[From Bill Powers (950807.1025 MDT)]
Ed Ford (950806.1400) --
Ed, I'm having a problem again with the way you describe your school
program. If your program is working I can't argue with it, but I can
sure argue with the way it sounds when you describe it.
The questioning process has many advantages. One, it teaches the
other person to think. Secondly, it allows the person asking
questions, providing the other person is willing to go along with
that process, it allows the person to CONTROL IN WHICH DIRECTION
THE CONVERSATION IS GOING TO GO. This is critical. At the initial
part of the conversation, I DON'T WANT THEM TO DEAL WITH THEIR
PRESENT REFERENCE LEVEL. IT MAKES IT EASY TO ESCAPE
RESPONSIBILITY.
First, I don't see how questioning can teach anyone to think. When you
say "what's the rule," you're not teaching children to think, you're
simply asking them to repeat back the words you said to them when you
TOLD them what to think. If you never TELL them what the rule is, how
are they going to know what to say when you ask "What's the rule?" What
your question does is to remind the children of WHAT to think, which you
or someone has already told them. They give back the only answer they
know you will accept. Repeating back what you have been told to say is
not learning to think.
What you get back from the child (in the videos, all I've heard, but of
course I HAVE seen other children in similar circumstances) is simply
the phrases that the adult has fed in, not anything that indicates to me
that the child understands. The child mumbles "Keep your hands to
yourself." That's not a rule, it's just an order from an adult being
repeated back. This is not thinking.
Secondly, it allows the person asking questions, providing the
other person is willing to go along with that process, it allows
the person to CONTROL IN WHICH DIRECTION THE CONVERSATION IS GOING
TO GO. This is critical.
One person can't control a conversation. Only two people can. All you
can do is to confine your end of the conversation to what you want to
talk about. That's all you can control arbitrarily without the threat of
physical force.
At the initial part of the conversation, I DON'T WANT THEM TO DEAL
WITH THEIR PRESENT REFERENCE LEVEL. IT MAKES IT EASY TO ESCAPE
RESPONSIBILITY.
This way of putting it sets up an adversary situation. The child tries
to escape responsibility, and you try to prevent that escape. What
you're doing here is stating your reference level for the child's
behavior. Face it, you're saying you intend to control the child's
behavior by preventing an escape from responsibility.
Why would a child want to escape responsibility? The answer is very
simple: because of the consequences of accepting it. If the child
expects to be punished for some act, and has no physical power to
prevent the punishment, the only possible way to prevent it is to deny
the act and hope to be believed -- to put the blame on something or
someone else, or simply to deny that it happened. The logic is very
simple: If I didn't do something, I can't be punished for it. That's a
rule, too. Children believe in that rule even if you never spelled it
out. If the only way to escape punishment is not to have done the act on
purpose, the child will try to get everyone, including himself, to
believe that the act didn't happen, that the child didn't do it, or was
forced to do it, or did it accidentally.
It seems to me that the easiest way to get children not to deny
responsibility is to set up the system so they aren't punished for
accepting it. If your system is working, it's not because you can
control children into accepting responsibility, but because you have set
up the system to remove their reasons for denying it.
But first John has to look at what he is doing, not in relation to
what he wants, BUT IN RELATION TO THE RULES OF WHEREVER HE IS. He
has to first recognize and reconfirm his willingness to follow
rules, regardless of other reference levels, if he wants to stay
where he is and enjoy the privileges that staying there offers,
which includes being with his friends.
If the rules have no relation to what John wants, then the only reason
John will obey them is the consequence of not obeying them. This does
not teach John to think about the rules -- only to remember them. It
teaches John that we follow rules for fear of what will happen to us if
we don't, not because of the good that comes to us, all of us including
John, because the rules exist. If following rules becomes merely a way
of avoiding bad consequences, you haven't taught the child to think
about the rules and why they exist. You've made following the rules into
a meaningless ritual having only one motivation: to avoid getting in
trouble.
You're specifically describing this as an operant conditioning
situation. What the experimenter says to the rat is that eating food is
not a right, but a privilege that the experimenter can grant or
withhold. The experimenter has control of the food, and is powerful
enough relative to the rat to keep control of it. The experimenter can
then decide that the privilege of eating will be granted only if the rat
performs some specific act or ceases performing some other act. The
experimenter does not need to know anything about the rat; how not
eating feels to the rat, or whether the rat would prefer to get its food
for itself, or anything. If the rat could offer reasons why it should
get the food without working so hard for it, or while continuing to do
what it wanted, the experimenter would not need to listen, because the
experimenter holds the power. The experimenter can say, "You don't have
to do what I want, but if you don't do it, you don't eat." In that
situation it's rather disingenuous to add, " ..it's up to you to
choose."
In the child's case, you're saying that the child has a need for
belonging to a group, for being with his friends. The teacher, of
course, has the power to withhold satisfaction of this need, by making
it into a privilege that the teacher can grant or take away. The child's
need then becomes a lever that can be used to control other behaviors of
the child: do this and don't do that, or else you'll lose the privilege
of being with your friends. There is nothing the child can do to avoid
losing the privilege (other than doing what the teacher wants). The
teacher holds the power. If the child doesn't accept separation from
friends, he or she will be sent to the parents at home or work. If the
parent won't cooperate, the child will be taken by the police and
incarcerated. What makes this system work is the threat of unlimited
physical force, and the child's realization that he or she is helpless
to resist.
This, clearly, is not what makes your system work. It is what makes the
OLD system NOT work. The rebellion and violence in modern schools is a
direct reflection of children's attempts to regain control and to escape
the feeling of helplessness that comes when everything they like and
want is treated as a privilege to be used against them -- except by
their friends. That is why they prefer to be with their friends. If your
system works, it works IN SPITE of the fact that it necessarily involves
the temporary denial of needs.
The system as you describe it, Ed, is not PCT. It is simply the same old
system that has always been used, exactly the same system under which
you and I were raised. You take away what the children want and need
until they conform to your wants and needs. Behind this approach is
nothing more elevated than physical power. You may describe this system
in ways that make it sound beneficial and friendly, but when you boil it
down to what actually happens, it is basically coercive. It's the same
old reward and punishment scheme that people have always used in their
attempts to control other people, even long before it was given a fancy
scientific name.
If your system really does work as well as it seems to be working, the
people applying it must be doing something different from what you
describe. If children are taking more responsibility for their acts, it
must be because the consequence of accepting responsibility has become
less threatening to them. If children are following rules without
resenting what happens when they don't follow them, we can only conclude
that breaking rules is not used as an excuse for denying them their real
needs, and that what happens as a consequence is not experienced as
punishing. When they return to class with an acceptable plan, they must
feel forgiven and loved, welcomed back with gladness rather than with
hostile and demeaning comments like "Well, I hope you've learned a
lesson from that." It must mean that what they got out of the sojourn in
the social skills room meant at least as much to them as being with
their friends during the same time. If these things were not true, your
system would not be working.
Ed, you and I were raised under the same system. The methods used were
what everyone believed would work to keep children under control, give
them right values (yours Catholic and mine Protestant (sort of)), and
fill their minds with what we call education. This is the system that
has led, precisely, to the present system with its chaos and violence.
In a way, children since the 1960s have been behaving just like people
all over the world have been behaving as, one country after another, the
call to freedom has been heard. Having only a rudimentary acquaintance
with freedom, only a beginning recognition of their own autonomy, all
these people, children and adults, have reacted first by behaving as
they had wanted to behave while they were still powerless and oppressed.
All the pent-up fear and anger has exploded into action.
This is the price we are paying for past ignorance. What we must do now
is to educate people -- of all ages -- about the true meaning of
autonomy. We must try to help them see how to take autonomy for granted,
as a right and not a privilege that others can manipulate. We must teach
them that the answer to being controlled is not to do the same thing
back, only more so; it is to study control and come to understand it as
a natural phenomenon, so we can do it for our own benefit rather than
acting against each others' and our own interests.
The schools that you are transforming are little universes within which
these lessons can be taught and grasped, by children and adults
together. As long as you are teaching these lessons, you are following
PCT. But when you fall back on the very system of thought that produced
all the problems we are trying to deal with today, you are going
backward, contradicting the lessons of PCT.
Actually, I think you have absorbed PCT very well. You haven't yet got
rid of all the older ways of thinking that are really incompatible with
PCT, but evidently you manage to get the message across anyway.
What remains to be seen is whether you have really been able to install
the new PCT approach, as your successes would seem to prove, or whether
you have simply made the old system more effective by making punishment
quicker and surer and making sure that the children know what to say and
do so as to appear more tractable -- as the same successes might also
prove.
I tend to think that the PCT concepts are getting across and are making
a difference. But if you don't describe what is going on in terms
appropriate to PCT, all the lessons can quickly be forgotten, because
what you say sounds a great deal like the system that is already in
place, only more so. If what you say and what you do are different, you
will deliver a mixed message, a weaker message. Those who don't get the
message clearly are likely to revert to the old system as soon as you
are gone, because then all they have left is your words, which carry a
different message.
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Best,
Bill P.