Thoughts on Participatory Democracy

In my opinion, there is no more thoughtful and well-written person out there contributing to the discussion about the continuing development of American society than my friend and activist for education alternatives, Ron Miller. His recent piece, “Toward Participatory Democracy”, published in Education Revolution, eloquently elaborates on an activist thread in American history that motivates my own cheerleading for a more egalitarian world.

Ron has done his research and connected a lot of dots in American history from Colonial times through the Industrial Age, 20th century “progressivism”, radicalism of the 1960s, and the political-corporatism of our current situation. Looking at the big picture, Ron writes…

There has always been a struggle in American history between democracy and elitism, and despite the cherished memory of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, this nation has never fully trusted “the people” to govern themselves. Sometimes this mistrust reflects sophisticated political reasoning, in the tradition of Plato and the British conservative Edmund Burke, asserting that governance is a complex and delicate art best practiced by those who are specially educated or fit for it, or by those who claim to have a greater stake in the outcome.

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Unschooling in the Art of Theater

Me as "Maurice" in Lord of the Flies
I am a huge advocate for unschooling, as I’m sure you can gather if you have read very many of my pieces. Wikipedia defines “unschooling” as a term coined in the 1970s by radical educator John Holt, representing…

A range of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum. There are some who find it controversial. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities, often initiated by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.

It was a continuing mid-life crisis some five years ago that inspired me to take a long and thoughtful look at (including muster the discipline to write about) my life’s experiences in my first five decades. How could I best leverage all that hair-graying and wrinkle-producing experience as some sort of wisdom as I looked forward to my purpose in the decades (hopefully) ahead?

A main theme emerging from that retro gaze and ponder was identifying the real mechanisms of human development, first looking at my own from young child to young adult and later the same for our two (now young adult) kids. What I saw from my own young life (and echoed by my witness of my kids) was that most of my significant developmental experiences were by Holt’s definition “unschooling”, because they happened outside of school.

In school I mainly learned about things, some of those things were interesting to me, but much of it lacked any context in my life and was not (and as Holt pithily notes is forgotten by the good students only after rather than before the test). There are some notable exceptions of course, including learning how to do many sorts of abstract math problems and proofs. But again lacking any real life context for applying these skills they were soon forgotten as well.

But outside of school my life was all about doing things, which required me to be constantly learning about and how to do new things that did have a context in my real life. In my recent piece “Unschooling in the Art of War” I documented a major narrative thread of “play” from age 7 to 23 starting with toy soldiers on the basement floor through complex historical military simulations, plus all the learning (about and how to) that facilitated that passion.

Not as extensive in duration but more so in concerted effort was another unschooling narrative thread around my “deep dive” from age 14 to 21 into theater (“the play” this time as it were). This thread featured the acquisition of a range of skills and wisdom around communication, collaboration and creativity (elusive goals in formal schooling) plus logistics and management. These are all key capabilities that I still routinely apply today in my “day job” and the rest of my life. All of this was learned because it was useful in a real life enterprise (I had freely chosen to engage in) of mounting theatrical productions.

What follows is my extensive unschooling narrative (like the prior “Art of War” one and about 7K words) that makes up the rest of this piece. Events actually started in school, inspired by one of those charismatic teachers that we are lucky if we have the opportunity to encounter.

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The Spectatorization of American Politics

Interesting juxtaposition between two pieces from this past week, “Americans’ Political Views Not So Far Apart” from LiveScience.com and “Yes, Washington is in fact more partisan now” from The Signal. The first looks at polling since 1970 that purports to show no growing ideological divide between people in the U.S. The second shows just the opposite, but among U.S. politicians. If you believe these two statistical snapshots, there is a growing ideological split among our elected representatives, that is not also reflected among the people they represent!

From the analysis of 40 years of polling results called out in the first piece “Americans’ Political Views Not So Far Apart”…

Political polarization among the public has barely budged at all over the past 40 years, according to research presented here on Jan. 27 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. But, crucially, people vastly overestimate how polarized the American public is — a tendency toward exaggeration that is especially strong in the most extreme Democrats and Republicans… “Strongly identified Republicans or Democrats perceive and exaggerate polarization more than weakly identified Republicans or Democrats or political independents,” said study researcher John Chambers, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida… The people who see the world split into two opposing factions are also most likely to vote and become politically active, Chambers said in a talk at the meeting. This means that while real growing polarization is illusory, the perception of polarization could drive the political process.

And from the second piece, “Yes, Washington is in fact more partisan now”…

Washington has never been more partisan, right? Or is that common lament simply a trick of nostalgia? A look at the numbers reveals that the problem is not, it turns out, all in our heads: over the last four decades, Congressional polarization has steadily increased… Since 1947, Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal advocacy group, has tracked the political positions of each Senate and House member, scoring how they voted each year on 20 key bills covering a variety of social and economic issues. (Many groups from across the political spectrum calculate lawmakers’ dedication to various ideologies and causes. The Signal is merely using this group’s data because it is collected over many years and is based on the controversial votes that reveal the fault lines in the House and Senate.)

The Problem Statement

As a political, history and anthropology junkie, this is a fascinating question to me. What the heck is going on here? What happened in the 1960s and 1970s that might have caused this growing ideological split between politicians (if not in the larger society, if you believe the polls cited above), progressive on one side and conservative on the other, leading to the “blue vs red” politics of today?

If you obsess about these things like I do, you may well have your own take on this. Here are some of my thoughts at this point. I’m sure you’ll have your own insights that I’m perhaps not factoring in.

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Apple, Textbooks and the Education-Industrial Complex

Apple has certainly come a long way as the corporate insurgent (capturing the imagination of my kids and many of their peers) challenging and now outperforming “the man” Microsoft of the computer industry. Of course, Apple has sought brand loyalty from the younger generation for years by marketing their computers to schools, to put them in front of all those young consumers cloistered in those educational venues. The late Steve Job’s company has also advanced their brand by playing the insurgent in the music business, challenging the traditional marketing practices of a moribund music industry with their iPod, iTunes, and now music industry topping iStore.

But now I read that Apple is moving big-time into the textbook business, and I would hope that they would similarly challenge that entrenched corporate establishment as well. Certainly one can argue that big publishing companies like McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin, have encouraged what I would consider a damaging centralization, standardization and increasingly OSFA (one size fits all) approach to public education in order to expand and protect their markets for selling textbooks.

But in the intro to Jason Tomassini’s piece “Apple Unveils E-Textbook Strategy for K-12” for Education Week, he calls out that Apple is now allying with rather than challenging the corporate educational “man”…

Apple Inc. announced aggressive new efforts last week to move into the K-12 electronic-textbook market, though educational publishers said the biggest news from the move is how the normally disruptive company is likely to help the publishing industry rather than challenge it. Through a partnership with three major K-12 textbook publishers—McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—Apple is offering interactive textbooks through its iBooks store at $14.99 or less.

These new corporate partners are the who’s who of the “educational-industrial complex”. Of course Apple has been a part of the education market for decades…

In its entirety, the announcement signals Apple’s intent to further deepen its market share in K-12 education. Sales of the iPad are outpacing Mac computers in the education sector, and Apple officials said there were 1.5 million iPads in use in education, more than 1,000 one-to-one iPad computing initiatives in K-12, and 20,000 education apps in the iTunes store.

Certainly public school systems have the potential to save money buying lots of virtual rather than hard-copy textbooks. But the bigger underlying narrative involves these big corporate dinosaurs looking to maintain their control over public education and their many billion dollar market for textbooks and testing materials.

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Thinking Outside the Schooling Box?

I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with the whole concept of “school” and “education”, seeing both as formalized and standardized bureaucratic mechanisms that awkwardly attempt to both facilitate and direct human development. I think that is at the heart of the issue and my discomfort, because facilitating people and directing people are two very different approaches to human social interaction, often incompatible with each other.

A recent piece I read in Education Week, “Superintendents Push Dramatic Changes for Conn. Schools”, highlighted my discomfort with this discordant duality. From the intro to the piece…

The Connecticut classroom of the future may not be limited by a traditional school year, the four walls of a classroom, or even the standard progression of grades, based on a proposed package of unusually bold changes that are being advanced by the state’s school superintendents. Instead, the current system would be replaced by a “learner-centered” education program that would begin at age 3; offer parents a menu of options, including charter schools and magnet schools; and provide assessments when an individual child is ready to be tested, rather than having all children tested in a class at the same time.

As a broken-record advocate for “many educational paths” this all sounds very good to me. Build an entire infrastructure of different and differentiated learning venues, which in some cases is a school, in other cases perhaps a library, in other cases a “real world” venue like a work place or community center, and even a kids’ home. Leverage the Internet as well to link all these together, students with teachers (only when teachers are needed by the learners) or create new virtual venues beyond all the brick and mortar ones.

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Unschooling in the Art of War

This is quite a long piece (over 7000 words) weaving a narrative thread through my young life that I think illustrates a key principle of unschooling. That principle is that the natural desire and capability of a young human being to learn and the opportunity to take a “deep dive” into the subject of interest results in a profound degree of broad learning and development beyond the perhaps narrow area of exploration. Note that though the subject of my youthful interest was the “art of war”, the impact and benefit of my learning pursuing that interest was much broader than the narrow and arguably non-progressive subject matter. Also note that very little of this tale involves anything that I learned in school (beyond learning how to read and basic math).

As far as I understand it, the premise of sending kids to school is that they will be given an opportunity to learn things, and in particular, the things that the larger community feels are important for kids to learn to become successful and productive adults. For many if not most people, behind that premise is the assumption that left to their own devices, kids would not learn these important things, and instead will just “get into trouble”, “stare at the TV”, “read comic books”, “play games”, etc.

Certainly in a lot of conventional thinking, kids “free play”, motivated by their own personal developmental needs (whatever they might be) is considered secondary to the formal learning that society generally compels them to undertake. And for the older youth, “playing games” is considered a waste of time better spent learning or doing something more “important”.

That assumption seems to persist in our culture despite what an observant parent or person who has studied child development will tell you, that young people are naturally motivated to learn and develop, interested in the world around them, and if not constantly redirected or otherwise kept away from those interests, continue to explore and learn voraciously. I suspect that many of us adults see our own lives as all about doing what we have to do rather than what we want to do, so whether we are projecting or applying some sort of convoluted logic, we figure that kids are not really interested in doing what they are supposed to be doing (that is learning) either.

As a parent of two now young adult kids, I certainly saw how much they were “learning machines” who loved to dive into things of interest to them. One of the main reasons their mom and I let them leave school and “unschool” during what would conventionally be their high school years, was because school (and particularly all the homework after school) had managed to turn most learning into a chore for them, rather than a passion.

Sure I had gone to school when I was a kid, including to a conventional high school as an older youth. But somehow back then in the 1960s and early 1970s it wasn’t so psychically draining. Maybe because there wasn’t nearly as much homework and there was none of the current standardized test obsession. Though in a mostly white middle-class university town there was the assumption that most kids would be going to college, I don’t recall my parents or my friends’ parents constantly trying to stage-manage our young lives toward that end. Also at my high school I don’t think they even took attendance, because I selectively would leave school during the day and miss one or more classes, but none of the school staff or my mom ever said anything about it.

For me as a kid, my life revolved around the things I did outside of school, and without the pursuit of those things that really interested me, my young life would have been mostly an exercise in compliance at school and perhaps boredom (or worse) at home. One of those compelling self-directed interests that weaves itself through my childhood, older youth and young adulthood was my fascination with the history and the “art” of war.

And that… is my extensive unschooling narrative that makes up the bulk of this piece.

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Keeping My Feet Under Me and Staying Off My Ass

My “day job” (that pays the bills) is working as a “business process consultant” for Kaiser Permanente. Honestly, I have a lot of issues with the U.S. health care industry, particularly the for-profit part of it, because it seems to be more about profiting from illness by selling more pills and procedures than promoting health. KP on the other hand, is a non-profit company and is all about being a “health maintenance organization”. It is successful financially by doing what it can to keep its members healthy. My partner Sally and I appreciate the KP model, we have been members for the 28 years we’ve been married, and KP has helped us through raising two kids plus our occasional health crises.

So like my current employer (and since my personal cataclysm of a bad bicycle accident two years ago followed ten weeks later by removal of a three-centimeter blood clot from my skull) I am all about my own health maintenance. For me, that maintenance includes eating a plant-based, whole-food, low-fat diet; leading as balanced a life as I possibly can; and maximizing the joy while minimizing the stress in my life.

Where I find a great deal of that joy these days is when (literally and metaphorically) I have my feet under me and I am moving forward, rather than sitting on my ass! Though I have what is conventionally a very sedentary job (spending the bulk of ones day sitting in front of ones computer or in a meeting) I don’t accept that conventional framing. I am up, on my feet and moving about as much as I can wrangle at my job site during my work day.

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Seeking the Essence of Unitarian-Universalism

nullIn her blog piece “Love is More Important than Freedom”, Unitarian-Universalist minister Victoria Weinstein writes…

It has come time for Unitarian Universalists to admit that we have honored free thought over love as an institutional commitment, and to consider the possibility that our obsession with personal freedom of belief has caused our organizations spiritual harm. We have developed a congregational culture that honors intellectual dominance over love and tenderness. We are brilliantly conversant when voicing opinion, but do not know how to engage each other as vulnerable persons in need of hope, grace and healing, leaving it to the self-identified victims in our congregations to motivate and then control most discussion of what it means to love, to welcome and to accept.

There are probably less than 700,000 “UUs” in the United States today (I among them), and not much more than a million in the entire world, and the denomination has soul-searched over the last several decades to find the missing keys to significant growth. The denomination has particularly struggled to gain adherents beyond its white Anglo-Saxon Protestant roots into communities of color. UUism is often criticized as a religion of the head rather than the heart, and thus of limited appeal to most people.

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You May Have Missed the Corporate Takeover of Education…

Because it may well have happened a long time ago before you and I were born! From my reading of history it began in the early decades of the 20th century and was solidified by the development of the “education industrial complex” in the 1960s. Now in the early 21st century we see this corporate public education system finally showing signs of collapsing due to the weight of its bureaucracy, corruption, regimentation, and entrenched interests. And as a result we see all the business foundations desperately trying to revive and sustain it, and the many billion dollar business market it represents.

What happened in the early 20th century I lay out in my previous piece, “Education and the Cult of Efficiency”, based on a book by the same name written by Raymond Callahan and published in 1962. In his book Callahan documents how an educational “crisis” was fabricated at the turn of the 20th century for a range of reasons, starting with selling newspapers and magazines. Says Callahan…

The material achievements of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century were responsible for two developments which were to have a great affect on American society and education after 1900. One of these was the rise of business and industry to a position of prestige and influence, and America’s subsequent saturation with business-industrial values and practices. The other was the reform movement identified historically with Theodore Roosevelt and spearheaded by the muckraking journalists. (pg 1)

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Moving Towards a World with No Bosses

I keep attempting to bear witness to and advocate for our society’s continuing transformation from “hierarchies of control to circles of equals”, but I got feedback from my partner Sally on our morning walk today that that is too academic of a framing… Damn! So how can I call this out in a more clear, un-geeky, and compelling way? What captures the essence of (along with the argument for) this transformation? I thought about it, feeling some frustration that I was not yet effective in really communicating what I’m trying to say.

So I suggested a new framing that my comrade thought might be more compelling. In the simplest and broadest sense of it, isn’t it about moving towards a “world without bosses”?

The word “boss” is such a loaded one in our culture, evoking (at least in my mind) an old-school sense of a person who gives you orders, monitors your conduct, and does a high-stakes evaluation of your performance in your work. Someone who is higher than you on the org chart that you may strive to replace or just to mollify. Someone who “bosses you around”, which from my sense of that usage, is never intended to mean something positive. As a parent, I still have in my mind one kid challenging another kid’s bullying by saying, “You’re not the boss of me!”

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