Peripheral Visions by Mary C. Bateson

dusty classroom, a topography of value and safety in space and human intercourse. The mothers too had quite different theories about what infants can and should learn. In Iran, children are characterized as innocent. Even in this society of sexual segregation, mothers traditionally took their sons with them to the bathhouse, where they would be surrounded by scantily clad women and sexual gossip, until they were visibly approaching puberty. Adult men remember listening and watching avidly, protected by the assumption that they did not understand. In the same way, while his mother is drinking tea and chatting with a guest, a three-year-old dives for the bonbonnière of nuts and dried fruits, knocking it to the floor and breaking it. “He’s only a child, he doesn’t understand” is the adult comment.
    Westerners have tended to attribute purposes to children: “He’s trying to get attention,” “He’s always into mischief,” or even “‘He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.’” Western child rearing suffered for a long time from the idea of original sin, in which badness is inherent and must be overcome by discipline and training. Bad behavior in a child used to be attributed to native waywardness permitted by parental laxity. More recently, misbehavior has been blamed on mistreatment or misteaching, with exploration seen as a positive value. Iranian children are good but not knowing. For our Puritan ancestors, children were knowing but not good.
    The watching students, meanwhile, were being confronted with a quite radical challenge to their habits of learning and attention. They reacted to the mother-infant pairs according to their own assumptions and common sense, at first judging the behavior of mothers and infants separately; but my purpose was to challenge them to think about the connection between the behavior of the mothers and that of the infants, the unstated assumptions and values the mothers were teaching, invisible bonds stretched in the air. It was only when they were offered a contrast, a moment of strangeness followed by the discomfort of having me point out their contradictory pattern of approval and disapproval, that they could begin to see that there was something to be discussed beyond a simple matter of nature.
    I think it would have taken a series of examples, such as they would have seen by living in another country, before they would have fully taken in what I was trying to show them, all at the same time: a new concept of classroom learning simultaneous with a new understanding of the working out of patterns of nature and nurture in the interactions of mother and infant. Still, they will remember and retain at least one layer to build on, one that would not show up on an “achievement” test. Without fully understanding what they were seeing, they were also drawn into a shared performance, as we all were in that dusty classroom, for one another and for the watchers in the corridor. With luck, life will provide a return of the spiral, to be met with recognition rather than bewilderment.
    Later, when I was teaching at Damavand College, an American-sponsored college for women where I had some married students, one woman asked me what I did when my child had a temper tantrum. “What do you do with yours?” I said. “Well, I try not to give in, but then when it gets really bad, I just give him what he wants.” “Exactly,” I said. “Why not give him something else to think about before he gets all worked up?”
    My answer made no sense to her until the following week. We had begun holding classes in a new set of buildings, beautiful but uncomfortable and difficult to reach. The administration improvised a shuttle but only announced a fare after it had been running free for some time. The students planned to gather on that very public corner, refusing to pay to board the bus and working up to a shouting demonstration that might attract the police—a temper tantrum that