2012-02-02

Why is the decline in social mood necessary? An example from education

Education will be a defining battlground as social mood declines. Due to the need for spending cuts, the education establishment will be forced to make changes in the way it operates, either by accepting reform or being replaced by a new leadership that takes over.

In one of his books, Prechter gives an example of how the traders behave in the pits, why they act in a manner that creates Elliot Waves. Socionomics is the same, there's a story behind the waves that provides detail and color to the unfolding wave. Declining social mood is sometimes presented negatively, but it is necessary, the same way a forest fire cleans out underbrush in a forest. When social mood is rising and reaches its zenith, people are united and follow their leaders. They don't question authority, they accept the advice of experts and this leads to rot. At first the leaders may be honest and driven by the desire to create good outcome, but later they become corrupt and concerned with advancing their own agenda, having drank their own Kool-Aid. When social mood declines, there is in some sense an unfocused mood that aims to destroy or tear down. The question is whether the inevitable decline in mood is constructive or destructive in its destruction. Does it destroy the current regime and replace it with something better, or does it simply destroy? Case in point in America, education.

The elites in America do not allow their children to watch television or restrict their children's viewing habits. They force their children to read books, learn to play instruments and play games that require concentration. They may send their child to an elite public school, otherwise they probably send their child to a private school. Less wealthy parents who want to give their children a similar upbringing spend money on tutors and extracurricular lessons, or they homeschool. At public schools, there has been a push to use computers and digital media, and when children don't concentrate, they are given drugs, the type used by recreational drug users.

How America made its children crazy
One really wants to light a torch and march on Frankenstein's castle, also known as the psychology profession. Until the passage of the 2005 Individuals with Disabilities Act, schools had the power to force children to take ADD drug, namely amphetamines, or bar them from classrooms, even when parents objected to the medication. I don't know how many children were harmed by the sorcerer's apprentices in school psychology offices, but the new research might provide grounds for some exemplary lawsuits. It turns out that the mainstream was dominated by cultists and loonies. The religious day schools, the home-schoolers, alternative schools like the Waldorf movement turn out to have been islands of sanity in a sea of delusion.
Consider the peak of social mood and the above paragraph. I don't think the author is using hyperbole here: America has been forcing young children to take narcotics because the educational system failed and the medical community offered an explanation that blamed the children. Many American parents objected to their children being "medicated," but unless they had the means to pull them out of public school, they could not stop the government from forcing their children to take drugs. Parents have a duty to take their children out of harmful situations and what the public schools were are are doing is child abuse, but most people accept what the government does and do not make choices that adversely affect their economic situation. As social mood declines, however, the "kooks" and "lunatics" who opposed the system are now seen as being correct. The psychology profession itself is attacking long-held ideas about child development. Now, evidence is piling up that computers in the classroom are a bad idea:
Learning how to learn is the point of education. We will forget the great majority of specific things we were taught: Euclidean proofs, the polynomial theorem, Roman emperors, French grammar, atomic weights, the poems of Browning, and whatever else was stuffed in our heads as schoolchildren. What we learned, if we learned anything, is to memorize, analyze and explain. If we know geometry, algebra or French today, it is not because we retained our knowledge but because we re-learned the subject. School, in short, taught us to concentrate. The most successful people are not the cleverest in terms of sheer processing power, but those who multiply cleverness with persistence.

The psychology profession, by contrast, thinks that the brain is a machine, and the best way to engage it is to use another machine, namely a computer. Computers, to be sure, do not kill brains; people kill brains with computers. Computers in the hands of people who believe that gratification is the highest human goal, and the quicker the gratification, the better, have devastated our mental landscape. Our children do not read; they only surf. They do not write; they only text. They do not plan and strategize in games; they react to visual and aural stimuli while inflicting simulated mayhem. They do not follow a plot: they cut among disjoined images in the style of rap videos. And when they fail to concentrate, we give them Adderall and Ritalin.

It is mouth-foaming, howling-at-the-moon madness, and it is our mainstream culture. The wired classroom hasn't worked, so the educational establishment recommends more of the same quack cure. The New York Times reported last September that computerized education has produced no measurable results, except for some negative ones (test scores fell after massive investment in computers). Yet the education gurus remain undeterred. ''The data is pretty weak. It's very difficult when we're pressed to come up with convincing data, ''Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told the Times. Reporter Matt Richtel wrote: ''And yet, in virtually the same breath, he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: ‘It's one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.'''
If social mood were still rising, we could expect no changes in the educational system. Instead, the decline in social mood is the moment when outsiders can challenge and tear down the existing system. In this case, they have plenty of evidence that this is the right course of action:
The American elite, to be sure, does not subject its own offspring to this kind of digital treatment. New York City's most exclusive private schools, the ones with an acceptance rate lower than Ivy League colleges, do things the old fashioned way. Brearley School, sometimes considered the best of the private schools for girls, requires every student to learn an instrument and play in the orchestra (the only other New York school with this requirement is the Rudolf Steiner School). The Dalton School teaches chess to every student. Acoustic instruments, classical music, and ancient games with wooden pieces teach concentration span.

In Silicon Valley, Times reporter Matt Richtel observed in an October 22 feature, many of the Silicon Valley types who make weapons of mass dementia send their own kids to a school that bans computers until the 9th grade.
Spengler goes on to note that China does not have an epidemic of ADD:
It appears that Chinese children, who must memorize several thousand characters in order to complete elementary education, do not suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. Two-thirds of Chinese children graduate secondary school, which involves a grueling exercise in memorization. As I reported earlier in this space, 50 million Chinese children are studying Western classical music (see China’s six-to-one advantage over the US, Asia Times Online, Dec 2, 2008). That's the same number of children aged 5 to 17 in America. Nothing builds attention span better than playing classical music. Granted that much of China's educational system teaches rote memorization, and that the majority of Chinese may not receive top-quality schooling, it is still the case that the absolute number of Chinese kids mastering high-level skills is a multiple of the American number.
Declining social mood is nature's way of shaking up the system; it is an opportunity for change. What people do with the changed mood is another matter. They could turn anti-intellectual and close schools, as happens in some countries. Or they can tear up the education establishment and replace it with new standards and ideas. The elite could find a minority group to target and attack them instead, blaming them for the failures of education. Or, perhaps the current system is the best one, but has some failings. Maybe it survives the challenge through reform and becomes a more robust system. Ultimately, this depends on the groundwork laid out in the years before. Today, the likely opposition is from school choice advocates and homeschooling.

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