bad student holds shame sign: big fat F for the parents

brianlux

Let me state first that I'm very big on education. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time in school- both as a student and an employee, and I'm a total book junky. That said, I don't think getting good grades has much if anything to do with how good or smart or motivated a person is. There is a young man in my extended family who never graduated from high school. He knows more about wilderness survival and computers and mechanical things than I ever will. He can fix and repair just about anything you put in front of him. In his early twenties he bought and has maintained for several years a very nice, large house in an excellent neighborhood. I'm very confident he will continue to be quite successful in his life. He's a good, honest, hard working kid who found school to be a boring waste of time.

For all we know, the kid who had to sit out on the street and have himself humiliated may become the next Mike McCready or Woody Harrelson or (as catefrances pointed out) Mark Zuckerberg. Or he could become a total dirt bag.

But we don't really know much about this kid. I'd at least give him a chance to defend himself and, regardless, I don't think putting him on public display is at all appropriate.

Paul Andrews

Also we used to look at abuse in different ways:

Sexual abuse - this one is obvious and well publicised.
Physical abuse - again obvious and well publicised.
Neglect abuse - sometimes obvious but neglect can be very subtle and the consequences serious.
Emotional abuse - less obvious and often with very serious consequences.

Humiliating your kids - especially by design, often in public, is emotional abuse and not a way to achieve anything, less likely the results this parent intends.

Paul Andrews

brianlux wrote:

Let me state first that I'm very big on education. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time in school- both as a student and an employee, and I'm a total book junky. That said, I don't think getting good grades has much if anything to do with how good or smart or motivated a person is. There is a young man in my extended family who never graduated from high school. He knows more about wilderness survival and computers and mechanical things than I ever will. He can fix and repair just about anything you put in front of him. In his early twenties he bought and has maintained for several years a very nice, large house in an excellent neighborhood. I'm very confident he will continue to be quite successful in his life. He's a good, honest, hard working kid who found school to be a boring waste of time.

For all we know, the kid who had to sit out on the street and have himself humiliated may become the next Mike McCready or Woody Harrelson or (as catefrances pointed out) Mark Zuckerberg. Or he could become a total dirt bag.

But we don't really know much about this kid. I'd at least give him a chance to defend himself and, regardless, I don't think putting him on public display is at all appropriate.

Well played sir

Multiple intelligence is more than just a catch phrase and the sooner we understand that there is more to education than grades, standardised tests and benchmarks, the better we will all be.

Cate Francis displayed a perfect attitude to her kids' reports, yes look at the grades, but pay as much (if not more) attention to the affective domain comments in regard to Effort, Attitude and Application. An F with high effort is worth as much than an A if it is the best they can do.

brianlux

Paul Andrews wrote:

brianlux wrote:

Let me state first that I'm very big on education. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time in school- both as a student and an employee, and I'm a total book junky. That said, I don't think getting good grades has much if anything to do with how good or smart or motivated a person is. There is a young man in my extended family who never graduated from high school. He knows more about wilderness survival and computers and mechanical things than I ever will. He can fix and repair just about anything you put in front of him. In his early twenties he bought and has maintained for several years a very nice, large house in an excellent neighborhood. I'm very confident he will continue to be quite successful in his life. He's a good, honest, hard working kid who found school to be a boring waste of time.

For all we know, the kid who had to sit out on the street and have himself humiliated may become the next Mike McCready or Woody Harrelson or (as catefrances pointed out) Mark Zuckerberg. Or he could become a total dirt bag.

But we don't really know much about this kid. I'd at least give him a chance to defend himself and, regardless, I don't think putting him on public display is at all appropriate.

Well played sir

Multiple intelligence is more than just a catch phrase and the sooner we understand that there is more to education than grades, standardised tests and benchmarks, the better we will all be.

Cate Francis displayed a perfect attitude to her kids' reports, yes look at the grades, but pay as much (if not more) attention to the affective domain comments in regard to Effort, Attitude and Application. An F with high effort is worth as much than an A if it is the best they can do.

Thank you, Paul Andrews! I say this because despite the fact that my GPA in my last two years of college was something like 3.95, I had two college courses in which I received big fat F's. And they were optional course I chose rather than required courses. (But don't ask me what they were or I'll... :oops: ).

Maybe this kid will do better than I did.

Paul Andrews

brianlux wrote:

Paul Andrews wrote:

brianlux wrote:

Let me state first that I'm very big on education. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time in school- both as a student and an employee, and I'm a total book junky. That said, I don't think getting good grades has much if anything to do with how good or smart or motivated a person is. There is a young man in my extended family who never graduated from high school. He knows more about wilderness survival and computers and mechanical things than I ever will. He can fix and repair just about anything you put in front of him. In his early twenties he bought and has maintained for several years a very nice, large house in an excellent neighborhood. I'm very confident he will continue to be quite successful in his life. He's a good, honest, hard working kid who found school to be a boring waste of time.

For all we know, the kid who had to sit out on the street and have himself humiliated may become the next Mike McCready or Woody Harrelson or (as catefrances pointed out) Mark Zuckerberg. Or he could become a total dirt bag.

But we don't really know much about this kid. I'd at least give him a chance to defend himself and, regardless, I don't think putting him on public display is at all appropriate.

Well played sir

Multiple intelligence is more than just a catch phrase and the sooner we understand that there is more to education than grades, standardised tests and benchmarks, the better we will all be.

Cate Francis displayed a perfect attitude to her kids' reports, yes look at the grades, but pay as much (if not more) attention to the affective domain comments in regard to Effort, Attitude and Application. An F with high effort is worth as much than an A if it is the best they can do.

Thank you, Paul Andrews! I say this because despite the fact that my GPA in my last two years of college was something like 3.95, I had two college courses in which I received big fat F's. And they were optional course I chose rather than required courses. (But don't ask me what they were or I'll... :oops: ).

Maybe this kid will do better than I did.

I fucked up my senior year of high school through my own fault of just losing interest. However, when i was ready i turned my head back to study, did very well at university, got into teaching, always chose the harder schools where I felt i could be of most benefit, was nominated for a national education award (which i didn't get) worked on two projects that won youth services awards and then when i'd had enough of banging my head against the wall of government indifference and lack of funding, left education and started my own successful business. My grades in year 11 and 12 would never indicate the future I had ahead of me.

Education is very important, but not if it is 'just another brick in the wall'. Potential is not measured in grades, it only measures performance in a narrow band of subjects - and in the case of standardised tests - only on a given day.

Jeanwah

Wow, so much assumption on here from a little blip of a story with few details. After reading it, I know I certainly can't gauge the situation going on in that family, the boy, his classes, teachers or school. Who really knows what's going on here, because it's certainly not us!

catefrances

Jeanwah wrote:

Wow, so much assumption on here from a little blip of a story with few details. After reading it, I know I certainly can't gauge the situation going on in that family, the boy, his classes, teachers or school. Who really knows what's going on here, because it's certainly not us!

so its ok to humiliate a child in this way? i dont need to know the minutiae of this situation to know humiliating anyone, especially a child, is degrading no matter what the circumstances.

Jeanwah

catefrances wrote:

Jeanwah wrote:

Wow, so much assumption on here from a little blip of a story with few details. After reading it, I know I certainly can't gauge the situation going on in that family, the boy, his classes, teachers or school. Who really knows what's going on here, because it's certainly not us!

so its ok to humiliate a child in this way? i dont need to know the minutiae of this situation to know humiliating anyone, especially a child, is degrading no matter what the circumstances.

Who am I to judge here? Obviously you feel that it's your right to judge a story based on a few words, where there is no abuse going on. Fine. Get all upset about something you can't do a damn thing about as well as know nothing about it as well. I just don't find this topic worthy of getting upset about when the whole story isn't being told.

Paul Andrews

Jeanwah wrote:

catefrances wrote:

Jeanwah wrote:

Wow, so much assumption on here from a little blip of a story with few details. After reading it, I know I certainly can't gauge the situation going on in that family, the boy, his classes, teachers or school. Who really knows what's going on here, because it's certainly not us!

so its ok to humiliate a child in this way? i dont need to know the minutiae of this situation to know humiliating anyone, especially a child, is degrading no matter what the circumstances.

Who am I to judge here? Obviously you feel that it's your right to judge a story based on a few words, where there is no abuse going on. Fine. Get all upset about something you can't do a damn thing about as well as know nothing about it as well. I just don't find this topic worthy of getting upset about when the whole story isn't being told.

Sorry Jeanwah, I disagree, this is emotional abuse - a textbook case of it.

Without the background or any other details needed, what that parent is doing (even with good intentions) this is child abuse that will have ramifications - whether they be a breakdown in trust and respect for the parent, education or even society (every arsehole who hooted), this is not a good thing to do to your child and most likely the child's urge will be to revenge rather then acceptance of their mistakes and a future desire to do better.

All these actions did is stoke the parent's ego, like to dickwit who shot up his daughter's computer. It is not effective discipline and had far more chance of backfiring or producing further negative results. There are better and more effective ways to deal with issues such as this and prevention is obviously the best. When the bond between child and parent/school/society is broken, it is rarely due to a single incident but years of ineffective or negative actions (again often well intended). This child's failure most likely stemmed from issues than have been present in his life since the very beginning and turning them around usually required an examination of the entire environment, not just a public humiliation.

I'm not talking from my arse on this, it's based on years of research and real world experience dealing with kids and parent like this - and not like this. I feel qualified to judge.

chadwick

i think the kid will be ok in the years to come. i bet next year he has no F's on his report card. i wonder though how in the world did he get 3 F's? i was a disaster and had incredible problems and even more incredible hurdles to get over just to get a C or a B. the only class i ever got an A in was physical education. i was a hyper active little shit.

the schools fed me ridilin pills; this had a helping hand in turning me into a drug addict and drunkard. in the summer they took the ridilin away from me. during school months i was drugged up again. then back off the pills for the summer.

my grades were mostly C's & D's.

in high school i dropped out and went to drop out classes with my drug addicted friends. we were a mess. i fully believe it did not have to be that way.

i had a friend in school whom was a pot smoker by 6th grade if not sooner. by junior high school he was fully into cocaine and crank and whatever else. he used to sleep at school most days in high school, at his desk during class. we were in the fuck-ups class.

i never ever landed an A on anything until college. i only have 2 years of college. one day i will go back and i will study my ass off again and i will be badass.

i remember the teachers i had in college all loved me very much because i bust my balls. in grade school, junior high and high school i was a walking zombie.

the only way a kid can get three F on one report card is if he/she is fucking around being an idiot or the kid is actually very much messed up with real problems.

catefrances

oops double post.

catefrances

Jeanwah wrote:

catefrances wrote:

Jeanwah wrote:

Wow, so much assumption on here from a little blip of a story with few details. After reading it, I know I certainly can't gauge the situation going on in that family, the boy, his classes, teachers or school. Who really knows what's going on here, because it's certainly not us!

so its ok to humiliate a child in this way? i dont need to know the minutiae of this situation to know humiliating anyone, especially a child, is degrading no matter what the circumstances.

Who am I to judge here? Obviously you feel that it's your right to judge a story based on a few words, where there is no abuse going on. Fine. Get all upset about something you can't do a damn thing about as well as know nothing about it as well. I just don't find this topic worthy of getting upset about when the whole story isn't being told.

why humiliate the kid? is that ever acceptable? to me its not. thats all im saying.

peacefrompaul

Come on parents. It's 7th grade... High school is where it really counts if you're looking to get into college. They should help him with his classes instead of wasting their time humiliating him.

Paul Andrews

peacefrompaul wrote:

Come on parents. It's 7th grade... High school is where it really counts if you're looking to get into college. They should help him with his classes instead of wasting their time humiliating him.

Well said sir - we gotta have a beer next time I'm in the states

peacefrompaul

Paul Andrews wrote:

peacefrompaul wrote:

Come on parents. It's 7th grade... High school is where it really counts if you're looking to get into college. They should help him with his classes instead of wasting their time humiliating him.

Well said sir - we gotta have a beer next time I'm in the states

If I was 21 I would join you.

Byrnzie

Some of you may find the following interesting:

http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Code-Search ... 0446673714
Some call it" genius". Others have named it "spirit", "daimon", and even "guardian angel". But while philosophers and psychologists from Plato to Jung emphasized the fundamental essence of our individuality, our modern culture refuses to accept that a unique, formed soul is within us from birth, shaping as much as it is shaped.
...Drawing on the biographies of such disparate people as Ella Fitzgerald and Mohandas K. Gandhi, James Hillman argues that character is fate and shows how the soul, if given the opportunity, can assert itself even at an early age. The result is a reasoned and powerful road map to understanding our true nature and discovering an eye-opening array of choices -- from the way we raise our children to our career paths to our social and personal commitments to achieving excellence in our time.


http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/hillman.html
On Soul, Character and Calling:
A Conversation with James Hillman

'...London: You're not a very popular figure with the therapy establishment.

People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture, a sense that there is some purpose that has come with them into the world.

Hillman: I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy. It makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. What I'm trying to say is that, if a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society.

London: You can't fix the person without fixing the society.

Hillman: I don't think so. But I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person. We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, "What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?" We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.

London: You've said that you usually write out of "hatred, dislike, and destruction."

Hillman: I've found that contemporary psychology enrages me with its simplistic ideas of human life, and also its emptiness. In the cosmology that's behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or do anything. We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I'm an accident — a result — and therefore a victim.

London: A victim?

Hillman: Well, if I'm only a result of past causes, then I'm a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here. Or, if you look at it from the sociological perspective, I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

London: What about the idea that we are self-made, that since life is an accident we have the freedom to make ourselves into anything we want?

Hillman: Yes, we worship the idea of the "self-made man" — otherwise we'd go on strike against Bill Gates having all that money! We worship that idea. We vote for Perot. We think he's a great, marvelous, honest man. We send money to his campaign, even though he is one of the richest capitalists in our culture. Imagine, sending money to Perot! It's unbelievable, yet it's part of that worship of individuality.

But the culture is going into a psychological depression. We are concerned about our place in the world, about being competitive: Will my children have as much as I have? Will I ever own my own home? How can I pay for a new car? Are immigrants taking away my white world? All of this anxiety and depression casts doubt on whether I can make it as a heroic John Wayne-style individual.

London: In The Soul's Code, you talk about something called the "acorn theory." What is that?

Hillman: Well, it's more of a myth than a theory. It's Plato's myth that you come into the world with a destiny, although he uses the word paradigma, or paradigm, instead of destiny. The acorn theory says that there is an individual image that belongs to your soul.

The same myth can be found in the kabbalah. The Mormons have it. The West Africans have it. The Hindus and the Buddhists have it in different ways — they tie it more to reincarnation and karma, but you still come into the world with a particular destiny. Native Americans have it very strongly. So all these cultures all over the world have this basic understanding of human existence. Only American psychology doesn't have it.

London: In our culture we tend to think of calling in terms of "vocation" or "career."

Hillman: Yes, but calling can refer not only to ways of doing — meaning work — but also to ways of being. Take being a friend. Goethe said that his friend Eckermann was born for friendship. Aristotle made friendship one of the great virtues. In his book on ethics, three or four chapters are on friendship. In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it's hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it's not a vocation.

London: Motherhood is another example that comes to mind. Mothers are still expected to have a vocation above and beyond being a mother.

Hillman: Right, it's not enough just to be a mother. It's not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them. It's a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood — the sense that motherhood isn't itself a calling — also arises from economic pressure.

London: What implications do your ideas have for parents?

Hillman: I think what I'm saying should relieve them hugely and make them want to pay more attention to their child, this peculiar stranger who has landed in their midst. Instead of saying, "This is my child," they must ask, "Who is this child who happens to be mine?" Then they will gain a lot more respect for the child and try to keep an eye open for instances where the kid's destiny might show itself — like in a resistance to school, for example, or a strange set of symptoms one year, or an obsession with one thing or another. Maybe something very important is going on there that the parents didn't see before.

London: Symptoms are so often seen as weaknesses.

Hillman: Right, so they set up some sort of medical or psychotherapeutic program to get rid of them, when the symptoms may be the most crucial part of the kid. There are many stories in my book that illustrate this.


...London: What is the first step toward understanding one's calling?

Hillman: It's important to ask yourself, "How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?" That may very well reveal what you are here for.

Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too. When you look into the archetypal nature of taxation, you realize that all civilizations have had taxation of one sort or another. Some of the earliest Egyptian writing is about tax collecting — the scribe recording what was paid and what wasn't paid.

So when you consider the archetypal, historical, and cultural background of whatever you do, it gives you a sense that your occupation can be a calling and not just a job.

London: What do you think of traditional techniques for revealing the soul's code, such as the wise woman who reads palms, or the village elders whose job it is to look at a child and see that child's destiny? Would it be helpful to revive these traditions?

Hillman: First of all, I don't think you can revive traditions on purpose. Second of all, I think those traditions are going on underground. Many people will tell you about some astrologer who said this or that to them, or some teacher. So it's very widespread in the subculture.

What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child's destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child. It's almost an erotic thing, like the filmmaker Elia Kazan's stories of how his teacher "took to him." She said to him, "When you were only twelve, you stood near my desk one morning and the light from the window fell across your head and features and illuminated the expression on your face. The thought came to me of the great possibilities there in your development." She saw his beauty. Now that, you see, is something different from just going to the wise woman.

London: In The Soul's Code, you tell a similar story about Truman Capote.

Hillman: In Capote's case, his teacher responded to his crazy fantasies. He was a difficult boy who threw temper tantrums in which he would lie on the floor and kick, who refused to go to class, who combed his hair all the time — an impossible kid. She responded to his absurdities with equal absurdities. She took to him. Teachers today can't take to a child. It will be called manipulation, or seduction, or pedophilia.

London: Or preferential treatment.

Hillman: Right. James Baldwin is another example. He attended a little Harlem schoolhouse of fifty kids. Conditions were appalling. His teacher was a Midwestern white woman. And yet they clicked.

You see, we don't need to get back to the wise woman in the village. We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child's beauty and singling that child out. That's how the mentor system works — you're caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.

London: Of all the historical figures you studied while researching The Soul's Code, who fascinated you the most?

Hillman: They all did. All these little stories fascinated me. Take Martin Scorcese, another filmmaker, for example. He was a very short kid and had terrible asthma. He couldn't go out into the streets of Little Italy in Manhattan and play with the other kids. So he would sit up in his room and look out the window at what was going on and make little drawings — cartoons, with numerous frames — of the scene. In effect, he was making movies at nine years old.

London: What about someone like Adolf Hitler, the prototypical "bad seed"? Is he an example of a destiny gone awry, or perhaps the fulfillment of some sort of twisted destiny?

Hillman: It's a puzzle. How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don't think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it's a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation — like Charles Manson. Jeffrey Dahmer had a wonderful father. His father even wrote a book saying that it was his fault that Jeffrey was the way he was. His father had strange dreams in his youth that were very similar to some of the crimes that Dahmer committed. So the father took responsibility. But he was not a bad father at all. When Jeffrey was four, they were carving pumpkins for Halloween, and Jeffrey screamed, "Make a mean face!" He would not let his father put a smile on the pumpkin's face. "I want a mean face!" he screamed. He was in a fury.

So I think there is such a thing as a bad seed that comes to flower in certain people. The danger with that theory is that we begin to look for those "troublemakers" early on and try to weed them out. That's very dangerous, because it could work against kids who are just routine troublemakers. But then you look at a child like Mary Bell in England, who was ten when she strangled two little boys — one three and one five. Yes, there were extenuating circumstances. She had a "bad" mother, so to speak. But to think that she would note have "flowered" if her mother had been in therapy, or that (as psychologist Alice Miller thinks) there would have been no Adolf Hitler if Hitler's family had been treated — that's just naive.

London: You've written that "the great task of any culture is to keep the invisibles attached." What do you mean by that?

Hillman: It's a difficult idea to present without leaving psychology and getting into religion. I don't talk about who the invisibles are or where they live or what they want. There is no real theology in it. But it's the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.

London: God?

Hillman: Yes, but it doesn't have to be that lofty.

London: Our calling?

Hillman: I think the first step is the realization that each of us has such a thing. And then we must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. It doesn't necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It's more a sensitivity, such as a person living in a tribal culture would have: the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.

London: When you talk in those terms, it seems to me that the boundary between psychology and theology gets a little blurry. Psychology deals with the will, and religion deals with fate. Yet this is not clearly not one or the other, but a bit of both.

Hillman: You're right. It isn't such an easy thing as the old argument of free will versus predestination. The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.

London: What is the danger for a child who grows up never understanding his or her destiny?

Hillman: I think our entire civilization exemplifies that danger. People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help? They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world.

London: Is it possible never to discover that "something else" — to turn your back on it, or to resist it and therefore "waste" your life?

Hillman: I tend to think that you fulfill your own destiny, whether you realize it or not. You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things.

London: It seems to me that illness and divorce an prompt you to explore some themes in life more thoroughly than others.

Hillman: Certainly. I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper. Any symptom can force you to go deeper into some area.

Many people nowadays who discover that they have a major symptom, whether psychological or physical, begin to study it. They get drawn very deeply into the area of their trouble. They want to know more than their doctor. That's a curious thing, and not at all the way it used to be. People used to trust their doctor. They went to an expert. Now people have new ideas and are thinking for themselves. That's a very important change in our collective psychology.

London: You write that one of the most stultifying things about modern psychology is that it's lost its sense of beauty.

Hillman: Yes, if it ever had one. Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.

London: And this has trickled down to therapists today?

Hillman: Yes. Art, for example, becomes "art therapy." When patients make music, it becomes "music therapy." When the arts are used for "therapy" in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.

Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way — whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.

London: But doesn't psychology have more in common with medicine than the arts?

Hillman: Well, one strand of psychotherapy is certainly to help relieve suffering, which is a genuine medical concern. If someone is bleeding, you want to stop the bleeding. Another medical aspect is the treatment of chronic complaints that are disabling in some way. And many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic. So there is a reasonable, sensible, medical side to psychotherapy.

But when the medical becomes scientistic; when it becomes analytical, diagnostic, statistical, and remedial; when it comes under the influence of pharmacology and HMOs — limiting patients to six conversations and those kinds of things — then we've lost the art altogether, and we're just doing business: industrial, corporate business.

London: Doesn't this have to do with the fact that, at a certain point in its development, psychology adopted the reductive method in order to gain the respectability of science?

Hillman: I think you're absolutely correct. But as the popular trust in science fades — and many sociologists say that's happening today — people will develop a distrust of purely "scientific" psychology. Researchers in the universities haven't picked up on this; they're more interested in genetics and computer models of thinking than ever. But, in general, there is a huge distrust of the scientific establishment now.

London: As people rebel against the scientific approach, they often wind up at the other extreme. We're seeing many new forms of self-help and personal-growth therapies based on non-rational beliefs.

Hillman: The new age self-help phenomenon is pretty mushy, but it's also very American. Our history is filled with traveling preachers and quack medicine and searches for the soul. I don't see this as a new thing. I think the new age is part of a phenomenon that's been there all along.

London: In some respects, you are a critic of the new age. Yet I noticed that a couple of reviewers of The Soul's Code have placed you in the new age category. How do you feel about that?

Hillman: Well, some reviewers have a scientistic ax to grind. To them, my book had to be either science or new age mush. It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view." There is never a third view.

My book is about a third view. It says, yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. So if you come at my book from the side of science, you see it as "new age." If you come at the book from the side of the new age, you say it doesn't go far enough — it's too rational.

London: I remember a public talk you gave a while back. People wanted to ask you all sorts of questions about your view of the soul, and you were a bit testy with them.

Hillman: I've been wrestling with these questions for thirty-five years. I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can't go back over that again. I can't put that into a two-word answer. I can't. Wherever I go, people say, "Can I ask you a quick question?" It's always, "a quick question." Well, my answers are slow. [Laughs]

London: You mentioned Goethe earlier. He remarked that our greatest happiness lies in practicing a talent that we were meant to use. Are we so miserable, as a culture, because we're dissociated from our inborn talents, our soul's code.

Hillman: I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics. Economics is a slave-driver. No one has free time; no one has any leisure. The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world.

Also, I see happiness as a by-product, not something you pursue directly. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made. Maybe they meant something a little different from what we mean today — happiness as one's well-being on earth.

London: It's hard to pursue happiness. It seems to creep up on you.

Hillman: Ikkyu, the crazy Japanese monk, has a poem:

You do this, you do that
You argue left, you argue right
You come down, you go up
This person says no, you say yes
Back and forth
You are happy
You are really happy

What he is saying is: Stop all that nonsense. You're really happy. Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here.

catefrances

thanx for that steve.

pandora

13 tricky age ... could be depression nothing hides that better
than a class clown. Also hides ridicule and pain.

Also a parent who would do this is an extrovert and apples don't fall far.
A need for attention ... even negative.

Were his grades really good before? took a huge ' I don't care' drop all of a sudden?

Is the child an outcast, being bullied, have a social life within school?
Any signs of skipping class, peer pressure, perhaps new friends, drugs?

These would be warning signs that could lead to worse behavior...
with a teen ... one step ahead.

Did he just change schools ... elementary to middle school?
This can be very tough on kids this move up. He might be finding his role
in school... if he's good at it get him into the theater projects where class clowns
excel and are role models for creativity.

Also this is common, a drop of grades at puberty for boys.
They got lot on their minds ... the parents can find a positive way to make
sure some of that is schoolwork.

chadwick

pandora wrote:

13 tricky age ... could be depression nothing hides that better
than a class clown. Also hides ridicule and pain.

Also a parent who would do this is an extrovert and apples don't fall far.
A need for attention ... even negative.

Were his grades really good before? took a huge ' I don't care' drop all of a sudden?

Is the child an outcast, being bullied, have a social life within school?
Any signs of skipping class, peer pressure, perhaps new friends, drugs?

These would be warning signs that could lead to worse behavior...
with a teen ... one step ahead.

Did he just change schools ... elementary to middle school?
This can be very tough on kids this move up. He might be finding his role
in school... if he's good at it get him into the theater projects where class clowns
excel and are role models for creativity.

Also this is common, a drop of grades at puberty for boys.
They got lot on their minds ... the parents can find a positive way to make
sure some of that is schoolwork.

what happened?

pandora

chadwick wrote:

pandora wrote:

13 tricky age ... could be depression nothing hides that better
than a class clown. Also hides ridicule and pain.

Also a parent who would do this is an extrovert and apples don't fall far.
A need for attention ... even negative.

Were his grades really good before? took a huge ' I don't care' drop all of a sudden?

Is the child an outcast, being bullied, have a social life within school?
Any signs of skipping class, peer pressure, perhaps new friends, drugs?

These would be warning signs that could lead to worse behavior...
with a teen ... one step ahead.

Did he just change schools ... elementary to middle school?
This can be very tough on kids this move up. He might be finding his role
in school... if he's good at it get him into the theater projects where class clowns
excel and are role models for creativity.

Also this is common, a drop of grades at puberty for boys.
They got lot on their minds ... the parents can find a positive way to make
sure some of that is schoolwork.

what happened?

exactly .... what happened?