Insidious coercion
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Definition
Insidious coercion is coercion that is not perceived by the coerced individual. Skillful enforcers of coercion can master a system of rewards and mild penalties that provide grounds for obedience with a sufficiently extended timeline.
Mild coercion
More and more people see the destructive impact of "modern" schooling on mental health and development of young people. Coercion in learning has gradually grown to be a pejorative notion, however, it has tacitly hidden behind a system of gentle rewards and mild psychological penalties. In its most insidious form, it evolved to be a glorious Finnish system of education in which children have a great deal of freedom, while the teachers are well educated, highly respected and decently paid. It appears that it is possible to boil the frog in tiny increments and still drag it to the desired destination. In Finland, a litmus test is the acceptance of conscription with an excuse of patriotic duty (long before Putin gave the words some actual meaning). See: Finnish paradox
As late Danny Greenberg correctly observed, coercion that is not perceived may be more dangerous as the one that is sensed in instantly. Coercion should awaken natural reactance and rebellion, which is a protective mechanism of intelligence. Insidious coercion can navigate around that obstacle. Reactance is also protective for mental health. While the Supreme Court with a 5:4 decision kept spanking at school legal (it still is in 19 states, 2022), the renunciation of violence necessitates the use of mental coercion, which may have far worse consequences for the mental health.
Loss of intelligence
From the point of view of mankind, the worst aspect of insidious coercion is not the loss of mental health and intelligence of individuals. It is the loss of collective intelligence by overriding the learn drive and the emergence in goalsetting. Adults, playing omniscient God, set the goals for children making them all renounce the tools of exploration for the sake intellectual obedience (see: Superiority of a rat over a schooled human). The reason for this civilizational grave error is the illusion of knowledge that comes with a mountain top view (see: Mountain climb metaphor). The adult believes that the goals he can see from the mountain top are optimum, while a neighboring peak may provide new opportunities that may turn out to be a matter of survival for mankind. The omniscient adult at the mountain top calls for a lemming rush to the same peak along the same route, while the only evolutionarily correct strategy is unrestricted and unpredictable exploration with unrestricted emergence of goals and subgoals on the way.
Early education
As we increasingly see the harm of coercion, some less obdurate educators call for the shortening of the compulsory schooling period. Compulsory schooling not only steals the freedom of children. Not only is it immoral. It also robs societies of collective intelligence (see: Compulsory schooling must end). Shortening that unethical practice isn't a solution. It is the young brain that is affected most by coercion. The usual mantra goes like this: "They need to master the basic. They need to, at least, do the math, reading, and writing". As a result, as young as 2–3-year-olds are introduced to coercion or insidious coercion, while the 3Rs are almost inevitably mastered by a child on her own. With proliferation of on-line educational material, it is far truer in 2022 than it was even a decade ago.
While dispassionate learning combined with coercion nearly inevitably leads to toxic memory, it also sets stage for a major change in the conceptualization process that affects thinking strategies for life. Memorization aimed at mastering the basics results in two major conceptualization changes in the brain:
- transition from exploratory learning based on the learn drive to sequential learning based on the curriculum (error of navigation)
- transition from semantic learning based on the learn drive to asemantic learning based on memorization (error of selection)
It is vital to recall that the conceptualization process changes the brain architecture! The younger the child the bigger the change. Conceptualization changes in navigation and selection, in addition to affecting mental health, have tragic consequences for child's intelligence. It is a form of robbery that leaves people affected for life.
In reading, instead of decoding texts using pattern recognition, semantics, and knowledge valuations, we automate the process with phonics and enable mindless rendition of texts without comprehension. The exact opposite can be observed in children who received no reading instruction: they can comprehend without reading! This is a bit like Google who understands a bad speller.
The whole-language method run on schedule is equally harmful (see: Reading wars are over). The whole-language method may be closer to what the adult brain does while reading, but under coercion it can also lead to educational dyslexia as observed by Samuel Blumenfeld. See: Don't teach your child to read
In math, while mastering the multiplication table, instead of allowing the brain to weigh up and compare dozens of strategies via exploration, the teacher insists on his superior strategy. In case of the multiplication table, it is often just memorization. Thus, multiplication is the queen of toxic memory, and the first step towards math anxiety (often spanning the entire life). The goal of memorization is a shortcut towards further steps of algebra with the assumption that the golden path towards mathematical wisdom has not changed for a dozen of centuries (al-Khwarizmi was born in 780 AD). This reasoning provides little room for exploring the world of computation from a modern angle (Wolfram Alpha, TensorFlow, hypergraphs, cellular automata, etc.). Even by coming up with the list of modern approaches, I employ my prejudiced adult brain. Only conceptual exploration provides a natural number sense and leads to new areas of discovery.
Coercion of early education sets stage for tolerance to coercion later in life!
Further reading
- Toxic memory
- Mountain climb metaphor
- On the superiority of a rat over a schooled human
- Videogames are better than teachers
- Semantic learning
- Asemantic learning
- Harms of the curriculum
- Curriculum lag
- Educational dyslexia
- Don't teach your child to read
- Reading wars are over: Whole language vs. Phonics
- Education counteracts evolution
- Abandon early math instruction!
- How school turns off memory
- Tunnel vision of school letteracy
- Papert's visionary call to ditch obsolete letteracy (1993)
- The greatness cannot be planned (YouTube)