Elements of a Curriculum on the Psychology of Living 2: Habit

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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In an introductory psychology class, students learn about conditioning, and the forms of conditioning, usually with respect to how learning takes place, and usually with respect to the behavior of rats, pigeons, and dogs. Rats are taught to run a maze, and behaviors are reinforced or extinguished through systematic reward, or the lack thereof. Pigeons peck for food in the presence of a stimulus. And, of course, dogs salivate.

Our study of human life on Earth would reveal precisely the same, that we are subject to conditioning. We are creatures of habit, more deeply than we realize. If the hardware is our physical body, then the software is the programming, the so-called schemata, repeating sub-routines, that spin off when I walk to the kitchen to refill my coffee cup, or shower, or take a nap. These fixed, mechanical programs repeat in the only way they can repeat, as they did yesterday, and the day before yesterday. It's true of all aspects of human life. Patterns of habit repeat, more easily observed in our physical movements and gestures -- right ankle over left, leaning to the left, sitting in the same place in a classroom, raising or not raising a hand, in all things, at all times. With a little sincere self-study, however, we'd observe that the same is true of our intellectual and emotional lives. Patterns recur.

The good news is that we have the ability to modify a habit, though it's easier said than done. A change of a behavior requires intention, whether from myself, or an instructor, and an active investment of attention. When attention lapses, the machine takes over, and plays a program its vast library of sub-routines, evoked always by association.

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?