Fear is a great teacher; it is known that adrenaline is a powerful neurotransmitter that forms new brain synapses. An individual’s fear is the emotional signal that all is not well, something is not safe. It should trigger a cognitive effort to analyze the situation and choose something to do about it. It is human to also experience anger at whatever or whoever is perceived as causing the fear; and anger is the emotional energy that we use to do the work to make it safe again, to make the fear go away, to fix it.

After reading my essay “Coco & Meme,” George had the following remarks: 1) When his son joined his sister’s therapy session to talk about her self-mutilation he told the psychologist: I cry about my sister almost everyday. And she replied: It doesn’t count when you cry alone. 2) The card game Bridge is not like Poker. In Bridge you can’t throw out your bad hands like you can in Poker, you have to play them. Winning at Bridge then depends not on how you play the good hands you are dealt, but on how you play the bad ones. 3) You have to look at life like a movie, not at the individual scenes but at the overall story, and how those scenes can lead to the happiest of possible endings.

A divide and conquer structure deals with fear in this way: responsibility for dealing with it resides at the higher levels of the hierarchy, and safety nets are available for those lower in the hierarchy. “I am safe when I just retreat and do what is expected of me.” Divide and conquer structures also provide the converse; “I am not safe when I advance and do the unexpected.” The anger is expected, directed upwards through the hierarchy, and individuals end with denial of the emotion rather than resolution.

I have so many things on my mind this morning, but I don’t feel safe enough to write them down. Neither do I have the energy to. In some ways, new revelations. In some ways, the same old same old. Forgiveness should be the beginning of the road, but it saves itself for the end. It is the only way to progress: to experience, to feel, to become conscious, to understand, to accept, to forgive, to move on.

The adaptive organization, with its rich structure of trusting and collaborative relationships both horizontally and vertically has the chance of building individual fears into a collective or organizational fear that is spoken and analyzed publicly; and the responsibility for dealing with it is a shared and collective responsibility. This does not mean that anger is automatically dissipated; it is still there and still to be used to provide the emotional energy to make it safe again, for everybody. A more collective anger moves away from blaming and towards a righteous anger that commands respect and action, for it has been the foundation of every social movement of consequence.

An historian would argue that we must remember the past. But the past can be a dead weight.

The fear/anger dual is not to be avoided in an adaptive organization. Processed by a democratic community of practice it provides recognition of what needs to be dealt with and the energy to go about dealing with it.

What we did not learn at home, we have to teach ourselves.

If it’s just us adults behaving badly, we simply leave it to social institutions such as the justice system or to the military if appropriate, and get on about our business of getting and spending. The children, however, bother us, they are, after all, our own children. We wish more for them than we wish for ourselves. And thus, in some desperation, many look to one more social institution for help - schools, the institution already charged with the care of children.

Teaching morals is surely vital to a person’s wellbeing, but how do we teach our children emotional intelligence, and that it has more value than intellect?

We are seeing the beginnings of a new character education movement, one which restores  “good character” to its historical place as the central desirable outcome of the school’s moral enterprise. For example, more than 30 educational leaders representing state school boards, teachers’ unions, universities, ethics centers, youth organizations, and religious groups drafted the Aspen Declaration on Character Education. The Character Education Partnership was launched in March 1993, as a national coalition committed to putting character development at the top of the nation’s educational agenda. They believe that values such as respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and civic virtue affirm our human dignity, promote the good of the individual and the common good, and protect our civil rights. For these folks not to teach children these core ethical values is a grave moral failure.

Three weeks since I began this essay, and we have just returned from a week vacation in Mexico, welcomed home by two broken motors on the water heater pump and relentless snowstorms. Before we left, Redstone was drying up, the Spring singing in an early, parched Summer only to be boxed back by a howling Winter’s fight.

Theodore Roosevelt said, “To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

Not only genetically but emotionally, I am a product of all those who existed so that I could exist. I carry their pain, even if I have no awareness of the root of that pain. The acuteness of the pain dissipates with each generation, but new pains develop further exacerbated by the ancestral remnants. I am not convinced that the physical imprint that emotional scars cause do not live on in genetic tissue. A predecessor of Darwin, Lamarck hypothesized that physiological changes in an organism acquired over a lifetime may transmit to its offspring. The hypothesis has been disproven and generally rejected by geneticists since, although psychologists and sociologists have applied some of Lamarck’s ideas into a memetic theory of evolution, which is also generally rejected by mainstream scientists.

There are many others who disagree, some point to the mass of research that shows no relationship between values and behavior, others say values are the sole domain of the family or of the church, and many ask: “whose values will be taught?” How do we decide which values are taught? For example, of the seven cardinal virtues some would remove faith, others would add chastity, and some would question temperance. What to do? The simplest answer for many becomes “do nothing”, leave values out of the schools, just teach them the “basics” - whatever that is - and if for some reason they don’t develop values and achieve character at least they haven’t been screwed up by someone else’s screwed up values.

The scientific community also rejects with a clean swipe of the brush the plausibility of past lives.

In trying to close out the discussion on “why schools?” we found that there was quite a bit more to be said. I found, again, that the words “struggle for social justice” are often heard as “struggle against social injustice,” and are assigned a liberal political stripe. We admitted to our own political agendas, largely liberal, and generally agreed that, while we need to be honest and open with our students it is inappropriate to proselytize them with our specific political agendas⎯both as a matter of professionalism and of job security.

I am only somewhat knowledgeable of the stories of my grandparents, and not any further back than that. On my father’s side: his mother born in Austria and migrated to America with her mother, to be met by her father a few years later on the Lower East Side of New York City. My paternal grandfather: the eldest of four children all born in Poland, children of bakers. Their father died of influenza before World War II, and their mother carried on the business. My grandfather left for America on his own when he was eleven before the War broke although anti-semitism stank like bad milk, through Ellis Island to the Lower East Side. His younger brother, Jack, and sister, Cypora (Ruby’s middle name is Zypora in her honor) left for Canada and Palestine, respectively. And a youngest sister and mother left behind in Poland to die at Auschwitz. My father, the youngest of three boys, was raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, decades before it became an artist’s haven and lucrative investment. His father could never hold a dollar, and his mother could never hold her bitter tongue. There were no congenial meals around the dinner table, and my father attributed the dysfunction more to the dearth of funds than to the dearth of affection.

As the language was shifted to values and supporting children in learning empathy, compassion, tolerance, rejection of violence, placing community interests alongside self-interests, etc. then these were thought to be appropriate functions of a school, and we felt were, in fact, a big part of our daily practice. It was also felt that while we talk openly and freely about the “social and emotional” development of our students, we don’t frame it in terms of teaching them “values.”

My mother’s family had settled in Cleveland, Ohio around the turn of the century, but hailed from White Russia. My maternal grandfather’s mother died while he and his full-blooded brother were young and their father remarried and produced five more children. My maternal grandmother suffered from bipolar disorder soon after her third and last child, my mother, was born and spent her life in and out of institutions, no form of medication or shock treatments worked, and she ended her life the same month my mother turned thirty-four, five months pregnant with her own third child, my youngest sister. There is a strong genetic component for mental illness on this quadrant of my family tree, including my mother’s cousin, a schizophrenic now free after serving years in a mental institution for murdering a millionaire active in the Jewish community in Cleveland.  My mother’s other cousin, the schizophrenic’s brother, was a cop who made his brother turn himself into the authorities. My paternal grandfather, a self-employed accountant serving small businesses, paid for all his wife’s medical care out-of-pocket, stayed by her side until her end, even convincing the court that she died of a heart attack and not the seeping carbon monoxide in the garage, and yet my mother is as unforgiving of her mother as of her deceased father, but to this day never shares why.

The idea that an emotion could be necessary to learning, and could indeed be a permanent “tag” attached to what was learned seemed acceptable and not remarkable. Some found it difficult to acknowledge there could as often be negative emotions, fear, anger, shame, confusion alongside the positive emotions of excitement, happiness, pride, etc. If a student indeed is experiencing negative emotions then the teachers job includes recognizing and acknowledging what is going on, helping the student to resolve the issue, come to acceptance, and hopefully find it all a brighter world at the end of the whole learning experience.

Emotions and emotional immaturity have certainly blocked my ability to learn, and were certainly not incorporated while a student. The few outbursts I had in elementary and high school sent me to either a psychiatrist or a headmaster’s office, and I was able to talk my way out of both. Emotion was disruption, not an element to the whole person. As a writer, I try my best to make order out of the emotional turmoil, and hope that such catharses will caulk the cracks in the road ahead.

Fear is an emotion and has no reasonableness or unreasonableness to it, as Blaise Pascal put it, “The heart has reasons that reason does not know at all.” It often happens that the cognitive effort to analyze the situation and choose something to do about it is based on assumptions.  In talking about fears with others these assumptions often surface and the others can help us to challenge our own assumptions. The foundation of a democratic community of practice is strong, trusting, and collaborative relationships. Trust begins with our predictably meeting each other’s immediate needs and small comforts.

My father recently informed me that it is one’s intellect that makes one adept at handling other people, and that the mind reacts before the heart does. I couldn’t disagree more – we react with our hearts, then use our minds in an attempt to comprehend our actions and control our surroundings. But it is illuminating when someone makes this kind of definitive statement, because it is indicative of so much more, and, unbeknownst to its demonstrator, could be the key that frees me from the pain of misunderstanding, and the self-assigned burden of always having to explain myself.

We need to tell each other what we think and feel in the quiet of our nights.

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