Is fun the real key to learning?

According to his classmates, seven-year-old Sean is a child who spends more time standing outside the classroom door for misbehaviour than he does in class. "It's awful," says the mother of one of the boys. "I know his family and I know he gets precious little love and attention at home and then when he goes to school he just gets more of the same."

The more this child is punished for failing to do what he is told, the more he misbehaves. He is clearly a teacher's nightmare and heading for disaster. Who can blame an exasperated teacher, anxious to maintain control, from banishing him from the classroom?

Dr William Glasser, however, would take issue with the treatment of Sean. The American psychologist believes that punishing students for misbehaviour or for failing to learn is a waste of time. Using these methods their behaviour will never improve, he says. Such students flounder because they get little empathy or encouragement and they feel forced to do things they are unwilling to do.

Most of us - including teachers - believe and practise external control psychology, says Glasser. The thrust of this theory is that it is outside stimuli which control our behaviour rather than we ourselves. We pick up the phone, for example, because it rings rather than because we choose to do so. We can be made to do things we don't want to do. And we believe that it is a right and even a moral duty to force people to do things they don't want to do, through the use of threats, punishment and reward.

"Coercion in either of its two forms, reward or punishment, is the core of the theory," Glasser observes. "Punishments are by far the more common, but both are destructive to relationships.

"The difference is that rewards are more subtly destructive and generally less offensive. Coercion ranges from the passive behaviours of sulking and withdrawing to the active behaviours of abuse and violence.

"The most common and, because it is so common, the most destructive of coercive behaviours is criticising - and nagging and complaining are not far behind."

GLASSER points out that in democratic societies the external control theory is used only in the family, in schools and in the workplace, where there is an element of ownership in relationships. Yet, it is a psychology which most people would be reluctant to use with long-term friends. "You'd never force friends to do something they were reluctant to do," he says. "Otherwise you'd lose a friend."

He does concede that there are very many successful schools which operate under the external control theory. "I believe their success is based on two things," he says. "First the school is led by a principal whose charisma has inspired the staff and students to work harder than they would ordinarily work. Second, these schools have strong parental support for good education" and contain very few demotivated students.

Sadly, however, the educational needs of "difficult children" go ignored and their life chances are consigned to the scrapheap.

For Glasser the problem is one of relationships. "Difficult as they may be to solve, relationship problems are 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 our lives, this is what I am going to do about it'. "

He believes that we should replace the external control theory with a new psychology - the choice theory. According to this theory, the only person whose behaviour we can control is our own. We each control our own lives and our behaviour comes from within ourselves. We answer the phone - or ignore it - simply because we choose to do so.

Human motivation, Glasser believes, is based on five genetic needs - survival, love and belonging, power, freedom and fun. We are all intrinsically motivated by the pleasure that occurs when we satisfy these needs or avoid the pain when we fail to satisfy them.

WHEN we satisfy a need we feel good. "In fact," says Glasser, "the biological purpose of pleasure is to tell us that a need is being satisfied. Pain, on the other hand, tells us that what we are doing is not satisfying a need that we very much want to satisfy."

For Glasser "fun is the genetic reward for learning . . . ask students who is a good teacher and they will tell you the one who makes learning fun." Schools have to give students the idea that learning is fun, he says. "We need to reinstate fun and laughter and get rid of punishment and children will learn a lot more," he says.

A quality school, argues the American psychologist, is one which enables all students to satisfy their needs.

Contact the William Glasser Institute Ireland (formerly the Institute for Reality Therapy in Ireland) Phone (01) 456 2216. email: irti@indigo.ie

website: http://indigo.ie/irti