Imagine what would happen if this sort of spirit spread throughout the rest of our public schools?
Category: Organizational Change
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.
Discipline in schools moves toward peacemaking
The first time he got in trouble, 7-year-old “Z” kicked his teacher — getting him into more trouble.
A few months later, shortly after his grandfather passed away, he kicked his teacher again.
In many schools across the country, where zero tolerance policies allow little wiggle room for understanding why a child may be misbehaving, Z would have been suspended, expelled, or even arrested.
That was how Z’s school district in Broward County, Florida, had operated for years — enforcing zero tolerance policies, and arresting or suspending children (most of them students of color, and often students as young as Z) at a higher rate than any other school district in the state.
On one level, of course, a zero tolerance policy makes sense. After all, schools can’t be safe places if students are allowed to kick their teachers. Order must be maintained. What could be clearer than saying that misbehavior will not be tolerated?
But on another level, every child is different, and students need the right kind of support if they are to be able to learn and grow. Different kids bring different sorts of issues with them to school, and punishment is rarely the best way to help a child who is most in need of love and support.
Classroom or Courtroom
Punishing children harshly does nothing for their ability to succeed academically, and statistics show that it contributes to the achievement gap. Suspended students spend less time in class, which correlates to lower test scores and grades and increased apathy and dropout rates.
Instead of being suspended, Z was placed in a Behavior Change Program the district had organized, where trained professionals teach children how to deal with their emotions and make better choices. His mother is relieved; Z still has a chance to be whatever he wants to be in the future, she says.
That distinction — keeping kids in the classroom, and out of the courtroom — is what Broward County superintendent Robert Runcie and a growing number of school leaders across the country are saying can make the difference in putting a child like Z on a path to success, instead of a path to prison.
This is a major challenge for American schools today — changing the way adults respond to student conduct, particularly with students of color. Consider this: Today, American public schools suspend roughly 3½ million kids a year — more than twice the rate in the 1970s — and we refer a quarter of a million children to the police for arrest.
Every year.
Worse still, educators suspend black students at more than double the rate for white students — even though statistics show that a student who is suspended or expelled is three times as likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year.
“When adolescents experience injustice in any context,” explains UCLA professor Phillip Goff, “they end up committing crime at much higher rates later in life regardless of how likely they were to be involved in crime to begin with. That is a sobering statistic. It means we can now show that injustice causes crime.
“When you expose young people to injustice, they lose hope that playing within the rules and working hard is going to pay off. They start to believe more and more that we live in a world where the goal is simply to get by and get over — and when you are teaching that implicitly, you shouldn’t be surprised that discipline becomes a problem.”
Restorative Justice
The good news is that more schools are heeding the advice of experts like Goff, and adopting restorative justice programs — alternative approaches to discipline in schools.
Restorative justice programs provide a way to repair the harm that occurs between people when conflicts arise. What they’re showing is that when victims, offenders and community members meet to decide how to do that, and do it well, the results can be transformational.
This is happening in Oakland, California. The city’s school district is nearly 75 percent nonwhite and 75 percent of student’s meet the requirements for the free lunch program and has experienced extensive discipline and violence issues. In 2012, however, it expanded its adoption of restorative justice work, and has seen change for the better.
It works like this: instead of suspending or expelling students who misbehave, schools with restorative justice programs bring kids together under skilled facilitation by a trained adult — and, often, fellow students — in order to resolve their conflicts peacefully, and build a stronger community in the process.
Howard Zehr, a distinguished professor at Eastern Mennonite University who is regarded as the “grandfather of restorative justice,” puts it this way: Typically, the questions our traditional systems try to address are: What rules or laws were broken? Who broke them? And what do they deserve?
By contrast, restorative justice (RJ) asks a different set of questions: Who has been hurt? What are their needs? And who has the obligation to address those needs and remedy the harm that has been done?
Positive Outcomes of Mediating Peacefully
Students are now asking for a circle, says one Oakland school staffer. “Instead of throwing a punch, they’re backing off and asking to mediate (conflicts) peacefully with words. And that’s a great thing.”
Better yet, it’s working. According to a September 2014 report that the district submitted to the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education:
• More than 88 percent of the teachers reported that restorative practices were very or somewhat helpful in managing difficult student behaviors in classroom.
• More than 47 percent reported that RJ helped reduce office referrals, and 53 percent said it helped reduce disciplinary referrals for African American students.
• Suspensions have declined significantly — and most significantly for African American students suspended for disruption and/or willful defiance, a decrease of 40 percent.
Knowing this, here are a few good questions to ask the leaders at your child’s school:
• “What is your approach to discipline? Do you have a zero tolerance policy here?” (And, if they do, are they willing to consider exploring a shift to a restorative justice program?)
• “What are the disciplinary statistics of the school?” “How often do you suspend students?” “How often are kids behaving violently?”
• “How are you helping students develop the skills they need to manage their emotions and make better choices in their interactions with other people?”
• “In what ways are the teachers here being trained to become more sensitive to the different cultural needs of their students?”
In sum, the key to a safe and healthy school climate has less to do with the children — and more to do with the adults. The approach school administrators, teachers, and other adults take to discipline in schools can make all the difference. As Broward County superintendent Robert Runcie puts it, “It isn’t about improving student conduct, as much as it is about changing the way adults respond to student conduct.”
(This article originally appeared on GreatSchools.org)
A Year of Wonder: What is the Future of Higher Ed?
It’s been the no-brainiest of no-brainers for as long as anyone can remember: If you’re a parent, and you have the means to do so, a mark of your commitment to your children is measured by the amount of money you’re able to sock away for their college education.
But what if it’s no longer true?
What if, in the wake of impending seismic shifts in higher education, the parents of today’s Kindergartners (aka the Class of 2032) need to stop worrying about their 529’s, and start preparing for a radically different landscape – one in which the very notion of “admissions” is an anachronism, the price tag is reasonable, and the experience doesn’t unfold over four years, but one’s entire life?
Before you block me from your Twitter feed for inanity, hear me out.
First, let’s consider the present state of higher education:
- Student debt is out of control. Whereas in 2004, the total amount of loans American college students had was around $250 billion, by the time today’s Kindergartner was born, that number had surpassed $1 trillion.
- Nearly half the students who begin college don’t finish within six years.
- It is now the norm for students in the bottom income bracket to borrow at least half their household income to attend a four-year college.
- And in the last twenty years, the average amount owed by a typical student has more than doubled.
Meanwhile, the majority of our colleges and universities are not even set up to give students an equivalent return on their investment: after all, the central function of the “hybrid university” is research, not teaching.
So what does that leave us with? An increasing disconnect between the skills young people have, and the skills their prospective employers need. As Forbes put it in 2014: “With the large numbers of recent college graduates who can’t find employment that pays well enough to justify the costs of going to college, it appears that we have reached the final stages of a process that has driven costs up but value down.”
Even the U.S. Department of Education sees the writing on the wall: “Today,” they write, “college remains the greatest driver of socioeconomic mobility in America, but if we don’t do more to keep it within reach for middle-class families and those striving to get into the middle class, it could have the opposite effect – serving as a barrier, instead of as a ticket to the American Dream.”
That’s bad news for middle-class families, but it’s devastating news for low-income families, who are constantly told that the only way to change their fortunes is by making sure the next generation is college-bound – despite the fact that just 9% of the country’s poorest students actually graduate with a bachelor’s degree by age 24 (as opposed to 77% of the wealthiest).
This is all starting to sound as sham-tastic as Trump University.
To be clear, the promise of college as a pathway to prosperity is still true for many – just not as many as before. Making college more accessible and affordable helped create the modern American middle class, thanks to policies like the G.I. Bill and the Higher Education Act. In fact, Title IV of the law focused on ensuring equal access for students from low-income families. It created support programs to help those students enroll in and afford higher education. And the 1972 reauthorization of the bill saw the beginning of the modern framework for federal student aid.
The problem is that while Congress has built out its own framework for federal aid, the overall costs of higher education have risen dramatically, resulting in a lower purchasing power for Pell Grants and a greater reliance on federal student loans. Consequently, whereas middle class kids can still get saddled with unwanted debt and a degree of limited utility, poor kids can get buried altogether.
This is not, therefore, merely a question of privilege. It’s a question of priorities – and of making sure that our institutions of higher education have the right ones.
The good news is there are more examples than you might think of colleges and universities that are changing their practices in ways that better serve the needs of kids and their families – and there are compelling reasons to think that by the time today’s five-year-olds graduate from high school, the landscape they face will be filled with options that are more personally relevant, affordable, and accessible.
If you’re looking for a future-oriented public university, for example, take a close look at Arizona State. As recently as a decade ago, ASU was little more than a party school with nice weather. Now, it’s the top-ranked university in the country for innovation – ahead of places like Stanford and M.I.T. Yet it’s still pretty affordable, and still pretty easy to get into.
And if you’d rather see how one of the world’s top universities is reimagining itself, check out Stanford 2025 – and see what you think of the creative ways they are redefining the structure and purpose of college (Goodbye Transcripts, Hello Skillprints). Or take note of Nike founder Phil Knight’s recent decision to give Stanford $400 million – not for its endowment or a new sports facility, but to create a new scholarship that recruits students from around the world to solve the world’s most intractable problems.
As Google’s Jamie Casap argues, this is precisely where education should be headed. Today’s students shouldn’t be thinking about what they want to be; they should be asking themselves what problems they want to solve.
Of course, that sort of shift requires a very different model of higher education – and a very different price point. But as Kevin Carey writes in The End of College, what schools like ASU and Stanford are showing us is where other universities will need to go if they want to survive. “To prosper,” he argues, “colleges need to become more like cathedrals. They need to build beautiful places, real and virtual, that learners return to throughout their lives. They need to create authentic human communities and form relationships with people based on the never-ending project of learning. They need to do it in ways that are affordable and meaningful for large numbers of people.”
For Carey and others, that means that many of the things we associate most strongly with “the college experience” may, once today’s Kindergartners reach university age, no longer exist. “The idea of ‘applying to’ or ‘graduating from’ colleges won’t make as much sense in the future,” Carey suggests. “People will join colleges and other learning organizations for as long or as little time as they need.”
Before that can happen, however, a vital monopoly must be broken: the sale of recognized credits and credentials. But Carey believes the exponential advances in information technology, coupled with the widening understanding of how people learn, will soon result in a digital marketplace of credentialing that reduces the diploma to its rightful, antiquated place. “The way the Internet allows people to connect with one another and share information creates new sources of authority that can be used to validate credentials,” he argues.
“They will allow people to control and display information about themselves in new and powerful ways, by assembling credible evidence of knowledge and skills gained in a variety of contexts – in college, in the workforce, in life.” And they will make each person’s educational identity “deep, discoverable, mobile, and secure.”
This is certainly the bet LinkedIn made when they spent $1.5 billion to acquire Lynda.com a year ago. It’s what new organizations like Accredible or Mozilla’s Open Badges platform are starting to develop. And it’s why some of the world’s top universities have combined to launch EdX and offer free online courses from top instructors.
So if all of these future-oriented efforts are already underway, why are they still at the margins of how we think about college?
Simply, because old habits die hard.
The comfort we get from continuing to imagine college as it has always been – as a symbol of acculturation and access, more than a vehicle to meaningful skills acquisition – will take a bit longer to collapse under the weight of its own untruth.
But make no mistake about it – we are already chasing chimeras. The unquestioned promise of college is, for too many, an illusion – and, worse still, an increasingly unaffordable and reckless one to pursue.
That means change is upon us. But perhaps by the time today’s five-year-old is graduating from high school, greater affordability, access and relevance will be, too.
Welcome to the “Era of Expeditioncy”
I spent the first half of this week in Memphis, Tennessee, working with a remarkable local group of educators, parents and developers (yes, developers) who are all dreaming big together as part of Crosstown Concourse, an ambitious effort to redesign a 1.5 million square foot former Sears warehouse into a “vertical urban village” of residents, retail outlets, non-profits, and — wait for it — an innovative public high school.
It’s a thrilling idea — a city within a city, organized around an overarching umbrella of arts, education and wellness, and imagined as a learning ecology that helps all people examine multiple pathways to healthy living. And clearly, if it works, the high school it houses (there will also be an adult education high school, by the way) will need to look nothing like the high schools of our collective past, which were designed for efficiency, and for batching and queuing unprecedented numbers of young people into an Industrial economy that was largely fixed and known.
Indeed, if this project is successful, Crosstown High School will be, according to the lead developer (who happens to be an art history professor), “the beginning of the end of education in a vacuum.”
YES!
So what does that look like?
That’s the task we at WONDER now have before us — along with some great local partners. And while the specifics remain to be hammered out, we already know enough to say this:
- A school like this must be a home base more than a school — a place where students gather to assemble their literal or figurative rucksacks before heading out on learning expeditions of their choosing;
- A school like this must not look or feel like a regular “school.” The design goal is not to facilitate 1:30 teacher/student ratios, or facilitate easy movement through double-loaded corridors. Instead, it should be to give kids environments that look and feel more like this — or this.
- A school like this must be oriented outward, not inward; the learning that happens there must be action-oriented, not abstract; and the space in which this all occurs must be dynamic, not fixed.
In other words, a school like this must mark the beginning of the end of not just education in a vacuum — but of the Industrial Age itself, and its emphasis on efficiency.
Behold: the “Age of Expeditioncy” — an era in which learning is deeply public, and contextualized, and relevant, and dynamic, and hands-on — is upon us.
This is the end of education (& the future of learning)
Or, more specifically, this is a video about a conversation of those issues. It features yours truly, but also Jaime Casap, the head of education at Google, and a number of other great educators in both K-12 and higher ed. Check it out, and see what it ignites in your own thinking . . .
This is how you move a school from crisis to calm
St. George’s School in England was a failing school — filled with children who were struggling in their lives and whose school was a reflection of that chaotic state of being.
Today, it’s one of the top 2% nationally. If you wonder how such a change could be brought about, take a look at this video (26 min long), and see what you think about the ways in which its educators transformed the teaching and learning climate at their school.
St George’s – From Crisis To Calm from Chuck Peters on Vimeo.
Why We Need to Look Back — and Ahead
There are two different articles in today’s New York Times that I would consider must reading for anyone interested in better understanding who we are, who we have been, and who we may become.
The first, “Obama and the Debt,” outlines Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz’s interpretations of the current crisis, and of its Constitutional underpinnings. Regardless of whether you love the Fourteenth Amendment (as I do), and regardless of whether you agree with Wilentz’s advice to President Obama (go hard or go home), I would offer this Op-Ed as very tangible evidence of why we need historians, and why there is great value in looking back to better understand that path that has led us to this particular moment.
The other article is in the Arts section, and it’s a review of David Cage’s new video game for the PlayStation 3, “Beyond Two Souls.” The game itself features star turns from two well-known Hollywood actors, Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. And the article struck me because it hints at the Brave New World we are entering, one in which a creator like Cage excitedly imagines the development of a “Scorcese algorithm” that would imitate the filmmaker’s iconic camera style and recreate it on demand, and one in which he describes his game as “an interface that will allow you to play life.”
I understand our infatuation with unadulterated self-direction, and I worry sometimes that it’s eroding our commitment to understand, on a broad, shared level, where we have been and what we have decided. And I share the disorientation so many of us feel when we hear of an algorithm that can codify the creative genius of Martin Scorcese in order to improve the narrative flow of a video game — and I can see why such a development could be very, very cool.
Both trends bear watching, and remembering, and questioning, by all of us.
The Good, the Bad & The Maybe on Charter Schools
Three recent articles seem to capture the promise and the peril of the charter movement all at once.
First, there was my piece exploring the evolving case law that challenges the notion that public charters are indeed, under the law, public schools.
Then there was the news from a recent study suggesting that charters are not, as is widely believed, pushing out kids with special needs at a disproportionate rate.
And then there was the question of whether charter schools should allow children who live in the neighborhood to receive preferential treatment in the admissions process.
Good food for thought on all fronts — and a reminder to me that anyone who speaks of charter schools as purely good or evil should not be trusted. As with interpreting the law, the best answer is almost always, “It depends.”
Happy Friday.
What Do You Teach?
Last month, I gave a keynote address at the annual conference of the New Tech Network, and suggested that this seemingly innocuous question is one we might need to think more deeply about, and start to answer differently. The video was just released, so see for yourself:
Recent Comments