Category: Leadership

The Most Famous Nursery Schools in the World — And What They Can Teach Us

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Most Famous Nursery Schools in the World — And What They Can Teach Us

Reggio Emilia, a mid-sized city that sits roughly halfway between Milan and Bologna, is not your grandmother’s Italy.

For starters, it’s more hardscrabble than picturesque — heavily graffitied, with streets and buildings that feel weathered and worn from everyday use. And although you’ll still find the charming clock tower, the cobblestone streets and the Renaissance-era churches in the city center, you’ll also find a city in which one out of five residents is not from Italy itself, but places as far-flung as Ghana and Nigeria, Morocco and Albania, Yemen and Syria.

It is, in short, a microcosm of the changing face of Italy, and of the wider world: nascent, uprooted, and precariously perched between worlds and worldviews.

Why, then, is it also the home to the finest nursery schools in the world?

Recently, I traveled there to find out — along with more than 300 other educators from around the world. We were part of an international study group, scores of which regularly visit Reggio’s integrated public system of more than eighty infant/toddler and early childhood centers to bear witness to what has been created here — and wonder how it can be replicated elsewher

Because Reggio schools don’t exist anywhere else in the world — the closest you’ll find are schools that say they’re “Reggio-inspired” — they’re not well known outside of progressive education circles. But for those that do know, a visit to Reggio is akin to a pilgrimage to Mecca. And after spending five days there, walking the city’s streets, listening to lectures, and visiting several of its schools, I can see why.

Reggio Emilia is a city of altars — to childhood, to imagination, and to the spirit of shared governance and democratic participation. It is magical, but not in a precious way; it is revolutionary, but only because it has had the time and space to evolve; and it is illustrative, but not because it is prescriptive or straight-forward. In Reggio, the whole is always more that the sum of its parts. There are no shortcuts. And yet the path is as clear as can be.

To understand why, you must first travel back to 1945, when, after four years of worldwide war and two decades of domestic terrorism, a group of local residents made an unexpected (and unintended) discovery: one tank, six horses, and three trucks that were left behind by fleeing Nazi troops.

After some discussion, it became clear that by selling what they had found, the townspeople could underwrite an initial investment in their post-war future, and begin to write a new history in the wake of all that had been lost.

The men wanted to build a cinema. The women, a school.

Fortunately, the women won, and within weeks, the construction was underway. A young man named Loris Malaguzzi heard what was happening, and hopped on his bicycle to see for himself. “There were piles of sand and bricks,” he recalled, “a wheelbarrow full of hammers, shovels and hoes. Behind a curtain made of rugs to shield them from the sun, two women were hammering the old mortar off the bricks.

“We’re not crazy!” they exclaimed, unprompted. “If you really want to see, come on Saturday or Sunday, when we’re all here. We’re really going to make this school!”

For Malaguzzi, an elementary school teacher in a nearby town who would in time become the ceremonial leader of the the Reggio network, it was a life-changing moment. “It forced everything back to the beginning. It opened up completely new horizons of thought. I sensed that it was a formidable lesson of humanity and culture, which would generate other extraordinary events. All we needed to do was to follow the same path.”

The bedrock of that path was illuminated by a disturbing wartime lesson about humanity. “Mussolini and the fascists made us understand that obedient human beings are dangerous human beings,” he explained. “When we decided to build a new society after the war we understood that we needed to have schools in which children dared to think for themselves, and where children got the conditions for becoming active and critical citizens.”

Consequently, after seven decades of tinkering and revision, what a visitor will see in Reggio’s schools today are a series of design choices and principles that run counter to the way most of the world does ‘school.’

The goal is not knowledge; it’s communication

In Reggio schools, all adults believe that all children have at their disposal a hundred different languages — and that typically, “the school steals ninety-nine.” By languages, these adults do not mean merely the use of words, but also clay, paper, color, joy, imagination — anything that can help a child communicate his or her inner thoughts with the people around them. “We have not correctly legitimized a culture of childhood,” says Lella Gandini, a longtime Reggio teacher, “and the consequences are seen in all our social, economic, and political choices and investments.”

To counter this, Reggio’s schools are relentlessly child-centered — not to achieve notable results in literacy and numeracy, but to achieve notable qualities of identity formation and to ensure that all children know how to belong to a community. “Our approach offers children the opportunity to realize their ideas are different and that they hold a unique point of view,” said Gandini. “At the same time, children realize that the world is multiple and that other children can be discovered through a negotiation of ideas. Instead of interacting only through feelings and a sense of friendship, they discover how satisfying it is to exchange ideas and thereby transform their environment.”

I know, I know. It sounds amazing, but how do you actually teach that? What’s the curriculum in a Reggio school?

The curriculum is not fixed; it’s emergent

By design, Reggio schools were created to protect children from what Malaguzzi called the ‘prophetic pedagogy,’ or an education built on predetermined knowledge that got delivered bit by bit — a format Malaguzzi felt was humiliating for both teachers and children because of the ways it denied their ingenuity and emergent potential.

Consequently, Reggio teachers have no predetermined curricula (as the behaviorists would like), but neither do they work as constant improvisers. Instead, every year each school delineates a series of related projects, some short-range and some long. These themes serve as the main structural supports, but then, as Malaguzzi says, “it is up to the children, the course of events, and the teachers to determine whether the building turns out to be a hut on stilts or an apartment house or whatever. The teachers follow the children, not plans.”

To see this in action is part of what makes Reggio so magical, and the central feature it requires is a very different notion on the part of adults as to what their central role is, and is not. In this sense, teachers (and there are two in every classroom) are not there to deliver content, but to activate the meaning-making competencies of all children. As Malaguzzi put it, “they must try to capture the right moments, and then find the right approaches, for bringing together, into a fruitful dialogue, their meanings and interpretations with those of the children.”

Context, in other words, matters more than content. And the physical environment, after adults and peers, is the third teacher.

The space is not ancillary; it’s exalted

This is why every Reggio schools feels like a collection of altars. Great care is given to the construction of space, and to the conditions into which children will explore their hundred languages. Intricate patterns of stones snake through an outdoor courtyard, inviting children to continue the pattern, or to begin a new one. A bright orange slide cuts through thick stalks of bamboo, just because. The art materials are ubiquitous, and organized, and easily accessible. And the boundary between inside and outside is always as permeable as possible.

Here, the light is always able to come in.

It’s why Malaguzzi called the physical environment the Third Teacher. And it’s what led the celebrated psychologist Jerome Bruner to take particular note of a group of four-year-old children who were projecting shadows onto a wall on the day of his visit. “The concentration was absolute, but even more surprising was the freedom of exchange in expressing their imaginative ideas about what was making the shadows so odd, why they got smaller and swelled up or, as one child asked: “How does a shadow get to be upside down?” The teacher behaved as respectfully as if she had been dealing with Nobel Prize winners. Everyone was thinking out loud: “What do you mean by upside down?” asked another child.

“Here we were not dealing with individual imaginations working separately,” Bruner concluded. “We were collectively involved in what is probably the most human thing about human beings, what psychologists and primate experts now like to call ‘intersubjectivity,’ which means arriving at a mutual understanding of what others have in mind. It is probably the extreme flowering of our evolution as humanoids, without which our human culture could not have developed, and without which all our intentional attempts at teaching something would fail.”

 

The community is not apart; it’s integral

That sense of intersubjectivity is everywhere in Reggio Emilia; it is, in fact, the clearest measure of the school’s longitudinal success. As former mayor Graziano Delrio put it, “We in Reggio Emilia believe that we should manage our cities with the objective of building an equal community, acting for the common good of citizens to guarantee equal dignity and equal rights. We assert the right of children to education from birth. The child is therefore a competent citizen. He or she is competent in assuming responsibility for the city. I often quote this statement by John Adams, the second president of the United States: “Public happiness exists where citizens can take part responsibly for public good and public life. Everywhere, there are men, women, children, whether old or young, rich or poor, tall or short, wise or foolish . . . everyone is highly motivated by a desire of being seen, heard, considered, approved and respected by the people around him and known by him.”

Indeed, the success of Reggio schools would not have been sustained without meaningful partnership and support from its elected leaders. Today, almost 20% of the city’s budget goes towards its early childhood education programs. There is no neighborhood more desirable than another because of the schools; the system has equity throughout. Parents are integral to the success of each school, and play an active role in shared governance. And the spirit of civic participation here, in a city founded by the Romans in the second century B.C., and in a community that can trace its collectivist tendencies back to the craft guilds and communal republics of the medieval 14th century, is what led a mayor of an Industrial city in Northern Italy to proclaim that the infant-toddler centers are “public common spaces where the multitudes aim to become a community of people growing together with a strong sense of the future, a strong idea of participation, of living together, of taking care, one for others. The school expresses the society through which it is generated, but school is also able to generate a new society.”

The bedrock is not love; it’s respect

Finally, this.

It is easy to imagine that all we need to do is love children more, or give them more space, and the rest will take care of itself. But what I witnessed in Reggio was less a case of adults loving children — though surely, they did. Instead, what I witnessed was a level of listening, attention, and care that came from an unwavering belief that all children, even the newest among us, are social beings, predisposed, and possessing from birth a readiness to make significant ties with others, to communicate, and to find one’s place in the world of others.

“We think of school for young children as an integral living organism,” said Malaguzzi, “as a place of shared lives and relationships among many adults and many children. We think of school as a sort of construction in motion, continuously adjusting itself. Either a school is capable of continually transforming itself in response to children, or the school becomes something that goes around and around, remaining in the same spot.”

This is the path. These are the ingredients. But none of it is possible until, as the great theorist David Hawkins once said, we realize that “the more magic gift is not love, but respect for others as ends in themselves, as actual and potential artisans of their own learnings and doings, of their own lives, and thus uniquely contributing, in turn, to their learnings and doings.

“Respect for the young is not a passive, hands-off attitude. It invites our own offering of resources. It moves us toward the furtherance of their lives and thus, even, at times, toward remonstrance or intervention. Respect resembles love in its implicit aim of furtherance, but love without respect can blind and bind. Love is private and unbidden, whereas respect is implicit in all moral relations with others. Adults involved in the world of man and nature must bring that world with them to children, bounded and made safe to be sure, but not thereby losing its richness and promise of novelty.”

Amen.

To learn more about the Reggio Children Foundation, and/or to register for an International Study Group, visit https://www.reggiochildren.it/?lang=en

At Blue School, the Learning is Alive (Literally)

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on At Blue School, the Learning is Alive (Literally)

Gina Farrar is not your typical New York City school leader.

For starters, she’s from the deep South — although any remnants of a Southern twang have long since disappeared. She’s also quiet and friendly  — the sort of person who likes going to restaurants in the middle of the afternoon, or smiling at kids on the train.

Then there’s her formal education:  a double major in Dance and Mathematics, followed by a PhD in Psychology. Although this is where, if you follow the pattern, Gina Farrar’s career path starts to make sense. “What attracted me to math and dance is that each is a puzzle,” she told me one recent fall morning. “The ways that math is a puzzle are obvious, but ballet is a puzzle, too — how your body fits together, how the steps fit together. And there’s a lot of technique involved, but it’s only when you master the technique that you can soar.”

The same can be said for Blue School, a decade-old independent school in lower Manhattan that Gina leads, and which was created by the founders of Blue Man Group, the global theatrical phenomenon that was designed to inspire creativity in both audience and performer.

To many, that riddle — how to inspire creativity — is the Holy Grail of school reform in 2018. Back in 2006, however, it was little more than a nugget of an idea that turned into a small parent playgroup in lower Manhattan. Soon thereafter, it grew into a full-blown school — albeit one whose theories about teaching and learning were both intriguing and unproven. And now, Blue School has evolved into something I’m not sure I’ve seen anywhere else in my travels — a school community that is, both literally and figuratively, a living organism, and a theory of learning that has, over a decade of strict scrutiny, constant tinkering, and loving care, developed a full-blown pedagogy as worthy of replication as its more famous single-name forebears:

Montessori. Reggio. Waldforf.

Blue?

To understand how it happened, you need to begin with the idea that anchors both the Group and the School: a colorful wheel of archetypal lenses for how human beings see and make sense of the world.

As Blue Man Group and Blue School co-founder Matt Goldman puts it, these lenses evolved as the founding Blue Men designed their characters. Each pair of lenses, which are positioned opposite one another on the wheel, represent polar ways in which we are likely to see ourselves (and be seen by others). Our culture is rife with examples of the archetypal Hero, for example, yet almost barren when it comes to equivalent celebrations of the Innocent. We are more likely to value the mindset of the Scientist over that of the Artist. And despite our country’s revolutionary origins, you’re still more likely to gain points in your local community as a Group Member than a Trickster.

This is why the Blue Men, over the course of a two-hour show, spend time inhabiting all six lenses, and modeling for people what it looks like when you check All of the Above in the multiple choice question of What Does It Mean to be a Human Being. As Goldman puts it, “We wanted to speak up to the intelligence of our audience members while reaching in to their childlike innocence. We wanted to create a place where people continually learn and grow and treat each other with just a little more consideration than is usually evident out in the real world. We wanted to recombine influences to create something new. And we wanted to have a good time doing it.”

That sensibility is also at the center of Blue School, which is equal parts ritualistic, research-y, and rebellious. At weekly community meetings, for example, kids and adults take time to celebrate these different ways of being, as a way to reinforce the extent to which all six are equally valued. “I saw the Trickster in Dana yesterday,” said one young student on the day I visited, “when we walked to the park and she asked us if we had heard of any mysterious mishaps in the area.” Moments later a teacher added that he “saw the Innocent and the Artist in Mati when she was working really intently and precisely to draw negative space.”

Beyond culture-building rituals, Blue School also works proactively to translate the latest research on cognitive science and child development into all classroom practices and professional development courses. Its teachers are deeply experienced practitioners. And its initial emphasis on archetypal lenses, playful mischief, and joyful learning has since grown into what Blue School calls the Balance Model — a richly visual comprehensive learning framework that is equal parts Academic Mastery, Self & Social Intelligence, and Creative Thinking; that proclaims the school’s determination to cultivate Adaptable Thinkers, Collaborative Problem-Solvers, and Irrepressible Innovators; and that outlines Blue School’s intention to cultivate a specific set of habits of mind in its students, from Openness and Empathy to Literacy and Self-Expression.

“There are so many ingredients that have gone into making this school work,” said Farrar. “And now we find ourselves in a position where we’re able to provide all these different conditions in which different kids can flourish. That’s the thing about schools — they don’t hold a static amount of energy; the energy is exponential. And when you’re feeling creative and relaxed socially, and when there’s real clarity of expectations, that’s when it becomes magical.”

One day after school, just a few weeks into the 2018-2019 school year, I asked Blue School’s three divisional directors — Laura Sedlock (Pre-Primary), Pat Lynch (Primary School), and Laurie Kardos (Middle School) — exactly how these different pieces had come together to wield such a place. After all, it’s one thing to know an expensive private school in New York City has found a way to be magical. The real question is, to what extent is that magic transferable — to all schools, and all types of communities?  

“All the things that look un-magical are what creates the space for the magical things to happen — here or anywhere else,” said Sedlock, a New York native with nearly two decades of experience in early childhood education. “Almost everything flows from our ability to answer two questions: What does it mean to really observe children? And how do we document each child’s learning more meaningfully?”

As an example, Sedlock pointed to an essential element of Blue School’s Primary program: “Big Study,” in which the children go deep on a particular subject over an extended period. Many schools have something similar, and usually, the subject of study is set in stone: the 5th grade will study ancient Egypt, the 2nd grade will study Ants, and so on. “But if we’re serious about listening deeply to children, we can’t project out that far. We have to remain nimble and go where they take us. It’s the children’s excitement that will lead to the big study, not a predetermined topic by the adults. But that requires a different skill-set than we’re used to as teachers.”

Pat Lynch agreed. “Our teachers have worked to become highly skilled at knowing that the best instructional fodder is right in front of them, and it’s unfolding in real time. Our role as leaders is to protect the space that allows our teachers to do that work. It’s very emergent.”

Indeed, emergent is a word you hear often at Blue School, and it’s illustrative of what makes the Blue School Pedagogy distinct. Spend a day there, and at all levels you’ll see students and teachers working on established courses of study — and wandering off in spontaneous directions. It’s an intellectual high-wire act — more jazz than classical — and it made me wonder what Blue School’s teachers have done to build the confidence that is required to teach this way.

“I think a real danger is to think that the solution is simply not to plan or have goals or to just give yourself over to the whims of whatever the kids want to do at any given moment,” said 4th grade teacher Ashley Semrick. “It’s the opposite, actually: it won’t work unless you have really clear goals for both individual kids and the larger group. The ability to be emergent as an individual flows from our ability as a group to have clear schoolwide intentions. Our job is to read what’s happening on any given day, and then to flexibly adjust as needed.”

How long did it take you to feel comfortable teaching this way, I asked her. “I remember back in grad school,” she responded, “someone told me that when things get rough as a teacher, you’ll just revert back to the educational standard you experienced as a student — even if that standard didn’t serve you well. Well, I can safely say that a decade into teaching, I am only now escaping that truth. It’s taken me that long to really trust that my kids always have something meaningful to say. That has made all the difference.”

“It’s taken several years for us to reach that point collectively as well,” added Laurie Kardos, who leads the school’s brand new Middle school division. “This is the first year I’ve felt like we aren’t in start-up mode. I don’t think there’s any way around that as an organization — you need to struggle with it — but for us, the work was in picking the things we wanted to align around, and then using each other to work on those things. What we’ve created is a space with the right balance of flexibility, choice, theatricality, precision, trust, compassion and autonomy. And with our experience has come a deeper ability to plan for the unexpected, not just for kids to learn something new but to become more effective at building off what they already know — and then to assess what they know not just at the end of the year but at every moment. That’s what gives this place life.”

It’s true — Blue School is alive, both literally and figuratively; even the scientists would agree. “We have discovered that the material world is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships,” writes physicist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “and that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. Life, then, is an emergent property. It cannot be reduced to the properties of its components. Social networks exhibit the same general principles as biological networks. What is valid for cellular life can be considered valid for any form of life. And the essence of life is integration.

“Organisms do not experience environments. They create them.”

As a result of these insights, Capra and many others — from a wide range of scientific fields — have concluded that “cognition operates on many levels, and as the sophistication of the organism grows, so does its sensorium for the environment, and so does the extent of co-emergence between organism and environment.”

There’s that word again. But what does being emergent have to do with making magic — and what needs to happen so that the magic might travel beyond Blue School’s walls?

If you ask the educators of Blue School, they’d say any recipe is a result of the sophistication of the learning culture they have steadily grown over time — the gradual mastery of technique, perhaps, that has allowed them to soar. They’d say it’s the intentional creation of a physical environment that is meant to reflect the values of the community that inhabits it.  And they’d say it’s their paradoxical willingness to be both highly structured and completely free — to ground the learning in a discrete set of lenses, or to craft a a Balance Model — and at the same time to protect the space and autonomy of the teachers to go wherever the children lead them at any given moment. Consequently, to visit Blue School is to experience it not just as a school, but as an actual living organism — an ecosystem unto itself, one that is both self-organizing and self-aware.

Which leads to the most radical, and replicable, observation of all. “In a nutshell,” Capra says, “nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature.

“The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community” — no matter where those communities may be.

This, then, is the work.

The story of us

Posted on | by Sam
I’m heading back on the train after two remarkable days at Blue School. It is almost a perfect place — filled with color and care and theory and practice and things growing and questions being asked. What is progress? Who are you? Can two things be different but equal?
I could go on . . .
 It also costs $50k a year. Its teachers feel like they have the time and space to do what is in the best interests of their kids. It has clear community norms. Kids feel safe to express themselves and find their voice. It is attentive to research and its unique swirl of art and science has given birth to a new pedagogy. Seriously, it is that good.
 
So why do I feel sad?
Because it is like a pearl at the bottom of the ocean, and it doesn’t need to be. 
Blue School is a unicorn — when it could so easily be the norm.
 
In Meg Wheatley’s new book, she warns us to beware of “the ambush of hope.” The world is a mess, she says, and the historical scholarship on the decline of civilizations is clear: America is on the downward slope. It’s almost time to turn out the lights.
This is, of course, no surprise — we see and feel aspects of it every day. The world is not getting worse; it’s getting revealed. We have had the ability to solve our biggest problems — poverty, inequality, the lack of more Blue Schools, etc. — for a while now. What we lack is political will. What we lack is the collective willpower to move that shit through. So the wheels go round and round . . . And places like Blue School remain unicorns.
What is left for us to do? Wheatley says it is to create “islands of sanity” amidst the madness, to seize all that we can control, and at the same time to stop kidding ourselves that anything occurring “at scale” is a realistic dream. We have met the enemy. We could have been so much better . . .

What are the central elements of a healthy human identity?

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on What are the central elements of a healthy human identity?

What are you wondering about these days? What are you struggling with? What is becoming clear to you?

My answer to all of these questions relates to a new book we’re writing, and to our ongoing search to identify the irreducible elements of identity — the qualities and dispositions that we need in order to preserve, protect, defend, champion, encourage and honor the human spirit (and to do so at this exact moment of decadence, division, and decline).

Towards that end, I just finished Margaret Wheatley’s new book, Who Do We Choose to Be (go read it!), and as I did, I jotted down some of the qualities that I think are element-al to our development of a healthy self and spirit.

As of this moment, these feel all or mostly right to me, meaning they are truly foundational to almost anything else that matters:
BELONGING
AWARENESS
LEVITY
COMPASSION
FREEDOM
JOY
AWE/REVERENCE/UNCERTAINTY/PARADOX
MEANING
BALANCE
Then there are other qualities I jotted down that make me wonder if they are distinct or actually sub-properties of the former. For example —
HUMILITY (as a product of levity?)
COOPERATION (as an offshoot of belonging?)
VIGILANCE (as an indicator of awareness?)
GENTLENESS (as the inevitable result of compassion?)
And then there is everything else.
What I’m wondering is, what would YOU add, change or modify? Who do you feel we need to become in order to serve as Warriors of the Human Spirit — knowing that, once we have identified them, we can begin to recalibrate our schools, communities and organizations in order to help bring those qualities more fully into being?

Public Schools Are Not Failing . . . They’re Starving

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Public Schools Are Not Failing . . . They’re Starving

Did you see that Betsy Devos interview on 60 Minutes this weekend? Did you see that President Trump appointed her to chair a yearlong commission on school safety? Are you ready to gouge your own eyes out in apoplexy?

Over a year ago, a group of parents and students from Detroit tried to warn the rest of us about just how unqualified she was to lead America’s public school system. Last January, in fact, they traveled to Washington to raise their concerns at her confirmation hearing, and speak truth to power.

What happened instead was that they were silenced— literally shut out of the room where it happened. But 180 Studio was there, and what we captured on film raises vital questions about the state of our democracy.

What this story shows is the delicate, dialectical relationship between being powerful and powerless. What it reveals are the different levels of gamesmanship that go into decisions like who will ascend to the highest levels of influence. And what it tracks is a distinctly American play within a play — a story about the halls of power that takes place in an actual hallway.
We can do better. We must do better. Please share this video if you agree.

This is what it looks like when a community designs its own school

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on This is what it looks like when a community designs its own school

At its best, nothing is more unifying and vital to a community’s civic health than a high-quality neighborhood school. Why, then, do all notions of “school choice” end up being about either charter or private schools?

Enter Oakland SOL, a new dual-immersion middle school in the Flatlands section of Oakland, California — and the district’s first new school in more than a decade.

Created over three years of hard work and careful planning by a motivated group of local parents and educators, Oakland SOL paints a different picture of school choice — one that is squarely grounded in the aspirations of the families and children who will comprise its community core.

To some, it’s a murky picture. After all, Oakland’s school district already has more schools than it can afford; it faces up to a $30 million budget shortfall. Yet when you consider that after fifth grade, one of every four students in the district leaves the system, Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammel is making a different sort of bet — one that will require districts to become more responsive to local needs and demands.

“If we can provide programs that help them make the choice to stay in our district, I actually do think that’s fiscally responsible,” said Katherine Carter, SOL’s founding principal. “It shows the district cares about creating quality experiences for our kids and our families.”

“This was really rooted in parent demand,” added Gloria Lee, president and chief executive of a local nonprofit that supports new public school options. “I hope it is the first and not the only example of a way the district can continue to evolve and create new innovative programs that serve the really diverse families in Oakland more effectively.”

We know more than we think we do.

Now is the time for a new learning story.

#thisis180

Before he says anything else about the Pledge of Allegiance, @RealDonaldTrump should read this . . .

Posted on | by Sam

Of course, we know he won’t — but that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t brush up on the actual history of the Pledge, and the actual meaning of the flag. When we do, there can be no room for alternative facts — only a history that, based on how we define patriotism, either puts us on the side of some courageous young schoolchildren of a generation ago, or on the side of totalitarianism. . .

—-

Billy Gobitas knew that refusing to salute the flag in his fifth-grade classroom could result in expulsion from school, loss of friends, and even persecution in his hometown of Minersville, Pennsylvania. But on October 22, 1935, he did it anyway. “I do not salute the flag,” he later wrote to the school board, “because I have promised to do the will of God.” The next day, twelve-year-old Lillian Gobitas followed her brother’s lead and also refused to salute the flag. “This wasn’t something my parents forced on us,” she later explained.  “I did a lot of reading and checking in the Bible and I really took my own stand.”

The Gobitas children were not alone. Other members of their church — Jehovah’s Witnesses — faced the same dilemma in school districts throughout the nation where saluting the flag was compulsory. As Billy explained in his letter, Witnesses believe that a flag salute is a form of idolatry, violating the biblical injunction not to “make unto thee any graven image, nor bow down to them.”

Two years earlier, in 1933, Adolf Hitler had banned the Witnesses in Nazi Germany for, among other things, refusing to give the Fascist salute in schools and at public events. Over the next decade, more than ten thousand Witnesses were imprisoned in concentration camps. These events in Nazi Germany led the leader of the American Witnesses, Joseph Rutherford, to denounce compulsory flag salutes in a speech delivered in 1935. Witnesses, he said, “do not ‘Heil Hitler’ nor any other creature.” Rutherford’s speech inspired the Gobitas family and other Witnesses to refuse to participate in the flag ceremony in the name of religious liberty.

The Witnesses’ objections to the flag salute failed to impress the members of the Minersville school board. In their view, the Pledge of Allegiance helped fulfill the public schools’ mission to instill “love of country.” They saw failure to salute the flag as insubordinate and unpatriotic. Most people in mostly Roman Catholic Minersville were equally unsympathetic with the unpopular Jehovah’s Witnesses. Consequently, Billy and Lillian Gobitas were expelled from school.

Eighteen months later, the children’s father, Walter Gobitas, filed suit. With the help of the Watch Tower Society of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the American Civil Liberties Union, Gobitas argued that the Minersville school board had deprived Billy and Lillian of their right to freedom of religion and speech under the First Amendment. The Gobitas family won in the federal district court in Philadelphia and won again in the U.S. Court of Appeals. Both courts dismissed the school board’s contention that refusal by schoolchildren to salute the flag on religious grounds was a danger to the nation. On the contrary, the judges said, Lillian and William Gobitas were exercising the very “liberty of conscience” that was sought by many of our ancestors when they first came to the New World.

The Minersville school board appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Minersville v. Gobitis was decided on June 3, 1940. (Due to a printer’s error, the Gobitas family name is misspelled in legal records.)  By an eight-to-one vote, the Court reversed the lower courts and ruled that the government had the authority to compel students to participate in the flag salute. Writing for the majority — and against the backdrop of an impending world war — Justice Felix Frankfurter pointed to the need for “a common feeling for the common country.” The flag, he argued, “is the symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences, however large, within the framework of the Constitution.” Justice Harlan Stone was the lone voice of dissent. The very essence of liberty, he wrote, “is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say, at least where the compulsion is to bear false witness to his religion.”

The Gobitis decision had an immediate and devastating impact on Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States. Within weeks of the Court’s ruling, hundreds of attacks on Witnesses were reported to the Department of Justice. Mobs, sometimes assisted by police, attacked and humiliated Witnesses across the nation. “In the two years following the Gobitis decision,” federal officials wrote, “the files of the Department of Justice reflect an uninterrupted record of violence and persecution of the Witnesses. Almost without exception, the flag and the flag salute can be found as the percussion cap that sets off these acts.”

Disturbed by the violence, three justices began to rethink their vote in Gobitis. When told by Justice William O. Douglas that Justice Hugo Black had changed his mind, Frankfurter asked, “Has Hugo been re-reading the Constitution during the summer?” Douglas replied, “No, he has been reading the papers.”

In 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear another flag-salute case, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette — this time with three changed votes and two new justices. The case involved children of three Jehovah’s Witnesses in Charleston, West Virginia. Walter Barnette, Lucy McClure, and Paul Stull had been expelled from school for refusing to salute the flag.

This time, by a vote of six to three, the Court struck down the West Virginia flag-salute law, overruling the Gobitis decision. In one of the most eloquent and powerful decisions in Supreme Court history, Justice Robert Jackson cited examples from history of repressive government efforts to enforce national unity:

“The ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”

The First Amendment, Jackson argued, was designed to avoid such tyranny by denying government the power over basic freedoms:

“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”

The American flag, Jackson reminded the nation, stands for freedom — including the freedom to dissent. And to deny people their inalienable rights is to deny the very meaning of the First Amendment:

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”

The U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Barnette on June 14, 1943 — Flag Day. Soon thereafter, attacks on Jehovah’s Witnesses ceased.

—

Postscript: For an understanding of what today’s debate is really about, take 30 seconds to hear directly from San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid. This is what patriotism looks like — courageous, uncomfortable, informed, principled.

This is also who we are . . .

How We Must Respond to Trump

Posted on | by Sam

Via Goethe:

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate, it is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate, humor, hurt or heal. In every situation it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated and whether a person is humanized or dehumanized. If we treat people as they are we make them worse. If we treat them as they ought to be we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”

Donald Trump, Westworld, & the Future of American Democracy

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Donald Trump, Westworld, & the Future of American Democracy

Is the 2016 presidential election the beginning, or the end, of American civic life?

I say it’s both.

Pessimistically, one can say we are witnessing the end of civility, honesty, and empathy, and the beginning of the end of our two-centuries-long experiment in a quasi-functional representative democracy. Yet I believe what this election must provide, no matter who wins on Tuesday, is a wakeup call from our collective somnambulism, and a willingness to confront the Brave New World we have already begun to enter – a world in which we can disappear into virtual realities of our own imagining, and therefore one in which our ability to be more conscious (of ourselves, our surroundings, and the invisible systems that hold us prisoner) must become the lingua franca of a renewed civic order.

Fittingly, the stakes are laid bare in HBO’s latest blockbuster series, Westworld, a story in which future citizens spend up to $40,000 a day exercising their most base impulses – sexual violence and murder chief among them – in a vast adventure theme park filled with blissfully unaware android “hosts.” These hosts are pre-programmed with narrative storylines. Their memories are then wiped clean after each new day of rape and pillage, resulting in an endless loop of unconscious servitude.

As the show’s co-creator Jonathan Nolan puts it, Westworld is an effort to explore issues surrounding artificial intelligence and “the idea that humans are getting ever better at immersing themselves in their narrative fictions.” Consequently, it’s a story that poses timely and provocative questions about the depths to which we humans will sink when the line between fiction and reality becomes almost impossibly blurred. As one of the hosts says, foreshadowing her own conscious awakening from the nightmare she inhabits (and quoting Shakespeare as she does so), “These violent delights have violent ends.”

On one level, the election results on November 8 will reveal how violent the end to our most recent binge of primal theater will be. On another level, though, we have been asleep at the wheel for a long, long time.

Indeed, Trump’s rise recalls the warnings in Erich Fromm’s 1941 classic Escape from Freedom, a book that was written in the shadow of Hitler’s ascent to power, and in which Fromm tries to articulate our dialectical relationship with freedom itself, and what that relationship tells us about ourselves and the societies in which we live.

Fromm’s thesis was that before we can understand the dynamics of any society’s social processes, we must first explore the dynamics of the psychological processes operating within the individual. Central to all modern societies and individuals, Fromm wrote, was man’s relationship with freedom itself, which he defined as “the fundamental condition for any growth.” Since the structure of modern society and the personality of modern man first began taking shape – beginning with the end of the rigid social structures and limitations found in the Middle Ages, and accelerating after World War One – we have become freer to develop and express our own individual selves and ideas. At the same time, however, we have become freer from a world that gave us, precisely because it was proscribed, more security and reassurance. “The process of individuation is one of growing strength and integration of the individual personality,” Fromm wrote. “But it is at the same time a process in which the original identity with others is lost and in which modern man becomes more separate from them.”

The dilemma of modern society and how it impacts us is the same: it has given us more space to develop as individuals – and it has made us more helpless. “It increased freedom,” says Fromm, “and it created dependencies of a new kind. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other.”

The danger, Fromm cautioned, is if we forget that “aloneness, fear and bewilderment remain; people cannot stand it forever. They cannot go on bearing the burden of ‘freedom from’; they must try to escape from freedom altogether unless they can progress from negative to positive freedom. The principal social avenues of escape in our time are submission to a leader, as has happened in fascist countries, and the compulsive conforming as is prevalent in our own society.”

Sound familiar?

Because of this anxiety – and this willingness to submit to someone who will do the thinking for us – Fromm believed that our capacity to think critically had dangerously dulled over time (and that was in 1941!). Ironically, however, this gradual numbing of our critical capacities doesn’t mean we feel more uninformed. On the contrary, the constant barrage of messaging so indicative of modern society tends to be designed in such a way as to “flatter the individual by making him appear important, and by pretending that they appeal to his critical judgment, to his sense of discrimination. But these pretenses are essentially a method to dull the individual’s suspicions and to help him fool himself as to the individual character of his decision.”

How will Fromm’s observations play out in a Trump presidency, where the ersatz becomes the law of the land? How will they play out in a Clinton presidency, where the fog of secrecy becomes the daily forecast? And how will they play out in either case, as the virtual world increasingly becomes part of the daily menu of possibilities?

British filmmaker Adam Curtis has an idea, and it isn’t encouraging. As author Jonathan Lethem wrote in a recent must-read profile of Curtis, “One of his central subjects, running through all his work, is the possibility that we’re listening to the wrong voices in public life, and in our own heads; that the ideas we find authoritative and persuasive about our politics and culture are in fact a tenuous construction, one at the mercy of bias, invisible ideological sway and unprocessed, untethered emotions (principally, fear).”

“This is the whole thing about ‘good and evil’,” Curtis explains. “It’s a naïve view of the world. The problem is bigger, it’s a system. But how do you illustrate something invisible?”

For Curtis, the problem is that the central ideology of our age is the lionization of the self – the philosophy of ‘freedom to,’ run amok. “That the self, being expressive, is the good thing. Expressing yourself through consumerism is central. So, the dilemma for artists is that however radical in content their paintings, their performance art, their video works, the mode in which they’re doing it — self-expression — feeds the strength of the very thing they’re trying to overthrow, which is modern consumer capitalism.”

That’s deep. It’s also terrifying. So how do we separate ourselves? How do we develop the capacity to live lives of positive freedom amidst the filtered bubble of our own devising? How do we become more socially conscious at the very moment our ability to disappear into all-encompassing virtual worlds becomes commonplace?

How do we wake up?

In this sense, we are more like the android hosts of Westworld than we may want to admit. As Curtis put it, “On a social-media network, it’s very much like being in a heroin bubble. The utopia they hold out is a world where machines make everything for you and you have endless leisure time, you become creative and everyone’s happy. And the only thing is, actually, everyone’s incredibly unhappy because they haven’t got anything to do. What we call our jobs today are actually fake jobs. We sit in our offices in front of our screens in order to get the money to go out and buy stuff. Our job is really to go shopping. And the rest of the time, we sit in our offices doing complicated managerial things, and when we’re not, we’re actually watching the internet. The internet is there to keep you happy during your fake job.

“You have to recognize that you’re part of the thing,” Curtis argues. “But the point about journalism is to try to portray the thing you are part of. I think that’s the best you can do.”

So cast your vote on November 8. Recognize that you are part of the thing. And let the real work begin.

This is why you can’t just say that public education is failing

Posted on | by Sam

I know, I know — we can do better, and public education in America is in need of a makeover. We’re in the midst of the biggest shifts to how we think about teaching and learning in more than a century, and some of us are a little slower on the uptick. I get it.

Here’s the thing, though — amidst the pressing need for change, amidst the horror stories of abject failure, amidst the reports of growing segregation and inequity — there are also stories like this one, about a remarkable school for the sorts of kids who rarely get to be seen and heard. How might we view the challenges and opportunities ahead if we were more collectively focused on these sorts of schools, and what we can learn from them?