HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?

One of the perennial tourist attractions, a component of every stage show put on for visitors to my island in the sun; are performers doing the limbo.

Perhaps because it is so simple and so popular; a bar is placed to span the space between two supports, very much like the apparatus for the high jump; but, instead of testing how high you can jump this is a test of how low you can go.

Sometimes, the bar is set on fire; and, somehow, incredibly performers approach the burning bar and pass under it when it is no more than six inches or less from the floor.

As I write, I am conducting such a test for every American I can communicate with; I am setting out to discover, how low can they go?

Not to worry, very like the last time I conducted this test; years ago in the period after 1996, only I will know the result of this test.

The test is to find out how many individuals can admit to the importance, the critical importance of motivation in human learning?

In their watershed work, “Personality and Psychotherapy,” Professors John Dollard and Neale E. Miller suggest that:

Human behavior is learned; precisely that behavior which is widely felt to characterize man as a rational being, or as a member of a particular nation or social class, is learned rather than innate.

The field of human learning covers phenomena which range all the way from the simple, almost reflex, learning of a child to avoid a hot radiator, to the complex processes of insight by which a scientist constructs a theory. Throughout the whole range, however, the same fundamental factors seem to be exceedingly important. These factors are: drive, cue, response and reinforcement. They are frequently referred to with other roughly equivalent words -- drive as motivation, cue as stimulus, response as act or thought, and reinforcement as reward. (Dollard 25)

For a long time, a very long time, I have been trying to communicate to Americans that human beings were driven up the steep incline towards civilization and that every social problem; those that now seem impossible to solve, that have assumed such monstrous, monolithic proportions have done so because the adoption and implementation of democratic ideals and principles have caused the people of this nation to reduce, in law and custom, the degree and extent to which coercion, in any form, overt or covert, can be applied to citizens - without creating an alternative means of motivating attitudes and patterns of behavior necessary for societal order, functioning and progress.

Education is a case in point; and, forms the acid test of the moral character of individuals who claim to be patriotic Americans.

I have circulated, or, will circulate by electronic mail an essay on freedom entitled “The Enemy Within;” to every major media house, print or electronic, to every Presidential candidate, to every member of both Houses of Congress; that contains the following analysis of the fundamental problem in education:

This is implicit in the situation I encountered when I went back to school to attempt to get an accounting degree at the Central Campus of the Broward Community College.

In a marketing course I witnessed an instructor, Professor Sheets, provide the answers to a multiple choice quiz, on the eve of an examination; and, students still failed to get high marks, immediately I realized that something was very wrong.

When I participated in a required course in Public Speaking and confronted the reality that half of the other participants in the class could not read; I began to discern the true dimensions of the problem in education; that students at lower levels of the system were not learning the basics, to read and do simple sums; but, were being passed upward through the system by means close akin to cheating like the ploy initiated and orchestrated by Professor Sheets.

I got the last piece of puzzle when an African American teacher, with twenty years experience in teaching in Public Schools, confided in me that the problem had its genesis in that period when the schools were first integrated; white parents who could not bear the thought of black teachers having the authority to apply physical sanctions to their children, demonstrated to have corporal punishment removed from schools, and, the descent, the three decade slide into disorder and chaos, began to be experienced.

This is the simple test; will any of the aforementioned individuals who read this be galvanized to confirm or deny the significance, the impact of motivation, or the lack thereof, on the secular decline in education?

Can any American, regardless of ethnic background, become aware and admit to the fact that this could have occurred?

I suggest that this is the fundamental underlying cause of the failure, the contemporary abject failure, of social institutions in most of the nations that are engaged in the experiment in democracy.

That coercion worked so well for so many millennia that the application of any other means became superfluous and redundant; and, atrophied.
That the application of coercion was so agonizing and odious; both for those who applied it, and, those victimized by it - that this was consigned to subconscious and became a blind area in the human psyche.

But to redeem the education process, to restore function in democratic societies that now exist in the limbo precipitated by low levels of motivation; this situation must be confronted, this demon must be exorcised.

It is embarrassing, totally embarrassing for any American, white, black, or whatever, to admit that racism is the petard on which this nation’s function is being hoist; but for the common good this must occur.

It is as embarrassing for me to admit that in designing this ploy; I find that the original version of the essay was rife with grammatical mistakes that had the effect of making the concepts obscure, creating confusion and obfuscating when clarity was so critically important.

Yet I soldier on because I must, because we all must to preserve this nation; that is built on ideals and principles which must survive - if civility and rationality is to survive.

I failed on the last occasion that I attempted to communicate this message; so again I have the very burdensome task of canvassing Americans as to how low can they go? As to what is more important; to collectively avoid exposure, censure and embarrassment, or, the capacity to socialize the young of this nation?

I ask you to remember those halcyon days when you went to school; when you confronted as I did, a teacher like my early mentor, Ms. Brown, who wielded a ruler as the symbol of her absolute power and authority.

With that ruler she created the order and discipline necessary for the imparting of knowledge; any student who was noisy or disruptive of her class, was constrained, while bearing the concentrated attention of the entire group, to present their open palms to be struck by that instrument of torture; and, to bear the pain and humiliation - which was exponentially increased, if, heaven forbid, the wrongdoer was reduced to tears or to vocal expressions of suffering.

If you did not share that experience, you have suffered for it all of your life; because you avoided it you have failed to be socialized; not only have you failed to learn certain basic skills that open up the vast universe of knowledge; but, you have probably failed to learn manners and civility, respect for constituted authority, respect for other human beings and for the property rights of other human beings; components of social learning the absence of which will make you prone to engaging in criminal, antisocial behavior; and, result in your being quarantined and isolated for the common good from extensive and meaningful contact with other human beings.

The basic principle that guides my existence is that I will not coerce another human being, or, be coerced by another human being; yet, what I am promoting here is that corporal punishment be reintroduced in Public Schools, for the common good.

This may, on the surface, appear to be a contradiction in terms; it is not, because function, the overriding imperative, demands that there be sufficient motivation if learning is to occur; and, for the general run of children in existing, contemporary social systems in which traditions of coercion based culture are still very pervasive and deeply embedded, the carrot is too esoteric and meaningless to currently replace the stick.


William E. Virtue

3222 Airways Blvd
Memphis, TN 38116

Ph: 901-201-8090