We Teach the Wrong Things Thoroughly

by John Jensen, Ph.D.

            We live inside a system of group behavior we call society. Among all other animals, group behavior is guided securely by instinct. Particular animals learn over centuries to seek out the environment that suits them and to rely on their instincts to survive in it. 

            We humans have instincts too.  The ones comparable to those of other animals take us mainly through direct need-meeting from infancy up.  We catch our balance when we fall and reach for food when we‘re hungry.  Even for meeting our own needs, however, our instincts serve only vaguely. We can get too much salt, sugar, and fat we like, can cling too dependently on others who provide us security, and connect with people who lead us astray. Face to face with others, we notice many reactive nudges but they fall well short of successful guidance about  reciprocity, fairness, attachment, responsibility, and other issues. Even to guide these inclinations, we rely on conscious guidance from parenting or education, but still may remain entirely within a small world where “It happened to me” remains the bottom line. 

            Yet each of us also lives in a world totally beyond our small one. And if in our limited world our instincts are unserviceable as reliable guides, this applies even more in the larger world. Our curse and blessing as humans is that we are free. Our design for our society has no instincts whatever to guide it as its size exceeds the numbers we interact with face to face.  At this stage, we rely totally on summoning up our uniquely human qualities.

            Perhaps the most fundamental misdirection lies in what occurs when you don’t understand or value this feature distinguishing us from other animals.  Like them, we delight in increased competence, but that delight doesn’t tell us what society desperately needs from us for its own survival.  As we’re forced to address conditions beyond our personal vision affecting thousands, millions, or even billions of others, our instinctual level is useless. We have to turn instead to our ability to abstract and reflect. We rationally look at what we’re doing, place in proper perspective the cues that would return to tribal-level thinking, and extend our conclusions with foresight about cause and effect to conditions in the modern world.  Education is presumably the agency intended to generate such society-sustaining thought.
            Expecting this of ourselves, we can be taken aback at examining what our rational choice of systemic influences on children’s minds has come down to. Thinking of what we have now, we have to inquire whether our “higher” intelligence designed it. 

            A critical period of my life occurred in college (perhaps for you also). I was confronted with the fact that the familiar world I had grown up in was too small, and that vast portions of what I hadn’t noticed before were extremely important. To begin even to think in these zones, I had to exert sustained attention to them, had to spend time reading and thinking by myself. Sometimes I could count on but few individuals to whom I could voice ideas about them.  

            Remember the scene in the movie City Slickers when Curly, the rugged cowboy, sizes up life sitting around the campfire late at night. To the city boys on a cattle drive trying to find themselves, he says, “All you have to know is one thing.”  The others ask him “What? What?” and he answers, “That’s for you to find out.” 

            Understanding the value of a world that till then stood entirely outside my own experience was the “one thing” I needed to know, and it has influenced everything since. The existence of that world not accessed by instinctive drives, a positive upbringing, or even good early education stands patiently outside everyone waiting to be noticed.  Given the varied contours of their physical, social, religious, and cultural beginnings, they are likely to experience it in varied ways.  That’s not the problem. The problem lies in this: to grasp that world and give it its due can only be done by conscious thought aimed at distinguishing and separating out the lesser and limited from the emerging and unlimited. The urgency of this task is driven home to us by problems beyond the reach of anyone, but that impact everyone. Obvious problems of this type are global climate change, economic insecurity, ideological conflicts, and wars. Considering them, we notice that thinking arising from our tribal level experience, individuality, and personal needs is not enough. We’re impelled to consider the impact of our actions on a larger world populated by everyone else and all values.

            Given that urgent need of stretching our minds to what‘s been beyond us, note what our system of education drills into us over and over. It comes not as a single lesson one might regard skeptically and then dismiss, but as a continued experience woven into a student’s fiber of thought:

            1. “The world is all about me.”  This is the first mistake and it may never be corrected. The tricky thing is that there’s a time in life when it’s true. Small children have no choice in the matter.  Their world is all about them, but the direction of their growth is toward the bigger one of which they are a part. Yet accepting their  personal limitations as “just the way I am,” they can erect an edifice to self constructed of the inclinations, prejudices, and mediocre thinking they happen upon, and can claim that egocentric design of the world all their lives.

            The core personal shift I described could be stated instead as, ”The world is not all about you. Some things are immeasurably more significant, and you had best understand them and your relationship to them before you carve your world into a configuration that pleases you.” The point for education isn’t just to modify one idea with another.  We do that automatically as we jostle each other. Hourly lessons bump one idea away to focus on another. The point is that really grasping the existence of the larger world entails a kind of reflective thinking; slowing our automatic impulses to appreciate something through the power of our mind, a use of consciousness seldom approached by customary schooling but crucial for becoming an active participant of the broad realities that bear upon us.

            2.  “How I see it is how it is.”  If you don’t establish a sense of proportion about yourself in the world, you’re thrust back constantly to believing the pre-eminence (if not the infallibility) of your own constructs. As a child grows in a healthy way, a fixed perceptual field slowly expands and its edges relax to draw in new information.

            Even gathering new knowledge steadily, however, an intuitive conclusion may continue to dominate–that one’s own experience is the measure of truth. To adjust one’s thinking to the real world, one has to know a lot about it, which education and family guidance are meant to supply. But even these may not enable a child to establish the proper proportions between what they know “for sure“ and all that remains unknown. Superficial learning drives us back to rely on our sparse, limited, personal history because we have not stretched beyond it.  

            3.  “The appearance of learning is enough.”  Students too often learn superficially, abetted by school policies that jigger tests so that the school itself appears successful. Review questions teach deliberately to the test, and students cram to overload the mind, insuring that it will later unload just as quickly.  Such practices, however, obtain a “credit” for the student that certifies the public appearance of learning while telling the student that the reality of it doesn’t matter.

            Superficial learning is intended, designed, and structured into the US system nationwide by the features of what in my book (cf. below) I title “The Learn and Lose System.”  A correspondent sent to me a quotation from G. K. Chesterton: “Men do not differ much on the things they call evil. They differ about what evil things they call ‘excusable.’” To me it is an evident, egregious, and urgent evil that schools deliberately conspire to teach for superficial, smoke-and-mirrors learning, a design for education that should and could be turned around on a dime. It is an evil deemed by the system to be tolerable.

            4.  “What I feel should determine how others treat me.”  While it’s a worthy thing for us to treat others sensitively according to our understanding of their needs, a contrasting principle is just as important: appreciating our personal resources to meet our own needs. Instead of teaching self-responsibility regardless of what others do for us, we harbor a series of associations:  If I’m angry, others should obey me. If I’m sad, others should cheer me up.  If I’m happy, others should play with me.  If I’m frustrated, others should solve my problems.  If I’m lazy, people should cut me slack.  If I’m bored, people should entertain me.  Enshrining our own feeling as Holy Writ, the last word in the argument  then becomes “I feel that…”.  The larger world is rendered invisible. Rational thought disappears in a fog of emotional assertions. 

            The irony of this is that these assertions are true at one point in our lives, in our infancy. Then, we do depend completely on adults to understand and meet our need, but we may initiate a thought-program then and never surrender it. To the end of our lives, we may harbor our two-year-old accusation against the world, “You are not satisfactorily meeting my need!” 

            Schools often think they’ve solved this problem as they require students to hide their feelings. If you’re frustrated, irritated, angry, resentful, jealous, or bored, put a lid on it and get back to work.  But it’s apparent from our experience with those who turn sneaky, cruel, amoral, or destructive that a hidden feeling can get worse. We need instead to manage it by conveying an interpretation of internal experience that makes sense to children and enables them conduct their inner  world thoughtfully.

            5.  “I have more power than you so I can tell you what to do.” Children’s experience of the adult world as governing their every move is poor preparation for them to trust their ability to understand. It says essentially, “You don’t have to understand.  Just follow the rules.” The point isn’t that we should cede control to students (so that ‘the inmates run the asylum’) but rather to obtain order by changing students’ thinking. 

            Consequences and limits here and there may get their attention, but the heavy lifting of their education occurs not as they comply with rules but as they think better. Can they, by looking at the school, understand society better?  That’s our goal. And when that lesson has been taught, is there another lesson that enlists their responsibility, judgment, and initiative?  By our  reliance on rule-following, we stride past great opportunities.

            Sometimes you get Golden Tongued Wisdom from the mouth of a child.  A bright first grader I know has had challenges getting along with peers and adapting to the classroom. After she had a run-in with her teacher, I found her uncustomarily sitting quietly on a bench at the side of the playground.  I sat beside her and asked, “How’s it going?” 

            In a glum voice, she answered, “People are always running my life.” 

            My heart went out to her as I thought, “Dear, you don’t know the half of it,” but I murmured some adult things about the school needing to help her learn how to live. Yet here is a child, small one at that, able already to recognize that she is an independent being ready to claim “my life,” and hungers to use her own intelligence to run what she already realizes to be hers alone. Her school, of course, is not “set up” to do that. Few are. 

            A debatable issue there is the essential independence of any individual from their group, each side a truth in its own way. We are both independent and interdependent, and understanding how each can be true is crucial. We have to penetrate what it means to subordinate ourselves to a higher purpose, to a legitimate authority, to a team effort, to a family’s needs, to another who happens to need us just now, and to perhaps millions or even billions of others who in a remote way are affected by how we vote and shape our own society.

            We need on the other hand to recognize when our determined attention to shaping our own personality and character is the fitting task. Sorting among such priorities is implicit in all our experience; when do my needs and views pick up, and when do I focus on others?  We need people around us who can point these things out, leaders in our lives who get it, who understand balance and proportion and comprehensive values and pass them on to us.

             We are not required to teach the wrong things thoroughly. A free choice looms. We can ground children not just in how they’ll assert themselves in the adult world, but also in how they grasp and respond to the larger reality that surrounds them, an understanding that seldom occurs accidentally.

            John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of The Silver Bullet Easy Learning System: How to Change Classrooms Fast and Energize Students for Success (Xlibris, 2008). He welcomes comments sent to him directly at jjensen@gci.net and will email an ebook version of his book to anyone without charge upon request.