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JOHN is capable of good work in school. Yet, essentially, he chooses to do nothing in school that anyone would call educational. He knows giving up on school is a serious mistake, but he doesn't believe his school will give him a chance to correct it. And he is far from alone. There may be five million students aged 6 to 16 who come regularly to school but won't make the effort to become competent readers, writers, and problem solvers. Their chances of leading even minimally satisfying lives are over before age 17.
The cause of school failure is that almost no one knows how he or she functions psychologically. Almost all believe in stimulus/response (SR) psychology.
I am one of the leaders of a small group of people who believe SR is completely wrongheaded and totally destructive to the warm, supportive human relationships students need to succeed in school. The solution is to give up SR theory for choice theory. I have written two books on what my staff and I try to do to implement choice theory in schools: The Quality School (1990) and The Quality School Teacher (1994).
Human relationship problems are the most difficult to solve but surprisingly easy to understand. They are all some variation of "I don't like the way you treat me, and, even though it may destroy my life, your life, or both, this is what I am going to do about it."
I used to call choice theory "control theory" because it teaches that the only person whose behavior we can control is our own. I find "choice theory" a better, more positive-sounding name.
Accepting that you can control only your own behavior is the most difficult lesson choice theory has to teachso difficult that almost all people refuse to learn it. This is because the whole thrust of SR theory is that we do not control our own behavior; rather, it is a response to a stimulus outside ourselves. Thus, we answer a phone in response to a ring.
Choice theory says we answer a phone-and do anything else-because it is the most satisfying choice for us at the time. If we have something better to do, we let it ring. The ring is not...