Horace Mann

After I finish Zimbardo's book I realized it might have been slightly biased and it really cast education in the U.S. in quite a dim light. I went ahead and did some light reading on Horace Mann. The Man (ha) with the plan. He really wasn't that bad. He did want people to become more efficient members of society and he did cause the adoption of the Prussian school method (which would cause his name to be screamed by many a kid if they knew it).

However he was working for a better society. He founded and published The Common School Journal which i had the pleasure of reading thanks to our schools access to a nice variety of data bases. He had 6 main principles
1. the public should live in the dark no longer
2. that education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by the people
3. That kids from all types of backgrounds should be able to learn together
4. that education should involve the church
5. that education is at the heart of a free society
6. that education should be provided by professional teachers.

Mann created better equipped school houses, the ability for kids to go to school till they were 16, higher pay for teachers, and a wider course of study.

After seeing his values and achievements he looks like the patron saint of education. He wanted to "equalize the conditions of men.” That is noble.

His work is viewed as a road to social advancement by the early labor movement and he suggest having common school’s would help those without discipline in the home.

He adopted the Prussian method because to him building a person's character was just as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. He did believe though that instilling values such as obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment. (this is the only unsavory bit, but it just doesn’t seem that bad.) The man faced a political backlash because he would not promote corporal punishment in schools. Horace Mann clearly had good intention with the plan, but it was meant to make us fit for the world. (by that i mean future oriented)

Visulaization excersices

So the problems with not learning a future orientation are obvious, but the solutions to them are not. (I'm not at all talking about myself here because even though I'm high in present hedonism, I'm also not too shabby on present orientation.)

People with present orientation neither identify the problem nor desire to seek the treatment. This leads them to make a solid number of bad life choices. So future oriented groups like Planned Parenthood spring up. They put tons of hours and money into developing programs to tech people if you have un-safe sex now you could wind-up with a baby in nine months or a sexually transmitted disease at any point. However the majority of people who walk into these clinics are present oriented. If they were future oriented this plan would have worked brilliantly. It doesn’t work. A group of Stanford professors conducted a study on 50 randomly selected present oriented girls at Planned Parenthood and found the class had no long term effect of them. Look a DARE six separate studies show that there is no difference in the drug and alcohol use of classes who have been through DARE and those who haven’t. Clearly Kids who are present oriented hear the fact the if this- then that, but it really doesn’t bother them.

So visualization is the key at the end of a 354 page book. Mental stimulation: the technical term for mentally rehearsing an activity. Over 2 weeks at a community center John Boyd led one class in mental stimulation and let another go through the regular course. They each selected a personal goal and imagined the thoughts, feelings and actions that would be associated with reaching that goal. Less quantifiable goals like becoming a brain surgeon turned into achievable ones like getting a GED. Most students in fact seemed to achieve 3 of their goals. In the other class however, one student overdosed, one dropped out of the program, one dropped out of school completely and yet other ran away from home.

Though the visualization sounds like some zen stuff. Zen stuff has a way of working.

Learning Time Perspective The Prussian Way

The way we filter information and disinformation is learnt from our schools and these plans are instigated by politicians who sit in Government. Governments create the institutions that instill time perspective.

In 1852 the Governor of our very own Massachusetts Edward Everett realized that children needed to be taught how to become more productive members of an industrializing society. He looked to a lawyer named Horace Mann (secretary of mass board of Education at the time) for a more effective system. Lucky of us, Mister Mann had traveled the world evaluating educational systems and he recommended the Prussian one. It consists of a compulsory 8 hour work day centering of academics and character. Academic lessons: reading, writing and arithmetic. Character lessons: discipline, morality and obedience.

Sound familiar?

Everett’s goal wasn’t to educate generations of free thinkers, but rather to prepare America’s masses for a lifetime of factory work. When they enter school, most children go from free0form day, where they can play and think as they wish, to having a teacher, class schedule and work. They learn that being late is bad, that they can only have fun some of the time, that lunch is only 30 mins long and they must go home the same time everyday from school.

I’m pretty sure Zimbardo is not lying to me, so it would seem the whole system was actually created to make us future oriented.

“Stay in your seat, don’t talk, don’t play, don’t act out, delay gratification, obey authority, and tolerate boredom. These are some of the main lesson ingrained by tradition schooling.” – zimbardo 288.

That is a pretty powerful couple of lines. He goes on to say that this works out find for most people and they come out to become productive members of society and he know as a teacher some alterations have been made. Also some schools are trying to break this down, but not really eroding at its core.

This really makes one think that a school is like a refinery and we are no more than raw material being flittered through and being spit out the other side to make the world go round.

Education: Psychological or socilogical?

So the chuck of text I read to write this post came from a really unlikely book: The Journal of Negro Education. It isn't really a book it's a journal and as such is a compilation of articles and wut not. It will soon become pretty apparent how it relates (hopefully).

This issue of the journal was published 2 years after what is considered the civil rights movement (1954). It talks about the sociological aspect of education vs. the Psychological. Once slaves were freed after the civil war and people of color gained rights thanks to a couple on amendments, people set out to increase their standard of living. It was widely believed by freedom fighters this must be done through education. Sociologically speaking the amount of education a person had corresponds to their income (to a point then one cross in to scholarly stuff and academia). So they set out too to help these people integrate into society and go to university by drilling education into them. However in the period between people of color didn’t experience a serious elevation from their not so amazing quality of living. They weren’t slaves no more, but they were clearly second class citizens. The reason why this didn’t work was because cramming knowledge into a person doesn’t lead to success. It got these your “Negros” through school and college but it hardly ever materialized into success. They were educated for political and social emancipation not to truly feel good and human. Jenne L. Noble said that what they must truly do if they want people of color to rise in society is (1) help them learn and be free to use their resources for the good of themselves and (2) Help them combat the meaninglessness and emptiness that dominates so many walk of life.

She understood that education is just not about studying hard for the future, but it is about being fulfilled with what one is currently doing. In fact the article took it one step further saying that people who embrace only the social aspect of education because a faceless member of the crowd and that in itself is a type of slavery.

Marshmallow experiment

Now the Marshmallow test is one of the most famous social experiments ever done. It is just under the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments. In fact everyone who I tell my topic too brings it up.

I was really glad to see my book had a short section on it and it was really quite interesting.

So some context if one doesn’t already know. Imagine you’re a four year old child and your teacher enters the room and places a marshmallow in front of you. He or she says something along the lines of I’m going to go run an errand, you can eat this marshmallow now, but if you wait till I get back to eat it I’ll give you another marshmallow. Now the small child if faced with a dilemma: the instant marshmallow gratification or wait a couple of minutes and get two. This is the simple, but telling experiment that was conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School.

They were interviewed years later when they were 8 year olds and the students who had delayed gratification had developed a range of superior emotions and social competencies compared to the children who had eaten the treat instantly. They checked back in with the kids again and the children who were able to control their impulses scored a whopping 210 points higher on average on the SAT compared to their impulsive 4 year old counter parts. Just how big a difference is that? Well it is a bigger score difference between record of those with a economic advantage vs. those with economic disadvantage. It is bigger than the difference between families whose parents have degrees vs. those whose parents never graduated high school. In fact the marshmallow test is 4times better at predicting SAT score over the IQ test. How ridiculous is that?

Also for your viewing pleasure a fun little video with some experiment imitators: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX_oy9614HQ

Becoming Future oriented

I never think of the future. It comes too soon. -Albert Einstein
The future ain't what it used to be. -Yogi Berra ( i thought it was yogi bear, but turns out to be some baseball player.)

No one is born future oriented. Future orientation is created by circumstance, by being born in the right place at the right time. When the conditions are right a present oriented baby will be transformed into a restrained, successful future oriented adult.

Some of the most common ways to pick up a future orientation are: Liking in a temperate zone; Living in a stable family, society, nation; being protestant or jewish; becoming educated; having a job; using technology regularly; being successful; Having future-oriented role models; and recovering from a childhood illness.

Well looking at these it is pretty obvious why they all work because all of them call for a reliance on the future. Look at the very first one: a temperate climate. One comes to expect the change of the seasons and the change of behavior that comes with it. Where as if one likes in a tropical climate the temp is always the same just with less or more rain and u don’t really need plan ahead for it.

One thing struck me when I read the list. Brookline the town with the highest concentration of Phds in the whole country is a hot spot for future oriented people. It’s a temperate climate with stable families in a stable society in one of the most stable counties in the world. Not to mention it is almost exclusively Jewish or protestant (or atheist with one of these culturally) and here successful people have jobs, use tech all the time and all have educations. Their role models come from within the town so they must have a future orientation. Other than the childhood illness one which is highly specific Brookline people are perfect for the spot.