The Grateful Abused

However much I’m not an historian, I am much more not a psychologist. Yet, as Chesterton says at the beginning of The Everlasting Man,

As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.

John Taylor Gatto said something to the effect that the greatest success of modern schooling is that no can think of doing it any other way. The colossal failure of modern schooling is so enormous, so obvious, so horrible that it is truly mind-blowing that any sane person is willing to keep doing it to themselves and their children. Yet not only are millions of parents eager to send their kids to school, they leap to its defense and complain about attempts to ease the burden on their children. Just look at the reactions of most parents when they are told that homework provides little if any benefit and should be eliminated – they freak out. No! Having their kid waste hours every night on homework is a badge of parental honor that shall not be taken away. Or something.

We’re not talking about people who reluctantly disregard their own children’s unhappiness with schooling through some misguided idea that they’re enforcing schooling for their kid’s own good, but about parents who actively (often angrily) support wasting even more of their kids time with homework, even when presented with the evidence that it doesn’t contribute meaningfully to academic success.

As we discussed in the last post, the typical American was much more literate in 1850 than in 2000 – despite? Because of? – the total professionalization of schooling. Here’s what an American 10 year old would be expected to be able to read and understand back in the 19th century:

If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on, or to give up, the war? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we shall be ground to powder, and our country and its rights trodden down in the dust? I know we do not mean to submit. We NEVER shall submit! Do we intend to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into by men, that plighting, before God, of our sacred honor to Washington, when, putting him forth to incur the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards of the times, we promised to adhere to him in every extremity with our fortunes and our lives? I know there is not a man here, who would not rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land, or an earthquake sink it, than one jot or tittle of that plighted faith fall to the ground. For myself, having twelve months ago, in this place, moved you that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces raised, or to be raised, for the defense of American liberty; may my righthand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or waver in the support I give him.

Daniel Webster, excerpt, Supposed Speech of John Adams, McGuffey’s 5th Eclectic Reader.

But mere evidence and logic stand no chance among the well-schooled. Most parents find some way to dismiss the success of homeschoolers – they’re weird, or socially stunted, or something. That homeschoolers, like those 19th century kids in their one-room schoolhouses, typically cover much more material in much less time and with much less stress can’t be allowed to contradict such parents’ need to send their kids to real school. Then when you get to the real crazies – like me – who not only didn’t send his kids to real school, but refused to bend the knee to grade level nonsense, and encouraged their children to do whatever they wanted, so long as they recognized that they were fresponsible for the outcome – well, that’s simply crazy! That our kids – and hundreds of thousands of similarly raised children – are some of the finest, brightest, kind, and thoughtful people you’ll ever meet just cannot be allowed.

We were told by family and friends that we were ruining our kids, then, when that became untenable, that our kids were just different, or that they were geniuses, that it might work for our kids, but their kids could never handle that level of freedom and responsibility. Never could it be admitted that keeping our kids out of the clutches of professional educators not only didn’t hurt them, but was a huge part in their ultimate successes.

How does one even begin to address this level of insanity? How can people be so blind as to insist that modern schooling is good and necessary (so much so that those who reject it are somehow evil) when not a shred of evidence supports that conclusion?

Here begins the psychological and evolutionary speculation.

In her book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, German psychiatrist Alice Miller describes how an abused child follows this 11th commandment of the book’s title, and simply cannot allow himself to be aware of the abuse.

Miller trained as a traditional Freudian, and worked with troubled children. She did extensive research into Freud’s writings. She discovered that, prior to his creation of his theory of sexual repression, he had taken the possibility that his clients were sexually abused seriously. Doing so, however, put him in conflict with the people paying his bills, making him an enemy of the sort of people who send their kids and wives to psychiatrists in the first place.

Miller’s direct experience taught her that abused children of all ages are often strangely unaware of the abuse they’ve suffered. When confronted with the evidence of their having been abused, they make up excuses for their abusers. Daddy or Mommy didn’t mean it. I was asking for it. If only I hadn’t done X, nothing would have happened. And so on.

Then, the kicker: in their own adult lives, these victims will often subject their own children to the same kind of abuse. This is key: to do otherwise, they would need to own that they, themselves, were abused. But that’s too painful to endure, too disruptive of their lives and relationships. Besides, they turned out OK. What’s the big deal? It couldn’t have been as bad as all that.

Thou shalt not be aware – so, the pattern repeats itself from generation to generation. Facing their own abuse is too painful. They have built up emotional structures to fend off the hurt. Trying to get them to see it only makes them angry. That’s Miller’s account, at least.

My only contribution here: this inability to acknowledge or even see the abuse we’ve suffered is both much broader than the classically abused, and is based in harsh biological reality. We humans, especially as children, simply must belong to a group in order to survive. A child is soon dead without the care of adults. From a Darwinian survival perspective, even adults without a tribe are as good as dead- there is no reproduction without other people!

Thus, all human beings are highly motivated – at a biological level – to somehow make peace with their abusers, if those abusers are part of their family or tribe. Miller points out that, in her practice, it made all the difference if the victim had someone in his life who told him that, no, what’s being done to you is not ok. Lacking such a sympathetic witness, the victim had little chance of recovery.

Stockholm Syndrome may be a similar phenomenon. In 1974, during a botched bank robbery in Stockholm, 4 hostages quickly began to identify with and support their captor. He didn’t kill them, after all, and so, for their emotional survival, they came to see things from his point of view.

It’s much more complicated than that, of course. Not every hostage identifies with his captors. It takes time, for one thing, and the captors must be in some sense sympathetic. But in a situation where the hostage situation goes on for a while, and the captors have opportunities to be, or at least appear, kind, eventually, biological reality will kick in: I, a human organism, need to figure out how to survive in this situation. If I can’t escape, then identifying with my captors might make the most (Darwinian) sense.

I do think that underlying both Miller’s claims and Stockholm Syndrome is a basic human need to be part of a group , even to fit in when one is being threatened and abused. This need to belong is a good thing, in itself, but can easily be twisted into something evil. The simplest, most common example is people going along with whatever their crowd promotes. The truth is a small price to pay for belonging.

There is a continuum from such basic and simply conformity up through groupthink and on to real insanity. I think you, my dear readers, can come up with plenty of examples.

And so here we are: That modern schooling is an expensive, humiliating failure by any objective standards simply must not be seen, if we are to maintain our place in society and our heavily reinforced psychological defenses. If our kids complain about being bored at school, at having their time wasted, of being made to do things they don’t want to do – well, those complaints have no standing! We MUST make our children do what we did – suck it up, and do what the teacher wants. To take our children’s complaints and unhappiness seriously would undermine OUR whole world – so we just don’t do it.

This is not just a theory. I spent years having discussions about the above with parents considering enrolling their children in our Sudbury school. Even among parents willing to consider this radical unschooling approach, about half just could not pull the trigger. These parents might acknowledge many of the points above, and might acknowledge the unhappiness of their child, but simply letting go of the schooling they, themselves, went through was too much.

Among the general population of parents, those not considering such extreme unschooling, the response is what i mentioned above: we were ruining our kids! Lord of the Flies! Wasting their time! They’ll never learn discipline! And so on. Never mind that a walk through the school showed generally happy, articulate self-controlled kids comfortable with talking with adults as well as children of all ages. Never mind the success of our kids by any measure. Nope, it can’t work, because, if it did, then I have to deal with all my feelings about my schooling – and all that had better be left buried. Even if I have to bury my own children with it.