As I have been prepping for some upcoming presentations on my book, “Principles of Applied Stupidity,” there has been one little module that keeps coming up again and again in the flow of the presentation. It has to do with certain habits of mind that we tend to think of as “stupid behavior.”
I started to wonder, where did we get these “standards”? And suddenly the answer became very very clear. They are the inevitable outcome of what I call “classroom conditioning.”
If you spend any time in the classroom (and in the United States, you’re required to spend thousands of hours in classrooms for at least 10 years, and an awful lot of people go 12 to 16 years), no matter what the subject matter of the class, and no matter whether you are interested in the subject matter, and no matter if you do well or poorly in the class, there are certain things that everyone in that classroom learns. There are 3 levels:
Level 1 of classroom conditioning includes:
Be on time
don’t make mistakes
perfection is the goal
follow proper procedure
do not communicate with anyone except the person in authority
never admit to not knowing the answer and
avoid failure at all costs.
Level 2 is a little more severe:
Do not challenge authority
(When I was in school, if you did that, you received a physical beating. I think they have stopped doing that lately, but the psychological punishments are just as severe)
And finally, level 3:
Do not cheat
(As doing so will result in expulsion/excommunication.)
The biggest problem with “classroom conditioning” is the implicit implication that they are providing a complete package of skills for functioning in real life, when in fact all they’re doing is providing skills for functioning in a classroom-like environment. For example, since all “production” in a classroom is presented to the teacher, it is very hard for people immersed in classroom conditioning to comprehend any other kind of “buyer persona.” In other words, they can work for a boss, but dealing with clients is completely foreign to them. Creativity and individual “brands” are repressed as well.
The other problem with “classroom conditioning” is that it is imparted indirectly through the threat of massive trauma for not complying with the rules. These rules for one’s behavior become embedded in the subconscious, making them very hard to see and/or change. For many people, these traumas build up over time, and the standards for one’s behavior become a vague “gut feeling” that is difficult or even impossible to overcome.
When I talk about the “Principles of Applied Stupidity,” in many cases, I’m talking about a practical approach to overcoming the gut-level limiting effects of classroom conditioning, and gaining the many benefits from daring to make mistakes, fail, not follow standard procedure, and question authority, just to name a few.
© Justin Locke
