Rectifications (25) – Inculcate, inculcation?
Torrey Orton– Jan 30, 2011

"Supporters of private school education argue that it inculcates students with values."

Chris Middendorp, The AGE 070111

I haven't had an opportunity for a literate rant for a while, and 'inculcate' gives it to me. It's one of those impermeable words which seem to signify or indicate a lot but cannot be parsed or scanned for concrete meaning. I inculcated them with…? Like 'instil', it suggests beating something into others by droning repetition, backed with implicit threats, occasionally explicated in some unavoidable way for the threatened.* A school, sports club or company will do fine, and as usual public politics provides the model for all non-physical violences with its occasionally revealed backdrop of more vigorous pursuits of branch leaderships.


Middendorp immediately debunks this assumed virtue of private schools with a reminder of the "antics" of their students at end of terms. Or, just partying. Since it's schools we're talking about, probably the inculcating takes place thru religious education classes, or even more advanced ethics for the entitled. The mantra obligations to 'give back' to 'make a difference' that they implicitly will not be making in their real adult lives make it clear that giving for a difference other than their own always comes second, or as a ploy for another first order (self-interested) advantage. In the US, this is formalised as entry requirements for the 'better' universities – x number of hours in community service. I wonder what kinds of giving that produces. It's no longer a gift; it's an obligation whose honouring dishonours the purpose it espouses.


Coming from households populated by the present role holders in leading industries and professions, or aspirants thereunto, and which can afford the annual fees, the kids will know what's the real world and what a religious or secular ethical proposition means in that context. Pro-forma moral positioning is not to be confused with the commercial-in-confidence rules of private sector and, increasingly, public sector life, the deniability of public actions, or if not deniable, the escape acts of leaders of many hues – sporting, commercial, political, spiritual.


What may be important to learn in schools is what the to-be-inculcated mantra of the times are so that appropriate deferences can be made to them when constructing spin for pollies, leaders and/or oneself. This is much easier now that we have two sources present at all times – the implicit value systems of public behaviour and it's school yard practice sessions, and the explicit values teaching stuff of positive psychology, anti-bullying principles, and the vision-mission-and-values statements which every up-to-date organisation must have these days.


I look forward to the school which checks ethics learning using the following test: two questions, (1) what values should graduates of this school display in public (and examples of that actually occurring)? and, (2) what values are the real values that are displayed by our graduates and some examples of those displays? The evidence base for the test should be easy to assemble, but dismaying to share with the world. And the marking could be done in discussion groups of 8-10 students.


This process would also give these emerging adults a taste of the organisational life most are headed for. This often demands active embracing of 'values' with a concurrent agreement not to discuss the realities of the contexts in which they are to be expressed. So, it may be more inoculated than inculcated they'll be getting, if not a belting of some sort for failing to recognise the difference between espoused values and those in practice wherever they are. Publishing the results in the school's annual report under a heading like "Proceedings with our values" could be fun and more attractive than the My School website.




*Let's have a look at the definitions.
tr.v., -cat·ed, -cat·ing, -cates.

1. To impress (something) upon the mind of another by frequent instruction or repetition; instil: inculcating sound principles.
2. To teach (others) by frequent instruction or repetition; indoctrinate: inculcate the young with a sense of duty.
   Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/inculcate#ixzz1AKfuvakt
   

Recognising little steps…of interest!!

Recognising little steps…of interest!!
Torrey Orton – January 7, 2011

If you don't recognise the step you've just taken,

you won't know where you've come from,

where you are, or

where you've got to….

 

• T. O. in talking to Ian, 301110

Of all the wonders of therapy, the ways of learning are the grandest and most marvellous. They are also often invisible to the client at the start of their development / recovery. Part of their obscurity to the actor's eye lies in their size – they are little steps, in little ways about large matters for them. We are not accustomed to seeing the detail of our behaviour except when we are learning something for the first time. Then attention to detail is absolutely required because we are, in a sense, making it up as we are doing it.


In addition, habitual behaviour depends on precisely not looking at the detail of its production; it functions automatically to free us up to pay attention to more demanding, non-routine matters. In that respect we are intentionally, but unconsciously, blind in that area at that moment. Hence the jolting shock of discovering that the terrain we were crossing has a suddenly more demanding character – a hole that could not have been seen until we were on the edge of it, and missed then because we were looking down the track.


Rough surface
The stumble tells us, if not a fall which is more damaging. I've had a couple of these driving lately where a "rough surface" sign should have been and wasn't, and a dented wheel rim was almost the price. The whack /thump of the plunge into a 10cm hole was followed half a second too late by my "oh shit…" appreciation of its arrival. For a therapy client such holes are just what their defences are arrayed to prevent: having certain kinds of feelings which are attached to certain life experiences – the triggers of their anxiety or depression. The learning needed for recovery is through pathways inhabited by their feared experiences so as to disarm those experiences, and eventually pre-empt them.


This in turn requires not merely learning kinds of actions, but at the same time learning that they can act in certain circumstances. A simple example is that of a very low self-esteeming depressed person who winces if complimented and never in their own hearing utters a word of self-approval for anything. They may act self-approvingly occasionally – like by starting therapy or sustaining appropriate exercise or health regimes or performing competently at work. But the evidence of their action has to be pointed out to them, and then it may take a while (weeks or months) to be accepted as such.


A tool box
So noticing that change is occurring is often not easy. Focus on effective action(s) is hesitant, interrupted by recurrent holes in their paths. Sustenance along the way may be an offering of small steps and picking up new ones from a therapist's tool box. It assumes there is a knowable set of domains of human needs / functions that are capable of development. There are six compartments in it, at the moment: mental competences – intellectual and emotional; physical competences – perceptual and performative; moral competences – evaluating and enacting; cultural competences – role flexibility and integration; spiritual competences – vision and celebration; and political competences – initiative and inclusion.


These obviously overlap. Development of mental competences will often have components of the other 5 competences built in or implied by the mental. The political and moral are interdependent. Competences do not occur in a pure, isolated form. Rather they will appear as the aspect of a moment of life which is pivotal for the client's development needs at that time. Or, it will appear as the aspect which circumstances both demand and provide as opportunity for their development.


For therapy clients, and millions of would be self-improvers, there is only one question. Can I actually change who/what I am now in any respect (assuming I know who or what, other than I am, I want to be and that becoming that is not merely a purchase away)? The failure rate of aspirational (diet fads, makeovers of various sorts, exercise regimes) and inspirational (spiritual, semi-religious and wholly religious regimens) is well known, though the latter are more promising than the former. These are the hunting grounds of shonks. That they survive regulatory regimes and constant warnings ensures us that the felt need to change is great (whatever its provenance).


The following is a prompt for self-recognition. These can be used to structure and prompt self-reflection. Here are the six of them (the tools in the box) in some detail.


Mental competences – intellectual and emotional:

• A little meditation step for beginners – noticing that you did not do the exercise you committed to doing; thinking about doing the exercise you decided to do daily, even though you did not do it!!
• Seeing something well-known differently, as did this contributor to the "Learning to act right" series, can open doorways of perception and action which revolutionise a struggle for personal effectiveness.
• Noticing a major change of mood which happened quietly – e.g. discovering that he was not anxious about getting to an appointment on time, though the normal conditions for being anxious were all there!!

Physical competences – perceptual and performative:

• Not doing my aikido practices for a long break (3 months) and then returning to find that I could remember all of them (21 moves) and more importantly I could see/feel parts of them which I had not noticed before, and so could improve them for the first time.
• Feeling that an unknown hill has been topped in a performance activity – sport, art, craft or technology.

Moral competences – evaluating and enacting:

• Suddenly seeing that a feeling of revulsion at another's behaviour arose from one's own conflicted values about that behaviour – that one thought at the same time that the behaviour was wrong and that the other had a right to their own values!! See Trusting judgment for an example in detail.
• Recognising that one's injuries cost pain and produced strengths, which others do not have because they have never faced the same challenges.

Cultural competences – role flexibility and integration (eg. gender):

• Realising that one had tried a new food, music, painting without first doubting it…had experienced it in itself, as itself, etc.
• Seeing the world thru another culture's eyes – e.g. gender roles – and acting to meet or join that world.

Spiritual competences – vision and celebration:

• People with religious upbringings which they have rejected, or been rejected from, often benefit from revisiting it by attending a service, a function (confession, baptism) or just the music.
• Noticing that his professional practice had ceased to be onerous and become what he looked forward to, almost from the finish of the previous practice session.

Political competences – initiative and inclusion:

• Writing a letter about a personally salient issue.
• Speaking up in public about a group issue, at work or socially.
• Inviting others to participate in a public process, at work or socially.

Search for interest
What's going on here is a search for interest(s), for the feeling of interest which is the core feeling* among the many striving for our attention. Little steps can often be identified by asking, 'What's my interest at the moment, what's in my actions now that is driving them??' But then you have to notice a step to ask the question. Certainly we can do that, but maybe we can do it quicker and with greater certainty. We know that the steps are moments of desired change. Even missteps can be useful signs of development, since the acknowledgment of them indicates there is a value or standard in the background which is evaluating our actions. Back to the discussion with Ian:

If you don't recognise the step you've just taken,

you won't know where you've come from,

where you are, or

where you've got to….

*"The emotion of interest is continually present in the normal mind under normal conditions, and it is the central motivation for engagement in creative and constructive endeavors and for the sense of well-being. Interest and its interaction with other emotions account for selective attention, which in turn influences all other mental processes."

Emotion Theory and Research: Highlights, Unanswered Questions, and Emerging Issues

Carroll E. Izard , Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2009. 60:1–25

Emphasis supplied.

A New Year’s Message - Aspirations for a divided world

A New Year's Message - Aspirations for a divided world
Torrey Orton – January 3, 2011

"…, plus c'est la meme chose."

Recently I ran into an IT consultant I had worked with in a bank years ago. From a quick hello, we stepped forward into the past. "How's consulting?" I asked. "Same as 20 years ago", he said. "They're making the same mistakes. IT doesn't understand user needs and users don't understand IT's needs." Since long before CP Snow's The Two Cultures it has ever been so.

He and I, and others, at that time worked to bridge that gap by running a system-building process with conscious intent to surface two-way communication blocks. I had been hired part way into it to front the eventual user helpdesk. We imagined that a defence against misunderstanding, and its siblings distrust, disrespect and dysfunction, could be created by engaging the different perspectives and their stakeholders early. The gap between the working practices of the players was deep enough to be unbridgeable by monthly management committee meetings or the daily drudge of the analysts disclosing the target business practices with enough confidence to warrant encoding them. Forces beyond our control short-circuited the effort. Fantasies are the yeast of imagination not the bread of its results.

Irrational merge-over

The bank in question did not survive its own financial incompetence 20 years ago. Recent memory is populated with more present evidence that they were merely instances of normal bubbles which pop in the national economic firmament, the product of what are now known as the irrational exuberance of capitalism, not the warning they might have been.

The merge-over* winner's own similar IT development project replaced ours, only to fail a year later to the tune of $90 million of that year's dollars. Hopefully some others since then have devised better strategies and finer tools. Legacy systems and system incompetence…for people, history is a source and a drag at once. But not for all peoples in the same way(s) at the same time.

Fast forward twenty years to find George Megalogenis' Quarterly Essay conclusion:

"What makes me pessimistic about the nation's politics now is the character of many of the people in it. The crew that delivered us such a silly campaign have to behave like adults to make the hung parliament work. They will need to overcome a generational instinct for instant gratification." (Trivial Pursuits, pg. 80, QE 40 2010)

Hung parliaments (and the close-call ones like the Victorian Liberal win a month ago) are a little less startling than normal ones these days. They are also promising because the clear lack of voter clarity is clarifying about where we and some others (UK, Iraq…) really are – namely, stuck. Stuckness, for shrinks, is a classic symptom of unresolved, and momentarily unresolvable, conflicts within persons, families and groups. For others, politicians for instance, it's the material of fear (of the uncertainty unavoidably present in the body politic) and loathing (of the pretensions of those who are seen to be uncertainty's cause – lesser political forces like Greens and independents). While being stuck is also a necessary precursor to solutions for difficult problems, it can turn into being mired. Political intransigence is a potent muck.

A sustainable response?

I find it easier to entertain aspirations for people rather than humanity in our collective forms - our cultures. Maybe this is proper in a deeply evolutionary sense, though merely an introverted preference in my personal one. The sustainable responses to present challenges may come from individual variations more than group ones?? Along the way many will not be adaptive or adapting.

In this view, the excessive late-capitalist focus on personal choice at the cost of all other levels and actions may be the 'right' emphasis in the natural tension between groups and the needs of their members. Our group and culture boundaries and meanings are breaking down faster than new ones being built, and that will likely be the case in the new powers of the east because their modernising is scientific like ours was and science eats traditional cultures, without consuming them. Sorting out the eaters from the eaten is usually violent, openly or implicitly.

While messages of wonder about the state and future(s) the "the West" increase, counterpoints from and about "the East" arise as well to remind us that the pathways of history are marked by cultures' living carcases, upon some of which their successors grow like the saplings of forest giants in California do on their parents' remains. Strangely, the rising and declining cultures (eastern and western) both identify themselves with their historical origins, all the more intensely as the pressures and strains of their respective stages of development torsion their psychosociospiritual innards.

So, engage

Rather than careening off into a revisit of the state of the world, I realise as a result of the difficulty of writing this so far – 3 weeks of stumbling around – that my aspiration for a divided world (which it has ever been so – nothing special about today's divisions other than their being the ones I'm experiencing now) is to be engaged myself in at least four dimensions:

My ageing and the possibility of a useless surviving (where unnecessary resource consumption meets loss of control of the choice to consume);

My need for an integrated professional practice in a context of dis-integrating forces moving persistently to decompose practice into specializations;

My enjoyment of therapy's endless opportunity for marvel at the different ways of being human;

and,

My conflictedly engaged relation with the world, reflected in my various sub-optimal patterns mingled with my flowing ones.

There are many enjoyments yet to be had along the way. They are not subjects of self-dispute, only perhaps of indulgent imbalances or over-consumptions.

* merge-over – a term coined at the time by us to describe what in public discussion by leaders was just a merger, even though it was clear we would never emerge whole from the exercise, and many would fall along the way as branches were "rationalised", as they liked to say.