The posters and signs adorning school walls speak volumes about the people who put them there, revealing a surprising amount about their views of children, their assumptions about learning, and even their beliefs about human nature. There’s the enforced positivity of slogans that basically tell students: “Have a nice day….or else,” the individualistic worldview of inspirational slogans with their messages of strenuous uplift, the chirpy banalities airily informing kids that structural barriers don’t exist: All they need is perseverance and a dream, so they have only themselves to blame if they fail to achieve greatness. Nothing preserves the current arrangements of power more than messages that ignore the current arrangements of power. To see this principle in action, just visit a school — particularly one in a low-income neighborhood — and read the writing on the walls.

RESOURCES

– Demotivators: https://despair.com/collections/posters

– Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (Metropolitan, 2009) (https://tinyurl.com/yr9vew3u)

A note from Alfie Kohn:

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