How Freedom Can Depress Students: More from Happiness Studies
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[See here for Part 1: On the Death of Genius for the Sake of College]
The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lost their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.
–Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 21
No Control
Psychologist Gilbert cites in this section an experiment in which two groups of seniors in a nursing home were given plants for their rooms. The first group was given the responsibility for watering and keeping the plants alive; the second group was denied any control over the plants’ care, which was the responsibility of the nursing home’s staff.
Six months later, 30% of the seniors with no control over the plants had died; only 15% of the group with control died in the same period.
They did a follow-up study with the same “control” variable to study the roles of control and autonomy in fostering mental and physical health. In this study, youth volunteers began a weekly visitation program to seniors in two groups. The first group was given the autonomy to schedule the visits and decide their durations themselves; the second group had no choice: the young visitors came on a schedule prescribed by the nursing home administration (in cahoots with the experimenters).
Again, two months later, the group with control and autonomy was healthier, taking fewer medications, and showing various other symptoms of increased well-being compared to their state at the beginning of the experiment.
That’s interesting enough1 – but the more interesting thing happened next, and was completely unexpected: when the visitation experiment was over, the visits stopped – and so did the exercise of autonomy and control enjoyed by the “happier” seniors. And within a few months, “a disproportionate number of [seniors] in the high-control group had died.”
Gilbert concludes:
Only in retrospect did the cause of this tragedy seem clear. The residents who had been given control, and who had benefited measurably from that control while they had it, were inadvertently robbed of control when the study ended. Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any control at all (21-2).
Implications for Schools
It should be obvious, but more and more I learn that the obvious should never be taken for granted. So here goes:
1. Students given some control over the content and demonstration of their learning are happier.
This is an old saw in education, but it doesn’t hurt to support it with psychological research.
2. The basic structure of schools – prescribed course selection, prescribed schedules and durations, prescribed timetables for learning and moving on – are innately “depressing” for students.
In other words, even those students given the freedom, in this or that class, to choose their content and design their own projects to demonstrate learning, are still stuck within a larger system of no control. For these students, the autonomous classroom is an anomalous blip on the screen of a much larger matrix of no choice, no autonomy, no “passionate control.”
3. If not the norm in schools, student experience of autonomous learning under one teacher may do more harm than good.
Graham Wegner and I touched on this in an exchange a while back2, and it bears repeating here: Graham told of hallway talks with students to whom he had given this autonomy the previous year, students now back in the passive mode in their current classrooms. And the students were predictably uniform, if memory serves, in their doldrums. Like the seniors after the visitation scheduling was taken away from them, the students who had control and lost it may have been worse off for that brief moment of learners’ happiness.
The Law of the Fall
Let’s call it the Law of the Fall: the higher you climb, the harder the fall – especially if you’re pushed from that height. And the pushers here are the teachers who keep control of everything that happens in their students’ experiences in their classrooms.
The bigger pushers, though – aren’t they the administrators? I don’t mean to admin-bash here, but only to ask the obvious question: if autonomous learning is the miniscule exception in a school instead of the norm, who is ultimately responsible for that, if not principals?
Conversely, if the loss of autonomy is more damaging than the benefits of its brief possession, might that not mean that administrators have to make a choice? Namely, the choice between requiring all teachers to provide autonomy, or else, paradoxically, requiring that no teachers do?
–
Photo: Waiting by RebelBlueAngel
Bonus: TED Talk with Daniel Gilbert
Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is my kind of scholarship: witty, playful, devoid of the constipated, jargon-stuffed voice of most academics. Reading it, you laugh as you think along. Here’s a TED talk for those of you interested in learning more about this guy:
- and you statisticians and scientists are welcome to weigh in with criticisms of the experiments, because I can only trust the authority of a Harvard professor’s citation of it here [↩]
- and Graham, if you can give me the link to that, I’d appreciate. I searched but did not find [↩]
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24 Aug 08 at 11:47 pm
And yet another thing to worry about. I am one of “those” teachers. The ones who do away with as much schooliness as possible as we try to move forward in the school environment. The one who kind of sticks out as different.
So, do I need to change my teaching style back to stifling in order to prevent my kids from crashing back down next year?
Ugh!
Reply
M
24 Aug 08 at 11:52 pm
@M, Instead of worrying, maybe share the findings with admin and your department?
I wouldn’t sweat it that much. More of a question than anything. And maybe the long-term benefits of the taste of freedom you provide benefit the students in other ways than “happiness.”
Hm. I should point that out in the post.
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Clay Burell
24 Aug 08 at 11:56 pm
Other bodies of research demonstrate that the vast majority of the variance in teaching practices is within-schools and not between-schools. Some might argue that this is a good thing; teachers should be free to be creative professionals, yada, yada, yada…
Are you suggesting that all schools should become Summerhill schools? Wouldn’t that be interesting…
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Jon Becker
25 Aug 08 at 1:28 pm
Clay,
Great article!
What a deal! One of the things I want most for my kids… an educational setting that provides the freedom to allow their intrinsic motivation and love of learning to flourish will make them depressed when that is taken away.
I totally agree that this is true… and have seen it in one of my own children. After a school with some really good experiences, the next year was pretty pathetic.
However, I view the good experience as a good thing… my child now knows what it is like to really enjoy learning. She may not get to enjoy it right at this moment, but she knows that given the right environment she will! She also seems to have a better understanding of what is going on when classes are not any fun… she doesn’t blame herself anyway.
Just my 2 cents… keep up the great articles.
Kent
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Clay Burell Reply:
August 29th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Hi Kent,
Good points, and I agree. The article was flawed by point three being put too simply. You added the complexity that was missing with your comment
Thanks for the kind words and keep enjoying fatherhood. Sounds like your daughter is lucky to have you.
Clay
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Kent Chesnut
29 Aug 08 at 12:38 am
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29 Aug 08 at 9:20 am
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7 Sep 08 at 12:07 am
Clay, I’m sorry that I am so late to this post – probably shows that my head has been in other places of late. I know the conversation you are referring to but I don’t think that I blogged about it. I think I shared that anecdote with you during a Skype call late last year.
The thumbnail version of the story was when I visited the computing lab where a bunch of Year Sevens were working on their “personal research projects”. A number of them had been Year Sixes in my 2006 class and I just wanted to see what they were up to. To my surprise one of my brightest and most receptive (to self initiated inquiry learning methods) ex-students was cutting and pasting slabs of text out of Wikipedia into a powerpoint. I expressed my surprise that he would choose to construct his project in a manner that seemed regressive from his 06 work and he just said to me quietly (paraphrased and subject to faulty recall) so his current teacher wouldn’t overhear, “Mr. Wegner, I like what we did last year and I liked having so much say over how I did things. Believe me, if I had my own way, I’d like to be still using those ideas and skills. But it’s easier and less hassle to do what the teacher wants, in their style, instead of trying to do things my way.”
Graham Wegners last blog post..Just Add Technology And Mix For Instant Engagement
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Clay Burell Reply:
September 15th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
No worries, Graham. Hope you’re well. Life here is too full too.
Thanks for telling the story.
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Graham Wegner
10 Sep 08 at 9:28 pm
As one of those administrators mentioned above it works from the other way as well. I often find myself pushing staff to be more creative and give more freedoms to their students. Sometimes the mule stuck in the rut isn’t the pencil pusher stuck in the office.
Another great post!
Charlie A. Roys last blog post..The Debate on Drug Testing
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Clay Burell Reply:
September 15th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Charlie, your point (as usual) is well-taken.
And I don’t know why I’m adding this, other than that it’s true: I think I’ll regret never working in a school you lead. That’s not smoke, either.
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Charlie A. Roy
14 Sep 08 at 10:13 pm
I’m just at the tail end of my education “career”, I’m finishing up my masters in mechanical engineering while I am working full time as a ME designer for a rather large company.
I pretty much hated all of school. I was a bright kid, but I also had a knack for picking up on what it was the teacher wanted. I’d sit through class hours at a time diligently taking notes. I’d pick out the key points of what the teacher was looking for and had a pretty good idea of what was on the test. Just a matter of memorizing a few key points and some methodology for problem solving. Nothing out of the box mind you, all problem solving in a school environment has a specific method. I have to admit I really disliked it when a teacher gave us a project that was too open ended, or where we had to come up with too much of our own content. It became impossible to figure out what they wanted. All I wanted was to keep my head down follow the 80-20 rule, get good grades and get the heck out of there. I understood I wasn’t really learning, I’m just going through the motions to get a shiny degree so I can land an equally stifling job where I make the big bucks.
I do keep up on my own education outside of school. Where I can decide whats interesting and work on constructing my world-view as best as I can. I spend a lot of time trying to separate objective reality and my subjective experiences and piecing them together and trying to figure out whats going on in this world. Most of my personal education simply comes from reading a large cross section of books and working hard to keep an open mind. This site does seem to do a good job of lending some ideas, and proposing some interesting reading material. I’ll comment often, I look forward to your replies.
One thing I’ve learned so far is that it seems most conducive to give the person who assigns your grade or the person who signs your pay check whatever it is that they want. Keep a nice shell of “good” student and “good” worker, with a rather strong core of the real self. Then search far and wide for people who do appreciate the real self.
speronis last blog post..Spore
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speroni
22 Sep 08 at 2:09 am
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