Choice Theory Read Free Page A

failure of children and parents to get along well may be more extreme among the poor and powerless, but it is hardly exclusive to that group.
    Although more students in poverty areas refuse to make the effort to learn than do students in affluent areas, this failure is related much more to how teachers and students get along with each other than to the fortunes of those who attend. Students from prosperous families, in which education is the main reason for the prosperity, are usually more motivated to learn than are students from families who have not been helped by education. Teachers appreciate this motivation and tend to make a greater effort to get along with the former students, which is another reason they learn more. But if teachers were offered choice theory and found how useful it was in their marriages and families, they could also begin to use it to get along better with students who seem to be unmotivated. This effort could go a long way to make up for the lack of support for education at home, and the previously unmotivated students would learn a lot more than they do now.
    In chapter 10, on education, I explain how choice theory was used in a minority school that my wife and I worked in for a year. This is an area I know something about. The
common sense
that poor or minority students can’t or won’t learn is totally wrong. When they get along well with their teachers, they may learn more slowly because they start further back, but, in the end, they learn as well as any other students. Productive, high-quality work is assured in any organization in which workers and managers get along well together.
    The name for what we usually do when we deal with each other is called
the system.
In an external control world, the system is naturally coercive. When it fails, as it is failing in marriages, families, schools, and workplaces, we use more coercion and focus on fixing the people. Many therapists stress the systems approach to counseling, in which they do not attempt to fix individuals as much as to help them figure out a way to make the family system work better for all involved. What I suggest is that we try to change to a choice theory system, which teaches everyone, not just unhappy people, how to get along better with each other. What makes external control doubly harmful is that notonly does our belief in it create the problems we are trying to solve, but it is also used to deal with the problems. When punishment doesn’t work, invariably we punish harder. It’s no wonder there has been so little progress.
    So far only a tiny fraction of the money spent to reduce misery has been spent on prevention, on teaching people how to get along better with each other before they get into the hard-core, adversarial relationships that are the result of too many attempts to control or manipulate. If we want to move the flat line of human progress up, prevention, which means changing from an external control to a choice theory system, is a way we can do so. Once any human problem occurs, for example, when marriages begin to fail, the couples rarely get back together. No matter how skilled the counselor, it is often impossible to save a marriage or a failing student. The answer lies in preventing these failures, not in looking for better ways to fix the people who are failing.
    To substantiate my claim that vast numbers of seemingly un-solvable human problems are relationship problems, take a look at your life and the lives of the people you know. I’m sure that many of you are unable to get along with your spouses, parents, or children as well as you would like to. You may also admit that the longer you are with them, the harder it seems to get along.
    Think about it. You were happy when you got married. Are you now miserable or divorced? Is there someone in your family you no longer speak to? Are your children as happy in middle school as they were in the early grades? Do you still find joy in the work you do?
    If you