I had come to the habit of listening without judgment or much comment to folks older or younger than I. This, a successful strategy as a child, I found useful as a parent and as a teacher. Let them tell their story, an occasional “humph” or “I’ll be darned” served as acknowledgement and encouragement to continue.

Doc Farner, too, lived in our neighborhood. We adults knew little about her circumstances, but the kids, Jules included, knew it all. She had lost her license to practice medicine and lived with her daughter, Beth, and a teen aged son Eric, who shot-up junk and slept under the pool table in the basement. One night Jules said she had recently been to Doc Farner’s who had hooked up a warm saline IV directly into her femoral artery. “What a sex rush,” she said.

Thirty five years later she sent a note of condolence over Hunter’s death, ending with, “You have no idea what it meant, and still means now, that you thought I was a person worth listening to.”

This week, now forty years later, I got a long letter, She is poor, bipolar, living with her “wife,” and painting beautiful covers for the magazine “Lesbian Connection.” The handwriting is difficult to read, but closes with, “ I think you’re one of the 1^st adult males who was safe. You helped by just being and created an enduring flame of peace, love and gratitude. P.S. Beth Farner and I have reconnected.”

Being a listener is not without its dilemmas and predicaments.  You won’t hear anything but polite banter unless they believe you won’t rat them out or go all righteous on them. And if you are safe you are going to hear things like what went on at Doc Farner’s. Part of the agreement is that I won’t tell anybody unless directed to. As a friend in what is now a fairly intimate relationship I am obliged to think through my moral responsibilities.

In this case I said, “That’s far out. Are you OK with it?” “Sure,” she said and I felt that I had done all that needed to be done at that time. And yet, even now, I look back on other options that I had and feel doubts. I’m still not comfortable with the ending; but then this listening business is simply more important than being comfortable.

Well, there are a lot of ways in life, including the way of the child. The name Common Core Standards implies that they are not about all possible ways, but about some essentials common to all possible ways. I have studied these 2010 Standards in English and Mathmatics and declare to be simply the way to get into college. The American unexamined assumption is that college is the grand boulevard of all good ways and that spending thirteen years getting there is thus a way in itself.

I found the report by the National Research Council, 1990, “Reshaping School Mathematics. ” This I found to be closer to a way. “To the Romans a curriculum was a rutted course that guided the path of two-wheeled chariots. Today’s mathematics curriculum follows a deeply rutted path directed more by events of the past than by the changing needs of the present. Vast numbers of specific learning objectives, each with associated pedagogical strategies, serve as mileposts along the trail mapped by texts from kindergarten until twelfth grade. Problems are solved not by observing and responding to the natural landscape through which the mathematics curriculum passes, but by mastering time-tested routines conveniently placed along the path near every anticipated problem. Students who progress through this curriculum develop a kind of mathematical myopia in which the goal is to solve artificial word problems rather than realistic world problems.”

Few have the stamina to survive the curriculum of mathematics—at least not the way it is now delivered. Of 4 million who begin, only 500,000 are still studying mathematics 12 years later. Most students receive little of lasting value {beyond acceptance into a college) from the final mathematics course they study—typically high school geometry or algebra II. Many of those who drop out harbor life-long feelings of guilt or distaste for school mathematics. Some of those who become disenchanted with mathematics become teachers; others help to decide educational and research policy for the nation.”

The idea that a college education and the mathematical preparations required for entrance to college are equal to education are as ridiculous that the idea of a lawn is equal to gardening.

“The changes in mathematics needed for intelligent citizenship have been significant. Most obvious, perhaps, is the need to understand data presented in a variety of different formats: percentages, graphs, charts, tables, and statistical analyses are commonly used toinfluence societal decisions… Citizens who cannot interpret quantitative data are, in this day and age, functionally illiterate.”

“A confused public often resorts to some form of media punditry, and media pundits know well that the public does not want to hear, “The issue is very complicated and there are no easy answers.”

To realize a new vision of school mathematics will require public acceptance of a realistic philosophy of mathematics that reflects both mathematical practice and pedagogical experience. One cannot properly constitute a framework for a mathematics curriculum unless one first addresses two fundamental questions:

What is mathematics?

What does it mean to know mathematics?

Although few mathematicians or teachers spend much time thinking about these philosophical questions, the unstated answers that are embedded in public and professional opinion are the invisible hands that control mathematics education. Unless the guidance system for mathematics education is permanently reset to new and more appropriate goals, it will surely steer the curriculum back to its old path after every innovation.”

Indeed, public education can change only when the public changes. We have lost our way until we do this.

“The greatest of our evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.”   G.B. Shaw

Historically we do not usually set out to directly impoverish folks; we shrug and accept that the less fit will naturally have to do with less, and the best we could or should do about it was, and still often is, “alms for the poor,” and get on about our business

My mother used to say, “Them that has, gets, them that hasn’t doesn’t.” She was no bible reader, but …

“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”   Matthew  25:29

J.J. Rousseau analyzed the situation this way; “The first man who had fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine,’ and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”  Indeed, “this is mine” means that it is not yours; and I will defend that forever, for me and mine against you and yours. Those who are the late to the “this is mine” table get the scraps or alms. Poverty just comes along with the human condition.

There are those who declare this acceptance to be cruel, merciless, unjust, even inhuman. Lyndon B. Johnson, shortly after passing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act spoke to a high school class; “Neither you not I are willing to accept the tyranny of poverty, not the dictatorship of ignorance, nor the despotism of ill health, nor the oppression of bias and prejudice and bigotry.”  The EASA was Johnson’s mobilization of federal power in his war on poverty. It’s major thrust was its Title I financial assistance to local schools for the education of low-income children. The act has been continuously reauthorized ever since, and always with care to avoid anything that might be interpreted as national standards or curriculum. The feds enter the education system in the name of civil rights, not in what or how children are to be taught, which traditionally, and probably constitutionally, belongs to the states. The latest edition was passed in 2001 under the name of No Child Left Behind, and it is due to be reauthorized by the current congress.

During most of the 20^th century public education assessed itself by the quality of its inputs: facilities, teacher credentials, seat time, and curriculum as determined by states and local school districts. By these measures of inputs it was clear that the war of poverty had been lost in public schooling; inputs were, and are, dreadfully unequal between haves and have-nots. Sometime around the late 80s the educational leadership shifted, “Why do we worry about inputs, it’s objective outputs that count, only outputs can gauge progress on educating all of our children equally and well.” Given that the nation does not trust a teacher’s opinion, the only objective, and cheap enough too, data are standardized tests. Numbers, god bless ‘m, not mumbles.

The NCLB act, carefully avoiding any hint of national standards or curriculum, demanded that every state adopt its own standards, devise tests to those standards, and report the data disaggregated, i.e. by race, class, ethnicity, etc. The difference in scores between rich and poor is now called the “achievement gap,” and there are punishments assigned to schools that don’t improve overall and also reduce the achievement gap. The presumption is, that faced with the punishment, schools would learn to adjust their inputs.  We should not be surprised that the achievement gap remains and exactly reflects the continued discrepancy of inputs.

This congress, possibly even in 2011, is due to re-authorize the ESEA. We hear early talk of a return to making sure that the inputs, defined now simply as the teachers, are good and equably provided.  How will we know if a teacher is good input? Exactly by the output as measured by test scores. It’s known to be very hard work teaching in have-not schools, now you can be fired for trying.

“Healthy nations have healthy schools, it’s not the other way around.” John Goodlad has this right, and it will do no good shaking our fingers at teachers and schools for not getting it right.

Governor John Kasitch (R) of Ohio speaks about this; “If they want to strike, they should be fired. They’ve got good jobs, they’ve got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for?” The governor speaks for many, if not for teachers themselves. Background facts:

Colleges of education enroll primarily from the lower academic 25% of students. 33% of new teachers leave within 3 years, 50% within 5 years. Richard Ingersoll in “Teacher turnover, Teacher Shortages, and the Organization of Schools,” 2001 analyzes organizations through studying the amount and causes of employee turnover. This is remarkably high turnover and Ingersoll notes, “High levels of turnover are both cause and effect of dysfunction and low performance in organizations.” His paper is an analysis of the reason teachers leave so quickly. “In particular, low salaries, inadequate support from the school administration, student discipline problems, and limited faculty input into school decision-making … Followed by: lack of student motivation, class sizes too large, inadequate time to prepare, unsafe environment, poor opportunity for professional advancement, lack of community support, interference in teaching, lack of professional competence of colleagues, and intrusions on teaching time.”

We hear the plain talk from those in charge that the goal is every graduate is to be career or college ready. This will be accounted for not by whether they go to or complete college or what jobs they take, but by standardized test scores. We hear that the way to this goal is a good teacher in front of every class. First we’ll learn how to measure a teacher’s goodness, then we’ll learn how to identify those with the potential to become good teachers, then learn how to train them. And, then, damn the unions, we’ll fire all the bad teachers and replace them with our brand new good ones.

My personal experience with good teachers is that there are many dimensions to the goodness, it goes well beyond the capacity to “deliver instruction.” To be done well, the job of a classroom teacher demands all the skills of any other skilled profession, they have many career choices. In other words, if schools want good teachers they will have to compete against many other careers for the kind of good people required. Indeed, teaching needs to be a good career in order to attract the folks who can be good teachers. Ingersoll gave you the reasons teachers left, here are some quotes from some that stayed:

“It’s like trying to dance in a girdle.”

“Every school has its internal assassins.”

“The faculty is divided and arguing; this makes me want to just shut the door and stay isolated.”

“I don’t feel safe in school until I close the door to my room.”

There are too many missions; too many different forces; too much diversity in the kids; too much diversity in the parents.”

“I give to the kids, I give to the parents; there’s nothing left for me to give to me.”

“If you do something great it’s rocking the boat.”

“We are driven by the school calendar; the cleaning schedule, bus routes, lunch schedule etc.”

“Neither teachers or students are trusted to make important decisions about their lives in school.”

“The community, the nation as a whole, doesn’t support education.”

Ingersoll’s conclusion is; “Popular education initiatives such as teacher recruitment programs, will not solve the staffing problems of such schools if they do not also address the organizational sources of low teacher retention. The data show that the solution to staffing problems does not primarily lie in increasing an insufficient supply, but in decreasing excess demand. In short, this analysis suggests that recruiting more teachers will not solve staffing inadequacies if large numbers of such teachers then leave. Current policies will not only not solve school staffing problems, but they will also divert attention from the primary underlying problem – the manner in which schools are managed and teachers are treated”

It is inherently difficult for a large, public institution based upon compulsory attendance – participation by its consumers – to avoid oppression upon its lower levels. Teachers lie just above students at the bottom of the heap.

Teachers are particularly into noting this particular characteristic, we need to almost read the student’s minds in order to teach, and that reading includes some understanding of their highly individualized smartnesses.

Intelligence is the word that captures most of what we mean: “The capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.” The word comes from Latin “to choose between …” The ancients wrestled with just what it is, and today’s thinkers, with advanced statistical methods, have devised many experiments that provide quantitative data that shows some common categories amongst different people and reproducible numerical results for individuals. Whenever intellectuals try to categorize such abstractions as thoughts and mental activities, there will be strong disagreements. What is perhaps a common sense commonality is that there is a general intelligence, a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, to plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience … a broader and deeper capacity for comprehending our surroundings –“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do. This is a non-technical conventional wisdom description of what is called “general intelligence,” or g intelligence, and is what the better IQ tests measure to some approximation. Then there are specific intelligences, like chess mastery, algebra, PhotoShop, arts ….

It has always struck me that the mental capacity required to do well on school’s standardized tests were simply those of general intelligence, with the converse that what standardized tests measure is primarily general intelligence. There is a correlation of .82 between IQ scores and SAT scores. The best predictor of how a student will do on any high school standardized tests is how she did in her first test in 3rd grade. Now school standardized tests also test for the specific knowledge and skills that have been taught. The high correlation simply suggests the obvious, that those with higher general intelligence absorb more facts and skills from the classroom experience. So, we don’t know exactly what IQ tests measure, nor do we know exactly what standardized tests measure, but they correlate and both are reliable indicators of intelligence, whatever that might be.

The question before education policy-makers is, “should we use student test scores to evaluate their teachers?” If test scores are just a reflection of the student’s general intelligence, then many would answer “No, the teacher cannot be held responsible for that over which they have no control.” That is a simple answer if we assume that a teacher has no power over student intelligence. When I worked in an alternative, progressive primary school where student responsibility held higher stakes than test scores, I always told the teachers, “If you give the students activities that cause them to reason, to plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience, and to gain a broader and deeper capacity for comprehending their surroundings, it follows that they will do fine on any tests.” And I believe that. If the teacher gives them activities that balance challenge with their individual skills, they get an intellectual “workout” that also achieves the pleasure that Csikszentmihalyi calls “Flow.” They will learn the techniques and pleasures of using their minds well.

The answer is that good teachers will have good student test scores, and it’s not the other way around, that good test scores mean good teaching. There’s just no easy answer to evaluating teachers, and if good teaching is important to us we must be willing to look at difficult answers.

In common usage community organizing implies a purpose of making things better for the community involved, i.e. there is a “cause.” The process usually involves defining and building a membership, defining and adopting a cause, understanding the mechanics of creating change, and then implementation. My friend Frank Sanchez has spent a life in community organizing and I asked him once for definition. He said that he liked to explain it this way:

Good community organizing wins immediate and concrete improvement in people’s lives
Good community organizing gives people a sense of their own power.
Good community organizing alters the relations of power.
Good community organizing springs from the concerns of the common interest.
Good community organizing understands individual wants.
Good community organizing is based on relationships and self-interests.
Good community organizing develops leadership.
Good community organizing implements collective ways of solving problems.
Good community organizing both confronts and negotiates.
Good community organizing teaches about democracy and creative conflict.
Good community organizing provides a critical social analysis.
Good community organizing brings about imagination and dreams of the possible.
Good community organizing produces public judgment through public dialogue.
Good community organizing includes appreciation, celebration, evaluation, and reflection.
Good community organizing trains mentors.
Good community organizing supports and sustains personal transformation.
Good community organizing creates a learning community.

There are many dimensions to cause; one is how much must be overcome to achieve the cause, how much power will have to be applied?

“Let me give you a word on the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all absorbing, and for the time being putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Frederick Douglass, Letter to an abolitionist associate, 1849

This cause took many, many years and a civil war. More common are ones like I found in South Texas; getting soap dishes into the bathrooms of an elementary school. Sometimes the cause is so soft that it is more important to think of the community as a Community of Practice, organized in order to perform the functions known as its practice. If a community is unable to self-organize, an emergent behavior, then it takes someone with the knowledge, skills, and time to be the community organizer. The organizer is not a leader, a leader is one tells the story and/or leads the life that the community aspires to; in community organizing lingo a leader is one who has followers … The organizer builds relationships within the community, arranges meetings, holds members accountable, develops leadership amongst the members, and generally knows the established processes by which the community becomes organized to Sanchez’s standards.

Saul Alinsky is more or less the acknowledged father of American community organizing, founding the church based Industrial Areas Foundation to deal with oppression in Chicago’s “Back of the yards neighborhood.” Someone asked him “what is a community organizer?” With only a moment’s thought he replied, “A great teacher.”

Good community organizing creates a learning community, a community of practice is a developing model about the psychology and sociology of social constructivism, our current and very vibrant explanation of learning, meaning, and identity. If Alinsky can say that a community organizer is a great teacher, then, within the structure of education, we may call a great teacher a community organizer. When, as a classroom teacher, I look at the Sanchez list, I easily and surely declare those to be my goals for this little community, my class.

Teaching and learning, that’s about education, and about the institutions of education, namely schools. I like to study various descriptions of education because ultimately teacher and school accountability is simply “are their students educated” according to some agreed upon definition of education. Currently our national standard is “Career or college ready,” which has no more specificity than this definition from Etienne Wenger’s “Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity:”

“Education, in its deepest sense and at whatever age it takes place, concerns the opening of identities – exploring new ways of being that lie beyond our current state … education must strive to open new dimensions for the negotiation of self … Education is not merely formative – it is transformative.” Well, as the business people say, “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” Opening of identities, would that be in inches or centimeters?

Well, sort of worked; she didn’t leave teaching, she just went on down the road and into another school. “In a study of Chicago principals conducted in 2009-09, 37 of the 40 principals who were interviewed described engaging in harassing supervision. Most principals expressed regret at their own actions, but said it was in the student’s best interest, and therefore justified. It’s the best that can done, given the “system’s dysfunctions.”

The McKinsey report, “Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching,” states, “Most students see teaching as unattractive in terms of the quality of the people in the field, professional growth and compensation.” Bruce Thomas adds this observation, “Neither teachers or students can be trusted to make any important decisions about their lives in school.” Good job, huh? Overworked, under paid, and not even trusted. The report spends the next 45 pages describing the most cost effective ways to fix the defects described, by filling the teacher cadre with college graduates who get good grades and/or test scores. The only evidence that this fixes anything at all is that several nations whose students score better than the US on international test score comparisons have education systems that attract the top third graduates.

Teacher Evaluation 2.0, published by The New Teacher Project, offers a short critique of current teacher evaluation systems, structures, and practices. It describes the current system as broken and as falling short in terms of rigor and fairness. According to the report, evaluations are infrequent, unfocused, undifferentiated, unhelpful, and inconsequential.

The same Kappan In the article “Education and the Role of Educator in the Future,” by Ian Jukes, Ted McCain and Lee Crockett includes these comments: “Students cram for tests and try to temporarily memorize as much of the content as they can to get a good grade. This is the essential paradigm of 20-th century education. Unfortunately the grim reality is that, most students have forgotten the content they memorized within 48 hours after the test. Worse yet, students don’t develop skills that will be useful to them outside the walls of school.”

Comment: the more thoughtful students understand this and engage cynically, if at all, in the exercise. I would like to see the distribution function on the drop-out scale from, “I’m totally confident that I will be better off out of here,” to, “I can’t seem to get anything right for these folks, so why bother anymore?”

“We must recognize that the current education system has been set up to prepare students perfectly for a world that no longer exists … Teachers are asked to do a great number of things beyond teaching. The kinds of changes we’re suggesting here will never happen within the current model of professional development for teachers …If we want to see the kinds of changes necessary to bring schools in line with the new reality, then we have no option but to radically reprioritize and restructure professional development for teachers.”

Let me pick out another piece from the jumbled puzzle pile that is American public education. Charles M. Payne, in “So Much Reform: So Little Change.” Writes of his extensive and deeply personal involvement in school reform, particularly in Chicago: “We have not learned from all this experimentation nearly as much as we might have. Much of this experience has just been wasted. From individual schools to school districts, to the research community itself, the entities responsible for the management and analysis of urban schools are themselves constructed in such a way as to make it very difficult for them to learn from their own experiences… At the school level, the district level, and the national level, even where we see some progress, we continue to see attempts to implement reform in ways that are manifestly unlikely to work. Some of this is just political expediency or earnest incompetence, but some of it is that people in leadership positions do not have a systemic understanding of the causes of failure, in part because the same dysfunctional social arrangements that do so much to cause failure also do a great deal to obscure its origins. The process mystifies itself.”

And now back to the Harassing Supervision article, which closes with: “Harassing supervision makes it clear that reforming schools is as much changing the nature of schools as workplaces for adults as it is about improving schools as institutions of learning for children. And perhaps the two are not unrelated.”

Is it useful, in understanding a puzzle, to spotlight a few individual pieces? And those chosen not even at random, but from the highlighting of but one observer? It is hardly arguable that the education system is a complex system and that fragments, pieces of the puzzle, will necessarily be complex too. There are no simple explanations of a complex system, no simple solutions for a system that can mystify even itself. We need to have a long conversation with ourselves.

“Progressive educators believed that a new education program, based on the development of cooperative social skills, critical thinking and democratic behaviors, could play a pivotal role in transforming a society of greed, individualism, waste and corruption for one based on compassion, humanism and equality.” Alexander Rippa, Education in a Free Society: an American History. What or who was left of this previous effort, could we join together their earlier experience and our current energy? There had been the Progressive Education Association formed in 1919 and author of the important but largely forgotten “Eight-Year Study” of the 30s and 40s. Were they still around? In the mid-90s I tracked the PEA down to a street address in Pasadena; my mail was returned, addressee unknown. They had formally folded in 1955, and by the 90s there was no one left.

No problem we thought, it’s time to start a new association. A dozen of us self-selected and met on the campus of U of Cal at Santa Cruz to create the Alliance of Progressive Educators. Martin T. came from the Graduate School of Education at Utah State University. When his turn came he told this story about his democratic classroom.

“It’s the student’s first year required course in education. They come in the first day and we sit around a large round table. I have a flip chart behind me. After a while one of them says, ‘Professor T, when are we going to start?’ And I say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘Teach us,’ they say, and I say, ‘The course is called The Democratic Classroom and it is run as a democratic classroom so that you learn by doing. What do you want to know?’ They answer, ‘To learn how to teach,’ and I answer, ‘Let’s make a list of what that would be, you guys tell me, I’ll write on the flip chart,’ and they start throwing out ideas of what you need to know in order to know how to teach.”

We ask Martin how good is the student’s list. He says, “Darn good, if it’s weak at all it’s weak on the history and philosophy of education. If that happens I have some tricks for getting them to fix it.” He then describes how the students go about prioritizing and time-ordering the list, and how students volunteer to find what books would be useful for their purpose. And so it goes for the year.

The young lady who accompanies Martin speaks in her turn; “I took Professor T’s class and now I teach a democratic 5th and 6th grade classroom the way he taught us. There are two of us and we have 80 kids in the class.” Wow, this is not theory, this is the battlefield! “It goes quite well,” she says, “They know quite precisely what they need to know and do to be ready for seventh grade. I fill in the few gaps and give some help in choosing materials.”

I like very much this leveling of the power relationships between teacher and students. She and Martin are describing operationally what I have been calling Teacher as Community Organizer, Teaching as Community Organizing. I have to ask, ”As the students learn that they are in charge of their own curriculum, do they also learn to take charge of behavior problems, or do they still expect you to be the enforcer, the cop?” “Yes,” she said, “it’s noisy for a while, but when they realize that I am not willing to be their cop, they begin to take over that job too.”

Never do for others what they can do for themselves. Never. The iron, or golden rule of community organizing.

Sometimes it means doing long division problems until it becomes such an automatic procedure that you forget it’s all about dividing X number of cookies amongst Y number of people and discovering that there is or is not a remainder. Sometimes it’s about absorbing something interesting and/or useful from a book, a teacher, or another student. But for almost all of the time it is also about learning to live a life under surveillance, control, and instruction. Inasmuch as either feel unpleasant to us, we learn how to live with unpleasantries too. Well, if the purpose of school is to prepare you for “career or college,” then learning to live under surveillance, control, and instruction along with unpleasantries is indeed appropriate.

But what if we expect our graduates to have learned “good citizenship” too, which I believe to be easily as complex as being ready for career or college? Being a good citizen in school has been a matter of living under surveillance, control, and instruction – being told what to do – and that’s all we’ve learned, in school, about doing good citizenship. I wonder if it isn’t fair enough to say that this perfectly describes what the average American citizen knows about citizenship? What they learned, by doing, in school.

What kind of governance within the school structure would involve the students in doing good citizenship? Here’s another book that I heartily recommend, Democratic Schools: Lessons in Powerful Education edited by Michael Apple and James Beane. There are indeed democratic schools out there, they are a community of practice, where what they practice is democracy, and I believe they develop good citizens that are also career or college ready. Good citizenship involves habits of the heart as well as habits of the mind, and these need tending to in the earliest grades.

Now I wonder how the current citizens go about electing a school board that creates schools that have children do good citizenship day after day, K through twelve. Hmm, chicken and egg? I see that I have circled back to an earlier post, Conservatives, Liberals, Schools, where I identified schools as a second-class, deeply conservative institution within our society. That the institution is oppressive to those at the bottom, teachers and students, and persistently second-class is, I have a hunch, a peculiarity to the US caused by its frontier/pioneer conception of freedom. We’re not finished with conquering the frontiers of commerce, military, and technology. When we finish those jobs perhaps we’ll turn back to education and the infrastructure, those assets that have long paybacks. Getting every student through algebra and getting many more into college is not at all an efficient route to developing the strange geniuses of genuine technological innovation. And you know what? The more we discover, the less there is yet to be discovered. There comes a point when there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s like peak oil, have we reached and passed peak innovation?