Stewardship vs Adultism in the Real World

Following up on several of my previous pieces (most recently “Adultism vs Legitimate Adult Stewardship of Youth”), I think it is important to call out some real-world examples of what I consider the exercise of legitimate adult stewardship of young people. That versus what I would consider inappropriate “adultism”. I believe sorting out this dichotomy is critical to adult interaction with young people in our society going forward, whether parents with their kids or teachers with their students.

My working definition of “adultism” is…

The disrespect and discrimination against young people (simply because they are not adults) that exists beyond the legitimate responsibility of adults – parents, teachers and others – to provide guidance and a developmentally appropriate environment for young people to mature to adulthood. The abuse of adult privilege beyond what is legitimate adult stewardship of youth.

The applicable definition of the word “stewardship” in Wiktionary is…

The act of caring for or improving with time.

And in Wikipedia…

Stewardship is an ethic that embodies responsible planning and management of resources. The concept of stewardship has been applied in diverse realms, including with respect to environment, economics, health, property, information, and religion, and is linked to the concept of sustainability. Historically, stewardship was the responsibility given to household servants to bring food and drinks to a castle dining hall. The term was then expanded to indicate a household employee’s responsibility for managing household or domestic affairs. Stewardship later became the responsibility for taking care of passengers’ domestic needs on a ship, train and airplane, or managing the service provided to diners in a restaurant. The term continues to be used in these specific ways, but it is also used in a more general way to refer to a responsibility to take care of something belonging to someone else.

My own current working definition, as I see the concept applied to adult interaction with young people, is…

Facilitating a person’s development by creating an enriched environment, including keeping them safe until they can adequately fend for themselves.

So what does this look like in the real world? My first reaction is that I know it when I see it. But I think it is a useful and interesting exercise to try to call out some examples. So here is a list of ten random examples that came to me, framed in terms of parenting (but broadly applicable to teachers and other adult-youth mentors as well). I’m going to first call out an instance of what I would consider legitimate adult stewardship of youth (particularly of younger youth) and then a related behavior that I would say crosses the line into adultism. Continue reading →

Person of the Year

I caught the cover art of the recent Time magazine piece calling out the “Protester” as its “Person of the Year” and thought it was very cool. For the second time in this new century this long-time bulwark of the Eastern U.S. establishment has gone against its longstanding elitist tradition of calling out a member (or at least a darling) of the elite as its (once “Man” and now) “Person of the Year”. You may recall back in 2006 when “You” were the “Person of the Year”, Time‘s nod to the growth and importance of the Internet and the egalitarian social networking it fosters.

My understanding is that Time magazine has always represented the world view and biases of its founder Henry Luce and his second wife and successor, Clare Boothe Luce. Stalwarts of a moneyed New York establishment, Republican in that old school Nelson Rockefeller or Henry Cabot Lodge sort of thinking, prior to that farther right drift of the GOP starting with Goldwater in the 1960s to the various incarnations of the political right today.

I remember my mom, who was a Democrat and feminist activist in the 1960s and 70s, telling me that she always read Time to see what the other side was thinking. (One of many bits of wisdom she gave me – putting yourself in the shoes of your adversary to more effectively challenge that adversary.) So my mom, were she still alive and ticking today, would certainly alert me to take note of this new perhaps more egalitarian nod from one of the champion voices of the elite.

I for one would like to see this new century be all about “us”, the regular folks of the world, rather than “them”… highlighted members of some defined elite or even the iconic leaders (like Barak Obama for example) that may rise out of “us” but then grab the spotlight to lead and perhaps vicariously represent our aspirations. To the extent that people in the U.S. still live vicariously through celebrities – whether politicians, sports figures, media stars, etc. – I’m so ready for all of us to move beyond that! We can move our society forward without having to put so much stock in the beneficence of our anointed superstars! Continue reading →

Adultism vs Legitimate Adult Stewardship of Youth

Following up on my pieces “Young People – The World’s Last Chattel?”, and “Looking at the Concept of Adultism”, I continue to try to wrestle with the “meta” level of adult-youth interactions and institutions that are the greater context beyond conventional inside-the-box thinking on “public education” and “parenting”. The question is, what represents a legitimate exercise of stewardship by adults of youth and what crosses the line into adultism, representing a corrupt exercise of adult privilege mis-justified as stewardship?

Time was that in many if not most cultures, women were essentially owned by their husbands and children were owned (particularly the female ones) by their fathers. Even today in some traditional cultures around the world the protocols of women and children as “chattel” still hold the force of tradition or even law. But for the most part human culture has transitioned away from the idea of adult ownership of children to something closer to the broader meaning of “stewardship”.

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Looking at the Concept of Adultism

[FYI… for those of you who have been reading my blog for a while, you may recognize this piece as the combining of three pieces I wrote previously on this subject.]

So you have probably already been “ism’d” within an inch of your life and may be ready to roll your eyes if I attempt to direct your attention to another one! Seems the 20th Century was full of positive movements and negative systems being coined as “isms”, including “feminism”, “progressivism” and “environmentalism” on the one side and “sexism”, “racism” and “militarism” on the other. Some might make a good argument that we should leave all those “isms” behind with the last century and turn our focus forward and reframe the way we look at liberating movements and the restricting systems that hinder human development.

Given those disclaimers I want to look at one more “ism”, “adultism”, that has been defined by and comes out of the milieu of thoughtful people, youth and adults, working in the democratic education and youth empowerment movements. One of my colleagues in the newly formed Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA), Adam Fletcher, has compiled information calling out this negative system on his website (Freechild.org) page titled “Challenging Adultism”.

On his site is a link to a very comprehensive piece defining adultism, “Understanding Adultism: A Key to Developing Positive Youth-Adult Relationships”, an article written by long-time youth worker John Bell of YouthBuild. Though I don’t agree with everything in Bell’s article, its definition of “adultism” does resonate with me as a useful calling out of a negative system that I would urge all progressive people to think twice about and keep in mind in our relationships (as adults) with youth.

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Tales of a Retribalized Corporate Knowledge Worker in the Egalitarian Information Age

Quite the long title, I know! But that is essentially who I am these days when I put on my “day job” hat as a “Business Process Consultant” for a major health insurance company. The work world that I plunge myself into is totally transformed from just a generation ago by the ubiquitous electronic media which (to use media philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s analogy), is the “water we swim in”.

In his extensive 1969 interview in Playboy Magazine, McLuhan said…

The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems… are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media and bringing us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another. But the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing — rather than enlarging — the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences.

McLuhan called this transformation “retribalization”.

In my mom and dad’s generation the norm of professional “knowledge work” in the U.S. was to have a hierarchy of “bosses” who actively directed your activities within “siloed” groups and departments. Your coworker peers were typically white males of northern European ancestry, with women supporting professional work as secretaries. Most collaboration with those coworkers was done face to face and most written communication was done (by secretaries) using a typewriter to produce written memos & other documents that flowed from person to person in a time frame of days or even weeks. Diagrams, charts and other visual documents were painstakingly built by graphic specialists well in advance of presentations.

But the work world I plunge myself into these days is nothing like that.

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15 Things Students Want the Nation to Know About Education

I was pleased to see this piece in the Huffington Post a while back and finally gotten around to writing about it. As the author Lisa Nielsen says in her opening…

It’s rare for education reformers, policymakers, and funders to listen to those at the heart of education reform work: The students.

Seems to me that in most education policy statements and discussions in the media, the students are not seen so much as the clients or key stakeholders in the education process, but more like the product. I think it is important that we resist the conventional wisdom of looking at education as an institution manufacturing an educated citizenry as its “product”, whose stakeholders are not our young people, but only political and economic leaders and parents (as necessary votes to keep at least those political leaders in office).

FYI, Nielson sets the context for this list of items from K-12 students…

In fact Ann Curry, who hosted Education Nation’s first student panel, admitted folks at NBC were a little nervous about putting kids on stage. In their “Voices of a Nation” discussion, young people provided insight into their own experiences with education and what they think needs to be done to ensure that every student receives a world-class education. After the discussion Curry knew these students didn’t disappoint. She told viewers, “Students wanted to say something that made a difference to you (adults) and they did. Now adults need to listen.”

So here are each of the sentiments shared by the students as listed by Nielsen in her piece. For whatever reason, the statements are very brief and lack any detail of meaning, but given that, they still communicate some important messages that I think we adults that attempt to play a role in young people’s development need to wrestle with… Continue reading →

Three Years of Lefty Parent

I’m three years into my writing under the banner of “Lefty Parent”. It has been the key outward expression of my effort to move beyond the mid-life crisis of my early fifties. In that time period I have written about 325 pieces, had over 120,000 views of those pieces on my own www.leftyparent.com blog, and thousands of additional views and comments on the Daily KOS version of my blog.

I consider myself blessed to be living and writing in the age of the Internet, so I can have an audience for my work without officially being “published”. Such is the nature of this new communication technology that allows us to share our written ideas with each other without having to necessarily go through a “gatekeeper” like an actual book, magazine or newspaper publisher. Not that I would not love my work to be formally published and garner a larger audience.

So given that I start writing this piece on Thanksgiving Day, I first want to say that I am thankful for all of you who read and comment on my blog, and thankful for the Internet that makes this whole interaction possible.

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Young People – The World’s Last Chattel?

This latest round of high-profile revelations of at times systemic cover-ups of the sexual abuse of young people at Penn State and elsewhere has been topping the news lately. There seem to be ongoing issues with this within the Catholic denomination but that is no longer news. Still in much of the world young people are coerced into military service, marriage or as sex workers under the threat of violence and often death. They are essentially “chattel”, human assets that are either owned and controlled by adult family members by accident of birth, or by “legitimate” or illegitimate sale to or seizure by others.

From my reading of history, at least since the beginnings of formal hierarchical organization of society perhaps 5000 years ago, the most prominent civilizations have featured an elite group of male people wielding power and authority (what I and others call “patriarchy”). The overwhelming majority of people – whether slaves, peasants, women or children – were essentially voiceless, owned and/or controlled by this elite group of men. With the ethical innovations of the “Axial Age” (~800 to 200 BCE) the legitimacy of slavery (particularly of adult males) began to be challenged, though it was still practiced in parts of Europe and the United States well into the 19th century CE. And in many parts of the world even today women continue to be virtual slaves to their fathers or husbands.

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My Take on the Goals of Human Development

In my previous piece, “My Real Issue is Human Development” (reviewing my own thoughts as expressed in my “Lefty Parent” blog) I called out that human development and the evolution of consciousness towards a “more evolved” state are what I consider of paramount importance and worthy of continuing discussion. One of my fellow blogging comrades on Daily KOS, “Cassiodorus”, challenged me on this with a thoughtful difference of opinion…

I would recognize life as a progression of qualitatively different states, with new realizations and burned energies each step of the way… You have cycles: birth, life, death.

Perhaps a more pragmatic, less metaphysical take on our species and individual existences than my own.

My comrade posed a provocative question on what in fact I meant by “more evolved” and what exactly did I see the human species developing towards?

So in the spirit of what I see as an important ongoing dialog… here goes!

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My Real Issue is Human Development

Human DevelopmentI write from the point of view of a parent, a “lefty parent” as I call myself, which is intended to have a double meaning of sorts. I grew up in the context and values of a liberal Midwestern university town (Ann Arbor MI), but also being left-handed, I tend to think outside the box of a mostly right-handed world, including the liberal or progressive “left” conventional wisdom of that world. My mom and dad were more left-libertarians than actual liberals and I have come to find that I share that subtle but significantly different orientation.

I really feel more like an ex-parent now, because our kids are grown up (now 22 and 25) and they have been basically running their own lives (for at least the past four years) since they learned to drive and figured out how to make their own living. That said we are still a close family, and their mom and I love seeing them whenever they are available and sharing our now mostly separate lives. We are proud of them and they reciprocate by acknowledging the positive role we have played in their lives, but otherwise the relationships between us look more like peers (though from different generations) than mentors and mentored.

Today at age 56, I have now had a full quarter century of both the perspective of growing up while being parented, and the flip side of being a parent myself (maybe now more ex-parent) and watching our two kids through their own growing up process. And you can squeeze about eight years in the middle there when I was a young adult pretty much on my own, neither parented or parent. All three periods have had their ups and downs, successes and failures, triumphs and tragedies, the whole range. But all in all, things have worked out for the better and I count my blessings (including my own health and my partner’s, plus our two kids surviving their youth and now fully functional as adults).

All that life experience, combined with a midlife crisis of sorts, inspired me to start writing this blog, and as of November 25 it will be three years since I posted my first piece, “Welcome to Lefty Parent”. Looking at the over 300 pieces I’ve written and posted since then, though many of them are about education and schooling, there are really two other more fundamental topics that are of the most interest to me. The first is human development in all its aspects. The second is what I have come to see as a key part of that development, which is the historical transition of human society, at least in the most recent 5000 years of history, from hierarchies of control to circles of equals.

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