Content Index

Social education is defined as learning the skills, techniques and competencies that enable one to form mutually satisfying and gratifying relationships. While it is true that “individuals with a wide range of physical, mental and behavioral differences – people with disabilities or unusual sexual preferences, criminals, substance abusers – regularly form close relationships with typical people”, it is also true that children with externalizing antisocial behaviors often find such relations to be the exception rather than the rule. Often rejected by their typical peers, they form relations with deviant peers who support and maintain the antisocial behaviors. In the process, the socialization process is skewed, since the opportunities for peer conformance experiences are limited.

Having read the report: The Current Status of Mental Health in Schools: A policy and Practice Analysis (3/2006), I find it difficult not to express concerns. The Center for Mental Health in Schools, authors of the report are good, caring and bright people. However, their thinking flawed, distorted by their perspective – and this is epitomized by it very name of the organization. The term ‘mental health’ is a euphemism that is a cohort of the euphemism ‘mental illness’.

Discipline has to do with standards, rather than simply procedures. Behavioral standards exist in any continuing social relationship. Appropriate behavior is a result of awareness of such standards, or in other words, the result of social consciousness. The objective of good discipline is to increase self-responsibility, social awareness and social responsibility.

The harmful effects of medical model interventions are significant and far outweigh any benefits such interventions may have. This is not simple opinion, but has been consistently documented by the failures of the last fifty years. Further, any study designed to specifically test this observation will verify these facts.

This paper will attempt to define some of the parameters regarding the identification of children with problems in the capacity to associate with other human beings in ways that are mutually satisfying. The failure to adjust socially may require a social education strategy to teach social skills or to restructure attitudes and beliefs that inhibit social adjustment.

Universal Prevention Strategies – These strategies target the general population group that has not been identified on the basis of individual risk. Because universal programs are positive, proactive, and provided independent of risk status, their potential for stigmatizing participants is minimized and they may be more readily accepted and adopted.

Structure is not organization. All organizational elements are, or must be, interrelated. Presently we have a belief that atypical behavior is caused by deficit or pathology. Although systems may be integrated structurally, they have no related context – what is the educational, protective or corrections role with atypical clients in this context? They are required to separate clients between the pathological and the otherwise if they are to function.

While CBM upholds the behaviorist notion that response consequences mediate behavior, it contends that behavior is largely regulated antecedently through cognitive processes – the major of which are appraisals, attributions and expectations. The content used in these processes are the beliefs, schema and attitudes held in the cognitive structures – particularly schema beliefs about self, others and future prospects. Therefore, response consequences of a behavior are used to form expectations of behavioral outcomes. It is the ability to form these expectations that give humans the capability to predict the outcomes of their behavior, before the behavior is performed.

Creating a decision support system for the creation of a plan of change is not a trivial task. One either must decide to create options for every possible occurrence, or determine some way of grouping the possible convergence of issues in a manner that will provide sufficient direction. We are loath to attempt to identify and label all possible individual human problems in living into the same kinds of categories used by the biomedical and psychodynamic practitioners, since we believe that such labels are rarely helpful and often harmful.