The first instalment of Michael McWilliams’ White Privilege series was well received by the community and hence the need to publish the next one. It’s an extremely sensitive subject and with McWilliams putting himself on the edge again, it’s sure to ignite more much needed debate. In this part McWilliams unpacks whiteness and how to get it. Another interesting read. – Stuart Lowman
By Michael McWilliams*
Privilege Secret Number 4: The first 18 months will provide the size jug into which education is eventually poured. Make it as big as possible.
School Choice
Now that our precious and fully stimulated first-born is speaking its first words and taking its first steps, we need to start considering its education and style of upbringing.
A good place to start would be to look at the very best you can afford. This should now be a considerable amount more than your many wived pals with more than enough children can afford, so choose wisely.
Belief system
A church school is usually a good choice because it should instil some sort of value system in Junior. What’s more, Junior will be able to easily be able to converse and socialise with the privileged playmates who will later become workmates and eventually employees and who will feature in his or her future.
Now, one thing we are pretty certain of is that our British African immigrants were deprived of were traditional healers, sangomas, witchdoctors or whatever they may be called nowadays. This contributed greatly to their eventual supreme scholastic achievements.
Besides not making the immigrants the laughing stock of their compatriots, a belief in witchcraft is counter-productive to transformation, both financial and cultural.
I say this, not because it is ridiculous it is to believe in witchcraft, but because it instills a bad mindset in its adherents.
All religions ask their members to believe the most outrageous things, so the belief in witchcraft is no different there. The two big problems with it are; firstly no-one else in the developed world regards it as anything else that primitive superstition. This means that they will invariably regard anyone who believes in it as primitive and superstitious. The other problem is that a belief in witchcraft encourages adherents to simply accept the status quo and neglect to take corrective action. After all, if the reason for an accident or mishap is due to magic or someone casting a spell, there is not much one can do about it, so nothing is done.
The apocryphal stories of the village in the jungle suffering the depravations of crocodiles for centuries because when women fetching water are taken by a croc, it’s a witch who did it.
When missionaries came and simply killed the crocodiles, it was a revelation.
Privilege Secret Number 5: Witchcraft only works if you believe in it. Cast it out.
The big monotheistic religions you are likely to be exposed to, Christianity, Islam and Judaism have one big advantage. They give their rewards after death. This promotes taking corrective action during life, rather than stifling it. This, over time, ensures that the societies that embrace these religions tend to improve the lot of their believers over time.
Of course, this beneficiation of society occurs at differing rates. Those societies that don’t allow female participation in government, business or religion don’t progress as quickly as those that do.
The reason for this is simply that societies that prevent meaningful participation by women are actually cutting off fifty percent of their human capital and not allowing it to contribute to the common wellbeing of the people.
It is therefore a good idea to choose a religious school that follows a code that gives women an equal status, especially if your child happens to be a daughter.
Another long-term benefit of most of the monotheistic religions is that they have good rules to genetically further the interests of their members. A prohibition on marriage between first cousins or closer relatives is prohibited. In the long term, this safeguards the privilege built by all the other measures. To show this, another article in the Economist mined the copious data collected by the UK government and concluded that Muslim children in the UK were thirteen times more likely to suffer from mental illness that other ethnic groups in the country. This anomaly has been attributed to centuries of allowing marriage between first cousins. The interbreeding accentuates undesirable characteristics. American pilot training in the Middle-East has also identified the prevalence of night-vision problems in population groups that allow first cousin marriage.
Privilege Secret Number 6: No matter how pretty or rich, don’t marry your cousin or anyone closer related.
If you are interested in continuous advancement, adopting a religion that promotes forgiveness provides long-term benefits. To illustrate this, one only needs to observe how long-time enemies of the Christian faith are capable of co-operating and prospering between their frequent wars. Contrast the present cozy relationship between France, Britain and Germany with that of Israel and the Arab states. Close inspection will show that while a belief in Christianity doesn’t seem to have any influence in avoiding wars, it does seem to have benefits during the brief periods of peace.
The other two great monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, that don’t take such a great interest in forgiveness, seem to promote antagonism right through war and peace, to the disadvantage to both. There is a lot to be said for “turning the other cheek” and “doing unto other what you would like them to do unto you.” Especially in contrast to “An eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.”
Privilege Secret Number 7: Having a monotheistic religion is a good idea in the Western world, being a Christian carries further economic advantages.
Planning your family
One of the greatest favors you can do for your child is plan when they will be born. Presumable, you have been practicing birth control of some sort so as to confine yourself to the aforementioned two children. Now you need to use it to ensure that your children are born as early in the year as possible. January is best, but you should definitely aim for a pre-July birth.
The book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell shows how children born in the months between January and July have a considerable advantage over children born later in the year. This is simply because the age-group cutoff is 1 Januaryat most schools. This means that a child born in early January will have a huge developmental advantage over his classmate born later in the year. If you consider the physical and mental growth that happens in the very early years, an almost one year developmental advantage is huge. What follows over the years is that these early year children, who are stronger, bigger and more mentally mature, are streamed into the top-achiever classes and sports teams and they get better teaching and coaching throughout their school careers. Thus the “accident” of birth gives them a real and unfair advantage over their whole school and work career. Malcolm Gladwell calls it the Matthew Effect.
“For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Mathew 25:29
If you are unconvinced, research the birth months of any successful sports team and you will see a great majority of players are born between January and July.
A good South African example is our soccer team’s relative successes. In the early years of the millennium, our SAFA under 13 Soccer Team, chosen from children all over the country, was sent overseas to compete with the worlds best Under 13 teams. SA were the worlds top performing team and this continued for a few years, culminating in our Under 19 Team becoming world champions.
This very strange phenomenon of a country fielding the world’s best Under 19 Team, but also fielding one of the world’s worst National Teams where age restrictions no longer applied raise the suspicions of the FIFA people. Our Under 19 Team was subjected to scientific age tests and was found to have many players much older than the ages on their birth certificates. These were the same players who, years earlier had been the Under 13 SA Champions. They had been enjoying an age advantage for years, but ultimately, it didn’t do either they or the nation any good because SAFA thought they were doing a great job with junior soccer development, but when the artificial age-group advantage fell away, these superstars turned into mediocre players because they had never been pushed, but had relied on a lie all their careers. The damage was twofold. Players who thought themselves superstars were unemployable hacks and the SA National Team , because they were not being fed good players became the laughing stock of the world.
Privilege Secret Number 8: Take advantage of the rules where you can, but cheating will eventually destroy you and your reputation.
When to start schooling?
As soon as possible with nursery or playschool, so long as it’s a good school and carries on the essential brain stimulation. The jug into which the childs education will be poured will be almost completely built by now. If we have been following the Secrets diligently up till now, it should be big enough to contain about fourteen years of schooling, four years of university and forty years of on the job experience. That’s a very big jug. In beginning to fill it, the interaction with other children combined with modern schooling techniques will be a superior environment to that which you can provide at home. Besides, Mother Dear can go back to work so as to save for the bigger expenses to come when formal schooling rears its expensive head. When checking the play or nursery school out, don’t neglect to find out what kinds of food and drink are provided and ensure that it is good and nutritious without too much sugar and chemicals.
When it comes to enrolment in Primary School, make sure that Junior is not too young for his class. In other words, if your family planning programme malfunctioned, and you have a child born late in the year, you would be wise to postpone the child’s entrance into formal education until the next year. By doing this, you will in fact give the child the big advantage of being older in its class. The developmental advantage will play out in the classroom, but not on the sports field, where age grouping, with the January cutoff will still handicap the child. This is still a better situation than being handicapped both in the classroom and on the sports fields.
Privilege Secret Number 9: Family Planning is exactly what it sounds like. Better late than early when it comes to Primary School.
How to become really good at something
As much as people like to believe that talent is essential to success, recent research seems to say that talent, on its own, is a negligible component in a successful career.
The books, Bounce and Outliers by Matthew Syed and Malcolm Gladwell respectively, make the point that in all really outstanding careers, be they in business, the arts or sport; the time spent in acquiring expertise is the dominant factor in determining success.
It seems that the magic number of ten thousand hours spent learning a craft, sport or commercial technique is what differentiates the real winner from the also-rans.
In music for instance, the similarities between two polar opposites like the Beatles and Mozart are striking.
Mozart was fortunate to be born to a highly skilled court musician. His father would today be much more famous than he is, if his son hadn’t become a bright shining light that eclipsed all other contemporary musicians.
A superficial look at Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s life would seem to point to massive early talent which enabled him to play and compose at a very young age.
Although the young Mozart was undoubtedly talented, the thing that made the difference was his application to learning all he could about music for many hours a day, every day.
Mozart was raised in a period where attendance at school was not compulsory. He was home schooled by his parents and he accompanied his father all day, every day, during his duties as a court musician.
By neglecting all the other things that boys his age would be learning, the young Mozart accumulated hundred of high quality learning hours at his father’s side. This meant that by the age of twelve, when other musical kids were beginning to read music, young Mozart was writing his first full opera. Mozart was probably almost at his ten thousand hour training target in his early teens. This meant that he had become a master of his craft long before adulthood.
The Beatles on the other hand, were fortunate as a band to have travelled to Hamburg, Germany where they, as a mediocre pop group were contracted to a night club to churn out music for up to ten hours a day. They did this year after year while their competitors back in England were lucky to play six hours a week in pubs and clubs. The Beatles became better and better because of this huge workload and they also reached the ten thousand hour point very early on in their careers.
This enabled them to become highly innovative and self-confident over time to become the worlds most successful pop group.
In the book Bounce, the author Matthew Syed, a British sports writer, notice a strange thing happening in a somewhat obscure sport. He noticed that a small, little known English village, was producing lots and lots of very skilled and competitive table-tennis players. He wondered whether there was something genetic in this, so he went off to visit the village to find out if it was something in the genes or perhaps in the water that produced this stream of great players.
Syed found instead a perfectly ordinary reason. An adult in the village was a bit of a ping-pong nut and he had erected a shed and supplied a table tennis table. There was not much else of interest for the kids of the village to do in their spare time except hang about the table-tennis shed and play ping-pong with one another. This pastime eventually became an addiction for the village kids and they would spend all their time not at school, playing table-tennis. The keener ones quickly built up thousands of hours of playing, many of those hours under the watchful eye of the adult who by this time saw himself as the village table-tennis coach.
First, one of the village’s best players entered regional tournaments, and kept winning. Then another , and another. Until there was a stream of players who had put in ten thousand hours of quality coached time playing the competition circuits in Britain. All from the one little village.
A similar thing was happening across the Atlantic in California. A young man called Bill Gates was spending all his free time, and lots of his school and college time too, programming the worlds first computers. He was fortunate enough to attend the only college in the USA at that time that, through parent donations, had bought one of the early computers for their kids to fool around on. Bill Gates became one of the first Americans to have put in ten thousand hours of quality computer time by the time he started working on the coding and programming that would make him the master of the universe as far as computers were concerned.
We could go on and on, looking behind the success of highly successful people and the find that the common denominator is putting in the ten thousand hours, coupled to two other very important factors. Luck and opportunity.
Privilege Secret Number 10: You have to put in the hours early on if you want to be really good.
To be continued…