The little one is half asleep, after a long talk with her mom (during which she elaborated on every detail of our day). And the older is texting a friend (someone he likes a lot, I’m guessing, judging by the ear-to-ear smile).
“What’s new?” I had asked them at dinner. He told me about friends and sports, music and four-wheelin’ with his dad. She talked about gymnastics, Minecraft, doing math on her IPad and missing her best friend.
“How’s school? I asked.
“Boring,” they replied in sync.
Boring…huh? Hmmm… I can’t say I don’t understand their sentiment. As a teacher for the last two decades in a community college that draws many ‘nontraditional’ students, I’m all too aware of how many, often brilliant, young minds fall through the cracks of schools as we know them, only to find themselves again and even go on to actualize their higher potentials in college and beyond (assuming they discover ‘open-enrollment’ universities that will give them another chance to prove themselves, despite a high school record stamped in red with ‘failure!’ Sadly, most high school students don’t even know such schools exist, given the rhetoric of ‘permanent records’ that hangs over them from grade schools onward.)
At any rate, there’s no denying that schools as we know them are, for most students, boring!
John Taylor Gatto, twice New York City & State Teacher of the Year turned educational reformer, says that boredom is what schools as we know them specialize in.
“Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children.”(Against Schools)
“After 30 years in the public school trenches,” he took the opportunity to say what he really thought about our institutionalized education system – that it amounts to “long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers…virtual factories of childishness.”
Back when “mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States,” Gotto argues, during that “enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions” of the early 1900s (1905 to 1915), many practitioners did pay lip-service to noble sounding purposes.
The stated intention of public schooling was:
1.) to make good people
2.) to make good citizens, and
3.) to make each person his or her personal best.
This would be a fairly “decent definition of public education’s mission,” Gatto says, were it not that the actual purposes of modern schooling are more likely to be:
“to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority…[which] precludes critical judgment completely....to make children as alike as possible…to harness and manipulate a large labor force….to determine each student’s proper social role…by logging evidence…on cumulative ‘permanent records’. And also to sort by role and train only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.”
Like the Prussian system on which it was modeled, Gotto argues, our public school system is “useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual heard of mindless consumers….”
This may seem an obvious overstatement to anyone who did well in schools, but here is an example of something that cannot be seen from only the point of view of those who benefit, for the whole truth includes those who ‘fail’ and ‘flunk’ – powerful words, given their effects on young lives, sometimes permanently. The truth is, while maybe 40 to 60 percent of students ‘succeed’ in our schools, that leaves 40 to 60 percent who do not!
You might think this is an epic failure, but in fact, it may actually be built into the very purposes of the system. It should come as a surprise to most Americans that modern education is actually modeled on the compulsory system developed in Prussia in the 1820s, the purpose of which was to put down “the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table….to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.”
Gatto adds how unbelievable it is “that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens all in order to render the populace ‘manageable’.” All this “can stem purely from fear,” he admits, “or from the by now familiar belief that ‘efficiency’ is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope.”
As H. L. Menchen wrote, contrary to popular perception, the aim of public education is not:
“to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim…is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States…and that is its aim everywhere else.”
Menchen’s being a satirist does not change the truth of his observation, which Gatto argues is revealed in “numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose.”
“It is simply in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform.”
Indeed, worst among “the purposes of mandatory public education in this country,” Gatto argues, is what he calls “the selective function” – “to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.”
And meanwhile, “a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.” All of which makes the young “sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era – marketing.” *
By means of so many behaviorist conditioning processes, we are “turning our children into addicts,” Gatto argues. “The Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers.”
In his book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore illustrates that “the science of PR” has become in our time “the principal language by which communication occurs in the public forum – for both commercial and political” and – one could argue – educational purposes.(p.94) In fact, one could argue that buying into the desire for so many products of our economy is prerequisite to even wanting an education to begin with, ‘success’ being defined in our time as purchasing power. In many ways, conditioning has become the foundation of education – and so much for the search for truth!
In the same way that “the raw power of electronic mass advertising” is “capable of artificially creating demand for products that consumers had had no idea they needed or wanted,”(Gore, Assault on Reason, p.95) our educational methods use effectively similar “techniques of mass persuasion,” intent in the first place to “shift America from a needs to desires culture.”(Assault on Reason, p.94)
It was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who would be remembered as “the father of public relations.” Bernays “adapted the [so-called] revolutionary insights of his uncle to create the modern science of mass persuasion – based not on reason, but on the manipulation of subconscious feelings and impulses.”(p.93) Giving rise to forms of advertising that use this associative form of conditioning, appealing to unconscious needs to sell want as a habit to the American public.
Bernays’ associate, Paul Mazur, the first head of Lehman Brothers, put it this way: “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”(in Assault on Reason, p.94) And underlying this argument, unstated, is the concomitant claim that, for this condition process to take effect, man’s ability to think for himself, that is, his reason – which knows better – must be undermined.
Is it any wonder that we are so confused in our age?
And so Bernays began in the 1920s a form of social control that has arguably been responsible for the rapid moral degeneration of human kind. And yet, perhaps not surprisingly, one would be hard pressed to find a single study on the consequences of this widespread practice on the decline of ethical growth. Why? Almost certainly because we still believe that the growth of our economy depends on our material wants…an assumption that goes unexamined, even in the face of evidence that an intrinsic goods economy could function as well, or better, without destroying the earth in the process.
Once seen for the power it has in our lives, we have to wonder how much of our education system itself is based on these conditioning processes, which are are part and parcel of what we today call education, and they play on this externalizing of our locus of control. Even if one grows up in a home that does not throw our center of gravity off balance, we are apt to have difficulty keeping our locus of control centered if only b/c the processes of classical and operant conditioning are at work on any of us who has ever been effected by advertising, which includes us all.
Given the power it has in our lives, this conditioning process deserves more consideration than we typically give it. And this is especially true because our childrearing practices too are rationalized by parents who themselves have been conditioned into adapting this process in place of actually teaching their kids, say, the difference in right and wrong. Habituating behavior that responds to parents authority seems to work because it also habituates them to patterns of response to school, religion, government and the like – so seems to facilitate ‘success’ in life, defined as accumulation of material rewards. And it’s difficult to see what the problem with this process of habituation is – until we ask those who’ve grown up this way, are you happy?
Ask most Americans, even and especially those who are most ‘successful,’ this question, and the answer is a resounding NO! In fact, we are consuming a record amount of pharmaceuticals in our efforts to maintain at least the ability to keep ourselves alive (a means which often backfires, since one powerful side effect of such drugs turns out to be suicidal tendencies).
So it’s worth taking a closer look at what we are calling education these, along with the process of conditioning that feed into our educational habits. For we have no hope of becoming good parents -- that is, parents who encourage the development of their children’s minds – if we do not examine our own conditioned responses, and the reasoning (or lack thereof) that goes into them.
Classical conditioning is the process of habituating behavior by way of associating two stimuli, one needed with another that is unneeded. Pavlov (1927) became famous for being the first to successfully condition dogs by way of associating food (which has intrinsic value to all living things) with the sound of a bell (which is not unpleasant, but has no real intrinsic value), such that eventually the dogs would reflexively salivate at the sound of a bell. In this way, behavior can be controlled by way of control of rewards associated with needs.
The psychology of behaviorism, which is what this stimulus-response form of conditioning was called by B.F. Skinner, who was the most famous proponent of these conditioning processes,
Likewise, it is the process by which advertising plays on human needs to make us think we need things we actually do not, but come to believe have value by association with things we do need It feels good to get the positive regard of those who are impressed with things we own, just as it feels good to get good grades – though the objects of our possession, like the grades, have little or none of the intrinsic value that positive regard and learning have.
Another form of conditioning is called operant. It is the process by which behavior is controlled by the expectation of consequences. Conditioning processes work in the same way that feedback loops work, that is, by positive reinforcement that increases the frequency of a given response, and negative reinforcement that decreases the frequency of that response (positive and negative here refer to addition and subtraction, as in positive and negative charge, rather than good or bad, as in the popular sense).
Skinner considered the ease with which humans can be controlled by extrinsic rewards and punishments to be a sign that we have no intrinsic will of our own. Any sense of freedom or self-control we might think we have is mere illusion, he argued. We think we are free when we can get what we want, but we don’t realize that what we want is being controlled for us in the first place, giving us the illusion that we have self-control – a concept Skinner does not recognize to be part of human potential, claiming that all human behavior is extrinsically controlled. “Operant behavior under positive reinforcement is distinguished by the lack of any immediate antecedent event which could plausibly serve as a cause, and as a result it has been said to show the inner origination called free-will.”(Skinner, 1974) This makes operant conditioning an especially powerful tool for those who would exercise social control at large, because “Feeling free is an important hallmark of a kind of control distinguished by the fact that it does not breed counter-control.”(Skinner, 1974) But while positively reinforced behavior, that which is performed in anticipation of a valued consequent, may give us a ‘sense’ of making a choice, this too is an illusion. It only makes us feel like we have free will, while we are in fact, only responding to a previously conditioned environmental stimuli.
On this logic (or lack thereof), Skinner argued that “to refuse to control is to leave control not to the person himself, but to other parts of the social and non-social environment.”(Toynbee, 1973) But who will do this controlling, Toynbee asks, if it is beyond the power of humans to take this initiative? Skinner seems to be saying we should do the very thing he claims we cannot do. How is it we cannot control ourselves, but somehow we can and should control others?
This question went unanswered as the twentieth century advertising and educational practices put this newfound power to work. “Control is concealed when it is represented as changing minds rather than behavior. Persuasion is not always effective, but when it is, it breeds little or no counter control… The control of behavior is concealed or disguised in education, psychotherapy, and religion, when the role of teacher, therapist, or priest is said to be to guide, direct, or counsel, rather than to manage.”(Skinner, 1974) Because persuasion is a kind of control that does not provoke counter-control, as Skinner argued, this skill works to the controllers advantage by playing on the unmet needs of the controlled subject, and bypassing any thought process that would allow the agent to see he is being manipulated. If the subject can be habituated to wanting the products, grades, and other rewards that being produced by the institutions controlling them, then the populace will come to believe this system of control is what they actually want, not seeing that their wants themselves are being induced.
And so it is that our will is controlled, and as Skinner predicted, we don’t even recognize it as control as long as we are successfully conditioned/persuaded to want/need it. Given the ubiquity of social control, he argues, economic advantage is the only real counter-control we have, which is why we so crave it, because it represents freedom from extrinsic social control, and may even give the controlled subjects the freedom to control others, which they perceive to be their turn in being in charge.
So how does Skinner explain the ‘great souls’ such as Buddha, Socrates, Jesus and the like, all of whom were able to follow a spiritual calling that took precedence over social claims and demands on them? Toynbee argued, “These ‘great souls’ did have the freedom to take spiritual action that has no traceable source in extrinsic rewards (in fact, many even endured punishments for the sake of doing the right thing). I also believe,” he said, “that there is a spark of this creative spiritual power in every human being.”(Toynbee, 1973, 119)
And it is THIS – the spark of creative spiritual power inside each of us – that is the ultimate price we pay for letting ourselves be educated by this conditioning process! Happily, we do have the power to resist such manipulation, first and foremost, by simply understanding it and thus seeing the many ways it is at work on us. Self-determination and the ability to actualize our higher potentials is what ancient philosophy is all about, and coming to understand what the ancients tried to teach us is the true reward of true education – which may well allow us to realize the true ideals of human existence, that is, true understanding, true happiness, true friendship, love, and wealth.
Psychologist Carl Rogers (1956) argues that controllers have a moral responsibility to promote self-control toward “new modes of richly rewarding living…more meaningful and satisfying modes of interpersonal relationships…more intelligent participation in (our) own evolution…so necessary if we are to survive in this fantastically expanded…age.”(Rogers, 1956) Science has made great progress toward “identifying those conditions in an interpersonal relationship which…[give rise to] greater maturity in behavior, less dependence on others, an increase in expressiveness as a person, and increase in variability, flexibility and effectiveness of adaptation, and increase in self-responsibility and self-direction.”(Rogers, 1956) “We can choose to utilize our scientific knowledge to make men happy, well-behaved, and productive, as Skinner suggested…or we can choose to use the behavioral sciences in ways which will free, not control; which will bring out the constructive variability, not conformity; which will facilitate each person in his self directed process of becoming.”(Rogers, 1956)
Laurence Kohlberg can explain the freedom of choice exhibited by those great souls humanity has produced in all times, except perhaps our own. They are nothing more or less than morally developed, a path all humans would follow, if not controlled by those with less than their true good at heart. “Everybody wants what’s good for them,” as Socrates argued, “though not everyone knows what that is.” To come to know this, we must be helped along the path that is toward our better selves; instead we are knowingly stunted in our youth by induced wants that do not serve our needs.
We do have the power though to respond to an understanding of our higher moral potentials, which would lead us to question, and thereby improve, the rules and dictates of the society in which we live.
It is only in this quality of character that the great souls are different from the rest of us - not in kind, but only in the degree to which they learned to not only understand the universal principles of justice, but willingly questioned the practices of their societies that inhibited the development of the just soul potential in us all. And what’s important in this, most would recognize if we understood Socrates primary message better, is that happiness itself depends on justice in the soul. This would be reason enough for us to take up the study of ancient wisdom, and offer it to our young, for the very thing we think our wants are serving is literally repelled by our persistent want!
Among the most essential things the ancients understood, that we have forgotten, is that WANT BLURS VISION! We cannot SEE what is truly good for us as long as we are perpetually focused on the enflamed desires that have been conditioned in us. Understanding that pleasure, in and of itself, is actually a good thing – if we can tell the good from the bad - as it will draw us to what is good for us, as pain will cause us to move away from what is not, the ancients understood that it is in this trial and error process that we come to understand the difference in true or good pleasures, and those that are not. Bad ‘pleasures’ are those that have bad consequences, and by way of this process that we learn to tell the difference between what is truly good and what is not. And in this way, as the ancient Hindu illuminated best, our understanding of pleasure evolves, and we move up what they call a four stage process of learning that takes us from enjoying childhood goods, like toys, to enjoying higher goods as we age.
This process is stunted, contemporary researchers have shown, when extrinsic motivators condition in us an inability to appreciate intrinsic goods that ought to be our true motivations. Researchers Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan (1983) showed clearly that once motivation has been extrinsically distracted, intrinsic motivation is damped, such that, when the conditioned stimulus is removed, intrinsic motivation does not readily return.
In studying the factors and forces that engender and/or undermine motivation, Deci and Ryan distinguish orientations or reasons that motivate. The primary “distinction is between intrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable, and extrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it leads to a separable outcome. Over three decades of research has shown that the quality of experience and performance can be very different when one is behaving for intrinsic versus extrinsic reasons,” and across the board, research demonstrates that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation and satisfaction. (2000)
Extrinsic motivation is not necessarily a bad thing, for there may indeed be intrinsic value in an extrinsically oriented task, most especially if it is autonomously chosen, that is, self-determined. One might take intrinsic satisfaction in extrinsic outcomes – and indeed, it is the purpose of conditioning processes to encourage this effect in a desire/satisfaction relationship. But, more often than we tend to recognize, extrinsic motivators, such as those used in educational methods, motivate us to act only “with resentment, resistance, and disinterest,” based on begrudging acceptance that comes with punishment avoidance – effectively taking the joy out of intrinsically joyful activities, such as learning, effectively doing the right thing, but for the wrong reason.
Over years of research, the evidence has grown that extrinsic rewards effectively “turn play into work,” as one study put it, and in the process, “increases tension and anxiety “(Nikos, 2001). “Results show deadlines, evaluations, and imposed goals, all decrease intrinsic motivation (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan,1999, b; Ryan & Deci, 2000). Whereas, provision of choice, and acknowledgement of feelings, enhance intrinsic motivation (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999). These results are all centered on one key concept—control. It appears that using controlling language and actions consistently lowers intrinsic motivation.” In general, “individuals who are intrinsically motivated (and or have the two forms of autonomous extrinsic motivation), compared to those who are controlled by others to perform an activity (extrinsically motivated) have more interest, excitement, fun, and confidence, which leads to enhanced performance, creativity, persistence, vigor, general well-being, and self-esteem, among other benefits (Ryan & Deci, 2000).”
(put Arrow’s Theorem…*)
Kohlberg (1973) wrote that role-taking ability and empathy are the keys to moral growth. We need to be able to understand another’s perspective to appreciate the consequences of our behavior on them, and the discrepancies between ours and other’s points of view. Empathic understanding is among those conditions necessary and sufficient for human growth – unconditional positive regard, honesty, effectively communicated ideas and feelings, and freedom to explore. These are the qualities that give rise to an overall better life.
So to fulfill the basic human need for understanding and control over one’s life, an individual must experience and exercise the freedom and faculty of choice, which can be encouraged, as Socrates will show, but cannot be ‘taught’ in the sense that we usually think of the word. Moral education, in this sense, amounts to teaching people to think for themselves, to help them see for themselves what is and is not in their best interest, allowing them to experiences the intrinsic consequences of their choices, and understand the intrinsic effects of taking responsible for those consequences because their own inner happiness depends on it. A sense of competence and control comes of allowing our young to exercise their full power and experience their full intrinsic satisfactions, by taking full responsibility for their freedom – and yet they get little exercise in this respect. Practically everything we use to educate our young depends on and encourages their desire for extrinsic goods, even and often at the expense of their intrinsic goods (example: the widespread practice of cheating on college campuses b/c, apparently, the grade is more important than the learning, or even the conscience with which they have to live).
Given the widespread practice of teaching our young to sacrifice intrinsic goods for the sake of extrinsic goods, is it really any wonder that bad conscience is the norm among our young? And shouldn’t we have bad conscience ourselves for conditioning in them a state of being that philosophers and contemporary researchers have shown to be to be the source of the deepest dissatisfactions in human life? We can hardly pretend the situation to be other than it is, and seeing that our methods of parenting and educating and generating our economy are backfiring, not only in the form of bad conscience in our young, but in horrific environmental backlash, haven’t we incentive to rethink our methods, to listen to the ancients who knew and taught better?
As we will see as we work our way through the great teachers of the ages, when intrinsic goods and internal satisfactions are the ends toward which behavior aims, then people will learn to be good, to behave morally, b/c it’s in their own true best interest to do so. And as Socrates will show us, a clearer understanding of the nature and power of justice will develop out of enlightened self interest alone.
But again, these are not values we can deliberately teach, especially when we give this lesson with one hand, but take it away with the other. Love of intrinsic goods can only be developed by giving your young exercise in making choices, and by setting examples ourselves. We can promote them best in others best by being them ourselves.
But as it is, we live in an age and a part of the world that does not take the advance of wisdom seriously, and does not consider the needs of the spirit in the education of our young. Rather, we are, all of us, conditioned from a very young age to meet our intrinsic needs by pursuing extrinsic goods.
In this light, remember what the ancient Vedic Indians would teach their young about the nature of desire and pleasure, as well as the danger of unbridled want – that it blurs vision and promotes ignorance by dirtying up our perception, leaving the dark of ignorance where the enlightenment might otherwise be.
By contrast with our typical western view of divine dispensation, there are those who consider the life we live to be a hand we dealt ourselves in past lives. They consider our seemingly better and worse fortunes to be the karmic result of how we have played our hand so far in this life. This view puts the moral education of the young central to the human purpose, for what we learn about right and wrong, and about intrinsic reasons for being good, will be key to actualizing our higher potentials in the course of a life well lived.
As we learn with increasing urgency every semester in my Environmental Ethics class, the chickens are coming home to roost for our having taken direction from “the great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a heard via public education.” We encourage them to “develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, [so that] they would grow older, but never truly grow up.” It is in this sense that a society that inflames our desires for purely material goods is, in effect, as Gatto argues, keeping us in a state of perpetual childhood!
And the success of this intention, at least in American schools, has been dramatic:
“We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside –down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to ‘be careful what you say,’ even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.”
“Easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation… happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments what would insult actual adults.”
“We must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.”
And if you don’t want to take the word of a ‘radical’ like Gatto, then consider what the New York Times has had to say about the condition of American schools:
“The bitter truth is that American schools have become a reflection of the nation itself: divided by race, class and aspiration -- and all too often animated by no higher calling than the selfish preservation of the status quo.”
And the result is predictable. But let’s not pretend that this is something new. Betty Freidan foreshadowed this growing apathy when, in 1963, she wrote:
“Over the past fifteen years a subtle and devastating change seems to have taken place in the character of American children. Evidence of something similar to the house wife’s problem that has no name in a more pathological form has been seen in her sons and daughters by many clinicians, analysts, and social scientists. They have noted, with increasing concern, a new and frightening passivity, softness, boredom in American children. The danger sign is not the competitiveness engendered by the Little League of the race to get into college, but a kind of infantilism that makes the children of the housewife-mothers incapable of the effort, the endurance of pain and frustration, the discipline needed to compete on the baseball field, or get into college. There is also a new vacant sleepwalking, playing-a-part quality of youngsters who do what they are supposed to do, what the other kids do, but do not seem to feel alive or real in doing it.”
John Stuart Mill observed what happens to individuality when such circumstances took hold in his time:
“The combination of all these causes forms so great a mass of influences hostile to individuality that it is not easy to see how it can stand its ground. It will do so with increasing difficulty unless the intelligent part of the public can be made to feel its value--to see that it is good there should be differences, even though not for the better, even though, as it may appear to them, some should be for the worse. If the claims of individuality are ever to be asserted, the time is now while much is still wanting to complete the enforced assimilation. . . The demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature. Mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.”( p. 90)
“In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even paid, to real or supposed mental superiority, the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind. In ancient history, in the Middle Ages, and in a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudality to the present time, the individual was a power in himself; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power. At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. . . . Those whose opinions go by the name of public opinion are not always the same sort of public: in America, they are the whole white population; in England, chiefly the middle class. But they are always a mass, that is to say, collective mediocrity. And what is a still greater novelty, the mass do not now take their opinions from dignitaries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers. I am not complaining of all this. I do not assert that anything better is compatible, as a general rule, with the present low state of the human mind… Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed one or few. The initiation of all wise or noble things comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual. The honor and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that initiative; that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open… The power of compelling others…is not only inconsistent with the freedom and development of all the rest, but corrupting to the strong man himself. It does seem, however, that when the opinions of masses of merely average men are everywhere become or becoming the dominant power, the counterpoise and corrective to that tendency would be the more and more pronounced individuality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought. It is in these circumstances most especially that exceptional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in acting differently from the mass…not only differently but better. In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time. “(p.79-80)
“There is one characteristic of the present direction of public opinion peculiarly calculated to make it intolerant of any marked demonstrations of individuality. The general average if mankind are not only moderate in intellect, but also moderate in inclinations; they have no tastes or wishes string enough to incline them to do anything unusual, and they consequently do not understand those who have, and class all such with the wild and intemperate whom they are accustomed to look down upon. Now, in addition to this fact which is general, we have only to suppose that a strong movement has set in toward the improvement of morals, and it is evident what we have to expect. In these days such a movement has set in; much has actually been effected in the way of increased regularity of conduct and discouragement of excesses; and there is a philanthropic spirit abroad for the exercise of which there is no more inviting field than the moral and prudential improvement of our fellow creatures. These tendencies of the times cause the public to be more disposed than at most former periods to prescribe general rules of conduct and endeavor to make everyone conform to the approved standard…Its ideal of character is to be without any marked character--to maim by compression, like a Chinese lady's foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently and tends to make the person markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity.”( p.84-85)
“As is usually the case with ideals which exclude one-half of what is desirable, the present standard of approbation produces only an inferior imitation of the other half. Instead of great energies guided by vigorous reason and strong feelings strongly controlled by a conscientious will, its result is weak feelings and weak energies, which therefore can be kept in outward conformity to rule without any strength either of will or of reason…There is now scarcely any outlet for energy in this country except business . . . What little is left from that employment is expended on some hobby…and generally a thing of small dimensions…it was men of another stamp than this that made England what it has been; and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline.(“p.85)
In the Art of Loving, Erik Fromm observes the result of all this in our time:
"The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either."[p.116]
“What’s new?” I had asked them at dinner. He told me about friends and sports, music and four-wheelin’ with his dad. She talked about gymnastics, Minecraft, doing math on her IPad and missing her best friend.
“How’s school? I asked.
“Boring,” they replied in sync.
Boring…huh? Hmmm… I can’t say I don’t understand their sentiment. As a teacher for the last two decades in a community college that draws many ‘nontraditional’ students, I’m all too aware of how many, often brilliant, young minds fall through the cracks of schools as we know them, only to find themselves again and even go on to actualize their higher potentials in college and beyond (assuming they discover ‘open-enrollment’ universities that will give them another chance to prove themselves, despite a high school record stamped in red with ‘failure!’ Sadly, most high school students don’t even know such schools exist, given the rhetoric of ‘permanent records’ that hangs over them from grade schools onward.)
At any rate, there’s no denying that schools as we know them are, for most students, boring!
John Taylor Gatto, twice New York City & State Teacher of the Year turned educational reformer, says that boredom is what schools as we know them specialize in.
“Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children.”(Against Schools)
“After 30 years in the public school trenches,” he took the opportunity to say what he really thought about our institutionalized education system – that it amounts to “long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers…virtual factories of childishness.”
Back when “mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States,” Gotto argues, during that “enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions” of the early 1900s (1905 to 1915), many practitioners did pay lip-service to noble sounding purposes.
The stated intention of public schooling was:
1.) to make good people
2.) to make good citizens, and
3.) to make each person his or her personal best.
This would be a fairly “decent definition of public education’s mission,” Gatto says, were it not that the actual purposes of modern schooling are more likely to be:
“to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority…[which] precludes critical judgment completely....to make children as alike as possible…to harness and manipulate a large labor force….to determine each student’s proper social role…by logging evidence…on cumulative ‘permanent records’. And also to sort by role and train only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.”
Like the Prussian system on which it was modeled, Gotto argues, our public school system is “useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual heard of mindless consumers….”
This may seem an obvious overstatement to anyone who did well in schools, but here is an example of something that cannot be seen from only the point of view of those who benefit, for the whole truth includes those who ‘fail’ and ‘flunk’ – powerful words, given their effects on young lives, sometimes permanently. The truth is, while maybe 40 to 60 percent of students ‘succeed’ in our schools, that leaves 40 to 60 percent who do not!
You might think this is an epic failure, but in fact, it may actually be built into the very purposes of the system. It should come as a surprise to most Americans that modern education is actually modeled on the compulsory system developed in Prussia in the 1820s, the purpose of which was to put down “the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table….to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.”
Gatto adds how unbelievable it is “that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens all in order to render the populace ‘manageable’.” All this “can stem purely from fear,” he admits, “or from the by now familiar belief that ‘efficiency’ is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope.”
As H. L. Menchen wrote, contrary to popular perception, the aim of public education is not:
“to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim…is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States…and that is its aim everywhere else.”
Menchen’s being a satirist does not change the truth of his observation, which Gatto argues is revealed in “numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose.”
“It is simply in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform.”
Indeed, worst among “the purposes of mandatory public education in this country,” Gatto argues, is what he calls “the selective function” – “to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.”
And meanwhile, “a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.” All of which makes the young “sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era – marketing.” *
By means of so many behaviorist conditioning processes, we are “turning our children into addicts,” Gatto argues. “The Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers.”
In his book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore illustrates that “the science of PR” has become in our time “the principal language by which communication occurs in the public forum – for both commercial and political” and – one could argue – educational purposes.(p.94) In fact, one could argue that buying into the desire for so many products of our economy is prerequisite to even wanting an education to begin with, ‘success’ being defined in our time as purchasing power. In many ways, conditioning has become the foundation of education – and so much for the search for truth!
In the same way that “the raw power of electronic mass advertising” is “capable of artificially creating demand for products that consumers had had no idea they needed or wanted,”(Gore, Assault on Reason, p.95) our educational methods use effectively similar “techniques of mass persuasion,” intent in the first place to “shift America from a needs to desires culture.”(Assault on Reason, p.94)
It was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who would be remembered as “the father of public relations.” Bernays “adapted the [so-called] revolutionary insights of his uncle to create the modern science of mass persuasion – based not on reason, but on the manipulation of subconscious feelings and impulses.”(p.93) Giving rise to forms of advertising that use this associative form of conditioning, appealing to unconscious needs to sell want as a habit to the American public.
Bernays’ associate, Paul Mazur, the first head of Lehman Brothers, put it this way: “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”(in Assault on Reason, p.94) And underlying this argument, unstated, is the concomitant claim that, for this condition process to take effect, man’s ability to think for himself, that is, his reason – which knows better – must be undermined.
Is it any wonder that we are so confused in our age?
And so Bernays began in the 1920s a form of social control that has arguably been responsible for the rapid moral degeneration of human kind. And yet, perhaps not surprisingly, one would be hard pressed to find a single study on the consequences of this widespread practice on the decline of ethical growth. Why? Almost certainly because we still believe that the growth of our economy depends on our material wants…an assumption that goes unexamined, even in the face of evidence that an intrinsic goods economy could function as well, or better, without destroying the earth in the process.
Once seen for the power it has in our lives, we have to wonder how much of our education system itself is based on these conditioning processes, which are are part and parcel of what we today call education, and they play on this externalizing of our locus of control. Even if one grows up in a home that does not throw our center of gravity off balance, we are apt to have difficulty keeping our locus of control centered if only b/c the processes of classical and operant conditioning are at work on any of us who has ever been effected by advertising, which includes us all.
Given the power it has in our lives, this conditioning process deserves more consideration than we typically give it. And this is especially true because our childrearing practices too are rationalized by parents who themselves have been conditioned into adapting this process in place of actually teaching their kids, say, the difference in right and wrong. Habituating behavior that responds to parents authority seems to work because it also habituates them to patterns of response to school, religion, government and the like – so seems to facilitate ‘success’ in life, defined as accumulation of material rewards. And it’s difficult to see what the problem with this process of habituation is – until we ask those who’ve grown up this way, are you happy?
Ask most Americans, even and especially those who are most ‘successful,’ this question, and the answer is a resounding NO! In fact, we are consuming a record amount of pharmaceuticals in our efforts to maintain at least the ability to keep ourselves alive (a means which often backfires, since one powerful side effect of such drugs turns out to be suicidal tendencies).
So it’s worth taking a closer look at what we are calling education these, along with the process of conditioning that feed into our educational habits. For we have no hope of becoming good parents -- that is, parents who encourage the development of their children’s minds – if we do not examine our own conditioned responses, and the reasoning (or lack thereof) that goes into them.
Classical conditioning is the process of habituating behavior by way of associating two stimuli, one needed with another that is unneeded. Pavlov (1927) became famous for being the first to successfully condition dogs by way of associating food (which has intrinsic value to all living things) with the sound of a bell (which is not unpleasant, but has no real intrinsic value), such that eventually the dogs would reflexively salivate at the sound of a bell. In this way, behavior can be controlled by way of control of rewards associated with needs.
The psychology of behaviorism, which is what this stimulus-response form of conditioning was called by B.F. Skinner, who was the most famous proponent of these conditioning processes,
Likewise, it is the process by which advertising plays on human needs to make us think we need things we actually do not, but come to believe have value by association with things we do need It feels good to get the positive regard of those who are impressed with things we own, just as it feels good to get good grades – though the objects of our possession, like the grades, have little or none of the intrinsic value that positive regard and learning have.
Another form of conditioning is called operant. It is the process by which behavior is controlled by the expectation of consequences. Conditioning processes work in the same way that feedback loops work, that is, by positive reinforcement that increases the frequency of a given response, and negative reinforcement that decreases the frequency of that response (positive and negative here refer to addition and subtraction, as in positive and negative charge, rather than good or bad, as in the popular sense).
Skinner considered the ease with which humans can be controlled by extrinsic rewards and punishments to be a sign that we have no intrinsic will of our own. Any sense of freedom or self-control we might think we have is mere illusion, he argued. We think we are free when we can get what we want, but we don’t realize that what we want is being controlled for us in the first place, giving us the illusion that we have self-control – a concept Skinner does not recognize to be part of human potential, claiming that all human behavior is extrinsically controlled. “Operant behavior under positive reinforcement is distinguished by the lack of any immediate antecedent event which could plausibly serve as a cause, and as a result it has been said to show the inner origination called free-will.”(Skinner, 1974) This makes operant conditioning an especially powerful tool for those who would exercise social control at large, because “Feeling free is an important hallmark of a kind of control distinguished by the fact that it does not breed counter-control.”(Skinner, 1974) But while positively reinforced behavior, that which is performed in anticipation of a valued consequent, may give us a ‘sense’ of making a choice, this too is an illusion. It only makes us feel like we have free will, while we are in fact, only responding to a previously conditioned environmental stimuli.
On this logic (or lack thereof), Skinner argued that “to refuse to control is to leave control not to the person himself, but to other parts of the social and non-social environment.”(Toynbee, 1973) But who will do this controlling, Toynbee asks, if it is beyond the power of humans to take this initiative? Skinner seems to be saying we should do the very thing he claims we cannot do. How is it we cannot control ourselves, but somehow we can and should control others?
This question went unanswered as the twentieth century advertising and educational practices put this newfound power to work. “Control is concealed when it is represented as changing minds rather than behavior. Persuasion is not always effective, but when it is, it breeds little or no counter control… The control of behavior is concealed or disguised in education, psychotherapy, and religion, when the role of teacher, therapist, or priest is said to be to guide, direct, or counsel, rather than to manage.”(Skinner, 1974) Because persuasion is a kind of control that does not provoke counter-control, as Skinner argued, this skill works to the controllers advantage by playing on the unmet needs of the controlled subject, and bypassing any thought process that would allow the agent to see he is being manipulated. If the subject can be habituated to wanting the products, grades, and other rewards that being produced by the institutions controlling them, then the populace will come to believe this system of control is what they actually want, not seeing that their wants themselves are being induced.
And so it is that our will is controlled, and as Skinner predicted, we don’t even recognize it as control as long as we are successfully conditioned/persuaded to want/need it. Given the ubiquity of social control, he argues, economic advantage is the only real counter-control we have, which is why we so crave it, because it represents freedom from extrinsic social control, and may even give the controlled subjects the freedom to control others, which they perceive to be their turn in being in charge.
So how does Skinner explain the ‘great souls’ such as Buddha, Socrates, Jesus and the like, all of whom were able to follow a spiritual calling that took precedence over social claims and demands on them? Toynbee argued, “These ‘great souls’ did have the freedom to take spiritual action that has no traceable source in extrinsic rewards (in fact, many even endured punishments for the sake of doing the right thing). I also believe,” he said, “that there is a spark of this creative spiritual power in every human being.”(Toynbee, 1973, 119)
And it is THIS – the spark of creative spiritual power inside each of us – that is the ultimate price we pay for letting ourselves be educated by this conditioning process! Happily, we do have the power to resist such manipulation, first and foremost, by simply understanding it and thus seeing the many ways it is at work on us. Self-determination and the ability to actualize our higher potentials is what ancient philosophy is all about, and coming to understand what the ancients tried to teach us is the true reward of true education – which may well allow us to realize the true ideals of human existence, that is, true understanding, true happiness, true friendship, love, and wealth.
Psychologist Carl Rogers (1956) argues that controllers have a moral responsibility to promote self-control toward “new modes of richly rewarding living…more meaningful and satisfying modes of interpersonal relationships…more intelligent participation in (our) own evolution…so necessary if we are to survive in this fantastically expanded…age.”(Rogers, 1956) Science has made great progress toward “identifying those conditions in an interpersonal relationship which…[give rise to] greater maturity in behavior, less dependence on others, an increase in expressiveness as a person, and increase in variability, flexibility and effectiveness of adaptation, and increase in self-responsibility and self-direction.”(Rogers, 1956) “We can choose to utilize our scientific knowledge to make men happy, well-behaved, and productive, as Skinner suggested…or we can choose to use the behavioral sciences in ways which will free, not control; which will bring out the constructive variability, not conformity; which will facilitate each person in his self directed process of becoming.”(Rogers, 1956)
Laurence Kohlberg can explain the freedom of choice exhibited by those great souls humanity has produced in all times, except perhaps our own. They are nothing more or less than morally developed, a path all humans would follow, if not controlled by those with less than their true good at heart. “Everybody wants what’s good for them,” as Socrates argued, “though not everyone knows what that is.” To come to know this, we must be helped along the path that is toward our better selves; instead we are knowingly stunted in our youth by induced wants that do not serve our needs.
We do have the power though to respond to an understanding of our higher moral potentials, which would lead us to question, and thereby improve, the rules and dictates of the society in which we live.
It is only in this quality of character that the great souls are different from the rest of us - not in kind, but only in the degree to which they learned to not only understand the universal principles of justice, but willingly questioned the practices of their societies that inhibited the development of the just soul potential in us all. And what’s important in this, most would recognize if we understood Socrates primary message better, is that happiness itself depends on justice in the soul. This would be reason enough for us to take up the study of ancient wisdom, and offer it to our young, for the very thing we think our wants are serving is literally repelled by our persistent want!
Among the most essential things the ancients understood, that we have forgotten, is that WANT BLURS VISION! We cannot SEE what is truly good for us as long as we are perpetually focused on the enflamed desires that have been conditioned in us. Understanding that pleasure, in and of itself, is actually a good thing – if we can tell the good from the bad - as it will draw us to what is good for us, as pain will cause us to move away from what is not, the ancients understood that it is in this trial and error process that we come to understand the difference in true or good pleasures, and those that are not. Bad ‘pleasures’ are those that have bad consequences, and by way of this process that we learn to tell the difference between what is truly good and what is not. And in this way, as the ancient Hindu illuminated best, our understanding of pleasure evolves, and we move up what they call a four stage process of learning that takes us from enjoying childhood goods, like toys, to enjoying higher goods as we age.
This process is stunted, contemporary researchers have shown, when extrinsic motivators condition in us an inability to appreciate intrinsic goods that ought to be our true motivations. Researchers Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan (1983) showed clearly that once motivation has been extrinsically distracted, intrinsic motivation is damped, such that, when the conditioned stimulus is removed, intrinsic motivation does not readily return.
In studying the factors and forces that engender and/or undermine motivation, Deci and Ryan distinguish orientations or reasons that motivate. The primary “distinction is between intrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable, and extrinsic motivation, which refers to doing something because it leads to a separable outcome. Over three decades of research has shown that the quality of experience and performance can be very different when one is behaving for intrinsic versus extrinsic reasons,” and across the board, research demonstrates that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation and satisfaction. (2000)
Extrinsic motivation is not necessarily a bad thing, for there may indeed be intrinsic value in an extrinsically oriented task, most especially if it is autonomously chosen, that is, self-determined. One might take intrinsic satisfaction in extrinsic outcomes – and indeed, it is the purpose of conditioning processes to encourage this effect in a desire/satisfaction relationship. But, more often than we tend to recognize, extrinsic motivators, such as those used in educational methods, motivate us to act only “with resentment, resistance, and disinterest,” based on begrudging acceptance that comes with punishment avoidance – effectively taking the joy out of intrinsically joyful activities, such as learning, effectively doing the right thing, but for the wrong reason.
Over years of research, the evidence has grown that extrinsic rewards effectively “turn play into work,” as one study put it, and in the process, “increases tension and anxiety “(Nikos, 2001). “Results show deadlines, evaluations, and imposed goals, all decrease intrinsic motivation (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan,1999, b; Ryan & Deci, 2000). Whereas, provision of choice, and acknowledgement of feelings, enhance intrinsic motivation (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999). These results are all centered on one key concept—control. It appears that using controlling language and actions consistently lowers intrinsic motivation.” In general, “individuals who are intrinsically motivated (and or have the two forms of autonomous extrinsic motivation), compared to those who are controlled by others to perform an activity (extrinsically motivated) have more interest, excitement, fun, and confidence, which leads to enhanced performance, creativity, persistence, vigor, general well-being, and self-esteem, among other benefits (Ryan & Deci, 2000).”
(put Arrow’s Theorem…*)
Kohlberg (1973) wrote that role-taking ability and empathy are the keys to moral growth. We need to be able to understand another’s perspective to appreciate the consequences of our behavior on them, and the discrepancies between ours and other’s points of view. Empathic understanding is among those conditions necessary and sufficient for human growth – unconditional positive regard, honesty, effectively communicated ideas and feelings, and freedom to explore. These are the qualities that give rise to an overall better life.
So to fulfill the basic human need for understanding and control over one’s life, an individual must experience and exercise the freedom and faculty of choice, which can be encouraged, as Socrates will show, but cannot be ‘taught’ in the sense that we usually think of the word. Moral education, in this sense, amounts to teaching people to think for themselves, to help them see for themselves what is and is not in their best interest, allowing them to experiences the intrinsic consequences of their choices, and understand the intrinsic effects of taking responsible for those consequences because their own inner happiness depends on it. A sense of competence and control comes of allowing our young to exercise their full power and experience their full intrinsic satisfactions, by taking full responsibility for their freedom – and yet they get little exercise in this respect. Practically everything we use to educate our young depends on and encourages their desire for extrinsic goods, even and often at the expense of their intrinsic goods (example: the widespread practice of cheating on college campuses b/c, apparently, the grade is more important than the learning, or even the conscience with which they have to live).
Given the widespread practice of teaching our young to sacrifice intrinsic goods for the sake of extrinsic goods, is it really any wonder that bad conscience is the norm among our young? And shouldn’t we have bad conscience ourselves for conditioning in them a state of being that philosophers and contemporary researchers have shown to be to be the source of the deepest dissatisfactions in human life? We can hardly pretend the situation to be other than it is, and seeing that our methods of parenting and educating and generating our economy are backfiring, not only in the form of bad conscience in our young, but in horrific environmental backlash, haven’t we incentive to rethink our methods, to listen to the ancients who knew and taught better?
As we will see as we work our way through the great teachers of the ages, when intrinsic goods and internal satisfactions are the ends toward which behavior aims, then people will learn to be good, to behave morally, b/c it’s in their own true best interest to do so. And as Socrates will show us, a clearer understanding of the nature and power of justice will develop out of enlightened self interest alone.
But again, these are not values we can deliberately teach, especially when we give this lesson with one hand, but take it away with the other. Love of intrinsic goods can only be developed by giving your young exercise in making choices, and by setting examples ourselves. We can promote them best in others best by being them ourselves.
But as it is, we live in an age and a part of the world that does not take the advance of wisdom seriously, and does not consider the needs of the spirit in the education of our young. Rather, we are, all of us, conditioned from a very young age to meet our intrinsic needs by pursuing extrinsic goods.
In this light, remember what the ancient Vedic Indians would teach their young about the nature of desire and pleasure, as well as the danger of unbridled want – that it blurs vision and promotes ignorance by dirtying up our perception, leaving the dark of ignorance where the enlightenment might otherwise be.
By contrast with our typical western view of divine dispensation, there are those who consider the life we live to be a hand we dealt ourselves in past lives. They consider our seemingly better and worse fortunes to be the karmic result of how we have played our hand so far in this life. This view puts the moral education of the young central to the human purpose, for what we learn about right and wrong, and about intrinsic reasons for being good, will be key to actualizing our higher potentials in the course of a life well lived.
As we learn with increasing urgency every semester in my Environmental Ethics class, the chickens are coming home to roost for our having taken direction from “the great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a heard via public education.” We encourage them to “develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, [so that] they would grow older, but never truly grow up.” It is in this sense that a society that inflames our desires for purely material goods is, in effect, as Gatto argues, keeping us in a state of perpetual childhood!
And the success of this intention, at least in American schools, has been dramatic:
“We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside –down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to ‘be careful what you say,’ even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.”
“Easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation… happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments what would insult actual adults.”
“We must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.”
And if you don’t want to take the word of a ‘radical’ like Gatto, then consider what the New York Times has had to say about the condition of American schools:
“The bitter truth is that American schools have become a reflection of the nation itself: divided by race, class and aspiration -- and all too often animated by no higher calling than the selfish preservation of the status quo.”
And the result is predictable. But let’s not pretend that this is something new. Betty Freidan foreshadowed this growing apathy when, in 1963, she wrote:
“Over the past fifteen years a subtle and devastating change seems to have taken place in the character of American children. Evidence of something similar to the house wife’s problem that has no name in a more pathological form has been seen in her sons and daughters by many clinicians, analysts, and social scientists. They have noted, with increasing concern, a new and frightening passivity, softness, boredom in American children. The danger sign is not the competitiveness engendered by the Little League of the race to get into college, but a kind of infantilism that makes the children of the housewife-mothers incapable of the effort, the endurance of pain and frustration, the discipline needed to compete on the baseball field, or get into college. There is also a new vacant sleepwalking, playing-a-part quality of youngsters who do what they are supposed to do, what the other kids do, but do not seem to feel alive or real in doing it.”
John Stuart Mill observed what happens to individuality when such circumstances took hold in his time:
“The combination of all these causes forms so great a mass of influences hostile to individuality that it is not easy to see how it can stand its ground. It will do so with increasing difficulty unless the intelligent part of the public can be made to feel its value--to see that it is good there should be differences, even though not for the better, even though, as it may appear to them, some should be for the worse. If the claims of individuality are ever to be asserted, the time is now while much is still wanting to complete the enforced assimilation. . . The demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature. Mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.”( p. 90)
“In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even paid, to real or supposed mental superiority, the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind. In ancient history, in the Middle Ages, and in a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudality to the present time, the individual was a power in himself; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power. At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. . . . Those whose opinions go by the name of public opinion are not always the same sort of public: in America, they are the whole white population; in England, chiefly the middle class. But they are always a mass, that is to say, collective mediocrity. And what is a still greater novelty, the mass do not now take their opinions from dignitaries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers. I am not complaining of all this. I do not assert that anything better is compatible, as a general rule, with the present low state of the human mind… Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed one or few. The initiation of all wise or noble things comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual. The honor and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that initiative; that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open… The power of compelling others…is not only inconsistent with the freedom and development of all the rest, but corrupting to the strong man himself. It does seem, however, that when the opinions of masses of merely average men are everywhere become or becoming the dominant power, the counterpoise and corrective to that tendency would be the more and more pronounced individuality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought. It is in these circumstances most especially that exceptional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in acting differently from the mass…not only differently but better. In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time. “(p.79-80)
“There is one characteristic of the present direction of public opinion peculiarly calculated to make it intolerant of any marked demonstrations of individuality. The general average if mankind are not only moderate in intellect, but also moderate in inclinations; they have no tastes or wishes string enough to incline them to do anything unusual, and they consequently do not understand those who have, and class all such with the wild and intemperate whom they are accustomed to look down upon. Now, in addition to this fact which is general, we have only to suppose that a strong movement has set in toward the improvement of morals, and it is evident what we have to expect. In these days such a movement has set in; much has actually been effected in the way of increased regularity of conduct and discouragement of excesses; and there is a philanthropic spirit abroad for the exercise of which there is no more inviting field than the moral and prudential improvement of our fellow creatures. These tendencies of the times cause the public to be more disposed than at most former periods to prescribe general rules of conduct and endeavor to make everyone conform to the approved standard…Its ideal of character is to be without any marked character--to maim by compression, like a Chinese lady's foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently and tends to make the person markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity.”( p.84-85)
“As is usually the case with ideals which exclude one-half of what is desirable, the present standard of approbation produces only an inferior imitation of the other half. Instead of great energies guided by vigorous reason and strong feelings strongly controlled by a conscientious will, its result is weak feelings and weak energies, which therefore can be kept in outward conformity to rule without any strength either of will or of reason…There is now scarcely any outlet for energy in this country except business . . . What little is left from that employment is expended on some hobby…and generally a thing of small dimensions…it was men of another stamp than this that made England what it has been; and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline.(“p.85)
In the Art of Loving, Erik Fromm observes the result of all this in our time:
"The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either."[p.116]