Kohn, “Why self-discipline is overrated”, or, a different story about the marshmallow
I won’t pretend that Jonah Lehrer’s article “Don’t!”, subtitled “The secret of self-control,” in the May issue of the New Yorker, didn’t irritate me. Here’s another perspective.
It’s not just that attending to individuals rather than environments hampers our ability to understand. Doing so also has practical significance. Specifically, the more we fault people for lacking self-discipline, and spend our efforts helping them to develop the ability to control their impulses, the less likely we are to question the structures (political, economic, or educational) that shape their actions. There is no reason to work for social change if we assume that people just need to buckle down and try harder. Thus, the attention paid to self-discipline is not only philosophically conservative in its premises, but also politically conservative in its consequences.Our society is teeming with examples. If consumers are over their heads in debt, the effect of framing the problem as a lack of self-control is to deflect attention from the concerted efforts of the credit industry to get us hooked on borrowing money from the time we’re children.[33] Or consider the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign launched in the 1950s that urged us to stop being litterbugs – a campaign financed, it turns out, by the American Can Company and other corporations that had the effect of blaming individuals and discouraging questions about who profits from the production of disposable merchandise and its packaging.[34]
But let’s return to the students sitting in our classrooms. If the question is: “How can we get them to raise their hands and wait to be called on rather than blurting out the answer?”, then the question isn’t: “Why does the teacher ask most of the questions in here – and unilaterally decide who gets to speak, and when?” If the question is: “What’s the best way to teach kids self-discipline so they’ll do their work?”, then the question isn’t: “Are these assignments, which feel like ‘work,’[35] really worth doing? Do they promote deep thinking and excitement about learning, or are they just about memorizing facts and practicing skills by rote?” In other words, to identify a lack of self-discipline as the problem is to focus our efforts on making children conform to a status quo that is left unexamined and is unlikely to change. Each child, moreover, has been equipped with “a built-in supervisor,” which may not be in his or her best interest but is enormously convenient for creating “a self-controlled – not just controlled – citizenry and work force.”[36]
[…]
We already know not only that grades suffer from low levels of validity and reliability but that students who are led to focus on grades tend to be less interested in what they’re learning, more likely to think in a superficial fashion (and to retain information for a shorter time), and apt to choose the easiest possible task.[46] Moreover, there’s some evidence that students with high grades are, on average, overly conformist and not particularly creative.[47] That students who are more self-disciplined get better grades, then, constitutes an endorsement of self-discipline only for people who don’t understand that grades are a terrible marker for the educational qualities we care about…
I should start a fuck-yeah-alfie-kohn tumblr. Full article here, “Why self-discipline is overrated: the (troubling) practice and theory of control from within,” from the November 2008 Phi Delta Kappan. Includes a more sophisticated reading of the marshmallow task studies that offers a useful supplement to Lehrer’s pop psych treatment.
(And if that isn’t enough, it’s worth pointing out: Kohn paints up all this nonsense for what it is without invoking a single French philosopher or post-Marxist critical theorist.)
