Interdisciplinary Critiques of the “Culture of Poverty” by Cole, Labov, and Valentine: 1965-1975

• In Event: The Culture of Poverty: Pity and Self-Critique in Confrontations With Poverty and School Failure, 1959-2013

Abstract

The Situation:

Arguments about the consequences of growing up in “a culture of poverty” dominated educational and family policy throughout the 1960s. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis, psychologist Martin Deutsch, and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed that broken environments produce broken people and that, once socialized to the demands of a hand-to-mouth life, poor children enter school with impoverished cognitive skills, language competencies, an inability to plan, and no desire to better their lives. Charges of “blaming the victim” followed quickly, and an empirical critical tradition developed to raise questions about the ecological and social validity of data and methods used in culture of poverty theorizing. The term went underground for 30 years, but has returned in public debate.

The Objective:

This paper focuses on the work of anthropologist Charles Valentine, linguist William Labov, and psychologist Michael Cole from 1965-1975. Our first goal is to document their achievements: they successfully contradicted the findings of culture of poverty proposals and managed along the way to redefine key concepts and accepted methods in their home discipline. Our second goal is to use the achievements of the early critiques to evaluate recent efforts to resurrect the idea.

Framework:

Imagine a 2x2 table with culture of poverty theories in the 1960s and the 2010s across the top, the critical tradition of the 1960s on the bottom left, and the critical tradition of moment on the bottom right. We will fill the last box with both the older critiques and calls for new kinds of work.

Data and Method:

We will examine two levels of data: first, the data delivered by the early critical tradition and, second, the ways the materials have been mined for the next 40 years. We will focus on the methods used to establish, justify, and generalize findings in all four quadrants of framework.

Findings:

Together, Labov, Cole, and Valentine successfully showed how inarticulateness is rarely a linguistic problem, stupidity rarely a psychological problem, and misbehavior rarely a moral order problem. In their frame, the problem of the poor is not that they do not have enough culture, but that they have a difficult place inside a culture that has them looking wanting and unable. The problem with postulating a culture of poverty: it too quickly assumes that it is wrong to grow up poor and, in this way, it makes the lives of the poor even more difficult.

Significance:

By bringing early achievements forward, we hope to save the present generation from having to do it all again. We will also re-envision, like Dewey, Vygotsky, and Lewin before us, an educational system that treats learning, not as an individual possession, but as a nuanced barometer of the multi-layered relations between persons and their shared circumstances. If someone seems unable to learn, ask not what is wrong with them, but what is wrong with the circumstances we have arranged for them. Educational research and policy should focus less on individual learners and more on the conditions of the system that makes learning possible.

Author

• Ray McDermott, Stanford University