The True Self, pt. 1

Last night's entry got lost in cyberspace, and I really liked it, too.  Won't be able to recreate it, that moment is lost, there has been new movement, new forms bubbling up into awareness.

I began yesterday's lost entry with the invitation to anyone reading this who might like to engage me in conversation over anything I've written, to get some feedback, I'm at lawteach@aol.com.  I've tried to get conversation over metacognition going at my HS, but no takers, really.  I suppose it is too novel an encounter for most to want to give up time to it, yet when we begin to touch on really key questions, people always say how much they'd really love to have the time to get into the topic.

I've been fascinated by Nathaniel Branden's discussions about the True Self, and self-esteem, and how that has been circumvented by today's society.  Neither self-resonsibility nor self-esteem can be given; it must come from the individual, says Branden; yet the individual is embedded in a LL, and that LL can sabotage the accrual of the elements of both. 

One of my top students told me once he graduated that he felt like a fool that he had never cheated.  The culture made honesty look purile, soft, and lacking in initiative and drive.  Don Beck gave us a scale, which I can't at the moment locate, about the layers we go thru when effectuating true change: it starts with just mouthing the words (like AA's "as if" suggestion), and it ends with deep memetic/values change. So if the deep value is "strive-drive", dog-eat-dog, hypercompetitiveness, then my moral student was deviant and felt that way!  Branden certainly acknowledges this.

Branden then continues:
---Young people are most likely to learn self-responsibility from adults who personally exemplify it in their behavior.

---Young people are most likely to learn self-responsibility if their parents and teachers require it.

I believe that the overwhelming number of teachers exemplify and demand self-resonsibility; it is the second concept that seems lacking, and one that is difficult for the school to deal with, unless, like our local elementary school, it acknowledges that the HS is embedded within the community holon, and cannot direct self-resonsibility when this is not a true value of the parents.  An important observation that I have struggled with is the either/or, adversarila nature of the vast number of parent/teacher meetings.  I myself gird for such encounters, figuring that the good vs. bad divisions are already determined, and that i will be pushed into that mold.  I try to rearrange the environment, but if targeting begins, it is difficult to reverse.  I will need to learn some new methods, since I've experimented with many over the years.  thank goodness, I am rarely involved in this type of encounter, since I refuse to consider myself in an adversarial relationship with my students.

"Children are unlikely to learn self-responsibility from adults who are passive, self-pitying, prone to blaming and alibis, and who invariably explain their life circumstances on the basis of someone else's actions or on "the system." Such adults do not teach self-responsibility, and if they do pay lip service to it, they are probably not convincing." 

So how does the community change this social ethos that abounds, the victimhood celebrated in media and literature?  what will happen as the schools change from Orange into Green?  from diplomat and beyond?  I have often held that Orange parents push Green morality onto the teachers, making us feel as tho our powerful positions make it  impossible for us to ethically even consider reprimands against students.  And the UL reactions of students are also held against us, since if we make the student "feel bad", we are again seen as the victimizers and the powerful oppressors.

"In nature, if we behave irresponsibly we suffer the consequences not because nature is "punishing" us but because of simple cause and effect. "

This is my cry now, and I tell the story of erica's life-lesson as I was instructed to teach her when she was a 10th grader at Dwight-Englewood.  She had gotten her history final date confused, and slept thru it on Tuesday, thinking it was on WEDNESDAY.  When the school called to ask why she missed it, we both panicked, and I asked that she be permitted to take it that afternoon; I was denied.  Her teacher, the department chairman, the principal and the headmaster stuck firmly to their refusal.  The headmaster then taught me a very important lesson, that if I failed to rescue her this one time, causing her to get an F on the final and a C for the course, she would never miss another appointment in her life.

She's 27, and she has never missed another appointment in her life!

OK, now how do we effectuate that change in insight for parents and administrators, against the competitive ethos of today?  I've become obsessed with "Intervention", the series that has gotten hotter on cable.  I see the changes--or NOT--that can result from lack of rescuing and lack of co-dependency.  Now who is going to hold interventions for children who aare lacking in self-responsibility because they have no real sense of their real SELF??
 

"This brings us to the subject of culture, political philosophy, and social policy."