WHAT DOG TRAINING HAS TAUGHT ME ABOUT EDUCATION; OR, WHY MY DOG MAKES ME THINK OF CHARLOTTE MASON, PART THE SECOND

Dora being very come-hitherish from the vantage point of her favorite chair. 

I have mentioned that in working with my dog, I'm making a lot of connections with Charlotte Mason's principles and methodology. I hope I don't have to say that I know perfectly well that dogs aren't people, and I'm not equating children with dogs. At the same time, the parallels and analogies, particularly as they pertain to behaviors, are striking. 

The dog-training program I'm following is based on Cognitive Behavioral Theory and the concept of brain plasticity, which is something Charlotte Mason was talking about a century ago. The idea is that you want your dog to replicate desired behaviors to the point where they become ingrained as habits, just part of the dog's nature. The corollary to this idea is the idea that you don't want your dog to replicate undesirable behaviors. When Charlotte Mason talks about the development of habits, this is what she's talking about. Repeat, repeat, repeat –– consistently –– what you want your children to do. What I mean is,  don't repeatedly keep telling them. That doesn't work at all. Actually have them repeat the behaviors themselves, because that's how those behaviors get wired into the brain. Again, the corollary: just as you want them to replicate desired behaviors, you also don't want to let them replicate behaviors you don't desire. 

For Dora, my dog, this means that in getting her to change her behaviors –– e.g., barking and growling at new people who enter our home –– I want both to encourage positive behaviors and prevent her practicing the old ingrained negative response. Here and here are some discussions about how I'm doing that currently (as well as my daily style diary, which you can regard as a bonus). 

Key to this approach is the idea of classical conditioning as opposed to operant conditioning. I can get my dog to sit by offering her a treat every time she does it: that's operant conditioning. The dog comes to connect a voluntary behavior with a reward. For dogs, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, mostly, again, because dogs aren't moral. They're never going to choose to do something because it's the right thing to do. They will choose to do something if it has pleasurable connotations for them. The most obvious, and basic, level of this kind of choice is the outcome of operant conditioning, or the behavior=reward response. 

The problem with this, of course, even with dogs, is that you can't possibly reward them for every single right thing they do, and you don't want them only to enact desired behaviors when there's a reward involved. Even given that compared to human beings, the animal world is a fairly mercenary place, still you don't really want to train your dog to be purely mercenary, in the sense of only doing things when something's directly in it for him. Instead, you want to condition him to a set of habits that to him are generally pleasurable, that have positive associations for him. He learns to pay attention to you because you're more interesting and pleasurable than anything else around him –– first because yes, you're dispensing a lot of treats, but gradually just because his notion of you, based on consistently good experiences of you (which begin with treats), is that you are the greatest thing in his world. You've built that idea by the use of treats and the non-use of force or threats or expressions of displeasure which make him feel anxious and destabilized. Over time this becomes his whole idea of you. By your side is where good things happen: treats first, because that's his #1 motivation, but then pats, kind words, good experiences. Your use of treats in the beginning is a way to make behaviors happen that you want to replicate; it's also a way to condition his whole emotional response to things. 

What's important here is that you're not just giving treats as rewards. You're giving treats freely during your interactions with your dog, as part of the atmosphere and relationship that you're building. He doesn't have to earn the treats. They're like grace: freely given. If you're walking on the leash and giving treats more or less continuously, at your side where you want your dog to walk, then over time your dog connects walking at your side –– which is hard, because dogs generally want to move faster than we walk –– with sensations of happiness, satisfaction, love, and wellbeing. By your side is a good place to be. Walking at your speed is a pleasant thing to do. And it's pleasant because you've made it pleasant, by connecting that not-naturally-pleasurable experience with things that are naturally pleasurable. 

This is the kind of thing I think Charlotte Mason is suggsting in, for example, her Principle 4. She's right to suggest that rewards and bribes –– though they might seem to offer a short-term solution for behavior issues –– don't really work, because what you create through a system of bribes is a person who expects a bribe if he's going to do something you want. Operant conditioning can be useful in targeted ways for some things, like potty training, for example. I'll just go ahead and confess that for one of my toddlers, we enacted a program called Peeing for Peeps, capitalizing on the fact that Easter was just past, and the only person in the family who liked those little marshmallow chicks and bunnies was the person who needed to pee in the potty. People had given us boxes and boxes of those things that year, and we made use of them. 

But say your child is resisting doing school lessons. This is where, frankly, operant conditioning is going to bite you in the backside. If you say, "I'll give you an M&M for every math problem you do," then you can see, can't you, where this leads? This leads to a person who looks at the math lesson and says, "What's in it for me," assuming that what's in it for him is not in the math lesson itself. You have trained this person to be the kind of calculating individual who has to see the money on the table before he does something, because he can't recognize anything of value in the task itself. Charlotte Mason says: DON'T DO THAT. And in this, as in most things, Charlotte Mason is right. 

For a dog, behaviors don't have moral implications. For a person, many behaviors do. Peeing in the potty doesn't really have a moral implication; the child who pees on the floor is not a bad person, just a person who hasn't learned to regulate his physical actions and responses. And once he's learned to regulate those actions and responses, the outcome is pleasurable enough –– no wet pants, no wet floor, the exhilarating sensation of being a big boy now and not a baby –– that the need for rewards obviates itself. That's true for the dog, too. The pleasure of going for an uninterrupted walk with a loved person takes over from the need for treats to remind him that being by that loved person's side is pleasurable. On the other hand, while the dog who continually needs treats becomes kind of a pain in the neck to deal with, the person who needs a bribe in order to do anything another person wants him to do is actually a morally corrupt person. (eta: I don't mean you've made your child a criminal. But I am thinking about parents I've known who have paid their kids for grades on a report card, for example, and how even before I had children of my own, my visceral feeling was that there was something kind of corrupt about this, like education was just a transaction, instead of an end in itself. I think this approach also presumes that you think the thing you're offering the reward for is inherently bad or unpleasant, which is what kids tend to pick up on). That's what happens when the adults in a child's world rely solely on operant conditioning for his formation: paying him to read books, for example, or make good grades. Nothing he does has intrinsic value; behaviors only have values when treats accompany them. Behavior out, reward in. If that's the only mechanism by which a child is taught to do what his parents expect –– because any replicated behavioral pattern becomes ingrained to the point of being second nature –– then that child's soul will be stunted. (Again, I don't mean like going to jail or hell stunted. But this kind of approach can really reduce everything in life to a transaction, and that is a stunting of a person's whole worldview). 

Again, Charlotte Mason is right to warn against such mechanisms. Moral implications aside, one of the pitfalls of operant conditioning is that it admits for behaviors that you don't want. Bribing your child suggests to him that he has a choice: he can resist doing what you want just as readily as he can not resist. And he gets something out of resisting. He gets something out of your anxiety that he's going to resist, or your assumption that he's going to resist, or your assumption that really, he's right to resist, because the thing, whatever it is, is actually unpleasant. As long as you assume that he can refuse to do whatever it is you want him to do –– picking up five toys, doing three minutes of copywork –– then he will assume the same thing. And again, he gets mileage out of that assumption. He might even get mileage out of the resistant behavior, because it accomplishes two ends: it delays his doing whatever it is that he's decided he doesn't want to do, and it gets him a reward that he wouldn't have gotten if he'd just cheerfully done the task without complaining. In fact, a related pitfall in this whole approach is that the child who does do what you want without complaining starts to notice that the one who does complain is the one who's getting all the goodies. A likely scenario is that you end up with multiple kids all rehearsing undesirable behaviors, instead of just one. While operant conditioning has its limited uses, if that's the only tool you have, then you are likely to create at least as many problems for yourself as you solve. 

Classical conditioning, on the other hand, is really what Charlotte Mason is talking about in Principles 5, 6, 7, and 8. It has to do with creating an atmosphere of associations in which a person gravitates toward certain behaviors and experiences because they are, however involuntarily, associated with positive emotions, not negative ones. That means that whatever your treat equivalents are in a homeschool-day scenario, you want to provide them freely during the course of the day, not as rewards when something is done the way you want it. This might look like even shorter lessons than you had originally envisioned. This might look like teatime and snack during lessons, not after. It might look like making sure your reading sessions are cuddly and cozy, with your loving attention to your children as the treat, because that's what they want more than anything else. It might look like letting your son run up and down the room while you read aloud, or do hopscotch while he does math problems orally, because sitting still is torture to him and movement is a relief. It means anything you can do to create a set of positive, loving associations with the schoolwork you do daily –– because over time, those associations transfer to the schoolwork itself. 

I hope you can see the advantages here. What you're aiming for –– what it seems to me that Charlotte Mason is encouraging you to aim for –– is a learning environment in which negative behaviors have a hard time even getting started. If they do start, then you back up to a place where there's no reason for them to start. What does this look like? 

*Setting modest, reasonable goals. It seems counterintuitive, but in anything you plan to do, aim for some point under your child's ability threshold, especially to begin with. A Charlotte Mason education is never going to be too easy or boring, but it's okay –– in fact it's absolutely desirable –– to set a bar that your child can easily reach. Failure is not motivating. It's about the most demotivating experience on the planet. Nobody likes to feel stupid and humiliated and overwhelmed; nobody likes to feel that they're letting down the people they love. On the other hand, it's fun to win. It's fun to feel that you can. It's fun to feel that you're good at things, not bad at them. The things themselves don't always have to be fun, as in entertainment –– it's the mastery itself that makes them fun. What's true of games is true of life generally. Success and the sense of mastery are motivating. When your child feels successful and on top of things, that is empowering and rewarding, and there's no impetus to resist. This is as true of chores, incidentally, as it is of schoolwork. Always ask for a little less than you think your child is really capable of, because success is your objective. 

*Making sure your child is ready and able to do what you're asking: not hungry, not tired, not stressed, not too wound up to focus. Before I work with Dora on the leash, I give her about ten minutes to play fetch or run around in the yard, then a few minutes of scatter feeding, when she has to sniff kibble out of the grass. Sniffing is a calming exercise for dogs, bringing their heart rate down in the same way that deep breathing does for us. Once she's had both those needs met –– the need to move, then the need for calming activity –– then she can focus on the lesson I want to enact. Your child is the same way. Better to have some play time after breakfast, followed by maybe some drawing, or ten minutes of an audiobook, or listening to some quiet music, before you start your lessons. Better to start later and have productive lessons than to insist on starting first thing and then fight with people who aren't ready to learn. I had one child who in high school used to spend her morning knitting and listening to audiobooks, then began her lessons after lunch. I had another child who had to run a lap around the downstairs of our house between each math problem. In both cases, what mattered was that when they sat down to work, they did it willingly and without a fight. That was the behavior I wanted to replicate, day after day. 

*Knowing your child's personality, struggles, and limitations. I've added this one in, as a reflection on dealing with mental-health issues and neurodivergence in children. It may be that yes, the idea of a treat at the end of a lesson needs to be part of your negotiation with a given child about how he's going to get past his own resistance to the lesson. Saying, "OK, we'll do this for ten minutes, and then you can have a break and some screen time" is not, in itself, a morally corrupting offer, and may be an absolutely necessary offer when you're trying to help a child get past a mental barrier to doing a task. But again, I think it's good to consider the larger picture of classical conditioning, as well as the immediate issue of the task at hand. Yes, you might need an incentive to help the person get started, but how can you also help that person to change his emotional response to the task itself --- to move it from something that provokes anxiety or overwhelm, to something that's actually, on its own merits, kind of an okay experience?  

*Possibly the most crucial element in all of this is your own emotional weather. Like your dog, your children essentially want to please you. For your children, your positive attention is a treat in itself, in the sense of being the high-value gift that creates in them a sense of pleasure and wellbeing. Conversely, as a dog feels destabilized and anxious when you express your displeasure –– yelling, jerking the leash, whatever –– so do your children. If you want to build the kind of atmosphere in your home that Charlotte Mason describes –– sweetened with love and ventilated with common sense –– then that atmosphere really must begin with you and in you. It's not about setting an example, or modeling a set of behaviors; it's about being the heart of the emotional environment of your home, because whatever your emotional state might be, your children will co-regulate with it. Giving them your approval, your affection, your on-their-side-ness from the get-go, not waiting for them to earn it, is the equivalent of feeding the dog treats before he's really done anything. It seems counterproductive. It might even sometimes seem that you're rewarding the dog, or the child, for negative behaviors, when in fact what you're doing is helping the dog or child to self-regulate and focus on you with pleasure. On the other hand, if you are tense, upset, and angry as a default setting –– even if your mood has nothing to do with them –– they will think that it is about them, and about you. They will want to stay out of your way and mistrust what you propose to them to do. So if you need help calming down and defusing your anger: get it. 

TO BE CONTINUED