Parents: Be Your Children’s Friend—Give Them the Easy Life

“It's not our job to be our children's friend and make life easy for them,” so states a mom blogger recently. She is apparently responding to the modern disease known as “helicoptering,” the parental behavior of hovering over one’s children to make sure they suffer no pain in life.

Many issues are raised in the above false dichotomy. Let me focus on friendship and the easy life.

Kindness versus “Hard Science”

In my previous post I cited Peter Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry as evidence to call modern psychiatric medical science both dictatorial and devastatingly harmful. Robert Whitaker’s very readable 2002 book Mad in America provides a great deal more detail about how the insane have been cared for in US history.

In the eighteenth century, for example, the insane were not considered human; they were wild beasts that had to be tamed. Hence the prison-like atmosphere, restraints and beatings, the blood-letting, the spinning chair, the dunking in water to the point of nearly drowning, and the administration of powerful emetics. These techniques were used repeatedly, day after day, sometimes for months. The aim of the mad-doctors, as psychiatrists were called prior to the late nineteenth century, was to terrorize patients, to break their will and supposedly knock the insanity out of them.

The twentieth century, as I mentioned in last month’s post, had its eugenics episode, and it is chronicled in detail by Whitaker, but the century also gave us shock therapies: insulin-coma, metrazol (camphor), and electro-convulsive. Administered perhaps hundreds of times, the purpose was to induce seizure, to supposedly shock the delusions and hallucinations out of patients. “Brain-damaging therapeutics” (Whitaker, p. 96), as these techniques were called, produced effects similar to brain trauma.

Transorbital lobotomy, performed with ice picks in the 1940s by the flamboyant Walter Freeman,* was called “surgically induced childhood” (p. 122). And because masturbation was still believed to be a cause of insanity, clitoridectomy was performed until 1950 (p. 79). In 1954 the drug era then began with the introduction of Thorazine.

But what happened in the nineteenth century? To be sure, many of the same cruel and inhumane techniques continued to be used. The Quakers, however, had a better idea, one that spawned the “moral treatment” movement in mental health (pp. 30-38). Recognizing that mental illness was not physiological, that it resulted from being overwhelmed by certain life events, they insisted that kindness, attention, listening, and talking were key to helping the mentally ill.

Fed well and allowed to sew, garden, read, write, and play games, the patients in the Pennsylvania Hospital that opened outside of Philadelphia in 1841 enjoyed a “pastoral comfort.” The hospital included a dining room, a greenhouse, a library, and a museum. The patients were encouraged to develop friendships, dress well, and rethink their behavior. They were urged to exercise free will and, not unlike Glasser’s Choice Theory, choose to be sane. Needless to say, they were neither chained nor beaten.

By 1890 all trace of moral treatment of the mentally ill was gone. The explosive growth of state-run, i.e., bureaucratic, hospitals made it impossible to train attendants in the spirit of kindness and empathy. What really killed moral treatment, though, was the ridicule and condescension put forth by medical doctors, especially the neurologists. They all considered themselves to be “men of hard science” and the moral treatment advocates were just old-fashioned, religious “gardeners and farmers” (p. 37). In the name of science straitjackets and cruelty were brought back; kindness and empathy were out.

The short-lived pastoral comfort of moral treatment brings to mind the “one brief shining moment” phrase from the title song in Camelot. Somewhat similar to King Arthur’s humanitarian moment in legendary history, moral treatment was eclipsed. It was stamped out by “hard science.”

Robert Whittaker is an award-winning investigative journalist. Before writing Mad in America, he subscribed to the conventional wisdom that psychiatry, especially the use of modern neuroleptic drugs, was good for the mentally ill. That is, until he stumbled on “symptom-exacerbation” experiments, conducted well into the 1990s, in which psychiatric researchers were giving patients drugs (such as ketamine, chemical cousin of angel dust) in order to worsen their psychotic symptoms. After this discovery, Whitaker in earnest began researching his book.

Psychiatric reviewers of Mad in America, not surprisingly, were unhappy campers. The reviews in fact were so negative that Whitaker’s editor advised him, if he wanted to make a living as a writer, to stay away from the field of psychiatry. He did so for awhile, writing two unrelated books, but psychiatric survivor groups kept contacting him. As a result in 2010 he wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic, the story behind the tripling of mental health disabilities from 1987-2007—this tripling despite increased usage of the alleged miracle drugs.

I have not yet read Whitaker’s latest book, but in a podcast interview about it with Peter Breggin, Whitaker relates three attempts by the psychiatric profession to silence him with ad hominem attacks and character assassinations. Here’s his response to one of the attempts. The profession, he stated in the interview, has succeeded in keeping him out of magazines where he used to write regularly.

This is how privileged “men of hard science” react when their monopoly and livelihood are threatened by facts. Fortunately, Whitaker has had the courage and independence to press on.

Many years ago William Glasser was denied a position at UCLA because he refused to buy into the medical model. In the 1980s Peter Breggin was threatened with having his license revoked because of comments he made on an Oprah Winfrey television show. (He won his case in court.) From outside the psychiatric establishment, Whitaker now joins this admirable pair.

Gentlemen, I raise a glass to you.



*It is worth noting that prior to taking up the ice pick, Freeman analyzed 1400 autopsied brains and found no differences between the normal and the schizophrenic (p. 115).


Postscript. One of the many tragic ironies in the history of science is the story of Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered the significance of and recommended—futilely in his lifetime—the use of antiseptic procedures in childbirth.

Semmelweis died a brutal death in an insane asylum.

Suffering in 1865 either from a breakdown because none of the “men of hard science” would listen to him or from Alzheimer’s disease or from syphilis, he was deceptively lured to a mental hospital. When he tried to leave, he was severely beaten, put in a straitjacket in a dark cell, doused with cold water, and given castor oil. Two weeks later he died . . . of septicemia, or blood poisoning, which he had argued was the cause of childbed fever and that the poisoning could readily have been prevented by washing the hands with chlorine.

Look It Up, Look It Up: The Open-Book Test

Remember what teachers would often say when they were unable to answer your question? “Why don't you look it up.” If there is one skill that pays rewards far beyond the school years, it is the ability to find answers on one’s own to questions that arise, when and as they arise.

I used to tell my students, “There isn’t any question you can come up with that you cannot find an answer to, or at least a good approximation of an answer to it, in the library.” In the past fifteen years, I changed the location of those answers to the Internet, since nearly everything in written form is rapidly being digitized. In the past year, I have been saying to my students, “I look up most answers to questions I have on my pocket computer.” And then I hold up my smartphone. “Look it up” is how we all educate ourselves beyond the school years.

Why do we have to memorize so much in school? Because that’s how schools have been run for millennia. A score or grade must be produced and memorization is said to be the key to that score or grade. But is it? The world does not work that way. Yes, memory is used in most jobs in the real world, but it is the memory of habit built up over weeks, months, or years of experience. When memory fails, the world says, “look it up.”

William Glasser makes this point in his 1969 book Schools Without Failure. The closed-book, memory-measuring examination, he states, is based on the “fallacy that knowledge remembered is better than knowledge looked up” (p. 72, italics omitted). “I would hate,” Glasser continues, “to drive over a bridge, work in a building, or fly in an airplane designed by engineers who depended only upon memory.” Good surgeons halt surgery to look up key steps in a procedure; the not-so-good ones—products apparently of “too many closed-book tests,” Glasser observes—rely on memory, sometimes “to the extreme detriment of the patient.”

The world says “look it up.” School says “memorize it,” even though decay rates after testing, without further use of the material, are exceptionally high. So why not use open-book testing in the schools? This is precisely what Glasser advocates, to teach students how “to use reference material quickly and efficiently.” It is what I have been doing over the past sixteen months . . . and no ivory-towered walls have come a-tumblin’ down.

In three different courses I have given ten open-book, open-notes exams (both midterm and final). Average scores have been higher than with the closed-book versions, but the grade distributions are not unusual; advanced study is still required to be successful at taking an open-book exam. My students certainly prefer open-book testing, though all or nearly all have never been exposed to it before and, as in all test-taking, a certain strategy has to be learned. I told my students to go through the test initially as if it were a closed-book exam, then go back to look up specific answers lest they run out of time looking up an answer to one question and find themselves unable to finish the test.

As Glasser concludes, “Faced with a problem in life, we marshal all of the facts we can; we don’t rely on our memories unless we have to.” Open-book tests teach us “to give thought to necessary reference material, and to utilize facts to solve problems, develop concepts, and explore issues.  Closed-book tests defeat all of these objectives.”

Then there is the artificial and false nature of testing. As I have written before (Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, p. 158):

Testing is a contrived situation that seldom corresponds to the reality it is supposed to represent. Supermarket shoppers in one study performed arithmetic calculations far more accurately in the store than on a formal test. . . . And one boy, considered the dumbest in his class, was discovered by his teacher to be a paid scorekeeper in a bowling alley, simultaneously tracking the progress of two teams of four players each. The teacher promptly created word problems, requiring students to calculate scores for games of bowling. The boy could not do the problems.

Time to inject education with a little reality.

Statements of Independence

Independent judgment is both a personality trait, a distinctive way of thinking and acting, and a character trait, a moral conviction in the face of opposition or indifference to stand by one’s beliefs and values. A number of writers in their own nuanced ways have captured the gist of these traits.

The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, offers in his Stanford Commencement Address of 2005 (1, 2) an eloquent statement of independence:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Follow your own thoughts and emotions, Jobs is saying. Don’t give in to the edicts and requests of others.

Psychiatrist William Glasser in Positive Addiction (p. 3) ties independence to happiness:

As we grow, we should learn to judge for ourselves what is worthwhile, but it takes a great deal of strength to do what is right when few people will agree with us for doing it. Most of us spend our lives in a series of compromises between doing what we believe in and doing what will please those who are important to us. Happiness depends a great deal on gaining enough strength to live with a minimum of these compromises.

It is these compromises to please others, Glasser says, that create unhappy relationships and lead us to seek compensating behaviors, such as anxiety and depression, or worse. Strength to say “yes” to ourselves and “no” to possibly too-demanding and probing others is the path to happiness.

Daniel Greenberg, founder of  the Sudbury Valley School, ties independence to the free society (The Crisis in American Education, p. 54):

Dependence, not independence, is the quality most suitable to authoritarian states. . . . The hallmark of the independent man is the ability to bear responsibility. To be responsible and accountable for one’s actions. To do, and to stand up for what one has done. Not to hide behind “superior orders,” not to seek shelter in group decisions, and to take strength from some heroic figure—but to be one’s own man.

The self-reliant and self-responsible individual, Greenberg is saying, does not unquestioningly take orders from authority. The citizen of a free society exhibits a healthy distrust of anyone in power.

Ayn Rand, by way of Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (p. 1019), places the source of independent judgment in one’s own mind:

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life . . .

No one, in other words, can get inside our heads to make us do our own thinking or, for that matter, make us not think. Perception, judgment, decision making, and action all originate within our minds. Control of our lives, then, is internal. Letting others “pinch hit” for us is to allow them to do our thinking.

What encourages us to become independent? How can our children develop it? Perhaps Summerhill School founder, A. S. Neill, states the conditions best (Summerhill, p. 9):

Free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.

By “free child,” Neill means one whose rights as an individual are respected by other children and adults in both home and school, and one who respects the rights of other children and adults in both home and school. Otherwise, the child is free to do whatever he or she desires, that is, is free of authoritarian edicts and bossing and bullying by others. Not surprisingly, Neill also ties independence to the free society as an essential requirement.

Independence and happiness require freedom because freedom produces independence. And independence makes happiness possible.

“Children Don’t Have Disorders; They Live in a Disordered World”

The title of this post comes from psychiatrist and attention-deficit/hyperactivity-disorder (ADHD) critic Peter Breggin. It’s a variation of Maria Montessori’s line to “control the environment, not the child.” For Montessori, children develop healthy psychologies—become “normalized,” to use her term—by being left free to pursue their own interests and choose their own educational work, provided the surroundings of the classroom are made safe and stimulating. Drugs are a cruel and totally unwarranted control of the child.

Most children who exhibit the well-known ADHD symptoms are simply failing to handle the boredom, confusion*, or authoritarianism, or all three, of school, home, and other environments in which they live and play. They are not diseased kids, possessing neurological or biochemical imbalances, who require addicting, cocaine-like stimulants to cow them into submission. They are youngsters trying to learn, and have fun in the process, but their world is complex and often the opposite of fun, especially school. What they desperately need is to be left free as much as possible to pursue their own interests and, when they request it, one or several adults to be their friends, to pay attention to them, to listen to their pleasures and worries, and to be their coach and confidant. What they most decidedly do not need are William Glasser’s seven deadly habits (p. 13): criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and bribing. All of these habits, of course, are staples of their world—and ours, but many children do not know how to cope with them. What they also most definitely do not need is to be made to feel stoned or spaced out.

Labeling children with ADHD stigmatizes them as inadequate and, as a result, induces unearned guilt, because the adults who recommend the drugs are actually blaming them for their behavior even though the theory behind the whole psychotropic drug mantra is materialism and determinism. A child who acts up in class, or who does not pay attention, according to the adults, must be controlled. Something, so the adults say, is wrong with the child, not with the adults’ methods of relating to the child. The message is clear. Donna Bryant Goertz says that medication today is the new spanking.

The evidence for a physiological basis of ADHD behavior does not exist. The experimental studies do not uphold the belief. This is especially confirmed when the ADHD researchers themselves admit that the children improve during summer vacation and when taught in smaller, more attention-focused classes. Indeed, when looking at the psychiatric professions’ nine symptoms of inattention and the nine symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity, I can say that I have often exhibited everyone of them—today, when I was a child, and in all the years in between. I also know too many highly successful people, and have heard of many others, who, if the medicines had been available when they were children, would have been drugged to the hilt and probably had their futures destroyed.

The criteria to look at concerning ADHD are Glasser’s (p. 256)**: if your child can watch and understand television, play video games, and use a computer, do better for some teachers than for others, do better in one subject than another that requires the same level of reading and understanding, and has good friends he or she enjoys being with, then it is highly unlikely that there is anything wrong with your child. Glasser (click educational, last clip on the page) piercingly and humorously puts the issue in perspective when he says that the worst attention deficit disorders in the world are husbands and wives, because many of them so often do not listen to each other!

As I have said in these pages before, the solution to helping so-called problem children is to let them go fish. “Many are just plain bored of sitting at a desk in a classroom and are sick of having adults lord their size and power over them.” Going fishing, though literally possible at the Sudbury Valley School, is metaphor for getting adults off their backs and more generally for removing confusion and authoritarianism from their lives.



*I say “confusion” because some parents today who have rejected the authoritarianism of their parents and grandparents have nevertheless failed to provide structure and consistency for their children. Similar behavior can result. Some schools can also provide this confusion.

**I’ve simplified these criteria. See pp. 255-59 in Choice Theory for a fuller understanding of Glasser’s analysis of the so-called learning disabilities. Glasser calls psychotropic medicines “brain drugs,” refusing to grant them the honorific “medicines,” and refers to their side effects as effects. There’s nothing secondary or “side,” he says, about the effects of brain drugs.

Control and Choice in Education

In education there exists a continuum of how much control is exerted over students or, to put it another way, how much choice is given to them. The scale ranges from the total control and minimal choice of state-run traditional education to the considerable freedom to choose given to students of such alternative schools as Summerhill and Sudbury Valley. With their cleverly designed didactic materials and the choice of which materials to work on, Montessori schools probably fall somewhere in between.

Teachers in all schools vary according to how much control they will exert in the implementation of their school’s ideology and how much choice they will give the students. So even an American public school classroom can enjoy freedom of choice and a Montessori classroom can be tightly controlled. The question is, how much control and choice should there be in education?

One answer for the public school is given by psychiatrist William Glasser: 

We are pushing for drug-free schools. We need to push even harder for coercion-free and failure-free quality schools because it is the alienation caused by coercion and punishment that leads young people to turn seriously to drugs (Choice Theory, p. 255).

“Quality school” is Glasser’s term for a B or above mastery learning, failure-free environment for all students. Replacing coercive external control psychology (1, 2), says Glasser, with kind and attentive teacher-student relationships will enable students to develop success identities. Glasser’s approach includes getting rid of the rewards-and-punishment system of grading and punitive detention and principal’s office “solutions” to disruption. Students will then become motivated through the friendly relationships with their teachers to achieve educational goals.

Glasser demonstrates in detail how his coercion-free, failure-free approach to schooling was accomplished with so-called learning disabled students in a Cincinnati middle school (Choice Theory, pp. 259-69; also described here). Smothered with kindness and attention, one hundred forty-eight overaged, “left behind,” probably destined-for-jail middle school students transformed themselves and learned what was required to move on to high school. Removing structural control over the students, adjusting to their pace of learning, and giving them choice in their education led to this success. Removing coercion removed failure.

The ultimate in coercion-free, failure-free schooling is that of Summerhill and Sudbury Valley, where nearly everything is optional—especially courses and class attendance—and the students are given wide control of the schools through the democratic process. The question remains, though, how much control and choice should be left to the students.* This question cannot be answered without understanding that the main structural control in education today is the state’s monopoly over schooling, achieved through compulsory attendance laws, expropriation of funds to pay for the system, and curricular and methodological dictates through the state’s regulatory power. The framework of education is that control and choice are denied to both parents and students.

In the absence of state involvement, that is, in a free market in education, the issue of control and choice becomes a little less clear. If by “control” one means a prescribed curriculum that all students must study, and the parents agree to send their children to such a school, then it is the parents’ legal right to do so. Psychologically, however, one can still argue that greater control and choice be given to the child. Adjusting to pace of learning and catering to interests are two of the most important methodological requirements of a good school. Responding to students as human beings by building Glasserian friendships helps them acquire the confidence to flourish.

Traditional public education denies the legitimacy of control and choice in the classroom and through its coercive bureaucratic framework makes both impossible to maintain for any length of time. It is this context of coercion that makes the likes of Summerhill and Sudbury Valley appealing and probably has contributed to their success. (Indeed, in 1969 or so, when I read the first Summerhill book, I longed to be a student there. I would have thrived.)

As parenting requires guiding in the process of becoming a mature adult, formal education also probably requires at least some guiding in the acquisition of knowledge, values, and skills to achieve independence. Learning to think conceptually, for example, is not automatic and may require direction from an adult. But does this learning have to take place on the adult’s schedule? In the Summerhill/Sudbury model the instructor waits until lessons are requested by the students. Guidance, yes, but not coercion. As responsible parents quickly discover, they cannot force anything into their child’s brain. Children must be won over by persuasion. So, too, with students in education.


*My question presupposes the principle of rights, namely that the students should not be given control or choice to harm others or their property.

Theory of the Big Mouth

It is with great trepidation that I write this post. Not ever having been one to talk a lot, I know from experience that if I dare to talk back to a talker I will be talked into the ground. Talkers do not suffer comment lightly, especially when the comment comes from quiet people. Talkers are experts at having the last word, and if they do not like what I say in this post, I am certain that they will tell me.

The theory of the big mouth has a simple premise. The world is run by people who talk a lot. The trouble is that 99.9% (well, some large percentage—I have not conducted a survey) of the talkers do not know what they are talking about. I sometimes fantasize that the world would be a better place if the talkers were to take a holiday one day a month and say nothing for twenty-four hours. Having been a shy, quiet person all my life, I have been on the butt end of many a talker comment. Also, by not talking a lot I have been able to observe much talker behavior. What follows are my comments to talkers, my turn at talking back to them.

The butt end of talker comment is the unsolicited and often rude and ill-mannered advice given to quiet people. “Speak up kid,” “bite your tongue kid,” “you're going to have to learn to speak up or you won't survive in this world,” and that gem of the reverse golden rule given to me as fatherly advice when I was a young man working in business: “you’re going have to learn to do it to others before they do it to you.” Variations on these comments go on ad nauseam. I have often wondered why it is okay for a talker to give unsolicited advice to a quiet person, but rude and ill-mannered for a quiet person to talk back to a talker, for example, by saying something like, “you’re going to have to learn not to talk so much” or “you need to stop and think before speaking.” When any attempt is made like this, the talker usually responds with an indignant “how dare you talk to me that way.” Funny, I always thought advice-giving was a two-way street.

My observations of talkers have shown that many talkers are oblivious to psychology, especially the psychology of the person they are talking to. Often they are just oblivious, unable to see or acknowledge the obvious boredom on the faces of their listeners. It is especially sad, though, to see a parent feeling embarrassed for the behavior of a shy child when, say, the child speaks an inaudible “thank you” or “goodbye” or does not speak up at all. Haranguing children in such situations will not help them become comfortable in the company of other people and encourage them to speak up; it may drive them to become quieter and more withdrawn. Addressing their fears and discomfort is the correct aid. Besides, shyness does tend to decrease with age and maturity. It did for my father, a quiet man most of his life, and today even I, in my older years, talk to strangers!

The “theory of the big mouth,” of course, is an unfriendly designation. In me it renders an image of the bigmouth bass, a fish. What I am really talking about is a variant of Glasser’s external control psychology, best captured by this quote:

The seeds of almost all our unhappiness are planted early in our lives when we begin to encounter people who have discovered not only what is right for them—but also, unfortunately, what is right for us. Armed with this discovery and following a destructive tradition that has dominated our thinking for thousands of years, these people feel obligated to try to force us to do what they know is right. (Choice Theory, p. 4)

And talkers seem to be the ones who know what is right for everyone else, especially those pesky quiet types. It is in the elementary school years when children become aware of right and wrong. As they discover what is right, they often conclude that whatever they do is not just right for themselves but also for everyone else. They fail to acknowledge, and need to be taught, the existence of options, the wide range of behavior that is not the same as theirs, but still is right. If not corrected, this premise can lead to rankism (1, 2, 3) and BS’ing, or worse.

It is not a sin (or disadvantage) to be shy. Remember the western cowboy heroes? They all spoke few words. Indeed, psychologists have found that many people, including the gregarious and famous, feel shy at some times and in some areas of their lives. The entertainer and comedian Johnny Carson several times said that he often felt shy at cocktail parties. The advantage of being a quiet type is that we can sit back and observe what is going on in the world around us and then write about it—as in a blog like this one. And I don’t think I’ve been a failure in life. So talk on you talkers. I’ll just write about you!

Working in Business as Opposed to Being a Student

When I began working in business, shortly after receiving my bachelor's degree, I experienced a pleasant surprise: I immensely enjoyed what I was doing. Indeed, I felt that working in business was a lot more fun than being a student, so much so that it took nearly six-and-a-half years before I could summon the strength to go to graduate school. I have related this story to a number of people, but never had a good explanation or understanding why being an employee is so much more enjoyable than being a student.

The answer is not the money difference—being paid to do work as opposed to paying the school for an education. It is the feeling of importance. The work itself may not be top-level decision making, which in my case it was not, but every stroke of my pencil mattered. It made the difference in customer satisfaction and company earnings. Everyone in the company contributed to both. The sense of importance also came from the familial atmosphere I experienced with my co-workers and boss, an atmosphere I experienced in every business that I worked for but have not found in any of my academic jobs. Is there something fundamentally different about business and education?

Ask a group of students if they feel important in their school and you are likely to get a blank or incredulous “are you kidding?” stare (Glasser, p. 45).  Importance in school, they say, comes from their friends or their extracurricular activities (sports, music, theater, etc.). As a student they feel more like a number on a roster, not overly seen or respected as a person, but as just another piece of produce to be graded and sorted. This, of course, comes from the bureaucratic nature of government-run and -regulated education (1, 2, 3). Grading and sorting are among the main functions of bureaucracy. Students do not feel important because they are not treated the way customers are in privately-run businesses.* Students are not customers, but they should be.

How are customers treated in private businesses? The slogans “customers are number one” and “the customer is always right” gives an indication of the importance of customers to businesses and the importance customers should feel when patronizing most well-run businesses. But what businesses can we compare to education to see what an education customer in a free market might feel? There are today several (relatively) free markets in education. Private lessons, whether piano, personal training, or tutoring, are one. The customer is given the instructor’s full attention and is rarely graded or made to suffer rewards and punishments. Importance is built-in to this type of learning.

Team lessons, especially in sports, are another. While softball and basketball coaches do evaluate players for best position and first or second team, they usually do not employ rewards and punishments of the type that carry the weight of school grades. The players, as a result, have fun working as a team to beat the other teams. There are small private classes, sometimes held in an instructor’s living room or in a rented hotel room. Customers feel relaxed and important to the instructor because they are there just to learn and have fun in the process. They are not there to be graded or tested, the source of anxiety and decreased feelings of importance. Finally, there are large private classes—lectures—sometimes given in hotel ballrooms. No grades, no tests. The customers are there to learn and take away from the lecture what they want. They are important to the lecturer for the revenue he or she earns. They may not have personal contact and receive personal attention from the lecturer, but the atmosphere nevertheless is pleasant—far more pleasant than the impersonal grad-student run megasections many of us have endured in research universities.

Clearly, it is the critical, comparative grade-and-sort atmosphere of government-run education that eliminates almost any chance for the student (customer) to acquire a sense of importance. Throw in at the K-12 level the compulsory attendance laws and you have students, especially at the secondary level, who have the sense of being in jail.**

The bureaucratic nature of education also makes it difficult for faculty to enjoy the familial atmosphere I experienced in private businesses. As professors, we have to fill out the right forms (and get our hands slapped if we don’t) and comply with the myriad rules. Customer satisfaction and earnings are irrelevant, so there is no benchmark of performance or importance. Conflict frequently erupts with the lack of a common goal. With guaranteed lifetime employment, the “family” sometimes becomes enmeshed in what seems like a marriage “without the possibility of divorce.” The stakes in such a situation have become too small.



* I include private universities, including the for-profits, in the category of bureaucratic education, because they are regulated and therefore their culture is controlled and defined by the government.


** Craig Haney and Philip Zimbardo, “It’s Tough to Tell a High School from a Prison,” Psychology Today, June 1975. Also, see John Holt, The Underachieving School.

Standing Down from External Control

In economics the principle of unilateral free trade (1, 2, 3) holds that everyone benefits when one country by itself, ignoring what others may do, eliminates all tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. Cheap imports increase the standard of living both at home and in the exporting country. The historical experiment and demonstration of this principle was the repeal of England's Corn Laws in 1846. Other countries followed England's lead and for a brief time peace, the natural consequence of free trade, was achieved.*

In human relationships psychiatrist William Glasser, whose choice theory I discussed in a previous post, offers a similar principle: in spite of what others may do (assuming the absence of physical abuse or attack), eliminate all habits of external control psychology from one's own behavior. The result will be less stress—from trying and failing to control the other person's behavior—and may even bring about a sense of calm. And the other person, says Glasser, may notice your change leading to a discussion of internal control psychology and new ways of relating to one another. Peace within the relationship may be achieved.

This strategy of unilateral refusal to use external control tactics is especially effective with teenagers, but works well in all relationships. Teenagers are not yet fully mature and can therefore afford guidance from parents, but they also want to be independent of their parents and resist attempts at control. Parents in the meantime instinctively practice all of Glasser's deadly habits—criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and bribing, plus many other variations—and protest that if none of these are used the child will not learn or mature or become responsible, etc. But parents in Glasser's practice who have stood down from using the external control habits have found their teenagers coming back to them, opening up, and even asking for advice. "When you stop controlling," as Glasser says (chapter 1), "you gain control." The strength of the relationship is what gives the parent influence. The deadly habits erode and destroy both.

The value of eliminating external control tactics with students, a relationship that is not unlike that of parents to teenagers, has been demonstrated abundantly by Glasser in numerous books (1, 2, for example). Other factors may complicate matters in couples and work relationships. A mature adult can choose to walk away from either or both. And a spouse or boss may not be willing to try to make the relationship work. Nevertheless, one-sided abandonment of external control, notably the "CBC's" (criticizing, blaming, and complaining), can work wonders in improving a relationship. Criticizing, says Glasser, is the most corrosive habit one can use in any relationship, but it is particularly harmful in marriages. Caring, trusting, listening, supporting, negotiating, befriending, and encouraging—Glasser's connecting habits—bring people closer together (1, 2).

Work relationships sometimes pose a challenge if the employee feels stuck and cannot move to a new job. The boss should be practicing what Glasser calls lead management, the application of choice theory to managing employees, but what if the boss is external control to the point of being almost drill-sergeant harsh? What can the employee do? Abandoning external control and practicing the connecting habits are a must, but offering an occasional compliment might melt some of the insecurities that seem to motivate such a boss. And reminding yourself constantly that you are choosing to remain in that position, choosing to stay for the benefits, for example, or to stay until economic conditions improve, can help. Internal control means choosing one's own behavior. Knowing that builds confidence and contentment.

The connection between internal control psychology and free trade is simple. The former is a theory of human relationships, of how people get along with one another on a personal basis, whereas the latter is a theory of human relationships occurring within the social institutions of business and society. The latter is the implementation of the former and there is no place for external control in either relationships or trade.** This is why advocates of capitalism argue that the monolithic and historical practitioner of external control, the government, should be prevented permanently from intruding into all aspects of our personal and business lives.


* "If goods don't cross borders, armies will" is a phrase attributed to French economist Frederic Bastiat. It emphasizes the connection between free trade and peace.
** Indeed, Ayn Rand calls the trader principle the foundation of all rational human relationships, because it is the principle of justice.

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.