>My guess is that this impulsiveness is the product of "tough love"
>social programs that employ what are basically Skinnerian tactics
>intended to encourage reactive thinking and a reactive relationship
>with the world rather than a more deliberative approach. Here's an
>anecdote Jonathan Kozol used (
><http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm>http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm
>) to illustrate the teaching style at a South Bronx school he's been
>visiting:
>
>"The teacher gave the "zero noise" salute again when someone
>whispered to another child at his table. "In two minutes you will
>have a chance to talk and share this with your partner."
>Communication between children in the class was not prohibited but
>was afforded time slots and, remarkably enough, was formalized in an
>expression that I found included in a memo that was posted on the
>wall beside the door: "An opportunity . . . to engage in Accountable
>Talk."
>
>Of course, you can see Skinnerian tactics being used throughout many
>other institutions poor people are forced to deal with on a regular
>basis. My hypothesis is that these institutions are very good at
>fostering impulsivity and reactive thinking but they have mixed
>success in terms of creating nice, productive members of the
>underclass -- when they fail, they create the lumpenproletariat.
>
>Anyway, this is a subject I'm pretty interested in; I wrote about it
>at length here:
><http://woomer.blogspot.com/2005/09/moral-accountability-and-katrina_15.html>
>http://woomer.blogspot.com/2005/09/moral-accountability-and-katrina_15.html
Very perceptive. I'm familiar with the issues you discuss, but have never seen it quite that way before. You might be right.
I would be interested to read anything else you have written about this. There's a few things I need to reconcile to test the theory. I would like to try to understand the exceptions, why some people are considerably less "reactive" as you put it, despite enduring the same.
Out of time for now. get back to this later.
Bill