How to make better lives
In this episode, we explore one real-world way to create the skills we’ll all need for a better and more thrivable world…
We live in a world now that seems to exist solely to prop up and pander to paediarchy, and to the ever-more-lethal covert cry-babies and their concomitant cults. And in the meantime, our chances of long-term survival get whittled away further and further every day. Is there any way out of this mess?
Actually, yes, there is.
Quite a lot of ways, in fact.
Some of them surprisingly simple. Surprisingly successful, too, under the circumstances.
For me, there’s one in particular that comes to mind. One where, in a world in which the supposed adults so often regress back to self-centred childishness, it’s their children who learn to be the responsible adults instead. And gain far better lives for doing so.
How? Well, it has something to do with things like this:
Although I’ve sort of fictionalised it a bit here, for use in my sort-of-novel Yabbies, published way back in 2010, it’s actually built directly upon a real story.
Again, the sort-of-quote that follows here is framed as fiction. Yet it’s also real - and usable as such, too.
From The Courier-Mail, Saturday
A quiet crusader for social justice
By our US correspondent, Maggie Combin
It’s the most comprehensive social study ever undertaken. Its credentials are impeccable, its logic is flawless, its results are undeniable. It could well be the answer to inner-city stress, the best way to eradicate the seeds of crime. And it’s simple, cheap and effective.
So why are the US authorities so studiously ignoring it?
Perhaps it’s because it doesn’t involve guns and violence. It doesn’t involve jail. It doesn’t involve punishment of any kind. In fact it doesn’t involve much of anything they’d know as ‘crime prevention’.
Because the one thing that’s been proven to reduce crime – and reduce it dramatically – is entirely at the other end of the scale.
Playschools.
Since the mid-1970s, members of the HighScope project have worked tirelessly with inner-city kids and their families in some of the most run-down, crime-infested districts of urban Detroit, Michigan. Over the years, more than 30,000 two- and three-year-olds have passed through their doors.
The results are startling. As children, as teenagers, and then as adults, HighScope kids have markedly different lives from their compatriots in other cities. On average, they are two-thirds less likely to commit a crime; their incomes are 40 percent higher; they are 70 percent more likely to marry, and much more likely to stay married.
It’s good for the individual, obviously, and good for society too. But it also makes sound economic sense. The figures show that for every dollar spent on HighScope, the effective return to the community is at least seven times that much.
And all of this from just six months in playschool.
So how does this happen? When I visited HighScope’s leader David Weikart and his colleagues earlier this week, what I saw going on in the small schoolroom behind us seemed much the same as in any other pre-school. There were more parents than usual, including fathers, engaged in the activities, but on the surface that was about it.
Weikart explained the difference. “The content of what we teach doesn’t matter much. It’s more about the context. What we show is that every action has consequences, and that everyone, even a two-year-old, has choices about those actions that can shape their lives.”
Weikart’s guiding mantra for the children is ‘Plan, Do, Review’. “What works is helping people to understand that they alone have the choices that matter”, says this quiet crusader for social justice. “Punishment doesn’t work. It never has.”
Britain’s Home Office agrees. “HighScope is brilliant, we need to be doing more of it”, said a spokesman there last week. “Prison does work, after a fashion, but it is way too late and ruinously expensive. If you increase the prison population by 25 percent, you can reduce crime by up to one percent. Prison should only be regarded as an option of last resort.”
But it is advice that is falling on deaf ears in Weikart’s homeland. The state of Michigan recently withdrew further funding for HighScope, and is instead launching an ambitious prison-building programme, aiming to complete two new prisons next year alone. It seems probable that the only people who will gain from this policy are the shareholders of the ever-growing band of private companies who will run the new prisons.
Last month the US passed a grim milestone: two and a half million people, or one percent of the entire population, are now serving sentences behind prison bars. And most of these prisoners are young and black, as in so much of HighScope’s Detroit.
It is anyone’s guess as to how long it will take the US authorities to understand that Weikart is right, and that there is a better, cheaper way. As one who has seen too much already of the carnage in American society, that day cannot come soon enough.
Yes, that ‘newspaper report’ was fiction, of course, as was its reporter Maggie Combin, and likewise the Courier-Mail newspaper itself. Just a story, really. Yet most of the story’s content was entirely real, with much of it adapted from an article I’d read maybe twenty years or so ago in a British newspaper - The Independent, I think, but I don’t remember now. So David Weikart was a real person; HighScope was a real project, with real data and real impacts on real people’s lives; and although I’d paraphrased it somewhat, the remarks of the spokesman from the British Home Office were also mostly real as well.
Also all too real, sadly, was the rejection of HighScope in favour of an insanely-expensive programme of building privatised prisons - a programme that, in some parts of the US at least, still continues onward unabated to this day. Oh well.
The key point here, perhaps, is that it’s the principles behind things like HighScope that do actually work, where almost nothing else does. Building awareness of choice, and awareness that actions have real-world consequences; balancing short-term and long-term, balancing everything across the whole; learning how to work in teams, and use of learning-loops such as ‘Plan, Do, Review’: all of these are important in playschools, yes, yet they’re even more essential in ‘adult-work’ in business and elsewhere. All of them are tactics that I use and teach during every day in my ‘day-job’ in enterprise-architectures and the like - and the work won’t work without them. They really are that important in every kind of change - including the kind of big-picture changes that we’re all facing right now.
So the shortest summary would be this: Right now have a world full of adults who have regressed back to the worst of childishness. Which is why we’re in the really big mess that we are. Yet we also have various means such as HighScope, to help young children to learn how act like real adults. So perhaps those children can help the adults learn how to be adults again.
That’d be one good way out of this mess, anyway, wouldn’t you think?