When the News Is What’s Not Happening: How the Media Can Help Prevent National and International Crises

We often ask our public officials and political candidates for more details and nuanced reasoning. We expect them to be better at anticipating events. However, it would be relatively easier if it were only our leaders who fed us simple slogans and retreated to all-or-nothing thinking and a crisis orientation.

Unfortunately, the media we often call on to keep our political processes on track also suffers such lapses. Just look at the headlines in any of the major newspapers and see if they reflect subtle, nuanced statements or dramatic, all-or-nothing ones. When there’s a political debate, is the headline about a nuanced difference in judgment about the economy, international relations, or social programs, or is it a dramatic, all-or-nothing type statement about who won or lost or who committed a faux pas. Focusing on the horse race between the candidates sells newspapers and draws in listeners to the national newscasts, but does it create an atmosphere of subtle nuanced, gray-area reasoning.

Even more worrisome is the complicity of the media in letting issues stay off the table outside the nations radar until they reach that all-or-nothing, crisis level. For example, there was enormous coverage of the recent commission’s inquiry of 9/11. It made good press. How much coverage, however, have we had before or after on the Homeland Security plans in terms of medical care when responding to a biological weapon’s assault, exit plans and related contingency operations for any type of nuclear event, and so forth. Similarly, periodically, there are reports about this or that environmental danger, ranging from lead in the water in DC and Boston to estrogenic compounds, such as dioxins, in our rivers and lakes. While there are periodic reports when federal, state, or local governments issue some news releases, there is not sufficient, ongoing reporting of progress in these areas vital for our survival.

Unfortunately, by not sufficiently reacting to the warning signs, the media maintains an all-or-nothing crisis orientation. Clearly there are exceptions to this tendency. For example, the recent media reports about the Iraqi prison led to federal hearings and ongoing coverage. However, even in this example, there were early warning signs that slipped beneath the media’s radar. Shows such as Nightline, 60 Minutes, and The News Hour, and newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, provide excellent periodic in-depth reports on vital issues. But is there sufficient follow-up? It is the nature of change that it requires persistence.

The media may ask how they can make something continuously newsworthy when there doesn’t appear to be a story. The answer is that for critical national and international concerns, the story is the lack of action or adequate progress. In other words, there are vital areas that relate to national survival and, therefore, are newsworthy on a continuing basis. These vital concerns have to do with potential biological, nuclear, or chemical terrorist acts; challenges to our environment; and the local, national, and international institutions that we have constructed to protect the vulnerable. At a minimum, there should be weekly updates on vital issues that each media group identifies as requiring ongoing coverage. After all, vital survival issues have to be at least as important as the daily monitored stock market and weather.

Ongoing information, however, is not enough. We have too make sure the information is accurate. Perhaps nothing is more important to the continuation of our democracy and our ability to engage in nuanced debate and anticipate events vital to our national security than accurate information. The consent of the governed, which Jefferson so aptly highlighted, must be “informed” consent. Perhaps the media could consider an accuracy index, continuously commenting on the accuracy of public reports, political statements, campaign ads, and the like.
The media is appropriately concerned about appearing partisan, especially in an election year. Monitoring national concerns and public statements, however, can be done in a fair manner. If the media bends over backwards not to appear partisan and, thereby, avoids “saying it like it is,” it has indeed been suckered to collude in providing misleading information.

If the media can keep its eye on the critical national and international issues, perhaps we won’t be reading about so many tragedies after the fact, for example, in the foster care system, where a little child is abused or neglected when the warning signs were obvious, but below our radar for months, if not years.

We won’t be wondering how we could have ignored the clues to 9/11 and the problems that have surfaced in communication between various federal agencies. It’s highly unlikely that our Secretary of Defense would be sitting before Congress and shaking his head, looking puzzled and wondering out loud how the leadership could have missed the clues of what was going on in the Iraqi prison.

Why Smart Public Officials Make Dumb Decisions

Understanding why smart people make bad decisions requires looking at the delicate nature of the human capacity to think. Is thinking -- like breathing and eating -- ingrained in human nature? While we may suspect that others have lost their critical faculties, we rarely suspect this of ourselves.

But thinking, like playing tennis or bridge, can exist on many levels. It’s easy to slip from higher to lower levels without even noticing it. In fact, conditions we take for granted may lead to dangerously low levels of logical thinking and even to illogical thinking. These conditions often characterize public office at the highest level.

I first became aware of this phenomenon many years ago, when I visited a distinguished colleague after he took a high government position. As a professor at one of the world’s best universities, he was known for his scholarly contributions characterized by high levels of reflective thinking. He was not only logical, he carefully considered all the reasons for a conclusion, weighed all the contributing factors, analyzed the short- and long-term consequences, and examined his judgment against a variety of established and emerging standards. His work was almost the definition of the highest levels of reflective reasoning—the type we expect in a classic Supreme Court case discussion.

When I first met my scholarly colleague in his government office, I was amazed to see an entirely different person. He jumped from topic to topic without always making logical connections. When he drew a conclusion, it was often of the polarized, all-or-nothing variety, rather than a subtle, nuanced one. There was little or no consideration of alternative conclusions, careful weighing of contributing factors, considerations of history or future consequences, or analysis of his own judgment. I noticed that his thinking was fragmented and, at best, concrete and polarized, and wondered what was going on.

As I listened carefully, I got my answer. He talked about being pulled in sixteen different directions, anxiously mentioning that he had to testify before Congress, respond ASAP to this or that policy initiative, outwit political opponents, keep the media at bay, and had no time to reflect, let alone make long-term policy decisions. Each day’s business was conducted on the run between meetings, briefings, and new crises.

While my friend was a good actor and could appear calm and competent, it was clear that he was operating under enormous stress all the time. Since then, I’ve observed the same phenomenon in many high-ranking elected and appointed government officials, on all sides of the political spectrum: bright, thoughtful, often gifted individuals operating nowhere near their capacity or potential as they try to deal with the daily challenges of running the government, too overwhelmed by the crises in front of them to address long-range issues.

In group meetings, where all the key individuals are experiencing this type of stress, the effect on decision-making is compounded. The higher the level of the stress, the more the group members tend to look to the most powerful officials to provide direction, and the more likely the group will embrace or eventually accept polarized, all-or-nothing -- rather than well-thought-out -- decisions. The more uncertainty in a group, the more likely it is to find security in easily accessible extreme positions. Such a group also tends to close ranks and insulate itself from differing opinions in order to hold on to the fragile security it has created.

The decision-makers are often unaware of this process. They may justify their decisions -- as well as the secrecy and rigidity surrounding them -- by claiming political expediency and the need to gain support. But in fact, such decisions (however realistic they may appear in today’s political climate) often reflect a polarized thinking process, rather than reflective processes that seek out and thoroughly consider alternate views.
Polarized thinking tends to result in a crisis orientation, in which a problem doesn’t fully register on our radar until it is extreme enough to fit in with our all-or-nothing worldview. Subtle, nuanced reasoning, on the other hand, enables the anticipation of problems before a crisis occurs. Unfortunately, we’re observing the former kind of thinking when we ask ourselves or our friends, “How could [that official] have done that?” or “How could our government have made this or that decision?”

Quite apart from whether we agree or disagree with a particular decision, we can examine the reasoning process leading to the decision, and see whether it reveals relatively higher or lower levels of reflective thinking. For example, does it reflect: Accurate information, or distortions, where facts are changed or “spun” far from any sense of reality? Logical thinking (characterized by a causal sequence of ideas), or fragmented and illogical thinking, as seen in far-fetched explanations or rationalizations? Subtle, nuanced, “gray-area” thinking, where multiple factors and the different degrees of their contributions are considered, or polarized, all-or-nothing thinking, where only two extremes are considered and communicated with simplified images or slogans? Judgment based on existing and emerging standards, including considerations of the present, past, and short- and long-term consequences, and both narrow (e.g., nationalistic) and broad (e.g., international) perspectives, or narrow judgments that exclude consideration of critical factors?

Some may argue that public officials and other leaders deliberately employ polarized images or slogans to control public opinion. Ironically, when this occurs, the leaders themselves become controlled by the very public opinion polls they are influencing. Once the process begins, it’s quite hard to know who is leading who. The long-term victim, however, is democracy itself, which requires an informed electorate.

What can be done to protect public officials and the nation from such stress-based thinking? A few possibilities come to mind. The first is to educate the public to expect a high standard of reflective thinking in public discourse. The media can help significantly by providing this type of analysis, while resisting the temptation to use polarized images in their headlines and sub-heads. Even the most sophisticated news analysis can’t undo a polarized headline. Unfortunately, the media and public fascination with “competition” fuels polarization. Who won or lost the debate, or who did better than expected, becomes the headline, while the substance of the policy debate is often buried in the fine print.

A second strategy is to encourage -- in the workplace and at home -- the conditions that favor reflective attitudes. If a high standard of thinking becomes the public’s expectation, perhaps public officials and political leaders will take the time needed to be truly reflective, resisting the tendency to indulge in the heightened sense of importance that goes with high office and fuels the hurried, on-the-run atmosphere that leads to unreflective decisions.

The third strategy to consider is to reduce decision-making insulation. The tendency to be intolerant of differing opinions and insulate oneself with a buffer of like-minded colleagues is often a result of heightened self-importance and stress. Increasing personal contact with others who hold differing views can counter these tendencies.

Long term, we need to consider better ways to educate future policy makers in both the cognitive and psychological aspects of decision-making. Intelligence and intelligent decisions are products of these aspects working together. For example, most students in high school, college, and graduate school don’t receive enough training in how to be their own internal devil’s advocate. They don’t learn how to raise questions about their own hypotheses that would stretch their reasoning capacities. They especially don’t receive training in how to identify their own psychological predilections and biases that would lead them to over-weigh the evidence for their favorite conclusion, rather than the alternative. To be truly objective requires not only a rigorous reasoning process, but an awareness of one’s own biases. The smarter we are, the easier it is for us to rationalize a subtle, unacknowledged bias by a skillful weighing of certain facts over others. The processes that lead to outstanding thinkers and decision makers are embedded in both family and educational experiences. In the future, given the growing interdependency and complexity of the world, we’ll need to greatly improve these processes.

It’s easy to focus only on the result of a decision itself -- whether it worked or didn’t work -- and not pay attention to the process that led to the decision. In fact, we often only examine decision-making processes when we get into hot water and try to figure out how we made such a “lousy” decision. Commissions that are created to examine the causes of a bad political decision usually focus only on the substance of the particular decision, rather than on the thinking processes themselves. Therefore, the risk of future poor decisions isn’t changed. We repeat history because we don’t generalize about the faulty thinking processes and only focus on the particular bad decision, as though the exact same situation will arise again.

In addition, we often disparage a focus on the processes of decision-making as the province of “eggheads” who are incapable of effective action. It’s important to counter this argument with the point that thoughtful, firm policy conclusions are often the product of thoughtful, reflective thinking. A good example is the definitive leadership in a time of crisis, fueled by reflective considerations, shown by Churchill during WWII. In contrast, a shoot-from-the-hip, polarized decision may be a lucky guess in one situation, but get us into hot water in another. Thoughtfulness and definitiveness are not mutually exclusive, and more often than not, go together. The best examples of this are in successful businesses, where polarized, illogical decisions are often associated with major catastrophes and only rarely with fortuitous success.

It may be naïve to think that political leaders will slow down and take the time needed to reflect on the long-term implications of a given decision. It may also be naïve to think that the media could rein in its profit-motivated use of polarized headlines and more fully direct the nation’s interest to the substantive policy issues. But, as the world becomes more interdependent and complex, the dangers of poor decision-making escalate, so the business of thinking needs our attention. Hopefully, by raising these issues, what seems naïve today may be viewed as sensible tomorrow. If we can learn to look not just at the ideas but the thought processes behind the ideas, we can understand why smart people and even smart groups make dumb decisions, and perhaps those decisions will begin to improve.

The Question of Medicating Children Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg

A recent Washington Post story (Sunday, April 18, 2004) indicated that the use of antidepressants for children increased as much as tenfold from 1987 to 1996, with a further 50% rise between 1998 and 2002. This increase occurred even though “the vast majority of clinical trials have failed to prove that the medicines help depressed children.” The article also pointed out that the increase has been especially dramatic in children under age 6 and that there are no clinical trial data for children in this age range.

To find an explanation for this phenomenon, we need to look at its broader context. While most professionals advocate a comprehensive approach, we’re seeing a tendency to lead with medications as a solution for a child’s behavioral or emotional challenges. Many children I see for a second or third opinion have been put on medications without a thorough evaluation of family, school, and intrapersonal functioning, and are not receiving other, often-needed, therapeutic work, for example, to improve coping skills, family relationships, peer interactions, and/or schoolwork and learning. Some children clearly require medication as part of a comprehensive program and have benefited from the enormous progress in our understanding of the biology of various types of emotional challenges. Almost all children with challenges, however, require systematic attention to personal, family, peer relationship, and educational domains.

What’s behind the tendency of at least some parents and professionals to lead with medication, rather than a broader approach within which medication may have a limited role for some children? To answer this question, we need to look at the shift that occurred over the last 30-40 years in the way society thinks about children. Gradually, as a result of the important discoveries that have been made about the biology of the brain, a growingly hurried and complex lifestyle, and an increasing tendency to rely on non-family members to care for our children, especially in the early years (e.g., daycare), the very way we characterize children has changed. More and more, as much as we may protest to the contrary, we treat children impersonally.

For example, the tendency to lead with medication, rather than a more comprehensive approach, is in part the product of seeing children’s behaviors and emotions as similar to the programs on a computer. The “person” gets left out as we try to tamper with the programs to change this or that symptom, problematic emotion, or set of behaviors. The breakthroughs in the understanding of the genetics of mental illness have been misinterpreted to mean that genetics and biology alone can account for complex human emotional functioning and that, with the right medication, we can correct specific problems without having to work with the whole person.

This perspective has become more and more extreme with changes in research and training. For example, since the 1990s, the National Institute of Mental Health has focused much more on the biology of mental illness than on psychological, social, and developmental factors. Training programs in child and adult psychiatry have also shifted from a balance of biology and psychology to an over-focus on biology.

Prior to this shift in our picture of children (and adults) and mental health, research and training programs had a more humanistic view, one that now has nowhere near the influence it should. In this view, humans are seen as complex beings who perceive and attend to a wide range of experiences, engage in ever-growing and ever-deepening intimate relationships, and experience, comprehend, and express a range of deep feelings -- from love and dependency, to assertiveness and curiosity, to anger and rage. This view sees humans as capable of engaging intuitively in complex social interactions; forming a rich, symbolic internal world of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and values; and learning to think logically, make sense of the world, interpret and evaluate their own feelings, and progress to very high levels of compassion, empathy, and reflection.

Obviously, a picture of children that includes their deepest feelings and coping capacities, as well as their creative and reflective thinking and empathetic abilities, would necessitate a comprehensive approach to childhood emotional problems. Such an approach might include medication in selected instances, as part of an overall program, but would not lead with medication to “fix” the child.

The impersonal view of children and ourselves that guides current mental health treatments can also be seen in educational and parenting approaches. For example, the current debate regarding the “No Child Left Behind” Act is not really about evaluating children or holding educators accountable (both of which can be very valuable), but about what, in children’s learning, should be evaluated, and what it is that educators should be accountable for. The view that we should focus tests on reading, and hold teachers accountable for progress only in a narrow area of learning gives, in my view, insufficient attention to thinking-based comprehension, reflective thinking, and social problem-solving skills. What’s most important to children’s education and most predictive of their future success is their ability to reflect on and understand what they experience and what they read and learn about. We can evaluate both reading and thinking, and hold educators accountable for both. We will only approach this more ambitious, but more meaningful, goal if we broaden our definition of what constitutes a healthy and well-educated child.

For children with learning disabilities and special needs, the narrow view of human development and learning results in testing the children on specific applied skills without evaluating the developmental steps that lead to this applied skill. In the case of some children, this has meant trying to get them to memorize the words they see without developing the underlying ability to understand what these words mean.
This preoccupation with the child’s appearance (i.e., the appearance of learning) also plays out in many approaches to changing children’s behavior, including the behavior of those with the most severe challenges. For example, frequently a child is conditioned to “look” at someone else, with no attention to whether the child wants to look -- and gain knowledge and information from looking and engaging with others -- or feels coerced to look and looks without interest, curiosity, or learning. The rote “looking” is hardly what we have in mind. Yet the majority of children with special needs in this country are still taught “basic compliant looking.” There is insufficient attention to the “person” who needs to learn to engage with others and become fascinated with the knowledge he or she can gain from interactions.

The controversy over medicating children, therefore, raises fundamental assumptions about what is a human being. Are we and our children like computers? Should we “change programs” through medication or narrow, surface-based educational and parenting approaches? Or should we re-engage with our heritage and continue to develop a deeper picture of what it means to be a person?

Healthcare Issues: Preventive Approaches To Improving Health and Reducing Costs

There is emerging evidence, quite strong evidence, that preventive approaches can improve health and significantly reduce costs in a number of critical health care areas. These include:

§ Cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, etc.

§ Cancer, including breast cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer, etc.

§ Memory loss and cognitive impairment associated with aging, including vascular-based senility, Alzheimer’s disease, etc.

§ Mental health disorders, including many forms of mental illness that characterize childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and aging.

§ Developmental and learning disorders in childhood.

These conditions not only impair the health and well being of individuals, they undermine the productivity of America’s workforce. They also put an enormous financial burden of growing health care costs on the nation. Simply trying to contain costs through innovative cost containment policies can only be part of an effective plan. A truly effective plan must embark on a multidimensional approach that includes access to health care for all, more efficient and effective health care, and a systematic, intensive, and comprehensive preventive effort. Various components of the private sector could be brought in this effort.
The key is to emphasize preventive approaches in a much more ambitious way than has ever been done before as one component of a comprehensive program. Obviously, the other components are also critical and these include, as mentioned, access to health care for all, early access for all so that conditions do not worsen simply because of inadequate or late health care, and more efficient care where needless hospital stays are discouraged and flexible, less expensive, and often better community based and family based models are implemented. Preventive care offers enormous potential to improve all elements of a comprehensive approach.

Agenda for Special Education

§ Historically, educational approaches to children with special needs and learning disabilities have been based on teaching specific skills or surface behaviors. For example, desired skills or behaviors from work with older children, such as the ability to sit and listen, identify letters and shapes, or sort shapes, are systematically taught to younger children. The approach is generally structured with a high emphasis on repetition and rote learning. Behavioral principles and a variety of eclectic approaches are often used, again with an emphasis on applying what is done with older children to younger children.

§ These approaches, however, have not sufficiently taken into account the newer, more modern understanding of how basic capacities actually develop. For example, we now have much better understanding than we had in the past of the developmental pathways and landmarks leading to the capacities for reflective thinking, for solving complex problems in math, reading, English, science, and social studies, as well as for focusing and attending, participating in groups, and cooperating. Understanding these developmental pathways reveals, however, that the road to desired academic thinking and social skills is not simply practicing desired behaviors or academic capacities, but involves mastery of critical building blocks in a number of areas.

§ Therefore, it’s critical to face an important fact. The older approaches have not been as successful as we would like, with large numbers of children unable to master basic academic thinking and social capacities, e.g., large numbers of children who can’t read, comprehend what they read, solve math or science problems, and engage socially at age- and grade-expected levels.

§ Modern approaches that work on building the foundations for academic thinking and social skills offer promise of much greater success. These approaches focus on three dimensions of development, including individual differences in information processing capacities (auditory processing and language, motor planning and sequencing—executive functioning, visual-spatial processing, and sensory modulation); functional problem-solving and thinking capacities; and relationship capacities. We now have the understanding to develop curricula for each of these areas and relate these curricula to specific academic goals, such as for reading, math, science, and social studies.

§ In order to implement these new curricula, however, for children with special needs and learning disabilities, we will need to rethink the organizational structures within which children learn. Specifically, the following innovations will need to be considered.

o New curricula for the areas outlined above

o An emphasis on one-on-one and very small group learning opportunities. This can involve either an aide or teacher. A small group would have no more than two to four children per adult

o Volunteers from the community who would be trained to apply these new curricula would need to be involved in order to supply the ratios outlined above. Volunteers could include parents, grandparents, and others. Also, public education would need to consider what private schools have been doing for years (i.e., employing talented BA level individuals as teachers with in-service training to foster their growth).

o Home-based programs led by parents, other family members, and volunteers would need to complement school-based learning opportunities. Schools and educators would need to reach out to help create partnerships with families where the family is seen as a vital resource for the child’s education and a co-member of a school/family team.

o Shifting resources from “guarding the door” into understanding the unique needs of each child and family. Traditionally, enormous resources are spent to make sure children who receive special education services evidence the significant, measurable delay or deviation from age-expected capacities. The tests that are used to measure these capacities, however, are not well validated for the variety of special needs conditions they are used to assess and often only delay children’s entry into special education, making the child’s challenges even greater. Therefore, children should be afforded access to the appropriate special education services, including special education services, if they are not learning to interact, communicate, think, read, write, or solve arithmetic problems in an age- or grade-expected manner. Often, this will be readily clear from class performance, parent reports, or combinations of the above. In other words, it’s rare that families seek extra educational help or that educators recommend it without a challenge being present and, as indicated, without help, such challenges usually intensify. Once a child is identified as needing further educational assistance, a thorough evaluation involving both observations, as well as needed formal assessments, can determine the nature of the challenges and the best ways to work with them. Some children, for example, may require little or no special education services, but simply more individualized regular education approaches while other children may require intensive, comprehensive approaches. If the detailed evaluation is implemented as part of the planning for the intervention, then the intervention team and the child and family will benefit from the evaluation. When the evaluation is used to “guard the door,” often there is a disconnect between the evaluation process and subsequent special education services. Therefore, resources should be shifted from guarding the door to the implementation of appropriate programs based on understanding each child’s and family’s unique needs.

These are some preliminary ideas that could help us turn around special education in the United States. We could help children much more substantially than we are now at far less cost per student with an innovative program that has the following features:

§ A focus on the building blocks of academic thinking and social skills (rather than surface traits or behaviors)

§ Small group and one-on-one learning opportunities on these basics

§ Emphasis on use of volunteers and entry opportunities for Bachelor level, talented individuals into teaching positions.

§ School/family partnerships with systematic home programs that complement school programs.

§ Heavy involvement of community and family in the governing structure of local schools.

On Education

Principles of Education

Modern approaches to education need to consider different ways in which children learn, the settings that provide effective learning environments, methods and curricula likely to be effective, and the different levels at which children learn, including the analytical and reflective level as well as the basic information processing level.

Evidence-Based Teaching Methods and Curricula or Evidence-Based Learning Relationships and Environments

There are many voices calling for evidence-based teaching methods. This means teaching methods and curricula that have some research behind them. Figuring out which approaches work best for which children is not as easy as it might appear. For example, many studies show that it is not the curricula, per se, but rather the personality and capacity of the teacher and the characteristics of the learning environment that contribute mostly to children’s progress. These studies suggest that the learning relationships and learning environment account for more of the variance in outcomes than the specific curriculum. If this is the case, it may not be appropriate to talk about evidence-based teaching curricula. It may be more appropriate to talk about evidence-based learning relationships and environments. In addition, because each child learns differently and does best with an approach that is tailored to his or her unique characteristics, educational approaches must embody flexibility. These considerations have also been shown to be true in many fields that involve human beings learning from one another (e.g., psychotherapy). Characteristics that characterize successful educational programs include:

§ A high degree of affective or emotional involvement from the students. This means dynamic learning interactions, where students are problem-solving with the teacher, with other students, or both together. It means learning through involvement and doing, not simply passive receiving.

§ Tailoring approaches to individual ways students process information and experience. Children differ in the way they process information and experience and learn. There are clearly observable differences even among children without specific learning disabilities in the major modalities they use to process information and learn. In each of these modalities, there may be differences in their long-term working memory, comprehension, analytic and reflective reasoning, and/or their written or oral communication. Therefore, it’s important to tailor approaches to children’s differences in the following capacities: auditory processing and language, visual-spatial processing; motor planning and sequencing (executive functioning); and sensory modulation.

§ Providing educational approaches that involve all these sensory and motor pathways as part of the learning process. Children learn best when all parts of their mind are involved together.

§ Learning approaches that work on both analytical and reflective thinking and basic information processing or learning tools. Many educational approaches focus only on one of these dimensions. Yet both are critical. For example, mastery of reading involves basic processes such as phonemic awareness and motor planning and sequencing. At the same time, however, reading involves comprehension at a number of levels, including remembering facts, perceiving the overall pattern in the material, and being able to analyze and reflect on the material, including being able to make thoughtful inferences from the material. While reading programs that have focused either on the very basic processes or the larger patterns and reflective and analytical capacities have shown beneficial results, clearly approaches that work with both abilities are essential. The goal, after all, is to enable children to take in information and analyze and reflect on that information.

§ Approaches that focus on children’s self-esteem and sense of mastery.

§ Approaches that recognize and work with the social milieu and peer relationships that constitute the learning environment.

§ Evaluation procedures that operate on a number of capacities—basic processing, analytic reasoning and creative and innovative problem-solving, and self-esteem mastery and pleasure in learning.

These suggestions are supported by recent reports from the National Academy of Sciences (Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students' Motivation to Learn, Committee on Increasing High School Students' Engagement and Motivation to Learn, National Research Council, 2003). The report emphasizes the importance of personalized relationships, critical thinking capacities, approaching subjects from multiple dimensions and multiple ways of processing information at the same time, using integrated curricula, and motivating, relationship based learning contexts. There appears to be enormous evidence from the research literature that is mounting for focusing on the overall learning experience rather than simply one dimension of it, such as a specific curriculum.

Different Types of Learners

As we consider learning environments and teaching methods, it is essential to question some longstanding educational priorities in light of children’s learning differences. Children learn not only in different ways, but require different types of settings and programs in order to be effective learners. One group of children can learn in large classes of 20 to 30 children and are probably so well prepared for learning in a variety of settings that it would be hard to keep them from mastering their lessons. These are the children most teachers wish would populate their entire class. Another group finds it hard to learn in the large class and often falls behind in this type of busy setting, but can learn very effectively and successfully in a small group of 8 to 14 children or so. The third group requires lots of one-on-one help and very small groups of 2 to 4 children in order to learn effectively. These three types of children may not have learning disabilities or be eligible for special educational services. Their different requirements have to do with learning differences. Obviously, some children also require special education strategies because of specific learning disabilities and/or developmental challenges. These children also require very small groups and lots of one-on-one work. While estimates may differ, it is reasonable to assume that less than half the children can learn effectively in very large groups. More than half the children, therefore, require smaller groups and one-on-one learning opportunities.

How to Provide Staff for Children Who Require Smaller Groups and One-on One Learning

Clearly, there aren’t enough experienced, trained teachers to provide medium-sized, as well as small group and one-on-one, opportunities for all the children who require it. Therefore, we need to explore innovative programs where volunteers from the community, as well as recent community college and college graduates, are provided brief training and excellent supervision by experienced teachers to help provide the adult to child ratios required. There are many capable adults who have natural talents in the way they relate to children and communicate with children. These individuals themselves are often quick learners and could do very well with proper support and guidance. If we insist only on very well trained, experienced teachers and are unwilling to explore innovative options, we may well persist in maintaining high rates of academic illiteracy. It’s not weak teacher training or poor curricula or lack of research on some of our curricula that leaves many children behind. It’s an inability and an unwillingness to provide the types of learning environments that many children require.

Conclusion

It’s no surprise that inspired teachers with inspiring curricula in supportive educational environments have the best results with children. When we break down what happens by these inspired and inspiring teachers, we see that it is the characteristics discussed above that characterize their classrooms.

The Road to Democracy—Paved with Aggression and Resentment?

Democratic nation-building can only be successful if the social and psychological causes of a dictatorial regime are understood and the multiple steps required to achieve democracy anticipated.

Democratic practices and institutions depend on collaborative relationships, trust, and reflective processes. When a socially and culturally cohesive nation -- where individuals have some degree of trust in each other -- with a history of democratic-type institutions is liberated from a dictatorial regime, its people can readily come together to support democratic reforms, as was observed in post-communist Poland.

However, a country with a long history of warring factions, where each faction distrusts the other, actually often depends on a dictatorship to contain hostilities. What happens when this type of nation is freed from a dictatorial regime? To answer this question we first must look at why a group would embrace or tolerate such a regime in the first place.

Social groups have a number of basic needs, including safety, cohesion, implicit survival-based communication, shared symbols, and a relatively shared sense of reality and humanity. Different groups, however, vary in how they come together to meet these basic needs. Chaotic, fragmented social groups, and social groups that are invested in polarized beliefs, meet their basic needs in different ways than social groups that are relatively integrated and share a sense of reality and humanity.

For example, fragmented and/or polarized organizations often can only cohere around a powerful feared leader or set of polarized beliefs or images, because the group feels that no other structure could contain the imminent danger from the different factions. Paradoxically, fear of hostility is used to contain hostility and provide security for the group.

The dictatorial regime may also provide a familiar social structure. Dictatorial regimes tend to operate at a level of group functioning dominated by “all-or-nothing” thinking, concrete rules, extreme punishments, and little tolerance for flexible reflective thinking that would challenge an authority structure. Warring factions also tend to operate with “all-or-nothing” thinking (i.e., “the other factions are all bad.”) and rule by severe authority figures. Therefore, the polarized thinking that characterizes a dictatorial regime feels familiar.

In contrast, reflective thinking -- embodied in representative forms of government -- and concepts such as justice, equality, debate, and compromise feel alien.

What is likely to occur when a nation of fragmented or polarized warring factions is all of a sudden freed from the tyranny of a dictator? Will they be appreciative, and feel a sense of security from a potential governing process that feels alien to them? Or will they feel a collective anxiety and uncertainty because the proposed new governing structure, while supporting individual freedoms, does not provide a familiar social organization or an immediate sense of protection against factional hostilities? Unsurprisingly in such a circumstance, we can expect a number of reactions: frank hostility by those with very different objectives, along with anxiety, fear, and resentment by those for whom a new structure does not provide the security and cohesion of the prior one, and lack of appreciation by those who do not intuitively embrace the liberating power as representing goals that are familiar and attainable.

The road toward democracy, therefore, often involves a considerable period of time and a number of steps. The nation’s different groups have to meet the challenge of working together and resolving hostilities. They have to learn to trust each other enough to experience a somewhat shared sense of reality and humanity and invest in some type of representative governing structure. The groups have to develop the psychological and social capacities to embrace reflective, integrated compromises rather than polarized solutions. Achieving the psychological level where differences are evaluated and debated is a long and difficult road.

What policies can promote these processes? Some are familiar. These include being prepared for the long haul, trying to establish safety, security, and basic necessities, investing in schools and health care, and working with moderates toward self-governance. In addition, however, it is crucial to anticipate hostile reactions, and to realize that, to cope with the anxiety of losing the relative security of a dictatorial regime, the liberated group will require a greater sense of safety than might be anticipated. Without this first step of “safety”, there will be an enormous temptation to return to autocratic practices.
Embracing abstract democratic principles requires high levels of personal and group functioning. As the United States was forming, Thomas Jefferson indicated that democratic processes can only be as strong as the capacity of the governed to invest their trust in these processes. Therefore, the support for human capital, including family and educational programs to enhance the capacities of future generations for reflective thinking, collaboration, and empathy, will have to be far greater than is usually planned.

Based on: Greenspan, S. I. & Shanker, S. The First Idea: How Symbols, Language and Intelligence Evolved from Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans. Boston, MA: Perseus Books