rituals, ‘habits’, transformation
____________________________________
“Conditioned reflexes are phenomena of common and widespread
occurrence: their establishment is an integral function in
everyday life. We recognize them ourselves and in other
people under such names as ‘education’, ‘habits’, and
‘training’; and all of these are really nothing more than the
results of an establishment of new nervous connections
during the post-natal existence of the organism.”;
── Ivan Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes:
An Investigation of the Physiological Activity
of the Cerebral Cortex, 1927,
translated from the Russia,
St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy;
Tom Butler-Bowden, 50 psychology classics, 2007,
p.210
“We are what we repeatly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”;
── ARISTOTLE;
The little book of Talent :
52 tips for improving your skills;
DANIEL COYLE, 2012, author of the talent code.
Nicholas Carr., "The shallows : what the Internet is doing to our brains", © 2011, 2010
[p.29]
"Neurons seem to 'want' to receive input," explains Nancy Kanwisher of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research: "When their usual input disappears, they start responding to the next best thing." 23
(Carr, Nicholas G.; 'The shallows', © 2011, 2010, [612.80285-dc22], published by Norton, )
("The shallows : what the Internet is doing to our brains", Nicholas Carr., 1. Neuropsychology, 2. Internet-Physiological effect., 3. Internet-Psychological aspects., © 2011, 2010, [612.80285-dc22], pp.27-28, pp.28-29, p.29)
____________________________________
Allan J. McDonald with James R. Hansen, Truth, lies, and o-rings, 2009 [ ]
p.573
James R. Hansen
A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner.
--Old English Proverb
What he came to fathom about the subject conformed well to what the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle taught over 2,300 years ago: Human beings are what we repeatedly do.
(McDonald, Allan J., Truth, lies, and o-rings : inside the space shuttle challenger disaster / Allan J. McDonald with James R. Hansen., 1. challenger (spacecraft)--accidents., 2. whistle blowing--united states., 3. space shuttles--accidents--invesetigation., 4. united states. national aeronautics and space administration., 5. united states--politics and government., 2009, )
____________________________________
16:18
Why it’s better to stop searching for your true self | Michael Puett | TEDxNashville
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOJgMK21-tk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOJgMK21-tk
TEDx Talks
Apr 24, 2017
We are often told that to live a good life we should look within and find ourselves, learn to love and embrace ourselves, and always strive to be sincere and authentic to who we really are. But what if this emphasis on self-acceptance and being true to ourselves is limiting and even dangerous? In classical China one finds a counter-intuitive understanding of the self that challenges many of our assumptions about how to live a good life and how to become a better person.
One of the most popular courses at Harvard University, Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory, is taught by Michael Puett, an award-winning Harvard professor and internationally renowned scholar. Learn about the unexpected popularity of Puett's course in "The Atlantic" article, "Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?"(http://theatln.tc/2o1IvPU). Puett is also the co-author of the "New York Times" bestseller “The Path: What Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About the Good Life.” In addition, Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History in Harvard University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion. For his work in these departments, Puett is the proud recipient of a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Puett is also the author of “The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China” and “To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China,” as well as the co-author of “Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity."
____________________________________
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-are-hundreds-of-harvard-students-studying-ancient-chinese-philosophy/280356/
EDUCATION
Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?
The professor who teaches Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory claims, "This course will change your life."
By Christine Gross-Loh
OCTOBER 8, 2013
Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together.
It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China, 2,500 years ago.
Puett's course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science. The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue on campus.
Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett's bold promise: “This course will change your life.”
His students tell me it is true: that Puett uses Chinese philosophy as a way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life. Elizabeth Malkin, a student in the course last year, says, “The class absolutely changed my perspective of myself, my peers, and of the way I view the world.” Puett puts a fresh spin on the questions that Chinese scholars grappled with centuries ago. He requires his students to closely read original texts (in translation) such as Confucius’s Analects, the Mencius, and the Daodejing and then actively put the teachings into practice in their daily lives. His lectures use Chinese thought in the context of contemporary American life to help 18- and 19-year-olds who are struggling to find their place in the world figure out how to be good human beings; how to create a good society; how to have a flourishing life.
Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are “feeling pushed onto a very specific path towards very concrete career goals” than he did when he began teaching nearly 20 years ago. A recent report shows a steep decline over the last decade in the number of Harvard students who are choosing to major in the humanities, a trend roughly seen across the nation’s liberal arts schools. Finance remains the most popular career for Harvard graduates. Puett sees students who orient all their courses and even their extracurricular activities towards practical, predetermined career goals and plans.
Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t fit into that plan. Students who do this “are not paying enough attention to the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire them, out of which could come a really fulfilling, exciting life,” he explains. If what excites a student is not the same as what he has decided is best for him, he becomes trapped on a misguided path, slated to begin an unfulfilling career. Puett aims to open his students’ eyes to a different way to approach everything from relationships to career decisions. He teaches them that:
The smallest actions have the most profound ramifications. Confucius, Mencius, and other Chinese philosophers taught that the most mundane actions can have a ripple effect, and Puett urges his students to become more self-aware, to notice how even the most quotidian acts—holding open the door for someone, smiling at the grocery clerk—change the course of the day by affecting how we feel.
That rush of good feeling that comes after a daily run, the inspiring conversation with a good friend, or the momentary flash of anger that arises when someone cuts in front of us in line—what could they have to do with big life matters? Everything, actually. From a Chinese philosophical point of view, these small daily experiences provide us endless opportunities to understand ourselves. When we notice and understand what makes us tick, react, feel joyful or angry, we develop a better sense of who we are that helps us when approaching new situations. Mencius, a late Confucian thinker (4th century B.C.E.), taught that if you cultivate your better nature in these small ways, you can become an extraordinary person with an incredible influence, altering your own life as well as that of those around you, until finally “you can turn the whole world in the palm of your hand.”
Decisions are made from the heart. Americans tend to believe that humans are rational creatures who make decisions logically, using our brains. But in Chinese, the word for “mind” and “heart” are the same. Puett teaches that the heart and the mind are inextricably linked, and that one does not exist without the other. Whenever we make decisions, from the prosaic to the profound (what to make for dinner; which courses to take next semester; what career path to follow; whom to marry), we will make better ones when we intuit how to integrate heart and mind and let our rational and emotional sides blend into one. Zhuangzi, a Daoist philosopher, taught that we should train ourselves to become “spontaneous” through daily living, rather than closing ourselves off through what we think of as rational decision-making. In the same way that one deliberately practices the piano in order to eventually play it effortlessly, through our everyday activities we train ourselves to become more open to experiences and phenomena so that eventually the right responses and decisions come spontaneously, without angst, from the heart-mind.
Recent research into neuroscience is confirming that the Chinese philosophers are correct: Brain scans reveal that our unconscious awareness of emotions and phenomena around us are actually what drive the decisions we believe we are making with such logical rationality. According to Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale, if we see a happy face for just a fraction of a second (4 milliseconds to be exact), that’s long enough to elicit a mini emotional high. In one study viewers who were flashed a smile—even though it was shown too quickly for them to even realize they had seen it—perceived the things around them more positively.
If the body leads, the mind will follow. Behaving kindly (even when you are not feeling kindly), or smiling at someone (even if you aren’t feeling particularly friendly at the moment) can cause actual differences in how you end up feeling and behaving, even ultimately changing the outcome of a situation.
While all this might sound like hooey-wooey self-help, much of what Puett teaches is previously accepted cultural wisdom that has been lost in the modern age. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do,” a view shared by thinkers such as Confucius, who taught that the importance of rituals lies in how they inculcate a certain sensibility in a person. In research published in Psychological Science, social psychologist Amy Cuddy and her colleagues found that when we take a power stance (stand with our legs apart, arms thrust out, taking up space), the pose does not only cause other people to view us as more confident and powerful; it actually causes a hormonal surge that makes us become more confident.
At the end of each class, Puett challenges his students to put the Chinese philosophy they have been learning into tangible practice in their everyday lives. “The Chinese philosophers we read taught that the way to really change lives for the better is from a very mundane level, changing the way people experience and respond to the world, so what I try to do is to hit them at that level. I’m not trying to give my students really big advice about what to do with their lives. I just want to give them a sense of what they can do daily to transform how they live.” Their assignments are small ones: to first observe how they feel when they smile at a stranger, hold open a door for someone, engage in a hobby. He asks them to take note of what happens next: how every action, gesture, or word dramatically affects how others respond to them. Then Puett asks them to pursue more of the activities that they notice arouse positive, excited feelings. In their papers and discussion sections students discuss what it means to live life according to the teachings of these philosophers.
Once they’ve understood themselves better and discovered what they love to do they can then work to become adept at those activities through ample practice and self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is related to another classical Chinese concept: that effort is what counts the most, more than talent or aptitude. We aren’t limited to our innate talents; we all have enormous potential to expand our abilities if we cultivate them. You don’t have to be stuck doing what you happen to be good at; merely pay attention to what you love and proceed from there. Chinese philosophers taught that paying attention to small clues “can literally change everything that we can become as human beings,” says Puett.
To be interconnected, focus on mundane, everyday practices, and understand that great things begin with the very smallest of acts are radical ideas for young people living in a society that pressures them to think big and achieve individual excellence. This might be one reason why, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education, interest in Chinese philosophy is taking off around the nation—not just at Harvard. And it’s a message that’s especially resonating with those yearning for an alternative to the fast track they have been on all their lives.
One of Puett’s former students, Adam Mitchell, was a math and science whiz who went to Harvard intending to major in economics. At Harvard specifically and in society in general, he told me, “we’re expected to think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what you’re good at’”—a road with little risk but little reward. But after his introduction to Chinese philosophy during his sophomore year, he realized this wasn’t the only way to think about the future. Instead, he tried courses he was drawn to but wasn’t naturally adroit at because he had learned how much value lies in working hard to become better at what you love. He became more aware of the way he was affected by those around him, and how they were affected by his own actions in turn. Mitchell threw himself into foreign language learning, feels his relationships have deepened, and is today working towards a master’s degree in regional studies. He told me, “I can happily say that Professor Puett lived up to his promise, that the course did in fact change my life.”
Christine Gross-Loh is the author of The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/26/can-harvards-most-popular-professor-and-confucius-radically-change-your-life
Philosophy
Can Harvard’s most popular professor (and Confucius) radically change your life?
Michael Puett’s book The Path draws on the 2,500-year-old insights of Chinese philosophers. He explains how ‘straightening your mat’ can help you break out of the patterns that are holding you back
Professor Michael Puett
Professor Michael Puett: what we really are is ‘a messy and potentially ugly bunch of stuff’. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
Tim Dowling
Tim Dowling
@IAmTimDowling
Sun 26 Mar 2017 10.00 EDT
685
The School of Life’s Sunday sermons could be described as lectures for people who don’t believe in God but still like church. They sing secular songs before and after the sermon (when I arrive, the large congregation at Mary Ward House in London is on the second verse of A Spoonful of Sugar), and everybody seems to share an abiding faith in the power of open-mindedness.
Buddha, Confucius and Laozi
Forget mindfulness, stop trying to find yourself and start faking it
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On this particular Sunday, the sermon is to be delivered by Michael Puett, professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, and is based on his book The Path, which applies the lessons of ancient Chinese philosophers to modern life. These philosophers may have done their best work 2,500 years ago, but they were trying to answer the same big questions we still ask. How do I live my life? How do I live my life well?
“I forewarn you,” Puett tells the congregation: “At first it’s gonna sound really bleak.”
The back cover of The Path describes Puett as “Harvard’s most popular professor”. It is unclear how this distinction is awarded, but the book grew out of a 2013 magazine article written by his co-author, Christine Gross-Loh, about the undergraduate course Puett teaches – classical Chinese ethical and political theory – said to be the third most popular class at Harvard.
“That’s still the case,” Puett says when I meet him. “No 1 and No 2 are the introduction to economics class and the introduction to computer science class.” Third biggest means his lectures are delivered to around 750 students. Puett exposes them to the writings of Confucius, Mencius, Zhuangzi and Xunzi, among others, but he also promises that the course will do more than just fulfil Harvard’s required ethical reasoning module.
“I do give them a guarantee,” he says. “The guarantee I make is if they take these ideas seriously, by the end of the course, these ideas will have changed their lives.”
When he speaks publicly, Puett’s voice ranges between a low rumble and an enthusiastic squeak. At first it sounds almost muppet-like, but after a while it becomes a little incantatory – you can see why he is a popular lecturer. He doesn’t refer to notes, and he has no visual aids. His sermon, like his course, begins by shattering some commonly held preconceptions about the self: there is no self, he says. The idea that we should look within, discover our true nature and act accordingly is, according to Confucius, nonsense. What we really are, Puett says, is “a messy and potentially ugly bunch of stuff”, a collection of emotions and conditioned responses, with no guiding inner core. We think we are self-determined, but in reality we are so set in our patterns that Google exploits our predictability to sell us stuff without us noticing.
Puett’s School of Life audience is very open to this notion – I think most of us already figured as much – but apparently when he tells this to his students, it blows their minds. Is this, I wonder, a generational thing?
“Yes, I think it is very generational,” he says. “This is a generation that was raised being told: ‘Your goal is to look within. Find your true self, especially during these four years of college.’ And furthermore the argument is, once you do find yourself, try and be sincere and authentic to who you really are, and then decide your career according to who you are.”
Once they get over the shock, however, his students are immensely receptive to Chinese philosophy’s counterintuitive model. “Because they’ve spent 20 years looking for this true self and not finding it.”
The Path is in part a pleasing debunking of fashionable self-help disciplines – there are no quick fixes; improvement is incremental at best, and a lifetime of work. “I think of it as sort of anti-self-help,” says Puett. “Self-help tends to be about learning to love yourself and embrace yourself for who you are. A lot of these ideas are saying precisely the opposite – no, you overcome the self, you break the self. You should not be happy with who you are.”
While Puett’s students are obliged to get to grips with the primary sources, The Path was written for people mostly unfamiliar with the history of eastern thought. It is no simple matter to create a modern-day guide to living – boiled down to 200 pages – from writings that are often ambiguous, if not downright gnomic. In The Analects, a collection of the teachings and thoughts of Confucius compiled by his followers after his death, one typical passage reads: “He would not sit until he had straightened his mat.” You could draw a lot of contradictory conclusions from that.
Puett is also aware that there is some risk in extracting an overarching message from a number of different philosophers who often disagreed with one another.
“They do share a generally common vision of human psychology,” he says. “That we have a tendency to fall into patterns and ruts in our existences.” The Confucian strategy for disrupting these patterns was the judicious observance of ritual – coded behaviours that force people to operate outside their normal roles. This has often been misunderstood as a call for conformity and a slavish adherence to tradition, but, according to Puett, Confucius meant no such thing. “For Confucius,” he writes, “the ritual was essential because of what it did for the people performing it.”
Confucius
Confucius, who apparently ‘would not sit until he had straightened his mat’. Photograph: Apic/Getty Images
Clearly there is a limit to the benefit a 21st-century human can derive from a ritual such as, say, ancestor worship. To apply the idea to one’s own life, Puett suggests “slightly altering how you interact with people” – saying something different to the bus driver or the man at the shop’s till every morning, thereby disrupting the patterns that comprise your daily life. I put to him the possibility that you might merely freak out the bus driver.
“Part of what [the philosophers] are getting at is that it’s the break that really matters,” Puett says. “You may say it in a way that’s actually very offputting to the driver, but you’ll be better at sensing that, and therefore altering it, if it isn’t just a rote way of talking.” By gauging the change you effect, you can teach yourself to become more emotionally intelligent about your dealings with other humans.
If this technique doesn’t sound wholly alien, it is probably because modern psychology shares some of its strategies. The therapist’s room, Puett argues, is a kind of ritual space, where you shed your normal self for a while, and talk about things from a different perspective.
Puett studied western thought almost exclusively at university. He had been reading eastern philosophers on the side since high school, but it wasn’t until he began a master’s degree that he decided to learn Chinese in order to pursue it exclusively. Did it change his life the way he promises his students it will?
“I’m sure I have a long way to go, to put it mildly,” he says. “But yes, I would say I am a radically different person.”
I can testify that Puett is one of the nicest people – if not the nicest person – I have ever interviewed: attentive, generous and patient. He seems unutterably pleased to be where he is – drinking coffee with a journalist in the noisy atrium of a building in King’s Cross – and he is a font of positive reinforcement. All my questions are great, and my every summary, surmise and speculation meets his approval: “Exactly!” “Precisely!” “A perfect example!” By the end I feel hugely intelligent, which is weird, because when I later listen to the recording of our conversation, I sound far from it.
Confucius developed his ideas against a backdrop of political upheaval – the last great bronze-age dynasty, the Zhou, was in decline, and old certainties had dissolved. Confucius decided to concentrate on teaching the next generation, in the hope that they could make a better world. I ask Puett if he believes we have reached a comparable cultural crossroads.
“I’m sure that every generation feels that way,” he says. “That being said, with this generation, it really is the case.” He and I, he points out, come from a generation that “thought the big wars over isms – socialism, communism, liberalism – were over, and a vision had won that was kind of right.” The generation below – his students – feels betrayed by us, and quite rightly. “Suddenly, they’re realising that we were horribly wrong.”
So, what are we supposed to be doing now? Straightening our mats?
“In a weird way the answer is kind of yes,” says Puett. “What you’re trying to do is train yourself to become incredibly good at dealing with this capricious world.”
At the end of his Sunday sermon, Puett takes questions from the congregation. At one point, a man in my row raises his hand. “If people are just an assembly of patterns,” he asks, “what does it mean to love someone?” In a way, it seems the bleakest moment of the hour, but Puett is beaming.
“Great question!” he says.
The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything, by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh is out now in paperback.
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-with-michael-puett_b_8471666
Interview With Harvard's Most Popular Professor, Michael Puett: What's So Great, or Not, About Asian Education?
"The danger is that because we are unaware of the rituals that we engage in, we do not take them seriously and therefore they do not achieve their intended purpose. Rituals work when they are truly transformational, like the expression, 'I now pronounce you man and wife.'"
By Emanuel Pastreich, Contributor
Director of the Asia Institute
Nov 4, 2015, 08:54 AM EST
|
Updated Nov 4, 2016
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Michael Puett
The goal of all learning was to be a better human being. Teachers would to emulate Confucius as he was portrayed in The Analects (the collection of his writings). Confucius was portrayed as working with his disciples to try to and first be a better human being himself and help them become better human beings.
The common approach taken by Confucius was like this. When Confucius was confronted with some situation, a disciple would have to quote lines of poetry that helped to explain, and also to alter the sense of the situation. There's not a right answer to Confucius' request. He's simply saying: "Okay. Quote some lines. Here's the situation, quote some lines that in this conversation right now can affect the flow of the discussion in a good way. So, for example, a discipline would will quote some lines that are too obviously fitting to the situation. And Confucius would shake his head and say: "No, no." And another one will quote some lines that were too weird. And Confucius would remark, "No, no, no." And then a disciple would quote some other lines, and Confucius would say: "Yes."
(] high context culture [)
The "yes" means that the lines fit the situation and push the envelope for observers in a powerful manner. Simply quoting these lines can different response in the listeners to the situation.
Emanuel Pastreich
The test is by nature transformative.
Michael Puett
Precisely. And the idea here isn't that there's a correct set of lines to quote. The test was: are you able to sense the situation well and bring the learning you've done to the situation in a way that transforms those around you? That approach suggests an educational system wherein that's what you're looking for. The issue is not how much you have learned, but rather whether you using this learning in daily life to act in ways that are good to those around you.
Education is often more effective outside of the classroom.
The danger is that because we are unaware of the rituals that we engage in, we do not take them seriously and therefore they do not achieve their intended purpose. Rituals work when they are truly transformational, like the expression, "I now pronounce you man and wife." If we don't take the rituals of life seriously, we do not gain anything from them. Some dismiss rituals, saying, "I don't want to bow before my ancestors." And yet that same person insists on driving a BMW and sending their children to the most expensive private schools. We should be first accept that these are modern rituals and post the question: "Is this ritual making us into better people?" If the answer is no, we need to be aware that this is in fact a ritual and be aware of its symbolic and social function so that we can bring it under control. Denial or suppression is not really a solution. We must modify the ritual and make it more healthy.
____________________________________
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-with-michael-puett_b_8471666
Interview With Harvard's Most Popular Professor, Michael Puett: What's So Great, or Not, About Asian Education?
"The danger is that because we are unaware of the rituals that we engage in, we do not take them seriously and therefore they do not achieve their intended purpose. Rituals work when they are truly transformational, like the expression, 'I now pronounce you man and wife.'"
By
Emanuel Pastreich, Contributor
Director of the Asia Institute
Nov 4, 2015, 08:54 AM EST
|
Updated Nov 4, 2016
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Michael Puett is a professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations who was s one of five professors awarded the Harvard College Professorship for outstanding teaching.
Emanuel Pastreich
There is great admiration for the remarkable emphasis on education we find in Asia. There are parents in the United States who want to imitate that approach to learning. But the people of Asia feel that their educational system is completely out of control. Students feel that they are drowning in the sea of examinations and certification. We have to ask ourselves why in Asia what school you went to is so very important. .
Michael Puett
I think there's a lot of truth to both those perspectives on education in Asia.
On the one hand, yes. It is very true. There has, traditionally, been an extraordinary emphasis on education in East Asia. We're seeing the fruits of that tradition now in East Asia, where economic development is directly related to the incredible emphasis on the importance of education in that culture.
At the same time, we must recognize that education in East Asia has assumed a rather dangerous vision how education is supposed to actually work. There has been a destructive drive in East Asia to assess education on testing and link all social success to those tests. By definition, therefore, all the education children receive in schools and with tutors is aimed primarily at having them do well on these tests so that they can advance to the next level. These tests are often geared to de facto natural aptitudes. So, for example, some tests are designed to find out if you're particularly good in mathematics, in which case you'll be tracked into a mathematics line. Or if you're particularly good at some other field, in which case you'd be tracked in that direction. This approach to education, it's true, is related to earlier East Asian notions about education and service, specifically the concept of meritocracy.
The initial impulse behind the tests in China was to create an educational system wherein people could be systematically educated, and, if they did well in their studies, they could serve at high levels in government. The concept is wonderful.
Emanuel Pastreich
The meritocracy system today in China, Japan or Korea is dominated by a few big tests, and these days the those tests are linked intimately to the test prep industry that makes money off of the process and has an incentive to continue the system. This situation has led to a huge backlash, and there are even those who send kids to the United States to escape.
Michael Puett
I understand why so many claim that education in Asia has gone too far, and that we need to pull back. But as someone who looks at how education actually functioned in the pre-modern states of East Asia, I want to just say, "Look! Actually, there were some values in traditional Asian that we could really learn from." The exam craziness should not be confused with the traditional Asian approach to education.
If you consider how education was understood, how training was understood, and what exactly meritocracy meant in ancient China, then you will see that although exams were important, and learning was related to the exams, there was another dimension to learning. There was a keen sense that we must train ourselves to be better. Education was part of a holistic approach to life and human relations that went far beyond the narrow test taking skills we so often see Asian students trying to master these days.
Emanuel Pastreich
I am reminded of Lin Yutang's classic book The Importance of Living which details the very human and humanistic vision of much of the Chinese tradition. It stands in contrast to the "examination hell" that we read about in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. From LinYutang's book we get the sense that life itself is the purpose of education.
Michael Puett
Well, one of the key points of traditional Chinese education, is that it wasn't at all based on natural aptitude. The whole idea behind education was that we, as human beings, are kind of messy things. What we'll become over the course of a lifetime depends upon, among other things, how we train ourselves to become better.
So the focus in traditional learning wasn't on whether you were skilled at mathematics versus some other skill. The notion was rather "No. You are not born good at something. You train yourself to be good at something and the focus should be on the practice, the training, not some innate genius." Confucian scholars were not looking at aptitude. If anything, they were looking for a positive disposition. Training was what would make the difference.
Second of all, and at least as important, learning was not primarily about skills for them. Skills are things that you gain to realize some higher purposes. But the higher purpose, the sense of what it means to be an educated person, was the primary concern in education. And that higher purpose was defined in moral terms. Being a cultivated and moral person was an aim in itself.
They wanted to create people who are ethically good human beings, people who, through the educational process, have been trained to sense situations well, to sense how to behave in the world in a manner that will help those around them. More than anything else, leaders must have a ethical base. Human beings should have a sense of how to operate so as to help those under them if they're in a position of authority.
The critical point for those who are going to be in positions of authority, with the potential for abuse is to emphasize moral cultivation. Memorization or problem solving is not that critical. And ironically, the current form of testing used in East Asia undercuts all of these aspects of traditional education.
More often the stress is on natural aptitude, not on development of the self. If there is a sense of development, it is not for the character and attitude, or ethical sensibility. The focus falls on things you can test in a standardized way: "Are you good at math?"
Emanuel Pastreich
In Korea and Japan, standard testing is quite different than it was thirty years ago. On tests, there used to be questions that required some sophisticated, three-dimensional thinking. Unless you really had some insight into the problem, you couldn't answer the question just by applying formulas. Today's tests, however, assure that if you've gone to cram school and practiced the questions ten-thousand times, you'll do well on the test. There's no out-of-the-box thinking. It's just following the drills over and over again.
Michael Puett
Yes, we see an unfortunate tendency to make test taking a "rite of passage" rather than a learning process. Such a move undercuts what had been the definition of education. If you look at the testing in the civil service exam of China that determined placement in government, the content of the exams was by definition not something you would spend at lifetime cramming for. The tests were for the most part aimed at trying to find out if you were becoming a good human being.
Emanuel Pastreich
What was the actual content of the exam? Obviously it varied from dynasty to dynasty, but how did they measure one's moral cultivation on the civil service exam?
Michael Puett
Let me just give one example. The exams would include unanswerable problems. A problem would be given to you, and you would be asked: "If you were a government official, how would you try to deal with this?" The test was unanswerable in the sense that it'd be based upon tons of complicated issues. You see, the test wasn't about giving a right answer. In most case there was no right answer. What was being tested was whether you could actually formulate an essay that demonstrates how you're trying to deal with the complexity of the situation. Such an exam required broad-based learning, knowledge of precedents from the past that may or may not be relevant to this specific situation. So the actual test is about degree to which you're striving to honestly assess the situation and assess how to act in a good way if you were in a position of authority. Yes, passing a test like that is an intense educational experience. But the whole focus of the test is: "Through this educational experience, are you training yourself to be a better human being?" That is what you're being tested on. You must demonstrate a complex, multifaceted process of character development and cultivation. You cannot cram based on skills in X, Y, or Z.
Emanuel Pastreich
At some periods in Chinese history, the examination included poetry, belles lettres, essay-writing. What are we to make of the fact that literary composition was considered so important?
Michael Puett
Because exam was focused on that question, "How do we actually design a test that will determine if someone is actually becoming a better human being through education?" There was a need for new ways of testing for this aspect of human character. And one of the ways, for example, of testing was requiring that you write poetry. That may strike us as an odd thing to ask someone to do. But the assumption was that if you read someone's poetry, you can gain a sense of what they're like as a human being. And I think there is something to this idea. And so you're not being tested as to whether it's a good poem, you're being tested as to the moral qualities that you would demonstrate through the process of writing.
Emanuel Pastreich
How would you describe the nature of education itself, in terms of the relationship between the teacher and the student, the way in which texts were approached, and the use of oral or written exams? What was the experience of education in traditional China?
Michael Puett
The whole point of the educational experience was to train people to be better human beings. Of course students would, for example, be asked to reads tons of things, memorize tons of poetry, etc. But education did not stop there.
Emanuel Pastreich
Education started there.
Michael Puett
The goal of all learning was to be a better human being. Teachers would to emulate Confucius as he was portrayed in The Analects (the collection of his writings). Confucius was portrayed as working with his disciples to try to and first be a better human being himself and help them become better human beings.
The common approach taken by Confucius was like this. When Confucius was confronted with some situation, a disciple would have to quote lines of poetry that helped to explain, and also to alter the sense of the situation. There's not a right answer to Confucius' request. He's simply saying: "Okay. Quote some lines. Here's the situation, quote some lines that in this conversation right now can affect the flow of the discussion in a good way. So, for example, a discipline would will quote some lines that are too obviously fitting to the situation. And Confucius would shake his head and say: "No, no." And another one will quote some lines that were too weird. And Confucius would remark, "No, no, no." And then a disciple would quote some other lines, and Confucius would say: "Yes."
The "yes" means that the lines fit the situation and push the envelope for observers in a powerful manner. Simply quoting these lines can different response in the listeners to the situation.
Emanuel Pastreich
The test is by nature transformative.
Michael Puett
Precisely. And the idea here isn't that there's a correct set of lines to quote. The test was: are you able to sense the situation well and bring the learning you've done to the situation in a way that transforms those around you? That approach suggests an educational system wherein that's what you're looking for. The issue is not how much you have learned, but rather whether you using this learning in daily life to act in ways that are good to those around you.
Emanuel Pastreich
One of the biggest problems with education today - in Asia and around the world - is this assumption that you must make the students digest information. They're just vessels that you pour knowledge into. But the end, they're still the same vessel, just with more knowledge. The process is not transformative. You yourself should be transformed in the process of learning.
Michael Puett
The fundamental vision in all East Asian cultures was education as a means of transformation. In so much contemporary education, you can become incredibly strong in every topic you're being tested on. So you get A's in the classes and you get high marks on standardized tests. But none of this implies in any manner, shape, or form, that you've actually changed as a human being in any way. In traditional East Asia, such an approach to education would have been unacceptable. The whole point of education was to be transformative. It's to transform into a better human being.
Emanuel Pastreich
At the same time, in Chinese education over the last 2,000 years, there's has also been a cyclical quality. As the dynasty drags on, the examination tests become formalistic practices that have nothing to do with moral issues. There were those periods when we lost the emphasis on abstract ethics.
Michael Puett
We do find such shifts, but there is nothing absolute about the evolution of education. It is always possible to find room for reform. There was intense internal debate in China for centuries and centuries about how education should operate and how to design tests that would test character. And needless to say, they never came up with a perfect solution. Over time, the approach to designing education systems would coalesce and become overly formalistic. People would see that they were growing away from actual ethical issues and there would be again a big debate. We see real shifts occurring as a result. I think that what's exciting about the Chinese tradition is that the debate was about values, not about test scores.
Coming back to the present day, youth are confronted with an intense test-driven system based upon a restricted notion of what education means. But sadly, we've taken that restrictive notion to be a "necessary evil" and therefore so natural that there's no reason to debate it or rethink it. But we can learn from the past. The debates in China and Korea were healthy and offer clues as to what we can do today to reform this test culture in Asia. We need to ask, "What are the values that are being distilled through this education system?" And if we're not comfortable with them (and I think many people are not) then we need to ask ourselves how we can change them.
Emanuel Pastreich
What about the role of the teacher? Teachers had a very different position in traditional East Asian societies than they do today. Often Koreans and Chinese say, "we respect our teachers as we did in ancient times." But I do not believe this part at all. Increasingly teachers and students are seen as products for consumption.
Michael Puett
Teachers in China took Confucius himself as their model and saw his devotion to training disciples as an imperative. Similarly, striving to be a good person in all actions was an essential part of being a teacher, more than any technical aspect of one's research or teaching technique. The entire educational process was seen as one of growing as human beings - both teachers and students. Teachers were, hopefully, further along in the process, but they were still far from perfect. The expectation was that teacher was trying to be a good human and would inspire those around him to do the same.
The teacher wasn't there to instill a body of knowledge to help you ace a standardized test. Tests were meaningless if they did not have some ethical imperative in them. The teacher was there, ideally, to be an inspirational figure, someone striving to be good, and inspiring the next generation to do the same.
Emanuel Pastreich
But the conditions in modern China are so radically different. If you went to a professor in a Chinese university, or a bureaucrat in the Department of Education, and said that, they would probably respond, "That's a great idea, but we can't do anything because the whole system is built this way and we're trapped inside it." What do you think are effective methods of change? How do we get back on track?
Michael Puett
The starting point is to reignite a debate about why education exists. If we stop asking "How to get into a great school," and start asking, "How can education help make a better society?" then we start to address the real issues and perhaps enough people realize we have real problems and start to take concrete steps to affect actual change.
We need to take on the exam structure itself and its role in our society. As long as the entire system is based on the exams, then education will just focus on getting students through each loop of the exam.
Let's begin by sitting down to think about the purpose of these tests--oddly, we very rarely do so. Should we be having these tests at all ages for all kids? In many respects the answer may well be no. If we think carefully, we will agree on a space for some kind of test, but we also need to think about how we can reformulate that test so that our primary concern is the values and motivations for the test, and not the test itself. Once you change the assumptions, then it makes no sense to have an educational system based upon jumping through hoops. It will no longer make sense to put the hoops there.
Emanuel Pastreich
Who do you draw inspiration from as a teacher?
Michael Puett
I certainly tried to live up to the ideals that we've been discussing. And I am afraid I have fallen short. But I get up each day, brush off the dust, and start again.
I have been fortunate to have had some truly transformative teachers. They were people whom I really did look up to as great human beings. They were inspirational to me and they saw the classroom experience as transformational. For those teachers, education was about making students into better people, not learning facts.
Different teachers used different techniques, so there isn't one right way of doing this. But in their own way they helped me break out of my usual way of being and thinking and inspiried me to try to become a better human being. And certainly much later, when I actually started reading Chinese philosophy, I found a vocabulary to talk about what I had experienced with those teachers.
My goal in teaching is to try to do what I can to help the students become better human beings and hopefully help them to change the way they're living in a good way. The learning part they will do on their own.
Emanuel Pastreich
Can you give a concrete example of how you challenge your students through Chinese-inspired pedagogy?
Michael Puett
One of the courses I teach is on Chinese philosophy. I teach using only primary sources, in English translation. The readings are not in classical Chinese. But the students are only reading primary sources, not commentary. And I ask them specifically not to read the secondary literature.
I find that secondary literature will often try to put these primary sources in certain frameworks that, in many cases, we may want to question.
I tell them: "We're only going to read the primary sources." I ask the students to allow these texts to challenge some of their fundamental assumptions. And I tell them: "You won't like having your fundamental assumptions challenged! And you may not agree with what you're reading in the text. That's perfectly fine. But take these things and challenge your assumptions." Challenging the students is our overriding goal. We are not trying to translate the texts into easy to understand English that anyone can digest. I want the students to take these texts seriously, to struggle with them. You don't have to agree with the content of the essays, but you must take them seriously.
I am constantly posing questions in class, and encouraging the students to pose questions. If they give a reading that seems overly facile, I say: "Yes, but what about this word? What about that phrase?" I want to roam the classroom trying to lead them to the point that they see how the texts challenge their assumptions.
Emanuel Pastreich
There is a risk when teaching Chinese philosophy that you get bogged down in repeating the Confucian values: "A gentleman should be a good person, honor his elders, take care of his family.blah blah blah. Blah." But if you read those texts carefully, you discover they are not just listing virtues. There are all sorts of ambiguities and potentialities in between the words.
Michael Puett
Yes! That is a real danger that when you read through a text, you can end up just glossing over it thinking it just says: "Be a good person, try to help those around you." But the goal of the teacher should be to point out to the student, "Yes, but really read this stuff. Really see what they're saying, the gaps between the words, and look at the complexities of what they mean by "being a good person" and ask yourself why they selected the particular analogies they use." I want the students to get into the complexities of the material. I want them to understand the complexity of being a good human being.
Emanuel Pastreich
Let us talk about the general crisis in education around the world. We see universities being judged more for the quality of the dormitories than the content of courses and a focus on getting a job, as opposed to learning. There is a disturbing hollowing out of education overall. What does it take to get us moving in the right direction?
Michael Puett
We have a lot of work to do at very different levels. At the institutional level we should be concerned that money increasingly controlling the educational process. We must understand the degree to which the evolution of institutions is directed by money interests. We must push back against that trend and offer alternatives that are viable. At the local level we need to simply take teaching more seriously. That starts with just a few people serving as innovators and a community that will support them. We must push for big institutional changes, like redesigning exams and classrooms, and battling against drives to squeeze profit out of education.
At the same time, it is critical to have a handful of people who just start teaching in new ways. If we do not have concrete examples of good teaching we can identify and support, we cannot solve the huge institutional. Bureaucrats cannot design innovative teaching. It must be built from the ground up through experimentation.
Emanuel Pastreich
I find that my interactions with students outside of class are a critical part of the education process. I like to talk to them about how what they read relates to the world we live in.
Michael Puett
We just have to take a look at how Confucius is portrayed in the analects. He is not in the classroom and he is not administering written tests. He is working with his disciples in any number of ways and applying learning to very real concrete cases. Education is often more effective outside of the classroom. How we can achieve this approach within institutions that demand grades and classes is not obvious, but there is plenty of room for experimentation.
Emanuel Pastreich
If you brought Confucius to the podium of a lecture hall in front of 400 students, how would he respond? Would he prepare a Powerpoint? How would he answer when students asked him: "Is this going to be on the midterm?"
Michael Puett
I do suspect he'd start with some of the points we've made. I can imagining him starting out saying, "The goal of this class is not for you to learn X, Y, and Z, or to do well on your exam." I suspect he would immediately try to restructure the classroom so that it became an arena wherein people are actually being transformed by the process of learning. And the fact that it's a big lecture hall doesn't mean that it cannot serve that function.
Confucius would want to challenge the students. He does not want to make the course easy, but also not to make the "difficulty" a matter of just learning more facts. For Confucius, there is not learning if it is not linked at some level to the process of becoming better human beings. In a way, learning parallels the rituals that Confucius discusses at length.
Emanuel Pastreich
Your emphasis on ritual is very refreshing. We've distanced ourselves from rituals as a society. If you ask students, they will say that rituals are things practiced by previous generation, by people in primitive societies. But in fact students are engaged in any number of rituals, from the way they talk to each other to the way they buy designers clothes.
You may say you have no rituals, but that only means you are unaware of them. Confucian is strong because it offers a language to discuss rituals and links them to ethical concerns.
Michael Puett
It's very common in the United States, but you also can observe this in East Asia, for youth to think that rituals are these old things that people used to do in traditional societies when they believed in spirits and ancestor worship. And now, they think, we are modern. We don't do those silly rituals anymore. We're are just true to ourselves and we don't engage in rituals. But if Confucius could be dropped into any part of the contemporary world, most certainly including contemporary America, he would say: "Well, no. You people are engaged in rituals all the time."
The danger is that because we are unaware of the rituals that we engage in, we do not take them seriously and therefore they do not achieve their intended purpose. Rituals work when they are truly transformational, like the expression, "I now pronounce you man and wife." If we don't take the rituals of life seriously, we do not gain anything from them. Some dismiss rituals, saying, "I don't want to bow before my ancestors." And yet that same person insists on driving a BMW and sending their children to the most expensive private schools. We should be first accept that these are modern rituals and post the question: "Is this ritual making us into better people?" If the answer is no, we need to be aware that this is in fact a ritual and be aware of its symbolic and social function so that we can bring it under control. Denial or suppression is not really a solution. We must modify the ritual and make it more healthy.
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Robert Greene, Mastery, 2012
pp.10─11
As a classic example, compare the lives of Sir Francis Galton and his older cousin, Charles Darwin. By all accounts, Galton was a super-genius with an exceptionally high IQ, quite a bit higher than Darwin's (these are estimates done by experts years after the invention of the measurement).
Galton was a boy wonder who went on to have an illustrious scientific career, but he never mastered any of the fields he went into. He was notoriously restless, as it often the case with child prodigies.
Darwin, by contrast, is rightly celebrated as the superior scientist, one of the few who has forever changed our view of life. As Darwin himself admitted, he was “a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect .... I have no great quickness of apprehension .... My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited”. Darwin, however, must have possessed something that Galton lacked.
p.11
In many ways, a look at the early life of Darwin himself can supply an answer to his mystery. As a child Darwin had one overriding passion ─ collecting biological specimens.
p.11
Suddenly, his passion for collecting found its perfect outlet. In South America he could collect the most astounding array of specimens, as well as fossils and bones. He could connect his interest in the variety of life on the planet with something larger ─ major questions about the origins of species. He poured all of his energy into this enterprise, accumulating so many specimens that a theory began to take shape in his mind. After five years at sea, he returned to England and devoted the rest of his life to the single task of elaborating his theory of evolution. In the process he had to deal with a tremendous amount of drudgery ─ for instance, eight years exclusively studying barnacles to establish his credential as a biologist. He had to develop highly refined political and social skills to handle all the prejudice against such a theory in Victorian England. And what sustained him throughout this lengthy process was his intense love of and connection to the subject.
p.11
The basic elements of this story are repeated in the lives of all of the great Masters in history: a youthful passion or predilection, a chance encounter that allows them to discover how to apply it, an apprenticeship in which they come alive with energy and focus. They excel by their ability to practice harder and move faster through the process, all of this stemming from the intensity of their desire to learn and from the deep connection they feel to their field of study. And at the core of this intensity of effort is in fact a quality that is genetic and inborn ─ not talent or brilliance, which is something that must be developed, but rather a deep and powerful inclination toward a particular subject.
p.12
This uniqueness is revealed to us through the preferences we innately feel for particular activities or subjects of study. Such inclinations can be toward music or mathematics, certain sports or games, solving puzzle-like problems, tinkering and building, or playing with words.
With those who stand out by their later mastery, they experience this inclination more deeply and clearly than others. They experience it as an inner calling. It tends to dominate their thoughts and dreams. They find their way, by accident or sheer effort, to a career path in which this inclination can flourish. This intense connection and desire allows them to withstand the pain of the process ─ the self-doubts, the tedious hours of practice and study, the inevitable setbacks, the endless barbs from the envious. They develop a resiliency and confidence that others lack.
p.12
In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement.
p.12
Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive.
“”─
p.162
In elaborating this concept, he theorized that the basic features of all languages are not simply genetic in origin and universal, but that each language has elements that reflect the uniqueness of its culture.
Culture plays a larger role than we might imagine in how we think and communicate.
p.162
Daniel Everett first book, Don't sleep, there are snakes
pp.184─185
B. Allow for serendipity
The brain is an instrument developed for making connections. It operates as a dual processing system, in which every bit of information that comes in is at the same time compared to other information. The brain is constantly searching for similarities, differences, and relationships between what it processes. Your task is to feed this natural inclination, to create the optimal conditions for it to make new and original associations between ideas and experiences. And one of the best ways to accomplish this is by letting go of conscious control and allowing chance to enter into the process.
The reason for this is simple. When we are consumed with a particular project, our attention tends to become quite narrow as we focus so deeply. We grow tense. In this state, our mind responds to trying to reduce the amount of stimuli we have to deal with. We literally close ourselves off from the world in order to concentrate on what is necessary. This can have the unintended consequence of making it harder to for to see other possibilities, to be more open and creative with our ideas. When we are in a more relaxed state, our attention naturally broadens and we take in more stimuli.
Many of the most interesting and profound discoveries in science occur when the thinker is not concentrating directly on the problem but is about to drift off to sleep, or get on a bus, or hears a joke ── moments of unstrained attention, when something unexpected enters the mental sphere and triggers a new and fertile connection. Such chance associations and discoveries are known as serendipity ── the occurrence of something we are not expecting ── and although by their nature you cannot force them to happen, you can invite serendipity into the creative process by taking two simple steps.
The first step is to widen your search as far as possible. In the research stage of your project, you look at more than what is generally required. You expand your search into other fields, reading and absorbing any related information. If you have a particular theory or hypothesis about a phenomenon, you examine as many examples and potential counter examples as humanly possible. It might seem tiring and inefficient, but you must trust this process. What ensues it that the brain becomes increasingly excited and stimulated by the variety of information. As William James expressed it, the mind “transitions from one idea to another ... the most unheard of combination of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbling about in a state of bewildering activity.” A kind of mental momentum is generated, in which the slightest chance occurrence will spark a fertile idea.
The second step is to maintain an openness and looseness of spirit. In moments of great tension and searching, you allow yourself moments of release. You take walks, engage in activities outside your work (Einstein played the violin), or think about something else, no matter how trivial. When some new and unanticipated idea now enters your mind, you do not ignore it because it is irrational or does not fit the narrow frame of your previous work. You give it instead full attention and explore where it leads you.
“”─
(Mastery / Robert Greene., 1. successful people., 2. success., 3. self-actualization (psychology), includes bibliographical references, BF637.S8G695 2012, 158─dc23, 2012027195, )
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“Conditioned reflexes are phenomena of common and widespread
occurrence: their establishment is an integral function in
everyday life. We recognize them ourselves and in other
people under such names as ‘education’, ‘habits’, and
‘training’; and all of these are really nothing more than the
results of an establishment of new nervous connections
during the post-natal existence of the organism.”;
── Ivan Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes:
An Investigation of the Physiological Activity
of the Cerebral Cortex, 1927,
translated from the Russia,
St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy;
Tom Butler-Bowden, 50 psychology classics, 2007,
p.210
“We are what we repeatly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”;
── ARISTOTLE;
The little book of Talent :
52 tips for improving your skills;
DANIEL COYLE, 2012, author of the talent code.
Nicholas Carr., "The shallows : what the Internet is doing to our brains", © 2011, 2010
[p.29]
"Neurons seem to 'want' to receive input," explains Nancy Kanwisher of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research: "When their usual input disappears, they start responding to the next best thing." 23
(Carr, Nicholas G.; 'The shallows', © 2011, 2010, [612.80285-dc22], published by Norton, )
("The shallows : what the Internet is doing to our brains", Nicholas Carr., 1. Neuropsychology, 2. Internet-Physiological effect., 3. Internet-Psychological aspects., © 2011, 2010, [612.80285-dc22], pp.27-28, pp.28-29, p.29)
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Allan J. McDonald with James R. Hansen, Truth, lies, and o-rings, 2009 [ ]
p.573
James R. Hansen
A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner.
--Old English Proverb
What he came to fathom about the subject conformed well to what the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle taught over 2,300 years ago: Human beings are what we repeatedly do.
(McDonald, Allan J., Truth, lies, and o-rings : inside the space shuttle challenger disaster / Allan J. McDonald with James R. Hansen., 1. challenger (spacecraft)--accidents., 2. whistle blowing--united states., 3. space shuttles--accidents--invesetigation., 4. united states. national aeronautics and space administration., 5. united states--politics and government., 2009, )
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16:18
Why it’s better to stop searching for your true self | Michael Puett | TEDxNashville
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOJgMK21-tk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOJgMK21-tk
TEDx Talks
Apr 24, 2017
We are often told that to live a good life we should look within and find ourselves, learn to love and embrace ourselves, and always strive to be sincere and authentic to who we really are. But what if this emphasis on self-acceptance and being true to ourselves is limiting and even dangerous? In classical China one finds a counter-intuitive understanding of the self that challenges many of our assumptions about how to live a good life and how to become a better person.
One of the most popular courses at Harvard University, Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory, is taught by Michael Puett, an award-winning Harvard professor and internationally renowned scholar. Learn about the unexpected popularity of Puett's course in "The Atlantic" article, "Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?"(http://theatln.tc/2o1IvPU). Puett is also the co-author of the "New York Times" bestseller “The Path: What Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About the Good Life.” In addition, Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History in Harvard University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion. For his work in these departments, Puett is the proud recipient of a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Puett is also the author of “The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China” and “To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China,” as well as the co-author of “Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity."
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https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-are-hundreds-of-harvard-students-studying-ancient-chinese-philosophy/280356/
EDUCATION
Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?
The professor who teaches Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory claims, "This course will change your life."
By Christine Gross-Loh
OCTOBER 8, 2013
Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together.
It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China, 2,500 years ago.
Puett's course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science. The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue on campus.
Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett's bold promise: “This course will change your life.”
His students tell me it is true: that Puett uses Chinese philosophy as a way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life. Elizabeth Malkin, a student in the course last year, says, “The class absolutely changed my perspective of myself, my peers, and of the way I view the world.” Puett puts a fresh spin on the questions that Chinese scholars grappled with centuries ago. He requires his students to closely read original texts (in translation) such as Confucius’s Analects, the Mencius, and the Daodejing and then actively put the teachings into practice in their daily lives. His lectures use Chinese thought in the context of contemporary American life to help 18- and 19-year-olds who are struggling to find their place in the world figure out how to be good human beings; how to create a good society; how to have a flourishing life.
Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are “feeling pushed onto a very specific path towards very concrete career goals” than he did when he began teaching nearly 20 years ago. A recent report shows a steep decline over the last decade in the number of Harvard students who are choosing to major in the humanities, a trend roughly seen across the nation’s liberal arts schools. Finance remains the most popular career for Harvard graduates. Puett sees students who orient all their courses and even their extracurricular activities towards practical, predetermined career goals and plans.
Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t fit into that plan. Students who do this “are not paying enough attention to the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire them, out of which could come a really fulfilling, exciting life,” he explains. If what excites a student is not the same as what he has decided is best for him, he becomes trapped on a misguided path, slated to begin an unfulfilling career. Puett aims to open his students’ eyes to a different way to approach everything from relationships to career decisions. He teaches them that:
The smallest actions have the most profound ramifications. Confucius, Mencius, and other Chinese philosophers taught that the most mundane actions can have a ripple effect, and Puett urges his students to become more self-aware, to notice how even the most quotidian acts—holding open the door for someone, smiling at the grocery clerk—change the course of the day by affecting how we feel.
That rush of good feeling that comes after a daily run, the inspiring conversation with a good friend, or the momentary flash of anger that arises when someone cuts in front of us in line—what could they have to do with big life matters? Everything, actually. From a Chinese philosophical point of view, these small daily experiences provide us endless opportunities to understand ourselves. When we notice and understand what makes us tick, react, feel joyful or angry, we develop a better sense of who we are that helps us when approaching new situations. Mencius, a late Confucian thinker (4th century B.C.E.), taught that if you cultivate your better nature in these small ways, you can become an extraordinary person with an incredible influence, altering your own life as well as that of those around you, until finally “you can turn the whole world in the palm of your hand.”
Decisions are made from the heart. Americans tend to believe that humans are rational creatures who make decisions logically, using our brains. But in Chinese, the word for “mind” and “heart” are the same. Puett teaches that the heart and the mind are inextricably linked, and that one does not exist without the other. Whenever we make decisions, from the prosaic to the profound (what to make for dinner; which courses to take next semester; what career path to follow; whom to marry), we will make better ones when we intuit how to integrate heart and mind and let our rational and emotional sides blend into one. Zhuangzi, a Daoist philosopher, taught that we should train ourselves to become “spontaneous” through daily living, rather than closing ourselves off through what we think of as rational decision-making. In the same way that one deliberately practices the piano in order to eventually play it effortlessly, through our everyday activities we train ourselves to become more open to experiences and phenomena so that eventually the right responses and decisions come spontaneously, without angst, from the heart-mind.
Recent research into neuroscience is confirming that the Chinese philosophers are correct: Brain scans reveal that our unconscious awareness of emotions and phenomena around us are actually what drive the decisions we believe we are making with such logical rationality. According to Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale, if we see a happy face for just a fraction of a second (4 milliseconds to be exact), that’s long enough to elicit a mini emotional high. In one study viewers who were flashed a smile—even though it was shown too quickly for them to even realize they had seen it—perceived the things around them more positively.
If the body leads, the mind will follow. Behaving kindly (even when you are not feeling kindly), or smiling at someone (even if you aren’t feeling particularly friendly at the moment) can cause actual differences in how you end up feeling and behaving, even ultimately changing the outcome of a situation.
While all this might sound like hooey-wooey self-help, much of what Puett teaches is previously accepted cultural wisdom that has been lost in the modern age. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do,” a view shared by thinkers such as Confucius, who taught that the importance of rituals lies in how they inculcate a certain sensibility in a person. In research published in Psychological Science, social psychologist Amy Cuddy and her colleagues found that when we take a power stance (stand with our legs apart, arms thrust out, taking up space), the pose does not only cause other people to view us as more confident and powerful; it actually causes a hormonal surge that makes us become more confident.
At the end of each class, Puett challenges his students to put the Chinese philosophy they have been learning into tangible practice in their everyday lives. “The Chinese philosophers we read taught that the way to really change lives for the better is from a very mundane level, changing the way people experience and respond to the world, so what I try to do is to hit them at that level. I’m not trying to give my students really big advice about what to do with their lives. I just want to give them a sense of what they can do daily to transform how they live.” Their assignments are small ones: to first observe how they feel when they smile at a stranger, hold open a door for someone, engage in a hobby. He asks them to take note of what happens next: how every action, gesture, or word dramatically affects how others respond to them. Then Puett asks them to pursue more of the activities that they notice arouse positive, excited feelings. In their papers and discussion sections students discuss what it means to live life according to the teachings of these philosophers.
Once they’ve understood themselves better and discovered what they love to do they can then work to become adept at those activities through ample practice and self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is related to another classical Chinese concept: that effort is what counts the most, more than talent or aptitude. We aren’t limited to our innate talents; we all have enormous potential to expand our abilities if we cultivate them. You don’t have to be stuck doing what you happen to be good at; merely pay attention to what you love and proceed from there. Chinese philosophers taught that paying attention to small clues “can literally change everything that we can become as human beings,” says Puett.
To be interconnected, focus on mundane, everyday practices, and understand that great things begin with the very smallest of acts are radical ideas for young people living in a society that pressures them to think big and achieve individual excellence. This might be one reason why, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education, interest in Chinese philosophy is taking off around the nation—not just at Harvard. And it’s a message that’s especially resonating with those yearning for an alternative to the fast track they have been on all their lives.
One of Puett’s former students, Adam Mitchell, was a math and science whiz who went to Harvard intending to major in economics. At Harvard specifically and in society in general, he told me, “we’re expected to think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what you’re good at’”—a road with little risk but little reward. But after his introduction to Chinese philosophy during his sophomore year, he realized this wasn’t the only way to think about the future. Instead, he tried courses he was drawn to but wasn’t naturally adroit at because he had learned how much value lies in working hard to become better at what you love. He became more aware of the way he was affected by those around him, and how they were affected by his own actions in turn. Mitchell threw himself into foreign language learning, feels his relationships have deepened, and is today working towards a master’s degree in regional studies. He told me, “I can happily say that Professor Puett lived up to his promise, that the course did in fact change my life.”
Christine Gross-Loh is the author of The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life.
____________________________________
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/26/can-harvards-most-popular-professor-and-confucius-radically-change-your-life
Philosophy
Can Harvard’s most popular professor (and Confucius) radically change your life?
Michael Puett’s book The Path draws on the 2,500-year-old insights of Chinese philosophers. He explains how ‘straightening your mat’ can help you break out of the patterns that are holding you back
Professor Michael Puett
Professor Michael Puett: what we really are is ‘a messy and potentially ugly bunch of stuff’. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
Tim Dowling
Tim Dowling
@IAmTimDowling
Sun 26 Mar 2017 10.00 EDT
685
The School of Life’s Sunday sermons could be described as lectures for people who don’t believe in God but still like church. They sing secular songs before and after the sermon (when I arrive, the large congregation at Mary Ward House in London is on the second verse of A Spoonful of Sugar), and everybody seems to share an abiding faith in the power of open-mindedness.
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On this particular Sunday, the sermon is to be delivered by Michael Puett, professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, and is based on his book The Path, which applies the lessons of ancient Chinese philosophers to modern life. These philosophers may have done their best work 2,500 years ago, but they were trying to answer the same big questions we still ask. How do I live my life? How do I live my life well?
“I forewarn you,” Puett tells the congregation: “At first it’s gonna sound really bleak.”
The back cover of The Path describes Puett as “Harvard’s most popular professor”. It is unclear how this distinction is awarded, but the book grew out of a 2013 magazine article written by his co-author, Christine Gross-Loh, about the undergraduate course Puett teaches – classical Chinese ethical and political theory – said to be the third most popular class at Harvard.
“That’s still the case,” Puett says when I meet him. “No 1 and No 2 are the introduction to economics class and the introduction to computer science class.” Third biggest means his lectures are delivered to around 750 students. Puett exposes them to the writings of Confucius, Mencius, Zhuangzi and Xunzi, among others, but he also promises that the course will do more than just fulfil Harvard’s required ethical reasoning module.
“I do give them a guarantee,” he says. “The guarantee I make is if they take these ideas seriously, by the end of the course, these ideas will have changed their lives.”
When he speaks publicly, Puett’s voice ranges between a low rumble and an enthusiastic squeak. At first it sounds almost muppet-like, but after a while it becomes a little incantatory – you can see why he is a popular lecturer. He doesn’t refer to notes, and he has no visual aids. His sermon, like his course, begins by shattering some commonly held preconceptions about the self: there is no self, he says. The idea that we should look within, discover our true nature and act accordingly is, according to Confucius, nonsense. What we really are, Puett says, is “a messy and potentially ugly bunch of stuff”, a collection of emotions and conditioned responses, with no guiding inner core. We think we are self-determined, but in reality we are so set in our patterns that Google exploits our predictability to sell us stuff without us noticing.
Puett’s School of Life audience is very open to this notion – I think most of us already figured as much – but apparently when he tells this to his students, it blows their minds. Is this, I wonder, a generational thing?
“Yes, I think it is very generational,” he says. “This is a generation that was raised being told: ‘Your goal is to look within. Find your true self, especially during these four years of college.’ And furthermore the argument is, once you do find yourself, try and be sincere and authentic to who you really are, and then decide your career according to who you are.”
Once they get over the shock, however, his students are immensely receptive to Chinese philosophy’s counterintuitive model. “Because they’ve spent 20 years looking for this true self and not finding it.”
The Path is in part a pleasing debunking of fashionable self-help disciplines – there are no quick fixes; improvement is incremental at best, and a lifetime of work. “I think of it as sort of anti-self-help,” says Puett. “Self-help tends to be about learning to love yourself and embrace yourself for who you are. A lot of these ideas are saying precisely the opposite – no, you overcome the self, you break the self. You should not be happy with who you are.”
While Puett’s students are obliged to get to grips with the primary sources, The Path was written for people mostly unfamiliar with the history of eastern thought. It is no simple matter to create a modern-day guide to living – boiled down to 200 pages – from writings that are often ambiguous, if not downright gnomic. In The Analects, a collection of the teachings and thoughts of Confucius compiled by his followers after his death, one typical passage reads: “He would not sit until he had straightened his mat.” You could draw a lot of contradictory conclusions from that.
Puett is also aware that there is some risk in extracting an overarching message from a number of different philosophers who often disagreed with one another.
“They do share a generally common vision of human psychology,” he says. “That we have a tendency to fall into patterns and ruts in our existences.” The Confucian strategy for disrupting these patterns was the judicious observance of ritual – coded behaviours that force people to operate outside their normal roles. This has often been misunderstood as a call for conformity and a slavish adherence to tradition, but, according to Puett, Confucius meant no such thing. “For Confucius,” he writes, “the ritual was essential because of what it did for the people performing it.”
Confucius
Confucius, who apparently ‘would not sit until he had straightened his mat’. Photograph: Apic/Getty Images
Clearly there is a limit to the benefit a 21st-century human can derive from a ritual such as, say, ancestor worship. To apply the idea to one’s own life, Puett suggests “slightly altering how you interact with people” – saying something different to the bus driver or the man at the shop’s till every morning, thereby disrupting the patterns that comprise your daily life. I put to him the possibility that you might merely freak out the bus driver.
“Part of what [the philosophers] are getting at is that it’s the break that really matters,” Puett says. “You may say it in a way that’s actually very offputting to the driver, but you’ll be better at sensing that, and therefore altering it, if it isn’t just a rote way of talking.” By gauging the change you effect, you can teach yourself to become more emotionally intelligent about your dealings with other humans.
If this technique doesn’t sound wholly alien, it is probably because modern psychology shares some of its strategies. The therapist’s room, Puett argues, is a kind of ritual space, where you shed your normal self for a while, and talk about things from a different perspective.
Puett studied western thought almost exclusively at university. He had been reading eastern philosophers on the side since high school, but it wasn’t until he began a master’s degree that he decided to learn Chinese in order to pursue it exclusively. Did it change his life the way he promises his students it will?
“I’m sure I have a long way to go, to put it mildly,” he says. “But yes, I would say I am a radically different person.”
I can testify that Puett is one of the nicest people – if not the nicest person – I have ever interviewed: attentive, generous and patient. He seems unutterably pleased to be where he is – drinking coffee with a journalist in the noisy atrium of a building in King’s Cross – and he is a font of positive reinforcement. All my questions are great, and my every summary, surmise and speculation meets his approval: “Exactly!” “Precisely!” “A perfect example!” By the end I feel hugely intelligent, which is weird, because when I later listen to the recording of our conversation, I sound far from it.
Confucius developed his ideas against a backdrop of political upheaval – the last great bronze-age dynasty, the Zhou, was in decline, and old certainties had dissolved. Confucius decided to concentrate on teaching the next generation, in the hope that they could make a better world. I ask Puett if he believes we have reached a comparable cultural crossroads.
“I’m sure that every generation feels that way,” he says. “That being said, with this generation, it really is the case.” He and I, he points out, come from a generation that “thought the big wars over isms – socialism, communism, liberalism – were over, and a vision had won that was kind of right.” The generation below – his students – feels betrayed by us, and quite rightly. “Suddenly, they’re realising that we were horribly wrong.”
So, what are we supposed to be doing now? Straightening our mats?
“In a weird way the answer is kind of yes,” says Puett. “What you’re trying to do is train yourself to become incredibly good at dealing with this capricious world.”
At the end of his Sunday sermon, Puett takes questions from the congregation. At one point, a man in my row raises his hand. “If people are just an assembly of patterns,” he asks, “what does it mean to love someone?” In a way, it seems the bleakest moment of the hour, but Puett is beaming.
“Great question!” he says.
The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything, by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh is out now in paperback.
____________________________________
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-with-michael-puett_b_8471666
Interview With Harvard's Most Popular Professor, Michael Puett: What's So Great, or Not, About Asian Education?
"The danger is that because we are unaware of the rituals that we engage in, we do not take them seriously and therefore they do not achieve their intended purpose. Rituals work when they are truly transformational, like the expression, 'I now pronounce you man and wife.'"
By Emanuel Pastreich, Contributor
Director of the Asia Institute
Nov 4, 2015, 08:54 AM EST
|
Updated Nov 4, 2016
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Michael Puett
The goal of all learning was to be a better human being. Teachers would to emulate Confucius as he was portrayed in The Analects (the collection of his writings). Confucius was portrayed as working with his disciples to try to and first be a better human being himself and help them become better human beings.
The common approach taken by Confucius was like this. When Confucius was confronted with some situation, a disciple would have to quote lines of poetry that helped to explain, and also to alter the sense of the situation. There's not a right answer to Confucius' request. He's simply saying: "Okay. Quote some lines. Here's the situation, quote some lines that in this conversation right now can affect the flow of the discussion in a good way. So, for example, a discipline would will quote some lines that are too obviously fitting to the situation. And Confucius would shake his head and say: "No, no." And another one will quote some lines that were too weird. And Confucius would remark, "No, no, no." And then a disciple would quote some other lines, and Confucius would say: "Yes."
(] high context culture [)
The "yes" means that the lines fit the situation and push the envelope for observers in a powerful manner. Simply quoting these lines can different response in the listeners to the situation.
Emanuel Pastreich
The test is by nature transformative.
Michael Puett
Precisely. And the idea here isn't that there's a correct set of lines to quote. The test was: are you able to sense the situation well and bring the learning you've done to the situation in a way that transforms those around you? That approach suggests an educational system wherein that's what you're looking for. The issue is not how much you have learned, but rather whether you using this learning in daily life to act in ways that are good to those around you.
Education is often more effective outside of the classroom.
The danger is that because we are unaware of the rituals that we engage in, we do not take them seriously and therefore they do not achieve their intended purpose. Rituals work when they are truly transformational, like the expression, "I now pronounce you man and wife." If we don't take the rituals of life seriously, we do not gain anything from them. Some dismiss rituals, saying, "I don't want to bow before my ancestors." And yet that same person insists on driving a BMW and sending their children to the most expensive private schools. We should be first accept that these are modern rituals and post the question: "Is this ritual making us into better people?" If the answer is no, we need to be aware that this is in fact a ritual and be aware of its symbolic and social function so that we can bring it under control. Denial or suppression is not really a solution. We must modify the ritual and make it more healthy.
____________________________________
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-with-michael-puett_b_8471666
Interview With Harvard's Most Popular Professor, Michael Puett: What's So Great, or Not, About Asian Education?
"The danger is that because we are unaware of the rituals that we engage in, we do not take them seriously and therefore they do not achieve their intended purpose. Rituals work when they are truly transformational, like the expression, 'I now pronounce you man and wife.'"
By
Emanuel Pastreich, Contributor
Director of the Asia Institute
Nov 4, 2015, 08:54 AM EST
|
Updated Nov 4, 2016
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
Michael Puett is a professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations who was s one of five professors awarded the Harvard College Professorship for outstanding teaching.
Emanuel Pastreich
There is great admiration for the remarkable emphasis on education we find in Asia. There are parents in the United States who want to imitate that approach to learning. But the people of Asia feel that their educational system is completely out of control. Students feel that they are drowning in the sea of examinations and certification. We have to ask ourselves why in Asia what school you went to is so very important. .
Michael Puett
I think there's a lot of truth to both those perspectives on education in Asia.
On the one hand, yes. It is very true. There has, traditionally, been an extraordinary emphasis on education in East Asia. We're seeing the fruits of that tradition now in East Asia, where economic development is directly related to the incredible emphasis on the importance of education in that culture.
At the same time, we must recognize that education in East Asia has assumed a rather dangerous vision how education is supposed to actually work. There has been a destructive drive in East Asia to assess education on testing and link all social success to those tests. By definition, therefore, all the education children receive in schools and with tutors is aimed primarily at having them do well on these tests so that they can advance to the next level. These tests are often geared to de facto natural aptitudes. So, for example, some tests are designed to find out if you're particularly good in mathematics, in which case you'll be tracked into a mathematics line. Or if you're particularly good at some other field, in which case you'd be tracked in that direction. This approach to education, it's true, is related to earlier East Asian notions about education and service, specifically the concept of meritocracy.
The initial impulse behind the tests in China was to create an educational system wherein people could be systematically educated, and, if they did well in their studies, they could serve at high levels in government. The concept is wonderful.
Emanuel Pastreich
The meritocracy system today in China, Japan or Korea is dominated by a few big tests, and these days the those tests are linked intimately to the test prep industry that makes money off of the process and has an incentive to continue the system. This situation has led to a huge backlash, and there are even those who send kids to the United States to escape.
Michael Puett
I understand why so many claim that education in Asia has gone too far, and that we need to pull back. But as someone who looks at how education actually functioned in the pre-modern states of East Asia, I want to just say, "Look! Actually, there were some values in traditional Asian that we could really learn from." The exam craziness should not be confused with the traditional Asian approach to education.
If you consider how education was understood, how training was understood, and what exactly meritocracy meant in ancient China, then you will see that although exams were important, and learning was related to the exams, there was another dimension to learning. There was a keen sense that we must train ourselves to be better. Education was part of a holistic approach to life and human relations that went far beyond the narrow test taking skills we so often see Asian students trying to master these days.
Emanuel Pastreich
I am reminded of Lin Yutang's classic book The Importance of Living which details the very human and humanistic vision of much of the Chinese tradition. It stands in contrast to the "examination hell" that we read about in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. From LinYutang's book we get the sense that life itself is the purpose of education.
Michael Puett
Well, one of the key points of traditional Chinese education, is that it wasn't at all based on natural aptitude. The whole idea behind education was that we, as human beings, are kind of messy things. What we'll become over the course of a lifetime depends upon, among other things, how we train ourselves to become better.
So the focus in traditional learning wasn't on whether you were skilled at mathematics versus some other skill. The notion was rather "No. You are not born good at something. You train yourself to be good at something and the focus should be on the practice, the training, not some innate genius." Confucian scholars were not looking at aptitude. If anything, they were looking for a positive disposition. Training was what would make the difference.
Second of all, and at least as important, learning was not primarily about skills for them. Skills are things that you gain to realize some higher purposes. But the higher purpose, the sense of what it means to be an educated person, was the primary concern in education. And that higher purpose was defined in moral terms. Being a cultivated and moral person was an aim in itself.
They wanted to create people who are ethically good human beings, people who, through the educational process, have been trained to sense situations well, to sense how to behave in the world in a manner that will help those around them. More than anything else, leaders must have a ethical base. Human beings should have a sense of how to operate so as to help those under them if they're in a position of authority.
The critical point for those who are going to be in positions of authority, with the potential for abuse is to emphasize moral cultivation. Memorization or problem solving is not that critical. And ironically, the current form of testing used in East Asia undercuts all of these aspects of traditional education.
More often the stress is on natural aptitude, not on development of the self. If there is a sense of development, it is not for the character and attitude, or ethical sensibility. The focus falls on things you can test in a standardized way: "Are you good at math?"
Emanuel Pastreich
In Korea and Japan, standard testing is quite different than it was thirty years ago. On tests, there used to be questions that required some sophisticated, three-dimensional thinking. Unless you really had some insight into the problem, you couldn't answer the question just by applying formulas. Today's tests, however, assure that if you've gone to cram school and practiced the questions ten-thousand times, you'll do well on the test. There's no out-of-the-box thinking. It's just following the drills over and over again.
Michael Puett
Yes, we see an unfortunate tendency to make test taking a "rite of passage" rather than a learning process. Such a move undercuts what had been the definition of education. If you look at the testing in the civil service exam of China that determined placement in government, the content of the exams was by definition not something you would spend at lifetime cramming for. The tests were for the most part aimed at trying to find out if you were becoming a good human being.
Emanuel Pastreich
What was the actual content of the exam? Obviously it varied from dynasty to dynasty, but how did they measure one's moral cultivation on the civil service exam?
Michael Puett
Let me just give one example. The exams would include unanswerable problems. A problem would be given to you, and you would be asked: "If you were a government official, how would you try to deal with this?" The test was unanswerable in the sense that it'd be based upon tons of complicated issues. You see, the test wasn't about giving a right answer. In most case there was no right answer. What was being tested was whether you could actually formulate an essay that demonstrates how you're trying to deal with the complexity of the situation. Such an exam required broad-based learning, knowledge of precedents from the past that may or may not be relevant to this specific situation. So the actual test is about degree to which you're striving to honestly assess the situation and assess how to act in a good way if you were in a position of authority. Yes, passing a test like that is an intense educational experience. But the whole focus of the test is: "Through this educational experience, are you training yourself to be a better human being?" That is what you're being tested on. You must demonstrate a complex, multifaceted process of character development and cultivation. You cannot cram based on skills in X, Y, or Z.
Emanuel Pastreich
At some periods in Chinese history, the examination included poetry, belles lettres, essay-writing. What are we to make of the fact that literary composition was considered so important?
Michael Puett
Because exam was focused on that question, "How do we actually design a test that will determine if someone is actually becoming a better human being through education?" There was a need for new ways of testing for this aspect of human character. And one of the ways, for example, of testing was requiring that you write poetry. That may strike us as an odd thing to ask someone to do. But the assumption was that if you read someone's poetry, you can gain a sense of what they're like as a human being. And I think there is something to this idea. And so you're not being tested as to whether it's a good poem, you're being tested as to the moral qualities that you would demonstrate through the process of writing.
Emanuel Pastreich
How would you describe the nature of education itself, in terms of the relationship between the teacher and the student, the way in which texts were approached, and the use of oral or written exams? What was the experience of education in traditional China?
Michael Puett
The whole point of the educational experience was to train people to be better human beings. Of course students would, for example, be asked to reads tons of things, memorize tons of poetry, etc. But education did not stop there.
Emanuel Pastreich
Education started there.
Michael Puett
The goal of all learning was to be a better human being. Teachers would to emulate Confucius as he was portrayed in The Analects (the collection of his writings). Confucius was portrayed as working with his disciples to try to and first be a better human being himself and help them become better human beings.
The common approach taken by Confucius was like this. When Confucius was confronted with some situation, a disciple would have to quote lines of poetry that helped to explain, and also to alter the sense of the situation. There's not a right answer to Confucius' request. He's simply saying: "Okay. Quote some lines. Here's the situation, quote some lines that in this conversation right now can affect the flow of the discussion in a good way. So, for example, a discipline would will quote some lines that are too obviously fitting to the situation. And Confucius would shake his head and say: "No, no." And another one will quote some lines that were too weird. And Confucius would remark, "No, no, no." And then a disciple would quote some other lines, and Confucius would say: "Yes."
The "yes" means that the lines fit the situation and push the envelope for observers in a powerful manner. Simply quoting these lines can different response in the listeners to the situation.
Emanuel Pastreich
The test is by nature transformative.
Michael Puett
Precisely. And the idea here isn't that there's a correct set of lines to quote. The test was: are you able to sense the situation well and bring the learning you've done to the situation in a way that transforms those around you? That approach suggests an educational system wherein that's what you're looking for. The issue is not how much you have learned, but rather whether you using this learning in daily life to act in ways that are good to those around you.
Emanuel Pastreich
One of the biggest problems with education today - in Asia and around the world - is this assumption that you must make the students digest information. They're just vessels that you pour knowledge into. But the end, they're still the same vessel, just with more knowledge. The process is not transformative. You yourself should be transformed in the process of learning.
Michael Puett
The fundamental vision in all East Asian cultures was education as a means of transformation. In so much contemporary education, you can become incredibly strong in every topic you're being tested on. So you get A's in the classes and you get high marks on standardized tests. But none of this implies in any manner, shape, or form, that you've actually changed as a human being in any way. In traditional East Asia, such an approach to education would have been unacceptable. The whole point of education was to be transformative. It's to transform into a better human being.
Emanuel Pastreich
At the same time, in Chinese education over the last 2,000 years, there's has also been a cyclical quality. As the dynasty drags on, the examination tests become formalistic practices that have nothing to do with moral issues. There were those periods when we lost the emphasis on abstract ethics.
Michael Puett
We do find such shifts, but there is nothing absolute about the evolution of education. It is always possible to find room for reform. There was intense internal debate in China for centuries and centuries about how education should operate and how to design tests that would test character. And needless to say, they never came up with a perfect solution. Over time, the approach to designing education systems would coalesce and become overly formalistic. People would see that they were growing away from actual ethical issues and there would be again a big debate. We see real shifts occurring as a result. I think that what's exciting about the Chinese tradition is that the debate was about values, not about test scores.
Coming back to the present day, youth are confronted with an intense test-driven system based upon a restricted notion of what education means. But sadly, we've taken that restrictive notion to be a "necessary evil" and therefore so natural that there's no reason to debate it or rethink it. But we can learn from the past. The debates in China and Korea were healthy and offer clues as to what we can do today to reform this test culture in Asia. We need to ask, "What are the values that are being distilled through this education system?" And if we're not comfortable with them (and I think many people are not) then we need to ask ourselves how we can change them.
Emanuel Pastreich
What about the role of the teacher? Teachers had a very different position in traditional East Asian societies than they do today. Often Koreans and Chinese say, "we respect our teachers as we did in ancient times." But I do not believe this part at all. Increasingly teachers and students are seen as products for consumption.
Michael Puett
Teachers in China took Confucius himself as their model and saw his devotion to training disciples as an imperative. Similarly, striving to be a good person in all actions was an essential part of being a teacher, more than any technical aspect of one's research or teaching technique. The entire educational process was seen as one of growing as human beings - both teachers and students. Teachers were, hopefully, further along in the process, but they were still far from perfect. The expectation was that teacher was trying to be a good human and would inspire those around him to do the same.
The teacher wasn't there to instill a body of knowledge to help you ace a standardized test. Tests were meaningless if they did not have some ethical imperative in them. The teacher was there, ideally, to be an inspirational figure, someone striving to be good, and inspiring the next generation to do the same.
Emanuel Pastreich
But the conditions in modern China are so radically different. If you went to a professor in a Chinese university, or a bureaucrat in the Department of Education, and said that, they would probably respond, "That's a great idea, but we can't do anything because the whole system is built this way and we're trapped inside it." What do you think are effective methods of change? How do we get back on track?
Michael Puett
The starting point is to reignite a debate about why education exists. If we stop asking "How to get into a great school," and start asking, "How can education help make a better society?" then we start to address the real issues and perhaps enough people realize we have real problems and start to take concrete steps to affect actual change.
We need to take on the exam structure itself and its role in our society. As long as the entire system is based on the exams, then education will just focus on getting students through each loop of the exam.
Let's begin by sitting down to think about the purpose of these tests--oddly, we very rarely do so. Should we be having these tests at all ages for all kids? In many respects the answer may well be no. If we think carefully, we will agree on a space for some kind of test, but we also need to think about how we can reformulate that test so that our primary concern is the values and motivations for the test, and not the test itself. Once you change the assumptions, then it makes no sense to have an educational system based upon jumping through hoops. It will no longer make sense to put the hoops there.
Emanuel Pastreich
Who do you draw inspiration from as a teacher?
Michael Puett
I certainly tried to live up to the ideals that we've been discussing. And I am afraid I have fallen short. But I get up each day, brush off the dust, and start again.
I have been fortunate to have had some truly transformative teachers. They were people whom I really did look up to as great human beings. They were inspirational to me and they saw the classroom experience as transformational. For those teachers, education was about making students into better people, not learning facts.
Different teachers used different techniques, so there isn't one right way of doing this. But in their own way they helped me break out of my usual way of being and thinking and inspiried me to try to become a better human being. And certainly much later, when I actually started reading Chinese philosophy, I found a vocabulary to talk about what I had experienced with those teachers.
My goal in teaching is to try to do what I can to help the students become better human beings and hopefully help them to change the way they're living in a good way. The learning part they will do on their own.
Emanuel Pastreich
Can you give a concrete example of how you challenge your students through Chinese-inspired pedagogy?
Michael Puett
One of the courses I teach is on Chinese philosophy. I teach using only primary sources, in English translation. The readings are not in classical Chinese. But the students are only reading primary sources, not commentary. And I ask them specifically not to read the secondary literature.
I find that secondary literature will often try to put these primary sources in certain frameworks that, in many cases, we may want to question.
I tell them: "We're only going to read the primary sources." I ask the students to allow these texts to challenge some of their fundamental assumptions. And I tell them: "You won't like having your fundamental assumptions challenged! And you may not agree with what you're reading in the text. That's perfectly fine. But take these things and challenge your assumptions." Challenging the students is our overriding goal. We are not trying to translate the texts into easy to understand English that anyone can digest. I want the students to take these texts seriously, to struggle with them. You don't have to agree with the content of the essays, but you must take them seriously.
I am constantly posing questions in class, and encouraging the students to pose questions. If they give a reading that seems overly facile, I say: "Yes, but what about this word? What about that phrase?" I want to roam the classroom trying to lead them to the point that they see how the texts challenge their assumptions.
Emanuel Pastreich
There is a risk when teaching Chinese philosophy that you get bogged down in repeating the Confucian values: "A gentleman should be a good person, honor his elders, take care of his family.blah blah blah. Blah." But if you read those texts carefully, you discover they are not just listing virtues. There are all sorts of ambiguities and potentialities in between the words.
Michael Puett
Yes! That is a real danger that when you read through a text, you can end up just glossing over it thinking it just says: "Be a good person, try to help those around you." But the goal of the teacher should be to point out to the student, "Yes, but really read this stuff. Really see what they're saying, the gaps between the words, and look at the complexities of what they mean by "being a good person" and ask yourself why they selected the particular analogies they use." I want the students to get into the complexities of the material. I want them to understand the complexity of being a good human being.
Emanuel Pastreich
Let us talk about the general crisis in education around the world. We see universities being judged more for the quality of the dormitories than the content of courses and a focus on getting a job, as opposed to learning. There is a disturbing hollowing out of education overall. What does it take to get us moving in the right direction?
Michael Puett
We have a lot of work to do at very different levels. At the institutional level we should be concerned that money increasingly controlling the educational process. We must understand the degree to which the evolution of institutions is directed by money interests. We must push back against that trend and offer alternatives that are viable. At the local level we need to simply take teaching more seriously. That starts with just a few people serving as innovators and a community that will support them. We must push for big institutional changes, like redesigning exams and classrooms, and battling against drives to squeeze profit out of education.
At the same time, it is critical to have a handful of people who just start teaching in new ways. If we do not have concrete examples of good teaching we can identify and support, we cannot solve the huge institutional. Bureaucrats cannot design innovative teaching. It must be built from the ground up through experimentation.
Emanuel Pastreich
I find that my interactions with students outside of class are a critical part of the education process. I like to talk to them about how what they read relates to the world we live in.
Michael Puett
We just have to take a look at how Confucius is portrayed in the analects. He is not in the classroom and he is not administering written tests. He is working with his disciples in any number of ways and applying learning to very real concrete cases. Education is often more effective outside of the classroom. How we can achieve this approach within institutions that demand grades and classes is not obvious, but there is plenty of room for experimentation.
Emanuel Pastreich
If you brought Confucius to the podium of a lecture hall in front of 400 students, how would he respond? Would he prepare a Powerpoint? How would he answer when students asked him: "Is this going to be on the midterm?"
Michael Puett
I do suspect he'd start with some of the points we've made. I can imagining him starting out saying, "The goal of this class is not for you to learn X, Y, and Z, or to do well on your exam." I suspect he would immediately try to restructure the classroom so that it became an arena wherein people are actually being transformed by the process of learning. And the fact that it's a big lecture hall doesn't mean that it cannot serve that function.
Confucius would want to challenge the students. He does not want to make the course easy, but also not to make the "difficulty" a matter of just learning more facts. For Confucius, there is not learning if it is not linked at some level to the process of becoming better human beings. In a way, learning parallels the rituals that Confucius discusses at length.
Emanuel Pastreich
Your emphasis on ritual is very refreshing. We've distanced ourselves from rituals as a society. If you ask students, they will say that rituals are things practiced by previous generation, by people in primitive societies. But in fact students are engaged in any number of rituals, from the way they talk to each other to the way they buy designers clothes.
You may say you have no rituals, but that only means you are unaware of them. Confucian is strong because it offers a language to discuss rituals and links them to ethical concerns.
Michael Puett
It's very common in the United States, but you also can observe this in East Asia, for youth to think that rituals are these old things that people used to do in traditional societies when they believed in spirits and ancestor worship. And now, they think, we are modern. We don't do those silly rituals anymore. We're are just true to ourselves and we don't engage in rituals. But if Confucius could be dropped into any part of the contemporary world, most certainly including contemporary America, he would say: "Well, no. You people are engaged in rituals all the time."
The danger is that because we are unaware of the rituals that we engage in, we do not take them seriously and therefore they do not achieve their intended purpose. Rituals work when they are truly transformational, like the expression, "I now pronounce you man and wife." If we don't take the rituals of life seriously, we do not gain anything from them. Some dismiss rituals, saying, "I don't want to bow before my ancestors." And yet that same person insists on driving a BMW and sending their children to the most expensive private schools. We should be first accept that these are modern rituals and post the question: "Is this ritual making us into better people?" If the answer is no, we need to be aware that this is in fact a ritual and be aware of its symbolic and social function so that we can bring it under control. Denial or suppression is not really a solution. We must modify the ritual and make it more healthy.
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Robert Greene, Mastery, 2012
pp.10─11
As a classic example, compare the lives of Sir Francis Galton and his older cousin, Charles Darwin. By all accounts, Galton was a super-genius with an exceptionally high IQ, quite a bit higher than Darwin's (these are estimates done by experts years after the invention of the measurement).
Galton was a boy wonder who went on to have an illustrious scientific career, but he never mastered any of the fields he went into. He was notoriously restless, as it often the case with child prodigies.
Darwin, by contrast, is rightly celebrated as the superior scientist, one of the few who has forever changed our view of life. As Darwin himself admitted, he was “a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect .... I have no great quickness of apprehension .... My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited”. Darwin, however, must have possessed something that Galton lacked.
p.11
In many ways, a look at the early life of Darwin himself can supply an answer to his mystery. As a child Darwin had one overriding passion ─ collecting biological specimens.
p.11
Suddenly, his passion for collecting found its perfect outlet. In South America he could collect the most astounding array of specimens, as well as fossils and bones. He could connect his interest in the variety of life on the planet with something larger ─ major questions about the origins of species. He poured all of his energy into this enterprise, accumulating so many specimens that a theory began to take shape in his mind. After five years at sea, he returned to England and devoted the rest of his life to the single task of elaborating his theory of evolution. In the process he had to deal with a tremendous amount of drudgery ─ for instance, eight years exclusively studying barnacles to establish his credential as a biologist. He had to develop highly refined political and social skills to handle all the prejudice against such a theory in Victorian England. And what sustained him throughout this lengthy process was his intense love of and connection to the subject.
p.11
The basic elements of this story are repeated in the lives of all of the great Masters in history: a youthful passion or predilection, a chance encounter that allows them to discover how to apply it, an apprenticeship in which they come alive with energy and focus. They excel by their ability to practice harder and move faster through the process, all of this stemming from the intensity of their desire to learn and from the deep connection they feel to their field of study. And at the core of this intensity of effort is in fact a quality that is genetic and inborn ─ not talent or brilliance, which is something that must be developed, but rather a deep and powerful inclination toward a particular subject.
p.12
This uniqueness is revealed to us through the preferences we innately feel for particular activities or subjects of study. Such inclinations can be toward music or mathematics, certain sports or games, solving puzzle-like problems, tinkering and building, or playing with words.
With those who stand out by their later mastery, they experience this inclination more deeply and clearly than others. They experience it as an inner calling. It tends to dominate their thoughts and dreams. They find their way, by accident or sheer effort, to a career path in which this inclination can flourish. This intense connection and desire allows them to withstand the pain of the process ─ the self-doubts, the tedious hours of practice and study, the inevitable setbacks, the endless barbs from the envious. They develop a resiliency and confidence that others lack.
p.12
In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement.
p.12
Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive.
“”─
p.162
In elaborating this concept, he theorized that the basic features of all languages are not simply genetic in origin and universal, but that each language has elements that reflect the uniqueness of its culture.
Culture plays a larger role than we might imagine in how we think and communicate.
p.162
Daniel Everett first book, Don't sleep, there are snakes
pp.184─185
B. Allow for serendipity
The brain is an instrument developed for making connections. It operates as a dual processing system, in which every bit of information that comes in is at the same time compared to other information. The brain is constantly searching for similarities, differences, and relationships between what it processes. Your task is to feed this natural inclination, to create the optimal conditions for it to make new and original associations between ideas and experiences. And one of the best ways to accomplish this is by letting go of conscious control and allowing chance to enter into the process.
The reason for this is simple. When we are consumed with a particular project, our attention tends to become quite narrow as we focus so deeply. We grow tense. In this state, our mind responds to trying to reduce the amount of stimuli we have to deal with. We literally close ourselves off from the world in order to concentrate on what is necessary. This can have the unintended consequence of making it harder to for to see other possibilities, to be more open and creative with our ideas. When we are in a more relaxed state, our attention naturally broadens and we take in more stimuli.
Many of the most interesting and profound discoveries in science occur when the thinker is not concentrating directly on the problem but is about to drift off to sleep, or get on a bus, or hears a joke ── moments of unstrained attention, when something unexpected enters the mental sphere and triggers a new and fertile connection. Such chance associations and discoveries are known as serendipity ── the occurrence of something we are not expecting ── and although by their nature you cannot force them to happen, you can invite serendipity into the creative process by taking two simple steps.
The first step is to widen your search as far as possible. In the research stage of your project, you look at more than what is generally required. You expand your search into other fields, reading and absorbing any related information. If you have a particular theory or hypothesis about a phenomenon, you examine as many examples and potential counter examples as humanly possible. It might seem tiring and inefficient, but you must trust this process. What ensues it that the brain becomes increasingly excited and stimulated by the variety of information. As William James expressed it, the mind “transitions from one idea to another ... the most unheard of combination of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbling about in a state of bewildering activity.” A kind of mental momentum is generated, in which the slightest chance occurrence will spark a fertile idea.
The second step is to maintain an openness and looseness of spirit. In moments of great tension and searching, you allow yourself moments of release. You take walks, engage in activities outside your work (Einstein played the violin), or think about something else, no matter how trivial. When some new and unanticipated idea now enters your mind, you do not ignore it because it is irrational or does not fit the narrow frame of your previous work. You give it instead full attention and explore where it leads you.
“”─
(Mastery / Robert Greene., 1. successful people., 2. success., 3. self-actualization (psychology), includes bibliographical references, BF637.S8G695 2012, 158─dc23, 2012027195, )
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The Atlantic
content | june 2016 | vol. 317-no. 5
How kids really succeed
by Paul Tough
p.62
Jackson's data showed that spending a few hours each week in close proximity to a certain kind of teacher changed something about students' behavior. And that was what mattered. Somehow these teachers were able to convey deep messages--perhaps implicitly or even subliminally--about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students' psychology, and thus on their behavior.
The environment those teachers created in the classroom, and the messages that environment conveyed, motivated students to start making better decisions--to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student's school day. And those decisions improved their lives in meaningful ways.
p.63
That mind-set is the product of countless environmental forces, but research done by Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, and others has shown that teachers can have an enormous impact on their students' mind-sets, often without knowing it. Messages that teachers convey--large and small, explicit and implicit--affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way they behave there.
p.63
Farrington has distilled this voluminous mind-set research into four key beliefs that, when embraced by students, seem to contribute most significantly to their tendency to persevere in the classroom:
1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
--__---──---__---──---__---──---__--
The Atlantic
content | june 2016 | vol. 317-no. 5
How kids really succeed
by Paul Tough
p.58
In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country--51 per cent, to be precise--fell below the federal government's low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch.
p.58
The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be harder to educate than children from more comfortable backgrounds. Educators often struggle to motivate them, to calm them down, to connect with them. This doesn't mean they're impossible to teach, of course; plenty of kids who grow up in poverty are thriving in the classroom.
p.58
My last book, How Children Succeed, explored this research and profiled educators who were attempting to put it into practice in their classrooms.
p.58
In California this spring, for example, a coalition of nine (9) major school districts has been trying out a new school-assessment system that relies in part on measurements of students' noncognitive abilities, such as self-management and social awareness.
p.58
And it has become clear, a the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or reading--indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom. This paradox has raised a pressing question for a new generation of researchers: Is the teaching paradigm the right one to use when it comes to helping young people develop noncognitive capacities?
p.58
What is emerging is a new idea: that qualities like grit and resilience are not formed through the traditional mechanics of “teaching”; instead, a growing number of researchers now believe, they are shaped by several specific environmental forces, both in the classroom and in the home, sometimes in subtle and intricate ways.
p.58
The process begins in early childhood, when the most important force shaping the development of these skills turns out to be a surprising one: stress. Over the past decade, neuroscientists have demonstrated with increasing clarity how severe and chronic stress in childhood--what doctors sometimes call toxic stress--leads to physiological and neurological adaptations in children that affect the way their minds and bodies develop and, significantly, the way they function in school.
p.58
Each of us has within us an intricate stress-response network that links together the brain, the immune system, and the endocrine system (the glands that produce and release stress hormones). In childhood, and especially in early childhood, this network is highly sensitive to environmental cues; it is constantly looking for signals from a child's surrounding that might tell it what to expect in the days and years ahead. When those signals suggest that life is going to be hard, the network reacts by preparing for trouble: raising blood pressure, increasing the production of adrenaline, heightening vigilence. Neuroscientists have shown that children living in poverty experience more toxic stress than middle-class children, and that additional stress expresses itself in higher blood pressure and higher level of certain stress hormones.
In the short term, these adaptations may have benefits, especially in a dangerous environment. When your threat-detection system--sometimes referred to as your fight-or-flight response--is on high alert, you can react quickly to trouble. But in the longer term, they can cause an array of physiological problems and impede development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls our most complex intellectual functions, as well as our ability to regulate ourselves both emotionally and cognitively.
pp.58-59
On an emotional level, toxic stress can make it difficult for children to moderate their responses to disappointments and provocations. A highly sensitive stress-response system constantly on the lookout for threats can produce patterns of behavior that are self-defeating in school: fighting, talking back, acting up, and, more subtly, going through each day perpetually wary of connection with peers or teachers.
p.59
On a cognitive level, chronically elevated stress can disrupt the development of what are known as executive functions: higher-order mental abilities that some researchers compare to a team of air-traffic controllers overseeing the working of the brain. Executive functions, which include working memory, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility, are exceptionally helpful in navigating unfamiliar situations and processing new information, which is exactly what we ask children to do at school every day. When a child's executive functions aren't fully developed, school days, with their complicated directions and constant distractions, can become a neverending exercising in frustration.
p.59
Executive functions also serve as the developmental building blocks--the neurological infrastructure--underpinning the noncognitive capacities that educators are now so focused on. What this suggests is that if we want to help children demonstrate these qualities in school, there are two places where we need to change our approach. One is the classroom, where right now many fundamental practices of modern American pedagogy ignore this science of adversity. The second is where children's neurobiological identity begins to be formed, long before they ever set foot in kindergarten: the home.
p.59
The most important environmental factor in children's lives, researchers have shown, is the way their parents and other adults interact with them. Beginning in infancy, children rely on responses from their parents to help them make sense of the world. Researchers at Harvard's Center on the Developing Child have labeled these “serve and return” interactions. An infant makes a sound or looks at an object--that's the serve--and her parents return the serve by responding to her babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech. More than any other experiences in infancy, these rudimentary interactions trigger the development and strengthening of connections among the regions of the brain that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory.
A second crucial role that parents play early on is as external regulators of their children's stress. When parents behave harshly or unpredictably--especially at moments when their children are upset--the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and respond effectively to stressful situations. By contrast, when a child's parents respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones.
p.59
But if a home environment can have a positive impact on a child's development, it can also do the opposite.
p.59
Adverse Childhood Experience Study
1990s
Roberts F. Anda, a physician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
and Vincent J. Felitti, the founder of the preventive-medicine department at Kaiser Permanente.
Anda and Felitte identified 10 categories of childhood trauma: three categories of abuse, two of neglect, and five related to growing up in a “seriously dysfunctional household”. They found that the number of these traumas a person experiences in childhood (a number that has come to be known as a person's ACE score) correlated in adulthood with health problems ranging from heart disease to cancer.
p.59
According to this study, slightly more than half of all children have never experienced a serious adverse event--but the other half, the ones with at least one ACE, account for 85 per cent of the behavioral problems that children exhibit.
p.60
For children who grow up without significant experiences of adversity, the skill-development process leading up to kindergarten generally works the way it's supposed to: Calm, consistent, responsive interactions in infancy with parents and other caregivers create neural connections that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills. Just as early stress sends signals to the nervous system to maintain constant vigilance and prepare for a lifetime of trouble, early warmth and responsiveness send the opposite signals: You're safe; life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and provide for you. BE curious about the world; it's full of fascinating surprises. These messages trigger adaptations in children's brains that allow them to slow down and consider problems and decisions more carefully, to focus their attention for longer periods, and to more willingly trade immediate gratification for promise of long-term benefits.
We don't always think of these abilities as academic in nature, but in fact they are enormously beneficial in helping kids achieve academic success in kindergarten and beyond.
p.60
The more they fall behind, the worse they feel about themselves and about school. That creates more stress, which tends to feed into behavioral problems, which lead to stigmatization and punishment in the classroom, which keep their stress levels elevated, which makes it still harder to concentrate--and so on, throughout elementary school.
Fast-forward a few years, to the moment when those students arrive in middle or high school, and these executive-function challenges are now typically perceived to be problems of attitude and motivation.
p.60
Instead, the adults see them as kids with behavioral problems who need, more than anything, to be disciplined.
p.60
One of the chief insights that recent neurobiological research has provided, however, is that young people, especially those who have experienced significant adversity, are often guided by emotional and psychological and hormonal forces that are far from rational. This doesn't mean that teachers should excuse or ignore bad behavior. But it does explain why harsh punishments so often prove ineffective in motivating troubled young people to succeed.
p.61
Within the field of psychology, one important body of thought that helps explain this apparent paradox is self-determination theory, which is the life's work of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, two professors at the University of Rochester. Deci and Ryan came up with the beginnings of their theory in the 1970s, when the field was mostly dominated by behaviorists, who believed that people's actions are governed solely by their motivation to fulfill basic biological needs and thus are highly responsive to straightforward rewards and punishments.
Deci and Ryan, by contrast, argued that we are mostly motivated not by the material consequences of our actions but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning of those actions bring us, a phenomenon called intrinsic motivation. They identified three key humans needs--our need for competence, our need for autonomy, and our need for relatedness, meaning personal connection--and they posited that intrinsic motivation can be sustained only when we feel that those needs are being satisfied.
p.61
Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan
In their writing on education, Deci and Ryan acknowledge that many of the tasks that teachers ask students to complete each day are not inherently fun or satisfying; learning anything, be it painting or computer programming or algebra, involves a lot of repetitive practice. It is at these moments, they write, that extrinsic motivation becomes important: when tasks must be performed not for the inherent satisfaction of completing them, but for some separate outcome. When teachers are able to create an environment that fosters competence, autonomy, and relatedness, Deci and Ryan say, students are much more likely to feel motivated to do that hard work.
p.62
C. Kirabo Jackson
A few years ago, a young economist at Northwestern University named C. Kirabo Jackson began investigating how to measure educators' effectiveness. In many school systems these days, teachers are assessed based primarily on one data point: the standardized-test scores of their students. Jackson suspected that the true impact teachers had on their students was more complicated than a single test score could reveal. So he found and analyzed a detailed database in North Carolina that tracked the performance of every single 9th-grade student in the state from 2005 to 2011--a total of 464,502 students. His data followed their progress not only in 9th-grade but throughout high school.
p.62
But then Jackson did something new. He created a proxy measure for students' noncognitive ability, using just four pieces of existing administrative data: attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA. Jackson's new index measured, in a fairly crude way, how engaged students were in school--whether they showed up, whether they misbehaved, and how hard they worked in their classes. Jackson found that this simple noncognitive proxy was, remarkably, a better predictor than students' test scores of whether the students would go on to attend college, a better predictor of adult wages, and better predictor of future arrests.
p.62
Jackson had access to students' scores on the statewide standardized test, and he used that as a rough measure of their cognitive ability.
p.62
Jackson found that some teachers were reliably able to raise their students' standardized-test scores year after year. These are the teachers, in every teacher-evaluation system in the country, who are the most valued and most rewarded. But he also found that there was another distinct cohort of teachers who were reliably able to raise their students' performance on his noncognitive measure. If you were assigned to the class of a teacher in this cohort, you were more likely to show up to school, more likely to avoid suspension, more likely to move on to the next grade. And your overall GPA went up--not just your grades in that particular teacher's class, but your grades in your other classes, too.
Jackson found that these two groups of successful teachers did not necessarily overlap much; in every school, it seemed, there were certain teachers who were especially good at developing cognitive skills in their students and other teachers who excelled at developing noncognitive skills. But the teachers in the second cohort were not being rewarded for their success in their students--indeed, it seemed likely that no one but Jackson even realized that they were successful. And yet those teachers, according to Jackson's calculations, were doing more to get their students to college and raise their future wages than were the much-celebrated teachers who boosted students' test scores.
p.62
Jackson's data showed that spending a few hours each week in close proximity to a certain kind of teacher changed something about students' behavior. And that was what mattered. Somehow these teachers were able to convey deep messages--perhaps implicitly or even subliminally--about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students' psychology, and thus on their behavior.
The environment those teachers created in the classroom, and the messages that environment conveyed, motivated students to start making better decisions--to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student's school day. And those decisions improved their lives in meaningful ways.
p.64
C. Kirabo Jackson
What Kirabo Jackson seems to have discovered is that certain educators have been able to create such an environment in their own classroom, regardless of the climate in the school as a whole.
p.63
Camille A. Farrington, a former inner-city high-school teacher who now works at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research
p.63
That mind-set is the product of countless environmental forces, but research done by Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, and others has shown that teachers can have an enormous impact on their students' mind-sets, often without knowing it. Messages that teachers convey--large and small, explicit and implicit--affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way they behave there.
p.63
Farrington has distilled this voluminous mind-set research into four key beliefs that, when embraced by students, seem to contribute most significantly to their tendency to persevere in the classroom:
1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
p.64
Instead, it conveys opposite warnings, at car-alarm volume: I don't belong here. This is enemy territory. Everyone in this school is out to get me.
p.64
Add to this is the fact many children raised in adversity, by the time they get to middle or high school, are significantly behind their peers academically and disproportionately likely to have a history of confrontations with school administrators. These students, as a result, tend to be the ones placed in remedial classes or subjected to repeated suspensions or both--none of which makes them likely to think I belong here or I can succeed at this.
p.64
These efforts target students' beliefs in two separate categories, each one echoing items on Farrington's list: first, students' feelings about their place in the school (I belong in this academic community), and then their feelings about the work they are doing in class (my ability and competence grow with my effort; I can succeed at this; this work has value for me).
p.64
...--none of which makes them likely to think I belong here or I can succeed at this.
p.64
Turn-around for Children, a school-transformation nonprofit that works in high-poverty schools in New York City; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C.
p.64
During my visit, much of the intervention team's focus was on encouraging teachers in what it called cooperative learning, a pedagogical approach that promotes student engagement in the learning process: less lecture time; fewer repetitive worksheets; more time spent working in small groups, solving problems, engaging in discussions, and collaborating on long-term creative projects. It's a style of teaching and classroom organization that is relatively common in independent schools and in wealthy suburbs but quite unusual in inner-city public schools.
p.65
But Turnaround's coaches eventually convinced the teachers--or most of them, anyway--that giving students more opportunity to experience autonomy and to engage deeply in their own learning would improve their motivation and mind-set. When the teachers tried these new methods, they discovered, often to their surprise, that they worked.
p.65
Polaris is affiliated with a national nonprofit called El Education. (The organization was known as Expeditionary Learning until October, when it changed its name.)
p.65
Polaris, which enrolls students from kindergarten through 8th-grade, has one of the more disadvantaged student bodies in the network: 94 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and the neighborhood where the school is located, West Humboldt Park, has high rates of violent crime, unemployment, and poverty.
p.65
The first strategy has to do with belonging and relationships; the second has to do with work and challenges.
p.65
On the relationship side, the most important institution at EL schools is Crew, an ongoing, multiyear discussion and advisory group of students. Each EL student belongs to a crew, which typically meets every day for half an hour or so to discuss matters important to the students, both academic and personal. In middle school and high school, the groups are relatively initmate--10 or 15 kids--and students generally stay in the same crew for 3 years or longer, with the same teacher leading the group year after year. Many EL students will tell you their crew meeting is the place where they most feel a sense of belonging at school; for some of them, it's the place where they most feel a sense of belonging, period.
p.65
The pedagogical guru behind EL's instructional practices and curriculum is Ron Berger, the organization's chief academic officer.
p.65
When we spoke, he [Ron Berger] explained that this feeling of connection is rooted in his own childhood: He grew up with four siblings in a chaotic and unstable family. He knows firsthand how stress and trauma at home can unsettle and derail a child's development, and he understands that without the right intervention, the child may never recover from those early setbacks.
pp.65-66
“Some kids get withdrawn and protective”, he told me. “Other kids get this kind of shell of being a tough guy, and they're frozen in school. Either way, it restricts them from being able to contribute in class, to be a part of discussions, to raise their hand, to show that they care about their learning. It holds back any kind of passion or interaction. They can't take risks in school, and you can't learn if you're not taking risks.” Berger recognizes these behaviors, he said, because they are exactly what he himself did when he was a kid.
p.66
Students at EL schools, Berger said, can't hide the way that he did. Crew helps pull them out of their shell, and in class they're compelled daily to interact with their peers and teachers in group discussions and to collaborate on group projects, and before long that kind of interaction begins to feel natural.
p.66
When I visited another EL school last spring, the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (know as WHEELS), in Upper Manhattan, almost every classroom I observed was engaged in some kind of elaborate discussion or creative project that demanded involvement from every student.
p.66
In social-science class that day, however, they were learning complex material and behaving perfectly well--and not because they were incentivized with rewards or threatened with punishments, but because school was, for that period at least, actually kind of interesting.
p.66
The central premise of EL schools is that characters is built not through lectures or direct instruction from teachers but through experience of persevering as students confront challenging academic work. This, to me, is the most significant innovation in the work that is going on at EL schools.
p.66
And while those students certainly need the sense of connection that comes from feeling embedded within a web of deep and close relationships at school, the crucial insight of EL Education is that belonging isn't enough on its own. For a student to truly feel motivated by and about school, he also has to perceive that he is doing work that is challenging, rigorous, and meaningful.
Paul Tough is the author of the new book Helping Children Succeed: what works and why, from which this article is adapted. This work was funded in part by a grant from the CityBridge Foundation, the education-focused foundation of Katherine and David Bradley, who also own The Atlantic.
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The Atlantic
content | june 2016 | vol. 317-no. 5
How kids really succeed
by Paul Tough
p.62
Jackson's data showed that spending a few hours each week in close proximity to a certain kind of teacher changed something about students' behavior. And that was what mattered. Somehow these teachers were able to convey deep messages--perhaps implicitly or even subliminally--about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students' psychology, and thus on their behavior.
The environment those teachers created in the classroom, and the messages that environment conveyed, motivated students to start making better decisions--to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student's school day. And those decisions improved their lives in meaningful ways.
p.63
That mind-set is the product of countless environmental forces, but research done by Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, and others has shown that teachers can have an enormous impact on their students' mind-sets, often without knowing it. Messages that teachers convey--large and small, explicit and implicit--affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way they behave there.
p.63
Farrington has distilled this voluminous mind-set research into four key beliefs that, when embraced by students, seem to contribute most significantly to their tendency to persevere in the classroom:
1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
--__---──---__---──---__---──---__--
The Atlantic
content | june 2016 | vol. 317-no. 5
How kids really succeed
by Paul Tough
p.58
In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country--51 per cent, to be precise--fell below the federal government's low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch.
p.58
The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be harder to educate than children from more comfortable backgrounds. Educators often struggle to motivate them, to calm them down, to connect with them. This doesn't mean they're impossible to teach, of course; plenty of kids who grow up in poverty are thriving in the classroom.
p.58
My last book, How Children Succeed, explored this research and profiled educators who were attempting to put it into practice in their classrooms.
p.58
In California this spring, for example, a coalition of nine (9) major school districts has been trying out a new school-assessment system that relies in part on measurements of students' noncognitive abilities, such as self-management and social awareness.
p.58
And it has become clear, a the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or reading--indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom. This paradox has raised a pressing question for a new generation of researchers: Is the teaching paradigm the right one to use when it comes to helping young people develop noncognitive capacities?
p.58
What is emerging is a new idea: that qualities like grit and resilience are not formed through the traditional mechanics of “teaching”; instead, a growing number of researchers now believe, they are shaped by several specific environmental forces, both in the classroom and in the home, sometimes in subtle and intricate ways.
p.58
The process begins in early childhood, when the most important force shaping the development of these skills turns out to be a surprising one: stress. Over the past decade, neuroscientists have demonstrated with increasing clarity how severe and chronic stress in childhood--what doctors sometimes call toxic stress--leads to physiological and neurological adaptations in children that affect the way their minds and bodies develop and, significantly, the way they function in school.
p.58
Each of us has within us an intricate stress-response network that links together the brain, the immune system, and the endocrine system (the glands that produce and release stress hormones). In childhood, and especially in early childhood, this network is highly sensitive to environmental cues; it is constantly looking for signals from a child's surrounding that might tell it what to expect in the days and years ahead. When those signals suggest that life is going to be hard, the network reacts by preparing for trouble: raising blood pressure, increasing the production of adrenaline, heightening vigilence. Neuroscientists have shown that children living in poverty experience more toxic stress than middle-class children, and that additional stress expresses itself in higher blood pressure and higher level of certain stress hormones.
In the short term, these adaptations may have benefits, especially in a dangerous environment. When your threat-detection system--sometimes referred to as your fight-or-flight response--is on high alert, you can react quickly to trouble. But in the longer term, they can cause an array of physiological problems and impede development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls our most complex intellectual functions, as well as our ability to regulate ourselves both emotionally and cognitively.
pp.58-59
On an emotional level, toxic stress can make it difficult for children to moderate their responses to disappointments and provocations. A highly sensitive stress-response system constantly on the lookout for threats can produce patterns of behavior that are self-defeating in school: fighting, talking back, acting up, and, more subtly, going through each day perpetually wary of connection with peers or teachers.
p.59
On a cognitive level, chronically elevated stress can disrupt the development of what are known as executive functions: higher-order mental abilities that some researchers compare to a team of air-traffic controllers overseeing the working of the brain. Executive functions, which include working memory, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility, are exceptionally helpful in navigating unfamiliar situations and processing new information, which is exactly what we ask children to do at school every day. When a child's executive functions aren't fully developed, school days, with their complicated directions and constant distractions, can become a neverending exercising in frustration.
p.59
Executive functions also serve as the developmental building blocks--the neurological infrastructure--underpinning the noncognitive capacities that educators are now so focused on. What this suggests is that if we want to help children demonstrate these qualities in school, there are two places where we need to change our approach. One is the classroom, where right now many fundamental practices of modern American pedagogy ignore this science of adversity. The second is where children's neurobiological identity begins to be formed, long before they ever set foot in kindergarten: the home.
p.59
The most important environmental factor in children's lives, researchers have shown, is the way their parents and other adults interact with them. Beginning in infancy, children rely on responses from their parents to help them make sense of the world. Researchers at Harvard's Center on the Developing Child have labeled these “serve and return” interactions. An infant makes a sound or looks at an object--that's the serve--and her parents return the serve by responding to her babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech. More than any other experiences in infancy, these rudimentary interactions trigger the development and strengthening of connections among the regions of the brain that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory.
A second crucial role that parents play early on is as external regulators of their children's stress. When parents behave harshly or unpredictably--especially at moments when their children are upset--the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and respond effectively to stressful situations. By contrast, when a child's parents respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones.
p.59
But if a home environment can have a positive impact on a child's development, it can also do the opposite.
p.59
Adverse Childhood Experience Study
1990s
Roberts F. Anda, a physician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
and Vincent J. Felitti, the founder of the preventive-medicine department at Kaiser Permanente.
Anda and Felitte identified 10 categories of childhood trauma: three categories of abuse, two of neglect, and five related to growing up in a “seriously dysfunctional household”. They found that the number of these traumas a person experiences in childhood (a number that has come to be known as a person's ACE score) correlated in adulthood with health problems ranging from heart disease to cancer.
p.59
According to this study, slightly more than half of all children have never experienced a serious adverse event--but the other half, the ones with at least one ACE, account for 85 per cent of the behavioral problems that children exhibit.
p.60
For children who grow up without significant experiences of adversity, the skill-development process leading up to kindergarten generally works the way it's supposed to: Calm, consistent, responsive interactions in infancy with parents and other caregivers create neural connections that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills. Just as early stress sends signals to the nervous system to maintain constant vigilance and prepare for a lifetime of trouble, early warmth and responsiveness send the opposite signals: You're safe; life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and provide for you. BE curious about the world; it's full of fascinating surprises. These messages trigger adaptations in children's brains that allow them to slow down and consider problems and decisions more carefully, to focus their attention for longer periods, and to more willingly trade immediate gratification for promise of long-term benefits.
We don't always think of these abilities as academic in nature, but in fact they are enormously beneficial in helping kids achieve academic success in kindergarten and beyond.
p.60
The more they fall behind, the worse they feel about themselves and about school. That creates more stress, which tends to feed into behavioral problems, which lead to stigmatization and punishment in the classroom, which keep their stress levels elevated, which makes it still harder to concentrate--and so on, throughout elementary school.
Fast-forward a few years, to the moment when those students arrive in middle or high school, and these executive-function challenges are now typically perceived to be problems of attitude and motivation.
p.60
Instead, the adults see them as kids with behavioral problems who need, more than anything, to be disciplined.
p.60
One of the chief insights that recent neurobiological research has provided, however, is that young people, especially those who have experienced significant adversity, are often guided by emotional and psychological and hormonal forces that are far from rational. This doesn't mean that teachers should excuse or ignore bad behavior. But it does explain why harsh punishments so often prove ineffective in motivating troubled young people to succeed.
p.61
Within the field of psychology, one important body of thought that helps explain this apparent paradox is self-determination theory, which is the life's work of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, two professors at the University of Rochester. Deci and Ryan came up with the beginnings of their theory in the 1970s, when the field was mostly dominated by behaviorists, who believed that people's actions are governed solely by their motivation to fulfill basic biological needs and thus are highly responsive to straightforward rewards and punishments.
Deci and Ryan, by contrast, argued that we are mostly motivated not by the material consequences of our actions but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning of those actions bring us, a phenomenon called intrinsic motivation. They identified three key humans needs--our need for competence, our need for autonomy, and our need for relatedness, meaning personal connection--and they posited that intrinsic motivation can be sustained only when we feel that those needs are being satisfied.
p.61
Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan
In their writing on education, Deci and Ryan acknowledge that many of the tasks that teachers ask students to complete each day are not inherently fun or satisfying; learning anything, be it painting or computer programming or algebra, involves a lot of repetitive practice. It is at these moments, they write, that extrinsic motivation becomes important: when tasks must be performed not for the inherent satisfaction of completing them, but for some separate outcome. When teachers are able to create an environment that fosters competence, autonomy, and relatedness, Deci and Ryan say, students are much more likely to feel motivated to do that hard work.
p.62
C. Kirabo Jackson
A few years ago, a young economist at Northwestern University named C. Kirabo Jackson began investigating how to measure educators' effectiveness. In many school systems these days, teachers are assessed based primarily on one data point: the standardized-test scores of their students. Jackson suspected that the true impact teachers had on their students was more complicated than a single test score could reveal. So he found and analyzed a detailed database in North Carolina that tracked the performance of every single 9th-grade student in the state from 2005 to 2011--a total of 464,502 students. His data followed their progress not only in 9th-grade but throughout high school.
p.62
But then Jackson did something new. He created a proxy measure for students' noncognitive ability, using just four pieces of existing administrative data: attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA. Jackson's new index measured, in a fairly crude way, how engaged students were in school--whether they showed up, whether they misbehaved, and how hard they worked in their classes. Jackson found that this simple noncognitive proxy was, remarkably, a better predictor than students' test scores of whether the students would go on to attend college, a better predictor of adult wages, and better predictor of future arrests.
p.62
Jackson had access to students' scores on the statewide standardized test, and he used that as a rough measure of their cognitive ability.
p.62
Jackson found that some teachers were reliably able to raise their students' standardized-test scores year after year. These are the teachers, in every teacher-evaluation system in the country, who are the most valued and most rewarded. But he also found that there was another distinct cohort of teachers who were reliably able to raise their students' performance on his noncognitive measure. If you were assigned to the class of a teacher in this cohort, you were more likely to show up to school, more likely to avoid suspension, more likely to move on to the next grade. And your overall GPA went up--not just your grades in that particular teacher's class, but your grades in your other classes, too.
Jackson found that these two groups of successful teachers did not necessarily overlap much; in every school, it seemed, there were certain teachers who were especially good at developing cognitive skills in their students and other teachers who excelled at developing noncognitive skills. But the teachers in the second cohort were not being rewarded for their success in their students--indeed, it seemed likely that no one but Jackson even realized that they were successful. And yet those teachers, according to Jackson's calculations, were doing more to get their students to college and raise their future wages than were the much-celebrated teachers who boosted students' test scores.
p.62
Jackson's data showed that spending a few hours each week in close proximity to a certain kind of teacher changed something about students' behavior. And that was what mattered. Somehow these teachers were able to convey deep messages--perhaps implicitly or even subliminally--about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students' psychology, and thus on their behavior.
The environment those teachers created in the classroom, and the messages that environment conveyed, motivated students to start making better decisions--to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student's school day. And those decisions improved their lives in meaningful ways.
p.64
C. Kirabo Jackson
What Kirabo Jackson seems to have discovered is that certain educators have been able to create such an environment in their own classroom, regardless of the climate in the school as a whole.
p.63
Camille A. Farrington, a former inner-city high-school teacher who now works at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research
p.63
That mind-set is the product of countless environmental forces, but research done by Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, and others has shown that teachers can have an enormous impact on their students' mind-sets, often without knowing it. Messages that teachers convey--large and small, explicit and implicit--affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way they behave there.
p.63
Farrington has distilled this voluminous mind-set research into four key beliefs that, when embraced by students, seem to contribute most significantly to their tendency to persevere in the classroom:
1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
p.64
Instead, it conveys opposite warnings, at car-alarm volume: I don't belong here. This is enemy territory. Everyone in this school is out to get me.
p.64
Add to this is the fact many children raised in adversity, by the time they get to middle or high school, are significantly behind their peers academically and disproportionately likely to have a history of confrontations with school administrators. These students, as a result, tend to be the ones placed in remedial classes or subjected to repeated suspensions or both--none of which makes them likely to think I belong here or I can succeed at this.
p.64
These efforts target students' beliefs in two separate categories, each one echoing items on Farrington's list: first, students' feelings about their place in the school (I belong in this academic community), and then their feelings about the work they are doing in class (my ability and competence grow with my effort; I can succeed at this; this work has value for me).
p.64
...--none of which makes them likely to think I belong here or I can succeed at this.
p.64
Turn-around for Children, a school-transformation nonprofit that works in high-poverty schools in New York City; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C.
p.64
During my visit, much of the intervention team's focus was on encouraging teachers in what it called cooperative learning, a pedagogical approach that promotes student engagement in the learning process: less lecture time; fewer repetitive worksheets; more time spent working in small groups, solving problems, engaging in discussions, and collaborating on long-term creative projects. It's a style of teaching and classroom organization that is relatively common in independent schools and in wealthy suburbs but quite unusual in inner-city public schools.
p.65
But Turnaround's coaches eventually convinced the teachers--or most of them, anyway--that giving students more opportunity to experience autonomy and to engage deeply in their own learning would improve their motivation and mind-set. When the teachers tried these new methods, they discovered, often to their surprise, that they worked.
p.65
Polaris is affiliated with a national nonprofit called El Education. (The organization was known as Expeditionary Learning until October, when it changed its name.)
p.65
Polaris, which enrolls students from kindergarten through 8th-grade, has one of the more disadvantaged student bodies in the network: 94 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and the neighborhood where the school is located, West Humboldt Park, has high rates of violent crime, unemployment, and poverty.
p.65
The first strategy has to do with belonging and relationships; the second has to do with work and challenges.
p.65
On the relationship side, the most important institution at EL schools is Crew, an ongoing, multiyear discussion and advisory group of students. Each EL student belongs to a crew, which typically meets every day for half an hour or so to discuss matters important to the students, both academic and personal. In middle school and high school, the groups are relatively initmate--10 or 15 kids--and students generally stay in the same crew for 3 years or longer, with the same teacher leading the group year after year. Many EL students will tell you their crew meeting is the place where they most feel a sense of belonging at school; for some of them, it's the place where they most feel a sense of belonging, period.
p.65
The pedagogical guru behind EL's instructional practices and curriculum is Ron Berger, the organization's chief academic officer.
p.65
When we spoke, he [Ron Berger] explained that this feeling of connection is rooted in his own childhood: He grew up with four siblings in a chaotic and unstable family. He knows firsthand how stress and trauma at home can unsettle and derail a child's development, and he understands that without the right intervention, the child may never recover from those early setbacks.
pp.65-66
“Some kids get withdrawn and protective”, he told me. “Other kids get this kind of shell of being a tough guy, and they're frozen in school. Either way, it restricts them from being able to contribute in class, to be a part of discussions, to raise their hand, to show that they care about their learning. It holds back any kind of passion or interaction. They can't take risks in school, and you can't learn if you're not taking risks.” Berger recognizes these behaviors, he said, because they are exactly what he himself did when he was a kid.
p.66
Students at EL schools, Berger said, can't hide the way that he did. Crew helps pull them out of their shell, and in class they're compelled daily to interact with their peers and teachers in group discussions and to collaborate on group projects, and before long that kind of interaction begins to feel natural.
p.66
When I visited another EL school last spring, the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (know as WHEELS), in Upper Manhattan, almost every classroom I observed was engaged in some kind of elaborate discussion or creative project that demanded involvement from every student.
p.66
In social-science class that day, however, they were learning complex material and behaving perfectly well--and not because they were incentivized with rewards or threatened with punishments, but because school was, for that period at least, actually kind of interesting.
p.66
The central premise of EL schools is that characters is built not through lectures or direct instruction from teachers but through experience of persevering as students confront challenging academic work. This, to me, is the most significant innovation in the work that is going on at EL schools.
p.66
And while those students certainly need the sense of connection that comes from feeling embedded within a web of deep and close relationships at school, the crucial insight of EL Education is that belonging isn't enough on its own. For a student to truly feel motivated by and about school, he also has to perceive that he is doing work that is challenging, rigorous, and meaningful.
Paul Tough is the author of the new book Helping Children Succeed: what works and why, from which this article is adapted. This work was funded in part by a grant from the CityBridge Foundation, the education-focused foundation of Katherine and David Bradley, who also own The Atlantic.
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