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ecomes dominant and the bridge or building relaxes back to normal. A human analogy is that we
remember who we are in school even when coerced to act like somebody else. In engineering, this
integrity of memory is called elastic behavior. Actors practice deliberate elasticity and the
Chechens or the Hmong express remarkable group elasticity. After violent stresses abate, they
remember who they are.
But another road exists. To end unbearable stress, material has a choice of surrendering its
memory. Under continued stress, material can become plastic, losing its elasticity and changing its
shape permanently. Watch your own kids as their schooling progresses. Are they like Chechens
with a fierce personal integrity and an inner resilience? Or under the stress of the social laboratory
of schooling, have they become plastic over time, kids you hardly recognize, kids who’ve lost
their original integrity?
In the collapse of a bridge or building in high wind, a decisive turning point is reached when the
structure abandons its nature and becomes plastic. Trained observers can tell when elasticity is
fading because prior to the moment of collapse, the structure cannot regain its original shape. It
loses its spirit, taking on new and unexpected shapes in a struggle to resist further change. When
this happens it is wordlessly crying HELP ME! HELP ME! just as so many kids did in all the
schools in which I ever taught.
The most important task I assigned myself as a schoolteacher was helping kids regain their
integrity, but I lost many, their desperate, last-ditch resistance giving way, their integrity
shattering before my horrified eyes. Look back in memory at your kids before first grade, then fast
forward to seventh. Have they disintegrated into warring fragments divided against themselves?
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that’s natural human development.
If there are no absolutes, as pragmatists like Dewey assert, then human nature must be plastic.
Then the spirit can be successfully deformed from its original shape and will have no sanctuary in
which to resist institutional stamping. The Deweys further assert that human nature processed this
way is able to perform efficiently what is asked of it later on by society. Escaping our original
identity will actually improve most of us, they say. This is the basic hypothesis of utopia-building,
that the structure of personhood can be broken and reformed again and again for the better.
Plasticity is the base on which scientific psychology must stand if it is to be prescriptive, and if not
prescriptive, who needs it? Finding an aggressive, instrumental psychology associated with
schooling is a sure sign empty-child attitudes aren’t far away. The notion of empty children has
origins predating psychology, of course, but the most important engine reshaping American
schools into socialization laboratories, 1 after Wundt, was the widely publicized work of Russian
physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) who had been a student of Wundt at Leipzig. Pavlov won
the Nobel in 1904, credited with discovering the conditioned reflex whereby systems of physical
function thought to be fixed biologically, like the salivation of dogs, could be rewired to irrelevant
outside stimuli, like bells ringing.
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