EducationNews.org

By John Jensen, Ph.D.

Today I watched while a large group of senior high school girls and boys argued loudly about why they didn't get along.  Girls blamed the boys and boys blamed the girls. Neither was interested in how the other saw the situation, nor in careful listening to the other side, nor in any understanding of problem-solving. No one suggested that their own behavior might contribute to a problem. The single intent evidently shared by everyone was simply "Who is to blame?"

It dawned on me that this argument played out "the elephant in the living room" of US education, the unspoken presence that everyone knows about and no one addresses. It was the presence of irrationalitydriven by unmanaged emotion. Allowed to have its way, it demonstrates as does nothing else why education produces poor results so often, and also why the customary aims of education fall short.

The standard reason given for education, to prepare students to function in society, echoes the theme accepted from the time of Aristotle but too often remains with defining the curriculum: they should learn this and that. Such an answer may work when society proceeds ahead on an even keel, but what happens when big choices are being made? Think about the following situations. In each, you may be tempted to blame a few leaders and ignore the substance of agreement and consent from mainstream thinking.

 How could it be that the Germans, the most educated people in the world possessing many of the world’s leading thinkers plus an intensive form of education, invented Naziism and inaugurated World War II and the Holocaust? How? How could an "educated" people have allowed this?

We needn't look elsewhere. How could “the best and the brightest” of American leaders in the 1960s be drawn into a long, brutal war in Vietnam that universal judgment now regards as unnecessary?  How?

How could the massive resources of the US be drawn into an unneeded war in Iraq while ignoring unfinished business in Afghanistan after the events of 9-11?

How could US and world leaders decades ago ignore the compelling scientific evidence even then that human activity was warming the globe and that disaster would ensue unless steps were taken that would have been easy then but are hard now?

How could an educated, religious people for almost three centuries from the time of its colonization collectively justify slavery?

How is it possible for the best educated elite of the US to be remain unaware of how their economic and fiscal practices were leading the nation toward disaster?  How is it that the effects of greed and self-interest could be either unrecognized or approved?

Examples can be extended indefinitely. They go far beyond blaming selected individual leaders. We customarily blame wrongdoing on the narrowest of bases, picking out this or that person as a scapegoat while ignoring its endemic, systemic origins. All of the issues listed above represent mainstream thinking gone awry. And when the mainstream goes awry, what is there to hold it back from self-destructing?  People try to enshrine safeguards such as the balance of power between legislative, executive, and judicial branches in this country, but the fragility of this balance was revealed in short order when, upon the excuse of the events of 9-11, the long-standing prohibition of torture (even during the trauma of World Wars I and II) was shredded by the leaders of government.  We recently have had the spectacle of then-Vice President Cheney defending the necessity of torture, and of imprisonment without charges and without right to a trial. Privacy rights, we discover much later, were flagrantly violated by the government.

What is apparent from the vast sweeps of change in the policies of the nation and their general acceptance by the country--is that people have not drawn a particularly crucial competence from their education.  They remain collectively unable to .examine the tradeoffs of values in a refined way, and to separate emotion from the interpretation of evidence, and to prevent personal motives from warping their reasoning processes.  In the examples above, all these things occurred. The conflict between behavior and values was ignored, personal motives warped reasoning, and emotions governed the interpretation of evidence and nothing left over from people's education stood in the way. Even if we teach students everything in our curricula about the world and about the higher cognitive processes, the events listed above demonstrate that our effort has not been nearly enough. 

What is needed further is a design for education in which personal, emotional self-management combines with a sensitive and accurate picture of the world in order to produce judgment pruned of distortions. Since they obviously obtain it from nowhere else, students need to leave the environs of their public education understanding how the impelling drives of self-interest and passion that can be so positive when channeled to constructive purposes can be warped.  They need to understand how vulnerable they remain when these aspects are left unconscious, how leaders study them in order to manipulate them for ends contrary to their own interests.

Constructive education-talk says “we want to educate whole people.  However much we aim at this, the historical record tells us that our aim overall has been egregiously misdirected. It reminds us we must be deliberate and resolute in altering our thinking if we expect society to survive its own internal malfunctions--to say nothing of disasters that may come upon it from the outside.

The implication for education is profound. The usual sources of how to manage one's inner world and hence how to select the opinions to assert in society have not produced the results needed to manage a complex world.  This is a different issue, we should note, than what to teach about the world. If some arrive at school believing that “the Holocaust never happened, or œthere are colonies on the back side of the moon, or the world was created circa 6,000 B.C, I suggest here that we don't engage in that argument. People already debate such things in venues where a specific action flows from a conclusion, and I suggest we respect those processes. It is not the business of government or its educational system to correct everyone’s contrary thinking.

The problem is deeper and more person-centered. It has to do with how one conducts internal activity to produce a constructive, healthy outward life.  We want rational self-awareness reflected in the following kinds of questions that invite people to notice what they do "inside" that makes them emotionally healthy and socially constructive. It is a rational, self-aware direction to ask ourselves and our students:

Do you understand what it means to be in balance?

Have you experienced finding yourself in balance versus out of balance?

What were the effects of one or the other on you and on others?

How does your balance affect your thinking? When you want something badly, how does it affect your judgment about it?

What's the difference between balance and harmony?

How do you obtain these in your life? In society?

How do sweeps of emotion affect groups you're familiar with?

How do balance and harmony affect an entire society's major decisions?

The list can be extended indefinitely, of course, as it tracks the fault line between the tectonic plates of one's wants, assumptions, fears, and decisions. What we can conclude about education, however, is that teaching students to examine the quality of their own thinking does not occur by accident.  It requires conscious attention to one's personal motivations, values, and emotions prior even to attempting to "reason logically." If we don't aim for such balance in the mainstream population, however, we can be sure that we imperil the nation.  We make it more likely that children still under our influence will later do just as prior generations have done—insert their own preconceptions and baser motives precisely where conditions scream for balance and refined awareness.