Learned helplessness
Learned helplessness is a state in which the brain gives up on its defenses against an unpleasant experience. Learned helplessness is induced by repeated failure in overcoming the experience, and persists over months and years even if the obstacles to achieving success have been removed. At this site, learned helplessness is frequently mentioned in the context of schooling. When children are deprived of freedom from the early ages, they tend to submit to their fate. This increases the chances of depression and/or addictions. This is also highly suppressive for the learn drive. As a result, children hate school and become helpless in the long run. The degree of injury will depend on the period and the severity of the bad experience. In theory, the learn drive can be recovered and drive a happy adult life. However, the damage may go deep and take years of recovery, which in practice, is often unsuccessful.
This glossary entry is used to explain "I would never send my kids to school" (2017-2024) by Piotr Wozniak
For more see:
- War of the networks: the mechanism of injury that leads to learned helplessness
- Irreversible maladaptability: why learned helplessness may be hard to reverse
- How schools suppress the learn drive
- Confusing creativity with ADHD: how school combats creativity under the guise of combating ADHD
- Dangers of being a Straight A student: how good grades may spell long-term trouble
- Baby management: how the process of inducing helplessness beings in the crib (crying for breasts, crying in the kindergarten, etc.)
- Baby sleep: non-co-sleeping "good sleeper" babies are capable of self-soothing, which is often nothing else than early expression of learned helplessness
- 50 bad habits learned at school: how restrictions on freedom underlie helplessness and dozens of associated habits
- Reward diversity in preventing addictions: how helplessness can contribute to depression and addictions
- Learned helplessness at Wikipedia
Figure: This is how school destroys the love of learning. Learn drive is the set of passions and interests that a child would like to pursue. School drive is the set of rewards and penalties set up by the school system. Learn drive leads to simple, mnemonic, coherent, stable and applicable memories due to the fact that the quality of knowledge determines the degree of reward in the learn drive system. School drive leads to complex, short-term memories vulnerable to interference due to the fact that schools serialize knowledge by curriculum (not by the neural mechanism of the learn drive). Competitive inhibition between the Learn drive and the School drive circuits will lead to the weakening of neural connections. Strong School drive will weaken the learn drive, destroy the passion for learning, and lead to learned helplessness. Powerful Learn drive will lead to rebellion that will protect intrinsic passions, but possibly will also lead to problems at school. Storing new knowledge under the influence of Learn drive is highly rewarding and carries no penalty (by definition of the learn drive). This will make the learn drive thrive leading to success in learning (and at school). In contrast, poor quality of knowledge induced by the pressures of the School drive will produce a weaker reward signal, and possibly a strong incoherence penalty. The penalty will feed back to produce reactance against the school drive, which will in turn require further coercive correction from the school system, which will in turn reduce the quality of knowledge further. Those feedback loops may lead to the dominance of one of the forces: the learn drive or the school drive. Thriving learn drive increases rebellion that increases defenses against the school drive. Similarly, increased penalization at school increases learned helplessness that weakens the learn drive and results in submission to the system. Sadly, in most cases, the control system settles in the middle of those two extremes (see: the old soup problem). Most children hate school, lose their love of learning, and still submit to the enslavement. Their best chance for recovery is the freedom of college, or better yet, the freedom of adulthood. See: Competitive feedback loops in binary decision making at neuronal level
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