A few weeks ago, I returned to the classroom of Dennis
Dalton, the most important college professor of my life. From the back of an
amphitheater seating several hundred students, I realized how much things had
evolved at Columbia and Barnard. The lecture hall was now equipped with a
wireless sound system, webcams, video projectors, wireless internet. Students
were using computers to record the lecture and to take notes. Heads were buried
in screens, the tap tap of hundreds of keyboards like rain on the roof.
On this afternoon, April 16, 2008, Dalton was describing the
satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar
massacre in 1919, when British colonial soldiers opened fire on 10,000 unarmed
Indian men, women and children trapped in Jallianwala Bagh Garden. For 39
years, Professor Dalton has been inspiring Columbia and Barnard students with
his two semester political theory series that introduces undergrads to the
ideas of Gandhi, Thoreau, Mill, Malcolm X, King, Plato, Lao Tzu. His lectures
are about themes, connections between disparate minds, the powerful role of the
individual in shaping our world.
Dalton is a life changer, and this was one of his last
lectures before retirement.
Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the
birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly
distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times,
editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for
jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew,
reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing
solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying
tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective
in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian
mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of
bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card
information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!
When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken,
composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then
I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated
incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking
virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence
in the national classroom.
Students defend this trend by citing their generation’s
enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact,
multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing. Brain
activation for listening is cut in half if the person is trying to process
visual input at the same time. A recent study at The British Institute of
Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another creative
task decreases your IQ in the moment 10 points. That is the equivalent of not
sleeping for 36 hours—more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana. But to
be honest, on the educational front, multi-tasking feels to me like a symptom
of a broader sense of alienation.
I know what it is like to be disengaged. In fact, the crisis
that played a large role in ending my chess career was rooted in becoming
disconnected from my natural love for learning.
Throughout my youth, I had been a creative, aggressive chess
player. I loved the battle, and wild, dynamic chess felt like an extension of
my being. Then, in my late teens a coach urged me to play in the opposite
style, his style of quiet, positional, cold-blooded prophylaxis. Instead of
cultivating my natural strengths, he boxed me into the cookie cutter mold he
knew. In time, I lost touch with my intuitive feeling for chess, and without an
internal compass I foundered in the swells of fame and high-pressure
competition.
I see myself in the eyes of so many kids today. Too many primary,
elementary, and high schoolers are being boxed into the mold of conformity
required by big classes, competition for grades, tests with multiple-choice
questions.
The first grader who leaps to his feet when he figures out
the math problem is diagnosed as ADHD and medicated to sit quietly with the
class. Young learners have immense pressure to perform, to get good grades, but
no one is listening to the nuance of their minds. They feel suppressed, they
are suppressed, and by the time students get to college, they have become
disconnected from the love of learning. Then they are asked to read 1000 pages
in a week and skimming is the only solution. Many of the students who actually
were engaged in the Gandhi lecture, the ones who wanted to learn more than to
shop, were taking notes on their computers in a frenzy, researching events
online while Dalton described them, typing every last word of the lecture. But
Dalton had already supplied them with a detailed course packet with all the
relevant dates and facts. His classroom is an environment for reflection,
introspection, and letting resonant themes sink into your being. Unfortunately,
to these college students, the notion of delighting in the subtle ripples of
learning is almost laughable. Who has the time?
The societal implications of this educational crisis are
huge and the issue must be addressed creatively.
We cannot afford to lose a generation to apathetic disengagement.
Part of the responsibility lies in public policies like No Child Left Behind,
the standardized tests that are turning education into a forced march, and a
culture that bombards us with so much stimulation that it is difficult to know
what to focus on. But part of the burden also lies with parents, teachers and
coaches, and with students themselves. I recently tried to persuade two smart
11-year-olds to give up video games for three weeks. One agreed to the
experiment and also agreed to send me a description of how the process felt.
The other simply couldn’t imagine life without the PSP, even for a day. Here
was an eleven-year-old self-proclaimed incorrigible video game addict!
This story has a happy ending. In the final month of
classes, Dennis Dalton discussed the issues of multi-tasking with his students,
and many responded. Last week when I went back to hear the final lecture of
Dalton’s Barnard career, there were only a few kids surfing the internet—nearly
all the students seemed riveted. Many told me they were relieved to have turned
off their computers and relaxed into listening. A number of my old classmates
came, and afterwards we threw a party for our teacher. After four decades
inspiring college minds, he has decided to nip apathy in the bud by teaching
younger kids. He will start with high school, but Dennis Dalton, one of our
culture’s greatest minds, dreams of teaching kindergarten.
Afterword from Josh:
Thanks to all of you for the powerful responses. I want to
address a couple of the issues raised.
We obviously live in a world that bombards us with
information, and we feel the need to respond to stimulus as it comes in. The
problem with this is that we get stretched along the superficial outer layers
of many things. I believe in depth over breadth in the learning process. Let’s
say we have three skills to learn. The typical approach is to take them all on
at once. It is much more effective to plunge deeply into one, touch Quality,
and then transfer that feeling of Quality over to the others. A martial artist,
for example, should internalize one technique very deeply instead of trying to
learn 10 or 15 superficially.
This approach engages the unconscious, creative aspects of
our minds, and we start making thematic connections which greatly accelerate
growth. It is also important to point out that deep presence is required for a
state of neural plasticity to be triggered—our brain does not re-map
effectively when we are skipping along the surface.
As for Jose’s question—“How do you remain focused all the
time?”—you don’t. It’s useful to build triggers for the zone, so you can slip
into it at will. Then, once we know we can attain a state of intense
concentration, we are free to let it go and recover.
I learned this lesson in my late teens/early twenties trying
to stay concentrated for 8 hours a day, two weeks at a time in world chess
championships—I would burn out. When I started taking mini breaks, my endurance
and quality of focus surged. Stress and recovery should be our rhythms, and
physical interval training can be an excellent tool for improving mental
recovery. One of many problems with multi-tasking is that the frenetic skipping
leaves little room for relaxation, and thus our reservoir for energetic
presence is constantly depleted.
Tim, now I think it’s important for us to home in on the
root of the problem. Multi-tasking, in my opinion, is just a symptom of a
broader cultural disconnect that emerges from too much rigidity and too little
creativity in our educational and corporate worlds. If we love what we are
doing, odds are we will want to focus on it. So the solution is two
pronged—help people discover the love, and arm them with strategies to zone in
when they want to. The second I addressed above. The first, I will tackle
below:
The path to mastery and to engagement is highly
individualized—this is a truism that much of our educational system ignores.
Those who succeed at the elite levels of any discipline have built
relationships to learning around subtle introspective sensitivity. They
understand how their minds work, and both cultivate strengths and take on
weaknesses through their unique natural voice. They have learned to open
communication between their conscious and unconscious minds, and construct
repertoires around moments of creative inspiration. They have built triggers
for their peak performance state, learned how to funnel emotion into deep
focus, turned adversity to their advantage as a way of life—and they have done
all of this in a manner and language that feels natural to them. That is how
they seem so unobstructed, so fluid…they are just being themselves. Like
children.
My road from innocence to alienation to a renewed childlike
love for learning is the catalyst for my writing, my educational nonprofit, and
my commitment to helping kids shine. As parents, teachers, and coaches, we must
reach children when they are young, nurture their natural curiosity, help them
understand their minds. Teachers have a responsibility to listen first—is a
child auditory, kinesthetic, or visual? Are they naturally extroverted or
introverted? What excites them? What gets their creative juices flowing? How
can we take that unique potential and help it grow? How can we help our child
enjoy learning instead of being paralyzed by external pressures?
In my case, I had to let go of a life’s work and start over.
It wasn’t until I left chess behind and became a beginner again, meditating,
studying philosophy and psychology, and ultimately taking on my second
discipline, Tai Chi Chuan, that I began to regain a feel for the art within the
learning process. I had to release myself from the desperate need to live up to
the expectations of others, and in its place grew presence to a natural
creativity that had been smothered by baggage. I started discovering
connections again, chess and the martial arts became one in my mind, and I
could transfer my ideas, my feeling of Quality from one to the other. Learning
became an expression of my being. After years of slogging, I was being true to myself
once more. Hopefully, the lessons gleaned from the painful end of my chess
career can help others avoid similar pitfalls—and perhaps my rediscovery of a
passion for learning holds some solutions to the crisis we face in our schools.
A note for teachers and parents: I am researching the effect
of video games on young minds. If you think it might be a healthy experience
for your kids, please ask them to give up video games for two or three weeks,
and write me about the experience at TheArtofLearning(at)gmail(dot)com.
Thank you!
-Josh Waitzkin
