[from Mary Powers 950814]
Hank Folson 950812
I think your prediction that Ed Ford will quit posting is wrong -
he's been jumped on worse than this for about 12 years now. Ed
is not the kind of guy who quits when his understanding of PCT is
criticized (unlike some other, former netters I could name). If
he hadn't been about to go out of town, I'm sure he'd have come
back with what? what? Explain, explain.
The issue of responsibility is an important one. Ed is using
that term partly because it sells to the adults who are dealing
with schoolchildren, who are mightily tired of having the
responsibility (i.e. of being blamed) for the chaos and
disorganization of many classrooms. The problem with the term is
that it carries a number of implications that need to be avoided.
One is that responsibility is the same as autonomy. It isn't.
You are born as an autonomous control system, and as such you
take responsibility for many things. But you also can get
responsibility by having it given to you. Once you have it, by
either route, if you fail to live up to it, you are to blame.
Unless you are well-acquainted with PCT, and presumably people
who read Ed's books are not, or they wouldn't be reading them, it
would be all too easy to pick up on "teaching responsible
thinking" as a kind of mantra, and miss the real point. The
appeal of shifting the blame from your overworked shoulders to
those of the kids who are driving you nuts is obvious. So
obvious that there is a risk that the real lessons won't come
through: that the kids are autonomous whether you think they are
or not. That there must not be even a hint of blame when you do
begin to acknowledge that autonomy. That teaching kids to parrot
the rules is not teaching them to think.
The point of asking "what is the rule" is not to get a correct,
memorized answer. Rather, it is to engage the child at a higher
level, to achieve a certain detachment from his behavior in order
for him to see that it is getting him into trouble, and is going
to be an unsuccessful means for getting what he wants. Maybe
learning to go up levels is a form of learning to think - but
spouting rules on request is not.
Where Rick keeps wanting to go with Ed's work, and Bill too, is
perhaps not relevant to kids up to and maybe through Junior High
age, but it is, or should be, a major issue for adolescents and
adults - people who have functional levels above the level of
rules - who are developing or who have developed systems
concepts. Then the question, "what is the rule?" raises the
questions (in some people, at least) "what the hell is a rule
anyway", "is this rule any good?", etc., etc. - questions that
challenge one's culture, religion, etc. A curriculum that is
sadly (dangerously?) lacking in most secondary schools, as far as
I know.
If one includes in culture the received wisdom about how people
are organized and function, simply learning the rules without
questioning them would mean that PCT would not exist. But it
does, and you're asking the very people who are questioning the
rules, who are shaking the foundations of psychology (and by
extension education and every other field that depends on a
particular understanding of how people work) to back off -
because what practitioners do is "realer" than insisting on
applying the theory correctly and with understanding.
If there is to be steady flow of posts from practitioners, it's
up to the practitioners to write a steady flow of posts. If they
are so sure that what they are doing accurately reflects PCT
theory, and are so sensitive on this point that they can't endure
being told they're off the track, or are starting to sound like
they're off the track, then obviously they don't need to post
here. Ed Ford keeps coming back for what some observers perceive
as more punishment. I think he sees criticism as indicating that
ther's something he doesn't yet understand, and he doesn't let
his ego get in the way of learning what that might be.
Mary P.