Fundamentals for Learning.

I want to think about why we are motivated to learn and why being told to learn on command only works to some degree and with some kids. Why approval and good-regard are effective and why any form of negativity can destroy a child's interest in, or liking for, a subject.

I have now come to know that my wanting to be a musician was because of my grandmother`s love for me and her passion for music. My sense of rightfulness and my compassion come from her too along with my love of nature.
Of course, when one is in such a relationship one doesn`t notice that one is copying someone else out of love, still less that we come to hate things because of someone negative in our lives, but just as we copy behaviours, we copy ideas, attitudes and experience of pleasures. My delight at seeing blossom in the spring is more than just me experiencing pleasure on a sensory level, my experience is loaded with my grandmother.

When I see the beauty of apple blossom, the pleasing shape of a tree and its branches and take a closer look at the delicate form of the tiny flowers, my shift from the macro to the micro is my grandmother appreciating the detail of nature and, second hand, my mirrored wonder.

So why do we follow someone else`s passion or hobby, someones liking or pleasure? First comes love with its approval of us, then comes a reciprocal copying of ideas and pleasures. When someone loves us or gives us positive regard, we will do anything to please them. Sharing their pleasures is our reciprocal approval, a sign to them that they are loved too !
On the other hand, when we receive disapproval from the folks around us it has the opposite effect. We invariably, especially in our formative years, come to dislike what they do or what they stand for. The power of disapproval is immense. At its extremity we take on a disapproving parent`s bad regard for us into ourselves, being to ourselves our own criticiser, pulling ourselves down and destroying ourselves from within. This we can see in a small child where they have experienced and hold onto bad regard and therefore have a bad regard for themselves: "I cant do it because I`m useless at things." Children take into themselves negative ideas about themselves expressed by others. This does not just take the form of direct criticism, it can be merely where a parent communicates a dissatisfaction with their behaviour or endeavours in terms of body language. We don`t know the threshold for an amount of criticism that is "too much" or a severity of criticism that is "too invasive", these are subjective, but it is for this reason that we must endeavour to be careful when we criticise children. Particularly damaging is criticism in education.....

Remember that disapprobation will lead a child to feel unhappy about a subject and their own abilities, this may be transitory or PERMANENT. It is fragile indeed to be responsible for a child`s education in any form at any age because both overt signals of disparagement or covert body language can take away a child`s confidence, their self regard and their willingness to learn. Most teachers, within a classroom environment, disregard, probably don`t think about, the impact of the manner of their relation towards their pupils. Are we surprised by this?

Well, I for one am not, a classroom is a group function, a group organism, as such it is not concerned with individuals or the wellbeing of individuals EXCEPT where their unhappiness might effect the viability of the whole organism. Harsh, sad, but true. In a group a teacher cannot pay attention to individual needs, the aim is to take as many of the group towards a rote standard or examination, not to cherish and nurture everybody according to their needs. I think that given this obvious fact, it is necessary for a teacher to morally compromise themselves. Certainly, we can see evidence for this in a teacher`s need to employ a guilt-shift upon hapless pupils who do not conform to the needs of the teacher and the class as a whole. Just as we saw in regard to the dumbing-down medication of old people in old folks homes, we see teachers willing to have their charges medicated for unwanted behaviours as in the case of the invented illness of A.D.H.D.

The very fact that the children who are disruptive, who do not follow the model of the classroom, are labeled with psychological diagnoses tells us that this is indeed a symptom of a group dynamic that labels the misfits in order to shift responsibility from a survival of the fittest teacher-led group, onto the child who doesn`t conform. As often when we human beings need to disavail ourselves of guilt, we see here the use of psychiatry to make certain that the misfit child gets a label and, better still, medication. Sadly, the teacher needs to escape the guilt that being part of a runting process would bring them, and this is why so many teachers support the medication of children who exhibit unwanted behaviours.

So to return to my second paragraph, let`s round up some fundamentals for achieving learning... We know that positive regard is essential when dealing with children of any age. We can see, too, that a classroom and all its dynamics, will bestow upon kids who fit in, learn to the required formula and keep up with the group, an ongoing approval. Necessarily, then, kids who do not will receive a comparative negative regard. This puts them at an instant disadvantage. This is why classrooms in mainstream schools do not work. It is simply not possible to make sure that ALL children receive the necessary attention to ensure that they think positively about themselves and that the nature of the classroom does not deleteriously effect their learning.

Love, positivity, praise, all engender attention, assimilation and eagerness. The most positive way to learn is with the facilitation of an adult who gives lots of positivity. Any sign of negativity, disrespect, or ill -couched criticism is absolute poison to learning.

In my next blog I want to take a look at why we eat animals......

Home Education, Sanctuary for Children.

Please sign this petition to help a persecuted Home Ed. family:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/ukssleaveourkidsalone/

With the Government`s recent failure to clamp their iron-fist on home education, many home educators are re-realising their rights, their right to privacy and their autonomy. Yet this menace of government to invade our lives and take away our cherished liberties is merely put on hold. There is no real liberation, no change of conscience by government and certainly no evidence that their thinking could or would include insight into the dangers of their one-track-mind solutions to issues of child abuse.

I have talked about this subject in earlier blogs, but I really want to revisit it here because the message of home education is still not getting through. Most of the media have followed government propaganda on the issue, with only a few T.V. programs or articles representing a balanced picture.

Why is this? Clearly, as with the Government`s psychological tactic that whipped up paranoia about terrorism and Muslims, the witch hunt of home education is created. That is to say that it doesn`t just happen out of thin air, so to speak, someone, some department or agency has to propel a witch hunt. Now, we have spent considerable time in my blogs talking about the hows and whys of demonisation, but I want to gather together these ideas here so that we can see it at work right in front of our eyes.

In order to witch hunt someone, or some group, you have to use fear. Fear is the way to control the people you want to help you in the hunt: folks are more likely to respond if they are frightened by something. I think though, that fear begets fear and therefore we should look to the fear that the pursuer of a witch hunt feels himself, what has caused his fear, and track his actions from there.

We know that the Government, because of the failings of the Social Services in cases of child deaths in recent years, felt pressure to prevent further cases of child deaths so that it could diminish its guilt and protect its position in the eyes of the media and the public. Obviously, a government that does not prevent child deaths will be seen in a negative way and will fear for its political survival. Political shame or embarrassment, loss of votes and loss of power for politicians, causes huge fear!

Because of this need for political survival, the Government needed to show that it would do everything to prevent further child deaths. Where it was seen to be preventing child abuse or death, didn`t matter, just the visibility of its earnestness. There then took place a classic psychological tactic to recruit all and sundry to the mission of preventing child abuse: find someone or some group, a minority, and whip up a demonisation drive. Simple and classic, it`s been used in every society over millennia !! The great thing about it is that it works every time!
The group this time is home education!! Not Jews or Muslims or Gypsies,but home educators !!! Brilliant. So home education was to be the perfect way to bury the guilt of the Social Services and get rid of those nasty fears about losing political votes!
So let`s see what Graham Badman (assigned the task of conducting a Review into home education) did to create a universal fear of home ed. that would be swallowed whole by most of the media.....

The single most important factor in the Review was to manipulate the statistics so that home education would look like a den of child abuse. Rule number one, make sure you drum up fear by using untruths about the people you want to demonise and make the fear as big and powerful as you can !!! The other vital tactic is to trap your new recruits in your demonisation drive with a guilt manoeuvre !!!! What I mean is, your potential allies will join you if you make the fear big enough, certainly, but just incase some of them wont follow you on just fear alone, you make them guilty if they don`t !!! The message is, "if you don`t help me in targeting home education, you will be guilty if any child dies" !!! The combination of these two components makes for the most powerful group drive. We saw it in the Muslim demonisation drive, for example, and let`s also not forget that the very same group psychology resulted in the death of Jean Charles de Meneses.

So, in summary, the need to shift guilt onto home education was the reason why government locked into a relentless persecutory drive. The method for it was classic fear-guilt psychology. Where the media might have defended home educators in the same way that some spoke up against the creation of terrorist paranoia to justify the Iraq war or Guantanamo, the guilt component of the strategy largely prevented them from doing so. Few in the media will want to side with a tainted group where, they are made to believe, there may be child abuse, because this would bring accusations of collusion or complacency in child abuse.With the dual operation of fear and guilt the Government managed to manipulate most of the media, and with such a small voice, home education had little chance of getting mass-media support.
More on home ed. later.......

www.parentsagainstinjustice.org.uk/

www.aspergersupport.org.uk/news/a23.html

www.home-education.org.uk/family-rights.html">www.home-education.org.uk/family-rights.htm">www.home-education.org.uk/family-rights.html

www.gutandpsychologysyndrome.com/

www.gapsdiet.com

www.scduk.co.uk/find.htm


www.guardian.co.uk/uk/menezes

Acceptable Forms of Abuse, 5.

In my previous two blogs I touched upon the idea that society wants to make us believe that children need to be controlled, and I suggested that this is a dupe.
I want to talk about why this dupe is pursued and also the consequences upon a child`s behaviour.

(Let`s just make it clear that there are degrees of control used upon children and we are not talking about the occasional necessity to curb behaviour. Neither are we here including other factors that impact upon behaviour, such as health issues. I will write about this at a later date.)

A dupe? Well, what do you mean, you might ask? A dupe implies that there is something covert going on here, some mass dissembling. The truth is that it is indeed a dupe, but that there is, generally, no conscious intent to feed us false propaganda about children. It just passes from one parent to another, one teacher to another without question, generation to generation. Yet, though there is little or no awareness for the need to hoodwink everybody into thinking that children will not comply unless forced, there is a group need for everyone to believe this ludicrous defamation of children.
The need is that this long established guilt in regard to children, is in serious need of people to go on justifying it, and all parties perpetuate the same myth about children to keep the belief going. (Honestly, if this negative regard for children were to be transferred to blacks or women or any other sub-group in society, the human rights, anti-discrimination lobbies would go ballistic!!!)

This belief about children uses our old friend the compartmental conscience to slip the whole notion past most of us. As you will know if you have stuck with me so far (!), the compartmental conscience is a psychological mechanism that allows things that are problematic to our conscience to be put into another mental box so that we can send our guilt somewhere else in our minds. In regard to the boarding school debate, for example, parents say that sending a child to boarding school is ultimately good for them and this justifies their strategies to force them to separate.

When we are legitimising threat, force or punishment towards a child, we compartmentalise by putting "guilt" onto the child in order to justify using duress to get what we want from them. The form this takes is to decide that all children are "guilty" of an inability to behave the way we want them to, unless we make them!! Once the child becomes the "guilty party" (and not us) we can legitimise our behaviour. For example: The argument for forcing a child to learn is that if you don`t make a child learn he wont learn anything. It is therefore perfectly acceptable to MAKE him do it.

So we see from this that the propaganda we hear all the time about children is essential to alleviate the guilt parents might otherwise feel about their attitude to their own children...There certainly is a vested interest, in group allegiance and for group guilt avoidance, to make children LOOK like they are "guilty"!!!! There would be no escape from conscience if it were proven that children aren`t animals that need to be tamed !!!! and I think that therein lies much of the problem that society has with home education: It simply does not want to find out that children are not guilty of an inability to learn unless forced to.

Now onto the point of this particular blog: When we force children to do as we wish, we teach children about power. Not just the power of the underling who is the child, but the power of the overlord, the parent.They don`t JUST learn how to submit and they certainly don`t learn to accept the power of their parent/s like a good child is expected to, without resentment. They learn the whole package. That is, they assimilate that the parent experiences the NEED to have power over them and they see that this is something to be desired.They want it too, and they will inevitably mirror this behaviour to some degree. As the child learns to want power, just as the parent does, the parent will have to use more power to enforce it`s will. You then have set up two people who, often desperately, need power over each other, both feeling this as an urgent need.

When parents get locked into power with their kids, they find that their offspring use, just as they do , strategies to gain power. This, in my view, is a prominent reason for much aggravation between parent and child.
Children copy parents behaviour...and parents usually don`t see it coming back at them !!!! Controlling parents get controlling children, to a commensurate degree. Parents who are chaotic emotionally, with mood swings or temper tantrums are reciprocated in kind. So in general terms, children are the parents manifested.

The fact is that a belief that tells us that children need to be controlled and the resultant behaviour parents deliver based upon this belief, is actually a major cause of misbehaviour in children. It`s like this: As an adult, if you try to make me do things and you use all sorts of threats and controls to get your own way, I am going to feel pretty bad. I will feel disrespected and powerless. From this sense of upset I may use the same behaviour back on you. I wont feel secure, I will feel vulnerable and unsettled, on edge. If you force me to learn, I will always retain, even as a forgotten imprint, an experience of learning based upon force. If you punish me for not learning what you want me to, it will always tarnish a subject that I might otherwise have wanted to learn of my own free will.

So let`s take this back to a child`s eye view.....If you do this to me as a child, I may be so humiliated that I refuse to learn altogether and you and the teachers will have to use more force to make me do it. If I still am turned off learning, I may start to hurt your world to pay you back for treating me like a thing that has to do as IT is told. But you know, even if I do what you want and I learn because I am told to, and I get qualifications and a good job, do you know what I`ll do??????Simple: I`ll do the same thing to my kids ........unless, unless I become one of the few who see that this is not the right way to behave towards children.