Let’s examine these dastardly equivocations further.

First, ‘positive’ used as a cover for educator naivete.  The idea that all children are good if they are touched by the right educator with a positive attitude and that any student can be ‘turned around’ with the right loving care and miracle pedagogy handed down from the University Research gods is naiive.  Certainly, students can be influenced for the good.  Certainly, a good teacher is better than a bad one.  But the root causes of current demise in education are hardly due to non-loving teachers, bad pedagogy, and a negative attitude towards students.  This belief, in fact, is in the process of  killing off what remains of American education.      

Do Ipods Make You Smarter than This?

To illustrate this, let’s imagine  (and I mean imagine) that negative thinking and attitudes on the part of teachers are one of the principle causes of poor education; let’s then imagine this problem being repaired. So, suddenly we will get a crop of teachers with a positive attitude, countrywide, that will solve this problem of students not learning due to the negative attitude of their teachers. 

As I say in my book Classroom Discipline 101, wrong premises lead to wrong conclusions.  If your premise is that students are performing poorly because their teachers don’t know how to teach and aren’t positive, you are going to try to solve the problem by fixing the wrong premise-by trying to make everyone somehow ‘positive’.

What’s the plan if you go with that premise?  Certify Principals in positivity training, then make sure every teacher nation-wide is screened for a positive-attitude test?  What will this test look like?

Question #1:  Johnny is failing Algebra.  He is in 10th grade but only working at 6th grade level.  He is absent once or twice or three times a week.  Why is he failing?

1. He has nowhere near the skills to achieve what he is supposed to at this level.
2. His past teachers displayed a negative attitude towards him.
3. His current teacher does not have a positive attitude and doesn’t care enough about him.
4. He has problems at  home that need to be countered with a positive attitude at school.
5. Johnny sensed the negative attitude of the teacher thinking he may not be able to do algebraic equations well when he couldn’t multiply 6 x 12, leading to his discouragement because of the teacher’s preconceived notion of what Johnny could and could not accomplish.  Had the teacher said ‘Hey! You don’t need any skills to enter this course, I can not only provide you with the skills you are missing from the last four years, not only reconnect synapse functions which are missing from your lack of intellectual brain stimulation for the last 8 years, but fill the class with the positive aura that comes from my positivity and faith in you which will turn around a lifetime of poor habits, but through the force of my positivity make you achieve, achieve, achieve!  Now, we need a bit of research-based technique also, so watch the smoke and mirrors as I throw in a little scaffolding!  Abracadabra, voila!’

Wow, if we can just replace all of the big meany negative teachers currently ruining the system through their lack of magical thinking and positive intent with teachers like these, attitudes will turn around and we will once again sit atop the world as the educational leader!  After all, all other countries with high achieving students do it by positive thinking…don’t they?

(to be continued)