— Dr. Mills began the training by saying: "Every child is born with a natural propensity to use common sense. It's inborn. Kids don't start out predisposed towards deviance or self-destructive behavior. They actually start out predisposed to function with common sense, to know what's in their best interests. They start out with a kind of a natural enjoyment of learning, with positive motivation that doesn't have 'proving' or 'stress' associated with it.
"It's always amazed me how much little children are natural learners, and how learning becomes aversive when they get into the formal educational system. Somehow that natural desire to learn gets shut off like a faucet. It's shut off because we, as educators, take learning so seriously. We think it's hard. We think grades are important. We create competition. We create stress—keeping the school's standardized test scores up. So our stress and insecurity is passed along to the kids. And guess what? They lose that natural interest in learning. It becomes aversive rather than fun.
"Also, a lot of these kids' parents have not gone to school. They've given up on school, so they're going to pass that on to their children—not consciously, not purposely, but because that's what they see possible for themselves. So what we want to try to do is see how to re-engage these students in learning.
"Every child wants to do the best at whatever they take on and, if they're enjoying it, they will do their best without any pressure or stress or performance anxiety. Kids start out with unconditional self-esteem. Have you ever seen a two year old or three year old whose self esteem is conditional on how expensive their clothes are or what color their skin is? They just enjoy life. They're not self-conscious. See, that's all stuff we learn from our upbringing, isn't it?
"So what happens is the child learns a set of beliefs. They develop a way of thinking because their parents say, 'You can't feel good about yourself unless ______.' All of a sudden we start to put conditions on their self-esteem or their well-being. 'You can't feel good about yourself unless you go to school looking nice.' We try to impose our standards on our kids because we think it reflects on us, so we try to make their self-esteem conditional in a certain way. Then they develop insecure beliefs, and their self-esteem is conditional. So when they get insecure they act out or get in trouble or react in a dysfunctional way.
"We found, with most of the kids we've been working with, that once they get into the first grade they have very insecure beliefs. They think that they don't fit in, that adults don't like them, that other kids won't like them, that they can't learn because they're Black, because they come from the projects, because their parents have dropped out, because of all the negativity in the home, because their parents are yelling at them all the time and telling them they're bad or stupid. So that becomes their way of thinking about themselves.
"Now what you want to keep in mind is that they never lose their innate mental health. It's impossible. It just gets covered up or pushed underneath the surface. But it's still there and still has a natural tendency to come back to the surface like a cork being held under water. So as soon as you take whatever insecure thoughts that are keeping it down out of the way, it will pop back up on its own. It naturally reemerges. As soon as you start to show a kid that these negative beliefs are just thoughts, not "reality," this will come back almost immediately. If they find any teacher or a counselor who just starts to treat them as if they're okay, treats them with love and respect and listens to them, treats them as if they're a whole person or a healthier person that health just comes right back to the surface.
"But the child enters school with this insecure way of seeing things, so if another kid gets angry at him or pushes him, or if a teacher looks at him cross-eyed, if he's insecure he'll react. He'll get in trouble, and that will give him further evidence that he doesn't fit in, that others don't like him, that teachers are against him or her. It just reinforces his view. If we have an insecure way of thinking, we interpret what's going on as evidence: 'that teacher really is against me; the other kids really don't like me.' And what's his emotional response going to be? He's going to get angry or feel hurt or feel sorry for himself or withdraw or talk back to the teacher. So the negative emotion will create a negative behavior. And the negative behavior will cause a certain kind of response from the teachers: send him to the principal, or give him an F or detention. So the response will reinforce the thinking that they are against him, that he can't make it in school, that he's not going to do okay. Do you see how it becomes a self-confirming, downward spiral of increasing alienation?
"So most of these kids don't expect to finish high school. They don't think it's the place for them. But it's just a cycle of thought that a child picks up. And you can break this at any point—if an adult really believes in you and likes you and connects with you and engages your healthier levels and really inspires you to do better than you thought you could do. You can get through to these kids at any moment. You can turn these kids around. If you build a good rapport with these students, the quality of your relationship will make their thinking relax, and it will bring out the best in them.
"You can't give a child self-esteem. He or she already has it. All you have to do is engage them in a way that it starts to come out of them."
Most of the teachers had never looked at it that way before.
