Determinaciones realizadas

“NEUTRAL” VOICES

"Where s the red one? Who can tell me where it is for sixty?" The operator of an illegal street hustle known as Three-Card Monte tries to engage someone in the crowd. But none of the midtown Manhattan pedestrians who have stopped to watch the action responds.

"Here," he says, turning over the card that everyone knew was the red one. "Watch it now!" He turns the card facedown again and slowly interchanges it with the other two cards on his makeshift table, fashioned from a couple of discarded cardboard boxes.

"Where is it now? Tell me for sixty," he says, peeling off three twenties from a wad of bills. "Who saw it? Anybody?"

"You. Do you know where it is?" he asks a man in the crowd. The man hesitates.

"Just point to it. Just point to it, for free. Go ahead," urges the dealer, trying to hook the mark. The man points to a card. There is little doubt that it is the red one, because the dealer, openly frustrated with the crowd's reticence, had moved the cards at baby speed this time, just to get people to start playing the game.

"Show me sixty and you're a winner," says the dealer to the man, offering him the opportunity to fill in the skipped step of betting by simply displaying the $60 that he would have bet. The man need not actually hand over the money, because the winner always gets his bet back anyway, along with his winnings. The game's rules, it seems, are bigger than both the dealer and the player, and so the dealer must ask the player to at least go through the motions of placing abet. "Show me sixty," repeats the dealer, in the tone of someone obliged to walk a beginner through the steps of the game.

"Show it to him, show it to him," advise two knowledgeable-sounding people in the crowd in excited whispers, encouraging the mark to seize the opportunity and win $60.

The mark is a bit bewildered; everything seems to be happening so fast. But he tries to appear like he knows what he's doing. He pulls out his wallet, removes $60 and shows it to the dealer.

The dealer reaches out to receive the money, as if it were being handed to him, but the mark hesitates. "I have to hold it," says the dealer.

The mark doesn't want to disrupt things now that he is just moments away from collecting his winnings. With his mind on the $60 that he is going to get, he decides to view the dealer's request

as just another rule. It's only for a few seconds anyway, he thinks, as he hands his $60 to the dealer.

"Turn over the red one," invites the dealer, gesturing toward the cards.

The mark slides the red card to the edge of the table and flips it face up— but wait a minute, it's black!

"Aw, damn!" yell the mark's two self-appointed advisers, showing sympathy— but in the process implying that this is a legitimate outcome.

Stunned and disoriented, the mark is struggling to figure out what's been going on.

"You took my money," he says quietly, apparently thinking out loud. And then, with greater confidence: "You took my money!"

"A bet is a bet..." the dealer starts to explain.

"You took my money! Give it back!" interrupts the stung mark, who now appears to be on the verge of using force.

A heated exchange of words ensues, and there seems to be no way that one man or the other can prevail through talk alone.

But then someone in the crowd says, "You lost, man."

These words seem to work a kind of magic on the mark, who suddenly appears to have lost full confidence in his own position. For the first time he allows himself to consider accepting the situation as it stands, perhaps by viewing it as the words from the crowd suggest: as his loss of a fair game rather than as his victimization by the dealer. The same words—"You lost, man"—had they come from the dealer himself, might have been further provocation. But coming from a nonpartisan, neutral, disinterested source, they are persuasive.

To finish cooling out the mark, the dealer offers a consolation prize that actually has some value, but he links this offer explicitly to the mark getting on with his day. "I'll give you a free chance to win twenty so you can have a nice day," says the dealer.

The mark, no longer making any demands, watches the dealer deploy the cards and interchange them a few times.1

At the dealers signal, the mark reaches out and turns over what should be the red card, but isn't. "Ooooh!" exclaim the two vocal people in the crowd.

And the mark walks away, disappearing quickly into the busy pedestrian traffic.

The dealer resumes his work immediately, giving himself the professional look of a casino employee who doesn't stop to react emotionally to the outcome of the game. But before he can hook another mark, a lookout stationed up the block spots a cop and motions back to the table. In an instant the dealer is a pedestrian, floating inconspicuously down the street. The boxes and cards that he has abandoned suddenly look like ordinary trash left out on the sidewalk for collection, and the people in the crowd go on their way.

“NEUTRAL” VOICES 162

But look! Look who the dealer is walking with. You guessed it—it's the two people who advised the mark. In fact they are the ones whose flamboyant winning and losing had attracted the crowd in the first place. (They always won in a way that made you think "That was easy; I could have done that," and lost in a way that made you think "That was stupid; I could have won that one easily") And they are the ones who spoke up at the con game's three critical junctures. At the hook: encouraging the mark to go ahead and "show sixty." At the sting: saying "Damn!" at the black card to frame the operation as a fair game rather than as trickery. And at the cool-out: encouraging the mark to view the outcome as his own failure by saying "You lost" instead of "He misled you."

I witnessed this scene during my lunch hour one day and have tried to recount it here as

accurately as possible. (Yes, the streetwise hustler really did say "so you can have a nice day.") In fact, I've seen this game—a variation on the age-old shell game—many times on New York City sidewalks, and it is pretty much the same every time.

I watch these games in part because the people who operate them often display extremely impressive insight into the way people think and show great sophistication in their use of

psychology. Surely their intuition and skill would make the typical professional psychologist look dull in a comparison. Watching the shills is especially instructive. The dealer could certainly engage some marks without the shills' help, but he wouldn't survive for very long without their protection. It is easier to get a person to believe a false promise than it is to get the person to accept a loss, and when the game moves from the former stage to the latter the operator's personal authority by itself is no longer sufficient to manipulate the mark. Thus, the operator has his neutral voices. For the operator of the game, getting the mark to go peacefully is a necessity, not an option, and so cooling out is not something that happens "after" the game. Cooling out is an integral part of the game.

There are lessons here that go far beyond the game itself. In 1952 sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a paper in the journal Psychiatry showing that many institutions, authority figures and ordinary individuals in "legitimate" society engage in activity that is essentially the same as that of the con artist cooling out the mark.2 _{In fact, as educational sociologist Burton R. Clark later}

showed, cooling out is one of the main social functions of institutions of higher education in the United States.3

The U.S. socioeconomic system, like the hustler, makes false promises, the principal one being that social mobility is available to all who work hard. By its very nature, a hierarchical system cannot possibly keep such a promise. The number of positions at successively higher levels decreases very quickly and is always less than the number of hardworking people who want the positions. This structure sets many ambitious workers on a collision course with the reality of limited opportunity. When they are finally hit with the tragic disappointment, they may become angry or resentful, and so the hierarchical system must engage in widespread cooling out. It does this not only to protect its agents who stand at the gate and do the dirty work of exclusion, but also to make sure that those who have been disappointed do not become opponents of the hierarchical system itself and enemies of its power elite. It is vital to the system that the losers serve the hierarchy respectfully, and not sabotage it, when they find themselves with jobs that have lower social status than the society of "unlimited opportunity" had led them to expect. Cooling out is therefore an integral part of the socioeconomic system.

Those who say "That's life" should understand that there is nothing natural about a system that kills the spirit of large numbers of people by first putting them in a position where they need opportunity, then promising them virtually unlimited opportunity and finally making them losers.

The hierarchical system itself does create much of the need for opportunity in the first place. Its hierarchical division of labor, in which the interesting and creative parts of work are separated out and reserved for a few, while the tedious and mind-dulling parts are heaped on the many, has a lot of people wishing for better jobs. And its hierarchy of authority, in which decision-making power is concentrated at the top, has a lot of people wishing for jobs where they have some say—or, at the very least, insulation from those above them (autonomy). If jobs were designed in a way that did not force people to specialize in the uninspiring parts of work, and if decisions in the

workplace were made democratically rather than by a hierarchy of bosses, two of the main goals that drive individuals to seek opportunity would already be met: more fulfilling work and a fair share of power.

As the avenues for getting ahead in this country have narrowed, the route of formal education has become dominant, so that today the pursuit of opportunity in the United States is to a large extent institutionalized in the colleges. As a result, the colleges have become one of the pyramidal system's main tools for cooling out people's "unrealistic" career ambitions. They do it on a massive scale, yet by necessity conceal the fact that that is what they are doing.

The process of cooling out students' high educational and career expectations begins, of course, long before college. Grades from high school teachers and advice from counselors have an effect, but it is easy to base your hopes and plans on the thought that these people are underestimating you. Their reactions to you have always been very subjective, after all, and so perhaps their professional assessments, too, contain errors of judgment due to misimpressions, personality conflicts, personal prejudices and so on. But then comes the big aptitude test, and a few weeks later when you open the envelope and look at your scores you feel like you really are looking at a true picture of yourself. SAT and ACT scores have a powerful impact on the self-images of students, and those whose self-images are hit hard lower their expectations. They may not even apply to the colleges that they most want to attend.

For most students, college itself means further cooling out. The lower the social status of the college, the greater its orientation toward wrapping up the formal education of its students. In fact, cooling out competes with remedial instruction to be the raison d'etre of the community or junior college. These two-year institutions, which take in two-thirds of a million graduating high school seniors every year,4 _{allow large numbers of people to "go to college"— and to get it over}

with posthaste. Today "we're playing more of that winnowing function," says George Prather, an official in the 100,000 student Los Angeles Community College District.5 _{Nationwide, most}

students going from high school into two-year colleges plan to transfer to four-year colleges or universities, where they can earn bachelor's degrees.6 _{In the end, however, a large majority of}

"transfer program" students either switch to a terminal program or leave college altogether. Each year, only about 5% of those enrolled in two-year colleges transfer to bachelors-granting

institutions, an astoundingly small fraction.7 _{For example, Los Angeles City College in the 1997-}

98 school year managed to transfer only 481 of its 15,000 students to the California State University system, and just 73 students to the more-prestigious University of California system. Statewide, California's 106 community colleges, which constitute the largest system of higher education in the world, opened the year with 1,143,000 students. By years end 56,000 (4.9%) had transferred to the California State University or University of California systems—and 1,087,000 had not.8

Clark analyzed the process by which junior colleges change transfer students into terminal students. He considers as an example a student who wants to be an engineer but who is destined not to be one. What might be the sequence of experiences that cools him out? At many junior colleges these experiences start even before classes do, in the form of testing and counseling.

“NEUTRAL” VOICES 164

Thus, after an enrollment examination in English and mathematics, our would-be engineer may find himself in remedial classes, which delay his eventual transfer to a four-year college and, more importantly, shake his self-image as a future engineer. At a required advising session, a counselor looks over his "counseling folder," which contains transcripts from other schools, test scores, recommendations from teachers and so on. Although his file is thin, the counselor observes that high school grades and test scores such as these usually suggest a less ambitious program—"but of course you are free to go ahead and try the pre-engineering program if you want—just remember that we have a lot of really good vocational programs here, too."

The student will face this folder again and again as the months go by and as grades and "need for improvement" notices from instructors accumulate. The file of impersonal, objective-looking data shadows him and, when it grows sufficiently strong, will stalk him. The counselors, skilled in handling the "over-ambitious" student, use the growing file to justify becoming more persistent with their advice. Advice given at previous counseling sessions is in the student's folder and is now cited impersonally as part of the accumulating "evidence." The counselors edge the student toward a vocational program, but they never countermand his choices, for the whole point of the protracted exercise is to avoid a personal, hard "No," and to have the student make the "correct" choice on his own.

Finally, the student is put on academic probation for receiving below-average grades and must now submit to more than the usual amount of counseling. Students are allowed to stay on probation for a number of semesters or indefinitely, depending on the school, so probation does not force many students out of junior college. Rather, it is designed to get the student to think about himself and admit to his thinking the possibility of reclassifying himself as a terminal student. Reclassification would allow him to receive the college's two-year degree, Associate in Arts, by putting him in classes in which he would get grades high enough to bring his average up to the required level.

He relents, at last, and reclassifies himself, marking a big change in his life. The college expedites changes of this sort by making them appear as small as possible: Our student will be an

"engineering aide" instead of an "engineer." There is a world of difference, of course, but on the surface things appear pretty much the same: He continues as a student (at least for the time being) and tells family and friends that he has decided to "start out" as an engineering aide.

The junior college s cooling-out work, like all cooling-out work, is necessarily hidden. When it isn't hidden, there is no cooling out. In fact, when attempts to cool people out become apparent, they backfire badly: Seen as attempts at manipulation, they provoke anger and heat things up. The junior colleges, in spite of their actual function, are widely thought of as transfer stations for students on their way to bachelor's degrees. If these institutions were to get a reputation among high school students and their families as dead-end side tracks for losers in the paper chase, many students would refuse to go to them. The pyramidal system, which uses formal education to allocate scarce opportunity, would have to find some other way of cooling out the "excessive" number of students who want bachelor's degrees. The four-year institutions themselves, with their dropout rate already at 50%, would be reluctant to help by increasing their share of the cooling- out action.

Many students who do get bachelor's degrees want to work toward a professional credential, such as a law degree, medical degree or PhD. As we have seen, the criteria that determine who is permitted to do this include attitude, and in particular favor individuals who have the kind of uncritical attitude, or narrow focus, that makes them easy to direct. But it is not enough for the qualification system to give the best positions to those who will do the best job from the point of

view of employers. It must also cool out the high educational and career expectations of those who are excluded, including those who would do the best job from other points of view, such as that of clients and the public. Professional qualifying examinations help to do both: Not only do they help identify those who would serve employers best, but they also help cool out the "failures."

Failures are not a waste product of the educational system, but are carefully "produced." At every