This Is Not News

Item 4: Reformers must highlight incompatible social tenets.

The purpose of a reform movement is to change something in a substantial way. This means that reformers will inevitably encounter resistance from people who are comfortable with the current situation or uncomfortable with the idea of change. This item is a strategy for dealing with that resistance. It has its roots in the philosophical pragmatists’ ideas about what forces us to revise our beliefs, and accept that something which we have considered to be true should not be considered as false. William James, for example, argued that we want to revise our beliefs as little as possible, and so we are only likely to do so if we recognizing that holding on to the particular belief in question will force us to discard a larger number of other beliefs. It is only when we become acutely aware of the contradiction between two beliefs that we are inclined to make the effort to revise one in order to keep the other.

I say acutely aware for a reason. It’s not enough to just point out an inconsistency the way you might correct an error in arithmetic or a faulty step in a geometry proof. Human beings are pretty good at glossing over such inconsistencies if they have a vested interest in doing so. The inconsistency has to be brought home in a visceral, emotional, personal way so that the contradiction is too powerful to ignore, and the path of least resistance changes from letting the status quo remain to removing the contradiction. This is what the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s accomplished. Americans who had turned a blind eye to Jim Crow could not do so when the pictures of brutality to protestors started filling newspapers, magazines and TV screens. I do not think that it is a coincidence that as the immediacy of those images fades from the public consciousness, it has become easier for opponents of the safeguards enacted in that period to weaken them today.

There are at least two dimensions on which a school can adopt this element of the reform model, and both are very challenging. The first is to highlight incompatible social tenets for students. This happens to a certain degree in normal circumstances. Anyone who has spent any time around young people knows that many of them are particularly skilled at identifying hypocrisy in authority figures. For it to be effective in the context of a reform movement school, that skill needs to developed consciously. Students need to reflect on and try to articulate the implicit ideals in our culture, our politics, and our social structures.

This can be done in a number of different disciplines. History or civics students can talk about the ideals of the Enlightenment and the American founders. English students can examine the virtues and aspirations presented in literature of the past and present. Science students can discuss the importance of the open exchange of information toward scientific progress. Foreign language students can compare how different languages articulate similar concepts and ideals. The staff and students of the school would have the responsibility to fully develop a plan and make sure it was part of the school’s identity.

Once these ideals and tenets are identified, students would also have to observe the world and find examples of behavior or social structures that seriously compromise those ideals. This is not the only thing that students should spend their time doing, of course. For one thing, confronting all of this cognitive dissonance is a pretty exhausting thing to do, and it needs to be balanced with consideration of the “success stories” of contemporary society. This way, identifying the contradictions can be framed as an exercise in making a good thing better, rather than one that points out how everything is lousy and there is no reason to try to improve or believe in anything. The school should be trying to inculcate a reforming spirit, not a cynical one.

Another reason why this needs to be carefully done is that the larger community may not be happy that the school appears to be introducing a destabilizing force by encouraging students to question authority, existing social norms, and the overall status quo. In a world where we are still arguing over the cultural legacy of Christopher Columbus, there will be people who believe that the reform movement school is radicalizing students against the very society that the education system is supposed to support. Especially if the school is part of a public school system, the school is going to have to have a strong base of support along with the ability to explain how the action of highlighting inconsistency is meant to strengthen society, not destabilize it.

This is particularly important because of the second dimension I alluded to. The students and staff at the reform movement school can not be insular if they want to be effective reformers. They must aim to share their work and their unfolding understanding with the community around them. (This is something that I am going to discuss in more detail in other parts of the model, so I will be brief here.) So the school will not just be trying to make the students and staff acutely aware of inconsistencies. They will be trying to do it for the public at large as well, and this is almost certain to encounter resistance.

We can see elements of this behavior in the students and educators who work through social media, community organizing, and other methods to speak out about the inconsistency of unequal school funding with the notion that education ensures that Americans have equality of opportunity, or in those who point out that emphasis on standardized test scores de-emphasizes the virtues of creativity and independent thought that are integral to America’s claimed entrepreneurial spirit. And we can see the resistance to this challenge presented by those who argue for more tests, more standards, and so on. If an entire school is going to make reform activity like this art of its essential identity, it needs to be prepared for the opposition it will encounter. If there is any aspect of the model that I think needs to followed carefully in a school environment, it is this one. But I am equally sure that it is an element that can not be ignored.

Item 3: Reformers must clearly articulate their goals and ideals

I originally included this in the model because in order for a movement to be successful, it must grow beyond its original core. During this process, some people may get involved with the movement who do not understand the goals and methods that the movement has chosen. Indeed, they may be opposed to the methods but believe that the movement presents an opportunity to achieve a shared goal. Leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. attracted supporters who were not necessarily committed to nonviolence in their pursuit of justice. When this happen the movement can begin to suffer from infighting or a muddled image. So I believed that it was important for a movement to state and then constantly reiterate its core beliefs, not just about its goals but about the process that it intended to follow.

I think this is even more important in the case of democratic reform school. For one thing, there is a constant turnover of members of the movement. Each year a new group of students enters the school, and even during the year there can be transfers. There is probably at least some turnover in staff as well. And an entire corps of student leaders, who have had years to shape and adopt the school’s goals, moves on to other activities. A school constantly renews itself, so it must constantly renew its commitment to its purpose.

Furthermore, if democratic education reformers are correct, then a school based on democratic education principles will be successful in the ways that the larger population conceives success for a school. A high school, for example, would develop a reputation for safety, for the engagement of its students, and for the academic and personal successes of those students after they graduate. Many parents and students are going to want to be a part of such a school regardless of their interest in democratic theory or a long term project to reform democratic society. But if people try to join the community solely to benefit from its results without buying into the culture and ideals that make those results possible, that effort could prove self-defeating.

Depending on the structure of the school, there may be some possibility of addressing this situation during the admissions process. If there are more students who want to be part of the school than the school can fit, the school could use an interview process to talk to prospective students and their families about the schools’ overall mission and how they envision themselves being part of that community. This may not always be possible, depending on how the school is structured and what larger admissions requirements might be imposed by local laws or district mandates. And at some point, the school is going to want to reach out to people who are not already committed to its overall methods, because that is the only way to change people’s minds and grow the number of people who support you. So this communication and reinforcement needs to be a constant part of the school’s activity.

Now, many schools today have a mission statement or a declaration of core values or something similar. But to meet this requirement of the model a democratic reform school has to go farther. It needs to make sure that the values are stated in a clear and meaningful way, not as a bland collection of buzzwords or statements that are so vague and abstract that no one would disagree with them because anyone can impose their own meaning on them. It needs to make sure that the school’s daily activities and culture reflect and model those values. It needs to explicitly mention and reinforce the values on a consistent basic. And it needs to build in major events that celebrate and reinforce the values.

So far I have been vague about what those values should be. On one hand this entire series is my effort to articulate a set of values, but I don’t think that they would necessarily work as a school mission statement. And each school community needs to put together its own mission, so I do not want to suggest that I aim to create a handy list ready to be cut and pasted. But here are some of the principles that I think are really important.

The school should be committed to the idea that true understanding requires seeing the possibilities for the future contained in the subject at hand and how to realize them.

The school should strive to help every member of the community understand and engage with the world as it is today through study, reflection, and action.

The school should strive to help every member of the community develop all of his or her interests, not just those of traditional academic subject matter.

The school should strive to help every member of the community become a more informed citizen, which includes understanding the positions and perspectives of other member of the community.

These are lofty goals, and there are going to be times when students do not want to hear about high-minded principles of democratic activism and they just want to know what the teacher wants them to do for the next assignment and how many points is it going to be worth toward the final grade. There are going to be times when teachers don’t want to think about how their lesson plan connects with current problems of wage inequality and just want to figure out how to get the concept of buying stocks on margin across to the students. But that’s where the idea of a school as a community comes into play. The members of the community are going to have to pick each other up when they are down and continually reinforce the principles of the school. Otherwise it will cease to be a force for reform.

Item 2: Reformers must adopt a generational time frame.

If we accept the idea that we need to change our educational system to give more students the skills and perspectives they will require in order to be active citizens in a robust democracy, then we have accepted the premise that many of the schools in that system do not prepare their students for such citizenship. If schools were already doing this, we would not need to change them. Furthermore, if people were developing these skills outside of the educational system, we would not be worried about trying to make sure the educational system can develop them. The inevitable conclusion is that many of the citizens in America today lack either the skills or the mindset to take an active role in creating and maintaining a democratic society. We can argue about the degree and how easy this would be to fix, but we have to acknowledge that the status quo is substantially lacking in significant ways.

So if this is true, how do reformers correct this? I argued that this project must be viewed in terms of generations. To be sure, there are things that we need to fix in the short term. But the process of changing an educational system and the democratic society that it supports is going to require a lot of two-steps-forward-one-step-back compromises, and sometimes one-step-forward-two-steps-back might be the best thing you can achieve in a specific situation. Reformers have to accept that they’re in it for the long haul. Partial victories should be celebrated as foundations for further progress; setbacks should be viewed as learning opportunities and motivations to keep working. Reformers need to be the change that they want to see in the world, but they can’t stop if they don’t see the world changing to meet them right away. Knowing the scale of the project and accepting the length of time that success will take can help keep the project growing. If I plant an acorn today I shouldn’t give up the project when I don’t have an oak tree by October.

In one sense, this is another easy item for a reforming school to adopt. After all, the whole purpose of a school is to teach the next generation. In Democracy and Education, Dewey argues that education (inside and outside of classrooms) is the way that a society decides which parts of itself to pass along to the next generation. A very stark example is segregated education under Jim Crow – this was a major way that the culture and attitude of segregation was passed on to the next generation, until the federal government acted to make sure that it would not be passed along any further. When people argue about what texts to read and which to leave out of the curriculum, they are arguing about what legacy we should leave to the future citizens. Anyone involved in education should recognize and embrace the stakes involved.

But even though educators will not see the full fruits of the work that they do today for years, we are also confronted every day with the immediate consequences of our schools’ successes and failures. There is an urgency to the fight against things like the excessive use of standardized tests and corporate influence over education. It is likely that a reformist school, if started from scratch, would attract staff, students, and families that are on board with the vision of the school, which will help the school community avoid conflicts on the local scale. But ideally, this would allow the school community to engage with the larger struggle about education and democracy. For example, students could study the legislative process in order to understand how the budgeting process works, and then use that insight to devise campaigns to change the school funding system.

Once engaged in the democratic process, the school community needs to be prepared for the highs and lows of that engagement. It will be very important for the staff to keep that in mind, so that students do not form unrealistic expectations of their democratic involvement. If those expectations are not met, disappointment can lead to cynicism and disengagement, which are precisely the things that a democratic reform school should not try to pass on to the next generation.

Item 1: Reformers must prioritize reform of attitudes over changing policies.

The main point of this item is that reformers frequently get caught up in particular policy goals, and don’t do enough to change the way that the public thinks about an issue. That makes the policy successes vulnerable if the public officials who enacted them change their minds or are no longer in office to defend them. I’m not dismissing the importance of policy changes and successes. I’m just saying that reformers need to keep one eye on the long game and build up support.

For example, when Ed Rendell was governor of Pennsylvania, he did a lot to increase funding for education. That was an important policy success. But no one really did much to make the Pennsylvania voters share that commitment to education, or to change the attitudes that a lot of voters in central and upstate Pennsylvania have toward Philadelphia. So as soon as Rendell was out of office, his successor undid a lot of those policy moves. If it’s possible, that’s something that reformers should try to avoid.

On one hand it would seem pretty easy for a school to fulfill this element of the framework. After all, schools don’t really spend a lot of time lobbying politicians to pass specific laws. They spend time teaching students, and in teaching students, schools influence their attitudes. But what attitudes are they trying to instill?

In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey argues that the “essential problem is that of transforming the action of [individual] hands so that it will be animated by regard for social ends” (PP 286, emphasis added). This does not mean that the individual sacrifices himself or herself for the group. It means that the individual’s actions always take place in a social context, and individuals should consider how their choices will affect that context. If I were to spend all of my time on this blog insulting everybody who isn’t exactly like me, then sure, I would be promoting my individuality. In the process I would destroy the audience which is the point of posting to a blog and not just ranting at my wall. So we definitely want to encourage students to look beyond themselves, and the staff at a democratic reform school should be doing the same thing. As a teacher, I should be asking myself if the way I teach a class makes it harder or easier for my colleagues to achieve their goals. I should be asking if the policies and structures of the school promote the building of a community that supports its members. And I should be doing that in a public way that lets my students see that this is an example of citizenship.

There’s another important element of a robust democracy. If we are all going to be inquiring citizens, we need a common framework to share our claims, proposals, and evidence. This is why Dewey and other pragmatist philosophers put so much emphasis on empiricism over faith or rationalism. (By rationalism I mean the philosophical idea that I can figure out important truths just by using logic and reason without testing those conclusions by investigating the sensible world.) A democratic school should be promoting this empiricist attitude.

Again, I am not saying here that schools should force one particular attitude or point of view on all of their students. We all come to the world with a unique perspective that is the result of our own lived experience. Indeed, one of the virtues of democracy is pluralism – the idea that there can be more than one valid way to look at a situation, and that we can benefit from sharing these different perspectives. But it should be possible to broaden one’s perspective through the checks and balances of a community of inquirers, inquirers who can speak in a common language with one another because they can appeal to a collection of empirical investigations that are shared throughout the community. Rather than use a priori reasoning or religious tradition to discover an ideal structure and then try to graft it onto the actual world, we should turn to the actual sensible world to discover what structure it will best accommodate.

There are people who are going to have a problem with that idea. Frankly, there are a lot of Americans who do not embrace empiricism or pluralism. If a school explicitly and consistently promotes and exhibits these traits, there are going to be people who accuse the school of indoctrinating students or violating parents’ rights to instruct their children. Now, I don’t think that you can communicate anything without taking a stance on the world, and I don’t think a community can exist without norms to guide it. If a student or a student’s family have beliefs that somehow conflict with the values of democracy, then a democratic reform school is not going to be able to accommodate them. So the staff of such a school needs to be prepared to defend this approach and speak to the larger community to build support. Already it should be obvious that being part of a democratic reform school is going to require a commitment beyond the commitments educators make during and after school hours. The benefit is that in the process, everyone involved is building a more robust kind of citizenship that has its own rewards.

For my doctoral dissertation, I constructed a ten-point model framework for a democratic reform movement. My goal was to take John Dewey’s vision of a robust democratic culture and try to come up with some specific principles that people should follow if they wanted to make that vision more of a reality. I deliberately tried to be general in my discussion of what form such a movement could take, but in my conclusion I did throw out the idea that a school could be good locus for such a movement. Now that I’ve been teaching in high schools for four years, I want to focus on that idea more. So over the next few weeks, I’m going to go through the ten points of my model and talk about how a school might be able to fulfill them. It should help me clarify and reflect on my own goals and practices in teaching, and hopefully it will also be a resource for those who want to discuss exactly what education should accomplish in a democratic society.

I’ll use this post as a table of contents; as I discuss each point, I’ll link to that post here.

1. Reform of attitudes must be priority over reform of policies.
2. Reformers must adopt a generational time frame.
3. Reformers must clearly articulate their goals and ideals.
4. Reformers must highlight incompatible social tenets.
5. The reform movement itself must be democratic.
6. Reformers must use new technologies to build community ties.
7. Reformers must operate at local level.
8. Reformers must target economic structure.
9. Reformers must understand and contribute to the artistic and cultural community.
10. Reformers must contribute to the base of social knowledge.