Moving Beyond Maslow: Why Elementary Schools Need Self-Determination Theory

Picture this: A fourth-grade teacher posts Maslow's pyramid on her wall, believing she must fix her students' home lives before they can learn. Meanwhile, a child who skipped breakfast is completely engaged in writing a story about dragons, forgetting their hunger entirely. Another student, from a wealthy family with every physical need met, sits disengaged and miserable, feeling controlled and incompetent. That pyramid on the wall isn't just wrong—it's actively harmful to how we understand motivation in our schools.

For decades, elementary schools have operated on Maslow's Hierarchy, assuming children must have their basic needs met before they can learn. This creates three toxic problems. First, it gives teachers an excuse: "These kids can't learn because they're poor, hungry, or from broken homes." Second, it ignores reality: children in refugee camps pursue education, kids in poverty become passionate learners, and wealthy children with every physical need met can be completely unmotivated. Third, and most dangerously, it blinds us to what actually drives human motivation. We're using a 1940s theory that Maslow himself never properly tested and has failed to meet proper scientific scrutiny ever since then, and we're failing our students because of it.

Self-Determination Theory, backed by 40 years of rigorous research, shows that three psychological needs drive motivation for everyone—regardless of their circumstances.
Autonomy: the need to have choice and voice.
Competence: the need to grow and feel capable.
Relatedness: the need to connect and belong.

Here's the revolutionary part: these needs aren't hierarchical. A hungry child can be deeply motivated when they feel autonomous, competent, and connected (naturally, their learning will be far more effective when they are not hungry). A wealthy child with every physical comfort can be miserable and unmotivated when these three needs are crushed.

When schools focus on these three needs, magic happens. Students from all backgrounds become engaged. The child who hasn't eaten breakfast forgets their hunger while leading their reading group (autonomy), mastering new skills (competence), and helping peers (relatedness). Teachers stop making excuses and start making changes they can actually control.

Imagine walking into an elementary school that has abandoned Maslow's pyramid for SDT's three needs. In one classroom, students choose from different ways to demonstrate their learning—some write, some build, some perform. That's autonomy. On the walls, instead of behavior charts showing who's "good" or "bad," there are growth portfolios showing each child's journey toward mastery. That's competence. During morning meeting, the teacher shares her own struggles with learning something new, and students support each other through peer mentoring. That's relatedness.

The hungry child? She's so engaged in teaching another student her method for solving word problems that she forgets she's hungry (and she will be fed through the school meal program). The wealthy child who has everything? He's finally excited about school because he gets to choose his research topic and work with friends who value his ideas, not his possessions.

Teachers stop saying, "These kids can't learn until their home lives improve"—something they can't control. Instead, they say, "Every child can be motivated when I support their autonomy, competence, and relatedness"—something they can control every single day.

Starting tomorrow, take down Maslow's pyramid from your classroom wall. It's not just outdated—it's an excuse that prevents us from doing what we actually can do. Replace it with three simple questions: How can I give students more choice? How can I help them feel capable? How can I build genuine connection?

For administrators: Stop asking teachers to identify which "level of Maslow's hierarchy" their struggling students are on. Start asking: "How are you supporting autonomy, competence, and relatedness today?"

For teachers: Stop waiting for students' home lives to improve before expecting engagement. Start creating classrooms where every child—regardless of their breakfast or bank account—can experience choice, growth, and belonging.

The research is clear. The evidence is overwhelming. Self-Determination Theory works because it addresses what humans actually need to thrive, not what we assume they need based on their circumstances. Our students don't need us to fix their lives. They need us to support their autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And unlike poverty or family dysfunction, that's something we can actually do. Today. In our classrooms.

The pyramid has fallen. It's time to build something better.

For a more precise analysis read Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is Wrong - Now Stop Using It!

Clarifying the Etiology of Violence: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on The End of Violence by Gary Slutkin

Is violence a disease or the symptom of a disease? Gary Slutkin in his book The End of Violence (EoV, 2026) has argued that violence is, in itself, a disease. I agree with him that violence is a deviation from the normal function of the mind causing morbidity and mortality, per the definition of disease cited on page 43 of EoV. The question is whether the violent acts that everyone would agree are characteristically morbid should be thought of as the whole disease or as merely one symptom of a disease that encompasses more than just violence. The disease, which to my way of thinking could be called supremacism, encompasses harms that are more subtle than its worst and most salient symptom, violence. 

Is the disease transmitted visually or culturally? EoV presents an argument that the disease is transmitted visually. I interpret this visual hypothesis as a behavioral approach, given the great conceptual leap that is made from perceptual processes to social consequences. I am familiar with behavioral approaches because I was trained in behaviorism and have a co-author credit for a behavioral study published in a leading behaviorist journal (Tan, et.al., 2014). 

Behavioral approaches are usually adequate to address behaviors that can be presumed to have been uninfluenced by organizational, institutional, and/or societal policies. Rats, pigeons, infants, non-communicative people, and even some types of behavior such as the unconscious blinking of our eyes, can be explained without reference to the larger social contexts in which they are embedded. While conceding that all the organisms just listed may, arguably, have psychological selves in at least some sense (Damasio, 2010), with the particular kinds of selves they have (or in some cases due to the particular limitations on how their self is being expressed) most of their behavior can be adequately explained with regard to reinforcement contingencies in their immediate environment via behaviorism. However, the behavior of most children and adults are not adequately accounted for unless we know about and take seriously the psychological self which operates as a key mechanism of motivation to act in the world and engage with the world that the self believes itself to be acting within. The most successful scientific model of human motivation and engagement today is called Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and it is, according to philosopher and psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon, “[T]he world’s most comprehensive and best-supported theory of human motivation. SDT has been under development for over fifty years and is still going strong.” 

The central tenet of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is that all humans have primary psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence (Ryan & Deci, 2019). SDT was built up from the idea of positing just a single entity within the black box of the human mind, a self. The self is a necessary mental entity because experiments starting in the 1970s showed that people did not behave according to behaviorist predictions in a variety of everyday situations. There was something inside the black box of their human minds (to use a phrase favored by behaviorism’s B.F. Skinner) that modified how they responded to reinforcement contingencies. Over decades SDT has proven that human psychological well-being is caused by the satisfaction of those needs. The cognitive processes within the human mind constantly assess the situation for opportunities to satisfy those needs or identify threats that may thwart them. Based on that assessment the mind allocates some level of energy, which is commonly called motivation. Based on where in the spectrum of motivation the self is located actions are taken, or refrained from, to produce some type of engagement. 

Inspired by recent work from Rebecca Winthrop and her colleagues (Anderson & Winthrop, 2025; Winthrop, Shoukry, & Nitkin, 2025) I have summarized the science of SDT  (applied to school settings) in the diagram [[which I have not added yet, email me attitutorATgmail.com]]. The four main boxes indicate discreet states as they are experienced and described by teachers and students in classroom settings. The vertical “Implicit Owner of the Goal” distinction is based on motivations being either autonomous, which will have positive effects on well-being, or controlled, which will have negative effects on well-being. The horizontal “Depth of Engagement” distinction is based on separating the merely behavioral, shallow engagement from the agentic, deep engagement. The mode most conducive to conceptual, transferable learning is the Explorer in the bottom right box. The mode most conducive to disrupting the conceptual, transferable learning of others is the Resister in the bottom left box. The modes that are most conducive to demands for unquestioned obedience are the Passenger and Fauxchiever. The Passenger is trying to be invisible and minimally engaged, likely avoiding punishment. The Fauxcheiver is trying to get the rewards on offer, but only engages to the point of getting the reward, not with sufficient intensity to achieve conceptual, transferable understanding of the subject being taught. The Fauxchiever is actually learning how to manipulate the system for rewards, to go through the motions, to jump through the hoops, but avoids doing any work beyond what is rewarded.

Before I return to the issue of violence I want to explain my perspective on levels of analysis. This is relevant because getting the levels of analysis problem wrong prevents us from properly understanding the nuances of the phenomenon under scrutiny. Slutkin appears to share a concern for achieving accuracy based on this quote:

“[T]o effectively treat disease of any kind, you need to diagnose it correctly — not just name it but deeply understand it and the mechanisms by which it operates.” [emphasis added, EoV, p.23]

If we misidentify the proper level of analysis we can send ourselves on a wild goose chase. 

Consider the phenomenon of a whirlpool. It is a prime example of an emergent behavior in certain bodies of water. If we want to understand the causal factors that contribute to the existence of a whirlpool we have to examine it at the right level of analysis. Imagine if we encountered an alien life form that was not familiar with bodies of water. In the process of sharing what our world is like we send our new alien friend images of whirlpools and a tiny sample of water, just a few drops. Our alien is a member of an inherently skeptical species, so he casts doubt on the existence of whirlpools. He says that when he examines a few of the individual water molecules we sent him (only a small volume could be sent due to the cost), he can find no evidence of whirlpools. Based on his examination of water molecules he states that whirlpools are a figment of our imagination and that our images must have been AI hallucinations. 

How should we address our alien friend’s concerns? He is correct that there is no evidence of  whirlpools in water molecules. There is, in fact, no way to deduce the existence of whirlpools from the properties of water molecules. As I said before whirlpools are a paradigmatic example of an emergent phenomenon. Addressing his concerns would involve a more complete description of the physics of fluid dynamics and, short of sending him enough water to experiment with, a physics simulation software for him to play with would probably be a close second. 

A similar confusion arises in the philosophical debates about the existence of free will. When a sophisticated scientist like Robert Sapolsky looks carefully at the various levels from biological to ecological he can not find any evidence that free will exists. In his book Determined (2024) he claims that the most important evidence to prove the existence of free will is to point out a neuron that makes a “choice” that was not already determined by the contextual factors surrounding it. Sapolsky’s book is particularly salient to this conversation because the central example that he returns to throughout the book is a potentially violent act, the pulling of a trigger. I cannot find any flaw in his analysis of almost all of the factors that he considered; however, I can also see that he failed to consider the role of the psychological self in the experience of free will that follows from SDT. 

In his book Freely Determined: What the new psychology of the self teaches us about how to live (2022) Kennon M. Sheldon explains the three central arguments against free will: the reductionist (materialist) perspective, the doctrine of predetermination, and epiphenomenonlism. Reductionists claim “that there is nothing but matter obeying physical laws in the universe.” Predeterminists claim “that things couldn’t possibly turn out any differently than the way they did; the universe is a giant machine, clanking along toward an inevitable conclusion.” Epiphenomenonlists claim that “our experiences are always mere symptoms of prior causes; they are never causes themselves. They’re dead ends in the chain [of causality.] … [O]ur feelings of being intentional agents are delusional.” Sheldon also shares the three related capacities that philosopher Christian List argues are necessary for free will to be present in a system (human or artificial): 1) the capacity to consider several possibilities for action, 2) the capacity to form an intention to pursue one of those possibilities, and 3) the capacity to take action to move towards that possibility. 

For my purpose now it is critically important to show that the central problem with dismissing free will from arguments about physics, chemistry, and biology (which are Sapolsky’s areas of expertise) is that the phenomenon does not occur at those levels of analysis. Free will is a psychological phenomenon that must be understood by accounting for other psychological processes that are relevant to that particular feature of the human experience. Specifically, a model of the self is necessary to connect the experience of free will with the physics, chemistry, and biology that makes that experience both possible and real.

When we recognize the role of the self in determining our behavior we can be sympathetic to both sides of the debate. The determinists who take materialist, predetermined, and/or epiphenomenonl perspectives have convincing evidence and arguments for almost all of their positions. The problem arises when they neglect to acknowledge that the self has a key role to play in modifying the reinforcement contingencies provided by the situations in which they are embedded. There is a key difference between water molecules interacting under physical constraints and humans operating within social constraints. 

No one is foolish enough to argue that water molecules make freely willed choices about what formations to create as they flow through a sink. A whirlpool is a structural outcome of multiple dynamic forces interacting with each other at the body of water level. Molecules are largely irrelevant except for their mere presence as a substrate in which the structure can arise and the level of viscosity that they exhibit collectively. The macro-conditions (the shape of the container, flow speed, and gravity) organize the particles into the spiral pattern that becomes the vortex that is the central characteristic of a whirlpool.

Most of the time humans also respond fairly automatically, at least to some degree, to the macro-conditions that surround them. This is why a significant amount of human behaviors can be satisfactorily explained with behaviorism; see The Nurture Effect by Anthony Biglan (2015). However, there are times when the self takes the reins and alters the pattern of conditioned responses. Most of the time most people do not exercise their free will. But sometimes they do. They perceive their situation to be one that is no longer satisfactory for the kind of person they want to be or the goals and/or aspirations they have chosen to pursue. Their cognitive machinery goes to work on generating possibilities that would be a better match for their intentions. They form an intention to pursue one of those possibilities and, finally, they take action in pursuit of that possibility. If we examine all the lower levels of machinery we will not find evidence for the free will that was exercised. The waves of cognitive activity that this process entails did not ever rely on a single neuron to fire one time and not another. Free will is probably better described as a process within a distributed network, not a singular moment or a neural structure. Neurons are the necessary substrate, but they do not play any other other role in the existence of free will. The majority of the process was completed outside of consciousness, so introspection is not of much help. The story of this process is told in a manner that might be interpreted to suggest conscious activities, but that is debatable. Yes, there was likely some conscious processing involved, but it need not have been decisive in determining any given part of the process. It is possible that consciousness takes undue credit for the work of non-conscious patterns and processes in the course of exercising free will. 

As I mentioned before, the initial evidence for the self as a necessary mechanism for explaining human behavior arose out of behaviorist experiments. Those studies produced results that contradicted the dominant behaviorist principles which were developed in the context of B.F. Skinner’s admonishment to be properly scientific by not attributing any cause of behavior to mysterious entities in the mind, until it is absolutely necessary. Back in the late 1960s and through the 70s many scientists arrived at the point of absolute necessity and, in the case of SDT, only posited one entity, a cognitive self. 

The most famous experiment in this literature gave children reinforcement for doing things that they were otherwise known to do spontaneously without reinforcement. The central principe of behaviorism is that behaviors that get reinforced increase in frequency. However, when the children were reinforced for painting, drawing, and other inherently engaging activities, they did less, instead of more, exactly the opposite of what behaviorism predicts. This gave rise to a scientific formulation of the idea of intrinsic motivation based on the observation that supplying extrinsic reinforcements for intrinsically motivated behaviors can sometimes inspire the self to reevaluate the behavior. A child’s unconscious thought process might be something like, “If the adults are using their manipulative powers to induce me to do that behavior maybe it’s not as awesome as I thought it was and I should do less of it.” Over time the notion of a dichotomy of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation has given way to a more nuanced view. Today, it is better to refer to autonomous versus controlled motivations, as I have depicted it in the visual summary earlier. The autonomous motivations, which are more attributable to internal reasons (which include some types of extrinsic motivations), have positive effects on well-being, while the controlled motivations, which are more attributable to external or instrumental reasons, have negative effects on well-being. 

The psychological self is not a distinct entity with its own brain area. It is not real in any physical sense. It is real in the same way that a center of gravity is real. Physicists discovered that they could make better predictions about the tipping point of a physical object by inventing the idea of the center of gravity. Note that centers of gravity only exist in the context of gravity. Where there is no gravity or in the subatomic realms where gravity is not a factor, the idea is not applicable. The center of gravity has no physical reality, it is meta-physical, but it is real nonetheless because every physical object on earth has one and it is the most reliable indicator of when that object will fall over. It is fictional, but it is not fantastical. 

The psychological self is also a fictional meta-physical reality that is not fantastical. It will never be found in the brain, but it is observable in human behavior, as the SDT community has found over and over again for over 40 years. The self is found in a very specific level of analysis, and not in others. If you don’t know to look for it, you are unlikely to find it. With regard to violence, I believe that is why the EoV book failed to take the self, as conceived of by the SDT community, into account. 

I agree with almost all of both Slutkin’s and Sapolsky’s points. However, there are a few key points that do not align with my SDT informed understanding of the science of how humans are in the world. Let’s examine the criminal pulling of a trigger, to borrow Sapolsky’s conceit. 

As a psychologist I have to say that the disposition (a.k.a. personality) of the individual is one of the least powerful factors in the situation. There are a variety of biological, relational, organizational, and societal factors that are far more powerful determinants of each individuals’ behavior. Sapolsky ran through an impressive catalog of those influences in both his Determined book and in his Behave book, so I will focus on a few key experiences. 

Let’s imagine how a sequence of events might contribute to the pulling of that trigger. First, let’s visit our trigger puller when he was two years old. Puller (as I will call him) is dropped off at a daycare, a highly respected professional operation that supports his needs pervasively just as his parents have been doing at home since he was born. Puller has never witnessed violence nor been the victim of it. Yet, one day he gets frustrated when another two-year old seizes a toy he had been playing with and he instinctively reacts to this threat by biting his compatriot. If you believe The End of Violence book on page 41, this is not possible. “We aren't born violent. Violence is not innate, congenital, or inherent to an individual or group. Nor is it a universal human urge.” On page 63 it says, “Without exposure to violence, there is no violence.” 

Did I paint an impossible picture of Puller? Or, is it possible that as mammals who evolved in a world of predators that could eat us we may have some instinctive ability to inflict violence when threatened? Fight or flight is a well established instinctive response pattern, so contrary to the assertions in EoV, that “fight” part seems like a pretty straightforward universal starting point for violence. While it is true that human babies are ridiculously helpless, as they start to achieve early milestones of mobility and communication they can have their fight response triggered and have not yet achieved the cognitive skills to self-regulate their emotional reactions and the behaviors that follow. 

Taking this fight mechanism as a starting point enables us to get a clearer idea of how Puller’s early instincts were also quickly moderated by socialization in the day care setting. He learned to handle his frustrations by using his words and developing more trusting relationships in the day care setting. The mechanism is dampened by a combination of social experiences and behavioral contingencies. 

When he gets to be five years old his wonderfully loving and supportive parents do what most people do; they put him in a mainstream K-12 school system that sees itself as a crucially important societal institution responsible for delivering the skills and knowledge of literacy and numeracy. Puller is mostly told what to do and trained for obedience to the expectations of his teachers and the school administrators. His schools are all known for producing high achieving children. He learns that if he expresses his preferences, opinions, ideas, and passions the reception they get is entirely subject to the whims of the adults (or anyone else) in power. If they don’t like his notions or if they don’t like him, they have no obligation to treat him with respect and dignity (even though they will have written policies that say they do). They will follow the rules religiously, but they will also use those rules to belittle and annoy anyone they don’t like. He doesn’t learn this explicitly, he learns this through the hidden curriculum. The hidden curriculum is how brains interact with policies (in a broad sense) to create the limitations on what can happen in classrooms. The brain activities that embody his understanding are unconscious. The policies that taught him these lessons were not the written ones, they were the unwritten, implicit, and usually unconscious ones. They were taught through the high expectations and the unrelenting schedules that sacrifice sleep, relatedness, and autonomy. The school is proud that they produce such objectively competent scholars, but they ignore any evidence of the pervasive emotional and cognitive disengagement that plagues a majority of their students by the time they graduate. They proudly tout their anti-bullying policies, but they have never questioned the power structure that automatically generates those conflicts because the psychological needs of everyone in the system are mostly being neglected and/or thwarted. 

By the time Puller is approaching graduation he has normalized the neglect of his psychological needs. He has developed what is technically called a controlled causality orientation. That means that he automatically views any institution that his mind unconsciously associates with school to be a place where he must fight for opportunities and fight against anyone who might be a threat to his power and influence. His schooling has taught him to access his toddler fight reaction and apply it in more subtle, non-physical, ways that are socially “acceptable.” His goals and aspirations as a member of the institution have been redirected from healthy and wholesome ends to establishing and maintaining power and control. He compensates for not having real autonomy by taking control of others. He considers joining the military because he is inspired by the obvious power wielded by soldiers and their commanders. He is confident from years of high achievement in school that he can attain a high rank through such a clear command and control structure. He looks forward to an institutional structure similar to the kind that he mastered in school, only with more clarity and purpose behind it. As a teenager preparing for his military service he begins to find online sources that romanticize military service and the hyper-masculine stereotypes that dominate portrayals of soldiers in movies and TV. At home his parents are proud of his accomplishments and only experience him as a confident athletic boy with leadership potential. 

I could tell this story in a variety of ways from here, but we’ve already established that the outcome is the pulling of a trigger. It doesn’t matter whether it is before, during, or after his military service, or whether the final stage of his radicalization is online or in person. It doesn’t matter whether the gun was aimed at himself or someone else. The stage for the trigger pull was set by a school system that ignored or actively interfered with his ability to satisfy his psychological needs. A school system that normalized in him the dysfunctional “needs” for power and control rather than healthy expressions of the needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence. The institution generated defensive psychological patterns and processes that became normalized in him as a worldview that made him distrustful of most, if not all, institutions and cynical about how other people would behave in them. The institution of school distorted his ability to perceive accurately, think clearly, and act effectively on self-selected goals and aspirations that would be appropriate to his situation. Due to his achievements he was able to parlay societal privileges into institutional roles that insulated him from most of the direct consequences of those distortions. He just went about his business until his case of the disease of supremacism became so acute that he pulled that trigger. Depending on what position he had acquired, he could be dead, in jail, or in a privileged place of honor with every (mostly implicit) expectation that he would never face a just accounting of the moral consequences of that particular trigger pull. 

To review, Puller had a perfectly normal instinctive fight response as a two-year old and had that instinct suppressed by positive socialization. Then he began attending mainstream schools that maintained a public image of high achievement that he did his part to uphold. He obediently subsumed his psychological needs in pursuit of goals that the community thought would be good for him. He learned to normalize the neglect of his needs and developed a worldview that led him to expect the same of all institutions like school. When he turned his attention to military service he was exposed to attitudes and beliefs beyond school that added cultural overlays that intellectually and emotionally justified the power and control he craved as being good for him and everyone else as long as he was tough enough to endure, like a real man would. Those beliefs contributed to the worsening of his supremacism symptoms to the point that he pulled the trigger of a gun in an act of criminal violence. Etiologically we can say that the instinctive fight mechanism was present early on but was socialized into dormancy. His schooling began the process of reactivating that fight response through persistently neglecting and thwarting his psychological needs. He found institutional supports for his frustrations through taking control of other people through leadership positions, which reinforced the institutional patterns of need thwarting and neglect. When he encountered the military and the social reinforcement of supremacist beliefs, his mind more fully adapted to the disease which resulted in his ultimately enacting violence. The disease ran its course. 

I want to address two other specific claims from the End of Violence. First, “[W]ith violence, there is nothing standing between exposure and infection” [EoV, p.45]. I doubt that this is true. This might seem true when taking the visual model as a given, but I don’t think it stands up to scrutiny under the SDT-based model. The visual model takes no account of the meaning-making processes that are required for the instinctive fight mechanism to be transformed into a cultural disease. The mechanism of exposure to the disease of violence is not the visual information in itself, it is the interpretation of that visual information as the thwarting of some needs. When violence is witnessed, the mechanisms that are constantly scanning for threats to need satisfaction would sound alarm bells. It is not the visual information that is triggering alarms, it is the interpretation of the consequences for need satisfaction. Dead and injured people have had obvious detriments to their most basic needs, and even if the harms were inflicted by your allies or friends you know that physical threats can do harms both intentionally and accidentally. The folks controlling the weapons inflicting harm are always a possible threat, so how you understand your relationship with them is critically important to how you respond. If you are thoroughly identified with and completely trusting of them, you will not feel threatened. You could, in fact, have your psychological needs satisfied by their actions if you have sufficiently close connections. Violence becomes associated with positive emotions through a combination of understanding your situation to be connected to important relationships and highly charged with meaning because of the autonomy and competence that can be expressed through it (even if those particular expressions are not healthy in themselves).  

Those positive associations would likely be undermined by taking a bigger picture view of the situation, so the cultural reinforcement would usually entail narrow conceptions of righteousness and valor. Acute infections of supremacism reduce the world to black and white, good/bad scenarios in which the battle must be won through total control or utter annihilation. It is the disease that would say, “Your calling is fulfilled by triumph over the hard challenge of defeating evil enemies. Remember that only the weak and the evil will cast doubt on the righteousness of your cause.” 

A cure for violence is not about preventing the visual input of violence, it is about reconnecting infected folks with their true needs and learning to reframe their lives around satisfying them while supporting everyone they care about to do the same, ideally in mutually supportive ways. 

Before I conclude I will briefly point out that EoV takes an odd position on what counts as an “adequate” school on page 28; “[I]nadequate schools do not cause children to bully or beat up their classmates, but kids who fear being bullied or beat up at school will not be able to learn.”

The notion of “adequate” that is entailed by this statement is one that must focus exclusively on the delivery of skills and knowledge as the only true obligation of schools. If that is true then an adequate school would be exclusively defined by demonstrating the successful delivery of literacy and numeracy as reflected in grades and test scores. From my SDT-informed perspective I take exception to this notion and with a moment’s reflection on the moral issues at stake I suspect most folks would agree. Any school taking custody of a child, before any kind of interaction can take place, is both morally and legally responsible for fulfilling its duty of care. No school should be regarded as “adequate” as long as the needs of the children are not being met, independent of all grades and test scores. By these lights it is ONLY inadequate schools that have persistent or chronic bullying or violence between students. The disease of supremacism may be a proximate cause of bullying and interpersonal violence but the school is also a cause when it creates the conditions for the disease to spread unchecked. Neglecting or thwarting the primary psychological needs of students and/or teachers is the hot bed in which supremacism is cultivated. 

In conclusion, I make the claim that violence is only the most salient symptom of the disease of supremacism. The natural precursor to the disease process naturally occurs in the form of the fight side of the famous fight or flight instinct. It sometimes manifests naturally and normally in toddlers who become frustrated or angry. While proper socialization normally and naturally suppresses the instinct for violence it can be reactivated and transformed into subtler expressions in institutional structures that normalize the neglect and/or thwarting of psychological needs of folks within the organization. The development of defensive attitudes and beliefs around those patterns of need neglect and/or thwarting are the cultural manifestation of the disease of supremacism, when they are shared and reinforced in organizational/institutional settings. Milder infections may involve only power structures that cause only psychological harms that do not rise to the level of physical violence (as appears to be the case in most mainstream schools today). If the disease process continues to develop it can reach a degree of intensity that can result in various forms of violence. More severe infections can result in a range of violent outcomes from interpersonal violence to countries at war. The cure for supremacism is need support at the personal level. The cure at the organizational level is to have participatory decision making and conflict resolution processes. Conflict resolution is the most important because decision making, independent of who makes the decisions, inevitably leads to conflicts. If they are not handled appropriately the result will inevitably thwart or neglect the needs of at least some of the parties to those conflicts. At the societal level the cure involves using the same kinds of cultural channels for meme propagation as the disease uses. The memes that cause the disease need to be driven out of the memetic codes of everyone in the population, both individually and organizationally. 

The work of Slutkin’s organization Cure Violence when seen through the SDT lens provides abundant examples of the multi-level cure process. The numerous stories he tells about their methods and the numerous challenges they faced in getting their work done attest to how important the supporting of relatedness, autonomy, competence, and beneficence are to effectively addressing violence. The stories are compelling and well told. 

When we examine the causes of both violence and free will we must take the psychological self into account. The science of the self is concerned with the metaphysical reality of how an individual person is able to modify the flows of energy and information in their environment for their own purposes. That self is not radically unconstrained, as some in the free will conversation might want or expect it to be. The psychological self involves a process of modifying the individual’s responses to contingencies in the environment, specifically by continuously, non-consciously evaluating their environment for opportunities or threats to need satisfaction. 

The patterns of behavior are predictable when we understand both the contingencies and the systematic ways that individual minds evaluate those contingencies. The notion of free will is where the self makes a “choice” regarding the level of response that will follow from the contingencies that it is aware of. The exercise of the will is not in a singular decision; it is in the pattern of responses over many decisions. The self is an active participant in the construction and maintenance of the environment in which it responds. The central factors of this implicit consideration are needs. There can be other factors, but in a healthy individual the needs will be central. Unhealthy individuals pursue substitutes that may only roughly approximate the needs (e.g. power and control instead of autonomy). 

Violence is a symptom of a cultural disease process that values power and control over healthy expressions of autonomy and relatedness. The disease builds on evolutionarily valuable instincts for fighting off predators. The disease process begins with normalizing need neglect, proceeds to normalizing need thwarting, and, at its most extreme, culminates with a system of beliefs and values that take violence to be both a necessary and desirable part of life. 

I created an extended version of the Puller scenario as a Choose Your Own Tragedy story, Click here for a mobile friendly PDF version.

References:

Anderson, J., & Winthrop, R. (2025). The disengaged teen: Helping kids learn better, feel better, and live better. Crown Publishing Group.

Biglan, A. (2015). The nurture effect: How the science of human behavior can improve our lives and our world. New Harbinger Publications.

Damasio, A. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2019). Brick by brick: The origins, development, and future of self-determination theory. In A. J. Elliot (Ed.), Advances in motivation science (Vol. 6, pp. 111–156). Elsevier Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.adms.2019.01.001 

Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.

Sheldon, K. M. (2022). Freely determined: What the new psychology of the self teaches us about how to live. Basic Books

Slutkin, G. (2026) The end of violence: Eliminating the world’s most dangerous epidemic. New York, NY: Little, Brown, & Company.

Tan, L., Sosa, F., Talbot, E., Berg, D., Eversz, D., & Hackenberg, T.D. (2014). Effects of predictability and competition on group and individual choice in a free-ranging foraging environment, Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior. 101(2):288-302. doi: 10.1002/jeab.76.

Winthrop, R., Shoukry, Y., & Nitkin, D. (2025). (rep.). The disengagement gap: Why student engagement isn’t what parents expect. Brookings Institute. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-disengagement-gap/. 

Motivation Does Not Cause Learning, But You’re Missing the Point

There seems to be a misunderstanding about the relationship between motivation and the duty of care known as in loco parentis among folks in the education field. It is true that motivation is only indirectly related to academic performance, but that is a trivial fact. The important fact that seems to be overlooked is that when children are in the custody of educators that means that need satisfaction is a prior obligation to academically educating them. The moment you took custody of the child from their parent you became obligated to ensure their well-being as a pre-condition to providing instruction. That means that you do not have an option about providing support for their primary human needs. Primary human needs are the most central CAUSES of well-being, by definition, and they also cause motivation to be certain ways, too. Both parents, and by extension all adults that they entrust custody of their children to, are duty bound to ensure their well-being, which necessarily means providing support for their primary needs and ensuring their motivations are more autonomous than controlled. 

No reasonable parent or teacher would accept the existence of a school that recklessly starved, suffocated, dehydrated, or exposed children to the elements. It should be equally abhorrent to accept schools that routinely thwart psychological needs which will manifest as a pattern of controlled motivations in their students and teachers.

Reading: Drop the Evolutionarily Secondary Skill Bullshit

The notion that reading difficulties are a consequence of that skill being evolutionarily secondary is bullshit. Children have an innate desire to be a competent member of their tribe. Evolution equipped them with a need to be competent. That means that all children possess the skill to learn whatever it takes to become a competent member of their group. When learning to read is necessary to be a competent member of society and when there is support for their primary psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence in that society, children are perfectly capable of tapping their natural learning abilities to do so. The observation that children struggle with reading is more about embedding them in an institutional structure that undermines those needs and/or places other barriers in the way of the children tapping their innate learning capacities. 

The folks that posited the secondary skill bullshit were taking mainstream schooling to be the natural way of things, they failed to realize that the institutional social structures of mainstream schooling are the problem. If you are embedded in a mainstream school and want to do better by the children, it would be far more impactful to support their needs rather than adjusting your instructional techniques. Obviously, instruction should be done skillfully, but children need to arrive in the instructional situation after their primary psychological needs have been satisfied, not before. Remember, all adults with in loco parentis duties of care (not just teachers) must, first and foremost, ensure the well-being of the children. They can attend to their others duties once the duty of care has been fulfilled. 

Update: I found references to other more academically respectable critics of the notion of evolutionarily secondary skills.

Ellis, G. F. R. (2008). Commentary on“an evolutionarily informed education science” by David C. Geary. Educational Psychologist, 43(4), 206–213. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520802392216

Gray, P. (2016). Children’s natural ways of educating themselves still work: Even for the three Rs. In D. C. Geary & D. B. Berch (Eds.), Evolutionary psychology (pp. 67–93). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29986-0_3

Lancy, D. F. (2016). Teaching: Natural or cultural? In D. B. Berch & D. F. Lancy (Eds.), Evolutionary perspectives on child development and education (pp. 33–65). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29986-0

Writing is not Transcribing Thoughts

If we thought with words then writing would be easy since we would just have to transcribe our thoughts. Maybe I’m weird but that is not what my writing process is like. I have thoughts that I have to translate into words and then I have to extensively edit the words to convey more of the thoughts than the first translation did. Plus, some thoughts evolve throughout the writing and editing process. And when I am engaged in a feedback process with editors who are not me I have to contend with what they are taking from my writing and projecting back at me both through their words and any other channels of communication to which I have access. 

If you hold the opinion that you think in words, does that mean that you have never had a thought that you couldn’t put into words?

Does it mean that you have never felt a magnitude of awe that made you speechless?

If there are people who think entirely in words I pity the limitations of their world. I also fear for the real world consequences of their thought processes. 

Are there advocates of the 3Rs version of Back-to-Basics that are assuming that teaching the 3Rs is the ultimate form of education because that is, practically speaking, complete access to the their entire world? 

On second thought, maybe that explains a lot of bad things in the world. If people in power are limited to thinking and acting based on words alone then they are living in such an impoverished world that they are an order of magnitude more delusional that those of us whose thinking transcends words. 

Our education system is a failure to every child who leaves childhood without having experiences that transcend the 3Rs. 

I wrote about a similar topic recently: magical thinking about language

(While I was writing this I found that there is very limited information about the modes of people's thoughts. Linda Kreger Silverman estimates 25% of people think only in words, but there appears to be some other source that estimates a range of zero to one percent. My biases and the fact that I could find no corroboration of Silverman's claim have me suspect that none to one percent might be more right.)

Lamentation For How The World Might Have Been: Reflections on Science And The Good by James Davison Hunter & Paul Nedelisky

A Book Review by Don Berg

(~10 min. to read)

Imagine that you have worked out the next iPhone for your industry, the most perfectly designed product that will create a major revolution. You create a mockup that is elegant and you figure it will be cheap to produce in factories that won't pollute anything. You get your colleagues to start working out how to make it as you raise money to fund their work on a prototype. Social media is abuzz with the possibilities; anticipating a moderate price that would generate abundant profits, millions of people have promised to buy it, if your initial assumptions all hold true. 

This story of potential success would mean that you have created a compelling case for the way you want the world to be. But it turns out that deeply hidden in the recesses of your idea is an assumption of perpetual motion, moving faster than light speed, spontaneous generation of life, or some other violation of the known facts about the physical, chemical, biological, or psychological universe. If you refuse or fail to disclose the underlying assumption upon which your invention relies then you will be risking accusations of fraud. You can argue that achieving the necessary breakthrough is just about to happen, but you should be prepared for your investors, potential customers, and regulators to lose their patience if you switch from producing the promised product to doing basic research.

This is not a complete fantasy. Cold fusion energy, laundry balls, Baby Einstein videos, and many other inventions have run some variation of this course. In a more basic context, the statement “grass is green” is also about the world as we would like it to be rather than about how the world actually is. Despite our assumption that color is inherent to objects, vision scientists have determined that this is not technically true. According to the book Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought, by cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, when linguists examined what people mean by the phrase “grass is green” they mean that there is some inherent quality of the grass that has the property of greenness. But what the vision scientists declare to be true about the universe is that there is no inherent characteristic of the grass that has the property of greenness. All colors arise only as a consequence of the interactions among the reflectance of objects, e.g. blades of grass, the local lighting conditions, and the neural structures of our vision systems. Greenness is an emergent property of the situation of looking at grass with a mind embodied in a particular way, not something about the grass independent of the rest of the situation. 

The nature of morality, it turns out, is like the nature of color. Despite a long history of well respected people making the assumption that morality is a transcendent mind-independent reality, there is no empirical evidence that this is true. Morality ultimately depends on cultural assumptions and/or individual understanding, no matter how much we might prefer that NOT to be the case. It is not relevant to the facts of the universe how widely accepted or how convincingly argued the case for a transcendent mind-independent moral reality is.

Science And The Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality by James Davison Hunter & Paul Nedelisky is a book length lamentation of this fact. They, however, take their lamentation one step too far. I will let the authors set out the terms that are under consideration and then quote their own summary of their argument to present the step that is too far. 

A Lexical Range: The Prescriptive, the Descriptive, and the Prudential 

First, "morality" can mean the realm of right and wrong, good and bad, whether these are grounded by fundamental moral laws or by the value of particular things and states of affairs. … This morality is prescriptive, meaning it is supposed to justifiably guide human action. This is the kind of morality we might describe as "genuine," "real," "prescriptive," or "authoritative." [Following Lakoff and Johnson, I also refer to it as “transcendent,” as in transcending the embodiment of individual minds.]

Second, “morality” can mean what people think is right and wrong—the realm of social rules and practices, and the rules or decisions that describe what groups of humans believe constrain certain kinds of behavior and encourage other kinds. This is the sense of morality we intend when we talk about a society’s moral code without intending to say anything about whether such a society’s codes really are right or wrong. This is also the sense of morality under investigation in the vast majority of scientific work on morality. We might call morality in this sense descriptive.

Third, "morality" can mean something practical or instrumental. In this sense, it concerns what one should and shouldn’t do, but where the "should" isn’t a moral "should" in the lived and prescriptive sense. That is, there’s a kind of ought that is practical without being ethical. It’s the sort of "ought" we mean when we say things like, "Well, if you want to win the lottery, then you ought to buy lottery tickets. In such cases, we aren’t saying that anyone morally ought to buy lottery tickets, but instead just that if someone’s goal is to win the lottery, then to achieve it they would have to buy some lottery tickets. This kind of normativity is sometimes called prudential. [pp. 141-142]

The following quotes are from their preface with their claims in bold:

[T]he new moral science … tells us nothing about what moral conclusions we should draw. 

This is not happenstance. There are good reasons why science has not given us [genuine/ real/ prescriptive/ authoritative/ transcendent] moral answers. The history of these attempts, along with careful reflection on the nature of moral concepts, suggests that empirically detectable moral concepts must leave out too much of what morality really is, and moral concepts that capture the real phenomena aren’t empirically detectable.

[T]he idea of morality as a mind-independent reality has lost plausibility for the new moral scientists. They no longer believe such a thing exists. Thus, when they say they are investigating morality scientifically they nowmean something different by "morality" from what most people in the past have meant by it and what most people today still mean by it. In place of moral goodness, they substitute the merely useful, which is something science can discover. Despite using the language of morality, they embrace a view that, in its net effect, amounts to moral nihilism.

When it began, the quest for a moral science sought to discover the good [as in a genuine/real/prescriptive/authoritative morality]. The new moral science has abandoned that quest and now, at best, tells us how to get what we want [because they found only descriptive and prudential moralities]. With this turn, the new moral science, for all its recent fanfare, has produced a world picture that simply cannot bear the weight of the wide-ranging moral burdens of our time. [pp. xiv-xv, Preface: The Argument, In Brief. Italics in original. Bold added.]

Most of Hunter and Nedelisky's claims are simply consistent with the facts stated by the “new moral scientists” and the book seems to have been motivated by their dislike of what “the new moral science” has found. It is the accusation of “nihilism” and the claim that the morality described by science “cannot bear the weight of the wide-ranging moral burdens of our time” which shifts their lamentation from a thoughtful exploration of the findings into an accusation that is a step too far.

A quick online search suggests that “nihilism” is defined as the rejection of all religious and moral principles, the belief that life is meaningless. To illustrate my concern, let's apply their argument to the scientific finding about the greenness of grass. Would it make sense to say that because vision scientists have found that objects are objectively colorless that they reject all color principles? Do artistic principles of color become invalidated by the fact that those colors do not happen to inhere in the objects that we perceive to be colored? That is a leap too far. It is irrelevant to the art world that color does not technically inhere in objects. That specific finding from vision science is just makes no practical difference to the art world or any other everyday application of color. An artist can insist all day long that visual art must adhere to abstract principles that happen to insist on color being an inherent property of objects but that discourse does not make their visual creations any better or worse. That insistence is irrelevant to the fact that the colors they use in their artistic creations are not inherent in the objects they created and that all non-blind people perceive as colored. They might attain some success for their insistence on those abstract principles, but that should be attributed to their flair for marketing, not to any meaningful insights into how the reality of color vision actually works. 

I suggest that it is irrelevant to human communities struggling with moral issues that morality is embodied rather than transcendent. It might have been convenient for the resolution of conflicting moral worldviews to have lived in a reality in which morality was transcendent. But, once we take a close enough look, science has consistently revealed that reality does not tend cooperate with our intuitions. It is, some might argue, a defining feature of science that it tends to contradict human intuitions about how the world works and the logical trains of thought that make the intuitions seem plausible. Quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and situational psychology are all anti-intuitive descriptions of the universe. It is not reasonable to argue that they are false because they are anti-intuitive, or because they contradict the a priori justifications and logical reasoning that props up the intuitions they falsify. You would make yourself irrelevant to making important things like engineering bridges, constructing buildings, and manufacturing computers by insisting on your intuition and subsequent logical reasoning that the fundamental elements of the universe are air, fire, water, and earth. Morality science is joining the anti-intuitive findings club. If you insist on abstract mind-independent moral concepts then you are insisting on eventually being rendered irrelevant in the reality of moral decision making. It has always been fiendishly difficult to alter the assumptions that consistently lead people to make and defend ideas that turn out to be poor descriptions of reality, but that does not mean we should give up the quest. 

Whether or not morality is embodied or transcendent is irrelevant for most practical purposes. It will be helpful to those with more technical interests in morality to be clear about how the reality of morality works since they can reject reliance on transcendent conceptions as inconsistent with practical moral decision making. After these scientific findings become more widely known and accepted in the fields that apply these concepts, such as our legal and political systems, there are probably important aspects of those systems that will greatly benefit from the new moral science. If the subsequent practical developments that followed from the insights from the sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology are any indication we can expect exciting things. But the implications need to be worked out in technical arenas before we can hope to apply them more broadly. And the changes they bring will not be easily accepted by everyone, there will be important political work to do if the changes are to bring about improvements rather than merely chaos.

It is romantic optimism to hold out for the development of a moral conception that fits with the intuitions that have energized the debates about morality throughout the ages, which Hunter and Nedelisky do a good job of summarizing. According to Lakoff and Johnson, cognitive linguists have already given us a crucially important insight into what we mean by morality: “Morality is about well-being.” This is the first line of Lakoff and Johnson's lengthy chapter on morality. I admit that I don't know how well validated this is across cultures, but I would be surprised if anyone outside of academia would balk at the idea. There are important questions about how big each person's moral universe is in terms of who gets included as a member of the group whose well-being they take to be important and how they intend to achieve well-being. 

By creating counterexamples with parallel logic and structure, Hunter and Nedelisky give the following examples to illustrate what they claim are “fatal assumptions” embedded in the idea that morality is about well-being.

[Quoting Sam Harris,] “Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value health. But once we admit that health is the proper concern of medicine, we can then study and promote it through science.… I think our concern for well-being is even less in need for justification then our concern for health is.… And once we begin thinking seriously about human well-being, we will find that science can resolve specific questions about morality and human values.” [This may have been written in ignorance of the much bolder and empirically validated claim made previously by Lakoff and Johnson in 1999.]

• Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value the enslavement of Africans. But once we admit that slavery is the proper concern of social science, we can then study and promote it through science.… I think our concern for embracing slavery is even less in need for justification then our concern for health is.… And once we begin thinking seriously about slavery, we will find that science can resolve specific questions about morality and human values.

• Science cannot tell us ... the purging of Jews, gypsies, and the mentally disabled from society. But once we admit that their eradication … .

• Science cannot tell us … the prohibition of gay marriage. But once we admit that such a prohibition … .

[pp.156-7]

The reconstructed statements they present are predicated on a moral logic that says, “My in-group is in a zero-sum game with that out-group and they are compromising our well-being. Therefore, in order for us to increase our well-being we must eliminate or take coercive control of that group.” The statements are all moral statements. What differs is who gets counted as us versus them and what we should do about the harms we perceive to be visited upon us. Those statements are only rendered abhorrent by changing the underlying conceptions used to understand them. If we enlarge who counts as us to include all human beings and change well-being into a non-zero-sum game then the moral conclusion is different, but the competing statements are no more or less moral. If we take them to be abhorrent it is because we operate from a different conception of how to achieve well-being for us. If Lakoff and Johnson are correct that morality is always conceptually about well-being (except in impractical esoteric contexts of speculative philosophizing), the challenge is to discern who is included and how the causality of well-being is conceptualized, which they go into in detail. 

As I understand the state of scientific facts at this time, A) cognitive linguists have studied moral concepts and determined that morality is fundamentally about well-being in everyday (non-academic) use, B) within psychology, my area of expertise, there is clear evidence that well-being is predicated on satisfying psychological needs for sleep, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and C) ill-being diminishes human psychological functioning. Therefore, if we value maximizing or even optimizing human psychological functioning then maximizing well-being is necessary. Self-Determination Theory, the framework I study, implies that psychological well-being is not a zero-sum game. The alternative constructions above are proposing to do harm to the well-being of the out groups they target by, at minimum, thwarting the primary psychological needs of those out groups. I conclude from this line of reasoning that the assumptions underlying the morally abhorrent examples are the result of faulty assumptions about the state of their world, not faulty moral reasoning. The burden of proof should be on those asserting such moral arguments to prove that their assumptions are true facts about the world. Self-defense is morally allowable, but only in the circumstance in which the “self” you are defending, whether individual or collective, is in mortal danger. If there was no mortal danger then any harms caused by the defensive actions taken are wrong. Those who create and perpetuate false alarms of mortal danger are potentially heinous villains and should be held responsible for any harms they may precipitate. This would be extremely tricky in practical terms, so I suspect it may not be currently plausible to impose an enforcement regime based upon this kind of assessment. But my premises about the state of the world, assumptions about who counts as “us,” and embodied moral reasoning are no less valid for being prudential and not having been based in transcendent moral ideals.

I found Hunter and Nedelisky's book to be quite readable and I appreciate their providing a concise summary of the deep background to this debate about the nature of morality. It took me a while to figure out my objection, since they do such a good job of presenting the scientific findings that I have been reading about for many years. Based on an early negative intuition I found myself looking for something to object to, but I also had to keep conceding that they were getting all the facts right. Even after identifying “nihilism” as the source of my discomfort it took careful reflection to articulate what specifically was objectionable about it. It's well worth the read, but keep in mind that they are merely lamenting their discomfort with the scientific findings that they report on so well.

Teaching Math Teaching Podcast Interview with Don Berg

Here is a link to my interview on the Teaching Math Teaching Podcast with Eva Thanheiser, Dusty Jones, and Joel Amidon hosting. 

https://www.teachingmathteachingpodcast.com/16

We discussed the work of Deeper Learning Advocates, the hidden curriculum, deeper learning, and the one thing that all teachers should do.

Here's the timepoints for each of their main questions:

What are some examples of the "hidden curriculum?"

2:00

What decisions should students be making?

2:54

What you mean by "deeper learning?

10:45

What is one thing a teacher can take from this podcast?

19:30

Your books?

22:50

A Better Proxy: How to Evaluate Equity in K-12 Schools

Even though I'm a white male soaked in privilege I have a personal history with busing, like presidential candidate Kamala Harris who brought up her busing experience in the Democratic debate in Miami, Florida, on June 28, 2019. In the Long Beach Unified School District, where I grew up in California, they decided to invite kids, like me, to be bused into predominantly black schools in poorer neighborhoods in order to participate in magnet programs. I took advantage of two of those options; in 5^th and 6^th grades I went to SHARP at Signal Hill Elementary and all through high school I attended PACE at Long Beach Polytechnic High. 

Each magnet program made the school populations more diverse, but they took very different approaches to the fact of that diversity. At the elementary school the magnet program classrooms were separate from the rest of the school and our schedules barely overlapped so we had little contact with the mostly black regular program kids. Even though we helped to diversify the demographic numbers of the school-as-a-whole, the school was not really integrated. On the other hand, the high school program took a proactive attitude towards making integration a positive aspect of its culture with good results. Us kids in the program had many opportunities to interact with the kids who were not in it and race was addressed directly. In my experience school integration can be both good and bad, depending on how it is done. It is not enough to take a simple for or against position when it comes to racially integrating schools. 

Shortly after Harris's comments brought busing back into the national discourse, an article came out with the headline, "Did Busing Work?" (https://all4ed.org/did-busing-work/). Based on my experience I am skeptical of claims that busing specifically, and desegregation more broadly, are necessary solutions to inequities in our school system. Even though I did benefit from the programs to which I was bused, I'm not one of the people who needed better access to those benefits. More importantly, my argument for rethinking the equity issue derives more from recent insights into the psychology of learning than on the effects of past policies.

Objectively, desegregation did improve educational outcomes for black children in those places and times when it was achieved, according to a study reported in the Hechinger Report (https://hechingerreport.org/two-generations-desegregation/). But was the difference made by desegregation in and of itself (white and black children sitting in the same classroom or school)? The researchers said the mechanism of improvement was more likely the increases in spending that went with the desegregation. I further suspect that no one would be naive enough to think that spending, per se, is the mechanism for improvement, either. Spending is a proxy for putting capable teachers in front of students who can benefit from their teaching capabilities with some minimal level of material support (in the form of books and other relevant resources for the children to learn with/from). 

We set public policy using proxies for important things quite often. For instance, the state health department's restaurant inspectors do not culture bacteria from each dish in each restaurant in order to count the number of toxic or disease-producing microorganisms as a means for deciding whether the food is safe to eat or not. They use the proxies of good personal hygiene by workers and their implementation of well-established “best practices” for safe handling of foods to stand in for whether or not the food is actually safe for consumption. 

We have been using proxies in the education industry forever. Education is generally considered an ethereal mystery that we can only evaluate through proxies. Test scores, grades and diplomas are proxies for being educated. Desegregation is a proxy for equitable deployment of resources. To be precise, in the absence of a good solid scientific theory that would more clearly indicate where to focus our attention regarding how to produce the kind of learning we need to produce, we use proxies. It is a perfectly rational thing to do. 

Consider further that the particular proxies that have historically been chosen do not reliably indicate what they are assumed to indicate. What if food inspectors were more concerned about the smells in the restaurant than the germs? This is a plausible choice of proxy for an inspectorate that believed in the miasma theory of disease. The miasma theory says that bad smells cause disease, not germs. A miasma-believing inspector might object to the use of harsh smelling chemical disinfectants and prefer the abundant use of perfume to create more pleasing smells instead. (Before the institutional adoption of germ theory the strategic use of perfume was mistakenly considered an acceptable medical practice for combatting the spread of contagious diseases.) Proxy measures are always problematic when they do not do the job we expect them to do. 

What would it mean if desegregation, as a proxy for equitable deployment of teachers and resources, was not valid? What if test scores, grades and diplomas are not valid as proxies for getting an education? Finally, what if we know there are more scientifically valid ways to measure educationally relevant features of classroom and school situations that would be better proxies for indicating our success along the path to attaining an educated citizenry? In short, what if we're getting it all wrong?

I have to clarify three things before continuing. Fair warning: the three things are necessarily a little more technical and/or philosophical in nature, so be patient for four paragraphs. First, I take it as a given that the goal of every individual parent is to ensure that their child is educated and that, in a face-to-face confrontation between two parents of different races, no sane parent would ever openly endorse a desire to sacrifice one child's education for another. In a one-on-one confrontation with someone who shares their identity as a parent, even a die-hard racist would be reluctant to share those stereotyping thoughts that demean that other person and their child. This is a version of the moral dilemma presented in the classic film Sophie's Choice (1982). Spoiler alert: Meryl Streep plays a Jewish mother who survived the Nazi concentration camps and was forced by a guard to choose which one of her children should be killed in order for her and the other child to survive. Every individual parent recognizes, if only intuitively, that being put in the position wherein they are asked to sacrifice their own child's education for the education of someone else's child would put them in a thoroughly unacceptable moral bind. No mentally competent person (parent or not) would wish that kind of moral catch-22 on anyone. 

Our education system currently makes you decide this kind of moral issue without telling you that the decision you made will have that effect. You don't even realize you are being made to choose some children for sacrifice because the children to be sacrificed are usually not your own. And those parents who are enduring (or even actively working against) the sacrifice of their own child's education may be deflected from the real problems because they are paying attention to invalid proxies that do not accurately indicate whether an education is being effectively offered/attained or not. My point, for now, is that we can expect pervasive good intentions on the part of all citizens when they properly understand the nature of the situation as one in which morally bankrupt sacrifices have been forced upon us because we did not understand how those sacrifices were actually happening. We shall proceed on the assumption that everyone has good intentions, no matter how unwittingly we might be undermining them or how unskillfully we may be pursuing them with our current pattern of political choices. To put this in another way, we are acknowledging that there are system-wide effects that are having unintended negative consequences requiring system-level solutions, despite the fact that everyone is doing their best. 

Second, we are all in this together: the fundamental promise of membership in society is that we will collectively provide for the education of all of our fellow citizens. United we stand, divided we fall, and the only true unifier is education and the very best divider is ignorance. “A rising tide will lift all boats” would be a sound idea if that tide is providing universal opportunities to become educated. We are assuming that an “educated” person is someone who perceives accurately, thinks clearly, and acts effectively on self-selected goals and aspirations that are appropriate to their situation without necessarily being consciously aware that this is what they are doing. Our school system does a poor job of facilitating children to develop the skills of selecting goals and aspirations, in particular, because it pervasively denies them opportunities to make significant choices about their own activities. Learning in schools is mostly shallow because of this pattern of children being prevented from exercising enough control over their own activities. Making the distinction between deep and shallow learning is crucial to understanding how education is sacrificed for some children and how this pervades our school system without anyone intending it to do so. (My book More Joy More Genius has a more complete discussion of this definition of education and how it relates to the patterns of deep and shallow learning in K-12 schools.)

Third, we now have a scientific insight into learning that must inform how we proceed with education strategies from here on out. In particular, over about five decades of psychological research into motivation and engagement has revealed that we can make one critical and universally applicable claim regarding learning that invalidates many of the proxies that we are currently relying upon to manage the system. The claim: Engagement is a necessary precondition for deeper learning and, conversely, the observed disengagement of a majority of students and teachers causes a pervasive pattern of shallow and fake learning (getting good grades or passing tests without understanding the material). The reason that this claim is “critical” is because it inherently calls into question many of the assumptions about learning that appear to be embedded in the system. The research tradition that this claim draws from, Self-Determination Theory (SDT), has been carefully accumulating empirical evidence for decades to support its explanation of the roles of motivation and engagement in human behavior. The researchers investigating and articulating SDT did not set out to create a theory of learning, but they have inadvertently laid the foundation for a more scientifically respectable one than we have ever had available before. The foundation is a causal chain that clearly sets out necessary (but not sufficient) psychological conditions for deeper learning. In other words, we know that there are some critically important prerequisites to the deeper learning that is necessary to be a productive citizen in our globalized society today. The pervasive disengagement of both teachers and students shows that some of those prerequisites are consistently undermined instead of supported in most schools. 

Remember the magnet programs I attended in school? Despite being busy and jumping through the hoops to look good enough to get into an elite college, I was mostly disengaged throughout much of my schooling. I was encouraged to attend those magnet programs because I was bored with the regular classes, an even more extreme form of disengagement than the fake learning I practiced. I’m now a psychologist who specializes in motivation and engagement in schools and the fact is that disengagement is bad for learning. Jumping through the hoops as an expression of fake learning is one of the most severe problems in our school system. It is a severe problem because the system itself does not recognize how it fails to educate many children who look like they are successful. Thank you for your patience, now back to the main subject of this essay.

What role should desegregation play in our school system today? Here's a radical thought that might get me into hot water with some hard-core desegregationists when it gets taken out of context: What if we focus on the educational quality of the environments into which children are placed rather than the demographic characteristics? The trouble I anticipate is that this seems like a restatement of the failed "separate but equal" legal standard that the Brown decision over turned. 

The court, in Brown v. Board of Education, took a prudent step toward revising their view of how to ensure that all American citizens, regardless of race, would be supported by their states to become educated. The prior "separate but equal" legal standard established in 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson was not getting the job done. Jim Crow was the law of the land in the South which meant that black people were too often being treated as if they were slaves (despite slavery being illegal) and otherwise being oppressed in a highly systematic way, according to Douglas Blackmon's book Slavery By Another Name and other analyses of that period in American history. In schools this took the form of separate black schools that were not given adequate funding or other forms of support that would have enabled them to function at the most minimal levels. They were separate and unsupported, thus unable to provide equal educational opportunities. 

The "separate but equal" legal standard failed because systemic racism undermined the minimal deployment of teachers and resources to serve minority children. White school boards throughout the country were failing to make equal provisions for teachers and resources in schools that served black communities, though most egregiously in the South. Those black communities were shorted but they were also subjected to the power of those boards without effective political recourse to righting those wrongs, until they eventually got the highest court in the land to decide in their favor and use federal power to force states to put new strategies into play as a result of the Brown decision. Desegregation was, in essence, a strategy for ensuring that teachers and resources were deployed more equitably. There was never an argument that shifting the demographics of schools was actually going to be a direct causal mechanism for improving educational outcomes. The argument was always, I believe, that desegregation was a reasonable proxy measure for the equitable deployment of teachers and other resources.

My new claim, that the pursuit of “equality” is now more plausible, is based on that fact that we now have a whole different context for attempting to achieve the educational outcomes that are at the heart of these issues. When "separate but equal" was first established, there was no federal department of education, the federal government had a very limited record of intervention in education issues, Jim Crow was in full force, and there were no accurate scientific insights into learning that would subsequently withstand prolonged scientific inquiry. To be clear, I am still against the "separate" part when it is enforced by any state or corporate entity, but I believe we are in a different position as a society in terms of making effective efforts to achieve the "equal" part.

We now know that psychological engagement is a fundamental part of the deeper learning that is required to understand and make a productive contribution to our global society. Engagement in a classroom does not depend on the demographics of the students and teachers. It can be negatively affected by a classroom or school culture that creates a hostile environment for some minority of students, but a denigrated minority can be created by putting a focus on just about any demographic detail and even some non-demographic details, e.g. the “dumb kids.” There is a fundamental problem that affects learning when there is any kind of threat to some of the learners in a classroom. Threats are barriers to deeper learning. That kind of threat cannot be ameliorated by adjusting the demographic details of each classroom. It needs to be addressed by adjusting the classroom and school culture (referred to as “climate” in education parlance). 

Successful implementation of “equal” educational opportunities was not possible prior to the development of a scientifically respectable understanding of deeper learning. But now that we have the beginning of that understanding we need to use it and revisit the possibility of ensuring a baseline of educational quality through measures of engagement in classrooms and schools. I am not advocating for separation, but I am advocating for a scientifically informed foundation of quality, regardless of existing demographics. Academic measures need to be recognized as proxies for what matters, they do not matter in and of themselves. What matters is children being fully engaged with subjects and activities that are valued by their local communities. If we can measure that engagement, then we are measuring what matters in education. One way of doing that, which has already been scientifically validated, is the Hope Survey. The Hope Survey was the subject of the book Assessing What Really Matters in Schools: Creating Hope for the Future by Ronald Newell and Mark Van Ryzin. The Hope Survey is a school and classroom climate measure. Other measures have been validated within the Self-Determination Theory community, but they have not yet been adapted for the kind of widespread use that will help transform the school system. Another measure that includes engagement and is readily available to many schools, but does not have the same scientific provenance as the Hope Survey, is the Gallup Student Poll.

Desegregation is an unreliable proxy for what really matters in schools. Test scores, grades, and diplomas are also unreliable proxies. Let's take on a new and better kind of proxy for indicating our progress towards educating all children: engagement. Every policy or strategy for the improvement of equity in schools today needs to be evaluated against how well it improves the engagement of teachers and students. When we can clearly see, based on scientifically valid and reliable measures, that the majority of both teachers and students are engaged, we will have effected a major transformation of the school system. That transformation will make better proxies out of test scores, grades, and diplomas (assuming they survive the culling of practices that create disengagement). More importantly, that transformation will be taking us down the path to achieving our true aspiration: the education of all of our fellow citizens.