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Mercury, November/December 1997 Table of Contents

(c) 1997 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

They call it the "crab-bucket syndrome," teachers in inner-city Washington told Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind. In a Pulitzer Prize-winning series three years ago, Suskind related the story of Cedric Jennings, one of the few straight-A students in his school. Jennings's classmates rewarded his academic honors, science projects, and dreams of MIT with jeers, harassment, ostracism. Whenever one crab tries to climb out, the others drag it back down.

"Being studious gets you in trouble with your peers," said Cornell University educationalist John Bishop. And not just in disadvantaged communities. Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg has argued that anti-intellectual youth culture is the single greatest factor in American teen-agers' underachievement [see Editorial, July/August 1996, p. 2]. The bad attitudes, though often blamed on Gen X, go back at least to the 1950s, when Johns Hopkins sociologist James Coleman documented them -- and the adult attitudes that abet them -- in The Adolescent Society.

Indolence or inability hardly explains the social pressures toward academic mediocrity. Athletes, musicians, and scholars all work hard, yet the athletes and musicians get the party invites and hot dates. One reason, Coleman proposed, is that athletes contribute to a collective effort, but not scholars. In sports, your teammates want you to give until you can't, and then some; in academics, your classmates prefer that you ease off, lest you spoil the curve. Even when athletes and musicians show off, they do so in ways that youth culture can claim as its own. The peer group comes to admire athletes and shun scholars.

The resulting stereotypes reinforce themselves. Alienated from the mainstream, intellectually minded kids find it more difficult to keep up with fashions, balance school and social life, and fend off bullies; many retreat into snobbishness or dorkdom. Conversely, jocks and band members can't admit they like physics without getting laughed at.

In a Humanist article last year, University of Nevada philosopher Todd Jones suggested another source of the nerd stereotype: the Hamlet syndrome. In our personal experience, we learn to associate thinking with weakness; when we need to think, it's usually because we're stuck. "We sit and ponder a chess move when the right winning move doesn't immediately come to us," Jones wrote. "We sit and agonize over how to write papers, trying out this phrase or that one, when the prose doesn't just flow." Many adults forget how often students face such frustration.

In a culture that values self-confidence and the appearance thereof, the thinker lacks the cachet of the doer. Imagine watching James Bond struggle at the firing range, comparison-shop for armored convertibles, or study flash cards on the favorite drinks of Russian spies.

To be sure, Americans do have a more positive attitude toward science and individual achievement than people in most other countries. But in our schools, the incentives remain skewed, as Bishop, Ted Sizer at Brown University, and other reformers have argued. Schools evaluate relative rather than absolute performance. Students don't want a tough teacher or brainy peers, because their grades and class rank will suffer. In countries where students are judged by external exams, the incentive works the opposite way. Rigorous classes and clever classmates help you to learn the material, pass the exam, and get the diploma.

In 1991, Bishop found, students in Canadian provinces that gave exams (Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland, Quebec, francophone New Brunswick) were almost one grade level more advanced than their peers in exam-less provinces. Students and parents in those provinces were also more likely to express interest in science.

In the United States, pressure is mounting -- slowly -- for external exams. (The SAT, detached from the curriculum and widely accused of bias, doesn't count.) New York is beefing up its Regents standards, and various school districts in California plan to require the "Golden State" exams for graduation. President Clinton's recent plans for standardized national tests in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math, albeit watered down by Congress, at least represent some progress.

As Sizer pointed out in Horace's Compromise, the usual academic exams are not always appropriate. But only with some clear demonstration of mastery -- and the latitude to work with teachers, as allies, to find the best way to succeed -- will most students ever think of schooling as something they do, rather than something done to them.

Cedric Jennings, incidentally, is now at Brown University.