Can We Stop Pushing Primal Fear On Students?

Jeremy Clifton has some ideas about how to understand human understanding of the world. Maybe they could be useful for how we teach students.

Stay with me. This will take a bit.

Who is Jeremy Clifton?

Jeremy Clifton is an academic researchy guy. He's working at UPenn, where he's currently Senior Research Scientist at the UPenn Positive Psychology Center where he directs the Primals Project. Before getting back into academia, he worked for Habitat for Humanity, including in Sri Lanka. He earned a Bachelors in Philosophy in 2007 (Houghton University) and a Masters in Applied Positive Psychology in 2013 (UPenn). He started on his PhD in 2014 and founded the whole, well, field of Prinals. Also, while he was an undergrad, he worked as a firefighter with the Houghton Fire Department.

He is not an educator, and he has not set out to connect his primals research to education. We'll get to that part.

So what is this Primal stuff?

Everyone walks around with their own internal map of the world, their own ideas about how the world works. We don't always think about them or take them out and look at them, but we couldn't function without them. What kind of world do we live in? Our answer to that question dives a lot of our behavior.

What Clifton has done is to break down and quantify the answer to that big What Kind Of World Do We Live In question, and he calls them primal world beliefs. His team has sifted through a mountain of statements about the nature of the world, and boiled it down to three central questions--

Is the world safe or dangerous? Is the world enticing or dull? Is the world alive (with some sort of animating intelligence or direction) or mechanistic? Each of those three is an umbrella for several more specific primal beliefs. The 26 primals add up to how "good" or "bad" you think the world is. If you want to read a very academic paper that gets into this work and also addresses the overlap with philosophy, try this. For laypeople, there's a whole web site about this primals stuff, but here is the actual list:




I don't think Clifton has come up with anything profoundly earthshattering here, but I do think it's a very useful tool for breaking down how we talk about how we understand the world, and I find that really interesting for reasons I'll get to in a minute.

Some of what we can observe here is not hard to figure out. Psychologists know that if you enter a space that you see as dangerous and combative, you will enter that place on high alert. Clifton is talking about a matter of scale; iow, what if you think the entire world is a dangerous and combative place?

Here's a good brief explainer:

 


The line that resonates with me is "my job is not to say which one is true but I can give you insight as to how your answer might affect your life."

Clifton and his team are psychology folks, interested in how to get a handle on the levers and switches that explain and, maybe, help human behavior. But if you're a regular reader here, you already know who else deals with questions of what drives human behavior and how that might be shaped.

Generation Scared and the Mental Health Crisis

For most of the 21st century, when civilians asked me "What are students like these days," my answer was, "They are scared." I've written about it in one of my more widely read pieces. We've heard plenty about a mental health crisis among young people. We are collectively stuck on the question of why and what and who and how? Who is scaring our kids? How are they getting the idea that the world is a bad, scary place?

I've had tabs about Clifton's works open for months, since I first came across it in a post by Robert Pondiscio, "Stop Telling Kids the World Is A Terrible Place." Pondiscio points out

Clifton and his colleague Peter Meindl found that negative primals—seeing the world as dangerous, barren, unjust—“were almost never associated with better life outcomes. Instead, they predicted less success, less life satisfaction, worse health, more depression, and increased suicide attempts.”

Pondiscio argues that schools that we "marinate children in bleak narratives" about social injustice and democracy in trouble.

From trauma-informed pedagogy to social justice curricula, many well-meaning educators have embraced a mission of radical truth-telling—foregrounding systemic injustice, historical oppression, and future threats in the name of equity and authenticity.

Pondiscio argues that the well-intentioned idea of exposing students to themes of suicide, depression, abuse, suicide, and systemic injustice are having the unfortunate effect of developing a set of primals, a world view, that is bleak and potentially damaging.

I'll disagree on a couple of counts here. First, there are far more bleak factors influencing student world views than the mostly-lefty influences that he cites. Active shooter drills and the daily practice of various forms of security theater practiced in school send a constant message that violent attacks are a constant danger. Virtually all students in school right now cannot remember a time when a major political figure/sometimes President has not been announcing that this country is, in part or in whole, a terrible hellhole. Fear has been woven into all political rhetoric, 24/7, and if we don't think that isn't trickling down to young humans who lack the ability to distance themselves from political posturing, we are kidding ourselves-- and it's only worse for those exposed to an electronic anger-and-fear algorithm for their media intake. That's before they start to absorb all the information about how hard it is to find a decent job or buy a house or hopeless to try to pay for a college degree that may not even help. And by the way kids, the new NAEP scores say you are the worst ever. Yes, young humans witness a great deal of negative world-building these days, but I don't think we can pin the blame on any single political, cultural, or educational sector. Hell, name five major prominent cultural figures who consistently present a positive, encouraging, beauty-appreciating view of the world.

Second, Clifton's own work says that our experience does not shape our primals so much as our primals shape how we view our experience. Which is very human. We tend to seek confirmation of our pre-existing views, and find that confirmation whether it's really there or not. Ultimately, an awful lot of those primals are developed at home and are unlikely to be budged by school. I haven't found it anywhere yet, but I'd love to know what Clifton has to say about differences between those whose primals are shiftable and those whose primals are set in concrete.

I do agree with Pondiscio that as a society, we have convinced a generation (maybe two) that they are too weak to stand up to the rigors of the world, and they are struggling with that message. He is clear that he doesn't want rose colored glasses, and that's sensible-- one of the things that toxic positivity toxic is the message "Let's just pretend everything's fine, sweetie, because you are too weak and tiny to handle the truth."

I have personal feelings about this: one of my lessons from the meltdown of my first marriage is understanding that one secret of life is not finding ways to avoid Hard Things, but instead finding the strength to deal with the Hard Things that will inevitably come. This lesson never gets old. It's a central irony of MAGA, which is hell-bent on controlling everything so that they never have to deal with stuff outside their tiny-boxed view of the world, thereby broadcasting that they think they're too weak to deal with any outside-the-box stuff.

Pondiscio has become interested in ways to use Clifton's primal research in education, and I can see how that might work, because I kind of did it already.

Primals in the classroom

I'm not stunned by what Clifton has come up with; it's plenty of stuff that we already knew (people who see the world as a bad broken place tend to be kind of miserable). But I do like the framework he and his team have come up with.

In particular, it's interesting to think about how cultural shifts reflect and influence the various primal values that people in those cultures have. And the thing is, we already study that sort of thing.

For most of my career, I taught American Literature with a focus on the different -isms reflected in the culture and the writing. Puritanism, Age of Reason, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism-- each a different way to see and understand how the world works. We studied the ideas behind the isms and then looked for how those beliefs were reflected in the writings of the period. In discussion we often compared the isms by looking at particular beliefs. Who thought that humans were powerful and important, and who thought they were insignificant specks? Who thought that the world was given order and direction by a higher power, and who thought it was just a machine, and who thought that it was random senselessness? Could I chart every one of these isms on Clifton's 26-point frame? I certainly could, and it would be an interesting framework.

But more than that--

One of the subtexts of my year-long ism teaching was that different people could look at the same world and develop a different map of how that world worked. Sometimes their view of how the world works changed in response to changes in the world (e.g. the grit and downbeat darkness of realism was in part a response to growing unpleasantness of urban and industrial growth). Sometimes the changes happened because people chose to see things differently. Every one of these people of various beliefs was sure that their picture of how the world works was the true and accurate one.

My students would recognize my standard spiel before each time I would deliver the new ism. "I am not here to tell you these people were right, or that they were wrong. My job is to make their case as clearly and forcefully as they would make it themselves. Accept or reject it as you wish; I just want you to be able to recognize their beliefs in action." Discussion of the "How could they think X' variety was always met with "What I think they would say to that, and why, is..."

And so my subversive lesson over the course of the year was that people can see the same world and believe different things about it. Or to dig even deeper, there may not be one true way to understand the world (though that is itself just one way to understand the world).

Clifton's work, with its vast catalog of many different primal beliefs, fits perfectly with that.

Now, this whole approach implies a level of pluralism in the classroom that the right wing crowd sure doesn't seem interested in these days. It also assumes that young humans are capable of navigating complicated belief systems. I can absolutely see students enjoying Clifton's primal inventory as a way to put words, a framework, and definitions to their own personal understanding of the world. And I very much like the idea that this frames their map of the world not on how closely it matches "true" reality, but on how they fall on a human spectrum of different ways to understand the world.

Anything that assumes that there's a difference between "how you see the world" and "how the world actually is" strikes me as a good thing. Anything that doesn't sort world views into "right" and "wrong" strikes me as a good thing. And anything that suggests to young humans that they have options in how they understand the world, and that exercising these different options could help them find more positive and productive ways to move through the world-- that's good too.

I generally define education as helping young humans figure out how to be fully themselves and fully human in the world. I don't know that I see Clifton's primals framework as revolutionary, but I see how it can be useful.

As for the grownups in the picture

If educators viewed themselves as building or reinforcing primals in school, would it help?

I can't help noticing that some of the primals, like pleasure and beauty and wonder, involve exactly the sort of things that some administrators and stern conservatives dismiss as not serious or academically rigorous; if you want to reinforce the idea that the world can be beautiful and joyful and filled with wonder, you need to find a way to organize schools and classrooms that reflects those values, and a carefully regimented test-prep grindathon that emphasizes compliance is probably not your best bet. Certainly many of these primal values do not align with the Big Standardized Test (one more reason these tests should go away). In fact, if we really want to do work primals into our educational approaches, step one would have to be taking a cold hard look at what primals are promoted by all current practices, and not just the squishy lefty ones.

There is an undertone of spirituality to all of this (the video above actually comes from the Templeton Religion Trust whose "aim is to improve the well-being of individuals and societies through spiritual growth and an ever-improving understanding of spiritual realities and spiritual information") which means that attempts to incorporate this model into education is liable to raise backlash from folks on both the left (schools shouldn't teach religion) and the right (don't you dare try to indoctrinate my kid).

I can certainly see ways in which this research could be misused, including attempts to get students to understand the world in one particular way. But I can also say that I find Clifton's work interesting, and if I were still in a classroom, I'd be finding ways to get some use out of it. I welcome anything that puts the focus on what it means to be human in the world and not on how to crank deliverables in the form of data or product from a soulless plagiarism machine.