[This is an excerpted draft from our forthcoming book, TOAST RULES: 10 Ways to Burn Your Organization (and Yourself)]
At a recent faculty dinner, our tablemates were discussing something they called “Premature Cognitive Conditioning.” “What’s that?” David wondered aloud. One of them gave an example: “if you want to train an elephant, you chain the baby elephant to a tree with an enormous chain. Over time, you reduce the size of the chain and the tree until the elephant, now fully grown, is contained with nothing more than a flimsy rope and a small twig. The elephant has learned at an early age that is impossible to escape, regardless of the reality of the flimsy rope and the twig. It has made a ‘commitment’ to its limitations based on its early life experiences.”
Another tablemate told of an article he’d read about how fish in aquariums are trained by placing large glass partitions between the different species. “After some time,” he proclaimed, “the partitions are removed and the fish are incapable of swimming beyond the point where there once was a partition!” This commitment to limitation isn’t limited to animals—humans invest huge amounts of trust in their own length of flimsy string, those “unwritten rules” by which we live, the ways in which we quash creative questioning and reinforce limitations on others.
REDUCTION INSTRUCTION
In 1969, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner wrote a terrific book entitled Teaching As A Subversive Activity. As relevant today as when first published, it offers some clues about what happens to, “YES,” and about how “yes, but…” came to be cobbled together. Here’s the root challenge they address in the book: “What students do mostly in class is guess what teacher wants them to say.” (pg. 19)
Our current emphasis on standardized tests—and their impact on teaching—reveals how little has changed since Postman and Weingartner first published their assault on outdated teaching methods. Here’s the crisis they outlined:
“…let us remind you, for a moment, of the process that characterizes school environments: what students are restricted to (solely and even vengefully) is the process of memorizing (partially and temporarily) somebody else’s answers to somebody else’s questions. It is staggering to consider the implications of this fact. The most important intellectual ability man has yet developed – the art and science of asking questions – is not taught in school! Moreover, it is not ‘taught’ in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued.” (Neil Postman, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, pp 24 – 25)
Our current national conversation about the educational system fixates on test scores and ignores the underlying structure that produces them. Content-focused learning will always produce mediocre results as will bottom-line focused businesses. These structures produce elephants held in place by the thinnest of strings because that is what they were designed to do. Chain a child brimming with “YES!” to a desk (sit up straight, don’t talk) and teach her that 1) her natural curiosity is a disruption and has limited value in school, 2) there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and 3) the teacher is the keeper of the distinction.
Over time, the child will reduce the scope and range of her natural curiosity and become a master of mining the teacher for the “right” answer. The goal is to fill in the correct bubble. When she enters adulthood and the workforce she’ll know that something is missing, that she is living too small but won’t really know what that means. Her employer won’t worry about her wandering beyond the limits of her reduced creative capacity because she has made a premature cognitive commitment to the idea that her curiosity is dangerous and the right answer is located elsewhere if she can only find an expert to illuminate it. Yet, simultaneously, her employer will be critical of her because she shows limited self-initiative. A flimsy rope and a small stick, “yes, but…” is prison enough.
Recent Comments