Strategies for Unearthing the Genius in Our Students
by John D. Lawry, PhD
Professor of Psychology
Marymount College
Tarrytown, NY 10591
914-332-8329
 
Introduction
 
Most academics have heard the claim that the average person uses approximately 10-15% of his/her intelligence 99.9% of the time. When pressed for the source of this claim some may know that it is attributed to either William James or Albert Einstein. Few may be aware that in fact both of these great thinkers of the twentieth century came to this same conclusion independently, as far as I can determine. In other words, it is as if our minds are like automobile engines with ten cylinders and only one is operating. The reason we don't know it is because that is the way virtually everyone's mind is operating. The only exception is the rare "genius" who has two cylinders working. Thus, if the IQ scale were a true ration scale (with an absolute zero making ratios possible), which it isn't, then the average person has an IQ of 100, geniuses have IQs somewhere around 200, and all of us have the potential for 1000! If that's true, then every student who is sitting in a classroom, every child, is a potential genius.

What is the evidence for this incredible contention? I believe the most impressive comes from two sources: the effects of hypnosis and the new research on DID (dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder). First DID. It has recently been defined as a dissociative disorder in which patients hypnotize themselves into an altered state to cope with overwhelming trauma. Former New York Times science writer, Daniel Goleman, has chronicled how the new research on "multiples" (as they are called) has been causing a revolution in the field of psychiatry and shaking up our notions of the power of the mind to affect the body. For example, multiples exhibit some remarkable biological and psychological changes as they switch from one to another personality. These include such phenomena as differential responses to the same drug, the presence or absence of such conditions as color blindness, epilepsy, diabetes, allergies, differences in handwriting, blood pressure, visual acuity, speech patterns, brainwave patterns, and even the presence of scars and other tissue wounds. Is it any wonder, therefore, that Nancy Napier, a New York therapist who works with multiples, has been quoted as saying, "I don't think we have the remotest notion about where all this is taking us."

If all this sounds like what Time magazine called "the UFO of psychiatry," then let me share a documented case of the effect of hypnosis on self-healing. In a video produced by the BBC in 1982, titled "Hypnosis: Can Your Mind Control Your Body?" there is presented a 16 year-old male who was diagnosed with having a congenital disease of the skin that rendered him like the "elephant man" as depicted in the popular movie of the 80s with the same title. In other words, the youth was born with a skin in which there were no sebaceous glands, and as a result, instead of flaking off normally, it built up into a grotesque epidermis resembling the skin of an elephant.

Dr. A. A. Mason, M.D. who treated him described how he came upon the case after there had been an unsuccessful attempt to graft on good skin through a surgical procedure. Misdiagnosing the case as warts, Dr. Mason suggested to the surgeon that he try hypnosis. In a moment of pique the surgeon invited Dr. Mason to take over the case if he thought he could do better. Unwittingly, Dr. Mason tried hypnosis and gave the boy the suggestion that one of his arms become completely normal within a week. The following week the boy arrived at the hospital and indeed the arm was completely normal. Immediately, Dr. Mason showed the boy to the surgeon and only then did the surgeon reveal the true diagnosis and suggested to Dr. Mason that he better come with an explanation since he would be asked to present the case to the British Medical Society.

Through further suggestions the boy's entire body was eventually healed with only a few residual marks from the condition. It was the first case of virtually complete healing of such a congenital condition in the history of modern medicine. As Dr. Mason remarks at the end of a very dramatic presentation of the case visually, the healing was no less remarkable than if the patient had been healed of a clubfoot. Indeed, if this were to have happened a hundred years ago it would have been characterized as a miracle.

After reading about the effects of DID and seeing or even hearing about this video presentation, I do not think there is anyone who can question at least the possibility of what I call the "James-Einstein hypothesis." If the mind can do that, albeit under the influence of suggestion, whether trauma-induced or clinically induced, then what is the limit? The challenge of the implications of these phenomena, it seems to me, is how to tap the obvious potential of the mind using, let us say, more normal means other than trauma or hypnosis.

Strategies:
 
1. Self-fulfilling Prophecy
 
The remainder of this paper will present five strategies for "unearthing the genius" in students, which I have developed and used in my courses over the years. The first is what Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jackson at Harvard University in the 60s termed "the Pygmalion Effect," and what others have called self-fulfilling prophecy. Rosenthal discovered in his experiment with elementary school (Oak School in San Francisco, Gr. 1-6) children who were reported to their teachers as showing unusual potential for intellectual growth that they got significantly different scores on intelligence and standardized achievement tests at the end of the school year. In fact, the children were matched and randomly assigned to the various classes but the teachers were given false information. Some teachers were told that they had the top 20% of the class ("magic" children) whereas other teachers were told they had the bottom 80% of the class. Most readers probably know that the "magic" children scored higher at the end of the year and thus Rosenthal concluded that it was primarily because of perceived differences in the relative abilities of the two groups.

Rosenthal and Jackson conclude by suggesting a very prescient application of their findings for its time (1966), one that unfortunately has not been heeded:

As teacher-training institutions begin to teach the possibility that teachers' expectations of their pupils performance may serve self-fulfilling prophecies, there may be a new expectancy created. The new expectancy may be that children can learn more than had been believed possible, an expectation held by many educational theorists, though for quite different reasons (for example, Bruner). The new expectancy, at the very least, will make it more difficult when they encounter the educationally disadvantaged for teachers to think, "Well, after all, what can you expect?" The man on the street may be permitted his opinions and prophecies of the unkempt children loitering in a dreary schoolyard. The teacher in the schoolroom may need to learn that those same prophecies within her may be fulfilled; she is no casual passer-by. Perhaps Pygmalion is the classroom is more her role.

So if you "know" that the students sitting in your classroom are potential geniuses and it is just a matter of unearthing that genius, is not that very fact going to make a difference in the outcome? The growing research on self-fulfilling prophecy would argue that it will and I can speak from personal experience that it does. There is a lot of speculation about why it works but there is no question in my mind that it works. In fact, I go one step further than the implications of the Rosenthal study. I tell my students they have the capacity for genius and guess what? Some of them begin to believe it and begin to perform as if it were true! They begin to think of themselves as "smart," "bright," "intelligent," whatever word they feel comfortable with and which enhances their mental functioning.

2. Self-hypnosis and Positive Thinking
 
This brings me to the second and related strategy, teaching students the use of self-hypnosis and positive thinking. Several years ago I taught a graduate course on developmental psychology for teachers. One of my students was doing much better than all of the other students on the objective tests I was administering at the time. When I queried him about his "secret," he informed me that he was a hypnotist by avocation and that he would study the text by putting himself in a light trance and giving himself a suggestion such as: "The material I am about to study will become fully assimilated in my storehouse of memories. When I am studying, my mind works clearly and sharply and I retain everything I learn." He assured me that he only needed to read the text once and he retained virtually 100% of the material, at least for the exam.

I now teach self-hypnosis in virtually all of my classes and give them a sheet of suggestions for "Increasing Creativity and Developing Dormant Talents, Improving Memory, and Improving the Learning Process and Performance on Examinations." This is what a student by the name of Claire wrote about this part of a first-year college survival course that was called "University 101":

In class, the session that really impressed me was "Positive Thinking." I realized that I always degraded myself about things before I even attempted them. It wasn't so much that my mother told me that I couldn't do things, because she never discouraged me about anything I wanted to do. It was just having to see life her life the way that she did; never becoming the accountant or nurse or entrepreneur like her other siblings. It made me think that I would be exactly like her, not because of a lack of intelligence but ambition. I was able to quit that negative thinking and begin to think positive thoughts with your "Positive Thinking" technique. Before each class and every test I would clear my mind of all thoughts and begin by telling myself that "I will retain all things I learned in class," or "I will retain all things I studied." Because of these techniques I have improved from a C- to a B in Microeconomics and have been getting all A's on my mathematics exams!

3. Chanting and Clearing the Mind
 
The reference to "clearing the mind" brings me to the third strategy. I believe that the beginning of class is a critical moment, i.e., the manner in which the class is begun influences the experience of everyone, thus the efficacy of rites and ritual for beginnings. Ever since we discontinued beginning class with a prayer to the Holy Spirit at Marymount College in the 1960s, I have struggled and searched for some kind of meaningful replacement. When I visited the yoga ashram, Kripalu, in Lenox, MA several years ago I found the answer. I now begin class with chanting "OM" followed by the Sanskrit greeting, "Jai Bhagwan," which translates loosely into "I honor the divine within you." Why "OM"? Well, to quote briefly from Swami Sivananda, "OM is everything. . . . The repetition of OM has a tremendous influence on the mind. . . OM is the inner music of the soul. It is the music of Silence, the voice of God."

This is how Dr. Deepak Chopra, author of Quantum Healing and other best-selling books, described it more scientifically in a lecture he gave in 1992 at Kripalu:

If you make that sound OM in front of a drop of oil, for example, then you will see that it manifests into a very specific visual form (under a microscope). If you examine that visual form, you will find that it's a "mandala," which is a very symmetric pattern that comes out of that vibration and every bit of it contains all of it. In other words, it is a hologram. It's a hologram of information and energy coming from the original information and energy field that contains every single thing in creation.

More importantly, what is the student reaction to such an unusual class beginning? Well, for one thing, they become so habituated that they remind me when I forget and when we all forget the class does not seem to go as well. But the experience is much deeper than that. This is what Nahoko, a Japanese-American student, wrote about her experience of chanting OM in her journal:

One of the most attractive qualities that made me and all the students comfortable was the famous OM at the beginning of the class. This simple sound of OM not only was a pleasing start, but it was also the strong, magical word that brought the entire class into a unity. For me, in addition to the harmonious quality, it was a moment of experiencing a spiritual atmosphere, where I was always reminded to think about or say a prayer for someone in my mind by creating a bridge from my heart to the loving God. Through the repetitive, ritual OM at the beginning of each class, the whole class was melted from a solid sugar into a blended, sweet liquid solvent, in which everyone could be open and interact with one another by sharing one's own experiences as well as her opinions.

I could not have said it better myself!

4. The Journal
 
The fourth strategy is one I have been using ever since I started teaching a Senior Seminar for Psychology majors more than 20 years ago. Requiring students to keep a journal for the duration of a course is a very powerful technique not only for facilitating student reflection of course content but also for getting to know the student. To help the students in this regard I provide an edited handout on journal keeping from McCarroll's book, Exploring the Inner World, which unfortunately is out of print but is available in an anthology I edited. To quote from my introduction for this reading:
 
For the majority of my students in University 101, nothing in the course requirements causes more initial resistance than the requirement of keeping a journal. "I hate writing." "How can I be personal if you are going to read it?" "I don't have time to keep a journal." Etc. And yet, nothing seems to match the journal in its power to teach self-exploration. As McCarroll says: "It is through my journal that I begin to hear my own story and to search for my part in the story of life." Most of my students acknowledge this at the end of the course and can't wait for me to read their journals.

Rather than my telling you how the students responded to the keeping of a journal, let me quote from Christine's final self-evaluation:

My journal reintroduced me to myself, a part of me that was lost in lectures, studying, and writing papers. I've learned that it is important to take the time to be by myself. A time to be free, a time to dream and a time to write. I've always tried to keep a journal, but with my busy schedule I forget to write for weeks at a time. I want to start over again with a new journal and my new attitude. I feel happier about relationships and myself as a result of my taking time to write my thoughts out. I've learned a great deal from this class, but most importantly, I've learned a lot about myself (emphasis mine).

5. Loving Our Students
 
The fifth and final strategy is "loving our students." It was Goethe who said that it was not the most brilliant teachers who had the greatest impact on his life; it was those who loved him. Would not that be a fair statement for most of us? It is interesting to me that the importance of love is becoming recognized in other professions as well. For example, Dr. Deepak Chopra, author of Quantum Healing, in a recent interview said that love was the single most important ingredient in the physician-patient relationship.

The empirical evidence comes from the work of David Asby and Florence Roebuck who have dedicated practically their entire professional lives to analyzing more than 200,000 hours of classroom instruction and found that what Carl Rogers calls empathy, congruence and positive regard, as measurable characteristics in grade-school teachers, contribute significantly to classroom learning. Not only that but the pattern holds for the entire school when the principal possesses those characteristics; such is the power of love.

How does it work? No one knows for sure but I believe that love creates an energy and atmosphere for learning as well as for healing. As Yogi Amrit Desai phrased it in a lecture: "The highest form of learning occurs when the teacher loves and accepts the students so fully that they feel safe enough to go within to see themselves and to emerge with new answers about themselves and their lives." Think of the greatest teachers down through the centuries: Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and in the modern period, such educational geniuses as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Steiner, Krishnamurti, Neill, and Montessori. What did they all have in common? I would argue an awareness of the importance of love in teaching, as the following quotes would suggest.

First, it was the great Swiss educator, J. Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), "Father of Modern Elementary Education," who said, "Love is the sole and everlasting foundation on which our nature can be trained to humaneness." But, as Noddings and Shore remind us:

Pestalozzi was not simply an educational theorist; he practiced what he preached. His school at Yverdon stood in dramatic contrast to other schools in early nineteenth-century Europe, where beatings, endless recitation, and harsh teachers were common. At Pestalozzi's school, children were treated with respect and kindness, given tasks equal to their abilities, and above all taught by word and by example that love in its most generous, altruistic form is important. So pervasive and genuine was the emphasis on love as an educating form that when a peasant came to visit the school at Yverdon, he exclaimed, "This is not a school, it is a household." Although Pestalozzi's school fell into decline and eventually closed during his own lifetime, his message to educators to fill their teaching and living with love was not forgotten and remains one of his most important legacies.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of the Waldorf school system as well as anthroposophy, was in my opinion, a man ahead of his times. For example, this is what he wrote about the sensitive soul of the child:

It is not easy, at first, to believe that feelings like reverence and respect have anything to do with cognition. This is due to the fact that we are inclined to set cognition aside as a faculty by itself&emdash;one that stands in no relation to what otherwise occurs in the soul. In so thinking we do not bear in mind that it is the soul which exercises the faculty of cognition; and feelings are for the soul what food is for the body. . . . Veneration, homage, devotion are the nutriment making it healthy and strong, especially strong for the activity of cognition. Disrespect, antipathy, underestimation of what deserves recognition, all exert a paralyzing and withering effect on this faculty of cognition. . . . Reverence awakens in the soul a sympathetic power through which we attract qualities in the beings around us, which would otherwise remain concealed.

In her excellent treatise on the Waldorf educational philosophy, Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America, M. C. Richards sums up the place of caring in this unique school environment where the child has the same teacher for the entire eight years of elementary schooling:

Teaching and the preparation of the teacher is a spiritual practice. But again let us ask what this means. For, as has been suggested, one does not go directly to something termed spirit, but rather one works through physical materials, activities, relationships, perceptions, meditations. In order to affect their mobility of thinking and their individual creativity of will, the teachers practice the various arts of painting and music and eurhythmy, poetry, and whatever else may attract them. To affect their feeling life, they attempt to observe rhythms in their waking and sleeping; to work imaginatively in their class preparation, using stories and colors and sound and movements and play; and to care for one another. This last is the hardest of all, of course. To care for another person more than for oneself, to let the ego of another person live in oneself as vividly as one's own&emdash;this we can barely begin to do. The teachers, through their faithful championing of a group of children through continuous years of schooling, have an opportunity to practice this high art, and to try gradually to develop a true sense of "the other."

Krishnamurti (1890-1986), one of the great spokesmen for Eastern thought to the West in the twentieth century, had this to say about loving students:

Only love can bring about the understanding of another. Where there is love there is instantaneous communion with the other, on the same level and at the same time. It is because we ourselves are so dry, empty and without love that we have allowed governments and systems to take over the education of our children and the direction of our lives. . . . If the teacher is of the right kind, he will not depend on a method, but will study each individual pupil. In our relationship with children and young people, we are not dealing with mechanical devices, that can be quickly repaired, but with living beings who are impressionable, volatile, sensitive, afraid, affectionate; and to deal with them, we have to have great understanding, the strength of patience and love (emphasis mine).

A.S. Neill (1883-1973), the founder of Summerhill school in England, wrote the following editorial in the student newspaper at the University of Edinburgh in 1912, chastising his professors for their aloofness:

They stand upon their dignity and their whole attitude which says, 'I don't want any of your familiarity. I am a Professor. . .' If he fails to be a man of charity, of kindliness, of love, the honorary degrees count for nothing; he is unfit to be a professor, for, in teaching, the man is greater than his subject.

Neill titled one of his early books, Hearts, Not Heads in the Schools, and this is what he wrote in Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing:

Summerhill is possibly the happiest school in the world. We have no truants and seldom a case of homesickness. We rarely have fights &endash; quarrels, of course, but seldom have I seen a stand-up fight like the ones we used to have as boys. I seldom hear a child cry, because children when free have much less hate to express than children who are downtrodden. Hate breeds hate, and love breeds love. Love means approving of children, and that is essential in any school. You can't be on the side of children if you punish them and storm at them. Summer hill is a school in which the child knows that he is approved of.

Robin Pedley in The Comprehensive School considered the changing relationship between teacher and child as the most significant area in which Neill's influence was felt.

Neill, more than anyone else, has swung teachers'opinion in this country from its one reliance on authority and the cane to hesitant recognition that a child's first need is love, and with love, respect for the free growth of his personality. . . . The magic of the inspired reformer is there in Neill's books, in his talks to teachers who still (1963) flock to hear him. . . . Today's friendliness between pupil and teacher is probably the greatest difference between the classrooms of 1963 and those of 1923. The change owes much to Neill, and to others in independent co-educational school who have practised similar principles.

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) called education a "technique of love" and is said to have hugged the street children in those first "Case dei Bambini" she founded in Italy at the turn of the century. She argued strongly for the importance of caring and nurturance on the part of the teacher, something that was unfortunately lost in the American translation of the Montesorri method if my daughter's school was typical. Listen to what Montessori says in the chapter, "The Love Teachers," in The Child in The Family:

And who are these instructors who would teach the child to love? Those who judge as misbehavior all the child's activities and who deal with them punitively? No adult can become a teacher of love without a special effort, without opening the eyes of his consciousness in order to see a world more vast than his own.

So what happens when the teacher is able to bring love as well as all of the other things we know are important to the learning process? This is what the famous lecturer, Jean Houston, wrote about a visiting young Swiss professor of religion, Dr. Jacob Taubes, at Columbia University who saved her life when she was in the midst of a personal crisis in her junior year:

Dr. Taubes continued to walk me to the bus throughout the term, always challenging me with intellectually vigorous questions. He attended to me. I existed for him in the "realest" of senses, and because I existed for him I began to exist for myself. Within several weeks my eyesight came back, my spirit bloomed, and I became a fairly serious student, whereas before I had been, at best, a bright show-off.
 
What I acquired from this whole experience was a tragic sense of life, which balanced my previous enthusiasms. I remain deeply grateful for the attention shown me by Dr. Taubes. He acknowledged me when I most needed it. I was empowered in the midst of personal erosion, and my life has been very different for it. I swore to myself then that whenever I came across someone "going under" or in the throes of disacknowledgement, I would try to reach and acknowledge that person as I had been acknowledged.

I believe this first example contains what Parker Palmer is talking about in his seminal book, To Know As We Are Known: A Spiritual of Education. In the first chapter, "Knowing Is Loving," Palmer writes:

Education . . . means more than teaching the facts and learning the reasons so we can manipulate life toward our ends. It means being drawn into personal responsiveness and accountability to each other and the world of which we are a part." Dr. Taubes had the courage to become a person to a troubled student and look what happened!

My second example is closer to home in that it is a quote from a final self-evaluation paper of a student of mine whose name is Alyssa for a psychology course I taught several years ago called "Perennial Quest:"

Reading over my journal in its entirety forces me to acknowledge the incredible growth I have experienced this semester as a result of "Perennial Quest." As the journal indicates, and as my memory confirms, I began the course reluctant, or more appropriately, unable to share openly in the class discussions, or even to honestly express myself in the journal. This closed-ness made itself more apparent to me through the psychosomatic pain I experienced for the first half of the course. However, I decided at the beginning to take a risk and to allow myself to speak and write freely, as well as to listen and read closely. My journey of the semester present itself in the journal. The end result is that right now I fee a tremendous sense of peace. In fact, the stomach pain, whish has tormented me for years, has not been active in these last few weeks. I see this in itself as a clear sign of my personal growth.

For modesty's sake, I hesitate to go on but I feel I must because it makes the point: I want to thank you for inviting me to make this journey and for these many gifts. I am so grateful that I could partake in this growth process and attain this delicious sense of peace. Thank you most especially for your openness, your nonjudgmental approach to your students, and for your love. Not only will I carry with me the lessons I have been granted during this semester, but I will also always remember you as a role model of healthy living, sincere interest in your work and your students, and the expression of genuine caring. Your living out of the words you impart to others, "Jai Bhagwan," has inspired me to embrace the radical transformation that has begun within me in order to be able to, as I see you do, breathe the divine with such peace and such profound joy.

Endnotes

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