Mental Discipline

One hundred years ago, one of the explicit purposes of education was the training of the mind for effort, patience, willpower applied to accomplish a task, and similar concepts which were grouped under the name "mental discipline". One of the first attacks that Progressive educators made against the academic curriculum was that there was no such thing as mental discipline. Their argument was that an ability gained was not transferable to a new task. That is, learning the state capitals did not prepare you in any way to learn a new set of facts in any way later on. It was effort for effort's sake, nothing was gained, and time was wasted which might have benefited the student. These challenges are nearly 90 years old. Today there is nearly nothing left of mental discipline. Rote memorization, the use of challenging tasks to build a sense of accomplishment, the notion that certain subjects imparted some greater ability to reason (mathematics and Latin were favorites for this claim) are all discredited by educational experts and most practitioners. You can find math teachers who argue that math helps reasoning aptitude, but many are happy to achieve basic functioning (with a calculator) for daily purposes. The ability to assess the risk of, say, Mad Cow Disease, of smoking, unprotected sex, or speculating on precious metals, are not common goals. Many teachers have abandon imparting any kind of reasoning all together and just want to produce results on standardized tests, thereby making the same error of reasoning that students make, namely that the test is supposed to measure the actual goal of learning, not become the goal itself.

I wonder if it could be possible to study the role of the decline of mental discipline in the schools and the rise of problems currently being labeled as hyperactivity and attention deficit syndrome. It may well be that many such diagnoses frequently occur before school starts, so could not be blamed. I can't help suspecting that if part of school was the cultivation of patience, appliction of effort, delay of gratification, a sense of accomplishment over a difficult task mastered, that we might well see less ADHD.

Then again, it could all be television.