Gritty and Grateful: Manufacturing Morality and Engineering Character, Pt. 1

KIPP teachers believe their job is to teach 49 percent academics and 51 percent character.  --Mike Feinberg 

Dr. Martin Seligman and his fellow psychological engineers are on a campaign to save the world by making it "happy," or at least to make sure that those who are not "happy" attain a level of "character" so as not to intrude on the well-deserved happiness of those who already have attained "authentic happiness."

Seligman has consulted the sages from Aristotle to the Zuni to come up a list of 24 common traits found among human civilizations, past and present, that would seem to constitute qualities that represent the individual and collective good of us humans.  From Paul Tough's NYTimes Magazine piece last Sunday:

The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude. 

Included on Seligman and Peterson's list but missing from Tough's short list are creativity, open-mindedness, love of learning, persistence, leadership, forgiveness, humility, prudence, hope and spirituality. 

Now pared down even more from Dr. Positivity's original list of 24 character traits is the final list adopted by KIPP, Inc. which translates "hope" as "optimism," changes "self-regulation" to "self-control," and uses "grit" for "persistence."

KIPP, Inc. Character Education: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity. 

Now there is hardly any controversy to be generated from the Seligman and Peterson virtue list nor the abridged Tough list or even the Spartanized Feinberg and Levin list.  What will create hot debate and outrage, however, is that Seligman would engender these traits, virtues, qualities by devising interventions that essentially replace choice, reflection, and metacognition with behavioral-cognitive treatments.

In short, Seligman prefers a society that is psychologically engineered to be happy and productive to one that is ethically deliberative or, perhaps, one that is outraged that human civilization is in the process of being sacrificed for corporate profits.  How else can psychologists justify their existence to corporations that pay their bills if they do not have something that can benefit corporations?

Here is a sampling of instruments that Seligman's "authentic happiness" team is working to perfect.  You can actually help Dr. Seligman by filling out these questionnaires.  Thought that Myers-Briggs inventory was intrusive when you applied for that position?

Featured Questionnaire:

Compassionate Love Scale
Measures your tendency to support, help, and understand other people

Emotion Questionnaires:

Authentic Happiness Inventory Questionnaire
Measures Overall Happiness

CES-D Questionnaire
Measures Depression Symptoms

Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire
Measures Current Happiness

General Happiness Questionnaire
Assesses Enduring Happiness

PANAS Questionnaire
Measures Positive and Negative Affect

Engagement Questionnaires:

Brief Strengths Test
Measures 24 Character Strengths

Gratitude Questionnaire
Measures Appreciation about the Past

Grit Survey
Measures the Character Strength of Perserverance

Optimism Test
Measures Optimism About the Future

Transgression Motivations Questionnaire
Measures Forgiveness

VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire
Measures 24 Character Strengths

VIA Strength Survey for Children
Measures 24 Character Strengths for Children

Work-Life Questionnaire
Measures Work-Life Satisfaction

Meaning Questionnaires:

Close Relationships Questionnaire
Measures Attachment Style

Compassionate Love Scale
Measures your tendency to support, help, and understand other people

Meaning in Life Questionnaire
Measures Meaningfulness

Life Satisfaction Questionnaires:

Approaches to Happiness Questionnaire
Measures Three Routes to Happiness

Satisfaction with Life Scale
Measures Life Satisfaction

Fun parlor games, right?

KIPP's industrial strength school model for behaviorally neutering children is taking these parlor games one step further by devising a "gritty" curriculum for its imposition of self-control, gratitude, etc., and then assigning grades that would follow students just like their Algebra scores.  No doubt this new character testing will reap big benefits for KIPP's total compliance program.  Do you really think that you are going to get into Brown, young KIPPster, if you show little gratitude for that helpful teacher who is screaming in your face for your own good?

Below, in fact, is a cartoon worksheet (click to enlarge that is now in use in KIPP schools to teach the virtues of zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity:

Don't be sad or angry, boys and girls.  Be gritty and grateful!  Don't have a meltdown just because you have been put in isolation after your teacher has humiliated you in front of your classmates.  Show some zest--earns some KIPP dollars.

 Paul Tough's celebratory piece notes that the first KIPP character report cards went out last year at all four NYC KIPP stores:

Logistically, the character report card had been a challenge to pull off. Teachers at all four KIPP middle schools in New York City had to grade every one of their students, on a scale of 1 to 5, on every one of the 24 character indicators, and more than a few of them found the process a little daunting. And now that report-card night had arrived, they had an even bigger challenge: explaining to parents just how those precise figures, rounded to the second decimal place, summed up their children’s character. 

Two decimal places, wow! 

Now no one is going to get up in arms about these most marginalized children being treated like caged animals who are taught to be helpless and then happy. After all, these children have already shown they are disposable by the fact that we use taxpayer dollars to fund these corporate reform schools that thrive on this model.  This is the model to emulate in urban America.


But will the public recoil when the Seligman plan comes to privileged leafy enclaves like Riverdale, which it the subject of Part II. 

Seligman's Brainwashing Is Not Just for Captive KIPPsters Anymore

Jason Leopold has a great piece up at Truthout on the former CIA torture advisor and KIPP compliance guru, Martin Seligman, aka "Dr. Happy." 

Seems that Seligman has leveraged his research on brainwashing poor schoolchildren into full-time happy scholars into a $30+ million dollar no-bid contract to pass the happiness bug to GIs who are coming back after multiple tours of duty with PTSD and worse.  

Hey, if it can work in Philly to make children love their poverty and their abusive schooling, why can't it work in Kabul to make GIs unaffected by putting their comrades' pieces into bodybags?  According to Seligman, "we're after creating an indomitable Army."

Now when GIs are done with being indomitable in the theaters of war, they can roll all that positivity into the Troops to Teachers movement--and the cycle can begin all over again.

. . . ."Learned Optimism"

Seligman, a past president of the American Psychological Association (APA), began consulting with General Casey in September 2008 about applying the research he and his colleagues have conducted over the past decade to the benefits of his theories on "Learned Optimism" to all of the Army's active-duty soldiers. Seligman then met with Cornum in December 2008 to discuss creating the foundation for CSF as a way to decrease PTSD.

"Psychology has given us this whole language of pathology, so that a soldier in tears after seeing someone killed thinks, 'Something's wrong with me; I have post-traumatic stress,' or PTSD," Seligman said in August 2009. "The idea here is to give people a new vocabulary, to speak in terms of resilience. Most people who experience trauma don't end up with PTSD; many experience post-traumatic growth."

According to a report published in December 2009 in the APA Monitor, Seligman believes that positive thinking methods taught to schoolchildren who "were [conditioned] to think more realistically and flexibly about the problems they encounter every day" can also be taught to Army soldiers and the results will be the same.

Seligman said he is basing his theory on a series of 19 studies he conducted, which found that teachers who "emphasized the importance of slowing the problem-solving process down by helping students identify their goals, gather information and develop several possible ways to achieve those goals," increased students' optimism levels over the course of two years "and their risk for depression was cut in half."

But unlike studies conducted on schoolchildren, there is no research that exists that shows applying those same conditioning methods to the Army's active-duty soldiers will reduce PTSD. Seligman, however, seems to be aware that is the case. That may explain why he has referred to Army soldiers as his personal guinea pigs.

"This is the largest study - 1.1 million soldiers - psychology has ever been involved in and it will yield definitive data about whether or not [resiliency and psychological fitness training] works," Seligman said about the CSF program.

"We're after creating an indomitable Army," Seligman said.

Positive Psychology's Critics

While positive psychology, a term coined by Seligman, has its supporters who swear by its benefits, the movement also has its fair share of critics. Bryant Welch, who also served as APA president, said, "personally, I have not been able to find a meaningful distinction between [positive psychology] and Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking. Both emphasize substituting positive thoughts for unhappy or negative ones."

"And yet the US military has bought into this untested notion to the tune of [$125] million," Welch said. "This money, of course, could have been used to provide real mental health care to our troops. Instead, it is being used to tell military personnel that they can (and, thus, presumably should) overcome whatever happens to them on the battlefield with the dubious tools of Positive Psychology."

PTSD "is is not a mental state that can be treated by suggesting to the patient that he or she simply re-frame how they think about the situation, as Dr. Seligman suggests," Welch added.

Other notable critics include authors Chris Hedges and Barbara Ehrenreich, both of who say the practice has thrived in the corporate world where the refusal to consider negative outcomes resulted in the current economic crisis.

Hedges, author of the book "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," wrote, "positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness and provides the psychological tools for enforcing corporate conformity, is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis."

"Positive psychology is a quack science that throws a smoke screen over corporate domination, abuse and greed," Hedges said. "Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction."

Hedges added that "academics who preach [the benefits of positive psychology] are awash in corporate grants."

Indeed, Seligman's CV shows he has received tens of millions of dollars in foundation cash to conduct positive psychology research.

According to a report published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "People credit a large part of positive psychology's success to the solid reputations of the field's leaders - and Seligman's ability to get science-supporting agencies interested."

"The National Institute of Mental Health has given more than $226-million in grants to positive-psychology researchers in the past 10 years, beginning with just under $4-million in 1999 and reaching more than nine times that amount in 2008," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Seligman has equated his work for the Army to assisting the "second largest corporation in the world."

Multimillion-Dollar Contract

Seligman's biggest payday came last year, when the Positive Psychology Center received a three-year, $31 million, no-bid, sole-source Army contract to continue developing the program. 

According to Defense Department documents, "the contract action was accomplished using other than competitive procedure because there is only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirement[s]. Services can only be provided from the original source as this is a follow-on requirement for the continued provision of highly specialized services."

In 2009, several months after receiving the green light from Casey to develop the CSF program, the Army paid Seligman's Positive Psychology Center $1 million to begin training hundreds of drill sergeants to become Master Resilience Trainers (MRTs), "certified experts who will advise commanders in the field and design and facilitate unit-level resilience training across the Army."

More than 2,000 MRTs have been trained since CSF was rolled out in October 2009. The Army intends to certify thousands more MRTs.

The Defense Department's justification for the no-bid contract said Seligman's program "possesses unique capabilities, in that, [it is] the only established, broadly effective, evidence-based, train the trainer program currently available which meets the Army's minimum needs."

Seligman's program was "explicitly designed to train trainers (teachers) in how to impart resiliency and whole life fitness skills to others (their students)," the contracting documents state. "Other existent programs are designed to simply teach resiliency directly to participants. The long-term outcomes of [Seligman's program] have been examined in over 15 well documented studies."

"Without the Army's Resiliency Master Trainer Program [as taught by Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania] the exacerbated effects of multiple wars and other stressors result in a weakened corps and this directly impacts the Army's readiness and ultimately compromises the national security of our nation ... This program is vitally important to our forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan."

The contracting documents go on to say that "market research ... mostly through a thorough web search and networking with subject matter experts both within the Army, across services and in [academia] into other "positive psychology" programs was conducted between August and October 2008 before the Army decided to award the contract to Seligman because his program met the Army's immediate needs.

Cornum said in July 2009 that similar resiliency tests used by the University of Pennsylvania for the general public would be "militarized" by the Army.

A Difficult Challenge

But according to Griffith, the atheist Army sergeant, the Army did not do enough to remove the religious connotatitions from the spiritual section of the test.

Even Seligman's colleagues acknowledge that attempting to separate spirituality from religion is a challenge.

"Mapping the conceptual distinctions between what we refer to as 'religion' and what we refer to as 'spirituality' can be difficult," wrote Ben Dean in an article published on the University of Pennsylvania's Authentic Happiness web site.

Griffith said there's a simple solution: "Scrap [the] spiritual aspect altogether."