Freedom and democracy

Some time ago I came across this quote by Royce Van Norman, who wrote about school administration in the 60's:

Is it not ironic that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?

I am reminded of this quote pretty frequently. You can't teach a child how to be a citizen and a participant in a democracy without giving them democratic freedoms and a meaningful voice. I don't think it's much of a mystery that most Americans don't vote, and that the youngest adults are least likely to vote. This isn't because they're young and irresponsible, it's because they just got out of school. They have no sense of being able to control or influence anything, no sense of themselves as citizens; instead they have fatalism. Also, they're used to being told what to think by an authority figure, and become confused when opposing candidates tell them different things. And their attitude toward democracy is rather shaky-- for instance, students have little respect for the Bill of Rights:

When told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories....

Possibly students are internalizing the distaste for freedom of the press which they experience in school. For instance:

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) -- Copies of a high school's student newspaper were seized by administrators because the edition contained stories about birth control and tattoos, stirring a First Amendment debate.

Administrators at Oak Ridge High School went into teachers' classrooms, desks and mailboxes to retrieve all 1,800 copies of the newspaper last week, said teacher Wanda Grooms, who advises the staff, and Brittany Thomas, the student editor.

The Oak Leaf's birth-control article listed success rates for different methods and said contraceptives were available from doctors and the local health department. Superintendent Tom Bailey said the article needed to be edited so it would be acceptable for the entire school.

In fact, however, this edition of the paper was re-printed and distributed without the birth control story in any form. It wasn't edited, it was deleted.

Only 83 percent of high school students agreed that people should be able to express unpopular views (see above Bill of Rights link). It's pretty shocking that almost 1 in 5 high school students thinks minority voices should be silenced, but then, they're used to being silenced themselves. They're used to speaking only with permission, and they're used to having their personal appearance edited whenever it fails to conform. In one of my earliest posts I compiled a list of stories in which schools took disciplinary action over a student's appearance, including suspending students for nose studs, copper-colored hair, and a "vegan sweatshirt," whatever that means. A related story popped up in today's headlines:

ATLANTA - A federal judge in Atlanta has ruled in favor of a Gwinnett County honors student who was disciplined for violating the school's "anti-gang clothing" policy.Judge Beverly Martin agreed that the policy is -- quote -- "fatally vague." She has enjoined the state's largest school district from enforcing parts of the dress code....

Marlyn Tillman approached the ACLU after school officials at Brookwood High School punished her son for so-called "gang-related activity" based on the color and/or style of his clothing. She says her son -- who has never been in a gang -- was disciplined several times for clothing items and accessories. She says the items included a pocket watch, a rolled-up pants leg and a shirt with the student's nickname on the back.

She says she and her son -- now a senior who remains in advanced-placement classes -- are happy with the judge's ruling.

In her words, "He feels as though finally, he can get back to education and not be as concerned with are the fashion police after him."

The heavy control of students in schools cannot produce strong, independent citizens who speak their minds and demand their rights. But then, it really isn't meant to.

Comments

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Wrong answers that aren't

Anya has been doing a lot of arithmetic lately, and there have been several times when she's gotten answers that would be counted simply as "wrong" in school, but for which there were reasonable explanations.

Take the simple addition pages in her workbooks. Usually she is supposed to count the number of objects in each of two groups, write in those addends, and then write in their sum. I was looking over one of these pages, where every answer was either 9 or 10, and noticed she had written 4 + 4 = 8 on one line. In fact the equation should have been 2 + 7 = 9, which I know she knows (there were no other errors), but you see, Anya's favorite number is 8. She resents it when there's no sum of 8 on the page. So she just ignored the instructions on that line and wrote in her own equation. I did not consider this to be "wrong," because my purpose is not to train accurate office workers who obey instructions to the letter; it's for my kids to learn arithmetic. And even if my purpose were to raise dutiful accountants, we have years in which to learn the importance of accuracy. Anya's equation would be marked wrong in school because one teacher cannot divine the thought processes behind the wrong answers of over 20 children-- even supposing they shared my perspective (not likely, with all the emphasis on test-taking).

In another example, Anya told me she added up "one of every number" on her calculator and it added up to 66. Sure, if you add all the numbers from 1 to 11 it does add up to 66, though an adult would probably think of the single digits 1 through 9, which only sum to 45. It takes a little effort to figure out exactly what she's calculated sometimes-- and would a teacher have that time?

Telling a kid their answer is simply wrong is incredibly frustrating to them, and it ignores the opportunity to figure out what the misunderstanding is. Of course humans make typos on the calculator and sometimes we goof on rote memorization tasks, mixing up 6 times 9 and 7 times 9. But a great many "mistakes" in fact point to a conceptual error which it would be extremely useful to investigate. I don't personally remember this happening in school unless I sought the teacher's help myself-- and sometimes not even then.

While we are on the subject of math, there is a heck of a lot of value placed on right answers as opposed to conceptual understanding. Here is an observation I had from undergrad and grad school: people with math degrees are no better at arithmetic or figuring out the tip in a restaurant than non-math majors. In fact, I'm substantially worse at off-the-cuff arithmetic than a lot of other people I know. I have a BS in math and an MS in biostatistics (applied math), and on the SAT, ACT, and GRE, math was in every case my lowest test score. Why? Because the conceptual understanding required to write proofs, conceive of infinite series, and integrate functions in 3-D has pretty much no relationship to the "meticulous" trait that makes for an excellent accountant, schoolteacher, or test-taker.

It's true that even in college I lost points on complex math problems because I'd goofed and missed a minus sign or forgotten to square something. Yes, students of all stripes should try to avoid these little errors, but you know, I made a lot of them and I still got a math degree. I think they're stressed far too much in these early grades. I'm glad my kids won't be in an environment where goof-ups count so much against them, yet real misunderstandings are not identifed or delved into.

Education spending

I'm going to do something that gives me the willies, and quote from an American Enterprise Institute (boo, hiss) publication. What can I say, they've got a good summary of difficult-to-find statistics:

American schools are actually well funded, by any reasonable standard. After inflation, education spending in the United States more than tripled between 1960 and 2000.

It may surprise some to learn that, in fact, we rank at the top of the international charts when it comes to education spending. In 2000 (the latest available data), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) calculated that the United States spent significantly more than any other industrial democracy, including those famous for generous social programs.

In primary education, on a per-pupil basis, the United States spent 66 percent more than Germany, 56 percent more than France, 27 percent more than Japan, 80 percent more than the United Kingdom, 62 percent more than Belgium, and 122 percent more than South Korea. High school figures were similar.

Despite this spending, the United States ranked fifteenth among the thirty-one countries that participated in the OECD’s 2000 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading exam. Ireland, Iceland, and New Zealand were among those that outperformed us while spending far less per pupil. The results in math are equally disquieting: on the 1999 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the United States ranked nineteenth of thirty-eight participating countries. Most troubling is that America’s standing actually deteriorates as students spend more time in school.

The article claims that many schools costs are, rather duplicitously, not included in per-pupil spending estimates. For instance, the interest paid on school bonds, renovation costs, land purchases, and new school construction costs are all not included. Thus, New York City's $12,000 per pupil expenditure is in fact over $14,000; Los Angeles actually spent about $13,000 per pupil yet reported less than $7,000 per pupil expenditures. They conclude:

A reasonable estimate is that widely reported per-pupil spending figures represent only 70-80 percent of what the United States spends on education. Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby has estimated that in 2000 we actually spent more than $9,200 per pupil, compared to the widely reported “official” figure of $7,392.

Just some back-of-the-envelope thoughts here: multiply $9,200 by 25, and you're spending close to a quarter million dollars per year per classroom ($230,000). Now, I don't know how much that space costs in terms of a mortgage, maintenance, and so on-- but let's say $2500 / month for the room (considerably more than my house payment, for instance). Let's additionally stipulate $60,000 for the teacher's salary, $500 / month for supplies (only during the school year), and throw in $25,000 for desks, books, maps, and a few computers. Still with me? We have $110,000 left. Say it takes $40,000 to operate a school bus, per year (roughly the cost in Wake County, North Carolina, which I picked at random)-- we still have $60,000 left. Where is this money going? According to the American Enterprise Institute, US public education spending grew by more than 50 percent from 1995 to 2003. What is going on? Well:

In 1949-50, schools employed one non-teacher for every 2.36 teachers. By 1998-99, there was one non-teacher for every 1.09 teachers. In Washington, D.C., the school system employs eleven thousand people (for sixty-five thousand students), less than half of whom are teachers.

Washington DC schools are not in good shape, physically or academically. They can't even afford to fix the plumbing in some schools. Yet they employ one adult for every 5.9 children-- less than half of them teachers. And what is the proposed solution for boosting academic success in the district? Mixed age classrooms? Peer tutoring? Training teachers to give students more choice and self-determination? Montessori-style learning? Firing some administrators and hiring some teachers (hello, isn't this obvious)?

No. In 2002 a DC councilman drafted legislation that would have required mandatory preschool starting at age 3. I guess reform in the classroom is too radical, whereas carseats on the schoolbus barely raises an eyebrow.

The more time goes on, the more I just think this system cannot be reformed.

Another blogger on bullying

Another homeschooling blogger, BigNut, has a post on students bullying teachers. According to a study in Ontario, 38% of teachers reported having been bullied by students. Of these, more than 1 in 5 sought professional help to deal with the consequences of the bullying. BigNut rightly asks, if so many teachers can't avoid being bullied and find it difficult to cope with bullying, how are the kids faring?

In another post on bullying, BigNut cites research showing that the vast majority of bullying occurs in front of others, and that bullies, contrary to what most of us had thought, are well-liked and have high social status. This suggests that counseling individual bullies is not going to work, because they are not "acting out" due to personal problems. They bully other kids because bullying works for them. It seems the whole school culture would need to be changed such that bullying does not boost one's social position (but how likely is that?).

Check out these posts... and thanks, BigNut!

More on bullying

From the NEA:

• Six out of 10 American teenagers witness bullying in school once a day.

• Bullying affects nearly one in three American schoolchildren in grades six through 10. Eighty-three percent of girls and 79 percent of boys report experiencing harassment.

• Students who are targets of repeated bullying behavior experience extreme fear and stress:

Fear of going to school
Fear of using the bathroom
Fear of the bus ride to and from school
Physical symptoms of illness
Diminished ability to learn

What the NEA does not say is that the 83% of girls and 79% of boys experiencing "harassment" are experiencing sexual harassment specifically. At least, I assume that the NEA is citing a particular important survey on sexual harassment, which found:

83% of girls and 79% of boys report having ever experienced harassment.

The number of boys reporting experiences with harassment often or occasionally has increased since 1993 ([to] 56% [from] 49%), although girls are still somewhat more likely to experience it. For many students sexual harassment is an ongoing experience: over 1 in 4 students experience it "often." These numbers do not differ by whether the school is urban or suburban or rural.

76% of students have experienced non-physical harassment while 58% have experienced physical harassment. Non-physical harassment includes taunting, rumors, graffiti, jokes or gestures. One-third of all students report experiencing physical harassment "often or occasionally."

Actions hurt but so do words. When given 14 examples of non-physical and physical harassment, students say they would be very upset if someone did the following:

• Spread sexual rumors about them (75%)
  
• Pulled off or down their clothing in a sexual way (74%)
  
• Said that they were gay or lesbian (73%)
  
• Forced them to do something sexual other than kissing (72%)
  
• Spied on them as they dressed or showered at school (69%)

The NEA and other groups tend to focus on school violence when addressing the subject of bullying, but I think that in fact non-physical bullying is more rampant and quite possibly more psychologically damaging. Consider that having sexual rumors spread about them was "very upsetting" to more students than were being forced to do something sexual or being spied on while dressing or showering.

A quarter of students experience sexual harassment "often," a third experience physical sexual harassment "often" or "occasionally." No wonder that:

A substantial number of students—both boys and girls—fear being hurt by someone in their school life. Eighteen percent (18%) are afraid some or most of the time, and less than half (46%) are "never" afraid in school.

And yet, the main objection to homeschooling continues to be "Aren't you worried about socialization?" (I'm going to memorize this response: "Yes, of course, that's the main reason we decided to homeschool!")

Your average person on the street does not know that homeschoolers do better academically than do public school students, so why is it that they latch onto "socialization" and almost never ask about academic concerns? (Or is that just my experience?) I am starting to think we are all aware, at some half-conscious level, that school is really about finding your slot in society and learning to conform within your category. And that people are willing to put up with the bullying, the harassment, and the misery experienced in schools because they just cannot fathom what happens to someone who does not find their pigeonhole, meld into their social clique, and get properly classified and defined. Better to endure the harsh experiences that teach you to accept your lot in life than to wind up a non-conformist, right? And better, many parents think, to help your kid through the cruelty, competition, misery and anxiety than to have them "not fit in" as adults.

I am beginning to suspect that the social life of school is most school parents' biggest concern, at least, in their heart of hearts. Nominally it may be grades, but what gets to them emotionally must be the teasing and harassment (if they're aware of it). They need to believe this is worth it. So when you say you aren't going to send your kids to school, what they want from you (not consciously, but arising out of some deeper emotional place) is to hear that yes, you're worried about your kid missing out on all that bullying. That yes, that's the one advantage their kid will have-- knowing what "the real world" is like (even though the adult world in fact contains far, far less of this kind of nastiness). That yes, the price your child will pay for still being happy at age 14 is they'll be the weirdo on the block.

I'm tired of being asked, in some never-articulated and indirect manner, to agree that schooled children will reap social advantages to make up for the everyday miseries they witness or endure. It feels like this is what I'm being asked to accept, when someone says "Well, there may be some socialization issues..." or similar. It does no good for schooled children if adults act as if the typical school social environment is inevitable, or worse, somehow helpful. There is no trade-off for the bullying. There is no excuse for adults allowing so much commonplace cruelty inside of schools, which we ourselves would never allow in our workplaces. I'm not going to go along with this by getting defensive when asked about socialization, citing our social opportunities and so on. These people don't really care if my kids grow up weird or not (some of the people asking me think I'm weird anyway). They are wanting me-- again, not consciously, but at some level-- to agree that a taste of cruelty is really the best thing. That it's not hurting their kids.

I just can't go along with that anymore. From now on I'm going to try and remember: "Yes, of course we're concerned about socialization, that's why we decided to homeschool!" To respond otherwise comes too close to endorsing the current venomous social atmosphere of most schools.

Techno bullying

Via CNET news:

According to a survey conducted earlier this year by U.K. children's charity NCH, one in five kids has been bullied via digital phone or computer. Bullying by text message was the most common form of abuse reported, with 14 percent of children interviewed saying they had received upsetting messages on their mobile phones. The interactions run the gamut from disconcerting to downright terrifying.

The more extreme instances of techno-bullying involve so-called "happy slapping," where physical assaults are recorded on mobile phones and distributed to Web sites and other phones via video messaging.

Experts say that while most bullying occurs at school, or on the way to or from school, mobile phone bullying follows students into their homes. Kids often do not tell adults about harassment for fear that their phones will be taken away, nor do they want to turn their phones off, as they are a key device for their social lives. In the UK, 97% of children aged 12 to 16 own mobile phones.

The attitude that "all kids get bullied and learn to live with it," besides being factually inaccurate, also contains the admission that adults do not bully each other like this. Among adults, "happy slapping" would result in a criminal charges, as would many of the lesser forms of harassment. Kids aren't learning this at home, they're learning this in the Lord of the Flies, nowhere-near-enough-caring-adults environment of the school.

When I was in college I came to believe that high school was about socializing everyone so that they "knew their place" and wouldn't get uppity. The social strife was designed to further racism, sexism, and classism, to destroy confidence, to destroy solidarity, to sow self-doubt, to enhance conformity. But what I didn't get was that this wasn't coming just from "the culture," from parents and kids. It is enabled and enhanced by the environment of the school, in which children can so easily be victimized without adult advocates to come to their defense.

When we first decided to homeschool, someone close to me said he thought it was a good idea because (and I quote): "Elementary school was when I learned that adults don't really care about children and are not actually there to help you."

Borrowed satire

I found this satirical news article on the web, and I hope the author (Angela Paul) won't mind me excerpting it here-- it imagines a future in which communal eating, like communal learning, has been mandated by the government:

Home Eating a Threat to Public Kitchens?

State Allows Growing Trend of Eating At Home

After much heated debate on the house floor, legislation was passed today to allow a growing number of families to cook meals for their families in their homes. The children must have annual physical examinations to assure proper growth and weight gain. Attempts to require weekly meal plans and monthly kitchen inspections were voted down.

A spokesperson from the National Association of Nutritionists (NAN) condemns this decision. "These children are being denied the rich socialization and diversity that is an essential part of the eating process. Without the proper nutritional background, it is impossible for the average person to feed their own children. We, as child advocates, see this as a step backwards and speak out for the sake of the children who cannot speak for themselves."

Homecooking parents say the benefits of eating at home include increased family unity and the ability to tailor a diet to a particular need. Elizabeth Crocker, a home cook, states, "We started cooking and eating at home when we realized that my son had a severe allergy to eggs. The public kitchens required him to take numerous medications that had serious side effects in order to counteract his allergy. We found that eliminating eggs was a simpler method and our son has thrived since we began doing so."

After this experience, the Crockers decided to home cook for all of their children, and converted their media room into a kitchen. Elizabeth says, "We have experienced so much closeness as we have explored recipes and spent time cooking together and eating together. We have a dining circle with other families where we sometimes share ideas and meals together."

The Crocker children have done well physically under their mother's care, weighing in at optimum weights for their ages and having health records far above average. It should be noted that Mrs. Crocker, while not a professional nutritionist, has a family history rich with nutritionists and home economists. "Surely the success of the Crocker children is due to the background of their mother," responded the spokesman from NAN. "The results they have achieved should not be viewed as normative." Mrs. Crocker counters that her background was actually a hindrance to the nutritional principles she follows. "Our paternal great-grandmother was a home economist, but she prepared most meals from pre-made mixes. In our homecooking we try not to duplicate public-kitchen meals, but to tailor our meals to the needs and preferences of our children."

Pretty darned funny, I thought.

Preschool

I've argued before that educators are continually trying to expand the time kids spend in school, through longer school years, longer days, and of course, universal preschool. Preschools are also becoming less about play, and more about academics. An article from Michigan included this:

With state education curriculum requirements becoming more stringent for all grades, it's essential that children receive some kind of preschool experience, [preschool coordinator Jan] Brock said.

"Preschool is so important because kindergarten requirements have increased," she said.

"We have an opportunity to provide them with experience to help them prepare for kindergarten. We want them to have a quality preschool experience to help prepare them for success in school."

Or, from New York state:

Many children who complete preschool programs do not have readiness skills required by the New York State Department of Education. "We have experienced significant change during the past few years," said Rosmarie Bovino, deputy superintendent of schools. "What used to be taught in first grade is now being taught in pre-K. In the past, pre-K was viewed as a time for learning social skills, with playtime being the primary activity. That is no longer true."

The district has met with local preschool teachers to discuss state standards, particularly math and reading, and provided copies of the recently released New York State math and English language arts curriculum materials.

I guess they are abandoning the social skills development purpose of preschool in favor of just making it like normal school, with curriculum requirements and the whole nine yards. So I suppose the next thing will be "Enroll your infant in our preschool readiness program, before they fall behind in socialization!"

A recent study looked at over 14,000 kindergarteners from across the nation, measured their academic abilities and their social skills, and recorded whether or not they had attended preschool. It did find that those who had attended preschool tended to test higher on pre-reading and math skills:

The study... shows that preschooled children from the poorest families would score 8 and 9 percentile points higher on standardized pre-reading and math tests, respectively, than children who stayed at home. Children from middle-class families made 5 percent gains in language and math compared to their peers who did not attend preschool, and children from upper-income families made modest gains in language.

In other words, preschool has little academic benefit for children from higher-income families (whose parents usually have higher education levels). "Modest" is usually code for "not statistically significant" or "miniscule to the point of being irrelevant." Higher income families are more likely to send their kids to preschool, and their kids do better in school-- but according to this study, their kids don't do better because of preschool. It's just that preschool attendance and academic performance have a common cause: higher socioeconomic status.

True, kids from lower income families have improved test scores if they have attended preschool, although:

Margaret Bridges, co-author of the study and director of child development at the institute, acknowledged the study showed that disparities in early cognitive development between children from wealthy backgrounds and children from lower economic backgrounds would not necessarily decrease, and that the gap could be addressed by prioritizing resources for certain at-risk groups.

"With limited resources to invest in preschool programs, I think it's important to focus the resources on the kids that are having the most trouble with achievement," she said.

In other words, you might send the lowest income kids to preschool but not send the higher income kids, and then you might have a better shot at removing the disparities in academic achievement. Only I think we know that higher income families are not going to keep their kids out of preschool, so only universal compulsory public preschools will seem like a real solution to public educators.

The study also looked at social skills. I don't have to tell any other homeschoolers, positively fatigued by people bringing up socialization concerns, how pleasantly ironic the study's results are:

Black children who attended preschool lagged in social development compared to black children who did not attend preschool, while white and Hispanic children showed almost no decrease compared to children of the same ethnicity who did not attend preschool.

All economic groups showed less social development compared to stay-at-home children, except those from middle-income families, who were not socially affected by attending preschool.

So, to recap: at best, preschool didn't affect social development. But for most kids, it impeded their social development. I would love to carry some sort of study results abstract around with me to hand over to people who bring up social development as a knee-jerk first reaction to hearing that we're homeschoolers, but in my heart I know it wouldn't make any difference. The study article goes on:

But some educators believe preschool helps children's social growth.

"I totally don't believe the (results on social development)," said Jennifer Lage, a teacher at Sheffield Preschool in Berkeley. "I think socially, that's one of the main reasons to put your child in preschool, for them to gain some social skills early on."

"Socialization" through schooling is a matter of theology with some people; it is unassailable. Never mind what the data say.

Paranoid Parenting

This morning I discovered the book Paranoid Parenting, written by British sociology professor Frank Furedi. The publisher's blurb says:

Hardly a day goes by without parents being warned of a new threat to their children's well-being. Everything is dangerous: the crib, the babysitter, the school, the supermarket, the park. High-profile campaigns convince parents that their children's health, safety, and development are constantly at risk. Parents are criticized by one child-care expert after another, but even the experts can't agree on matters as simple as whether or not it is wise to sleep next to a child. Parents don't know whom to trust; the only clear message is that they can't trust themselves....

I thought that sounded interesting. When you bring up homeschooling with most people, the response is essentially fear: fear that the child won't develop any social skills, usually, or fear that they won't get into college, or fear that they'll never learn algebra. When it comes to raising children, people are afraid of attempting it without the intervention of experts. (Moreover, they're sometimes threatened if you try it yourself.)

I stumbled across an interview with Furedi as well, on the radio show Counterpoint. It was one of those moments, like when I first discovered John Gatto, where my own half-formed thoughts were suddenly articulated. I'll end with a longish excerpt from the interview-- hope you like it as much as I did.

Michael Duffy: Why do you think we have started to worry so much?

Frank Furedi: I think there are several reasons. One reason is that we’ve tended to regard human relationships as, by definition, very difficult and complicated, and we tell ourselves that, particularly parents, are not competent enough to deal with children, that apparently they are very difficult, that you almost need a PhD in developmental psychology to know how to manage your children. I think the more we treat parenting as a skill rather than a fairly naturally developed relationship, the more parents lose confidence in themselves. And when you lose confidence in your ability to mother or to father it becomes very easy to opt for, ‘You can’t do that, you shouldn’t do that, you shouldn’t go outdoors, you mustn’t do this, you mustn’t talk to strangers.’ That’s the easy way we can compensate for our insecurities, and I think that’s been pretty much institutionalised within the Anglo-American environment.

Michael Duffy: You mean we—the parents are feeling insecure about themselves, and they’re sort of pushing this off onto the children?

Frank Furedi: Yes, I think sometimes we create a poisonous atmosphere for parents; it’s not the parents' fault. But quite often…for example, at the moment there are big campaigns being organised in Britain to teach parents how to touch their children. So you can get massage classes, and there are classes that are designed to tell parents how to cuddle their children. Now, call me silly, but I used to think that touching your child and cuddling your child is something that you could work out for yourself; it often comes very naturally. But the very minute that we turn that into a skill that requires the support of professionals, we actually make it more difficult for parents to spontaneously touch their children, and to intuitively and instinctively cuddle their kids because it’s now seen as, somehow, a complicated task. The more we send out that kind of message, the more we, as parents, lose confidence in ourselves and stop believing in our intuition.

. . .

Frank Furedi: In many ways what we’re doing is we’re turning help-seeking into a primary virtue. We’re told that a responsible parent is somebody that seeks help. A responsible parent is not somebody that just gets on with life and does the business; it’s somebody that seeks support, calls up help lines. So the more we tell parents that they need to look for help and look for support, the more we incorporate the idea that actually they’re partners with some professionals in the joint task of bringing up their children.

Michael Duffy: Frank, I’d just like to continue with what you were just saying; there are people and companies, indeed entire industries, who benefit from this paranoia, aren’t there?

Frank Furedi: There are. In one sense, we all suffer from it because, if you are a parent, bringing kids up in this environment is not really good for anybody, but there are people who kind of benefit from this. I think governments, for example, who often are confused and disorientated about what kind of policy to pursue, find it easier to go for what I call the ‘politics of behaviour’, which involves regulating people’s lifestyles and basically preying on people’s fears and insecurities at established points of contact, and they provide support. You, in return, are meant to be the grateful public who responds positively to this.

So politicians use our insecurities as a point of departure for policy making. There’s a veritable parenting industry that has developed which insists that they’re in the business of bringing children up, and their ambition is continually expanding. For example, in the UK and in America, the parenting industry is now targeting very young children between the age of one and three, and they’re claiming that unless they get their hands on them and train them, they’re not going to be fit to go to school because they’re not going to learn certain social skills, they’re not going to have the ability to concentrate on their work, and therefore we need to have the kind of institutions established…schemes established where, already at that early age, they can be trained in a particular way. So in that sense there’s an industry that’s evolved around parenting which thrives on our own fears and insecurities, and which puts us in a perpetual state of dependency in relation to the things they tell us.

Michael Duffy: I’m fascinated by the advice industry. Obviously, if one sits down with a number of books, they often give wildly contradictory advice, and there’s also a magazine that I read from time to time for parents and it literally differs from each month; one month it will tell you to do one thing and the next month it will tell you to do another, and no one seems at all worried by this. The ultimate effect is to create this sort of state of permanent neurosis, which people seem to accept.

Frank Furedi: Well, they do, because what happens is that once you get on the treadmill of listening to advice, you then become almost like a junkie and you try out a particular strategy, it doesn’t quite work and then you read somebody else’s advice, and they tell you that when your child goes to sleep make sure that the lights are on. That doesn’t seem to work either, then you read somebody else’s advice and they insist that there mustn’t be any lights on, they must be very quiet and maybe you can put some music on…and you can go through all these books and all these self-help manuals, and after a while you don’t realise that you’ve tried five or six different techniques and you don’t realise the most important lesson of all—that, in the end, you are the only person that actually knows your child well enough to know what’s the most appropriate way of going forward, and without listening to your intuition and cultivating your intuition, you’re kind of perpetually listening to people who are giving very boring, routine, formulaic advice that’s actually often quite inappropriate to your circumstances.

Autonomy in learning and literature

I've been reading a bit more of Punished by Rewards, and I paid particular attention to how a degree of freedom in the classroom improves learning. Everyone learns better when they are interested in the subject, but even when a certain subject has to be learned, it still helps to provide choices and some self-determination along the way. Maybe that seems obvious, but Kohn provides an interesting sampling of actual research in this area (quoting from pp. 222-23):

• When second graders in Pittsburgh were given some choice about their learning, including the chance to decide which tasks they would work on at any given time, they tended to "complete more learning tasks in less time."
• When high school seniors in Minneapolis worked on chemistry problems without clear-cut directions -- that is, with the opportunity to decide for themselves how to find solutions -- they "consistently produced better write-ups of experiments" and remembered the material better than those who had been told exactly what to do. They put in more time than they had to, spending "extra laboratory periods checking results that could have been accepted without extra work." Some of the students initially resisted having to make decisions about how to proceed, but these grumblers later "took great pride in being able to carry through an experiment on their own."
• When preschool-age children in Massachusetts were allowed to select the materials they used for making a collage, their work was judged more creative than the work of children who used exactly the same materials but did not get to choose them.
• When college students in New York had the chance to decide which of several puzzles they wanted to work on, and how to allot their time to each of them, they were a lot more interested in working on such puzzles later than were students who were told what to do.
• When teachers of inner-city black children were trained in a program designed to promote a sense of self-determination, the children in these classes missed less school and scored better on a national test of basic skills than those in conventional classrooms.
• Fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students who felt they were given personal responsibility for their studies had "significantly higher self-esteem and perceived academic competence" than children who felt controlled in their classrooms.
• When second graders spent the year in a constructivist math classroom, one where textbooks and rewards were discarded in favor of an emphasis on "intellectual autonomy" -- that is, where children, working in groups, took an active role in figuring out their own solutions to problems and were free to move around the classroom on their own initiative to get the materials they needed -- they developed more sophisticated higher-level reasoning skills without falling behind on basic conceptual tasks.

One of the fascinating findings in the above list was that giving college students a choice of puzzles resulted in them enjoying the puzzles more even at a later date. Maybe being forced to do math in a certain way at a certain time results in kids disliking math even weeks or months later (or forever). As Kohn points out, perceiving oneself to be in control (or feeling helpless) is an enormous psychological factor as well as a predictor of academic learning. According to research Kohn cites, even infants exhibit enjoyment of noisy toys that they control, but fear similar toys which make noise at random. Based on research, giving kids no control would tend to reduce their self-esteem, make them more vulnerable to depression, and just plain make them angry. To have all this associated with academic learning cannot be a good thing.

I had to read Great Expectations at age 13 and I hated it. It was the most dark, grim, depressing, frightening, awful book in existence as far as I was concerned. I remember thinking that only a creepy half-insane man could come up with Miss Havisham and her cobweb-strewn wedding cake. (I didn't read much beyond that, in fact.) To this day, in spite of enjoying other 19th century literature (even Wuthering Heights, which is also nightmarish), I have never completed a Dickens novel. Along similar lines, I read Hamlet in 12th grade and again in college and thought it was okay, then read it one weekend all on my own and loved it. This isn't to say I never enjoyed an assigned work-- I loved Madame Bovary and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but for various reasons I hated the lectures and discussions on these books and still wished I had been able to read them in peace, on my own, rather than for a class. In short, I don't think I would want my children to be assigned to read literary novels, at least until college. If my kids don't (for example) see me reading an Austen novel and get interested, or in some other way pick up one of the literary novels around the house, I plan to say "Here are some shelves full of literature, pick a book to read."

Last spring a friend of mine was asking for literary book recommendations. He was helping to identify some easier-to-read classics for his niece to read over the summer, as his family is quite focused on education and academic success, and his niece would soon be starting high school. My recommendation was not one of the classics, it was anything by P. G. Wodehouse, but particularly the Jeeves/Wooster novels. These make tough reading at first, due to the strange slang, the massive vocabulary, and the more complicated sentence structures. But the key is, they are hysterically funny once you are used to the style of writing. Once you "get" the humor, you're more than willing to slog through the unfamiliar language. For any of you who have kids of high school age (maybe younger, I don't know), you can boost their vocabulary easily if you can get them hooked on Bertie Wooster (a bumbling rich bachelor) and Jeeves (his valet). I'll just end with an excerpt from one of the best of these books, The Code of the Woosters:

I suppose that when two men of iron will live in close association with each other, there are bound to be occasional clashes, and one of these had recently popped up in the Wooster home. Jeeves was trying to get me to go on a Round-The-World cruise, and I would have none of it. But in spite of my firm statements to this effect, scarcely a day passed without him bringing me a sheaf or nosegay of those illustrated folders which the Ho-for-the-open-spaces birds send out in the hope of drumming up custom. His whole attitude recalled irresistibly to the mind that of some assiduous hound who will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing-room carpet, though repeatedly apprised by word and gesture that the market for same is sluggish or even non-existent.