Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Introduction to Sociology · Acedra
Home
Explore
Sociology
Introduction to Sociology
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
85 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:24
I want to talk to you about uh the the the very subject that brings us together um and that is the word sociology sociology and um it's hard to get all those syllables in uh I want to talk to you about sociology uh and I know many of you have had other experiences with sociology or with the other social sciences and in fact this gives me an opportunity to learn something from you so I would like to know first of all how many of you are new to NYU this term raise your hand
1:01
oh okay a good number thank you how many of you are in your first year of of any University raise your hand wow okay great thank you um so we have a room of young people it's uh safe to assume and um uh again a hearty welcome uh I remember I don't really remember when I was uh in your situation um but I have some photographs uh maybe I'll share uh at some point during this semester uh and um uh pass it along uh how many of you have had another Sociology class
1:38
somewhere in the world a couple of you and how about anthropology a handful and economics and political science and psychology okay thanks so much uh history all right uh I saw a lot of hands go up for uh quite a number of those disciplines when I asked about it I could have asked about others like geography and planning uh and what's interesting for the present purpose is that sociology includes touches on borders all of those fields and you will see that as the semester uh goes on that
2:23
sociology has a kind of its own space but it is adjacent to all of those other spaces and in fact many fields like Communications for example emerged out of sociology the field of demography the study of population was born out of Sociology uh studies of of of various versions of History were born out of sociology and in fact one of the great sociological thinkers a founder of of the discipline sometimes a French a French uh theorist whose name was um AUST compt whoop that doesn't this is
3:03
I'm just learning by the way this whole exciting world of electronics and um uh oh I know what I got to do I know know don't don't give me any clues I know what I've got to do there we go like that uh see the way it works it's just something fantastic I'm going to get better at this as the uh semester goes on I know I have a um got to put back and now I go like that oh man I'm just no good okay I'll practice every night for 10 minutes uh until I uh get this right I'll roll my RS to improve my
3:43
Italian okay so um that's a nice little pattern isn't it so I know what I was doing I wanted to give you the name of a dead European uh and uh uh AUST compt and uh he uh a philosopher of the what century is it 17th century where is it do we know we're going to I'm you I'm getting confirmed on that 17th century uh called sociology the queen of the sciences and he meant that in a positive way uh that sociology is the centerpiece of all of these other disciplines
4:26
because sociology after all is about human beings beings and it is about human beings interacting together it is about what happens when human beings interact together so whether it's their economic relationships their relationships of power as the political scientists take it up whether it's comes out of their psychology uh the fact that they are together and what comes out of that phenomenon is the subject matter of sociology and that being together kind of thing what results from that uh is
5:01
what also gives rise to all of these other disciplines which are all about social relations in one form or another but sociology is the heart of it so let's start with some sociology um what um uh the first part of this course the heading for it is the sociological imagination who we are and how we got here and I Tred to I want to give you one way of answering uh that question the very term the sociological imagination was uh coined by uh a professor who was at Columbia University
5:43
and he um uh died uh uh not so long ago uh he died quite young in fact um but he he's um when I was young he was about to die so just to give you you a a sense of the historic periods and his name was C Wright Mills a professor at Columbia University and he wrote numbers of books but one book a very famous book is called the sociological imagination and that's what you are assigned to read from and so what I'm going to do right now is speak about in effect the Mills
6:27
version of Sociology it isn't the only one but it's a favorite uh and has survived for a long long time so what is the sociological imagination it is virtually like any kind of so sociology the idea that um it matters who's around that um we can answer the question let's try to be a little bit non-s sociological uh as as a way of getting started uh if I ask you why are we here uh you might say well I had to take something between 11 and 12:15 uh that would be an answer
7:01
because I I work uh after 12:15 and I can't get up uh I can't get up early so that's why I'm here that's one kind of way of answering it there are many other ways of answering that question as well which is that uh I have I performed well on on tests and so therefore I was able to get into NYU um uh my uh family has a a lot of money uh and they're able to pay for my tuition at NYU I uh I love NYU I came here as a child and was just blown away uh by a school whose colors
7:38
uh were uh Violet and eggshell that really was a place that I wanted to go to uh there are many ways of answering that that question of how we got here and some of those ways um fit with the idea of the sociological imagination and how Mills would go about explaining uh what goes on the number one thing that Mills would say I think is that or maybe it's the number two but a critical thing Mills would say is that we have to look beyond the individual and their own
8:15
sense of how they got to be where they are in Life or in geographical space that you may think that NYU is a groovy school and that's why you are here uh you chose chose NYU maybe you'll even add in that NYU chose you and so you're here but much more is going on than that and that we are all buffeted constantly by the forces of History uh the forces of social class the forces of race the forces of gender uh all of these kinds of factors and forces are shaping all of
8:56
our Behavior Uh and pretty much all the time time I'll try to convince you uh as the semester goes on and only by understanding how those forces intersect and in and in this case at at the level of a particular individual each of us can you understand and answer a question like why are we here the why are we here is really a question for investigation it the answer is to be found Mills would say at the intersection of biography and history so each of us is living our lives uh
9:34
getting up in the morning uh we came out of the womb uh at an earlier Point um and it's been really one meal after another um and uh one um one session of sleep uh after another as we've gone forward but we haven't gone forward like a little motorboat um isolated in the world instead as we've gone forward all of these other forces are shaping buffeting determining altering that course of our existence and only by getting a handle on those forces will we understand uh
10:12
where we are and why we are where we are Mills was very oriented toward problems in society he was oriented toward individual problems and you will see that um Mills did this writing 50 60 years ago and his a repertoire of problems he speaks of aren't exactly the same problems as we would speak of today but problems for example of uh of of race uh of of illness of Health Care uh and its access of economic deprivation of unemployment if you can't get a job one way of thinking about the fact that
10:51
you can't get a job is that there's something uh I've done wrong I should have not gone to NYU I certainly should have not majored in sociology I should have gone to Carnegie melon and gotten a degree in engineering for example I made the wrong decision and that's why I'm employed uh or I don't have any real get up and go I don't have skill I don't have talent I can't get up in the morning uh that's why I'm can't get a job the alternative is to ask um what is
11:27
going on with the national economy these days uh how did that happen What kinds of political economic Global forces uh created the economy we're in right now how is it that the economy values one kind of job uh and not another kind of job I love taking care of small children I want to be a daycare teacher even if I get a job as a daycare teacher I won't be able to pay rent or eat uh attract a mate I I won't be able to do any of those things how is it that this kind of
12:06
a job is paid so little compared to say being a fighter pilot on a Jet Plane uh or being a plumber how come plumbers make three or four or five times what a daycare teacher makes is it something about Plumbing that's more important than uh than helping a child develop or just what maybe that why I can't get a job maybe that's why I can't make a living it's about the structure of the situation and the way these forces have evolved over history such that this is
12:42
just the way it's going to be and just as a small footnote um um doctors um in uh countries in which the doctors are primarily women receive lower income than countries in which the doctors are primarily men so maybe maybe it's not something about doctoring that pays well or doesn't pay well but it's something about the surrounding society and the way it's emerged over history that determines uh whether something is going to be good or not going to be good
13:16
individual troubles which I've given you a few examples of are public issues and that's a very important another idea from seite Mills people who tend to go around see seeing their life as a series of private troubles are missing the boat they should be seeing the relationship between their private troubles and public issues that's I think the second leg of the Mills argument and you see when they do that when they see that well wait a minute I love children I'm
13:51
devoting myself to that children are important in society well wait a minute um that should be paid well uh or wait a minute I'm not getting this job because I'm a woman or I'm not getting this job because I'm Hispanic there's something wrong with that that then leads to once you see there's something wrong with that taking political action the solution is not to enroll in Kaplan uh or go to church or synagogue the answer is in political and and and Collective
14:27
moral action I have to join up and this is the political action it isn't just that I now go vote for president Obama as opposed to President Bush it's that I find other people who are similarly situated to me uh uh men who want to do Child Care um um uh uh uh uh African-Americans who want to be president of the United States uh whatever it might be I have to link up with people who are in a way in the same predicament I am caused by the same forces of history and culture and politics and all the
15:07
rest of it and we have to become agents for change we have to organize we have to be together workers of the World Unite you have nothing to lose but your chains as Mark said or uh gays of the World Unite you have nothing to lose but your stigma women of the World Unite you have nothing to lose but your indignity uh and your poverty and whatever else it might be so now you see a series of things that are interl which is that um and some other punchlines that you get
15:42
from seite Mills and that is that the sociologist if they're following the sociological imagination full force is engaged and it is something that not only does the sociologist have the sociological imagination with these multiple steps that I've outlined but everyone should it's about citizenship it's about living a dignified life you've heard the phrase the unexamined life is not worth living this is the nons sociologically examined life is I don't know if Mills would go so far as
16:22
to say is not worth living uh but it would be something like is a much better life and will create a better world and not just for some high futin moral reason of a better world but it will create a better life for me if I can get the whole thing organized in a way that is more fulfilling more liberatory uh more uh more uh more more equal in its opportunity structures uh everyone will be better off so this then the sociological imagin is a call for political action and it
17:02
means that when you have the sociological imagination whether you're a professional sociologist like I am or you're a citizen who is a plumber or a childcare worker or a physician whatever that might be that you are engaged in the world you are not just trying to understand the world you're trying to change the world and your efforts to understand the world are so that you can change it you have to be very careful you have to be very thorough you have to be very systematic because you want to
17:41
try to learn well what it what are the wages for example of a child care worker uh what happens when we can't attract the right people to that job what kind of suffering do people experience both the children and the adults because of it how does that work uh that that it requires systematic scholarship we're not born with that knowledge it's not intuitive so you have to carry out the craft of engaging in systematic observations systematic data collection uh surveys sometimes like I did we when
18:18
we started this class to find out uh what year you were you were all in you of course we do it in much more systematic and careful ways um worry about sampling and we have statistical techniques and we we have a lot of fancy stuff we do but the goal is to then break through um and create the kind of knowledge that is needed to generate change so that is um that is the seite Mills image of what sociology is or what sociology should be uh and what and what citizens ship
18:59
should be it's a very Grand Vision isn't it because it includes history and politics and personal troubles and anxieties and and worries and everyone sociology is too important to be left to the sociologists it is everyone's job and especially in a Democratic Society where presumably the power to act is distributed on a massive basis I should tell you that seite Mills um wasn't exactly the most uh important sociologist who ever lived while he was alive and he had critics and indeed it's
19:41
probably safe to say that a majority of the professional sociologists in the world really do not follow on in the SE Mills U path uh they they get a they get some of it and they think it's kind of cool this history and biography and all of that that that resonates with them but the idea that sociology uh should have this um builtin moral and political um role in in the world that excuse me that's a little more controversial and not everybody is on board with that and
20:21
we're going to be reading uh you'll be reading um from uh a um a dead German uh named uh uh here I'll put his his first name is Mox and his I've really mucked this up uh that's a w web R MOX vber uh it looks like there's a barbecue bit Grill called the Weber and um for some reason we we really pronounce this correctly so people will laugh at you if you say ma Max Weber uh it's he's German and uh we call him Max vber and uh we're going to be reading MOX vber to get the alternative
21:04
perspective and uh some of you will want to uh read before we meet next time uh and pick up on your um Mox vber and I'm going to be uh talking about him next time now what I want to do though is um push on this sociological imagination a little bit more but in a concrete way to get back to this topic of the one I raised when we began the class the topic of why are we here how did we get here and how can we explain that well one Avenue to explain that is one of the
21:41
readings that that you have and it's from um it's actually it's a it's a book review from The New Yorker uh written by uh a staff writer of the New Yorker who has now written many very very popular books his name is ma Malcolm Gladwell he's very very much alive and Malcolm Gladwell typically rounds up social science and uh popularizes it uh in part because he's a very beautiful writer and so I'm sparing you the 700 page book that Malcolm Gladwell is writing about a
22:16
book called the chosen by a sociologist at Berkeley named Jerome carabel and instead just giving you Malcolm gladwell's review of it uh in the New Yorker and uh what what we learn um actually what we learn from Carell's book and what we learn as Gladwell tells it again is how people actually get in to the schools that many of you did not get in so one way one small uh twist to the explaining why are you here is why are you not at Harvard Yale or Princeton uh and I won't
22:56
ask for a show of hands of how many of you were turned down by Harvard Yale and Princeton uh but a number of you were just like a good large number of you turned down uh Stony Brook and Cornell and maybe the University of Chicago and um Penn or Penn State or I don't know what your list is of the schools that you got into but you chose not to go to there is a hierarchy and who gets to be in this privileged group now Caravel could have done a study that just exam
23:28
NYU the University of Chicago Johns Hopkins universities that it's more a Boston University that it's more parallel to but he took on the kind of kings of the mountain Harvard Yale and Princeton which are the most selective uh almost brown is up there of selective universities in the United States and he tells some interesting stories and I think you'll enjoy uh when you have the opport opportunity uh to read uh about it uh Harvard Yale and Princeton functioned essentially as finishing
24:02
schools for the rich um in the 18th and 19th centuries and well into the 20th century and so if you were from a good family uh and your family had money and breeding and um didn't have funny accents then uh and of course we're white uh goes without saying then you uh uh basically had a not just a shot uh but if you were in the right social category then that was School uh that you went to you went to one of those schools or some school like it um and there were family traditions of going to
24:35
Harvard Yale or Princeton or maybe brown or maybe one of the other Ivy Leagues um and that's where you um and that's where you ended up the problem in the 20th century after the great migrations from Europe um is that those great migrations from Europe included Jews and Jews tended to do very well in school and so they accomplished a whole lot in the public high schools uh which they went to uh and they scored very well on the entrance tests to the degree which they
25:06
had entrance tests which in the me many many years before they never had entrance tests because it was just the entrance test was birth um and U mode a family that you're from uh but the problem was when they started to uh um uh uh test people or take into account Merit the Jews did too well and 20% of the entering class at Harvard became Jewish somewhere in the 1930s and this created a crisis for Harvard because it didn't want to be juw youu and um it the
25:46
idea was was that it wouldn't be Harvard anymore because Harvard um is many other many things besides the offering of classes um people learning that's the stuff see in the catalog when you open the catalog of Harvard just as you open the catalog of NYU or the University of Michigan or whatever it'll say something about transferring knowledge to the young um fulfilling the culture and transferring the culture from one generation to the next join us in this exciting undertaking of learning uh and
26:20
and build a better democracy there's all variations on the theme uh but my God uh we don't want Jews uh doing that kind of thing here with us uh we all know why they're swy they're short uh they eat with their hands um they're loud they're money grubbing uh have I offended you yet um uh we certainly don't want no Jews uh like that the occasional a Rothchild might be all right uh but we don't want uh these Jews piling in that redefines what we are and uh we are for Harvard men and of
27:00
course it is a it is I failed to mention uh the great gender issue um uh they took Jews uh before they took women women uh women are uh yet to come so um Harvard had to do something about it and now we're talking about not just Harvard but uh the other IVs uh had to do something about it as well um little did they know that um uh in the in the wi were uh Asians and Hispanics and blacks uh and other people of suspect ethnicity who might redefine what the place is and
27:39
so they used various techniques one of them was geography and geography distribution so Harvard came up with the idea that it is important for students to learn from each other and to do that we need to have geographic distribution we can't have everybody here come from the Bronx we've got to have people from uh Montana for example uh and they look like marro men you've seen what they look like and they'd be good to have here do we have anybody from Montana no we don't we don't what do you
28:16
know uh how'd that happen uh so they decided that they would have Regional quotas so they're not discriminating against Jews that what they are doing is instead a positive thing of generating a diverse student body since there are or were virtually no Jews in Montana if you have a if you have a quoted from Montana or from the Mountain West then by then empirically you're going to generate uh a large number of non-jewish applicants uh they'll also be non-black and
28:50
non-hispanic and so forth and so on and so therefore that's what Harvard did but it didn't work there first of all there were objections uh and you were getting the wrong kind of people into into Harvard through that technique um and so they looked for other ways of doing it geography loomed large um and these geographic distribution requirements the other thing that happened as we learn from the review by Gladwell is they decided that character was important the
29:24
essence of Harvard and of what it's doing for the world is is taking people who have good quality character and training them for leadership um so that our country um and to some degree our world but our country can be a better place uh and it will have better leaders and so therefore we've got to get to the character issue well what creates character in our young men and how do we recognize it well one way we recog we recog recognize it is by Sports because
30:01
on the playing fields of America are the great tests of human character and that for those of you who are not Americans you will know that this is a distinctive quality still of American universities that Sports even counts that Sports matters that there are sports that there are uniforms that there are pep pep rallies and floats and all of that stuff that is bizarre in a Eur European context uh for example um the London School of Economics is not a football
30:34
power uh so so this is odd but in part it comes about through this idea that what you're doing in higher education is you are creating character uh and therefore you've got to find out who has the stuff the right stuff and sports it becomes ipsofacto on its face an indicator of character but there are other things like leadership experience what were you president of uh what groups did you form uh and what do your references say about you and you need to be interviewed and
31:17
by an Alum to see if you have what it takes if you are a Princeton man do you have the stuff of a Princeton man well what all of these things do um contributions um um extracurricular activities uh letters of reference leadership qualities interviews uh uh sports stuff all this does what all this does is it it keeps let's just get to the quick it keeps the Jews Out and because it provides a mechanism through which things other than Merit can actually count and can count to a degree that is
32:00
unaccountable uh they assign points it's true for one kind of quality as opposed to another but how you decide that someone has character how you decide they have leadership leadership capabilities how you decide that this kind of extracurricular activity should count more than that kind of extracurricular activity all of that is very subjective and in that subjectivity is the mechanism of changing the outcome of who actually is going to get in and who is not going to get in and so it
32:35
came to be that even to this day and oh I should add that all of these universities over the years cleaned up their act they no longer discriminate as far as I know against for example Jews they don't as far as I know discriminate against blacks or Hispanics uh or Arab Americans or any other group so far as I know they are certainly diverse compared to how they were and they make a big thing out of their diversity as you all know because you're connected into
33:04
higher education and the uh issues of who gets in and who doesn't get in but they're all there in some way shape or form and some of you um succeeded because of them you did take extracurricular activities seriously you did um get Advanced uh training in uh by enrolling in colleges or junior colleges uh to be uh ahead of the game you did get coaching of course some of you at least as you were going through school um uh on how to make a better impact um and be more impressive and of course you
33:43
also learned excuse me you learned how to how to indeed take tests um and how to succeed and how to have the right study habits and all of that sort of thing that went into you're getting into one school as opposed to another school all of those things then now enter into who gets into Harvard who gets into Y and who gets into NYU uh and these are then our uh our U our forces some of the forces uh that that are at work now I haven't brought up the more clear cases
34:19
of legacies uh and at certain times in history at say Princeton legacies uh and athletes together make up a majority of the student body at Princeton where I have friends who teach um one of whom is indeed Mitchell Dair uh they actually have a a word for admitting students who who are being admit on academic criteria in other words that's that is a that is a um that is a segment of the class that they actually acknowledge because so many other segments of the entering class
34:57
class are entering as legacies uh as the children of large donors or of athletes because the ivy league is an athletic league and they must field all the sports and so they need a term for increasing what they call the academic admits whereas here at NYU I'm happy to say we don't have that uh we certainly don't have that term and I think it's because the faculty assumes that the entering class is overwhelmingly made up of academic admits um and that's um a
35:29
degree of meritocracy as we call it that uh certainly was not true in the ivy league at an earlier time and by the way one of the prideful things about NYU is that NYU compared to other private universities um in the American uh life and the American east coast um did not discriminate very much um if they did at all against minorities um and had what we would today call a diverse student body in uh ways that other places didn't have including by social class uh they
36:00
somehow managed to do that even though they have always um been um tuition driven to a degree uh that uh public universities are not they somehow manag to to bring that off the the power of income is very strong in American higher education I don't want to embarrass you but we could do another survey by my asking how many of you come from families where the family income over $100,000 a year uh that puts you way way above the norm in American life and I would get the vast majority of hands
36:36
that would go up I stopped doing it because of my fear of embarrassment but when I taught at public universities which which I have in the past the same is true so um in the in the California system uh a public university a public educational system the family income on the average these are numbers that are uh from my memory but the public a the average of incomes from uh parents of children uh who go to the University of California are approximately double uh those who go to
37:14
the state college system that's a three-tier system in California the University of California the state colleges which are called things like Fresno State um and Los Angeles State uh and then the community colleges uh it it haves again so there's a clear class hierarchy and that uh getting into the University of California a public university supported by not so well anymore um the state budget which means all taxpayers um uh uh from all walks of life all income classes uh the
37:50
University of California is actually a subsidy system through which the upper middle class can trans transfer their status from one generation to the next that's putting it in the most critical light of course there are um exceptions to that massively in the case of the University of California in which people come from workingclass homes and that's true I would bet to some non-trivial extent here at NYU as well but the point is is that sociologists are always
38:21
looking for things that partly explain outcomes if we can partly explain an outcome we get very very happy if we can explain an an outcome a difference across States um across different settings different historic times we get really excited and the fact that and and this outcome that the more prestigious the university the uh educational institution the higher the income of the families that are sending their kids to that school that is what we call a robust finding because it tends to hold
38:59
across time and from one state to the next so we know we're dealing with something um that's real one of the other ways of deciding who should get in and how you should decide it is by what succeeds who succeeds so we could take a look at a Harvard could or NYU could and see what kinds of success our students have and in a way backfill choose students like the ones who do succeed compared to the ones who don't succeed and so you don't even have to figure out why there's
39:35
something an old psychological test book called The Raw carrot and cook carrot if I ask you who whether you like cook carrots better or raw carrots better and I later find out that people who chose raw carrots did better in life made more income for example then we should just make that a criteria for admission into NYU the people who do the who choose raw carrots they'll do better we don't even have to know why that's a pretty a dumb way of doing things but you but some
40:06
testing is based on things like that where you don't even know why but it it it it could it it's predictive and so let's go with that well if we do that one of the great problems is what does success mean let's admit students who will make more money that would be a criteria that's an obvious one well what about we should admit people who live lives that are happier uh maybe that's who we should admit or maybe it's we should choose people who we can predict
40:41
will be more generous toward other human beings maybe that's who we should admit maybe it should be people who vote more intelligently and when they participate in public life they know more of what's going on after all our democracy require Ires that that's who we should admit and give the privilege of an NYU education what I'm trying to get at here is that who should what success means is itself another variable as we like to say in sociology that's another choice to be
41:17
made that like uh you should be from Montana to balance out the people who are from the Bronx uh it's another choice choice that has to be made that then structures what is going to be the result and how it's all going to how it's all going to work I want to now um talk about um what makes somebody smart because uh probably in this room there's one little bit of consensus and that is is that uh higher education and and universities like like NYU should be the place of smart people and we should
42:01
admit smart people and the tests and all of that are heavily oriented of course toward deciding who's smart and who's not so smart uh one way of measuring that is IQ and probably everybody in this room raise your hand if you have taken an IQ test raise your hand if you've not taken an IQ test wow okay the world has changed uh as I was coming up uh I would be examined uh regularly for my IQ and that is how intelligent I am everybody was measured in terms of their IQ which
42:43
was supposed to get at that raw smartness uh that some people have much more than other people there is a wonderful uh phenomenon that uh has been worked out by actually a New Zealander uh a scholar in New Zealand uh who uh is uh whose name I'm going to give you in a second it's an easy name he's still alive by the way and his name is Jim Flynn and he's famous for something called the Flynn effect and I'm going to tell you what the Flynn effect is it's that in he studied the IQ scores of all the
43:31
people in the world where IQ tests are given and across history IQ tests have been given for about a hundred years in in the United States and and Europe and what he found out was that they keep going up they go up to such an incredible degree that someone who who scored uh average uh in when they first started to be giving them in the 1920s and 1930s would be regarded as a today so it implies that the population has gotten much smarter in the United States and
44:12
they've also gotten much smarter in France and in Germany and in the Netherlands wherever and in India wherever this test has been given so that means that it can't be measuring something like in inic intelligence because there could be no genetic change in such a short period of time that could account for these wild and wide differences and that then means that performance on something even like an IQ test which is deliberately arranged to get at that core quality that supposedly
44:52
exists of smartness of intelligence that it can't be doing that and it's somehow a fraud it's somehow wrong and if something that has been engineered to go at the raw intelligence can get it then what good are things like interviews uh or these other kinds of criteria that you are all subject to that I was subject to uh that are still being um the mechanisms through which entering classes at at universities of the world are organized smartness is not all it's cracked up to be at least by these
45:33
measurements how can we I'm going to tell you a little bit about a study done by one of my PhD students uh years ago uh her name uh was Judy H Handel unfortunately she died at a very young age uh Judy Handel and she studied Children Learning in school at a local elementary school upper middle class little school and what what she saw were things like this that the teacher would hold up an object and the object would look more or less like like the object I'm going to um hold up right now to you
46:11
um except I'm not um able to do it very very well at all but it's ew it's something like it's something like like that can you can you see it something like that anyway I did it in on in a paper but I can simplify it and go like that uh a triangle and the teacher holds it up to the children and they're about third fourth grade and and asks what it is and the little children raise their hands and call out things and they say things like uh it's it's a sale it's a
46:50
piece of a puzzle uh it's a piece of paper uh all of these answers and finally a child says it's a triangle and the teacher gets very excited this is a nice school so the teacher when the child says it's a sale or the teacher says it's a p or the child says it's a piece of paper the teacher goes well that's very interesting that's very interesting and then a child says triangle and boom the teacher loses it because that's right and the reason why it's right is because
47:23
this is fourth grade and we're starting our geometric Concepts which is what they do in fourth grade and so this becomes a triangle if it was art class then they don't do geometric Concepts and and a sale would be an imaginative child who has artistic qualities but a child who says sale when it's the beginning of geometric principles and they don't know that the children except some children do they get it that this is for fourth grade and this is going to be the introduction of geometric
48:01
Concepts now they don't think of it like that but maybe their parents have been holding up things like the blocks and saying you know Jimmy pass me that triangle and the child grabs the wrong thing and eventually gets the right thing sometimes people have referred to the hidden curriculum of the middle class home as something that trains people for knowing not just what's the difference between a triangle and a square but much more important what's the social context here such that the
48:35
answer for Miss Jones in the fourth grade is triangle whereas for Mr Smith uh in art class it's not triangle it's something different where my imagination is being called for being able to as we sometimes say psych out the test psych out the teacher Psych out life that I'm sitting in a lecture hall at NYU I I don't wear a big funky hat I don't take off my shirt I I don't um uh talk to my neighbors I don't get up and walk to the bathroom um and and say excuse me excuse
49:15
me excuse me there's a lot of things we don't do and that is because we are able to read the context and so this ability to know what is is the right answer at the right moment in the right place at the right time is certainly only partially taught in schools it's something that comes from other aspects of life and it becomes another mechanism through which something like an entering freshman class and a university is formed it's both subtle and not so subtle what's going on well now I want to
49:57
look back at what we've done today and at what the lesson was uh and what uh what I was trying what I was trying to do it means that a child who does not get into the advanced learning class in high school uh it may be because they just walk around and say I'm dumb it might be that it's because they didn't know it was a triangle uh on that occasion it may be because they uh were unaware of the other ways you need to perform to be an appropriate child such that at each level moving from preschool
50:39
to school to kindergarten to first grade 12th grade uh and then onto college this capacity to mobilize the world in effect on your behalf is distributed unevenly as we say some people have it and some people don't as sociologists or have it more and have it less or have it in certain ways compared to other ways but those differences are being organized such that some people are organized in to let's call it privilege and some people are being organized out of let's call it privilege and then
51:17
there are besides these micro mechanisms like I was bringing up with Judy Handel's research project and the triangles in the schools besides those subtle um um details there are these macro forces like I am um I I am a Jew in 1920 uh and I cannot get into Princeton uh I am a a Jew in Montana if there's one in 1920 and it is easy for me to get into Princeton so there are um these forces that are macro forces uh like um bold processes of discrimination which get um which get
52:05
institutionalized as we like to say become things like interviews as a requirement for getting in or tests of one kind or another as a requirement to get in or as we like to say often in social science they get naturalized we all take it for granted that that's the way of of course you would get into school that's what smart means if you get in um geographical distribution it makes sense because then we can all learn from each other whether we come from Idaho or we come from the Bronx
52:41
these forces become naturalized uh forces of amazing consequentiality of War of Peace of gender of sexuality they all become naturalized we take them to be Givens and don't realize that they are human made and can be human changed that they're a result of history and of politics and thus they are subject to alteration if we will engage them at a sociological level and practice the sociological imagination so that's what I hope to do this semester and I hope
53:22
that you will join me in that Enterprise and the Tas is looking at the micro looking at the macro the tour of our course is going to be to start at the micro level and work our way once we get Beyond this week from the micro to the macro uh and end up at very large scale issues so thanks for coming today
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat