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If baboons ran schools - Cafe Technos - primatologist Robert M. Sapolsky - Interview
Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Winter, 2001 by Thom Gillespie
Do you think this school was "stressful"? Was this good or bad for you?
Stressful only in the sense of "good stress"--an ideal level of stimulation. There was definitely a subset of students who sank there; they couldn't deal with the freedom and lack of structure and kind of disappeared. So, I think that for them, one could somehow frame it as there being insufficient stress of a certain shaping sort. But that's a bit of a reinterpretive stretch.
From what you know about schools today that your son might go to, do you think schools are designed to minimize or maximize stress for kids?
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I don't know a ton about this, and there is obviously a great variety of schools. The Columbine High School model seems to be one built around worship of sports, of cliques, of the popular, a tremendous tolerance for victimization--this obviously creates vast amounts of stress for the outliers, but I don't think there's the remotest hint that such schools are "designed" to be that way. It seems like a combination of laziness, uncreativity, and [rotten] values.
Palo Alto seems to specialize in schools instead where smarts/achievements are valued, which is a nice change, but where it winds up being a pressure cooker that apparently does some pretty stressful things to the kids. This seems to be the world of the ninth graders developing ulcers worrying about the SATs years hence; it's immensely competitive, where you can't escape it, no matter how tacitly the stress is generated. I found Harvard to be a lot like this. So obviously a variant exists there of maximally stressing kids along a certain axis, and what seems to be an outcome of design. Then, we're seeing various progressive schools, in looking for places for our son. A lot of them seem to be designed to minimize stress and, in the process, to accidentally generate too little stimulation, which makes it seem slightly un-PC and boorish to be excited and driven about something.
Is the stressfulness of a learning environment something that should be taken into consideration when teaching, designing, or evaluating a school?
Obviously yes, in terms of stress making for poorer learning, less pleasure in learning, depression. And the stress could be: (a) because the place is a driven, competitive pressure cooker; (b) because seemingly anything but learning is what is valued; (c) because the environment is not safe, either physically or emotionally; or (d) because the values taught at school, as a representative of mainstream culture, are strongly conflicting with your values at home. (I'm thinking here of the Ebonics war of a few years ago--the issue of what is a kid supposed to make of school where, if they learn things properly there, they can only reach the conclusion that their parents are ignorant and don't know how to speak English?)
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Robert M. Sapolsky
The author recalls his trip from Kenya to Uganda in 1979, after Idi Amin's overthrow by Tanzanian forces.
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