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If baboons ran schools - Cafe Technos - primatologist Robert M. Sapolsky - Interview
Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Winter, 2001 by Thom Gillespie
How can teachers create the right context for kids? In Columbine, supposedly the kids couldn't deal with the hazing of high school.
I don't see any easy primate lessons with Columbine. I certainly identified with Klebold; the hazing was my experience growing up. It is an appalling world where high school jock-dom and cliques are not only ignored but also officially condoned, because it is much the same people who have wound up running the school systems. No primate lessons at Columbine. It was an abusing situation.
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We teach kids it is okay to lie, sometimes. You lie to Grandma when you don't like the present she gives you. You see your parents lie when they say the meal is wonderful, even if it isn't. Most of what we teach is not the moral absolute. It is okay to lie; it is okay to be violent; it is okay to kill--in some cases. It would have been nonsense for me to be a pacifist in World War II. It is all about context.
That is what primates get socialized to do. Somewhere in the book I describe an event involving an infant who has been born to one of the lowest ranking females. When she is about a week old, just as she was about to interact with the daughter of the highest ranking female, the low-ranking mother reaches over and drags her back. She had just gotten a lesson at a week of age that this is not someone you walk up to and interact with. If you are going to interact with her, you sit still and you don't make eye contact, and you hope that the interaction consists of her walking past and ignoring you. In her first week of life she was learning context dependency of having a low rank. If I come back a quarter of a century later, these old ladies will still be behaving in the same way.
But in this situation it was the mother teaching the lesson. In the Columbine situation, do you think it was the parents' or a teacher's responsibility to teach the lesson to Klebold?
No, because human society has more layers, more complex peer groups, more routes of socialization than in a nonhuman primate society. They don't have the equivalent of police, teachers, social workers, of differing peer groups with differing social values; they don't have the media. Much more complicated with humans.
You said you identified with Klebold. How did you cope with the situation back then?
I ulcerated internally. I did not have good coping mechanisms. I decided that someday I would go live with baboons or some sort of primate. In Huxley's Brave New World, a very stratified caste system allowed the system to work. Each caste was propagandized to think of themselves as the lucky ones. Rationalization works well in humans. I know someone at Harvard who studies the health consequences of being in a low caste in India. He studies how much the Huxley model protects someone in a low caste from health consequences, and it works. Working with that model also makes you less likely to be revolutionary. Working with that model makes you less likely to be a random Klebold. It is not for nothing that American Southern slave owners taught the slaves turn-the-other-cheek Christianity. It is not for nothing that Islam in the Middle East has the attribution system pointed outward rather than inward.
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