White Privilege Won’t Budge with Current Psychological Theories of Human Development
Psychological, religious, philosophical, and spiritual theories to date have all been developed during authoritarian/patriarchal time periods. This means the applications of these theories are designed to help people comply and cope optimally within authority based systems.
Think about the senator who gives lip service to optimizing public education but sends his own children to elite private schools. He wants to give his children a leg up because he sees the entrenched inequalities. He wants to ‘fix’ public schools, but until they are ‘fixed,’ his children certainly will not be attending them.
Americans with economic, societal, and/or political privilege give lip service to inequality and how ‘terrible’ it is. But like the senator, privileged Americans mostly support institutions and practices that rigidly perpetuate inequality.
If we truly want to create egalitarian educational and political organizations, we must take the theories by which we have built our American institutions and painstakingly reevaluate them. An easy place to start is with our psychological theories.
Psychological theories determine how we treat and educate our developing children. Upon careful evaluation you will find psychological theories of human development ensure we raise children to learn unquestioningly that to be successful one must either submit to authority or become an authority. There are simply no other options within the frameworks provided by our psychological theories and their applications.
Regardless of our privilege or lack there of, we have been trained to fit into and promote authoritarian/patriarchal systems, but this fact is not apparent to us because we have been led to believe we are being trained to fit into and promote egalitarian systems. This distortion obscures our ability to accurately analyze and evaluate our human organizations and it misdirects our efforts.
In the same vein, we have been taught our psychological theories are the key to treating one another as equals, but these theories in practice, reward authority acquisition and authority wielding. We have been subjected to distorted psychological theories of child and human development for so long we have lost our ability to question them.
Religious theories of child and human development ruled the day before the dawn of psychology in the early 1900’s, but psychology mirrors religion in how it preserves the rights and privileges of those in authority.
In addition, authority based systems are extremely effective at organizing human groups, but they are terrible for individual mental health. It is no wonder one in five of us suffer a mental illness each year.
Those with privilege consistently blame society and unethical authorities for persistent inequalities. But we need to dig much deeper and get much more specific in order to unearth, reevaluate, and rewrite the systemic frameworks that perpetuate inequalities.
The problem is the fox is one hundred percent in charge of the henhouse. We allow psychologists to supply the psychological theories that guide our practices of child rearing and education. Our antidote to children who fail to thrive in school is to inundate them with ever more psychological therapies like drug therapies, applied behavioral therapies, cognitive behavioral therapies, etc. The most consistent aspect of education is if you don’t comply with authority, you will eventually be made to comply, even if it involves drugging you into submission whether you are 2, 5, 10, or 16 years old.
We need a theory of human development that takes the emphasis off of behavioral compliance and puts it onto achieving developmentally and contextually appropriate learning goals.
If we take behavior off the table as a bargaining chip between teacher and student, the teacher has nowhere else to go but to provide alternative strategies for a child to achieve learning goals that don’t include authority mandated behaviorism. Such a change would be easy to choreograph because educational authorities control 100% of what goes on in a school to the nth degree. Teachers can manipulate the environment and their methods in literally thousands of ways. There is no reason we can’t move away from behaviorism other than the continued validation and promotion of non evidenced based psychological theories that lead teachers to believe behavioral compliance is the key to healthy brain development and successful learning.
As it stands, teachers who do not demand behavioral compliance are vulnerable to reprimands from administrative authorities because our psychological theories insist upon it. From top to bottom, behavioral compliance is the name of our psychological game.
Insisting upon behavioral compliance is the hallmark of an authority driven operating system, a system devoid of checks and balances, a system perfect for perpetuating inequality.
Psychological theories of behavior are draconian, unscientific, and biologically disastrous. Why else would one in five of us suffer a mental illness each year? Behavior is only one aspect of psychological theorizing crying out to be reevaluated and retooled for a healthier and more egalitarian society.
Psychologists have been blaming society and bad parenting for the epidemic numbers of mental illness, but never have they turned the mirror onto their own foundational theories to shoulder some of the blame themselves. Society reflects the methods by which its children were taught to understand and interact with information and other people. So we should be looking at those methods. Instead of trying to ‘fix’ society, we should be improving the methods by which we raise and educate our children.
