Is our education system biased against kids who don't give a shit?

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

Kids and meds

Check out Sarah Silverman talking about being prescribed 16 Xanax a day by her therapist.

SEAL: 'we get a little crazy'

I've been looking into a curriculum subject introduced by New Labour in 2003, called Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL). It began as a voluntary primary school subject, and in 2007 was also made a voluntary secondary school subject. Over 90% of primary schools and over 60% of secondary schools now teach it.

SEAL teaches five emotional competencies: self-awareness, managing feelings, motivation, empathy and social skills. It's the biggest example of the new 'politics of wellbeing', and of the new confidence governments have in managing their citizens' emotional development.

What I've discovered, to my surprise, is that this new national subject was almost entirely based on one book - Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence (EI).

Goleman, then a journalist at the New York Times, wrote EI in 1996. The book was a huge hit and spent a year and a half in the New York Times best-seller list. It captured the 1990s fascination with the emotions, the role they play, and how we can manage them.

Cut to Southampton, in 1997, and Peter Sharp, the local authority's chief educational psychologist, read EI and was so "inspired" by it that he and Southampton's chief schools inspector decided that "emotional literacy should be an equal priority with literacy and numeracy for all children in Southampton". The book must have made quite an impression.

Nudging the Issue

News here in the UK that the prime minister, David Cameron, has established a 'behavioural insight' team, led by the policy advisor David Halpern, to find ways to implement the ideas of behavioural psychologist Richard Thaler, who is also working with the unit.

Thaler is, together with Cass Sunstein, the author of Nudge, a study of ways people can be manipulated to behave in more socially harmonious and beneficial ways through small, fun interventions. Putting a picture of a fly on a urinal, for example, nudges people to pee more in the urinal, and less on the floor. Creating bins that make a funny noise when you drop things into them encourages people to put more rubbish into bins.

And so on!

There are other, more far-reaching ways you can use behavioural psychology to affect public policy. For example, if you present a policy decision to citizens, you could either have them tick a box to sign up to it, or tick a box to opt out of it. If you choose the latter option, they are more likely to sign up to it, out of inertia. This has been used to nudge people to choosing voluntary pension contributions.

Thaler and Sunstein call this sort of social manipulation 'libertarian paternalism'. People are still free to choose how to live. But, knowing that people often make bad decisions because of their cognitive biases, governments and companies should structure the choices they present people so that they are nudged to make choices in their long-term optimal interest.

There are two ripostes to this approach:

1) It doesn't really work on anything significant, and getting people to pee in urinals, while valuable, is not deeply socially transformative.

2) Governments should not try to manipulate the poor decision-making processes of the masses, even if it is for 'good' aims. Who is to say the aims are good?

The same sort of manipulation techniques could just as easily be used by corporations for their own short-term profit - just as tobacco companies used the psychological techniques of Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud and the father of PR (and arguably the grand-father of nudge), to sell their cigarettes. It could also easily be used by a militaristic or fascistic government to nudge the people to war (see the video below).

The alternative approach to Nudge has been called Think. It's a bit more old fashioned - you try to explain things to people to allow them to make a more free, informed and rational decision. Crazy idea!

And a middle ground between Nudge and Think has been suggested by the RSA, called Steer: you nudge people towards decisions, but you explain how you are doing it. The Derren Brown approach to politics, in other words - 'I just tricked you, but here's how I did it'.

Do we really need the government to spend our money on this? Is the Tory Party's big idea really to manipulate our poor decision-making processes? Do we rationally agree to join the Big Society, or we're simply nudged into it?

'You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake'

'You are not a beautiful, unique snow-flake...You are not your bank account...You are not the clothes you wear...You are not your grande latte...You are not your fucking khakis...' Tyler Durden, Fight Club

The philosophy of communitarianism involves a rejection of the Romantic cult of the self, and particularly of the values of the Post-War 'me generation', and its abandonment of traditional ideas of community and the common good.

The key book for modern communitarianism's engagement with and rejection of the Romantic cult of the self is Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity.

Communitarianism rejects Romanticism's cult of the self, its idea of the self as a unique snow-flake, by suggesting instead that the self can only be understood in a social and communal framework.

Communitarians like Alasdair MacIntyre often go back to Aristotle, and his definition of man as a social and political animal - MacIntyre suggests it would have been impossible for the ancient Greeks to imagine the self separate from their community.

We need, the communitarians suggest, to move beyond the Romantic cult of the self, to move beyond the 1960s' obsession with 'finding myself', and to return to the idea of serving something higher than the self: the community, the common good, and so on.

Quite often, communitarians argue that the cult of personal freedom ('I do whatever I want to do, who are you to tell me different?') is mistaken, because humans have a common nature, and you need to understand how this nature works, understand its impersonal laws, in order to achieve happiness. You can do whatever you want, but to be truly fulfilled, you have to understand your nature as a human, and how to develop and fulfil that nature. So all models of living are not equally good.

Given that, some communitarians argue, politics should be built on the models of the Good Life that 'fit' our biological nature. I call this 'natural communitarianism'. Alasdair MacIntyre is an example of it, so is the RSA's Matthew Taylor.

I think we are at an interesting moment in history where the Romantic cult of the self turns into the Communitarian cult of the common good. It is not that the latter rejects and replaces the former, it is that the former turns into the latter.

The search for one's true self leads from the personal to the impersonal. Eventually, after staring at your navel for long enough, you get bored and look for something beyond the personal self, for something transcendent.

A good example of this is Rousseau (pictured above), who was the father of the narcissistic cult of the self in modern culture. But he ended up, in The Social Contract, advocating a form of civic engagement so total that the personal self would be entirely obliterated by the public self, or the 'citizen'.

That's an extreme example of the shift from the cult of the personal self to the cult of the impersonal self, but there are modern counterparts.

Cognitive behavioural therapy and Positive Psychology grew out of the world of self-help. That's to say, they gained a lot of their popularity because they promise to make the self 'happy'. In that sense, they very much appeal to the 1960s 'me generation', and are themselves products of that generation.

But they discover that the way to achieve happiness is not to 'do what you feel like' but instead to follow what are, on examination, impersonal laws or guidelines that 'fit' with our rational nature.

Both CBT and Positive Psychology are based on ancient Greek psychology, on the idea in Socrates and his followers that humans have a rational nature, that we can use our rationality to know ourselves, to rationally scrutinize our beliefs, and to replace irrational beliefs with more rational beliefs.

In other words, there is a sort of 'natural law' to our minds, a natural rationality, and becoming happy and fulfilled people involves understanding and following this natural law.

Ancient philosophy was very much based around the idea that finding fulfilment, finding and fulfilling your 'real nature', involves obeying a set of impersonal laws and practices. It involves a moving from the personal self to the impersonal self, which is God, or the Logos.

The search for the personal self becomes, ultimately, an understanding of the impersonality of the self: an understanding that the self is not this cognitive habit, or that cognitive habit, but is instead the reason and awareness that is capable of considering each habit and choosing it.

It is the light of reason or awareness that shines through the lenses of different thoughts and beliefs. Not the belief itself, but the awareness of that belief. This awareness is not 'you'. It just is. There is no stable, permanent entity called 'you', only the light of awareness, shining on your transient thoughts and habits, like a torch shining on a river at night.

One can compare this to the idea in Hinduism that the deepest Self is impersonal - it is God. the search for the self leads to the Self.

The question for modern communitarianism is: can one order society politically, so that it cultivates the impersonal self, rather than merely providing a legal space for our private cultivation of the personal self?

Rousseau tried to create a society that would engineer the impersonal self of the 'citizen'. It ended up being a totalitarian society. Plato likewise tried to create a society that would cultivate our 'natural', impersonal self. It also ended up a model of a totalitarian society.

The movement from the Romantic cult of the personal self to the Communitarian cult of the impersonal self and the common good is a dangerous moment in history.

Creativity: the opposite of flow?

Here's an interesting study by Harvard: it suggests that one aspect of creativity is a poor ability to disregard random information from your environment. Your higher intelligence or awareness means your attention is constantly being pulled around by external stimuli, but this makes you more creative than less sensitive people - because you see things they don't, process more information than them, and are more alive to your environment.

But this is also why creative people are, perhaps, more likely to go mad: they can't always handle all the information they are being swamped with:

"Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked, particularly in artists, musicians, and writers," notes Shelley Carson, a Harvard psychologist. "Our research results indicate that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought predispose people to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishments under others."

Carson, Jordan Peterson (now at the University of Toronto), and Daniel Higgins did experiments to find out what these conditions might be.

They put 182 Harvard graduate and undergraduate students through a series of tests involving listening to repeated strings of nonsense syllables, hearing background noise, and watching yellow lights on a video screen. (The researchers do not want to reveal details of how latent inhibition was scored because such tests are still going on with other subjects.)

The students also filled out questionnaires about their creative achievements on a new type of form developed by Carson, and they took standard intelligence tests. When all the scores and test results were compared, the most creative students had lower scores for latent inhibition than the less creative.

Some students who scored unusually high in creative achievement were seven times more likely to have low scores for latent inhibition. These low scorers also had high IQs.

"Getting swamped by new information that you have difficulty handling may predispose you to a mental disorder," Carson says. "But if you have high intelligence and a good working memory, you are more likely to be able to combine bits of new information in creative ways."

This is a very different model of creativity to the rather influential theory of 'flow' put forward by Mihaly Csikszentmiyhalyi: that highly creative people are able to achieve high states of flow, or complete absorption in what they're doing so that they lose track of time and space.

Perhaps creativity is actually the opposite of complete absorption. Perhaps it is the ability to open your mind up to your environment and let it be invaded by it, like Coleridge's Aeolian Harp...

Or perhaps creativity is both the experience of opening up and absorbing all kinds of stimuli, and then the experience of focusing in and creating something from all that information. It is an opening up, and then a narrowing in.

A great example of this process, I think, is TS Eliot's The Wasteland: Eliot opens his mind up to all the fragments and confusing elements of his cultural environment, emptying his self out and becoming passively invaded, or assaulted, by a barrage of cultural stimuli, and then asserting his attention and will to forge these elements into a new order.

Creativity is the process by which we bring order out of the chaos of information that swamps us.

Drawing over-hasty conclusions

Here's a new animation in which Matthew Taylor, former head of the Institute of Public Policy Research and now president of the RSA, sets out what he wants the Royal Society to do. He's clearly very interested in the politics of well-being, and in what moral and political insights we can draw from new research in psychology and neuroscience. But he may be over-hasty in the policy conclusions that he draws.



Taylor refers in the talk to "powerful new insights" from neuroscience, anthropology and psychology, particularly the idea, in the work of social and behavioural psychologists like John Bargh and Jonathan Haidt, that we are mainly automatic, irrational creatures, and we need to be aware of the limits of our rationality and free will, in order to become more self-aware and responsible people. (If you read the excellent www.edge.org, you'll be familiar with a lot of this research.)

Taylor argues that this research provides a scientific 'evidence base' that takes us beyond individualism, and towards a more social and communitarian model of politics. In this, he is in the same camp as New Left thinkers like Richard Layard and Oliver James, who have tried to use insights from psychology to criticise neo-liberal individualism and justify a more social-communitarian model of society.

The main problem with this 'natural communitarianism' is that Taylor and the RSA are moving too rapidly from an 'is' to an 'ought', when in fact the same scientific research can be used to justify quite different policy approaches.