whiplash

xp to NA - That's kind of a "prove a negative" problem in certain professions I can think of, music education certainly being one.

I think a lot of music educators - not one-on-one instructors much, but definitely bandleaders, conductors etc. use bullying and similar drill instructor techniques as a shortcut to get obedience out of small crowds of geniuses.

I should differentiate between the truly pathological, manipulative shit that JK Simmons does in this movie, and the shouting and belittling that are par for the course in marching bands and military training everywhere

Art Taylor published a book of interviews he conducted with (famous) jazz musicians, and none of the drummers in the book cite "tough love" as a motivator for being creative or improving their craft. The closest they come is one drummer describing how hard he studied and practiced, telling a story about being really competitive about who gets to the equipment for practice in the morning when he lived with another musician. Meanwhile, another drummer in another interview basically says jazz is about feeling and not technique, and a lot of the musicians from the period Art Taylor focuses on describe their experiences of learning to play by listening to and playing with musicians they like.

When I was reading the motivation literature as a prelude to entering a teaching credential program a few years ago, I learned that a lot of the motivation folk wisdom about, e.g., rewards and punishment is wrong, and those things are not particularly motivating and can in fact be demotivating. Even the "conservative" hardliners and dissenters in motivation literature like applied behavior analysis researchers and practitioners or Pritchard, Campbell & Campbell believe punishment is demotivating.

I think people espouse the virtues of tough love because it's easy. If someone isn't doing as well as you'd hope, or if someone seems disinterested, you can yell at them or force them to do something. It's easy to find anecdotal evidence of this having some effect on young people. You hold their feet over the coals and then they do the thing you asked, therefore your tough love made them into the intelligent and responsible adults they become, no credit due to having literature in the home, or to eating with them, or to giving access to the tools they need to think and be creative, or to the daily demonstrations we give of how to live in the world and get along with others.

Yeah, not disputing any of that. Interestingly I've come to realize the structured "tough love" I got in the service did more to bring out my work ethic and confidence than the previous nearly two decades of whatever my parents and teachers had been doing.

I am certain that almost no famous creative person would ever point to a disciplinarian as a prime motivator, though.