Get Learnt

I have earned a meager income for the last two years of my life working for a tutoring centre that tries to fill in the gaps left by our state's education system. I see lots of kids who don't understand the reading strategies employed by their teachers, kids who have yet to learn their math facts by 10^th grade and kids that can't sit still for more than 83 seconds without climbing the walls and swinging from the ceiling. Some of my closest friends and my mother are also in the educational system, so when my professor recently assigned an article for my practicum cohort based on a lecture by a psychologist named Rudolph Dreikurs, I was extremely impressed by what he had to say. It has certainly given me material to think about as I tutor and work as a therapist. Here is the link to the full article, and below are some of the more exacting excerpts.

First Dreikurs lays some groundwork:

I have found many, many people who try so hard to be good. But I have failed yet to see that they have done so for the welfare of others. What I find behind these people who try to be so good is concern with their own prestige. They are good for the benefit of their own self-evaluation. Anybody who is really concerned with the welfare of others won't have any time or interest to be concerned with the question of how good he is.

There is only one area where we still can feel safely superior: When we are right. It is a new snobbishism of intellectuals: "I know more, therefore, you are stupid and I am superior to you." It is superiority of the moralists: "I am better than you; therefore, I am superior to you." And it is in this competitive strife to establish a moral and intellectual superiority that making a mistake became so dangerous again because, "If you find out that I am wrong, how can I look down at you? And if I can't look down at you, you certainly will look down at me."

And then he gets to the crux of his article . . .

I feel that in the majority of tests given to students the final mark does not depend on how many brilliant things he said and did, but how many mistakes he made. And if he made a mistake he can't get a hundred regardless of how much he has contributed on other parts of the same assignment. Mistakes determine the value. In this way, we unwittingly add to the already tremendous discouragement of our children.

It seems to me that our children are exposed to a sequence of discouraging experiences, both at home and in school. Everybody points out what they did do wrong and what they could do wrong. We deprive the children of the only experience which really can promote growth and development; experience of their own strengths. We impress them with their deficiencies, with their smallness, with their limitations; and at the same time try to drive them on to be much more than they can be. If we want to institute in children the enthusiasm which they need to accomplish something, the faith in themselves, regard for their own strengths; then we have to minimize the mistakes they are making, and emphasize all the good things, not which they could do, but which they do do.