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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
Is there anything a teacher can do to work with kids dealing with childhood aggression?
Channel it into an appropriate setting. Channel it into an appropriate setting.
People often say that when two kids want to fight, you have to let them fight. Do you think that is true?
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We are actually dealing with this issue with our son in his preschool. They are saying, "This is inevitable, and what we do is set it up in a safe, constrained atmosphere with rules for how it happens, for instance with wrestling." I actually hate it. I don't know if we are right. We are horrified seeing our angelic child become this "male." But, who is in charge? What is this bullshit that this is inevitable male behavior? But, if it is happening, you sort of have to constrain it, channel it. In my book I talk about the New Guinea highlanders, who were forcibly westernized into Christianity. One of the things they had to stamp out was the tribal raiding between villages, which accounted for a huge percentage of their mortality. What they did was organize very successful New Guinea highland Olympics where they do spear throwing under controlled circumstances. People do occasionally get injured and even killed, because otherwise it would not have the right saliency to it, but it has been very successful. Villages get bragging rights, just like they used to when they burned and plundered the neighbors.
After 20 years in the field, are you ever talking to another person and you realize that person is behaving like a baboon or another primate?
All the time. When I first became a faculty member at Stanford and I was a totally subordinate faculty member, faculty meetings were amazing to watch in terms of the utter power dominance displayed. Hierarchies, totally primate behavior.
What about with your kids? Do you look at them as little baboon types?
They are two and four. What has surprised me is how little my primatology credentials have prepared me in the slightest for fatherhood. Somewhere around six to eight months of age, when they started picking up pieces of things, the differences between them and other nonhuman primates flooded far more than the similarities. I thought parenting was going to be one big primatology blowout, but mostly I have been stunned by how little the language and symbolic manipulation is in such a different league.
You mentioned that the high school you went to was different from most high schools. Can you describe this school in a little more detail, and why it was perfect for you?
It was a public high school in New York City, an experimental school, called John Dewey High School, based on the educational philosophies of John Dewey. I went to it the second year it was open. It had no grades, no competition; no honor societies, no competitive sports. It was self-paced and had tremendous facilities. Probably just as important as all those things--because it was a new, weirdo experimental school, where there was considerable anxiety as to whether people would be accepted into decent colleges afterward without grades--it was highly self-selective. Smart, eccentric kids who would have moldered in traditional high schools, or loathed the "Ooh me, I know, I know, call on me!" edge of the elite NYC specialized high schools such as Bronx Science or Stuyvesant, went there. It was wonderful for me--I was driven enough to not need grades or any sort of structure, and the flexibility of things that were available was great. For example, in addition to traditional science courses, there was a two-year course in anthropology, a year of microbiology, two years of marine biology. You could take "sabbaticals"--throughout, I worked one day a week in a primate lab. There was no violence whatsoever, not the remotest hint of kids bullying each other, no idiot sports worship. Lots of hippie teachers who found the school to be a refuge from traditional high schools, so they were wildly enthusiastic and motivated. A great place for me.
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