Joe's Thoughts!, It's true, Bill!!

[From Rick Marken (950823.0930)]

Joe Sierzenga via Ed Ford (950822) --

Students choose to go to the social skills room because it is a place that
is safe and secure.

A student may be sent home if he or she disrupts the social skills room or
refuses to go there.

I'm not sure I see how this approach to dealing with students is based on
an understanding of people as perceptual control systems.

Ed Ford (950822) --

I've read the letters they've sent to the social skills room (on their own)
thanking Darleen for the help she's given them.

I would really like to read these letters. Could you post three of four of
them? If they are long perhaps just one or two. It would also be nice to know
something about the kids who wrote the letters; what were they doing in
class -- from their perspective and from the teacher's perspective; what led
them to select going to the social skills room over remaining in class. I
think this would be extremely valuable information for evaluating the program.

Bill --

What I wish another boy...HADN'T said when asked about his plan was
"keepmyhandstomyself"

Ed --

Bill, he was just repeating a rule. Is it not the place of schools to teach
rules?

I don't think so. Teaching a rule is like teaching a person to have a
particular goal (in this case, the goal of keeping one's hands to oneself).
I think schools should teach kids how to control, not what goals to control
for. This is because, in order to control for certain goals (like goals for
perceiving oneself living according to certain principles) kids may have
to vary other goals (like goals for perceiving oneself following certain
rules).

All I know is that where it has been implemented as I designed the program,
EVERYONE is happier, the children, the teachers, the administrators, the
entire staff.

I don't doubt that this is true. It sounds to me like your program is
extremely well received by everyone involved and I am very glad that this is
true.

What I'm having trouble with is the way your program is DESCRIBED. What you
(and Joe) SAY you are doing doesn't sound an awful lot different than what a
behavior modifier would say he or she is doing. I just don't see how your
DESCRIPTION of what you do relates to my understanding of people as
perceptual control systems. I think Bill Powers is having the same problem so
it's not just me: it SOUNDS like you are describing a behavior modifiaction
program using some of the language of PCT.

I think that IN PRACTICE your program is consistent with a PCT understanding
of the the nature of people and that it works because, by and large, you
allow the students to control in a way that respects the autonomy of the
teacher and of other students, too. I just don't see a lot of PCT in the
DESCRIPTION of the program; I don't see, for example, how an understanding
of PCT would lead to a DESCRIPTION of a program that includes, as important
components, 1) teaching students the rules 2) sending students to a
social skills rooms if they don't follow the rules and 3) allowing students
to return to class only after they have produced a plan for behaving
properly.

These elements of the program SOUND LIKE operant conditioning (control by
contingency). If this is ACTUALLY what is going on in the program and the
program is as well received by everyone as it appears to be then I would
conclude that PCT is wrong, behaviorism is right. I would also conclude that
I don't know why my PCT experiments came out the way they did or, for that
matter, why my kids came out so well;-)

Best

Rick

[Hans Blom, 950824]

(Rick Marken (950823.0930)) re Ed Ford (950822)

Bill, he was just repeating a rule. Is it not the place of schools
to teach rules?

I don't think so. Teaching a rule is like teaching a person to have
a particular goal (in this case, the goal of keeping one's hands to
oneself).
I think schools should teach kids how to control, not what goals to
control for.

This strikes me as incredibly naive. Remember the nature-nurture
debate? In organisms like humans and the higher apes, there are goals
that are undoubtedly innate but that require the organism to perceive
how others reach these goals before they can do so themselves. Some
of these goals are very basic, like having sex or breast-feeding a
baby. Organisms raised in isolation somehow cannot find their way
into how to do these things.

So culture steps in. We imitate others. We do things the way we were
shown by our elders or that we discovered from books, magazines or
street talk, however limited or biased that information may be. Other
elders -- the educators -- may have discovered that the BEST infor-
mation ought to be offered to the young. They say: "If you want this
-- and I am certain that you want this, because everyone does and it
feels SO good -- you also got to do this". They define a sequence of
achievable sub-goals that allows one to reach the super-goal. What
Skinner calls "shaping".

People living in isolation -- like those poor kids that were left in
the woods and were raised by wolves -- may be superb controllers, but
they are hardly human: they control for wrong (non-human) goals. And,
since man is a social animal, they would not be able to express their
basic human-ness in situations like that.

As a teacher myself, I sometimes encounter resistance. "Do I have to
do that?" "Yes, you do. These are the rules. You cannot graduate
without having studied such and such. Of course you don't HAVE TO
graduate, and you don't HAVE TO study such and such. But then you
won't graduate". Society / cultures / institutions have their rules,
discovered in a process of how individuals get along more smoothly in
the context of that society, in a process of finding out how to give
better control to all those individuals that want to live together.
Like the genes, those "memes" are the ones that somehow survived as
"optimal" solutions in a particular culture.

You don't have to join a particular institution. But your human-ness
will tell you that you will want to join SOME institution / culture /
subculture. And, at so young an age as Ed's students, on which
grounds will you be able to select which one would be best? Maybe it
is better to trust your culture in this respect as well...

Greetings,

Hans