Choice Theory and Capitalism versus Dictatorship

In my book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 118, note 8), I speculate that the root of dictatorship may be the parent/child relationship, stemming from the millenniums old theory of teaching and parenting based on authoritarianism. “If it is okay to coerce children,” I write, “why should it not also be okay to coerce adults?”

I drew this conclusion not just from the work of Maria Montessori, but also from Thomas Gordon, Haim Ginott, and Alfie Kohn. All are advocates in varying degrees of so-called intrinsic motivation. Some have even suggested a connection between external control psychology and dictatorship, but none have linked internal control with the need for laissez-faire capitalism. Psychiatrist William Glasser goes furthest by commenting extensively on our “external control society” and the need for less of it. Glasser indeed provides an extremely simple and fundamental foundation of my statement in his discussions of choice theory versus external control.

Choice theory, according to Glasser, means that we choose most of our behavior, including the alleged mental illness of depression. Glasser prefers verbs to nouns, emphasizing what we choose to do rather than dwelling on what we think is done to us. So he says that we do not suffer depression. Rather, we depress, or choose to depress, when we experience a disappointment. The way out of depressing, he says, is to take internal control of our lives by making value judgments to choose other, happier behaviors and then acting on those judgments.

The broader implication is that we control only our own behaviors and not that of others. Even though we may try at length to change other people’s behaviors, the result on our part is usually frustration, or worse, and on the part of the person we are trying to change resistance, rebellion, resignation, or withdrawal. The relationship—whether it is between parent and child, husband and wife, teacher and student, or manager and employee—ultimately ends in unhappiness, and sometimes complete separation. The solution, says Glasser, is to stop trying to change other people’s behavior, acknowledging and acting on the fact that we can only control or change our own.

This means avoiding Glasser’s seven deadly habits that destroy personal relationships: criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and rewarding to control (bribing) (Unhappy Teenagers, p. 13). These are all tools of external control psychology and their aim is to coerce behavioral change by bypassing the other person’s consent or understanding. Criticizing and blaming, says Glasser, are the worst, though all of the habits erode closeness. When the aim of coercive behavioral change is taken to the extreme, direct physical force may result, such as spanking, hitting, or the use of weapons. Caring, trusting, listening, supporting, negotiating, befriending, and encouraging are the connecting habits that Glasser recommends as replacements for the deadly ones (p. 14).

External control psychology is the belief that we know what is best for others and that we have the right to impose our will on those others. It is the use of rewards and punishments as motivation. When elevated to the relationship of politician and citizen (Glasser does not quite go this far), external control psychology becomes the right to impose—by legislation or fiat—laws, regulations, and edicts to force citizens to do or not do what the politicians think is best. External control psychology assumes and attempts to invoke dependence. It is the real root of dictatorship.

Internal control psychology, on the other hand, is the foundation of independent judgment. It assumes that each of us controls our own destiny by choosing our values and behaviors. Interaction with others is conducted through reason and logic, that is, persuasion, rather than Glasser’s manipulative deadly habits. Motivating others requires appealing to the others’ self-interest, communicating in such a way that the others see the benefit to themselves of the requested action. Internal control psychology treats others with dignity. It derives from a high level of self-esteem and respect for others and acknowledges that the others have or are capable of a similar disposition.

At the political level, internal control psychology means each individual has the right to choose his or her own values and behaviors. To the politicians and government in general, it means: leave us alone. Internal control psychology is the root of capitalism.

On Judging the Quality of Today’s Students

A favorite pastime of today’s teachers, especially college professors, is the trashing of their students.

“My students are terrible,” is the common complaint. “They can’t write, they can’t calculate, and they can’t think. They are woefully ignorant! They just don’t measure up to the standards of the good old days when I was a student.” And those “good old days,” depending on the age of the critic, could be the 1940s, the ‘60s, or the ‘80s. Exaggeration aside, the complaint is that students today are not receiving the education that their predecessors did.

The facts, however, are a little more difficult to discern. Consider first of all that teachers have always complained about their students—“shop talk” style not unlike the complaints of sales representatives about their customers or employees about their bosses. Harvard Business School faculty in the 1950s complained about the math skills of their liberal-arts trained graduate students and a Harvard report in 1894 complained about grade inflation (quoted in Kohn).

I, too, have expressed complaints about my students’ skills, especially the handling of decimals, but my A students do know where the decimal point goes and the others have a variety of reasons why they don’t know or don’t care to demonstrate that they do know. Interest or desire, after all, is a major factor in determining what people learn. Some, perhaps many, students just may not be interested in the subject of the complaining teachers’ courses.

In my “good old days” of elementary school in the 1950s, it was common to have Jesuitical style contests at the chalkboard to see who could solve arithmetic problems the fastest. I was usually in the top three, but in a class of thirty-five students that leaves thirty-two who did not handle the math as well. Similarly for spelling. So what? Well, almost all of those thirty-two students at the time likely did not go on to college and some may not have graduated from high school; today, most of their counterparts are sitting in college classes.* Whatever one thinks of the normal curve as it applies to intelligence (or motivation), the lower ends of the curve are now in college and probably affecting test scores and grades (not that I think much of either) and demonstrating lesser knowledge and skill than I had back in those good old days.

This phenomenon could explain declining SAT scores (not that I think much of the SAT—it’s no longer referred to as an aptitude test and it predicts little about college success), as well as the lack of broad scale grade inflation that everyone assumes to exist. If grade inflation exists, it probably has occurred at the more elite institutions, the greater influx of weaker students in less prestigious schools keeping the grade point averages level or even declining (1). As education and social critic Alfie Kohn has said, “No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A's for the same work that used to receive B's or C's. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim” (2).

What about the change in curricula? Curricula change all the time. Teaching and understanding of the Greek language in ancient Roman schools declined in the latter part of the Empire (and, no doubt, teachers of Greek back then complained that their students didn’t know anything!). In the early nineteenth century US, the university core curriculum consisted of math, Latin and Greek language and literature, and a strong dose of protestant Christianity. Science and history did not appear until the last third of the nineteenth century. And western civilization courses did not appear until the 1920s. (Term projects, the attempt to give students some individual choice and initiative in education, are products of the progressives.)

I would, of course, like my students to be better informed about American and world history, but then again, I took two American history courses in junior and senior high school and at least one course on world history, but I only remember what I learned in college—when I was much more interested in the topic. And, oh yes, I was also taught, among other myths, that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. When I finally saw the Potomac as a young adult, I concluded, “Man, the Kansas City A’s sure could have used GW’s arm!”

And then there’s the “cacophony of teaching” that Lawrence Cremin (pp. 51-83) talked about in 1990. Teaching is everywhere, not just in the classroom. More so today with the Internet. That Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the early 1960s (p. 35) was seen on television by more people in one night than had seen it since it was first performed in 1600 should make English teachers everywhere praise television, not just condemn it.

Bottom line: it’s not easy to compare today’s students with their grandparents, especially when most of the grandparents did not attend college (or have television or the Internet) and may have quit high school to go straight into a blue-collar job. (And most of my students’ grandparents attended school, if at all, in Mexico, China, or Vietnam.) It is also important for teachers to introspect about their own motivations for complaining about students. Are teachers just patting themselves on the back for being smarter than their students?** Or are they genuinely concerned about teaching and, if so, why don’t they focus on the minds they are presented with and work to stretch them as far as the minds are capable. In the course of a year, one or two of the minds just might get turned on to the subject or method of the teacher and become eager to learn more.

After all, was it not one or two teachers that turned on the present teachers to become teachers? That’s how it happened for me. Inspiration, interest, motivation, method. Those are the fundamentals of a good teacher, not any particular subject matter. Get the light turned on in the student first. The subject matter will follow.



* Only 1.6% of the US population aged 15-24 was enrolled in college in 1900, 12% in 1950, and 38% in 2000 (1, 2). Other calculations indicate that 69% of high school graduates began college studies right after high school in 2005, whereas only 49% did in 1980—the implication being that the percentages were correspondingly smaller in earlier years.

** Teachers are motivated to learn. That’s why they become teachers. They love their subjects and tend to expect everyone else to love it the same as they do (an unrealistic expectation). And, because of their motivation, most were good students, perhaps very good students, but the normal curve again, in motivation—never mind intelligence, means that many of today’s students are not going to give a hoot about what the teacher is teaching. I think the critics delude themselves if they think their classmates in the good old days learned the multiplication tables or correct spelling or history, etc., as well as they did.

Healthy and Unhealthy Competition

Education and social critic Alfie Kohn is an exhaustive researcher and engaging writer. I have not read all of his eleven original books, but I do highly recommend these two: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes and Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. The titles and subtitles make clear his premises about human motivation and behavior. In his first book, however, No Contest: The Case against Competition, Kohn writes (p. 9), “The more closely I have examined the topic, the more firmly I have become convinced that competition is an inherently undesirable arrangement, that the phrase healthy competition is actually a contradiction in terms.” To this, I must take exception.

Kohn, a strong defender of intrinsic motivation, frames his critique of competition—an extrinsic motivator—as setting up an irreconcilable conflict between doing well and beating others, as focusing on competence and accomplishment vs. trying to do something better than someone else. But healthy competition, especially the economic type, requires strong focus on doing well; beating someone else in the process, if it is focused on at all, is consequence. Kohn’s understanding of economic competition, unfortunately, is laced with Marxist mythology, Galbraith’s dependence effect, and the doctrine of pure and perfect competition, so he sees competition as an unfair and arbitrary creator of desires. Even at the highest levels of athletic competition, winning is consequence of doing well. Winning for its own sake is indeed not an attractive character trait.

Other forms of competition, however, do tend to focus exclusively, or nearly so, on beating others. Competition in the animal kingdom is the extreme example where, because of the limited supply of food and territory, competition often becomes a fight-to-the-death encounter. Among humans living in a society of abundance, a different kind of fight-to-the-death desperation is sometimes seen—not physical desperation as animals might face, but psychological. Because of the anxiety that many people feel, “competitiveness,” or a desperate need to defeat others, becomes a defensive motivator. Doing well takes a back seat. Occasionally, a highly talented and accomplished person exhibits defense-driven competitiveness, but this does not detract from the point that the source of the competitiveness is psychology and the source of the accomplishment is ability.

The one form of competition that devalues doing well and encourages beating others is that caused by government intervention into the economy. Ludwig von Mises points out (chapter 15, section 5) that totalitarian states encourage people to “court the favor of those in power,” but this is true of any bureaucratic intrusion into the economy. Licensed professionals, because of the privileges extended to them by the government, will focus less on doing their jobs well and more on making sure the bureaucrats keep the unlicensed out of their market. Because of the restriction in supply brought about by the licensing monopoly, the consumers of that profession must now scramble—not too differently from what animals must do in their kingdom—to compete with each other, that is, to try to beat others, to obtain that limited supply. The beaten ones, as in the medical market, go without.

Kohn’s book is filled with examples of bureaucratic and defensive competition, two types that I would agree are unhealthy, but he does not always identify them as such. He, of course, confuses the two with healthy, economic competition. If read with an understanding of this confusion in mind, Kohn’s book can provide a detailed analysis of the less savory forms of competition that exist in our society.