to have died and I don't see how homeschooling can save it. Well, the whole idea of citizenship has died in the United States they simply don't use the word anymore. Yeah, it's the public good, the public mind civic mindedness. Civic mindedness has come to be synonymous with being a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Yeah, they use the word taxpayer something like the same context that they used to use the word citizen yet in an entirely different context inescapably paradoxically. Never mind that there's a lot of unmarked taxpaying what they mean when they say taxpayer is somebody who pays money in income tax or property taxes. The truth of the matter is quite a few people are not marked as a taxpayer who pay taxes and the second truth is it's not a basis of simply paying your taxes. There's a lot more in a citizenship than paying taxes and to reduce it down to taxpaying is to lose quite a bit of an understanding of what's good for the group may be good for me and it might be a good idea to keep the group, the community, the school, whatever the group may be going in order to take care of my future and the future of my community and so it gets right back to that loss of culture in a way. Do you think that it's a recoverable loss? I hope so. I'm just wondering if homeschooling is going to be the way that will recover it. I think alternative schooling would be. I think it would be really nice. One of the things that Black Panthers did in Chicago in the 1960s and that SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee did in the late 50s and early 60s was create citizenship schools schools in which people could learn more about their community could learn how to read and write could learn how to think critically about the world around them. I mean there was a real recognition in those efforts that educated people were needed in order to make a better world and that that education needed to be broad based and it needed to encourage critical thinking and that was an alternative to the public schools which were segregated and which were regimented. I guess what I'm saying is that I have my doubts that homeschooling alone would do it. I think that if homeschooled children would come together from different racial ethnic socio-economic levels and create some alternative schools to the public school system that they might have a chance that they could become the new public schools and in that sense they could support parents who are raising up citizens instead of indoctrinating their slave class. You have been listening to First Person Plural because how people get along with each other still matters. First Person Plural is a show created for community radio by Carl Wilkerson and Dr. Patty Thomas to examine social and organizational issues. Music for First Person Plural is performed composed and produced by Carl Wilkerson. Except where noted. For more information about First Person Plural Dr. Patty Thomas or Carl Wilkerson visit our website www.culturalconstructioncompany.com or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com