[From Bill Powers (2003.03.24.0956 MST)]
Bruce Gregory (2003.0324.1029)--
>Rick's alternative simply demonstrates control on the part of the
>teacher. Do you have an alternative that satisfies you and fulfills Ed's
>goals?
This was the remark that led to my comments about people controlling each
other's behavior. Ed has said from time to time that the teacher can't
control the students' behavior and shouldn't even try. If this is one of
the goals to which you refer, then it is one of the things I would suggest
changing about Ed's admirable program. The teachers who send students to
the Responsible Thinking Classroom or RTC are controlling something that
matters to them, which includes absence of disruptions by students. There
is no need to conceal this fact by saying it is the student who chose to
leave, particularly in the case of the many students who know full well
that they made no such choice.
The teacher, under Ed's program, can choose to send a disrupting student
away and allow the student back into class only when a satisfactory plan
for avoiding future disruptions is submitted to the teacher and accepted.
"Away" is defined as a special place, the RTC, where the student can obtain
adult counselling and help in working out the required plan. I see no
reason to put a different spin on what happens under RTP. I'm sure this
bare-bones description is how the children see it when the program is
working right, and the teachers and administrators too if they're not busy
trying to make it seem like something else.
The point is not whether interpersonal control happens in school (it always
happens), but how it happens. If it takes place in an atmosphere of respect
and affection (as in RTP), with rules that are clear, fairly administered,
fully explained, and constructed with the cooperation of all involved, the
trading of control can be a normal and easily accepted part of healthy
social life. I believe Ed's program comes closer to achieving this ideal
social arrangement than any other such program I have learned about.
However, I also think that there is a superstructure of ideas in this
program that range from unnecessary to flatly false (the latter being the
case for the idea that teachers can avoid controlling the behavior of
students). These ideas either have no effect because they're irrelevant, or
are counteracted by the fact that the mechanics of the class interactions
are laid out so clearly that they are not influenced by the false concepts
in the way the system is verbalized. The teacher asks the questions, and
when the answers are obtained, but student is sent away. It doesn't matter
who chose what.
I don't think you really disagree with any of this. You say now,
Fair enough. The teacher should say, "There is a rule that if you
disrupt you go to the designated room. You have disrupted. Please
leave."
That is the plain unvarnished truth and is therefore exactly what the
teacher should say, in my opinion. If the student doesn't get it, the
"designated room" is the place where the student can raise objections, ask
questions, propose alternatives, and finally decide that making (and
sticking to) a plan is an acceptable way of getting back into the mainstream.
The teacher could point out that the student presumably could
have chosen not to disrupt, so the choice to disrupt led to the trip to
the designated room.
That's fine, if it happens that the disruption was consciously chosen. But
classroom disruptions are, in my opinion, mostly side-effects of
controlling for something else. John quietly passes Henry a note, without
disrupting anything. Henry, reading the totally new (to him) joke in the
note, bursts out in loud laughter which totally disrupts the lesson. Is
that the time for the teacher to look solemnly down her nose at Henry and
say "I see you have chosen to go to the RTC"? Of course not, and not least
because it's a damned lie. Henry was laughing at a joke that really
fractured him, not choosing to leave the class. He might not, being
fair-minded, object to being sent from the class for disrupting it, but he
ought to be incensed at being sent away for a false reason. It's like being
given a ticket for attempted murder when all you did was break the speed limit.
Once in a while you come across someone who breaks the rules deliberately,
in order to obtain the anticipated consequence. In some quarters that's
known as BDSM, but even in lesser degrees it's surely a sign of a serious
problem that is not going to yield to any routine treatment. Ed's program
actually treats it as such -- the "frequent flyer" who repeatedly and
deliberately chooses to disrupt is given extra attention and the home
situation is looked into; in general repeatedly _choosing_ to go to the RTC
is taken as a symptom of some much deeper problem (read Ed's books for
examples).
In that sense the trip is the result of the
student's choice not something that the student had nothing to do with
bringing about.
I truly don't see the advantage of putting this interpretation on it. It's
obvious to everyone that the _occasion_ for the student's being ejected is
the student's commission of an act that the teacher finds unacceptable,
unacceptable enough to decide to invoke whatever rule applies to it. But
the rules are always invoked and enforced by someone. I was on a UFO
investigation once, chewing the fat with a couple of Pennsylvania state
troopers while looking down from a hilltop on a freeway full of whizzing
cars. I made some remark that they seemed to be going pretty fast, and the
senior trooper said, "We give 'em five, they take ten, and we nail 'em on
fifteen." That's how enforcement of the rules works. That trooper was not
at all confused about who was responsible for what.
The rule has nothing to do with student's agreement, anymore than the
rule against speeding requires each driver to agree to it and to think
it applies in his or her case.
I don't agree. If your Significant Other is in the middle of a heart attack
and you're driving him or her to the hospital, you have every right to
speed where you think it's safe and ignore the speed limit and other
traffic rules. And the rule is unlikely to be applied by any passing
patrol; in fact, you will probably pick up an escort after a quick
conversation.
The effectiveness of most rules (laws), I have heard lawyers say, depends
on general agreement with them. Rules that that are not agreed to by most
of those affected are regularly flouted, and cases based on them are
regularly thrown out of court. The agreement of those subject to rules is,
I believe, essential to the functioning of any viable society. Since this
is true in the real world, it should also be true in the microcosm in which
we try to teach children how the world really is.
I once went to talk to a high-school principal about an important test one
of my children had seriously flunked because of getting out of sync with
the questions by one line in blacking out the little squares. In subsequent
conversation, the principal defended the security at the school, which
required checking with hall monitors at every intersection, being thrown in
the slammer (as the principal called it) for "looking crosswise" at a
teacher, and a bunch of other similar procedures, by saying he was simply
preparing the children to live in the real world. I gave up at that point
and did not ask him exactly which real world he was thinking of.
That school was a mess, as you would expect.
If you want to find out whether the student knew the rule and deliberately
broke it _in order to_ go to the special room (which is what "I see you
have chosen" means),
Only to the most literal minded. But I agree that children can be very
literal minded.
Scientists, too, and anyone else who is interested in truth. I think we
come to clear understandings mainly by sticking to what seems the literal
truth. Metaphors leave too much wiggle room.
I'm sure these questions are relevant to some point, just not to the one
I am pursuing. Who suggested that teachers are anything but control systems?
Ed Ford -- not on purpose, but in effect, by saying teachers should not
control the behavior of students. A simple mistake, easily rectified.
Unless someone decides to make a Supreme Court case of it just because
there's an implied criticism of a small part of the RTP program.
People control other people's behavior all the time. It's a natural way for
human beings to interact with each other. To say that PCT says teachers
should never control the behavior of students is simply wrong. It's also
wrong to think that PCT says students should never control the behavior of
teachers. Those concepts show a misunderstanding of PCT.
I do a lot of that, don't I?
No, not directly. But you seem to have missed my point, so far, that this
is the crux of the argument about teachers and students and who is
responsible for what.
The choice to disrupt is the child's, the consequences are imposed by
the teacher. Perhaps your literal mindedness is taking you down this
path unnecessarily.
A disruption is a _consequence_ of what the child consciously "chose" to
do; but whether the disruption itself was the controlled variable or only a
side-effect of controlling something else has to be determined case by
case. Your assumption that the disruption is always what the child intends
to bring about is simply unwarranted. "Disruption" is used in this context
as an accusatory term, an unwanted event for which someone has to be held
responsible. You're prejudging the case. That is Not Fair, something about
which children feel deeply.
In adult life, for which we are presumably preparing these school-children,
a bad effect produced by someone's behavior is not automatically treated as
an offense. The prosecution is required not only to show that the bad
effect occurred, but that it was intended. If you kill someone, you are
charged with murder in the first degree only if it can be established that
killing was your intent, for example by proving premeditation. If it was a
predictable but not an intended consequence of your behavior, like beating
someone up very badly, you may be charged with second-degree murder, and so
on down the list to manslaughter, negligent homicide, and even innocence of
any wrongdoing. that's how the real world works.
>I am not trying to fool anyone. Least of all the student. I don't know
>what i have to do to disabuse of this notion. Perhaps it is impossible.
I'm sure you're not trying to fool anyone, because you believe that what
you're saying (as far as you've thought it through) is true. But I'm saying
that it's not necessarily true, and in the cases where it's not -- where
the child did not in fact make a conscious choice as described -- there can
be an effect of fooling the child into distrusting the evidence of
introspection. Of course, since you believe it is true, you are being
fooled, too -- by whom or what, I don't know.
>Your reasoning has nothing to do with what I have proposed, so I will not
comment.
What you're proposing, as near as I can comprehend it, is that we rely on a
metaphor in teaching children about social relations. You're saying, "It's
_as if_ the child had chosen to be sent from class, and chose disruption as
the means of doing so." To be sure, if a child does decide to leave class,
and disrupts as a means of being sent away, the metaphor becomes the
literal truth, and you are perfectly justified in speaking that way. But
you seem to want to use the same metaphor when it is _not_ the literal
truth -- in fact, even when its implication is quite false -- and that is
what I object to.
>Nasty? I'm sorry, I had no idea you were so sensitive.
I see. So you _did_ have an idea you were being nasty, but figured I would
be insensitive to it.
Does your rejoinder seem logical to you? It seems like a total non
sequitur to me.
Odd. It's clear to me. You said, "I'm sorry. I had no idea you were so
sensitive." You seem to be apologizing ("I'm sorry") for the nastiness, and
indicating that if you had known I was so sensitive, you would not have
spoken that way. Of course you could mean that you scored higher than you
had anticipated, and were delighted that I was more sensitive than you had
thought.
Doesn't the sentence (more conventionally) indicate that you intended the
nastiness, but not that I would respond sensitively to it? If that's not
what you meant, you'll have to be patient and explain more clearly. Were
you saying, perhaps, that you were sorry for me that I was so sensitive,
but not about being nasty?
Seems to me that plain talk works better than allusion, indirection, and
metaphor.
Best,
Bill P.
