Psyching Out: Addressing Psychological Barriers to Success

(In response to David Brooks' "Getting kids psyched: We must confront the psychological barriers to success")


I don't think enough attention is paid to the psychological state and trials of children.  We tend to assume there are two groups: either they're from good homes or they aren't.  Either they're psychologically healthy or they aren't.  This binary approach doesn't help the kids who are from rough homes or the kids who are psychologically unhealthy; Tolstoy was right about unhappiness and hardship. And it certainly doesn't help the kids in the middle.  We need to acknowledge that there is a gradient: someone can be generally psychologically healthy and going through a bout of depression (statistics say most of us will, and with everything on their plates it's becoming increasingly common among all children, especially adolescents).  There are kids who come from divorce who have one safe home, one unsafe or two unsafe homes.  Abused children don't always come to school with bruises.  You aren't always going to know what kids oversee and overhear at home, or in their communities. 

I especially appreciate Brooks' attention to the fact that the lifelong effects of childhood psychological trauma cannot be solved or mitigated by schools alone.  I have long argued that while education has the power to change individual lives the American public school system, with all its inequalities and problems, is symptomatic of much broader social trends.  We can get high-risk kids into great schools but if their brains haven't had proper nutrition or been exposed to a high volume and variety of words by age 5, there is only so much that can be done.  If a child is gestated, born, and educated in generational poverty, a good school alone cannot fix this.  We need more attention to national patterns of inequity.  We need to consider the other social institutions, codified and not, that foster the status quo of generational poverty. We need to abolish food deserts.  We need to subsidize fruits and vegetables, not commodity corn.  We need to change how we fund education and train teachers.  We need to destroy the idea that "those who can't do, teach."  We need to revisit gun control.  We need to change the restrictions placed on former prisoners so that they have real options when they return to their communities.  We need to incentivize real, good choices for young men and women in poverty, both rural and urban.  We need to give kids real, useful sex ed so that they can protect themselves from disease and unwanted pregnancy, so that they can have a shot at establishing lives for themselves before they become parents.  I could go on.  Each and every one of these problems is being addressed by brilliant, passionate, innovative, creative minds.  But these are all symptoms of a larger, national problem: "across vast stretches of America, economic, social, and family breakdowns are producing enormous amounts of stress and unregulated behavior, which dulls motivation, undermines self-control, and distorts lives."

I'd go one step further than Brooks, though.  I say it's long since time for the people fighting these disparate symptoms to get together in a room and collaborate.  It's long past time for real, uncomfortable conversations about these problems.  We need to do some national soul-searching:  How did we get here?  How are we going to work together to fix it? As a special ed teacher said to me today, "What is the antecedent?  Where does this behavior come from?"  He thinks that with everything kids deal with today teachers will eventually have three degrees/certifications: subject/grade level, special ed, and psychological counseling.  I welcome such a program.  We need to be able to look at our kids and see the psychology at work.  But we can't do it alone.  Eduction can do a lot but it can't fix all society's ills on its own.

We Can Do Better or, What I Learned in Grad School

In reflecting on my education in the MAT program at Chatham, I’m surprised to realize how much I’ve learned.  The frustration with the program’s failings has often eclipsed any awareness of gaining skills or knowledge relevant to my chosen career.  However, as I head into student teaching in a public school, I find myself wondering why they bother teaching us these things at all.

It is incredibly frustrating, disheartening even, to know that I’m entering a system that is fundamentally antithetical to what I’ve learned about good teaching.  We know that mastery-oriented motivation produces better adjusted people who care about their learning and have a lifelong curiosity.  But the public school system is not only performance motivated but performance obsessed.  We are inadvertently teaching our students that their PSSA scores are all that matter, that they are the only valid and valued measure of who they are.  Psychological research has shown that the most important aspect of good parenting and good teaching is consistency.  Yet the system changes constantly, moving benchmarks and goal posts almost yearly.  People can’t meet expectations that are unclear and always changing.  We know that teaching for depth rather than breadth of understanding is the best way to develop students’ critical thinking skills and knowledge base.  Yet we insist upon teaching ninth graders the nitty-gritty details of protein synthesis, rather than giving them an overview of the living world and their place in it.  

American public education was founded upon the Jeffersonian ideal that “the cornerstone of a democracy is an educated electorate.”  The common school movement sought to provide an equal, democratic, humanistic education to all American children.  (Technically all non-laborer class, white, male children.  But we’ll give Jefferson and the founders the benefit of the doubt that when they said all “men” were created equal, they were referring to all of humanity.  Which isn’t a huge intellectual leap given the modern applications of that most famous turn of phrase.  But I digress…) 

As America’s shores were inundated with immigrants and the Industrial Revolution seized the economy, a new purpose was identified for public education: To Americanize all children and to create a skilled workforce for the industrial machine.  This goal was expanded upon after the Sputnik crisis, when the powers of public education were turned toward beating the Soviets in the STEM race. This is the trend and legacy of 20^th century American education: The commoditization of children.  Adults decided that education should be the development of future human capital.  They stopped seeing children as people and became blind to the deeper, more meaningful outcomes of a good education. 

We must move forward by returning to our roots: Equitable, democratic, humanistic education for all.  It won’t be easy.  There are major practical and political obstacles.  As in so many spheres of American public policy, we have moved far from the founding ideals. (Or is it just that we haven’t yet agreed on what those founding ideals were?)  The American education system is a slow, unwieldy leviathan not easily given to change.  There will be opposition to the “progressive measures” or “excessive federal influence” or the dangerous proposition of a “socialist” education system.  But if we’re serious about closing the achievement gaps—both domestic and international—and about preparing our kids for the 21^st century, we don’t have a choice.  What we were doing barely worked under the old paradigm; otherwise, A Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind wouldn’t have been necessary.  Certainly the old status quo can’t meet the needs of the new paradigm. As Sir Ken Robinson quoted Abraham Lincoln, “The silent dogma of the past is insufficient for the stormy present.”

We face real challenges in American education.  How do we educate an increasingly diverse student population?  How do we affect meaningful systemic change within the confines of a ­­­­­­­populist system that is allergic to federal interference?  How do we prepare today’s kids for a future we can’t even imagine?  And if we figure it out, how are we going to pay for it?  These are valid questions.  But challenges are no reason to accept the status quo.

Before we address these practical concerns, we have to change the values of the system.  There are two major philosophical obstacles to any meaningful reform in American education:  How we view the children and how we view the teachers.  We must view children not as future cogs in the economic machine but as developing human individuals in need of care, guidance, and support.  We must view teachers as what we claim to see them as now: The source of all student success. 

It might seem obvious that we have no choice but to educate our children for the 21^st century.  It is, after all, the 21^st century.  But we’re using a system designed for the mid-20^th century.  We’ve tried to fix it, but clearly we have failed.  So yes, we must choose to education our children for their century.   

But 21^st century learning is not about technology.  Or rather, it doesn’t have to be.  It can be more than an upgrade in instructional methodology and materiel.  As Trudy Sweeney makes clear, effective, meaningful incorporation of new instructional technology requires a pedagogical shift.  If you just tack the technology onto your existing teaching you are doing both yourself, your students, and the technology a disservice. 

And as Mitra discussed in his TED talk, educational technology has the potential to do more than change how we teach.  It has the potential to change how we think about education.  Sir Ken Robinson, Alan November, and other innovative 21^st century pedagogical thinkers agree.  Sir Robinson identifies the major challenge to today’s teachers:  It isn’t using technology, or preparing kids for a global tech economy.  It is preparing kids for a world we literally cannot envision.  How are we supposed to do that?  How can you prepare for something you can’t even imagine?  How do you teach students the necessary skills for success when you don’t know what they’ll have to be successful at?!

If we accept the basic premise of American public education, that the K-12 system is designed to prepare students for the workforce, then we must conclude that we’re doing a terrible job.  A high school education isn’t what it used to be. The earning power of a bachelor’s degree has declined significantly.  College is the new high school. The master’s degree (I can attest) is the new bachelor’s.  So we must assume that we are educating our students for the unskilled, sub-living wage workforce: for jobs at McDonald’s.  Is this really our goal?  Logically, it must be.

Likewise, if we accept that the K-12 education isn’t what it used to be, then the purpose of K-12 education must change.  K-12 education becomes about preparing students for success in whatever line of study they choose to pursue in higher education.  Because we cannot provide all children with the prerequisite declarative knowledge necessary for all college majors, we must deduce that our goal should be to provide them with the prerequisite, universal procedural knowledge necessary for the pursuit of all higher education and for successful adulthood.

What defines a successful adulthood? The individual.  One of the blessings (and curses) of the modern global economy is choice.  Each student will be able to choose how to define success for him or herself.  There are students who will define success as working for a hedge fund, arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court, or curing cancer.  Still more will define it in less traditional ways, ways that are made possible by the global, technological world in which we live.  Success for one might be getting off the grid or running a locally sustainable farm.  For another, it might be seeing her painting in MoMA or tagging as many global cities as possible with his street art.  For many, success will be defined as having a job they don’t hate that allows them, both financially and temporally, to live the life they want outside of work.  So how to we prepare students for such diverse futures?

"Rather than focusing on specific technologies or specific problems, we need to equip students with those concepts that are common to all problems, all technologies, all skills."(Gunderson, Jones, and Scanland: "Jobs Revolution: Changing How American Works)

By focusing on procedural, rather than declarative knowledge.  We want a literate populace.  What does literacy mean, beyond being able to read?  It means being able to find and evaluate information.  It means being technologically savvy.  It means being able to understand domestic and international news through the lenses of history, politics, and economics.  It means being able to understand, apply, and make decisions about ethically gray scientific topics.  It means being able to respectfully, productively communicate with people different from ourselves.  These are the tenets of Jeffersonian education. 

So the answer is deceptively, dauntingly simple:  We teach them to think.  How? By remembering that children should be at the center of any conversation about education; not money, not politics, not the economy.  Children. By taking a leaf out of Finland’s book.  By refusing to believe that teachers who can’t do are good enough for American children.  By caring about the education of our educators. By not just listening to but implementing the advice of smart, creative, innovative people.  By training our teachers well and then loosing them into a system that supports, encourages, and trusts them to apply their talents and skills to meet the needs of the unique groups of kids in front of them. By barring complacency from our educational institutions. By considering the questions of passionate, frustrated pre-service teachers who demand to know why, when they are devoting their lives to education, their own education is so insufficient. By not being afraid to dowhat we know works.

Food for Thought: Disparate Reflections on Technology and Education

• Our society has no need for children…
• Technology has taken children out of the workforce.  And while we can all agree that taking nine year olds out of factories is a good thing, this has robbed children of a sense of contribution to the community. 
• Production of human capital has always been the purpose of American public education.  We don’t care about the kids, we don’t even care about the adults they will be (where adult = citizen, partner, lover, parent, neighbor, friend, generally self-actualized person)—we care only about the WORKERS they will be!  (This is disgusting.)
• No wonder they hate school and adults and The Man and The System.  No wonder they tune out any way they can, with sex and drugs and video games.  No wonder they feel isolated and misunderstood.  They have no control over their lives and aren’t even seen as people. 

• Vygotsky and the Internet
•   “People learn by having conversations and testing each other”
•  The internet provides new opportunities for engagement with Vygotskian experts (people who know how to do something you don’t)
• What impact does this have on the concept of authority? 
• Crowd sourcing
• Calling on a community rather than an expert for answers
• Fall of the Ivory Tower?

• The evolution of information
•   For today’s kids, the online experience of information is very personal.à How do we duplicate this online experience in the classroom?  How do we make information relevant, personal, and the focus of agency?
• We should use tech not “because we have to” but because it is a very real way to make learning experiences authentic and autonomous
•  Info as a raw material:  Its value comes from what you can DO/MAKE with it
• This is in line with Vygotsky: An expert is just someone who can do something you can’t.  And learning happens through direct, interactive engagement (aka conversation) with these experts

•   “In every classroom”
•  November’s recommendations are for “every classroom.”  This misses the point.  One-size-doesn’t work.  It won’t work any better with fancy technology and new definitions of learning.
• What works for one teacher in a classroom in the Bronx won’t necessarily work for another teacher in a classroom in Orange County.  We need to let teachers teach the kids in front of them. 

• Shifting the locus of control
•  Novmeber recommends changing the concept of a learner to someone who contributes to society through their work (learning)
• This requires a shift of control from the teacher to the network of students
•  In any time, in any place, a good teacher is one who isn’t afraid of her students.

Tulgey Wood

I did what I was supposed to do: I cared about school. I cultivated my grades like prize orchids.  I worked hard, played light.  I didn’t party.  I did my homework.  I once wrote an unassigned essay because I had something to say about A Separate Peace and my teacher had neglected to provide an outlet.  I participated in extracurriculuars.  I got into a top tier liberal arts school and majored in a STEM subject.  I got a job in my field after graduation.  I was set.  I was ready.  I was on the path to medical school, to the prestigious career as a world-famous, life-saving surgeon.

But I was lost.  I hated my research job.  I was miserable.  The MCAT never took itself.  I discovered that while I desperately wanted to be a surgeon, I didn’t actually want to become a doctor.  And that realization left me nowhere.  I had decided to become a neurosurgeon in the sixth grade.  My entire identity had been built on that foundation.  “Hi, I’m Emily.  I’m going to be a brain surgeon when I grow up.”  If I didn’t want to be a doctor, I didn’t know who I was.  I loved science but hated doing it.  But doing science was all I was qualified to do.  When you have a B.A. in biology, you can go into research, go to graduate school, or go to medical school.  These are the acceptable, respectable choices.  I said no to all three.   

In an attempt to reconnect with my curious, creative, and intellectually insatiable sixth grader, I applied for a job at my childhood Mecca: the Carnegie Science Center.  It was there that I discovered what I wanted to do with my life.  One day, a five year old boy asked me how our blood gets around our bodies.  “Are there tubes?” he wanted to know.  I bent back my wrist and showed him my veins.  I showed him his.  I told him that there are, in fact, tubes.  He stared at his wrist and then looked up at me, the embodiment of pure wonder.  “I can see inside my body!” he said.

I wanted to teach science. 

In a way, my sixth grade self was still right:  I do want to be a surgeon.  I still wish I could cut it (pardon the pun).  But my inability to become a surgeon is not an intellectual handicap; it is a spiritual one. I cannot become a surgeon because life as a surgeon would not make me happy.  It would fulfill my childhood dream, but it would make my adult self miserable.  Being a surgeon would not be, as Sir Robinson put it, an expression of my most authentic self.  Getting up in front of a classroom every day with a license to talk and geek out and gush about science…that is the expression of my most authentic self.  And I didn’t find it in school.  I didn’t find it by doing what I was supposed to do.  I found it by giving up, by throwing in the towel, by admitting defeat.  I found it by moving home and taking a $9/hour job. 

I am lucky enough that, while the path I laid at twelve left me in Alice’s Wonderland forest of confusion, I loved every minute of school along the way.  I loved organic chemistry, for Christ’s sake.  My education served me well.  It fulfilled me. And I came full circle: I rediscovered the passion I found in my 6^th grade science class, the passion I mistook for ambition. 

What must it be like for kids who hate school, who find nothing there that excites or ignites them? What about kids who are good with their hands, who want to be artists, or hermits, or aid workers, or firemen, or taxi drivers, or flight attendants, or moms, or dads, or any other vocation that isn’t valued by our rat race obsessed society? What about the kids who don’t know what they want to do, but who know that a decade of school hasn’t come close to helping them figure it out?

It should be noted that my secondary education was at an independent school, one of the best in the city.  I was given freedom, encouragement, stimulation.  My teachers fostered my love of dance as assiduously as my love of science. Great credit should be given, in equal measure, to the teachers who encouraged my brain-surgeon dream and to those who encouraged me to consider the possibility of something else.  At 18, I couldn’t imagine wanting anything other than a life in the OR.  But every time I saw my old history teacher, he respectfully asked me if I had changed my mind yet.  He saw something I didn’t. 

I truly cannot imagine my life if I had attended public school.  I think that even I, a kid with “potential,” would have been lost in the shuffle.  My history teacher wouldn’t have seen that something in a class of thirty students. And if I had found myself in the same dark woods after college, I doubt I would have been equipped to find my way back to myself. 

Sir Robinson reminds us that we literally cannot envision the world in which our students will live.  And yet we are expected to teach them.  How?

By teaching them to think.  By fostering the skills necessary for successful adulthood, rather than a successful career:  decency, responsibility, humility, respect, resiliency, creativity, problem solving, persistence, compassion. Good grammar and an ability to evaluate information.  The willingness to make mistakes.  The ability to admit that you’re wrong or that you need help. The courage to question authority.  The reverence of both your own inner voice and trusted, expert advice.  The gumption to figure it out for yourself.  Because in the end, we won’t be there with them.  They’ll be on their own.  And a fat lot of good a bunch of forgotten facts will do them.