I'm reading this story,
No Heroes for Daniel: Many failed to help a bright child with unusual ways. by Helen O'Neill of the AP.
and I came across this paragraph:
The school blamed Daniel. He was a bright child, staff told investigators. If he applied himself and behaved, things would have been better for him.
I think of myself, and how often I've heard those words. "You have so much potential, you could do so much if you just applied yourself."
What does it mean, this "apply yourself" thing?
I knew what they meant, and at the same time, I had no idea what they meant. In many ways, it's like learning to ride a bike. "Just sit on the bike, hold the handlebars straight, pedal your feet, and you will go." That's really all it takes. No more knowledge is required. All else that is required are things which can't be broken down into instructions. They must simply be experienced. Until they are, nothing else that is said can truly educate or inform.
The book Psycho-Cybernetics suggests that your mind, as a goal-seeking machine, will figure out how to succeed without breaking every task down into the nth degree. But who tells this to children? The phrase, "you could succeed if you just applied yourself," includes a presupposed fact: that the child does not apply himself or herself. This goes straight into the goal-seeking machine's programming, and prevents the child from hitting the goal.
Now, I'm an adult that survived having my machine rigorously learn how to not hit the goal (because I subconsciously knew that I did not "apply myself"). What does "apply yourself" mean? It means, simply, this: "Do." And the not-so-simple version for those of us who start thinking about what that means is this: "Don't think, just do."
Like riding a bike.
Funny thing is that I see a lot of kids riding bikes. Who taught them? How did they learn it? A parent, an older sibling, and grandparent. But do these same people teach those kids that are thinking too much to "apply themselves?"
Education is a funny thing. As a child who thinks too much, you start thinking that school is about learning things: facts, procedures, classifications, methods, theories... and partly that's true. But school is also very much about one thing, which is never taught explicitly: doing. You either do, or you are labeled as a kid who "if he had just applied himself, then things would have been better."
How do you teach a thinking person to not think so much? I will have to give that some thought. (sigh)
