So I just glanced at yet another front page story on dailyKos about Paul Ryan and objectivism and the Republican's continued insistence on viewing the poor as "takers" that need "incentives" or they will be totally useless leeches on society. And I have just finished Peter Gray's recently published book, Free to Learn. If you aren't familiar with Peter Gray, he is a research professor at Boston College and writes a popular blog called Freedom to Learn for Psychology Today. He frequently writes about democratic education, unschooling, and free schools.
This book, while striking familiar themes to me as an unschooling parent who has read a lot of books over the years about alternative education, has made me think even more about how our current institutional educational processes are part and parcel of the view of humanity that is so evident in the extremism of the Republican Party as well as many of the wrong paths the Democratic Party has gone down in the past 30 or so years. This book is not just about education. It is about who we are, who we are becoming, what ideas have led us to this way of doing things, and how our educational institutions reflect ineffective ideas about how humans learn and find meaning in life. It is as much about how bankrupt our economic theories are as it is about the problems inherent in our undemocratic schools. If this interests you, I will tell you more about this book and what it makes me think about below.
Peter Gray is not the first person to connect our undemocratic methods in schools to the rise of industrialization and the demand for compliant, obedient workers. But he goes much farther back in history to discuss the research on children's intellectual/educational development in early history when we were hunter-gatherers, (yes those kids were "educated" to have the skills needed for their culture), and how for millenia more naturalistic play-based approaches to the education of children were highly successful, and continue to this day to be successful. And he outlines clearly how the demands of modern society, rather than demanding a different approach for our times, actually demands this same play-based approach to education.
One section fascinated me, since I think a lot about how and why children "cheat" in ways large and small (frequently in my speech-language therapy sessions with them, where they receive no grades). It is in the chapter titled "Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education" under the subtopic Sin 4: Judging students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism, and cheating. He reviews survey research as well as his own experiences in dialogues with students. I can't do it justice with just a short passage but here goes:
In other respects, cheating to get high grades seems to many students to be a win-win-win situation. They want to get high grades, their parents want them to get high grades, and their teachers want them to get high grades. Teachers generally don't look hard to see cheating and often ignore it when they do see it, because the higher grades, especially on standardized tests, make them look good too.
. . .Teachers often say that if you cheat in school you are only cheating yourself, because you are shortchanging your own education. But that argument holds water only if what you would have learned by not cheating outweighs the value of whatever you did with the time saved by cheating. If by cheating in Subject X, you gain more time to really learn Subject Y, which you care about and which may or may not be a school subject, then you haven't really shortchanged your education. In my experience talking with students, the argument against cheating that is most compellng to them is the argument that be cheating they are hurting students who didn't cheat. Most students don't want to hurt other students. . .
note: unless they are
Rand Paul in medical school. But I digress.
Students also come to realize that the rules about what is and isn't cheating in school are arbitrary and have little or nothing to do with learning. If you create a summary sheet of terms and facts and then consult that sheet while taking the test, you have cheated. However if you create such a sheet and commit it to a form of short-term memory that lasts long enough for the test and then vanishes, you have not cheated. If you create a term paper by copying out large chunks of other people's writing and pasting them together, that is cheating, but if you do essentially the same thing and then paraphrase it sufficiently, that is not cheating. Students understand the rules distinguishing cheating from not cheating in school are like the rules of a game. But it's a game they did not choose to play. They have little or no say in what they study, how they are tested, or the rules concerning what is or isn't cheating. Under these conditions, it's hard to respect the rules. It should be surprise, therefore, to learn that cheating in schools is rampant.
He goes on to discuss the research that shows an overall increase in the amount of cheating and shift in who does most of it--used to be "poor students" and now the highest incidences are among the "best students." It's hard not to see how our carrot-and-stick high-stakes testing and accountability movements, that permeate not only our schools but our ways of thinking about economic behavior have contributed to this.
The best sections of the book are on play, including creating a working operational definition of its defining characteristics and in-depth discussion of its role and effects in human society. Not just the play of children but the playfulness that has been the engine of society since hunter-gatherer times, driving the development of independence, autonomy, innovation, creativity, and critical thinking. We give lip service to these qualities, but the truth remains that if we wanted to create a system that truly nurtured those qualities, it would not look anything like our current system of age-segregated, curriculum-defined, autocratic and undemocratic system of institutional schools. Yes, humans are strong and resilient and can develop those qualities despite not having the optimum environment. But the negative effects of having an education--and economic theories--based on Skinnerian control and simplistic views of rewards and punishments as the only shapers of human behavior can be argued to be related to the documented rise in stress, anxiety, and even suicide rates among our young people. And "one thing we know for sure about anxiety and depression is that they correlate strongly with people's sense of control or lack of control over their own lives. " (p 16). Gray argues that while there are definitely other areas of our society where we are failing to provide hope for young people that they do have a future they can shape, institutional schooling is increasingly part of the problem rather than being part of the solution by its ever-increasing demands that take away freedom and autonomy to learn.
I want to make it clear--rewards and punishments and incentives work on a certain level. I use those principles myself all the time in therapy because I am required by payor sources to have clearly defined goals and clearly delineated activities I do to help foster achievement of those goals. I can try to enlist the child or adult's input in deciding what the goals are, but in the end, I am the decider and I am responsible for "making something happen" in therapy. But I can also tell you that by raising my own two children to adulthood using unschooling philosophy, I could clearly see the limitations of the operant view of learning and human behavior and how much more enriching and, well, just beautiful and life-affirming a democratic approach could be. You can read my daughter's diary about her perspective here: My Experience as an Unschooler
Gray clearly has a preference for the need to provide group settings with mixed ages for children--while he accepts democratic homeschooling/unschooling as an alternative that can work, it is clear that his preference is for democratic schools, such as Sudbury Valley, which his own son attended years ago, or hypothetical community centers. More play, more mixing of ages, more autonomy and choice/freedom for learners.
Peter Gray connects this a couple of times to economic theories but doesn't go into much detail. But he mentions that much economic theorizing continues to be based on overly simplistic Skinnerian views of behavior. And I think that is what leads the Paul Ryans and "objectivists" down the false path of missing the boat about what truly motivates humans. He also connects the decline of children's free play to documented increases in narcicissm and a decline in empathy. It's not hard to see how that characterizes conservative thought. And the directive-domineering parenting style he discusses is all too evident in conservative agendas. But we have to acknowledge where we are complicit too, in allowing our schools to become so focused on accountability that we have lost the understanding of what really drives humans to develop and become competent in their cultures. There has been a rise in a "school-centric model of child development and parenting" where more and more children's lives are seen as something to be continuously monitored and directed by adults.
Yet the hunter-gatherers who grew up with a trustful parenting model with unlimited time to play "usually became highly competent, cooperative, non-domineering, cheerful, valued members of their society. " (p 210). "Social play. . is, by its very nature, a continuous exercise in cooperation, attention to one another's needs, and consensual decision-making." Might many of our political dysfunctions today be related to lack of emphasis in our society in developing those skills needed to engage in consensual decision-making (eg. compromise), empathy, and cooperation?
It's really all about play, and trust. And I hope you read the book to learn more about what that means for children and adults.
UPDATE 12/22/13: So today Joseph Stiglitz writes about exactly what I was trying to refer to in this diary. Stiglitz: In No One We Trust
The meat of the part on incentives:
THE banking industry is only one example of what amounts to a broad agenda, promoted by some politicians and theoreticians on the right, to undermine the role of trust in our economy. This movement promotes policies based on the view that trust should never be relied on as motivation, for any kind of behavior, in any context. Incentives, in this scheme, are all that matter.. . . .Of course, incentives are an important component of human behavior. But the incentive movement has made them into a sort of religion, blind to all the other factors — social ties, moral impulses, compassion — that influence our conduct.