EDSS 531

Journal #2

Quote from the Text/Video	What it Means	Deeper Thinking
The reality is that diagnoses aren’t especially useful for understanding kids with behavioral challenges or for helping adults know what to do next. -From “Kids do Well if They Can	A diagnosis is basically a label.  The author here is saying that labeling the behavior does not by itself solve the problem.	I remember hearing about a psych study on the attitude of therapists towards their patients pre- and post-diagnosis.  The gist of it was that after a patient had been diagnosed, the therapist became less curious, less interested and treated the patient as a disease more than as a person.  The upshot seemed to be that therapy was more effective without a diagnosis.  My own thinking is that we have a left-brained tendency to want to be able to look up in a book the solution to our problems and apply it, secure in the knowledge that if we just get the diagnosis right, all will be well.  That approach works well for washing machines and cars, but not so well for people.  I think experience has shown, often tragically, that we frequently make the wrong diagnosis, and that once diagnosis is made, we carry on blithely with the prescribed treatment oblivious to its effects.
…kids who haven’t responded to natural consequences don’t need more consequences, they need adults who are knowledgeable about how challenging kids come to be challenging….. -From “Kids do Well if They Can	Teachers and parents need training in those skills.	Perhaps those people who we consider to be natural born teachers are the ones who are able to empathize with the adolescent experience and support their students’ maturation.  Take black-and-white thinking for example.  As long as a kids brain has not yet developed the ability to see shades of grey, they are stuck in that black and white world.  We can’t shake them out of it.  Perhaps teachers should be recruited from the ranks of psychotherapists.
“This is precisely what happened to the routine mass production jobs, which moved across the oceans in the second half of the twentieth century.  And just as those factory workers had to master a new set of skills….many of todays  knowledge workers will likewise have to command a new set of aptitudes.” -From A Whole New Mind	Adapability and lifelong learning are the essential skills for the current generation.	There has been an incredible increase in the standard of living in Asia over the past twenty years or so.  While the economies of America and Europe are undergoing recession, those of Asia are booming.  As a by-product there has been a small but significant increase in manufacturing in the United States.  During the 1950’s and 1960’s Japan became an economic powerhouse, flooding the developed industrial world with products cheaper than we could make at home.  The result was an increase in the standard of living of Japan and a continuing migration of low-level labor to China, India, Southeast Asia and South America.  Now mid-level labor is also migrating.  Prognostication is always dangerous, but I think the defining economic trend of the 21st century will be the leveling of the global playing field and a more even distribution of valued skill sets.  Throughout history those “right-brained” qualities have found expression in societies characterized by abundance.  But that abundance has usually been at the expense of the poverty of some unseen class, often in another country.
“The whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of University entrance and the consequence is many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not.” -From Do Schools Kill Creativity?	The whole thrust of the current educational system is misdirected.	He goes on to say much more about this topic and elaborate about the industrial revolution, etc., and makes a lovely joke about school being designed to create university professors, but here’s a scarier scenario.  If schools were initially designed to train children to be factory workers, once the factory work became automated goes away, the next most appropriate application for that type of unquestioning, regimented training is the military.  And now that warfare is becoming automated the next most appropriate application is the prison system.