Beyond School

[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:

1. 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 [↩]
2. and Graham, if you can give me the link to that, I’d appreciate. I searched but did not find [↩]