Mind Control. You Can Have More Self Control than You Think

 

Who’s in charge in deciding what your brain thinks about? Many factors are involved, but you have more control than you might think.

Everyone has some degree of self-control that affects their beliefs, desires, thoughts, goals, plans, and feelings. Humans are unique in their capacity for self-control, which is generally assumed to arise from the relatively large frontal cortex in the brain. The neocortex even has a series of linked circuits that constitute an executive control system. Lack of self-control underlies many social and mental health problems. Failing at self-regulation can lead to obesity, addiction, poverty, sexual promiscuity, and other ill-advised behaviors. On the other hand, people with superior self-control are more likely to be "healthy, wealthy, and wise."

How do we learn such control? I identify five factors:

1.    Motivation

We are motivated by the brain's positive reinforcement mechanisms and our mental ability to adjust the set point for the level of reinforcement that satisfies us. Like a heater thermostat, if the setting is low, it doesn't take much heat to meet the demand. If the setting is high, we need more heat and for longer periods. How does one adjust the personal hedonistic set point?

One way to increase self-control is to have many alternative positive reinforcers that allow one to substitute "good" reinforcers for bad ones. Another way is to structure goals consciously so that achievement requires "good" reinforcers. You can seek the company of fellow beings who wish to share those same values and guidelines. Incentives matter.

2.    Mental Fatigue

Resisting temptation can be hard work. In secular life, we get refreshment from taking a vacation. Taking a vacation from resisting temptation is hardly the righteous choice. What then, do we do to refresh the self-control required for resisting temptation?

Capacity for self-control is apparently a "limited resource" that can be depleted. Replenishment takes time in which there are fewer demands. Maybe this is one advantage of vacations or retreats. Escape from tempting situations is akin to taking a vacation.

Our own negative thoughts wear us out. Distressing thoughts make it all too easy to obsess to the point of emotional exhaustion. Think of all the times you have lost sleep over something that troubles you. When awake, such obsession diminishes our productivity.  How do we inhibit such obsessive thought? Mental discipline is required. There are ways to train the brain to be more disciplined at screening out intrusive thoughts. One method, strangely enough, involves working-memory training tasks; these train the brain to focus and screen out distracting thought.[1]  Habitual intense prayer or meditation may do the same thing.

3.    Age

Young people usually have less self-control that adults. Educators assert that self-control in preschool-aged children is more associated with school success than is IQ.[2] Brain dysfunctions that alter self-control will increase impulsivity and often lead to anti-social and even violent behavior. Brain scans show that impulsive people have an abnormally small hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.[3] We don’t know if they were born that way or got that way by a lifetime of indulging their impulses.

Executive control capability may decline in the elderly, who may become less able to take care of their needs and control their life. A study of seniors (average age of 75) revealed a tendency for elderly to withdraw from social interactions, along with an associated tendency to become depressed.[4] Stress, which may well have a cumulative effect over the years, is compounded by the current stresses of old age. The adrenal-pituitary stress axis may be more active, resulting in a high blood pressure from adrenalin release and shriveling of neural synapses from excessive cortisol release.

Biochemical markers of inflammation increase with age. The cumulative stresses of a lifetime can cause increased anxiety, confusion, further stress, and depression. Thus, a vicious cycle of mental deterioration may ensue. In such a state, executive control fails, and the person may become helpless and dependent.

4.    Religion

"Mind over matter" is a central theme in most religions. The idea is that proper spiritual belief gives you the strength to cope with the vicissitudes of life. Paradoxically, the most religious people, like monks, may not use their strength of faith to cope with life but actually escape worldly stress by living in monasteries or nunneries.

Literature surveys reveal a strong relationship between religiosity and self-control. Self-control in religious people is manifest in that they tend to suffer less from depression, avoid trouble with sex or drugs, do better in school, and even visit the dentist more regularly. It is not clear whether religious experiences promote self-discipline or whether a self-disciplined person is more likely to respond to the self-control requirements of religion. It could be both. Whatever the case, to be mentally and spiritually healthy, we must learn to discipline our thinking, just as we discipline our body to improve our golf game or other physical skills.

An interesting survey of 213 people measured both the degree of self-control and religiosity.[5] People who believed in traditional religions were more likely to have motivational drive and strategic planning for their actions. Perhaps not surprisingly, people who had more superstitious beliefs were less likely to control impulsive behavior.

Prayer seems to be an active way to promote replenishment. A demonstration of this point comes from an experiment where subjects engaged in personal prayer or an equivalent time in free mind-wandering thought. A subsequent self-control test revealed superior scores for those in the prayer group.[6]

Adolescents seem to have less self-control than mature adults. One study involved 1,785 young adults of different religions (Muslims, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox- and Bible-belt Christians) in different countries.[7] Young people with intrinsic religiosity (living one's faith)  were less likely to exhibit deviant behaviors, such as theft, substance use, cheating, etc. than those driven by extrinsic religiosity (using one's faith for personal advancement). The religious beneficial effect was greatest in those who had low natural levels of self-control.

Most religions make a positive social impact by teaching and requiring self-control. Just thinking about God can improve our will power. One experiment demonstrated this in a trivial way by priming subjects with a pre-test task of unscrambling sentences that contained religious thoughts. The subsequent task was to drink an unpleasant mixture of orange juice and vinegar, for which they were paid for the amount they drank. Compared to a neutral-primed control group, the religion-primed group drank twice as much of the sour juice. In another part of the experiment, investigators told participants that when the study was over they would receive monetary compensation. If the participants came back the next day, they would receive $5, but if they came back a week later, they would receive $6. Even with the small $1 difference, a greater percentage of the participants in the religious-primed group decided to wait and receive the larger amount of money than those in the neutral-primed group.[8]

Some evidence indicates that people are more motivated toward good behavior if they view God as punishing rather than a God of love. In a study at Brigham Young University, Mormon students were assigned a task to button press when they saw a picture of juice or to inhibit the press when they saw a picture of beer (which their religion forbids). A neural signal over the anterior cingulate cortex that is known to be an error indicator became smaller when subjects were reminded of God's love instead of God's punishment. The interpretation was that focusing on God's love and forgiveness made students less worried about making mistakes in the task.[9]

One of the more obvious and measurable examples of religion effects is how it can reduce pain. A common way that medical service providers assess pain is to ask a patient to rate the intensity of pain on a scale of 0 to 10. In one experiment, 24 patients, half practicing Catholics and the other half avowed atheists, had been screened to have equal baseline pain thresholds. They were then given electrical shocks while staring at different images, some religious and others not. Pain scores dropped when viewing religious images, and non-religious images had no effect. Brain scans showed that when pain was reduced, the activity level was increased in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region that other investigators had shown was instrumental in driving top-down circuitry that inhibits pain.[10] A simple explanation is that the pain-relief is like that afforded when a dentist twists your cheek as he inserts a needle to anesthetize a tooth or a veterinarian slaps a horse's hip as he simultaneous slams a needle to inject a medication. In these cases, the signals that ordinarily cause pain are mixed with other dominant signals that limit the brain's ability to feel pain.

5.    Yoga/Meditation

Yoga is a practice that most clearly illustrates the ability of the mind to control the body. The most obvious effects of yoga meditation are on breathing, which can be dramatically slowed and made more abdominal, and the cardiovascular system, in which heart rate slows and blood pressure drops.[11]  Yoga masters can alter bodily functions in even more profound ways, such as forcing extreme sweating or lying on a bed of nails. Mindfulness meditation, wherein attention is focused on breathing or a mantra, promotes the development of attentional skills and changes neural activity related to self-control.[12

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[1] Bomyea, J., and Amir, N. (2011). The effect of an executive functioning training program on working memory capacity and intrusive thoughts. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 35(6), 529-535. doi:10.1007/s10608-011-9369-8

[2] Blair, C., & Razza, R. (2007). Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Child Dev., 7(8), 2nd ser., 647-663. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01019.x.

[3] Penney, S. (2012). Impulse control and criminal responsibility: Lessons from neuroscience. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 35(2), 99-103. doi:10.1016/j.ijlp.2011.12.004

[4] Boss, L., Branson, S., Cron, S., & Kang, D. (2016). Biobehavioral examination of religious coping, psychosocialfFactors, and executive function in homebound older adults. Religions, 7(5), 42. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel7050042

[5] Wain, O., & Spinella, M. (2007). Executive functions in morality, religion, and paranormal beliefs. International Journal of Neuroscience, 117(1), 135-146. doi:10.1080/00207450500534068

[6] Malte Friese, Michaela Wänke, Personal prayer buffers self-control depletion, In Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 51, 2014, Pages 56-59, ISSN 0022-1031, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.11.006.

[7] Klanjšek, R., Vazsonyi, A. T., & Trejos-Castillo, E. (2012). Religious orientation, low self-control, and deviance: Muslims, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox-, and “Bible belt” Christians. Journal of Adolescence, 35(3), 671-682. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2011.09.003

[8] Rounding, K., Lee, A., Jacobson, J., Ji, L., Religion replenishes self-control. (2012). Psychological Science, 23(6),  635-643.

[9] Good, M., Inzlicht, M., & Larson, M. J. (2014). God will forgive: Reflecting on god's love decreases neurophysiological responses to errors. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:nsu096 [pii]

[10] Wiech, K., Farias, M., Kahane, G., Shackel, N., Tiede, W., & Tracey, I. (2008). An fMRI study measuring analgesia enhanced by religion as a belief system. PAIN, 139(2), 467-476. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2008.07.030

[11] Olex, Stephen, Andrew Newberg, Andrew, and Figueredo, Vincent M., (2013). Meditation: Should a cardiologist care?, International Journal of Cardiology, 168(3),1805-1810,

[12] Moore, A., Gruber, T., Derose, J., & Malinowski, P. (2012). Regular, brief mindfulness meditation practice improves electrophysiological markers of attentional control. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6(18), 1-15.

Learning Lesson 2. Getting Motivated

Do you remember my story in the Introduction to this short course about how motivated changed me from a D student in the 4^th grade to an all-A student in the 7^th grade? We don’t all have a Miss Torti in our lives to motivate us to be effective learners, but we all have something. If you can’t find a source of motivation, make one up. It can change your life.

In my book for parents and teachers, The Learning Skills Cycle, I made it a point to begin the cycle with motivation. If motivated to learn, a student not only acquires the knowledge but, in the process, can become more learning competent as learning skills develop. As a student realizes that such skills have been acquired, confidence about the ability to learn grows, and this in turn stimulates more motivation to learn. This positive feedback cycle does not occur if students do not acquire learning skills.

The basis of the motivation does not have to be particularly inspiring or honorable. My physical attraction to Miss Torti certainly lacked such worthiness. For motivation to give you the drive needed to do all that is necessary to become a good learner, you must feel compelled and passionate about the objective.

Bad educational environments and experiences stamp out the motivation to learn. In my work in consulting with middle-school teachers, I have found that by that grade level many students have been turned off of learning. They had too many bad learning experiences in the earlier grades. This is especially true of the majority of students who have not learned how to excel in school. Week after week, year after year, ordinary performance kills their interest in learning. Such students develop defense mechanisms. “Why do I have to learn this?’ “This book is boring.” “My teacher doesn’t like me.” “I could make As, but I don’t want to.” “School work is for nerds.” So goes a litany of excuses.

These problems have always plagued teachers who try to motivate the under-achievers. In today’s standards-based, high-stakes testing environment, we have the new problem that a teacher is liable to give an answer that is equivalent to “You need to learn this to score well on the state learning achievement tests so that you make your teachers and school look good.” This, you can be assured, does not do much to motivate students.

Source: unsplash.com

Well, learners, I have shocking news for you. Motivation that works in learning has to come from inside of you, not from the outside influence of parents, teachers, school district, or whatever. You are like horses that can be led to water. Outside influences can't make you drink if you are not thirsty.

So, how do you make yourself thirsty for effective and efficient learning? Well, the efficiency goal comes easy. We are all rather lazy about school work, and thus naturally want our learning to occur with minimal effort. The effective goal should also come easy, because what is the point of trying to learn if you aren’t good at it? What is the point of learning if you don’t remember it?

Beyond such basics, I can list several things that will motivate you to learn:

·       The Wonder of Learning. We live in a universe and world full of natural wonder. Every academic subject is wondrous to some people. Why not you? You can see the wonder in every subject (yes, even algebra, if you look for it.).

Babies are fascinated by what they see, hear, and touch. Watch a baby as a mobile dangle overhead. Exploratory activities become conspicuously pronounced if the mobile objects are close enough to be manipulated. Everything a baby encounters is new and astonishing. Why do we allow ourselves to lose that fascination with the world as we get older? For some people, the more they learn, the less wondrous the world seems. Among adults, scientists seem to be an exception (to a biologist, pond scum is beautiful and wondrous).

·       Relevance. The real-world relevance of academic subjects is not always self-evident to someone learning the subject for the first time. Even if the learner understands the relevance, the subject may not be relevant for them at the time they have to learn it. The first step in seeing relevance is to realize that our lack of knowledge about a subject has put us in a small and narrow world that blinds us to the relevance. Once we know there is relevance we do not yet perceive, we have reason to look for it. In other words, we need to try to identify the relevance of what we need to learn for us. Once we realize how we might use new information or how it might make us a better or more competent person, we have reason to learn it. Even if the relevance is limited to the recognition we would get from successful learning, that in itself can be sufficient relevance.

·       Rewards and Punishments. We have all been amazed by performance animals that demonstrate astonishing feats of learning at Sea World, circuses, and similar venues. These animals learn all sorts of tricks they seemingly have no need to learn. Their training process is known as “operant conditioning.” They learn under conditions in which they are punished for failure to learn and rewarded for successful learning. Direct punishment does not work very well as a motivator. As used by trainers, punishment occurs in the failure to receive a reward if the learning objective is not met.

In a typical school environment, grades are the usual basis for reward and punishment. This is frequently not enough. Recall that my low grades in the 4^th grade did not motivate me to get better. What worked finally in the 7^th grade was seeing Miss Torti pay attention to me because I was showing improvement. The more I learned, the more she payed attention to me. The principle here is called “positive reinforcement.” It means that when we receive a reward, even a small one, for generating a certain behavior, we are motivated to repeat the behavior. So, the practical point for students is to construct or find positive reinforcement for themselves for improving their learning skills and resulting learning successes. You may not have a Miss Torti to reward you for your achievements, but you can reward yourself.

·       Ownership and Pride.  I think it was back in the Great Depression that someone coined the expression, “Knowledge is something nobody can take away from you.” You may have things stolen, you may lose your job, you may lose out in a competition, but your knowledge is always yours. And you earned it. You have the powerful sense of ownership. This is the obvious benefit of projects where the student builds something, like robots or a science-fair presentation. Even less obvious products, like cursive writing, are something a student owns in a very personal way, and if it is done well, can take great pride in. Speaking of cursive, in the first 6 weeks of the 7^th grade, I had to take a penmanship course. I apparently have good hand-eye coordination, and I readily learned to write well. I took great pride in showing others my handwriting, because I knew it was really good. That little success may have had more to do with my 7^th grade academic reformation than anything else. To this day, I still get compliments on my handwriting. It was a great feeling in the 7^th grade, and still feels good every time I look at my handwriting.

·       Attitude Adjustment. No one likes failure. No one likes to feel inferior. Everyone relishes achievement. Failure should not be an option. However, we make failure an option by constructing excuses for it. We develop attitudes to explain away our failures and in the process perpetuate the failures. At some point, when it dawns on us that our attitude is counter-productive, we realize the value of adjusting our attitudes to be more positive.

·       Acting “as if.” Behavior changes attitudes, emotions, and motivation.  Conscientious students try to adjust their attitudes and feelings by force of will—this often fails. A better result, especially with students who are not all that conscientious, can sometimes occur with the principle enunciated about 100 years ago by the famous psychologist William James. He noted that how a person acts can change his or her own thinking, attitude, and feelings. This is the "as if" principle, which states that behaving the way one wants to be will help make it so. We know that mind can sometimes change behavior, but the "as if" principle says that behavior can change mind.

·       Learning Self-control. Few things in life are as motivating as when you reach the point where you are in charge, where you discover that your capacity for self-control gives you power. Once you discover that you have the power to be a good learner, you will want to seize the added power that learning gives you in this world.

·       Confidence. Confidence is something you have to earn. As you begin your trek to effective and efficient learning, small successes will happen. They will build on each other and give you reason to be more confident. When I made my first A in a difficult subject, I realized, “Hey, I can do this. I just did. Maybe I am not as stupid as my former Ds suggested.” Belief in your ability to learn can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As confidence slowly grows, you start thinking about what worked in the learning effort, and you know you can do more of that. You start to believe that you can learn how to learn.

Summary

1. Find what is awesome and wonderful in everything you have to learn.

2. Identify why or how what you have to learn is relevant to something in your life.

3. Give yourself little rewards for each successful learning event.

4. Take ownership of what you learn and be proud of yourself for knowing it.

5. If your attitude about school or learning is impeding successful learning, adjust your attitude to be more positive.

6. Act "as if" you are a good learner, and do the things good learners do.

7. Control yourself. Be the "master of your own ship."

8. Gain confidence from successful learning events. Believe in yourself.

Next Lesson: Lesson 3. Paying Attention.

Grit: The Key to School Success

What do you think is the major determinant of whether our children excel in school? IQ? Good teachers? Good schools? Good standards and curricula? No, I say it is the students' motivation, or just plain grit. Other teachers think so too.

Education reporter, Libby Nelson, calls attention to the issue of grit in student learning achievement. Her findings are that teachers and parents sometimes put too much emphasis on intelligence, when the more typical problem in education is that students don't try hard enough and are not sufficiently persistent in trying to achieve excellence. I know from personal experience: I excelled in school because I was an "overachiever."

Indeed, excellence is not even a goal for most students. Many students just want to do the minimum required to pass tests. This limiting attitude is reinforced by teachers who yield to the pressure of "teaching to the test." A few students don't care at all. They just drop out. One student told a teacher friend of mine, "I don't need to learn this stuff. Somebody will always take care of me."

Nelson points to evidence of grit's importance with these examples:

• West Point cadets who scored highest on a scale of grit were more likely to complete the grueling first summer of training.
• National spelling bee contestants with more grit ranked higher than other contestants of the same age who had less grit.
• College admissions officers know how important grit is (more important than SAT tests) but they don't know how to measure it other than grades, which of course may be inflated and inaccurate indicators of grit. 

Clearly motivation is essential. I regard motivation as the cornerstone of what I call the "learning skills cycle," which led me to publish a book with that title with Rowman and Littlefield.  Learning begins with being motivated to learn, and successful completion of every step in the cycle strengthens motivation. However, every step in this cycle (organization, attentiveness, understanding/synthesis, memory, and problem solving/creativity) requires a degree of grit—the more, the better.

As applied to specific learning tasks, grit is central to all the ideas in the learning skills cycle. In the case of memory, for example, the well-known strategy of deliberate practice requires disciplined grit. Students diligently need to use established memory principles in a systematic way. This includes constructing a systematic learning strategy that includes organizing the learning materials in an effective way, intense study focus in short periods, elimination of interferences, use of mnemonic devices, and frequent rehearsals repeated in spaced intervals. Learning success depends on mental discipline and persistence.

Students differ enormously in their level of grit. It would be nice if we knew how to teach grit. Surely, parental influence is central. Parents lacking in grit are unlikely to model or teach it to their children. Some schools, especially private schools, teach grit by having high expectations and programs that help students discover the positive benefits that come from having more grit. One of those benefits is confidence, because grit promotes achievement and achievement develops confidence.

Confidence in the ability to learn is necessary for a student to try hard to learn. Here is the area where teaching skills count most: showing students they can learn difficult material and thereby building the confidence to take on greater learning challenges.

Students who have passionate goals are much more likely to invest effort and persistence in doing what is needed to achieve those goals. It is unrealistic to expect grade-school children to have well-formulated career goals. But certainly by early high-school, students should be forming specific lifetime goals. What a career goal is probably does matter as much as having one in the first place. Achieving a goal, regardless of whether it is later abandoned or not, teaches a youngster that grit is necessary for the achievement. The student learns that grit pays off.

Grit may not always lead to excellence in students with innate limited abilities. But grit allows such students to "become all they can be," as the Army recruitment slogan claims. Moreover, the benefits of grit perpetuate beyond success at any one learning challenge. Learning anything requires physical and chemical changes in the brain needed to store the positive attitudes that come from learning success and the learning content itself. In other words, the more you know, the more you can know.

Source: http://www.vox.com/2014/10/9/6835197/grit-kipp-noncognitive-skills-duckworth-teaching

"Memory Medic's newest book has just been released: Triune Brain, Triune Mind, Triune Worldview, available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. See descriptions and reviews of all his books at http://thankyoubrain.com.

What Happened to The Wonder of Learning?

I read a lot about educational theory and research so that I can share "best practices" for better ways to teach and learn with my readers. Shared here are the ideas in a most informed and intelligent article on learning, written by Catherine L'Ecuyer, a Canadian lawyer with an MBA now living in Barcelona, Spain.[1] The article explains the fundamental importance for motivating children to learn: the sense of wonder.

This notion resonated with me, because I know it to be true from personal experience. To this

day, I have vivid memories of the excitement I had as a six-year old in Fort Myers, Florida, as I walked to my first day of school. Yes, in those days it was safe for kids to walk several blocks to school unattended. And yes, there was, at least for me, no kindergarten, pre-kindergarten, or day care.

Sauntering to school, I became entranced with all the new sights and sounds, stopping several times along the way to savor a new experience. A vivid memory was my stop at a beautiful flower I had never seen before. I physically probed the bloom, astonished at the elegant expression of nature. On that day, the prospect of school was a most joyous opportunity. It did not take long for school's pedantic nature, drills, and drudgery to squelch my sense of wonder. It was only in late middle school that my sense of wonder was resurrected, and that only occurred because I had a crush on my teacher and wanted to impress her with my learning. For many children, their inherent sense of wonder that school stamps out never returns.

Clearly, a child's state of mind affects how learning and the school environment are regarded. Among the more relevant states is stimulus seeking. That is why for example I wanted to explore the innards of that beautiful flower. Then too, there is the basic human responsiveness to positive reinforcement. If a learning experience is perceived as wondrous, it is perceived as good and beneficial, serving as incentive to have other such learning experiences. It obviously helps for a child to be aware of such perceptions.

L'Ecuyer adds the sense of wonder to the list of fundamentals of the motivation to learn. She makes the point that wonder is innate in children, especially when they are young. As a child matures, much of this sense of wonder can fade. For some people, the more they learn, the less wondrous the world seems. Among adults, scientists seem to be an exception (to a biologist, pond scum is beautiful and wondrous).

L'Ecuyer argues that modern educational paradigms are behaviorist and conflict with nurturing the sense of wonder in children. By behaviorist, she means that the guiding principle of teaching is that the environment directs learning with its emphasis on teachers, curriculum, and high-stakes testing. The popular mantra is that learning is better when it is provided earlier and in abundance. Curricula are designed to bombard students with information and testing. Do we really think that is motivating?

The problem is that children can be overwhelmed by too much too soon. Yet government policy increasingly advocates pre-kindergarten. Young developing brains do not respond well to too much stimulus, too much curriculum, and too much high-stakes testing. Children become preconditioned to expect high levels of stimulation, leading to attentiveness disorders. Children become passive and bored. The associated loss of the sense of wonder diminishes a child's motivation to cope with all this stimulus and pressure.

L'Ecuyer cites convincing research showing that compared to adults children learn at a slower pace than adults. They need more calm and silence. They are more intrigued by mystery. They need to trust in a human attachment figure, most commonly a caring mother.  Unfortunately, our educational culture assumes that we don't teach enough curriculum and don't demand enough of children. Children learn to pass tests, not love learning. Our multi-tasking culture only adds to sensory and cognitive overload that interferes with learning and mental performance in general. The family breakdown in our culture diminishes a child's trust in primary caregivers and degrades attachment to them. Schools cannot provide such trust and attachment. Nor can pre-kindergarten or day-care.

These are basic reasons why I push for a reform in education that stresses teaching learning skills to young children, as opposed to the domination of traditional curriculum and excessive high-stakes testing. I am writing such a book now. When children have good learning skills, learning stops being an onerous chore. The "Learning Skills Cycle" that I advocate begins with motivation, and motivation begins with a sense of wonder.[2]

Educational policy makers seem confused about why so many students fall behind. Every year, over 1.2 million students drop out of high school in the United States. That’s a student every 26 seconds – or 7,000 a day. About 25% of high school freshmen fail to graduate from high school on time.[3] At the college level, only 59% of full-time four-year college students graduate within six years.[4] Most college data use a six-year limit because so many college students can't finish in the usual four years.

Over the last 40 years, all the educational fads we have tried apparently do not work. In this time we have had such high-profile government initiatives as "Goals 2000, New Math, Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards, Charter Schools, and Head Start." Where is the evidence that any of this works? SAT scores have not improved, even declining in some years, while funding for educational has increased dramatically, on the order depending on the state of 200%.[5]

Despite much ballyhoo and funding, Head Start's effects wash out within a few years. Nonetheless, many states think Head Start did not start early enough and that what is needed is government funded pre-kindergarten. Nobody considers what this too-soon, too-much, too stressful education does to childhood sense of wonder and motivation to learn.

The key question asked by L'Ecuyer is this: Are today's educational paradigms and policies promoting the sense of wonder and motivation to learn or squelching it? While all our government programs to improve education seem valuable, the results say otherwise. Teaching is now driven by high-stakes testing. While accountability is necessary, when high-stakes testing becomes the focus of education, it poisons the learning atmosphere. The law of unintended consequences applies. Today's educational environment suffocates the wonder and love of learning for its own sake.

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Dr. Klemm is author of two books on learning: Memory Power 101 and Better Grades, Less Effort. Reviews and information can be found at his web site, WRKlemm.com

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[1] L'Ecuyer, Catherine. 2014. The wonder approach to learning. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Volume 8, October 6. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00764.

[2] Klemm, W. R. 2014. Shift Away from Teaching to the Test: A Better Way to Improve Test Scores. The STATellite, 59 (1): 10-13. http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.statweb.org/resource/collection/ED7F18DF-2934-4034-BDF2-CF81CADE155A/WinterSTATellite2014.pdf

[3] https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-high-school-dropout-rates

[4] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

[5]http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/state-education-trends