Reading, Writing, Therapy : Education: The art of optimism. Coping with living. Many schools are trying to fill a psychological void--but do these subjects belong in the classroom?
Here’s today’s pop quiz:
What do “Peace Builders,” “Coping With Living” and automated teller-machine training have to do with reading, writing and arithmetic?
How does “Optimism” play on your kid’s school transcript?
Exactly what do college admissions committees think when they find out that your child spent part of his or her senior year learning to balance a checkbook?
Nobody has all the answers yet. But more and more, touchy-feely programs are popping up in schools all over the country.
Some focus on confidence, self-esteem, “negotiation enhancement” or “aggression containment.” Others target diversity, disability, death and divorce.
There are coming-out seminars for gay adolescents, symposiums for children of gay parents, AIDS information workshops. Classes in sexual harassment awareness abound. Some schools even provide quick-hit sessions on table manners.
“We think the skills we teach are just like teaching reading,” said Mark Greenberg, a psychologist at the University of Washington who develops educational programs.
This shift in academic mandate--call it, for lack of a more pronounceable term, the “psychologization of education”--has been slow, subtle and largely unheralded.
Many parents and educators praise the inclusion of these subjects as an important recognition of the role of education in the 1990s. But others decry it as “psychobabble,” stealing already limited class time and treading on turf traditionally belonging to another of America’s beleaguered institutions, the family. Yet another contingent wonders both about the quality and piecemeal nature of these psychological services.
“As our society changes, as families change in the various ways they have changed over the last 25 years, some of the things one used to assume occurred in the home are not taking place. Schools have been encouraged, forced, told or directed to pick up the vacuum,” said Connie LaFace Olson, career equity services coordinator for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“I’ve seen it much more than in the past, and I think it’s really a positive trend,” said Carol Mares, a teacher adviser whose three children attend public schools in Pasadena. “It’s little by little giving kids tools with which to work out their problems as they go out into the world.”
But many of the therapeutic interventions, while well-intentioned, “have a low probability of efficacy,” said Dennis D. Embry, an Arizona psychologist who works extensively with schoolchildren.
He said families and educators alike may attach excessive weight to these efforts, reasoning that if a child has studied something in school, there’s no further reason to pursue it. “It’s like, ‘Johnny, you’ve had your self-esteem training. Now shut up,’ ” he said.
Carol Kelly, president of the National Assn. of School Psychologists in Silver Spring, Md., said psychologically oriented programs are, for the most part, welcome additions to the conventional school menu of learning.
Kelly said recent research shows that “there are a lot of children coming to school whose lack of social skills gets in the way of learning.”
Howard Weiss, a psychologist who heads the family and school project at the Ackerman Institute in New York City, finds no fault with the premise that as “the business of living” in contemporary society has changed, so have the obstacles confronting schools, parents and students.
The problem is, “the discussion usually stops at that point.” Schools have ventured into territory traditionally occupied by the family with “no central set of beliefs,” Weiss said.
“The schools have had to take it on,” he added. “It’s like a relay race--you’re the schools, and somebody passed you the baton. There’s a sense now that things are going down a rat hole, and we’ve got to plug the hole” with new learning strategies.
The makeshift nature of this approach makes long-range success unlikely, said Susan Swapp, professor of education at Boston’s Wheelock College.
“The problems are so pervasive that patchwork, onetime Band-Aid approaches are not going to do it,” she said. “You can take all the programs in the world on self-esteem or sexual adjustment or whatever it is, and if it is not connected to a larger vision of what the purpose of school is, or what the connection between school and family should be, then it is not effective.”
But vision is a luxury in a time of educational trench warfare. School administrators never sat down and hatched a battle plan for students’ psychological well-being, said Olson, of the L.A. Unified School District. Instead, she said, a ticking grenade of dysfunction and discontent was tossed on their doorstep.
“If the question is, ‘Why are schools doing this?’ the answer is, ‘Because society is demanding it,’ ” Olson said.
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Students today enter school with emotional and psychological equipment that is vastly altered from what their parents brought to the classroom, said Lee Huff, a psychologist at Fountain Valley High School.
“Because of the dissolution of the family unit, the structure isn’t there to provide students with any kind of frame of reference,” he said. Courses with such titles as “Mediation Training” and “Conflict Resolution” may generate guffaws among academic purists, Huff conceded, but without adult role models or training, “kids resort to their peers”--meaning, they duke it out.
Take a look around, Huff suggested. “The extended family seems to have vanished from the scene. I can’t tell you the number of students I talk to, they don’t have a grandma, a grandpa, an aunt or an uncle to rely on for sage advice.”
But in Albuquerque, N.M., Paquita Hernandez replied--in effect-- get real .
“People aren’t looking at the roots of these problems,” she said. “We’re not looking at causes.”
Introducing school-based programs on self-esteem or aggression is “a way of pacifying our anxiety,” she added. “We’re looking at little ways of entertaining ourselves.”
Instead, Hernandez points to Celebrate Youth, the independently funded after-school program she introduced to secondary-school students in Albuquerque seven years ago. It pairs students with adult mentors who work with them for a minimum of one year in fields of mutual interest.
“You don’t give people self-esteem through a workshop,” Hernandez said. “Self-esteem evolves because you feel competent.”
Along with so many other phrases in the current lexicon of public education, competence has become a buzzword. The University of Washington’s Greenberg, who has worked with public schools to enhance “thinking skills” and other social problems since 1981, argues, in fact, that the entire objective of psychologically adjusted curricula is to make students “more socially competent.”
He helped launch a program called Fast Track, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, which is aimed at identifying primary school students with emotional problems. He bristles if Fast Track or its cousins are described as non-academic.
“I don’t talk about it as something outside academic work,” Greenberg said. “We think of it as making children more successful in their academic work.”
He added that whereas “10 to 15 years ago, these were seen as problems only for kids who were ‘at risk,’ now they are seen as more generalized” in the school population. Similarly, Greenberg said, the value of social skills training is now more widely recognized in the culture at large.
But Susan Neufeldt, director of graduate programs in the school of psychology at UC Santa Barbara, worries that while “more behavioral things have been put into schools, there are fewer psychologists in the schools.”
Neufeldt’s concerns come from her roles as a clinical psychologist and as the mother of a 13-year-old girl. “We look for quick, inexpensive ways of solving problems that have little effect,” she said, adding that too often, teachers conducting socialization or behavioral segments of the school day have had only minimal training in the subjects.
“They don’t know much about it,” said Neufeldt, an ex-high school teacher.
She cited, for example, a self-esteem seminar she attended at her daughter’s public school. “I went to some of these meetings as a parent, and they were just laughable. They don’t provide the training or the experts that are needed--and you’re just not going to solve problems of this magnitude with quick hits.”
Neufeldt judged the vogue toward psychologization in education harshly, saying it detracts from traditional curricula.
But L.A. Unified’s Olson said that “to suggest that these kinds of trainings are at the expense of academics is probably too broad.”
Rather, Olson said, “what I see happening is that some of these issues are covered in the course of a particular subject area.” As examples, she pointed to gender role training that can begin as early as kindergarten, “making sure that it’s not always the boys who carry the books to the storeroom”--and making sure that boys and girls know they are equally qualified to perform this task.
