How We Teach Peer Pressure at School

Teaching Kids to Be Dumb (I mean, to Think For Themselves)

and/or

How We Teach Kids Peer Pressure at School

My friend Lucy came to see me the other day.  Okay, I probably should refer to her as a student named Lucy.  But after I have talked to someone for a while and no longer see her regularly because she is doing well, I think of the person as an “old friend.”  Anyway, Lucy is a senior and asked to see me.  I was a bit worried because in the past that meant something was going on in her life and it wasn’t always good.  But in this case, Lucy just wanted to use me as a resource for a class project.  And her project got me thinking about something I think about all the time!

Lucy was doing a project on drug use among high school students and the premise of her project was that there need to be better classes on the topics of drinking and drug use and so on for high school students because programs like DARE which are done with elementary students are basically “useless” – her word not mine.  But I agree with the word choice and any research I have seen on the topic has supported that elementary prevention programs are not effective in the long term.  Lucy said, “I don’t remember anything we did in DARE (when I was in fifth grade).  And it didn’t stop me or anyone else from getting into alcohol and drugs.”  I immediately thought of a passage from my soon to be released book called “Fool’s Gold: Searching for Goodness in the Human Heart” (Yup, this is an unashamed advertisement!)  I showed Lucy this section which refers to “Just Say No” education that is based on a values clarification model (“decide for yourself what you believe and choose based on that”):

These programs are started at early grades in the schools and the basic approach is to teach kids early that there are good reasons not to smoke (or drink or do drugs) and no real good reasons to smoke.  The kids are taught to make a figurative list (sometimes literal) of pros and cons of smoking.  Ask any first grader who has been through this kind of teaching and they will likely be able to give you several reasons why smoking is bad for you and maybe one or none why someone might smoke.  The one reason will be “to be cool.”  But first graders don’t see other first graders who smoke as cool.  So that reason isn’t appealing.  Recognizing that there are unique situations out there, in general there are very few first graders who are going to smoke or drink or do drugs.  Teaching them reasons why not to do those things is pretty much meaningless.  But teaching them how to think about these issues and make their own decisions is laying a pretty big trap for adolescence.

All through elementary school, Julie has been taught to think for herself and to make up her own mind.  She graduated from the DARE program in sixth grade and now has gone on to junior high school.  When Julie was in elementary school, she made a list just as she had been taught about why she was never going to start smoking.  It kind of looked like this:

SMOKING

                                Pros                                                                      Cons

                1.  Some people think it’s cool                                     1.  You can get cancer

                                                                                          2.  It makes your clothes smell bad

                                                                                          3.  It costs lots of money

                                                                                          4.  My parents will be mad at me

                                                                                          5.  You could die

                                                                                          6.  It’s against the law

                                                                                          7.  My teachers will be sad

                                                                                          8.  It makes your teeth yellow

                                                                                          9.  It makes your breath stink

                This pro/con list made it easy for Julie to see why she would never smoke.  The cons clearly outweighed the pros.  Of course, Julie had little opportunity to test her list in elementary school as she was never actually offered a cigarette by anyone, including any of her friends.  Nor was she in any way interested in finding out what smoking was like.

                But now Julie is in junior high and things have changed a bit.  Some of her friends have started dabbling in various things they all said they would not do when they were learning about them during Red Ribbon Week in elementary school.  Julie has even gone to a couple of parties where some of the people she knows have been smoking.  Time to get out the list to see if the cons still outweigh the pros.  Julie has been well taught to think for herself and not just to do what her friends are doing.  In fact, in many cases, Julie has learned to not even do what her parents say just because they are her parents.  She knows how to clarify her own values and she can make her own decisions; except now the list looks like this:

SMOKING

                                Pros                                                         Cons

                  Some                             1.  You can get cancer

                                                                                  2.  It makes your clothes smell bad

                      People               3.  It costs lots of money

                                                                                   4.  My parents will be mad at me

                     Think                         5.  You could die

                                                                                  6.  It’s against the law

                      It’s                                           7.  My teachers will be sad

                                                                                   8.  It makes your teeth yellow

                     COOL!!!                9.  It makes your breath stink

                So now, when Julie gets out the scale and weighs the decision out, which side weighs more?  And so, like many kids who in first and second grade swore they would never smoke (as if kids that age can make decisions like that!), Julie now joins those with clarified values who choose to do what they said they never would.  And it’s not even that the content has changed in the list of pros and cons; only the relevance of the content.

                If this is true for smoking, it’s the same for drugs and sex and shoplifting and lying to parents and other adults and cheating and all sorts of things that many of us, left entirely to our own “goodness”, would do!  What kids learn from this kind of instruction is not useful for making decisions that will affect their lives in a positive way (not smoking, not doing drugs, etc.).  Instead, it teaches them a way of thinking that in many ways actually gives them permission to do the very things we thought we were teaching them not to do!  We’ve taught them to think for themselves according their own knowledge of good and evil regardless of what their friends, teachers, or even their parents think. 

Lucy took one look at this and just like her namesake waiting for Schroeder to play just the right version of Jingle Bells shouted, “THAT’S IT!!”  She totally got it and said that was exactly what happened in her own life and in the lives of her friends.  Once people started doing it, whatever “it” was, in order to fit in, logical reasons to not do it were overwhelmed by emotional reasons to do it.  But we taught the kids to think like this!  “Make a list; check it twice, make up your own mind!”

Someone says, “Sure, but that’s why we teach kids about resisting peer pressure and we do that even more when the kids hit junior and senior high.  We tell them, ‘You shouldn’t do something just because your friends do.’”  In the category of actions speak louder than words, I can only say, “Really?”  From the time kids enter the institutional school setting they are told in subtle and not so subtle ways that the only sin is to be different from the kids around them.  Hear these teacher voices:

·         “Everyone else is already in line.  You need to get in line also.”
·         “If you are not sure what to do, you should look at your classmates 

       and do what they are doing.”
·         “Your friends are not going to want to play with you if you keep acting like that.”
·         “I like what the blue table is doing; the other tables might want to look at the blue table and            see what those students are doing.”
·         “No one else in the class is out of their seat!  Why are you walking around the room?”
·         “Do you see anyone else doing that!?!?” (Extra punctuation means extra emotion!)

These kinds of statements are ubiquitous in the school setting.  They are constant and they have one constant theme: Do what your classmates (friends) do because the goal is that everyone should be the same and the only sin is being different. 

We even carry this into academic performance.  The main goal of all schools right now is that all kids score above the 40^th percentile on standardized measures of reading, math and science.  Standardized basically means there is a normal or average group of kids and we need all kids to be in that category.  This comes from No Child Left Behind and there are many challenges to this goal in terms of statistical realities and maybe even desirability (My last essay called Delight in the Gap deals with some of this). 

But beyond the challenges, think of the foundation on which it is built.  We need to close the gap in terms of achievement so that there is no gap in achievement – in other words, everyone is the same.  This close the gap thinking is applied (almost always unconsciously) to behavior as well.  The school system’s goal is that everyone’s behavior would be the same.  “You need to act like everyone else,” or more directly, “No one else is acting like that!”  I hear this from teachers I work with who in one form or another say to me, “My class would be fine if it wasn’t for . . . .” and the sentence is completed with the names of a student or students who act differently than the rest of the class in terms of behavior or achievement.

Kids are exposed to this incessant systemic voice which says, “Act like everyone else.”  And at the same time, they are taught to think for themselves – make your list and then make your own decision.  We have laid a foundation of thinking that can’t help but result in kids following peer pressure as a main source of decision making.  And we are surprised!  Because after all, we adults don’t make decisions based on peer pressure!  The fact that our churches and sports teams and service organizations and hobby groups and circle of friends are made up primarily of people who look and talk and believe just like us is not about peer pressure – it’s just our personal preference!  As I said, actions speak louder than words.

Lucy was right.  We do need a new way to address the pressures that kids face in dealing with really dangerous choices like smoking and drugs and alcohol and sexual activity.  What we are doing is not working and part of it is the truth that our current school system teaches peer pressure as the best way to know that one belongs.  And it teaches personal decision making based on one’s own list of pros and cons.  In my view, we need to start thinking in absolutes, a foreign concept in our relativistic world.  There are behaviors and actions that are wrong because they are wrong, not because no one else is doing it!  And there are behaviors and actions that are wrong even if EVERYone else is doing it.  It isn’t about opinion and pros and cons and conforming to the standard of others’ behaviors or even others’ achievement scores.  It’s about doing what is right because it is right.  I’m looking forward to seeing what Lucy comes up with from her point of view.  She’s an expert in teenage peer pressure, being a teen herself, and will have some great insight on what might actually work!