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Many classes commented on what they saw and felt were the unwanted effects or consequences of acting from the punishment meaning perspective and when we teach from and through the power of fear. It's the meaning perspective and the power that as a society we see as beneficial when it comes to dealing with those who have breached against it. We put people into prisons. These institutions function as places of punishment and of learning, no doubt, and the skills learned only augment the perspectives already held by those how go to prison and what got them in prison in the first place. As a society, we seem to expect that threatening everyone with prison acts as a deterrent to people committing crimes. If people fear prison, they will not breach the law. They will obey. The recidivism rate in the United States argues against that as a reliable premise. Fear doesn't keep people from committing acts that bring them to prison for many reasons, and if it changes behaviors, it often does so for the worse. Fear works in similar ways in the children who depend on us for reasonable and responsible actions.
Most of my classes established learning how to feel afraid, internalizing fear, came as the first of the lessons, the meaning perspectives, learned through fear that punishment produces. We might consider that a two edged result. On one edge, we find a child who feels saddened by life generally, the sheer joy that we wish them (and all of us for that matter) to find in life disappears. It becomes replaced by a wariness about life and about the acceptance of the self in the world and within themselves as well. On the other edge, another punishment engendered common meaning perspective speaks. The child will accept that newly implanted state of attention through submission as regrettable but acceptable. After all, as that perspective tells us, people gain only through loss. In this case, the child may lose a certain kind of childish joy, but the child has learned the power of good behavior and will keep away from inappropriate acts. The second edge supports the meaning perspective of the first edge and justifies the consequence of that perspective in action. Although it has an unwanted consequence, a repression of the becoming self in the child, we accept that consequence as part of the greater good of the child. We are doing it for the child's good.
However, the sense of fear does not strike the child only when the child plans on some questionably nefarious behavior. The fear may come when the child takes almost any action. This sense of generalized fear will feel at a lower level sometime and a higher level at others, but the fear will form a part of nearly every, if not all, new actions. Every action that the parental figure has not specifically approved will cause fear and apprehension in child as a child and, perhaps, for all the years to come.
One student in an English class came to my office and told me that she couldn't be creative. She explained that her father taught her not to do anything unless he specifically approved of it. If she acted creatively, did something for the first time, she couldn’t know what he would think, so she couldn't act in such a way. If I just gave her workbook of things to do, something with a right answer and a wrong answer, she would do just fine with that. She could, she said, deal very well with criticism. Many others have reported an inability to deal with or even an outright fear of creative work, work where the factor of the unexplored and unknown came into play. I promised to make what accommodations I could, but she dropped the class. She felt threatened by the unknown nature of the effort involved. Like it or not, writing involved her creative self, a self she had the right to know and enjoy.
Fear in the right places has its purpose and makes us aware of dangers that may arise. A meaning perspective that motivates a generalized fear of conduct that can come from punishment for conduct (adult students reported not remembering the reason for the punishment, just the punishment itself) will hamper our ability to recognize that the vast majority of life offers no reason for fear. We will miss the joyful nature of the creativity our daily lives offer us, and many of us will stick to the rules and procedures of everyday life so we feel safe inside our bubble of fear even when those rules don't really work anymore. We feel safe, but we do so by remaining inside the fear-inducing meaning perspective that asserts continuous authority over our lives.
Fear may have taught us as children many things not dreamed of in that dominator philosophy.