March 8, 2021

Dewey, Piaget, and Frosted Mini Wheats

By Alfie Kohn

In case you are not familiar with the cereal called Shredded Wheat, it is basically hay. Many of us who are members of the species Homo sapiens, rather than, say, Equus ferus, do not find hay appetizing, even when it is pressed into small packets and sold in a brightly colored box. This may explain why, in 1969, Kellogg's introduced a variant called Frosted Mini Wheats, which made the hay somewhat more palatable by coating it with 11 grams of sugar per serving. (For purposes of comparison, Shredded Wheat has -5 grams of sugar per serving. Attempting to chew it actually extracts sugar from your body.) More than 70 million boxes of Frosted Mini Wheats are sold every year.

I would argue, however, that the relevant contrast to Frosted Mini Wheats is not Shredded Wheat but Cheerios. I love Cheerios. For many years I have patiently endured teasing -- from my children and, before them, a series of roommates -- about my prodigious consumption of, enthusiasm for, and loyalty to Cheerios.¹ Cheerios are simple, nutritious, and extremely tasty without the need to add anything other than milk, and even that isn't entirely necessary.

I mention all of this because it recently occurred to me that the adjective "sugarcoated" appears in not one but two important books about education. Moral Classrooms, Moral Children was written by Rheta DeVries (who studied with Jean Piaget and, along with Constance Kamii and Eleanor Duckworth, was one of the key thinkers who worked out the educational implications of his theories) and Betty Zan. The book draws from Piaget's distinction between "autonomous" relationships between adults and children, which are defined by mutual respect and cooperation in order to promote children's independent thinking and moral growth, on the one hand, and "heteronomous" relationships, which are defined by a demand for deference to authority, on the other hand. DeVries and Zan observe that the latter "can range on a continuum from hostile and punitive to sugar-coated control."²

Bullseye! If I say to a child, "Do this, or here's how I'm going to make you suffer," it's pretty obvious that I'm using my power to compel compliance. But if I say, "Do this, and you'll get that" -- or if I marinate the child in praise afterward for doing what I wanted -- well, I'm still using my power to compel compliance. I'm taking something the child wants or needs, such as my approval, and turning it into an instrument of manipulation. It's still hay under all the sweetener.

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