Learned Helplessness and the year Y2K By Bruce Renehan
If you have read my book Daughter of Babylon, you know that I no longer buy into the idea that the world is coming to a cataclysmic end in our lifetimes. On a personal level, not only was it a way that many of us wasted decades of our lives but, there is ample documentation that people have been making the same mistake that we have for nearly two thousand years. On a different level, the divulging self-occupation in activities like waiting it out for the return of Christ is psychologically and socially damaging. This article explains the principle of learned helplessness and how socially self-defeating it is.
I have periodically had the opportunity to teach in several classrooms in the county that I live in. In every classroom that I have been in, I have found that there is somewhat of a social structure. There are a small handful of kids who have very poor academic and social skills and then, reflecting the ubiquitous bell curve, a handful of good, well-groomed, disciplined kids and the larger remainder being "average" students making up the general population of the class. That bottom portion of students is so toxic to the functioning and success of the class as a whole. One of the most disheartening things that a teacher can hear a student say is, "I don't care about my future." I have heard this many times from kids who are destined to a life of failure. Many of us have heard the quip, "Too soon old, too late smart." I have often wondered, if we could just teach that one thing to our nation's youth what potential these kids would have in the next millennium. It used to be felt that success is based upon something called IQ. This is no longer a popular belief among educators. There is something much more fundamental to the mastery of one's destiny; it is simple caring. I have asked students, from the third grade onward, why they just don't care. There are many variations of how they've answered but it is basically the same message. A beautiful little red-haired third grader told me, "I don't expect to live past 20." She told me that her parents had asserted this to her this repeatedly. A group of eighth graders told me collectively, "Haven't you heard? These guys on TV said that the Bible predicts the end of the world in the year 2000." And so our children are hoodwinked into giving up on their future.
Ironically, the one thing we have more control over than anything else is our future, and yet so few people are aware of that. It is the very feeling that one has no power or control over one's environment or destiny that causes a type of a disabling impotence that psychologists have come to label "learned helplessness." Once we come to feel powerless over the outcome of any action we might take, we surrender and endure whatever pain we accept as our inevitable fait.
This phenomenon was first discovered about 40 years ago when behaviorists Richard Solomon and L. C. Wynne, experimenting with dogs learned that there was a residual effect of their learning through mild electrocution. Years later, Solomon, with colleagues Martin Seligman and Steven Maier would refine their understanding of this fear response with another experiment:
They began by first putting the dogs in a chamber and giving them "unavoidable shock." The dogs (as you might suspect) were fairly upset at first, and showed all of the emotional behaviors Solomon and Wynne's animals had displayed on their first trial. Eventually, however, the dogs settled down and "coped" with the inescapable pain as best they could.
Then, Maier and his colleagues put the dogs in the shuttle box. Now the animals could learn to avoid the shock if they cared to do so. However, none of them did. Even though they could see safety on the other side of the barrier, the animals refused to escape. They simply sat there, apparently "depressed," and endured the shock for trial after trial.
Seligman then tried a number of "tricks" to get these animals to jump. For instance, he put food on the other side of the barrier. The dogs ignored the food. He tried coaxing them over by calling to them. But the dogs sat passively just accepting their "bad luck." Finally, Seligman tied ropes around their necks and pulled them over the barrier by brute force. He reports it sometimes took more than 30 "pulling sessions" before the dogs learned they could avoid the shock by voluntarily jumping the barrier (McConnell, 1989).
The behavior of Seligman's dogs showed him that when we feel there is nothing we can do to escape the unavoidable, we simply give up and close our minds to the possibility of making something out of our future.
Seligman's Theory of Learned Helplessness holds that when people (or other animals) experience outcomes that are independent of their actions, they come to expect that their efforts to "gain control" will be futile. They become depressed and simply "suffer the stress" rather than try to reduce it. And they frequently become prime candidates for stress-related diseases (Seligman, 1976, qtd. in McConnell).
Learned helplessness is very prevalent in our society. In counseling sessions, clients always point to their helplessness as inevitable and the cause of their psychological problems. Everything from the inability to leave a physically abusive mate to the feeling that one's destiny is to spend eternity in hellfire is such a common theme with clients suffering mental turmoil and learned helplessness. Those of us who have sat in such sessions know that almost without exception, our client will also report a childhood where they have learned that they are helpless from parents who are sexually, physically, and mentally abusive to them.
Does it really benefit our society to have so many wounded and helpless citizens in it? Other behavioral scientists have taken Seligman's Theory and gone on to discover the effects of stress and lack of self-efficacy on a person's feeling of helplessness. Helplessness is the very source of depression, a major mental health issue in our society. We also know that helplessness is a very subjective issue with people. In other words, one person may be rendered helpless in a situation that causes another person to become excited with challenge. Students have often told me, "I can't do this, teacher," wanting me to buy into their own self-defeat. Good teachers don't buy into the belief that children are too helpless to learn.
I recently taught an eighth grade class of minority children filled with excuses why they couldn't learn. When I asked one black girl why they felt they had to resist learning so much, she told me, "We're ghetto kids. We're supposed to be this way." Later, the principal came in and sat in the back of my class. He too had been raised in the ghetto as a black child and now possessed two master's degrees and was preparing to get his PhD. In front of the class, I told the principal what the young girl had told me. I told the children how growing up in the 60's in Texas, no black child was allowed to attend school with white children. The principal said, "Let me share with you children something. As a boy in Selma, Alabama, I too could not attend school with white children, even though I was a straight A student. When it came time for me to attend college, I had to be escorted by National Guardsmen. I know your parents would not like to hear you children say what you have told your teacher here today."
It seems that the easier some people have it, the quicker they give up. Some are easily self-defeated, some take defeat as a challenge. If being in the Worldwide Church of God has taught me anything, it is that giving up on life and waiting for the end of the world is a big cop out. It is our challenge to actively participate in the future of our planet.
Source Cited
McConnell, J. (1989). Understanding Human Behavior. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Fortworth. pp. 209-211.
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