Choice Theory (33 page)

Reality therapists are not detectives. We do not set ourselves up to separate the truth from what is false. We know that there are enough real problems in the present, and we look for them. We know that these problems can be dealt with without knowing any more about the past except when the client was in effective control. These strengthening memories, which are usually true or can easily be checked, make therapy more effective. There is no reason to believe that we can’t help clients because we don’t know much about them besides what they are choosing to do now. This is why the use of reality therapy can substantially shorten the time needed for therapy to be effective. I did not think that Terri’s ten-session limit was a block to good treatment. If she needed more, I would have worked out a way for her to pay.

Reading this book can be a good way for many people to handle family relationships that are unsatisfying. If each party in the unhappy relationship can learn choice theory, stop blaming the others in the relationship, get into the solving circle, and subordinate his or her own demands to the needs of the relationship, they all could get along much better than they do now.

I
N THE EARLY
1990s I was invited to Pittsburgh to keynote a special conference on high schools. The conference organizers were interested because I had written two books,
The Quality School
and
The Quality School Teacher,
explaining how choice theory can be used in schools. Those attending were administrators, teachers, and students from a consortium of about forty schools that, by all measures of success, were judged the best high schools in the United States.

Knowing that top students from each school would be in the audience, I chose to nervous because I was going to start my speech with the claim that more than half the students in the best schools do nothing more in class than get by. I was afraid that the students selected to come to this conference, who might be school boosters, would resent the claim that their schools were filled
with do-enough-to-get-by students and pay little attention to what I said. It wasn’t the teachers and administrators who concerned me. They don’t know or want to know as much about the schools as do the students.

The night before I was to deliver my speech, I asked the students if they would be willing to meet with me half an hour before my talk in the morning. I told them I was planning to make a statement about their schools, but I didn’t want to say it if they disagreed. Almost all fifty students showed up. I asked for their estimates of how many students in their schools were doing far less than they were capable of. We had a discussion about students’ effort, and I told them that I would go along with their criteria but I wanted a number—how many were working hard to learn?

I was surprised at the range of their estimates that 20-45 percent were working hard in class. The students from the 45 percent high school explained that although poor performers in middle school were not admitted, still less then half the students were buckling down. We talked about that low figure, and to make sure they understood what I wanted, I asked, “Are the poor performers incapable of doing good schoolwork?” They said no, but added that some of the most capable students were doing very little in class because they had turned off in middle school. Although in my talk I said that less than half were working, I tend to agree with the students, the actual figure in the best schools is closer to 25 percent, but less than 5 percent in many large inner-city schools.

When I made the claim that this low figure is due to coercive, or boss, management, no one in the audience challenged it. I will describe both boss management and lead management in detail in the next chapter on the workplace. But, in essence, bosses fail because they force and punish, and leaders succeed because, without forcing and punishing, students see it is to their benefit to follow them and do so more because they like them than because of what they teach. If good education is our goal, boss management is costing us at least half of every dollar we spend on this effort.

But even more alarming was what I soon learned while making an all-day presentation on quality schools in Alma, Michigan. The schools were closed for the day; all the school employees and many of the city leaders were in attendance; however, no students were present. As usual, I lectured all morning, but in the afternoon I interviewed high school students. Considering that the town’s power structure was there, I knew I was going to get the best students, and I did. Since I had talked on quality schools all morning, I decided to ask, “What is quality?” The students had no trouble answering and defined quality as well as it can be defined: the best you can do, it takes time and lots of effort, it’s what we want when we spend our money, and it’s usually expensive. I then asked a question they did not expect, “Do you do quality work in school?”

The students were silent, not knowing exactly what to say. I thought maybe these good students did not want to boast. After a pause of at least twenty seconds, a tall young man stood up to address the audience. In the several hundred of these interviews I have conducted, this was the first time a student had ever stood up to make a statement. He said, “I’ve gone to school here since kindergarten and I’ve been a good student, all A’s, a few B’s, no C’s. My parents and teachers have been very satisfied. But I want to tell you this. Never once in an academic class have I ever done the best I can do.” The audience was stunned to hear this from such a capable young man whom most of them knew. When the interview ended, many from the audience rushed up to talk to him. A few challenged him, but he held his ground.

After the audience was through with him, I asked him what I should have asked during the interview, “If you don’t do it in the classroom, where in school do you do your best?” Immediately he said, “On the basketball team. I always do the best I can there.” His answer supported my belief that the best work in most schools is done in extracurricular activities for two reasons. First, the students almost always have both the teachers who lead these activities and the activities themselves in their quality worlds. This is by far the most important criterion for good work in school.
Second, there is no
schooling,
a term I will soon explain, in these activities.

What is so disappointing about his answer is that it pinpoints a huge problem in the way we teach. Not only are many poor students doing badly in our coercive schools, many good students are not doing their best either. Although I concern myself mainly with lower achievers, we need quality schools for
all
students. If a future leader like this young man does not choose to do his best, there is little hope for improving education.

The main reason so many students are doing badly and even good students are not doing their best is that our schools, firmly supported by school boards, politicians, and parents, all of whom follow external control psychology, adhere rigidly to the idea that what is taught in school is right and that students who won’t learn it should be punished. This destructive, false belief is best called
schooling.
It is defined by two practices, both of which are enforced by low grades and failure.

The first practice is trying to make students acquire knowledge or memorize facts in school that have no value for anyone, including students, in the real world. The second practice is forcing students to acquire knowledge that may have value in the real world but nowhere near enough value to try to force every student to learn it. Forcing people to learn has never been successful, yet we continue to do it because we think it is right.

Schooling is what students, even many good students, rebel against in school. If they are failed or given low grades because of this rebellion, many stop working altogether and take not only the schooling but the teachers who school out of their quality worlds. To be fair, many teachers believe that the coercive system that runs the schools forces them to school students and that if they don’t, they will be punished. If we are to get rid of schooling, we must stop defining education as acquiring knowledge.

Education is not acquiring knowledge; it is best defined as using knowledge. The dictionary defines knowledge as the fact or awareness of knowing something. I recognize that you have to know something to use it, but except in some television quiz shows or party games, there is little value in merely knowing something. The value is in using what you have learned, and this is where the schools fail to focus.

Much of what students are required to do in school and are punished if they refuse is to memorize information they will never be asked to use except in school. What makes this practice senseless is that in most instances, the school does not require that the students retain the knowledge, just know it for tests. As Linus said in a Peanuts cartoon strip, “The difference between A students and F students is the A students forget it five minutes after the test, the F students, five minutes before.”

Education is worth the effort; schooling is not. Education is worth improving; schooling cannot be improved. If you know something, you know it; if you don’t, you don’t. You can’t know it better or worse. Where you can demonstrate your competence is in using knowledge. You want your dentist to be able to spot a cavity when she sees one, but if she doesn’t know how to fill it properly, you might be better off if she didn’t even see it. We commit a fraud on students when we tell them that because they learn facts like dates, names, and places, they have acquired something worth knowing. The real world does not reward schooling. If needed, the knowledge of where to look up names, dates or places is well worth acquiring. If the popular schooling game Trivial Pursuit had been called Serious Pursuit, it would have been a dud.

Schooling is what the young man from Alma was referring to when he said he did not do his best. He couldn’t do his best in temporarily acquiring knowledge. But on the basketball team and in most nonacademic areas, students put in a lot of effort because they not only use what they learn but can improve it. The real excitement attached to learning anything is improving it. When students tell you, “We have a great teacher,” what they are saying is
that the teacher has taught them to use and improve knowledge, not just acquire it. That is why the best teachers are usually the toughest teachers: They require students to think. For most students in our schooling schools, thinking is new and seen as difficult. But once they see that it’s useful, they respect their teachers and are willing to do the work. In or out of school, there is nothing good about knowing something or bad about not knowing something unless you use it or intend to use it.

Most people will agree that much of what they memorized for both school and college was useless. But there is still the argument of the popular educator E. D. Hirsch, who has written a series of books on what children need to know. Hirsch claims that just being aware of a certain amount of knowledge is indispensable if we want to succeed in the culture we live in. If he was talking about using knowledge, I would agree with him. My question to people like Hirsch who define things worth knowing is,
How are we to get this knowledge into the heads of almost all the students if we don’t concurrently teach them to use it?

Since we are a widely diverse culture, in which the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening, the blind forcing of what experts say we all must know will be rejected by many students who do not have homes in which education is valued. They will be failed for this rejection and will “retaliate” by taking schoolwork and then school out of their quality worlds. Many will drop out of school into lives that include violence, crime, prison, drugs, and unloving sex. In a quality school, where students are led instead of bossed, they acquire a lot of knowledge by using what they learn, and they retain it. We need more quality schools if we are to reduce the increasing and costly gap between the haves and have-nots in our society.

This point leads me directly into the second procedure of schooling, where things get more complicated. Some teachers at another conference asked me to role-play how a teacher or a counselor could deal with a capable seventeen-year-old girl who was failing senior English because she had stopped working in class. A teacher volunteered to play the girl. I played the counselor.

“Your teacher sent you to see me. She thinks you have a problem. What’s happening in that class?”

“I’m flunking English. I try, but I really don’t know what’s going on in that class. I don’t make any trouble. But I’m going to fail, and without that class I won’t graduate. I want to graduate but I don’t think I’m going to.”