Behavior Policies To Effect Behavior May Have To Focus Elsewhere

In response to a request for thoughts on developing policies, here, and here. I am becoming aware that I have a sequence of reactions. My first reaction is to not put much faith in policies. In order for an effective policy to work, the policy makers must somehow transfer the true intent and desired outcome to the policy enforcers. This is not easily done. Just try the game where people sit in a circle, then the first person reads a sentence to the person on their left, the message is repeated around the circle until it gets back to the reader. And see what you get.


As one who used to study the teaching of rats to follow a maze. played with "Skinner Boxes", worked in a psychiatric in-patient unit and participated in a nationwide AID's research on migrant workers, when it comes to behaviors, I am all up with scientific understanding of cause and effect.

In the late 70's, I also used to conduct parenting classes using the framework of Systematic Teaching for Effective Parenting (STEP). I think it may still be around.

While I respect the need for an answer to the question to develop effective behavior policies, I struggle with how to present my belief that the real answer lies in a comprehensive understanding of various social influences that may not be readily recognized.

Perhaps what I am trying to present can be illustrated by this article I found. It is a long read, but if one is truly interested in gaining a perspective of why common practice may not be working, it might be worth the time.

I chose a few comments that I would bring out in a discussion. I would also like to say to the readers to remember not to personalize the comments and reject the content. Self critique and continued analysis of one's part of the project is a must when trying to solve an issue one who is engaged with. The few teachers/administrators that read this are probably what the writer refers to below as "swimming up stream". His comments about middle school reminded me that two of my kids were temporarily placed in private schools due to the unsatisfactory circumstances in their middle school settings. And the reason they both wanted to go back to public school: socialization preferences. Two have graduated from college or it's equivalent, (Helen Keller National Center for deaf/blind for the disabled one), and one is attending.

Why Nerds Are Unpopular

"......And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school."


"But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy


(Can we define "the enemy" as nerds, (the focus of this article), as adults (parents, teachers, etc,)?

......"I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year............

......For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.


The writer is talking about the social influence of "being popular" effecting behaviors.
".....Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about."

"....If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase."

"......Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric."


"......In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system."

"............We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents." Could this be a commentary on in-house hiring practices?


"...........The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning."

"..........I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem"

"..........Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can."

".....If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both." Paul Graham