Self-actualization

I recently wandered across Maslow's idea of self-actualization on the web. Self-actualization seems a better ultimate purpose for education than cultural competency or earnings capability. Maslow (you may remember Maslow's pyramid of needs) studied people he considered to be models of self-actualization, and noted 15 common characteristics. This page lists the characteristics, and here is a longer summary. I'll quote from the latter summary:

The self-actualizers also had a different way of relating to others. First, they enjoyed solitude, and were comfortable being alone. And they enjoyed deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family members, rather than more shallow relationships with many people.

Does public school encourage deeper personal relations? Gatto has said the following, much more succinctly than I could, though it squares with my experience of high school:

The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candour. My guess is... they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behaviour borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy, so intimate relationships have to be avoided.

As for solitude, Gatto estimates that many of the children he teaches get only 9 hours of private time per week. When the kids in my neighborhood aren't at school, they're at some sort of class or playgroup. They're used to being directed, and might not know what to do with themselves when left alone. To continue with some of Maslow's self-actualized models:

They enjoyed autonomy.... And they resisted enculturation, that is, they were not susceptible to social pressure to be "well adjusted" or to "fit in" -- they were, in fact, nonconformists in the best sense.

When you are in school you have no autonomy. You can't go to the bathroom or eat without permission. As for resisting enculturation, high school was the very process of enculturation itself. To go on:

They had an unhostile sense of humor -- preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing their humor at others. They had a quality he called acceptance of self and others, by which he meant that these people would be more likely to take you as you are than try to change you into what they thought you should be. This same acceptance applied to their attitudes towards themselves: If some quality of theirs wasn’t harmful, they let it be, even enjoying it as a personal quirk... Along with this comes spontaneity and simplicity: They preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or artificial.

Hostility is a daily part of school, in my experience, but it's hard to know where to start with the examples. I'll bring Gatto in again:

The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.

Gatto discusses how this cruelty comes about. Twenty-some children competing for the attention of a single adult in elementary school does not breed warm feelings among them, for instance. Personally, I think kids know they are being tracked, and are jockeying for position on the social ladder. Whatever the cause, I witnessed cruelty every year I was in school. Acceptance, spontaneity, and simplicity? Half the time it felt like Lord of the Flies come to life.

Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards others -- something Maslow also called democratic values -- meaning that they were open to ethnic and individual variety, even treasuring it. They had a quality Maslow called human kinship or Gemeinschaftsgefühl -- social interest, compassion, humanity.

Not existent in my school. Maybe others have had better luck.

And these people had a certain freshness of appreciation, an ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder. Along with this comes their ability to be creative, inventive, and original.

I recently heard the phrase "drill and kill" for the first time. This refers to an attempt by a school to improve standardized test scores by heaping on mounds of worksheets and repetition. When I was in school, in the early grades, we still got those funny-smelling purple-inked mimeograph worksheets. We had worksheets, workbooks, copying things off the board, and reading out loud in what always seemed like slow motion, all of which was drudgery (although I didn't have homework, at least). Even Einstein reported that upon leaving school he had no taste for scientific inquiry for a full year. Socially, there is also pressure to adopt the popular bored and cynical demeanor; enthusiasm in most settings is socially unacceptable. None of this is very compatible with freshness of appreciation or creativity.

Altogether I have to conclude that public schooling is a hindrance to self-actualization.