It's really tough to teach someone a lesson by lying to them.
Boiling it down to the most basic logic here, when you deceive someone, you teach them you are not to be trusted. If you are then asking someone to take your advice about something important, you've already tossed away your credibility. It's unlikely you're going to teach people what you intend to teach them when the more accurate lesson (of your duplicitousness) has already been driven home.
Check out how this school in California completely missed the above point.
On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.
Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.
A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax - a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.
Not surprisingly, when the students realized they'd been "punk'd" they focused their anger on the school that deceived them. And still the school didn't seem to fathom that the lesson learned was not the one intended. They explained themselves by saying that they had intended to traumatize the students.
This is so obviously idiotic, it is the basis for a recurring joke on "Arrested Development" as an example of bad parenting. George Bluth senior's "lessons" with the one-armed J. Walter Weatherman and Michael Bluth's own version using the "Hot Cops" to scare his son straight in the episode "Pier Pressure." BTW, if you've never seen this episode, you really must see it. It's one of the best. Watch the first 2 minutes for an example of George's "lessons" or the whole 22 minutes for the entire experience.
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Posted by James at June 13, 2008 8:02 AMAh, why can't they just make them watch "The Third Killer" and "The Last Prom" like they did in the old days?
Posted by: Julie at June 13, 2008 11:10 AMAnd that's why you always leave a note.
Posted by: Derek at June 13, 2008 4:12 PMYipes. Sounds horrible - and was. However, I got a similar lesson when I was 18 and a counselor at a YMCA Summer Camp. (That was about a hundred years ago, so this tactic isn't new.)
In that case the lifeguard - someone we trusted and looked up to - with the approval of whoever was running the camp - staged a drowning. That is, suddenly, while we were all in swimming, he "discovered" one popular kid was "missing." We all went into a quick drill where we assembled in a line on the beach, then walked out through the water looking for the "victim."
My spot in the line took me under two docks and in each case I had to dive under them, swimming with my eyes open under water. That gave me the creeps then and it still does today - reaching around in a murky, mud and weed covered lake, all the time thinking that at any moment you might encounter a lifeless - or near lifeless - body. After I got under the second dock and surfaced I heard a whistle, and looking towards shore they seemed to be loading the victim into the back of a station wagon.
It wasn't until an hour or two later at dinner that we - the counselors and campers - were told it was all a drill. I honestly don't remember being angry. Our first reaction among the counselors was that the camp was trying to cover up a near fatal accident by pretending it was a drill - that's how convincing it was and how deeply we were burned by it.
There may have been a lot of anger after it - there sure should have been - but I was a counselor teaching everything from riflery to camp crafts and even ham radio. It had taken us two weeks of intense work to get this old camp in shape to receive campers. Bottom line - I was exhausted and just was glad the incident was behind me. I didn't have time to be angry.
The technique did make one helluva an impression. Did it teach me any lasting lesson? Yes. I never wanted to be in a situation again where I had to swim under water with my eyes open looking for the body of a friend. Did that make my life in and around the water safer? I don't have a clue. And I honeslty don't know which is worse - the teaching with lies, or the intentionally causing severe emotional trauma - they're both terrible ideas.
And as I think of it now, I was 18. The impact on me was bad enough. What it did to the kids we had in camp is hard to imagine. We had a new group of campers every two weeks, however, and this was never repeated, so maybe they learned a lesson. Or maybe the whole thing was aimed primarily at the counselors.
Posted by: Greg at June 14, 2008 6:53 AMman oh man, do I miss arrested development...
Posted by: bigsam27 at June 16, 2008 2:10 PM