Elements of a Curriculum on the Psychology of Living 1: The Food Factory

Introduction to the series

How is it that children spend a thousand hours a school year in classrooms, but over the course of a dozen years come away with having learned so little about themselves -- practical knowledge about the psychology of being human.

The following series of blog entries explores the elements of a curriculum on the psychology of living, with the aim of providing children a toolkit for understanding themselves and their relations at a deep level.

There is nothing novel in these ideas; none belong to me. They are, I believe, generally accepted concepts from cognitive, social and clinical/counseling psychology, and deserve to be as much a part of the pedagogy of schooling as math facts and decoding skills.

I've shared these ideas with students and parents in recent years, typically in the context of a parent-student conference, or in response to unnecessary dramas associated with managing a classroom of two dozen or so diverse children.

The entries are not referenced, but the concepts can be found in an entry-level psychology text. The bibliography may be developed at a later date.

Imagine that we are studying life on Earth through a very large telescope from a distant world. What patterns might we observe in the lives of humans? What might we conclude about the nature and organization of their minds, their so-called psychology?

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From a systems' perspective, we inhabit highly complex and interactive food processing machines. Food is taken in, metabolized, and waste expelled (perhaps to become food for something else). Food is metabolized and becomes the fuel for what we know as thinking, feeling, moving, and the general operation of the human machine.

Food is of three types: gross food (i.e, hamburgers), air, and impressions.

The most familiar form of food is the hamburger. We must eat hamburgers or the machine will die in about two weeks. Without water and we will die in about 5 days. The quality of the functioning of our machinery requires a well-balanced diet of hamburgers.

Air is food. Prove it to yourself: hold your breath. Deprived of oxygen, the human machine will die in 5-8 minutes.

The third type of food are the impressions which stream in through our five senses. Impressions are food. Reduce or alter the sensory impressions we receive and the consequences are immediate. Cut them off altogether and we drop like a rag doll.

So here's the first big idea:

We inhabit a fantastically complex and interactive food factory, which takes in food of three types -- hamburgers, oxygen, and sensory impressions -- fueling the work of several functions: thinking, feeling, moving, and the general maintenance and operation of the physical machine.

Any change in the amount or quality of these foods results in an immediate change in the functioning and health of the machine.

Are these ideas important for children to know about and explore? How important are they? Who is it that will share these big ideas with students if not in school? What better laboratory than the classroom?