The opening to a seminal movie on education and learning environments.
Three Ways of Saying the Same Thing
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#1: The Erudite Way
The following article is about akrasia:
The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do and What to Do About It
It’s lengthy, entertaining, well researched — and probably, when it is assigned like this, a good example of itself. In all likelihood, you won’t read this, even as I encourage you to read Clear’s essay and to think about how it tackles an idea so entrenched in human nature that it has a Greek term all to itself. In fact, it also has a Latin phrase describing it: Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor, which appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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#2: The Multimedia Way
Here, from David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, is an article on procrastination:
Procrastination might the most common example of akrasia, but you don’t need any Greek or Latin to understand what McRaney writes. He also gives us the image of “capable psychonauts,” or people who think about thinking, which is a helpful way to look at improving your learning.
You can also watch the book trailer for You Are Not So Smart, which animates the idea of fighting procrastination:
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#3: The Straightforward Way
And then there’s a much more accessible, straightforward, and funny version of this idea, which nevertheless comes with all the NSFW warnings you might expect if you are given an article published at Cracked:
From birth until the day you move out on your own, pretty much every facet of your life is controlled by someone else. Parents, teachers, babysitters, the secretive nameless guardian who taught you to kill from the quiet embrace of the shadows. There’s always someone looking over your shoulder to prevent you from [messing] up. “Don’t run in the house, you’ll get hurt.” “Don’t stab that guy, you’ll go to jail again.”
So from the time we’re old enough to rationalize, we’re trained that nothing is truly under our own control, and if we do happen to [mess] up, the most we have to fear is getting grounded, spanked, or yelled at. When you enter adulthood, that all changes literally overnight…
For the first time, you’ll be put into situations in which the only person you have to answer to is yourself. How will you react? Take away the teacher, and do you start slacking off? Take away mom and dad’s rules on junk food, and do you start eating at McDonald’s every day? Take away the police patrols, and do you strip naked and set houses on fire, cackling like a crazed hyena?
This is what we’re dealing with when we talk about things like addiction, teen pregnancy, and obesity (the type that’s not tied to a physical cause, of course). It’s an area in which the only person who is going to give you hell is your future self. Are you prepared for that? I wasn’t. Hell, I’m not sure I know anyone who was. Because keeping yourself in check when the temptation is there to just take the easy way out is excruciating. “Man, I don’t feel like cooking tonight. Maybe I’ll just order a pizza again.” Yes, others may voice their concerns about your choices (“Dude, you’re pushing 300 pounds, and you’ve eaten pizza every day for two months”), but nobody is going to step in and force you to get your [life] under control, unless it’s flat-out breaking the law.
That might be edited down for decorum in an instructional post1, but it remains the most straightforward version of this lesson: Self-control is difficult to learn, but the sooner you learn it, the more successful you will be.
As for the Flying Guillotines…
The title of this post and the pictures in the header are another example, like Dürer’s Rhinoceros, of using a unique metaphor or image to clarify an idea. There are enough clichés about self-control to fill a thousand posts, and you’re likely to hear most of them before you figure it out. We need something more motivating.
In this course, the failure to develop self-control has an exponential impact on your success. Unlocking the “second course” explained in this post is important, but right now, many of you need to think only in terms of avoiding penalties. There are guillotines flying through the air, and if you stand there, you will end up like this:
It’s the part right after this in the video that ought to concern us, metaphorically speaking.
You must work during the class period, and you must develop a feedback loop. That’s how you are evaluated, which you’ve seen in handouts and posters and a half-dozen other forms. It takes self-control to do this. If you don’t develop that self-control, you are going to lose your head.
Iterative note: There are a couple of interesting Medium essays from about two years ago that explore this same idea with some of the same metaphorical language. They are embedded below.
Cracked is replete, by the way, with this kind of NSFW-but-insightful writing. Tread carefully, if you explore, but realize that The Onion is often just as profane, and The Onion was featured on an AP Language exam. This is the way rhetoric and argument look in the real world. ↩