“Jesus, I must be crazy to be in a loony-bin like this.” Randle Patrick McMurphy

An article from Science (Jan. 1973), On Being Sane in Unsane Places, (also at Susan Ohanian.org) described an experiment in which eight sane people volunteered to be secretly admitted to psychiatric hospitals to find out if hospital staff could distinguish them from patients with legitimate diagnoses. The author, David Rosenhan, asked whether characteristics of insanity are located in the patient or in the contexts in which observers find them.

If the sanity of such pseudopatients were always detected, there would be prima facie evidence that a sane individual can be distinguished from the insane context in which he is found. Normality (and presumably abnormality) is distinct enough that it can be recognized wherever it occurs, for it is carried within the person. If, on the other hand, the sanity of the pseudopatients were never discovered, serious difficulties would arise for those who support traditional modes of psychiatric diagnosis.

Rosenhan argued that a failure to discover the sanity of the imposters would mean that “Psychiatric diagnoses…are in the minds of observers and are not valid summaries of characteristics displayed by the observed.”

How did the sane people in Rosenhan’s experiment prove they were, in fact, not insane? They acted normal. They cooperated with hospital staff. And they were never discovered! The label, insane, clung to them despite their best efforts to appear normal. Reasonable and compliant behavior, though genuine, did not signal sanity. Instead, they were each eventually released as “schizophrenics in remission.”

Interestingly, many of the other patients insisted the imposters were perfectly sane while none of the professional hospital staff ever considered the possibility. Some of the patients even suspected that the observers, who took notes, were checking up on the hospital, while the nursing staff reported “writing behavior.”

The power of labels to influence our perceptions is enormously important, and the resultant depersonalization of those who are labeled is the source of monstrous injustices. Racism, and all forms of bigotted intolerance are exercises of power based on categorical discrimination.

What does it mean to be sane? To be competent? Most people probably assume being sane or competent simply means that we aren’t insane, or incompetent. But is there a more positive way to view sanity? Based on the outcome of Rosenhan’s study, I think we should wonder.

S.I. Hayakawa explored what a sane person might look like in “The Fully Functioning Personality” from his book Symbol, Status, and Personality. He believed it would be worthwhile to think of sanity in terms of what he called the “genuinely sane individual,” referencing the work of both Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. Hayakawa was attracted to Maslow’s description of the secure individual as a person who was comfortable with disorder and ambiguity. He saw this as dynamic security, a form of confident resourcefulness, as opposed to the security we gain from defensively building walls.

Hayakawa noted that “these sane people are not, in the ordinary sense of the term, well-adjusted.” The sane person does not conform, and does not fit in with the goals and ideals of a society that he finds himself in opposition to. At the same time, he does not stand in open rebellion. The genuinely sane individual, according to Hayakawa, wears conventionality as a cloak that is easily cast aside when conditions warrant it.

People with fully functioning personalities are concerned with social realities, rather than appearances. They are aware of their own feelings, and are not misled even by their own beliefs about themselves. They are creatively open to awe and innovation. And finally, their behavior is guided by an unwavering ethical compass.

Teachers should think about this because high-stakes pressure from federal regulation paradoxically pushes us to race through curriculum content, while leaving many children behind. It’s all about raising the bar and says little about helping the jumpers. That is supposed to happen from some kind of black box process called effective teaching. The professionalism and competence of teachers is being scrutinized under a new regime of accountability, which makes contradictory demands on the professional work force in schools.

…accountabalism whispered two seductive lies to us: Systems go wrong because of individuals; and the right set of controls will enable us to prevent individuals from creating disasters….by overly formalizing processes, accountabalism refuses to acknowledge that people work and think differently. It eliminates the human variations that move institutions forward and provide a check on the monoculture that accounts for most disastrous decisions….While claiming to increase individual responsibility, it drives out human judgment. (David Weinberger) -from Where the Blog has No Name

The release of the Aspen Commission Report (pdf) on NCLB’s reauthorization has been called NCLB on steroids by FairTest. It makes me wonder what they think we’re doing. Call it “teaching behavior.”

“… But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.” – Ken Kesey

Current policy revisions are an attempt to standardize educational outcomes. High stakes consequences promote false security through assurances of certainty. We would be better served by a program that encourages diversity and flexibility instead of standardization. The monoculture which would come from long-term standardization will be vulnerable to sudden obsolescence in the face of rapid technological development. Furthermore, schools have increasingly become racially segregated, undoing the progress made by civil rights activists 40 years ago. The current standards movement’s narrow focus on work preparedness will breed resentment and hostility among students who stand to gain the least from its dubious promises.

To develop fully functioning personalities, we need to honor the natural creative impulses in our students and allow children the freedom to build self concepts that spring from their own fertile imaginings. Human beings are symbol makers, and we must honor our symbolic, as well as our functional needs. Teachers, especially teachers of young children, would do well to emulate the simplicity and naturalness of their students, for these are qualities of the truly sane individual. We teach who we are more certainly than what we know.

David L. Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Science, Vol. 179 (Jan. 1973), 250-258.

Hayakawa, S. I. (1958). Symbol, status, and personality. New York: Harcourt,Brace & World.