Well, she didn’t exactly use that term, but I did.
Bailey reviews a study that calls for more “rigor” in preschool and the New York Times’ shameless endorsent of this finding. What if someone did a study and concluded that leeches are the best curative and every hospital should order a supply? Just because someone does a “study” doesn’t mean that it is just or reasonable. Suppose a study found that students get higher test scores if they are threatened with a beating? That might work if you think higher scores are the goal of education and nothing else matters.
She writes:
Prerequisite to Kindergarten: Instead of demanding four-year-olds talk of geometric “attributes,” how about getting them to show up the first day of kindergarten with great big smiles on their faces?
The New York Times is praising a new study in a report titled “Free Play or Flashcards? New Study Nods to More Rigorous Preschools.” The study itself is titled “Do academic preschools yield stronger benefits? Cognitive emphasis, dosage, and early learning?” The authors are researchers from the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley and the Food and Drug Administration. But I am not going to spend much time reading this study.
The first mistake these researchers make, is that many Americans want to see the word “rigor” buried. It’s mean-spirited, and we recognize that people who use rigor and preschool, in the same breath, know little about children, or, worse, they don’t like them. So “rigorous” in the title, especially when it is getting a nod, is troubling.
It’s a study done on low and middle class children. I think many are also tired of pushing this group of children to learn. We understand that poor and middle class students do well with all the stuff wealthy students have in school. Why didn’t this study include a private school like Sidwell? At least then, if children grow up mal-adapted due to rigor, their parents will be able to afford therapy…
“Why go through the trouble of having a child, if they are made to become an adult before their time? Why do these researchers care so much about who “outperforms” who? Most of us don’t want preschool teenagers. That period comes soon enough! We’re sick of hearing young children can and should work above and beyond their age and development!…
“We don’t want child oddities, children forced to know facts and figures, and pushed to read before they’re ready. Little children don’t need to be browbeaten to learn. It could backfire. They could easily learn to hate learning.
“Preschools should be about love. They should encourage children to enjoy learning about other preschoolers who are different, but fun and interesting. And play is sacred. Dressing up and playing make believe, and building a Lego structure are critical. Play is where children really learn. And good teachers help make this happen through good guidance.
“A preschooler should never be hungry or have a toothache. They should have lovely books to read and be read to often. Dancing, art, and joyful music should be a daily affair.
“So I’m not interested in this study. I’m just not.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When my kids, in the UK and now 31 and 35, went to “pre-K” it was called Playgroup.
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My daughter went to “play group” when she was 2 and then “nursery school” when she was 3 and 4 in England. In France, it’s called la maternelle.
I think we should abolish the term “pre-k” in the U.S. It emphasizes that we are preparing them for kindergarten. Of course, we intend the outcome to be that they are “ready” for kindergarten, but we don’t call kindergarten “pre-1” and first grade “pre-2.” The year before kindergarten should be respected and recognized as a year where children are doing more than getting “ready.” “Preschool” also emphasizes what’s coming ahead rather than honoring that stage of education. I vote for “nursery school!”
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Annat,
We also need to recapture the meaning of kindergarten. It was intended by its founder Freidrich Froebel to be “a children’s garden.”
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The literal meaning of kindergarten is children’s garden. It was meant to be an opportunity for hands-on exploration, not academic boot camp.
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We should probably rename Pre-K to pre-C (pre-Crap), cuz with Common Core and testing, that is what it is preparing them for.
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Judith Schickedanz said it best in her article for Young Children, “Academics in Preschool?” way back when. The answer was yes. No argument about the content, but the how is most important. And the how must be through playful, meaningful, authentic opportunities and experiences. “Rigor” does not belong in any conversation about preschool!
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Preschool may be where the case for rheephorm rigor is most obviously an ill-fit and egregious, but those pushing corporate education reform are consistent when they demand the same across the board for all students, levels and situations.
With the usual unspoken caveat on their part, of course, that this applies to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
When it comes to THEIR OWN CHILDREN—
Check out the website for LakesideSchool. A rheephorm heavyweight even among the heavyweights. Bill Gates. He went there. His children go there.
Link: https://www.lakesideschool.org
Remember that old folk standby “Where have all the flowers gone?” by Peter, Paul and Mary?
A new ditty for those in hot pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ could be titled “Where has all the rigor gone?” Just look at what Lakeside School offers in the performing & visual arts, athletics, and summer offerings.
‘Nuff said.
😎
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“The federal child labor provisions, authorized by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, also known as the child labor laws, were enacted to ensure that when young people work, the work is safe and does not jeopardize their health, well-being or educational opportunities.”
The Rigor Wars in the Pre-School/K – 12 education system for low and middle-class families (but clearly not for the wealthy) are a precursor to returning to the era before 1938. Before the FLSA, children could be sold as young as 7 and sometimes younger into a form of slavery called servitude.
Many children ended up in factories and coal mines. Some as young as 7 ended up working in the sex industry so older, rich, fat, white men like the Kremlin’s Agent Orange, that malignant narcissist in the White Hosue, could legally abuse these children sexually.
In 1938, the High School graduation rate in the United States was about 40-percent. After WW II we see a dramatic increase in on-time HS graduation rates until that rate had more than doubled from 1938.
It’s obvious that Rigor is the code work to turn back the clock to pre FLSA, but where will the children get jobs – most factories are automated, and there are few coal mines left?
Whoops, I forgot about human trafficking – sex slavery and trafficking. Are those the only jobs left for children once FLSA is gone?
https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Human-Trafficking-Problem-The-Sex-Slave-Industry-PKC7459ZTC
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UC Berkeley and the NY Times need to use more “rigor” in their hiring because as it stands now, they have clueless twits working as “researchers” and “journalists” ( and I am being very generous with those words)
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“Suppose a study found that students get higher test scores if they are threatened with a beating? That might work if you think higher scores are the goal of education and nothing else matters.”
I love your answers, Dr. Ravitch. I’m so happy you fight for our children and our teachers. I think that is the gift you give all of us.
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Thank you, Dottie.
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I’m still bothered about using the words “child abuse” to describe what is happening to children who are taking these tests. Diane, you’re not a teacher, so it’s a bit different when you use these words. However, when teachers use these words to describe what is going on in their classrooms, I have to ask WHY they are complicit in what they call “child abuse.” I remember one commenter saying he/she comforted students while they struggle with the test. Would you also hold someone’s hand and comfort him/her while s/he is being beaten or emotionally abused? Don’t fool yourself. You know why you are doing it. I feel like if teachers are so outraged about child abuse, why are they allowing it to happen?
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Mamie,
I told you why I used the words “child abuse.” I got it from a book called “Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children,” by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. She wrote that NCLB ignored the developmental needs of the child. This is “childism.” Quoting from a book by child development experts, she writes:
“Is testing in the best interests of children?” No, testing is about failing and being tracked according to failure. “Children are shamed by such an approach, not encouraged…Shaming harms children; it produces anger and resentment. If the law forces teachers to shame children, then the law should be changed. It is child abuse.
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I don’t doubt that the current testing regime is hurting children, and it may well be child abuse. But what should teachers who are faced with testing these children do if they feel it is child abuse? There have been many people who have refused to do what they were told when they knew it was wrong. They knew the consequences to their lives and they chose NOT to participate in what they were being told to do. So, how do teachers deal with this? Let’s face it, most of them probably stay because they need the money and they need a job. But HOW do they square inflicting what they call “child abuse” with this need? I’m just asking. I don’t have an answer. Should they continue to do the testing and try to speak out knowing they may get in trouble? Should they join a group? Should they quit? Should they hold a child’s hand while they are having a breakdown? I guess each person must make his or her own decision. It seems to me that teachers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and no matter what action they take, they may lose their jobs. Yes, as you say, the laws should be changed. But HOW do teachers go about bringing that about? And what do they do in the meantime???
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I was a teacher for thirty years and like any employee, if district administration and/or the state mandates teachers do what they are told, then those teachers have a choice. Do it, quit, or get fired. Teachers are not allowing it to happen. Most if not all teachers are not wealthy. When teachers have invested 10 years or more in the classroom, then they are also vested in the retirement plan. Imagine a veteran teacher who is forty-five with 20 years in the classroom losing their job and they have to wait until they are 55 or older to collect the retirement they are vested in, a retirement that will pay about 30-percent of the average of what they earned the last three years they were in the classroom.
Then there is the fact that if they lose their teaching job, they also lose their medical plan and many Americans are struggling with lifestyle diseases and to stay alive they NEED that medical plan. And don’t even suggest they should just change their lifestyle to a healthier one because that kind of suggestion applies to more than 70-percent of the entire population. The U.S. has the highest ratio of obese and fat people in the world due to poor lifestyle choices and teachers are only one segment of that population. Criticize one segment; you have to bash them all.
What do you suggest the teachers do, quit or get fired and end up working for poverty wages at a fast food cancer joint or an abusive Wal-mart or maybe end up permanently unemployed while they are replaced with two-year TFA recruits or anyone with any type of college degree.
If you haven’t noticed, teachers are treated like cow dung in this country. When teachers stand up and fight back, they seldom win and often lose.
That is how the Trump’s of this word crush the working class resistance. That’s why the autocratic, fascist, dictatorial billionaires are out to destroy the labor unions so the working class has no one and nothing to stand up for them anywhere.
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Lloyd, I was laid off from teaching at the age of 44 and have had to find other employment. I was vested. I had a lot of years in the retirement system. I was doing what we’re told to do which is get an education, work hard, save money, and all will be fine. I have had to find employment in other fields. It’s hard but not impossible.
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I came close to leaving teaching in the early 1980s after teaching only 7 years. To pay off debts, I was forced to take a night and weekend job working an additional 30-hours a week on top of the 60-to-100 hours I worked as a teacher in the classroom and at home. I made this work by sleeping about 3 to 4 hours a day.
That part-time, second job paid minimum wage but even that helped. After two years on that job as a maitre d in charge of the male and female hostesses that sat customers, I was offered a full-time job in management for that restaurant/nightclub chain with a dozen establishments scattered across Southern California.
It was a large restaurant with three dining rooms that had about a hundred tables and the night club had three bars, dance floor, stage, DJ booth, and held about 1,000 clubbers.
The managers often worked 16-hour days, 7-days a week. I was tempted by that job offer because it would have been an escape from the classroom that I had learned was already a demanding, tough job made more difficult with top-down micromanagement from the district office. But the management pay for that restaurant-nightclub job was less than I was earning as a fairly new teacher. I could not afford to take a pay cut. I stayed in teaching for another 23 years.
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It’s the “Good German” syndrome, Mamie. Humans have an amazing capacity to turn a blind eye to their own complicity in the daily banal evils that they are mandated to do. It’s sad, heartbreaking what happens to children’s learning. “When will we learn, when will we ever learn?”:
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I agree with you to a good extent, Duane. But in all areas of life, we are asked to do things that are cruel, unethical, immoral, etc. It’s going to happen in every job. We can’t quit everything. Some things we can. I guess it comes down to what a person can and can’t do within his or her own vision or philosophy of morality. My mother used to say, “You’re the one who has to look yourself in the mirror everyday.” I guess we also tell ourselves lies sometimes to be able to do that.
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I don’t agree that “in all areas of life, we are asked to do things that are cruel, unethical, immoral, etc.” I’d say that in most areas of life were are not asked those things at all.
But in areas we in which we do interact with others, to do those things that one considers “cruel, unethical, immoral, etc.” can only be seen as a betrayal of self. To ask others to do so is even worse. No matter what intimidation is used, mental or physical to demand that others betray themselves is even worse than self betrayal. Unfortunately, many are to cowed into doing the bidding of others.
I know my harping on the “good german” aspect of public education administration falls on purposely deaf ears and blinded sight of the vast majority. It appears that is the “human condition”. So be it.
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Duane,
Not “so be it.” Never. What if Europe had said that in 1941?
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Yes, I understand, Diane. You are right to point that out!
It is so frustrating to know that so much of what is imposed upon the schools is utter garbage, even a lot worse and then knowing that the adminimals (yes I refuse to call them administrators) and the GAGA Good German teachers will implement those malpractices with nary a word nor action against said malpractices and realizing just how little I can do at this point in time.
Yes, I also realize that one mosquito can ruin a good night sleep, but. . . who knows what effect a few of us mosquitos that are around may have to end up turning the tide of public education. Just very frustrated at the moment with those who should be protecting and nurturing the children are the ones implementing multiple harms to so many children. And then to hear/read so many excuse that shit as “Oh, I have to do it”, “It’s mandated by law” or “I’ll lose my job” (if I don’t harm the children) How sick is that attitude. Screw them.
And yes, I know that’s not a good way to get people who supposedly should be on the side of justice to get there but. . . someone has to tell them what it really is even if it “stings” them. And I hope it does hurt their psyche (maybe it will make a few change) to show them just how ugly and evil their compliance is.
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Duane,
A new organization: the Mosquito Squad?
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Mamie –
What you do as a teacher/proctor is try to create as relaxed an atmosphere as possible, tell the students to do their best and not to worry if they don’t know all the answers, give them test taking strategies, and comfort them with encouraging words when the assessment is done. It helps them to know that you care.
While the assessments don’t count, in NYS the Regent’s Exams are required for graduation. As a proctor, I used to put a mint on each student’s desk (they are supposed to help you focus) and wished them luck prior to the start of the test.
Quitting my job was not an option, so I tried to be supportive of my students just as I did with my own children. Ultimately, opting out of senseless exams is the best answer to fight abuse.
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Mamie, I appreciate that Diane called it what it is. Many teachers leave. I also know those who stay and shield their students the best way they know how. Also, I have always found that parents in numbers have the most power in their local school districts. Parents and teachers united would be best. It would be nice if teachers spoke out more. Many do. But if they need their jobs for income it can be difficult. That’s why they need tenure.
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The teacher’s job is to follow the curriculum. They have no choice. Or they can just quit , Which is what so many of them are doing.
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IN my mind, based on my experiences – rigor is synonymous to boring or tedious.
As far as studies are concerned, why don’t these newfound experts refer to previous studies. One of the criticisms of Head Start is that even though the children show advancement in the beginning from this program, by the time they are in elementary school their progress is no longer evident. Everything evens out.
What is there to say that rigor in preschoolers will achieve the required effect? And what parent would agree to allow their child to be a Guinea Pig in an unproven program which might do more harm than good?
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flos56 I can appreciate what you are saying but I believe we have a responsibility to help children develop skills and awareness to recognize an oppressive environment. Unfortunately, the school environment neglects children’s social and emotional needs. They do not have opportunities to develop a strong sense of self. They are learning to survive in an emotionally abusive environment that will make them codependent rather than independent. They will perpetuate the same codependency in adulthood and think it is normal. It will take a unified effort by all teachers to resist rather than participate in this covert abuse that is doing harm to so many children.
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Mamie,
I call this dangerously dysfunctional school environment “institutional psychological abuse” because that is what it is. This school environment is no longer about education. It is about punishing children. This oppressive environment of increasing authoritarianism has gradually taken on the dysfunctional dynamics of “crazy making” codependency, as some therapist like to call it. That is the kind of environment that creates childhood self punishing behaviors and mental illness.
As a veteran school counselor with expertise in trauma training, crisis intervention, and codependency, I have observed disturbing signs of chronic traumatization in increasing numbers of young children that looks like an epidemic. I have spoken up, loudly and clearly. I violated my contract with Austin iSD by going to the media and publishing an article in the Austin American Statesman calling it Institutional Psychological Abuse. I had the encouragement and support of numerous activists in the community as well as several University of Texas professors who validated what I was observing, but few political leaders who had power to make changes actually listened. The Texas Senate Committee for Health and Human Services did not respond to my 12 page report that outlined first hand observations of systemic emotional abuse in graphic detail. I even included photographs. The politicians did not respond for the same reason that teachers continue to stay in this environment. Without empathy, people cannot recognize emotional abuse.
You asked, “Why do teachers continue to stay in this system if they think it is child abuse?” That is a question that requires an individual teacher answer. As for myself, I could not stay and participate in a system that clearly was causing harm to young children. After I did my whistleblowing and persisted through ugly attacks from deranged administrators who invested all their efforts into cover ups rather than change, then I resigned. Local school districts have no power over this OCD testing and performance since it is “The State”. However, for many young teachers whose survival depends on their job, they adapt, much like the “good” Germans who worked in the concentration camps. Or, like people who stay in abusive marriages. They are trapped in codependency and they cope with dissociation, avoidance, and denial. Functioning in an oppressive environment is not healthy for teachers, and it has not been healthy for the teaching profession, and it has especially not been healthy for the children we serve. Children are at the mercy of their environment, and we need to change this environment.
Just today, I wrote an article about this very subject. I emailed a copy to Diane, and also to Dr John Gartner, who is leading the Do No Harm group of medical professionals who have diagnosed President Trump’s behavior as “dangerously dysfunction”. I am hoping that Dr Gartner might have some insight on mental health intervention and recovery strategies for our teaching profession and our workaholic teachers.
My article is long, but I will attach it here in the event you have time to read it and pass it on to anyone who might find it helpful.
What to do in the meantime? In the words of Susan B. Anthony:
Joyce Murdock Feilke
Texas School Counselor 1980 – 2014 (Retired)
Current: Interim School Counselor Lakeshore Middle School, Lake Norman, NC.
After spending three weeks as interim counselor assisting with “The State” tests in a North Carolina upper socio economic middle school, I am once again inspired to speak up. In this particular school, the children were all obedient, polite, and diligent as they sat in silence listening to a script read by a teacher, then labored over their test booklets, worksheets and lap tops, every day for a solid week, first thing in the morning until noon. Some finished early, so they sat at their desks and starred into space since there were no other options, and they could not leave the room. The test administrators were all super organized and the teachers marched to orders as if they were part of a fine tuned machine. The stress was managed well and only a few students had breakdowns and were sent to the office in tears. In one 8th grade class that I proctored, after the test ended and the teacher left to take the tests to the office, I gazed across the room at the 29 students all sitting straight in their desks facing forward, silent, blank stares, dissociated. It reminded me of Emily Dickenson’s poem: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”…..The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
This increasing militarization in schools is happening across the country, in “high performing” schools like the one I observed, and in “low performing” schools that struggle with more stress and drama. This is unnatural. This is “institutional emotional abuse”. The authoritarianism that has taken over US schools that is masked as “standardized testing” is the same authoritarianism that created a sociopathic society in Germany prior to WWII. This obsession with “performance” and “control” is not only unnatural, it is emotionally abusive and should be illegal. It is behavioral engineering of a sinister nature. Children have no rights, except through adults who are responsible for them. Where are the responsible adults who are supposed to protect children from this kind of emotional abuse?
As a veteran teacher and counselor who entered the profession with pride and passion four decades ago, I can now say I am ashamed of what the teaching profession has become. Schools are no longer about education, they are about punishing children. They are about turning principals and teachers into frightened “adult children” who will perpetuate cruelty to other children. Schools have become a convenient social institution for creating an oppressive society of codependent workers who will perform as loyal followers and not complain about their cruel treatment. Our schools are perpetuating emotional abuse of a nature that causes self punishing behaviors that lead to the addiction of workaholism. Our schools are producing workers who will deny their own basic needs to perform for abusive authoritarians. But worse, we are causing young children to become“self punishing” during their developmental years, which puts them on a self destructive path for life. This environment is a perfect storm for creating codependency, which causes mental stagnation and denigration. This must stop.
Don’t be distracted by the outward appearance of beautiful buildings and colorful wall paintings in the tidy halls. Four or five consecutive days of four-hour standardized testing for young children is cruel and inhuman treatment. And, the week of testing is only the finale to a year of chronic stress and obsessive drill leading up to the test. This is covert torture from deranged politicians and corporate lobbyists and snake oil salesmen who apparently get money and pleasure from punishing children. These elected “leaders’ are no different than other sadistic perpetrators who abuse children in various cruel ways. This creeping dysfunctional regression in the school environment is a symptom of a disturbing social phenomena of self punishing behavior that is becoming epidemic among children and young adults. Is this happening because workaholism is a covert addiction in the teaching profession and we have brought this on ourselves?
Schools appear to be in an evolutionary process of discovering how much torture and cruelty children can tolerate to obtain higher and higher performance before they break. As a school counselor who has observed behavior in schools since the late 60’s, what I have observed in recent years is a sinister dysfunction of management that looks like OCD on steroids. This captive environment of stress, boredom, and busywork is causing young children chronic traumatization that will lead to self destructive behaviors and mental illness. How has this deception been so successful in a public institution? Part of the answer is gaslighting. Gaslighting is the tool perfected by higher authorities in “The State” to control administrators, teachers, parents, and especially children. Gaslighting is the modus operandi of sociopaths.
Billions of US tax payer dollars are being wasted to perpetuate unnecessary standardizing testing and chronic anxiety that is destructive to children and teachers. Billions of hours are wasted by teachers and administrators who are required to jump through hoops and follow insane testing procedures as if they were staging for D Day. Teachers are no longer respected as intelligent professionals who can be trusted, or are capable of performing on their own. Instead, they too have been exploited with fear and their regression is showing. Teachers who function in this unhealthy environment for a time begin to behave like “adult children”. They appear emotionally desensitized and robotic. Their anxiety may be covert, but their signs of workaholism are clearly visible.
Teachers are no longer allowed to use their professional expertise or creative talents. Their individuality and vitality have transitioned into conformity and dissociated mind blindness. They are being obsessively controlled and scripted, which leaves them in a chronic state of hyper vigilance. The underlying anxiety of this dysfunctional coping causes hyper reactionary behaviors that project aggression when triggered. Teachers are being conditioned to disrespect themselves, their profession, and their students. Children are being conditioned to devalue and disrespect themselves, and to be loyal to abusive authority. Their attachment to their teachers is more like trauma bonding that comes from fear, rather than secure healthy attachment that comes from mutual respect and trust.
In this environment of authoritarianism, teachers and students are socially isolated and emotionally deprived. Children’s basic needs that are required for healthy development are being ignored as a result of political incompetence, arrogance, and abuse of power. Not only is the school environment neglecting children’s basic social and emotional needs, it is teaching them that self denial and self punishment are “normal”. It is teaching them loyalty to abusive power is a “good” thing. Most children in emotionally abusive environments try to survive on the crumbs of kindness that are occasionally tossed out to keep them following. Those crumbs are becoming less and less as teacher exploitation and indoctrination increases. Why are teachers not seeing this abuse, to themselves or the children? Is it because codependency causes mental stagnation and denigration. Is it because “adult children” have dysfunctional coping mechanisms?
No professional teacher with a moral conscious, empathy, or common sense would continue in this environment unless they had been indoctrinated with fear. Teachers have become bystanders to institutional bullying that is unprecedented in US History; but, instead of resisting, too many are participating. They have adapted to an oppressive environment of blind obedience. They have become obedient children, like the “good” Germans who worked in the concentration camps during WWll. When children are afraid of punishment, you can make them do anything. The same is true with “adult children.” Adult children can be easily deceived with gaslighting.
Gaslighting is now the tool of people who have power over the nation’s schools. That abuse of power is perpetuating codependency and workaholism in children and teachers. Covert workaholism is to the emotional self what covert anorexia is to the physical self. Both Workaholism and Anorexia are self punishing addictions that lead to emotional desensitization and spiritual annihilation, which are characteristic of PTSD. Our schools are producing “over responsible”, “over self reliant” obedient children to a level of OCD behaviors. Their anxiety, hyper focus on performance, perfectionism, people pleasing behaviors, and self denial may lead to high academic performance, but tragically it will most certainly lead to self punishing and self destructive behaviors. In this environment, children will learn gaslighting as a sophisticated skill for survival.
Gaslighting is a US phenomenon of cultural dysfunction that has become “malignant normal” in our current narcissistic/borderline society of folie au plusiers. Gaslighting has become “normal”, obviously, from chronic fear and insecurity. Young parents now have grown up in this environment of school dysfunction, although most cannot recognize how much more extreme it has become in recent years. Children who grow up with authoritarian teachers or parents are especially hypersensitive to critical judgment. That is the fear that fuels perfectionism, people pleasing behaviors, and the addiction of workaholism. Our society has become so imbalanced it is impossible to grow up in America without having some level of anxiety, depression, identity issues or mental health issues, regardless of socio economic status. This imbalance does not mean it is a permanent condition; however, it will get progressively worse unless balance can be restored. That is the nature of spectrum behaviors.
Families have always had dysfunction and always will, but throughout history the community based school environment has helped to maintain a “normal” balance. That balance has changed as “The State” has gained more power over the school environment, gradually tightening the restraints of conformity, increasing the performance demands, and taking away freedom for teachers to use their individual talents, or communities to self govern. Now that children are under the control of “The State”, a militarized regime of indoctrination has led to social and emotional regression for both children and teachers. This social and emotional regression in the school environment is a symptom of our cultural regression. At some point in our collective culture, chronic traumatization increased until it reached the breaking point of structural dissociation, like that of PTSD. Our society is now functioning like the split personality of Dr Jekell Mr Hyde.
The normal reaction to trauma is to repress it into the unconscious and dissociate it from memory. However, when high levels of stress are relentless and increase to the level of chronic traumatization, then dissociation becomes standard coping. Dissociation doesn’t allow interactions with positive emotions or memory, nor does it allow new learning to take place. It is the auto pilot behavior of cognitive brain functioning that is rigid, repetitive, and robotic, like Dr Jekell.
The repressed elements of the unconscious are sometimes called “shadow”. Shame and guilt are the primary elements of shadow, with anger as the gatekeeper. Projection from the shadow comes via impulsive reactionary behaviors, primarily through body language. Any perceived threat that might expose elements of the shadow can trigger anger in the form of impulsive aggression, or withdrawal, as in fight or flight. There is also “freeze”, which tends to be the response for children since they are helpless in their captive environment. Their coping mechanism in this anxiety generating codependent school environment has increasingly become “dissociation”, which is their only escape from restraint and boredom. Functioning with chronic dissociation will change brain chemistry. It can cause mental illness and learning disabilities. Intentionally keeping children in an environment that can cause permanent harm is a textbook definition of psychological abuse.
A “trigger”, which is a potential threat of exposure of shadow elements, may direct impulsive aggression inward, toward the self, or outward toward others. For children who live with the fear and insecurity of “reactionary behaviors” from their teachers or parents, or experience emotional neglect, fear of punishment, or lack of validation from caregivers, their “self talk” becomes punishing self flagellation and is programmed into personality. Their sense of self, identity, and ability to function independently is greatly impacted by their unconscious self flagellation. This unconscious punishment to their “self” over time tends to increase and can lead to more self destructive behaviors, addictions, suicide.
Children’s perception of their “self” is a mirror of how they perceive others see them. Their perception is based primarily on reactionary behaviors of parents, teachers, and peers. When children’s basic developmental social and emotional needs are denied, neglected, or are not met, and they are conditioned to “self sacrifice”, or forgo those basic needs, while focusing primarily on work and high performance, then it is only a matter of time until their self denial turns into “self punishing” behaviors. Workaholism is what I call Anorexia of the Spirit.
High intelligence, high performance, and career success usually mask the anxiety related self punishing behaviors that underlie this covert addiction. It has only been in recent years that the dynamic of workaholism has been recognized as an addiction. Typically it runs in high performing codependent families; and, like most addictions, it is kept in denial and not recognized as a dysfunction. Unfortunately, workaholism often leads to other addictions or comfort seeking compulsive behaviors, especially alcoholism or drug addiction. Workaholism does not require a “job”, since anyone, including children can become addicted to performance or work that has no boundaries. The tragic impact of self punishing addictions for children is that it causes withdrawal into rigid self restraint and self denial that is hardwired into personality. Children lose their ability for imaginative play, spontaneity, and vitality. They deny emotional comfort from others. They deny themselves pleasure and joy. They are trapped in a self generating prison of punishment.
As a collective society, our nation has a fragmented self. We are not functioning as a whole, but in parts. We are functioning with the same dysfunctional dynamics as a codependent Covert Narcissistic Family. Our outward faux front looks normal, but our dysfunctions and addictions are covert. Gaslighting is a coping mechanism that maintains a constant supply of shame and guilt to perpetuate this dysfunction. We see gas lighting now in all areas of government, corporations, military, churches, schools and families. Gaslighting is the standard tool of a sociopathic society that has lost its moral compass. We are that society.
Covert workaholism is to the emotional self what covert anorexia is to the physical self. Both Workaholism and Anorexia are self punishing addictions that can lead to spiritual annihilation and emotional desensitization, which are characteristic of PTSD. Our schools are producing “over responsible”, “over self reliant” obedient children to a level of OCD behaviors. Their anxiety, their hyper focus on performance, their perfectionism, and their people pleasing behaviors will lead to self punishing and self destructive behaviors in adulthood. As high performers, they will learn gas lighting as a sophisticated skill for survival.
We are a society with anxiety disorder that has reached an extreme imbalance on the spectrum. We must stop feeding the anxiety that stokes the primitive brain. We can restore balance, but only if there is awareness and a unified effort. We need to recognize that children are sensitive human beings and have basic social and emotional needs that require validation and support just as their physical needs require food, water, and sleep. They need healthy role models who are kind, patient, trustworthy, and have a moral conscious. We need to recover our teachers. We need them to be role models not only for children, but for the rest of our dysfunctional society of “adult children”, including our president.
Mental health professionals in education who have observed this disturbing decline into authoritarianism and codependency can recognize how educational management has used gaslighting to mask control and punishment. Tapping into the fears of teachers, parents, and children, “The State” has used every aspect of gaslighting to make people think this obsession with testing and performance is “authentic” in a rigorous learning environment. It is as “authentic” for children as Abu Ghraib was for the prisoners in Iraq.
Our children have lost the freedom to learn and develop in a healthy natural way. Our once noble profession is being used to exploit, manipulate, and abuse children in ways that will impact their future health and their ability to function independently. This is inhumane. This institutional emotional abuse needs to be reported to the highest agency that is responsible for child welfare in every state.
Three years ago, after observing increasing and disturbing signs of chronic traumatization in children who were “victims” of the testing obsession in Texas, I wrote a professional report for the Texas Health and Human Services Committee pointing out this environment as “institutional psychological abuse” for children. I am an enlightened witness to the abuse. However, they did not respond. Senate committees do not respond to a single person, unless they happen to be a lobbyist. Only Senator Kirk Watson on the Education Committee responded with concern, but there was little action.
We in the schools are all mandatory reporters. This will take a unified effort. As enlightened witnesses to this abuse, we need to get organized. We need the help of mental health professionals to educate our state legislatures about “institutional child abuse”. I am sending a copy of this article to Dr John Gartner of Do No Harm to ask for advice and to see if teachers may link with the mental health professionals of this group. Our state governors need to hear from us. We have some strong “Climate Governors” who are willing to stand up against President Trump’s oppositional behavior and support the Paris Climate Accord. Why are our governors not recognizing that children are the most neglected, abused, and endangered resource on the planet? Why are they not recognizing the destructive dynamic in our schools that is perpetrating mental illness and destroying children’s health and future? How do we recover our profession? How do we recover our workaholic teachers?
If we can recognize that most of us are the products of “overly” responsible parents and “overly” responsible teachers who grew up as “overly” self reliant children in a workaholic society, then we can learn to understand the nature of their struggles with unrecognized anxiety which is helpful to understand ours. To recover our spirit, we must disconnect the punishing voice of critical judgmental authority that was programmed into our brains by every parent, teacher, older sibling, and cruel human that we ever encountered during our developmental years. We must recognize that as “overly responsible” sensitive people who became teachers, we are all workaholics. We need to educate ourselves about this sinister covert addiction and the impact it has on our health, our families, and the children in our care.
We must stop the verbal self flagellation from perfectionism that beats us up with every mistake, that makes our performance demands go higher and higher without limits in order to please some unknown critical authority in our brain. We must stop and say “enough”, and start recovering ourselves and our profession. We must embrace our shadow, and acknowledge those elements of shame and guilt that are keeping us hostage from fear of exposure. We are human. It’s ok to make mistakes and be imperfect. Find a safe person you can trust to listen and put words to those dark elements of shadow and get them out. Or, go to a SMART (Self Management and Recovey Training) group that is anonymous and find support. You can learn skills to validate your authentic emotions. You can learn to stop the self punishing behaviors and treat yourself with kindness and respect. We must recover our teachers’ mental health in order to recover our profession. We must bring back a healthy balance in order to exorcise the destructive force of “Mr Hyde” that has taken over the schools and calling itself “State Tests”.
We need awareness to recognize children’s emotional needs, and skills to validate those emotions. We can learn to interact with kindness rather than cruelty, with respect rather than disrespect. In order to help our children, we must give up the obsessive control and restraints that we have placed on ourselves and projected onto our children. We must overcome codependency and allow ourselves to experience autotomy and the freedom it brings. We must educate ourselves about the nature of self punishing behavior, the addictions it causes, the dynamics of codependency, and especially the covert anxiety that leads to the addictions of codependency. If there is any social group that has a chance of helping to recover our dysfunctional society, it will be the teachers; but, first they have to get healthy enough to recover from their own codependency in this oppressive environment.
How did we fall into this self destructive pattern that is destroying our profession and the children in our care?
It is typical for high performing “adult children” to be workaholics if they grew up in codependent families where dysfunctional OCD behaviors were covert, and often masked by high performance, career success, wealth, social status, talent, or pleasing appearance. In their adult life, they tend to mirror the same relationship dynamics, with work, with possessions, with special interests, and with people, because they use the same dysfunctional coping mechanisms as in childhood; and, they usually have the same belief system. They continue to cope with avoidance and dissociative denial, which is what gave the name “adult children” Some typical names for codependent family dynamics are Covert Narcissistic, ACoA Trauma Syndrome, PTSD Families, or Fairy Tale Families.
We can all relate to some level of dysfunction in our families because we are human, we are not perfect, and neither were our “overly responsible”, “self sacrificing” parents. At some point, self sacrificing behavior becomes self punishing behavior, and cruelty to self can also be projected outward. We all have anxiety on some level, but what we are now seeing in the schools is obsessive control that is far beyond any range of normal.
Overly responsible codependent people who are self sacrificing managers or “caretakers” of others are high risk for “self punishing” via “perfectionism” and “people pleasing” behaviors. They learn to deny their own basic needs, such as the emotional comfort of interactions with others that bring them joy, play, humor, or emotional comfort. Self punishing behavior over time is the chronic traumatization that leads to spiritual annihilation, or structural dissociation. Tragically for families and schools, the covert self punishing behaviors of workaholic teachers and their obsessive need for control is typically unrecognized, but it is projected onto vulnerable children whom they have power over. The children develop obsessive self restraint from chronic fear. They lose vitality and spontaneity. They will not allow themselves close emotional attachment to others. They will deny themselves opportunities to play or laugh or to experience pleasure and joy. This intergenerational trauma in workaholic families is passed on unknowingly for generations.
Teaching is a career magnet for sensitive caring intelligent “over responsible” “over self reliant” people who follow a noble cause. Even though teacher or parent projections are “unintentional”, as Alice Miller says in her book, “Drama of the Gifted Child”, “Unintentional cruelty hurts too!”
Teachers, we have participated in emotional abuse to children. It is time to take off our blinders. It is time to validate and embrace our shadow. It is time to recognize our addiction. Only then can our inner child return to heal our fragmented self and allow us to function with wholeness, with an authentic self. It is the repressed child that carries the spirit, that carries the emotions. Without emotions, without empathy, we cannot have a moral conscious. We need to become a light force, and we can.
Scientists have called the cultural phenomenon of social regression and dysfunction in the US “reverse evolution”. Our collective society is functioning too much with dissociation, which is primitive brain functioning, commonly called the Reptilian brain. Have we reached the point in reverse evolution where humans will become the next Great Extinction, and only the Reptilians will prevail?
Changing an attitude is like flipping a light switch. Teachers and mental health professionals, we can be the force to flip that switch from cruelty to kindness, from disrespect to mutual respect, from codependent to independent, from slave teacher to empowered teacher. We need to do that to bring our profession back to a healthy range of normal. Otherwise, if we stay on this destructive path, our vision into the future is cold horror.
Joyce Murdock Feilke
Texas School Counselor 1980 -2014
Austin, Texas
Current: Interim School Counselor Lakeshore Middle School Lake Norman NC
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My take: https://waynegersen.com/2017/05/31/rigorous-pre-schools-prove-that-weve-learned-nothing-from-reform/
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I used to sell Childcraft Toys – I felt like going insane when some mother would say,
“My child is precocious – which toy is more challenging than this one defined for his age.” arrrrrgggghhh!
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What has happened to us? How did we get into such an ugly circumstance that we dare use words like “grit and rigor” in the same sentence as “child”?
Who thought that was a good idea? And who permissioned that so-called “good idea” to become part of childhood?
Childhood has no reality. It’s not supposed to.
Childhood is all about merry fantasies, amusing imaginings, and daring daydreams.
Those are jobs. Done by children.
And not one of them has a whiff of rigor … or an ounce of grit. Nor should they because these are the jobs of children. The preoccupations of childhood. And the job descriptions include grins and giggles and tons of teehee.
Why is it that we never know the names of these childhood exterminators? These ghosty-theoreticians who seem obsessed with hardship and tenacity and guts … for children not even 100 months old? Let’s examine that sad psychosis.
And then let’s ask why they live in some peculiar shadowland … and never stand before real-deal educators and defend their dogmatic presumptions on early education? Why aren’t they identified … and never confronted?
Who are these educational Scrooges anyway?
It’s stunning to have to defend recess … and play … and fun. Astonishing to have to champion fantasies and fairylands as healthy and necessary exercises for a new mind.
This manic era of reform seems in an absolute rush to dispose of every phase of childhood as hurriedly as possible. And yet, too few ever learn the identities of those who advocate for this sick-sad competition.
These freaky theories just appear … and are shoved into practice as if they are infallible. And it’s not just about recess.
Testing the new pedagogical god. Close reading has made reading a special torture … and sabotaged joyful reading for an entire generation. Unrestrained technology is frankensteining classrooms into learning centers offering kiosk-educations from touch-screens that will supply the finger-pointer with all they need to succeed in a life of rich monotony.
And at every level, parents will lose more and more control of their children. And that is all by design because the very last thing these new educational absolutists want is any mother or father acting as though they have any regency at all over their own child’s education.
Orwell yourself and come to terms with what sits on the horizon of touch-screen scholarship. Huxley yourself into the world where children will have been programmed and plugged into lifetime situations based not on their passions but on some algorithmic prescription burped out by some electronic-ouija-motherboard.
And childhood is the greatest casualty of all. An extraordinarily special part of life that is now routinely smothered by educational frauds who have flimflammed an entire profession with dangerous nonsense.
How did this happen … and why did we let it happen? And how we will repair these children?
Denis Ian
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I’ve personally tried close reading and even though I am an avid reader, I found the experience frustrating, unnecessary, and frankly, a complete waste of time. It was also extremely boring and I must confess I only read the uninteresting passage once, skimmed it a second time, and altogether skipped the third reading.
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It is child abuse until we take a stand. All of us.
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Life coaching
Nancy E. Bailey: Pre-School Rigor Is Child Abuse | Diane Ravitch's blog
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