Last week I was reading an article on how to make your kids successful, when I came across a phrase that described a key component to success – desirable difficulty. This is a conversation I have been having concerning today’s youth for a long time. I have seen the direction our public education system has taken over the last 40 years as undesirable primarily for this reason. I have long had a particular interest in education as both of my parents were teachers. In fact my ultimate goal as an undergraduate at UC Davis was to teach teachers how to teach better, so I designed my own major in educational psychology. As fate would have it, there was no such job field when I graduated and so I chose to pursue Chiropractic as a service and profession.
What happened 40 years ago that I felt generated a wrong turn in education? Like most wrong turns, they looked like a good idea at the time. A bunch of research came out showing how success in life was highly tied to self-esteem. The better you felt about
yourself, the better you did financially in life. So the cry went out that teachers and schools needed to foster high self-esteem in students. This sounds like a laudable idea. The problem is there was no research on just how to do this. So-called “common sense” took over and the answer was to try to make kids feel good about their school experience. The problem is, like so many other “common sense” answers, the reality turns out to be the opposite of what everyone thought (and still thinks.) Medicine is full of this same type of faulty reasoning, like the totally false idea that cholesterol causes heart attacks.
Simple minded bureaucrats and administrators figured that if every kid felt like a winner in school that they would all have super high self-esteem. The logic was impeccable and completely wrong. It fit well into other American fantasies such as we are all equal, which is obvious poor quality thinking. Reality says we are all individual and unique, not equal on any measure except a spiritual one. Trying to force this lie onto society has generated untold amounts of suffering. The
constitution framers were much smarter than this and clearly said that the spiritual equality gives us each the right to pursue our own happiness. They did not say that we would all be equally successful in achieving this goal.
It is also reality that in a world of limited resources, there is no such thing as everyone being a winner. Even that whole story misses the point, because self-esteem does not come from winning. Self-esteem comes from overcoming difficulties. Self-esteem comes from meeting challenges and developing life skills. Self-esteem comes from struggle that ultimately results in success, but that initially presents difficulty. This is where the idea of desirable difficulty comes from. When actual scientific studies are done over and over, the common sense approach the education system took has been shown to actually produce just the opposite of what they were intending. By making curriculums success oriented rather than difficult and challenging, the net result is that kids don’t develop the kind of recall memory and functional application skills that allow them to actually use the information they were taught. This is why American kids consistently come up
lacking in international competitions for intellectual skills. Basically our kids are dumber because school was too easy for them in order to make them all feel like winners.
The good news is that this gradual decline in American intelligence has not gone unnoticed. Serious academic research is discovering that most of our assumptions about what makes good education are wrong, and more importantly, what does work. One leader in this field is Robert Bjork. Here is a short video link
Unfortunately, what does work is not easy. Teachers don’t like it, administrators don’t like it, and state agencies that control funding don’t like it. They like nice discreet modules of information that are easily delivered and so easy to demonstrate that the information was transmitted
to the students through multiple choice standardized testing. This approach is good for the bean counters at the state level to prove teaching goals have been achieved.
The more work that is involved in learning something, the better you are at recalling it much later. The more variety in how you apply the information in useful manners, the more useful the information is when applied to real world situations. We have been teaching kids how to pass standardized tests, not how to think or how to develop useful skills with what has been learned. The result is that most of what kids learn in school is lost within a few months without any residual functional skills. It is these functional skills that give kids real self-esteem because they can see that they are able to tackle novel situations with these skills and be successful. Self-esteem is that confidence based on real world experience that they can figure stuff out and make it work. I am not seeing most of the current and recent generation having that confidence. Instead they have the entitled expectation that life should be easy
like school. Everything should be easy and handed to them on a silver platter. They should be winners in life simply because they exist. Hard work and suffering to figure things out is never even considered. Why would it be? That is not what they were taught.
The education problem is at least being looked at and we may see some changes down the road. For me the bigger issue is the impact socially this school-taught-life-perspective is having on the whole of society. We have a couple of generations now of citizens who largely don’t have a clue. The hard work and sacrifice to figure out the skills needed to be a success have been replaced with entitlements and demands for life satisfaction from external sources. This only results in frustration and anger as they discover there is no satisfaction that comes from the outside. Happiness is an inside skill set that is developed through a lot of difficult trial and error. Happiness comes through developing the skills to have
honest, mutually supportive relationships and through the healthy expression of your creative potential. It is not something that can come from a pill, a bag of money, or demanding your way with others.
Not all kids run through the system have ended up this way obviously, or the social structure of our country would already have collapsed. Some percentage of these kids have retained the values of hard work and honest ethics. But the numbers of dispirited, disempowered, dependent and desperate folks is growing at an alarming rate. A crash is inevitable unless some major change of attitude comes about.
The simple message that I think would get the ball rolling is thatlife is supposed to be difficult. It is by
overcoming difficulties that we develop our character and empower ourselves to be able to create happiness from the inside out. We need desirable levels of difficulty to build ourselves with. Impossible difficulties are not helpful. But challenges that call upon us to reach deep within ourselves to come up with creative solutions is what is needed. Life is not meant to be laid back and easy. That just makes us degenerate. Our lives are just like our bodies. We absolutely need appropriate levels of stress and challenge to be healthy. Without this we devolve into gelatinous blobs. We need healthy stress, not chronic unremitting stress, but challenge that we can overcome through the development of enriched adaptations and coping skills.
Those of us under that chronic overbearing type of stress may have a hard time appreciating this viewpoint, but maybe not. What do we consider stress relieving activities – hobbies, sports, crafts, and other things that are challenges that we can skill up and do well with.
These things build us up. We need success that is a result of our skill development just like we need healthy food.
That is the message of this newsletter. We need healthy stress in our lives. We need challenge to keep us sharp and on our toes. What that looks like will be very different for each person. We are meant to grow, to overcome adversity, to reach new levels of connection and creativity. We need desirable difficulties.