WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at [1] dougbelshaw.com... [2]

Following on from my previous post about John Holt’s What Do I Do Monday?, we’re looking this time at what Holt has to say about, amongst other things, the rather disturbing parallels between how people develop schizophrenia and the experience of students in schools…

Let’s quickly remind ourselves about Holt’s view of mental models:

Each of us has a mental model of the world as we know it. That model includes ourselves… We have a sense of who we are and what we can do… We have feelings about ourselves, the world we know, and the world we know about. These feelings depend on and very powerfully attract each other. If we think of ourselves as bad, stupid, incompetent, not worthy of love or respect, we will not be likely to think that the worlds we live in are good. Even if we have fairly good feelings about ourselves, a sudden change in those feelings will affect our feelings about everything else.

And therefore…

A person who is used to being ill, exhausted, and in pain, if he does have a spell of feeling well, thinks, ‘This can’t last’.

This is in part why children who are used to failing are so little cheered up when now and then they succeed.

Holt goes on to cite the work of Ronald Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist who gained remarkable insights into human constructs of the self and identity through his work with schizophrenics. he found that what we call ‘mental illness’ is actually a way of dealing with an intolerable situation in which people find themselves. To put it bluntly, and with a nod to Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit people go crazy because other people drive them crazy.

In The Politics of Experience, says Holt, Laing finds that conventional treatments of people we term ‘mentally ill’ are based on ‘the invalidation of their experience’ - i.e. saying to these people that their ways of interacting and communicating with the world are invalid. Instead, they should do so in ‘normal’, culturally-acceptable ways.

What has this to do with education? Well, as Holt quite cogently argues, the situation of the schizophrenic and of the school student aren’t so dissimilar. For one, in order to ‘be successful’ both have to assume a role and act in a way which is unlikely to be in keeping with how they wish to behave. The outcomes are different (escaping from the asylum or hospital vs. graduating/gaining good grades) but the processes are the same.

Schools, teachers, parents all believe that their job is to make learning happen in children, and that if it happens it is only because they made it happen.

This is similar to the invalidation and undermining schizophrenics receive when they come to believe that their very capacity to act is due to another. In almost every situation it is assumed that the adult knows better than the child what is good for them. At school, students are told what to do and where to be all day long. What effect does this have on learning? Holt quotes Dennison:

Every human being, whether child or adult, seems to require significance, that is, place in another’s world… The slightest sign of recognition from another at least confirms one’s presence in his world. ‘No more fiendish punishment could be devised,’ William James once wrote, ‘even were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof.

OK, so (most of us who are enlightened) promote more active learning styles these days. But situations where students are not allowed to talk and can only be seen as ‘good’ in a teacher’s eyes if he or she does as they are told are not entirely absent from schools even in the 21st century, are they? This results in a lack of identity for students which is why many of the behaviours we have ‘medicalized’ in education are essentially attention-seeking.

Holt describes the following quotation from Laing as ‘blood-chilling’ when read with its application to education:

The loss of the experience of an area of unqualified privacy, by its transformation into a quasi-public realm, is often one of the decisive changes associated with the process of going mad.

I agree. However much we are told to praise in public and criticize in private in reality, how much does this actually happen? Where can students go in school to think privately? Many teachers liken their job to ‘being on stage’ but how much more is the case for students? Except that it doesn’t end for them when an individual lesson finishes - it lasts for them all day, all year, and throughout their school career.

So next time you describe a class as ‘mad’ or ‘wild’, just think about what you’re saying and what’s making them like that. Behaviours are learned, and schools provide many conditions for the ‘wrong’ type of them to develop.

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