August 17, 2014

August 17, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist 

Dear Reader, 

 

We can’t become scientific and continue to believe what we believe and behave the way in which we have always behaved. Our behavior is going to change based on what we are going to know. However, this has nothing to do with who we are, with our decision to act in a particular kind of way. It is caused by the circumstances which set the stage for us to act differently. Even if we resist behaviorology, based on our previous pre-scientific conditioning, this resistance will at one point be completely gone. Our knowledge will be is like light that dispels the darkness.

One can illustrate this with a student, who presumably was very bad in math, like this writer. He thought that he couldn’t do math and was able to avoid having to do it early on in his education. The fact was, however, that his first math teacher was an incredible jerk, who reminded this writer of his forceful, disapproving father. Many years later, after this writer had immigrated to the United States, and thus had drastically changed his environment, he felt like going back to school again to get his college education. There he had to come face to face with his so-called fear of math, but it turned out to be no big deal at all. A tutor told him repeatedly to calm down. This helped. Because he was stimulated to remain calm, he was able to learn math and got A’s for all his classes. He felt so confident that he became a math tutor himself and helped numerous students, who, like him, had been struggling. 

It is important to recognize here that this writer never struggled to overcome his fear of Math. Once a fear-free environment was facilitated, he was able to learn quickly, in other words, once the correct teaching was there, the student was learning. In spiritual circles there is an ancient proverb that says once the disciple is ready the master appears. This is of course a bunch of total nonsense. It is the other way around: once the teacher is truly teaching, the student will appear, that is, he or she will learn. The problem we have not paid much attention to is that many teachers aren’t teaching. They keep insisting on student’s being ready to learn, but who is preparing them? Focus on the student takes the attention away from the teachers, who either successfully create a learning environment or not. We couldn’t learn, because we blamed the individual for his or her behavior. We also blamed ourselves, but there is no one to be blamed, because we learn only due to our environments.