Delphic Maxim 94: Do not curse your sons (or daughters)
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
94. Do not curse your sons
Here’s another one of those super weird maxims that doesn’t necessarily apply to contemporary life. The interesting verb here — curse — could mean a whole bunch of different things, all of them feeling a little out of place in the modern world. Curse could mean ‘swearing’ at our sons, it could mean the sort of ‘witch’s curse’ style of curse, or it could mean abusing them more generally. To play with this one, I’m going to walk away from the literal definition of the word ‘curse’, and get a bit more abstract.
Let’s imagine that a curse is the sort of ‘transmitted harm’ — something that attaches to a person until it is ‘lifted’. I’m also going to imagine that this doesn’t just apply to sons, but daughters as well (since it doesn’t really make sense to not curse your sons only, it seems a little sexist). If we interpret the maxim this way, it could be paraphrased along these lines: don’t transmit lasting harm or disadvantage to your children.
Let’s turn to sociology for a bit of convenient theory.
I’ve mentioned Pierre Bourdieu in previous posts, and I think he’s relevant here because he spent a bit of time theorising how disadvantage gets reproduced across generations. It’s one of his most important contributions to the sociology of education. Bourdieu observed that a child from a working class background was likely to grow up working class as well — a cycle of social reproduction that comes from access to a thing called cultural capital.
Our normal understanding of ‘capital’ in the financial world is money and assets. Bourdieu’s theoretical innovation was to think about the kind of cultural and social assets that we might have access to, and how they work to make us ‘richer’ in certain social contexts. Books, museums, music and libraries are all forms of ‘cultural capital’ that prepare students for education in wealthy western countries. Schooling is middle class, and middle class (and wealthy) kids have an advantage because they are more likely to have access to the kinds of cultural capital that are valued by our education systems.
It actually goes a lot deeper than that. Research since the 1970’s — pioneered by people like Paul Willis and Jean Anyon — has shown that schools with different socio-economic demographics tend to teach kids in different ways. ‘Working class’ schools tend to give students more manual, repetitive, rote-learning tasks — things that you might do at entry level jobs in retail. ‘Middle class’ schools give kids the kinds of skills — critical thinking, some creativity, elaborated writing — that is required for professionals like teachers, nurses, and managers. ‘Wealthy’ schools teach kids leadership skills and very creative, innovative, dynamic tasks, preparing them for life as judges, political leaders, doctors and so on. Look at the schooling backgrounds of the people who typically fill these occupations, and you’ll see a fairly consistent story (there are always outliers, of course, but follow the trends).
What’s the point of all this? Well, we know that the biggest determining factors on a students success at school are mostly outside of the classroom. Schools and teachers can make a difference, of course, but they’re fighting an uphill battle for kids who haven’t been given the cultural capital that best fits our schooling systems. It’s for this reason that I’m an advocate of public education: parents are better off spending the fees they would otherwise spend on private schools on books and excursions on the weekends instead. If you want to give your kids a big advantage in life, then give that to them early: read to them, buy them books, encourage them to play with other kids, take them to museums, teach them how to use libraries, play music, talk with them about the world, find ways to create a rich and elaborated understanding of life.
This isn’t a value judgement by the way, of course not. It’s just a way of saying that you can open up possibilities for your children, rather than closing them off. If someone doesn’t care to work in a profession that demands more than 60 hours a week (like law), then that’s fine. But I think the point of today’s maxim is to say create possibilities for your children, and help break that cycle of social reproduction — wherever you sit in it.
