The three Ps of education

A friend of mine reminded me the other day of a talk I had given way back when.  The gist was that I was challenging incoming adult students to take the appropriate view of their educational process in order to gain the most from it.  I used alliteration to make it more memorable – evidently it worked for my friend.  I, on the other hand, had to be reminded.

Perfectionism – The belief that there is an ideal, that the ideal is achievable, and that the ideal ought to be achieved.

This is slow, painful death.  It has been known to result in the unfortunate situation where a student earns an “F” for unfinished work that is being perfected rather than a “B” for completed work that is imperfect.  Our adult degree completion program had students who failed to graduate because they were perfectionists who could never bring themselves to hand in their final projects.

Procrastination – The belief that there is always more time even as the deadline races toward you like a bullet train.

This is speeding toward an immovable object, hoping that it will disappear, only to be obliterated.  More students have failed assignments because of procrastination than will ever fail due to inability.  Procrastination has many sources (one, of course, is perfectionism), but the end result is the same, work is submitted that is inferior to what it could and should have been.  I’ve had many students tell me that they do their best work under pressure.  There may be some truth to that – the mind focuses as the deadline approaches and they are able to concentrate their attention and effort.  But it is only a partial truth.  I know from my own experience how many times I have stood to give a presentation and realized that if I had just given more thought to the illustration I was using it would have been so much more effective.  Bottom line: One cannot be assured that creativity will flow, or that printers will work, at the last minute.

Pragmatism – The realization that reality trumps what might have been.

This is a compromise between our striving for the ideal and our desire to avoid failure.  Pragmatism is often treated like something that is lesser, something to be avoided.  Compared with perfectionism and procrastination, pragmatism gets things done.  Pragmatists graduate, on time, often with better GPAs than anticipated because, at the end of the day, they were committed to finishing more than they were committed to reaching the unreachable or to being waylaid by distraction.

All of this grows out of personal experience.  When I entered my PhD program at Northwestern, I was assigned an up and coming star among the faculty as my advisor.  He was a charismatic educator and a reminder of what we, as incoming graduate students, were meant to become.  Thankfully I asked around and found out that none of the students assigned to work with him had completed their dissertations.  He was a perfectionist who was always calling upon them to revise their work.  I requested a new advisor and was assigned to an aging star with decades of experience guiding doctoral students.  He made it clear from the start that he wanted to see me graduate and that the goal was to get things done.  I went through a period of nine months where I was getting nowhere on my dissertation and so I avoided him.  When I reengaged, he steered me back toward a pragmatic view of my work and a commitment to completion.  So, once again, I thank the late Dr. Michael Leff for teaching me the value of educational pragmatism.

(For the record, this is not a defense of philosophical pragmatism and its view of truth.  That is another topic for another day.)

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