THE SCHOOLING GAME

You are probably aware the title, As a Man Thinketh, is not original. It is actually taken from a Bible verse, Proverbs 23:7. It is also the title of a very well known "little volume" written by James Allen and first published in 1902. As a friend of mine said to me recently, "When a book has been in print for over a hundred years -- it might be worth reading. It is.

This article is not however about James Allen's book. This article is about what is determinative in man's thinking. What causes man to think the way he does? Obviously there is the old nature vs. nurture argument. Are humans shaped more by their genetics or their developmental environment? Without much effort you can think of people you know who have risen far above their apparent beginnings; who have left the models of their upbringing far behind. But those examples seem to be rare. It is more often that we lament the plight of children reared in terrible conditions because we believe that their future is determined to a great extent by those conditions. It is commonly accepted that children who go astray in a variety of ways do so as a result of conditions in their lives over which they have no control. This is accepted because it is generally true. The marvelous exceptions are fairly rare.

When we become adults we don't necessarily leave childish thinking behind. Unfortunately we are stuck with a sound track running on a continuous loop in our head. You have all heard it playing. It tells you what you are good at and what you are not. It tells you whether you are ugly or pretty. It tells you whether you are well coordinated or clumsy. It tells you whether you are gregarious or shy. It may be a completely false message -- but it is your truth. The only way you can make decisions in defiance of the sound track is through monumental effort on your part to prove the track wrong. It can be done, but it is not easy.

What is recorded on this track comes from two primary sources. The first and most important source is our parents. Parents can make positive recordings or extremely negative ones. I witnessed a recording in progress once in Kotzebue, Alaska. I was walking down an icy street on a cold blustery day when I met a woman and her son who was about four years old. She was carrying a bag of groceries as was the child. Suddenly the child slipped on the ice and dropped the bag. Grocery items went sliding across the ice. The woman started yelling at the child immediately, and I will attempt to quote her, as distasteful as it is. She said, "Pick it up, you stupid little son of a bitch. You stupid bastard. You clumsy little bastard. Pick it up now!" How would you like to have that playing in your head when you are thirty?

This is an extreme example but unfortunately not that unusual. Parents however can do almost as much damage with much more benign statements like: "John is not as good in math as Susan." or "I don't think Jack will ever be a baseball player."

The second source of recordings is school. Schools constantly evaluate children's work and this evaluation is frequently interpreted as evaluation of the child-not the work. Schools also constantly engage in the practice of comparing and ranking children. Unless teachers are acutely aware, and many don't seem to be, children will personalize these evaluations and rankings and add them to their collection of recordings. I am sixty years old and I still have some of them playing in my head. Some are good and some I wish I could turn off. All of them have had an effect on my life.

Parents must be aware of the importance of these recordings on the minds of their children and guard against the negative ones. They must also become intimately familiar with what goes on in their child's school so they can prevent negative messages being recorded there as well.