I was surprised yesterday to find a post by Jerry Pournelle (well known SF author and technology columnist) on MensNewsDaily (a starkly conservative news magazine site with pretensions of middle-of-the-roadism). His column, Intelligent Design: Answers and Questions, is openly favorable to the premise that Intelligent Design and Global Warming denial…
I'm currently reading a new book by Susan Linn, The Case for Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World (2008). The main point of the book is that modern parents tend to over-schedule their children and otherwise deprive them of time for creative play. For instance, many parents are letting…
It is often observed that girls do not perform as well as boys in mathematics. This difference is often overstated and it's cause is often highly debated. Many people have suggested that the basis for this difference is essentially biological. It is now well established that a society's attitude toward…
In 1964, Rudolph Dreikurs wrote a child psychology book that is still considered a classic by child psychologist: Children: the Challenge. Dreikurs argued that using punishments to change behavior is inefficient.
No amount of punishment will bring about lasting submission. Confused and bewildered parents mistakenly hope that punishment will eventually bring results, without realizing that they are actually getting nowhere with their methods or, at best, they gain only temporary results from punishment. When the same punishment has to be repeated again and again, it should be obvious that it does not work. The use of punishment only helps the child to develop greater power of resistance in defiance.
Dreikurs argued that the authoritative idea of using punishment needs to be replaced with a sense of mutual respect and cooperation. Children need real leadership. “A good leader inspires and stimulates his followers into action that suits the situation.” It is important to arrange the learning situation such that a child learns “without a show of power, for power insights rebellion and defeats the purpose of child-raising.”
Dreikurs also cautions parents about using rewards:
The system of rewarding children for good behavior is as detrimental to their outlook as a system of punishment. The same lack of respect is shown. We “reward” our inferiors for favors or for good deeds. In a system of mutual respect among equals, a job is done because it needs doing, and the satisfaction, for the harmony of two people doing a job together…. satisfaction comes …
The list has grown too long to ignore. We are a country that exercises almost no foresight. We wait for disasters to occur and only then (if then) does it occur to us to do something about the problem.
Here’s an especially heinous example: our government hires numerous financial experts, of course. Alan Greenspan was one of them. Why couldn’t any of them see the subprime disaster long before it occurred? Instead, our government’s experts allowed unscrupulous mortgage companies to lend out far too much money to homeowners in the form of “exploding ARMs” such that it was entirely predictable that the borrowers would fall behind on their payments after only a few years, and that many would lose their homes through foreclosure. Our government stood by while these loans were hyper-securitized to the point where the unscrupulous mortgage companies would go belly up, tranch-laden real estate trusts (who ultimately purchased the loans) would throw their hands and claim that they were innocent and Wall Street would laugh all the way to the bank. That is, until Wall Street failed and successfully begged the federal government to bail out Bear Stearns. All of this was entirely foreseeable. The real disaster is that we failed to use our brains.
For another example, think of the Minnesota Bridge collapse. Let’s see… what might happen if you don’t allocate proper federal funding to fund sufficient bridge inspections? Of course, it’s only after a huge bridge collapses or a major levee breaks that we …