Friday, July 31, 2015

"Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting their eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted." - Garrison Keillor

Children watch adults ever so closely. They inherit our view of the world and how life works. They start by seeing everything through the lens of our perception, including and especially how they see themselves.

Our kindness and generosity become long-lasting lessons to them. A part of the architecture of their own cognition and emotions.

Equally, negative emotional traits also form patterns of thinking inside of them. For most of us, that negative voice inside our head sounds distinctively and recognizably like adults who played significant critical roles in our own childhoods.

Children are finely tuned to perceive how we respond to them, constantly learning from those responses. They often understand us better than we do ourselves, since they experience how we actually act and react versus how we tell ourselves that we do.

I'm thinking of how children become so very good at knowing just what to say or do to get a response or a behavior from their parents. Ever stood in a checkout line and watched a frustrated parent give in to a whining child just to avoid the embarrassment of parenting in public?

We might attribute some form of malicious intent to the annoying child--the frustrated parent usually does--but what we are actually witnessing is just the incredible awareness the child has of how his or her parent operates. If you are not the parent who is caught in the emotion of that moment, it's fascinating to watch.

This also means we have great opportunities to build cultures, within our families, our classrooms, and our schools, that use this power of childhood awareness to grow, reinforce, and perpetuate healthy behaviors and beliefs.

Who we are, and how we act with children, matters. A lot.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

“When you judge you project your shadows onto others. When you love you project your inner light.” - Aine Belton

I've always been intrigued by the degree to which those things which bother me about other people are often the things that I like least in myself.

Perhaps it's my own worries and insecurities--the fact that I haven't figured out how to overcome or come to peace with something--that makes them particularly prickly for me. As a parent, my shortest fuses were in situations where I felt most unsure.

It's tragic to think that our own insecurities can so easily create confusion, doubt, and fear in another. Our heart breaks for the child who is on the receiving end of an adult's insecurity.

When we feel calm and confident, we are much more capable of being generous about others' shortcomings. Their difficulties don't threaten us. We feel some sense of confidence that we can help them.

Projecting light is a powerful image for helping another, especially a child. Illuminating the areas of darkness for them, providing a bridge across the shadows of fear. Showing confidence in the ability to deal with and overcome life's challenges.

Our ability to influence others truly depends on who we have become. 

Final Pat Farenga Webinar in "Starting to Homeschool" Series


"Starting to Homeschool" is concluding its series of six Webinars for those interested in starting the journey to homeschooling, or in just learning more about homeschooling. "Webinar #6: Year-Round Learning Opportunities," will be broadcast live from 3 - 4pm US-Eastern Time on Friday, July 31st. Those who are able to join the Webinar live will be able to ask questions in the chat during the Q&A period.

The Webinar will be held using Google Hangouts on Air, and it shouldn't require any special software. Like each previous Webinar, it will be a half-hour+ presentation by Patrick Farenga, followed by questions and answers with attendees. The Webinar tomorrow is free to attend live and to watch in recorded form for the following 24 hours.

Join the mailing list HERE to get the links needed to log into the Webinar.  To have access to the full set of recordings, please purchase the archive set. If you can help us advertise this program, please consider joining our affiliate marketing program.

See you online!

Patrick Farenga is a leading and unique authority on homeschooling, bringing more than 30 years of fieldwork, advocacy, and personal experience (he and his wife homeschooled their three daughters) to help parents and children learn in their own ways. Farenga is a writer and education activist who addresses academic and general audiences about working with children, not on children, to help them learn.

Farenga worked closely with one of the founders of the modern homeschooling movement, the late author and teacher John Holt, as well as with many of the key figures in homeschooling, such as Dr. Raymond Moore and Ivan Illich. Farenga continues Holt’s work and published Growing Without Schooling magazine (GWS) from 1985 until it stopped in 2001. GWS was the nation’s first periodical about learning without going to school, started by Holt in 1977.

Farenga speaks as a homeschooling expert at education conferences around the world—such as in Colombia, Ireland, France, England, Canada, and Italy—as well as on commercial radio and television talk shows in the United States (The Today Show, Good Morning America) and abroad.
Farenga writes about homeschooling, democratic education, and unschooling (John Holt’s preferred term for learning in the real world) for a number of trade and academic publications. Pat also wrote the entries about homeschooling for the International Encyclopedia of Education, 3rd Edition (Elsevier, 2010) and the online edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (2015). Pat operates the John Holt/Growing Without Schooling website, www.johnholtgws.com, and is a founding member of www.alternativestoschool.com.

Farenga’s recent publications include:
The Beginner’s Guide to Homeschooling (Holt, 1998)
Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (Perseus, 2003)
The Legacy of John Holt: A Man Who Genuinely Understood, Trusted, and Respected Children(HoltGWS, 2013)



Interview with Denise Pope on "Overloaded and Underprepared"

I interview Denise Pope on her new book, Overloaded and Underprepared:  strategies for stronger schools and healthy, successful kids,  as part of the FutureofEducation.com interview series.


Wednesday, July 29, 2015

"There is no recipe for raising children to be successful adults, but parental warmth and affection make more of a difference than any other factor… The main finding… was that 'subjects who had warm mothers or warm fathers were more likely to be rated as higher in social accomplishments 36 years later.' - Radcliffe Study, Quoted in the Boston Globe (4/8/91)

I remain intrigued by the idea that to really help students, we need to be helping families.

Not trying to transplant things from the family to school, which is a risky proposition, and based on the belief that we can somehow isolate certain factors and replicate them outside of their natural circumstance. Transplanting practices that should be happening in the family, but aren't, also holds the obvious drawback of further weakening the families.

I call this the A-to-C fallacy.

A is where we are (in this case, wanting to help children who are struggling).  B is a known mechanism for fundamentally helping (in this case, parental warmth and affection).  C is where we want to be (in this case, children becoming successful adults).

B is the hard work. In the world of farming, it's planting, watering, cultivating, weeding--all the things you have to do to get the harvest (C).  In the education equation, a significant part (arguably the largest) of B is healthy families.

But because B is hard work, because we're not always in direct control of B, and because we're always trying to improve or be efficient, we look for shortcuts, ways to skip the work, and ways to go somehow more directly from A to C. This is a trap.

Remembering the importance of B, committing ourselves to working on B, and remembering that what we want (C) is B's natural outcome, means that we're thinking deeply and carefully.

So then my own personal question becomes: who's doing really good work to strengthen families, and how can I help them?

Monday, July 27, 2015

"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us." - Marcel Proust

There is a difference between wisdom and knowledge.

Knowledge can be taught, but wisdom must be obtained by oneself. Wisdom is self-discovered. Galileo said: "You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself."

Knowledge is crucial, and can be transferred in machine-like fashion from one individual to another. But if we focus only on knowledge, we will find ourselves in the barren wasteland of information without understanding.

Wisdom is about how we work as human beings, and we are not machines. It is wisdom, not knowledge, that saves nations from destroying themselves and others. It is wisdom that understands human needs, cognitive biases, and emotional growth. It is wisdom that balances and bridges conflicting information. It is wisdom that reflects on history and builds carefully for the future. It is wisdom that thinks about how to help future generations become good thinkers.

We live in an age of knowledge, but our greatest need right now is wisdom.






Saturday, July 25, 2015

"Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another." - G.K. Chesterton

A little self-reflection is badly needed right now.

What do we believe about children, about learning, and about the role of education in a society? And what do these beliefs tell us about the soul of our culture?

Friday, July 24, 2015

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." - Paolo Friere

Here is the initial synopsis of Hans Christian Andersen's tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes," from Wikipedia:
[It] is a short tale by Hans Christian Andersen about two weavers who promise an Emperor a new suit of clothes that is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, no one dares to say that he doesn't see any suit of clothes until a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" 
For those interested in truth versus narrative, or the social dynamics of power, one of the most interesting parts of the story has been left out. In Wikipedia's fuller description of the plot, the important conclusion to the story is included:
Then a child in the crowd, too young to understand the desirability of keeping up the pretense, blurts out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all and the cry is taken up by others. The Emperor cringes, suspects the assertion is true, but continues the procession.
The procession continues.

Most people tell this story as way of emphasizing the need to regain a child-like purity of vision, to be able to see and tell the truth, even when everyone else is pretending and going along with a lie. And of how we easily we can be manipulated by being told that if we were smart enough, then we'd believe that lie that others are telling us.

But there is more.

Do we recognize the truth, either initially like the child, or ultimately like the crowd, but stand idly by as the procession continues?

Do we say, "well, that's just the way things are?"

Or are we sometimes even holding up the imaginary cloth, part of the continued procession, because we depend on the King's support?

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

"All children are born geniuses, and we spend the first six years of their lives degeniusing them." - R. Buckminster Fuller

I've never really liked the use of the word genius in pithy quotes about education. It's always felt to me that claiming every child to be a genius was sort of the height of silliness--an exaggerated, rose-colored, and naive view of what could be a more pragmatic acceptance that children are likely to excel in different areas, and not all of them in academic pursuits. And that some children are born with difficulties and constraints, not by any fault of their own, who deserve no less love and attention from the adults in their lives.

But I recently came across this definition of genius, and it allowed me to shift my view. "The word genius derives from the Latin gignere, 'to beget.' The word also carried the meaning of a guiding spirit, present with every individual from birth: literally, a spark of the divine" (from What is Generative Literature? Introducing “The Generative Literature Project”, emphasis mine).

This idea that every child has a spark of the divine surely resonates with parents. We may be intimately aware of the struggles of our own children, but we also deeply believe in them.

Our willingness to see that spark in each child, whether we believe it is divine or just evolutionary potential, is critical to building a healthy culture of learning, and a healthy society.

Robert D. Shepherd gives us a scientific view of the same:
Every child born today is the product of 3.8 billions years of evolution. Between his or her ears, is the most complex system known to us, and that system, the brain consists of highly interconnected subsystems of neural mechanisms for carrying out particular tasks.... The truth is that there are, quite literally, billions of intelligences in the brain–mechanisms that carry out very particular tasks more or less well, many of them sharing parts of the same machinery to carry out subroutines.Over that 3.8 billion years of evolution, these many intelligences were refined to a high degree....
Almost every new parent is surprised, even shocked, to learn that kids come into the world extraordinarily unique. They bring a lot of highly particular potential to the ball game. And every one of those children is capable, highly capable, in some ways and not in others. 
On the religious side, we can turn to the Quakers. Because Quakers believe there is “that of God” - an Inner Light - in each person, a "hallmark of the Quaker school experience is the basic belief that we are all teachers and learners and that each child has unique gifts and talents" (quoted from here). And the Quakers are not alone in believing this as a part of their core religious tenets.

Religious terminology carries a lot of baggage these days, but I think if I ever write a book, I might call it The Divine Learner.

So, are all children born geniuses? Yes, of course... if we believe them to be so.



Tuesday, July 21, 2015

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction." - E. F. Shumacher

It's really hard to not do anything. To not solve a problem for someone else. To not create a program to fix something.

But sometimes, not doing anything is the best thing.

For example, when a student needs to go through the discovery process on his or her own. Or when solving a problem for a group would ultimately be disabling, thwarting the building of their own constructive and creative capacity.

I can remember when I had significant responsibilities for a lot of people. A wise friend said, "don't ever respond immediately to any problem that is not life-threatening." He told me to wait 24 hours before calling people back, because doing so allowed them to figure things out on their own.

Not doing anything can look to others like a cop-out. But it can also reflect deeper thinking, which usually has a hard time competing with the enthusiasm, sense of purpose, and allocation of resources that come from taking action.

It takes some courage to defend not doing anything, but it's often the best decision.









Interview with Erica Renee Goldson - The Valedictorian Who Spoke Out Against Schooling



Today I interviewed Erica Renee Goldson, who in June of 2010 gave a valedictory speech at Coxsackie-Athens HS Class of 2010 that went viral on the web. A YouTube video and the text of her speech are at her website, for ease of viewing her ten minute speech is embedded below--worth watching before the interview!

Monday, July 20, 2015

“Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.” - Mahatma Gandhi

There is reality, and then there are the stories or narratives that are told.

Reality + motive = story.

We see things through the lens of our own interests. And if those interests involve profit, power, or control, we can bring a lot of energy to the task of helping other people see our narrative as reality.

Sometimes we're not aware that this is what we are doing. Our boss, colleagues, friends, family--they all have expectations of us, and so we craft narratives that seem to suit those who figure most importantly in our lives, often not even conscious that we are doing so.

But other times, we're quite aware. We call it marketing. Or salesmanship. Or influencing.

It's not easy to see past our own subconscious or conscious narrative-building to something more truthful, as our view of the world--and our paycheck--can be at stake. This is not an easy process, and it may be that most of the time we're not finding truth or reality, we're just getting closer to it.

And when that truth-seeking confronts someone else's pervasive and persuasive narrative, especially one that has lots of energy behind it, things can get hard. Those who depend on that narrative (again, either unconsciously or consciously) will do everything they can to keep it intact. Their responses can run from just ignoring you, to dismissing you, to outright belittling or punishing you. (E.g., the whistleblowers in the financial industry.) While there is an institutional benefit to supporting whistle-blowing (the health of the institution), in reality there tends to be little benefit, and maybe even disincentives, to the managers and decision-makers in that institution in supporting it.

So the bottom line is that speaking truth to power is not easy, and most often requires sacrifice. Gandhi was a great example of this.

Might we also be.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." - Leo Tolstoy

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” - Mahatma Gandhi.
"Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing." - Albert Schweitzer.

One of my favorite stories to tell is about the instructions given on airplane flights regarding oxygen masks. In case of an emergency, we're told, please place the mask on yourself first, then on a child. I haven't been able to independently verify this, but I've been told that this is because a child will be much more willing to have the mask placed on them if they see that you have the mask on first.

Modeling is certainly an important part of the "change yourself" concept.

And there is something deeper.

I have a friend who talks about having, doing, and being. Having is the goal that we are after, the tangible result. Doing are the actions we take to accomplish that result. Being is who we are and why we are doing that accomplishing.

Who we are matters. We can get caught up in all kinds of goals, and working on all kinds of programs to get those goals, but if what we do isn't ultimately reflective of our deeper core self--our being--it's hollow, ultimately unfulfilling, and arguably unimportant or even distracting.

Those who, in their being, are settled and centered do a much better job at determining what goals are important, and then in choosing appropriate actions to accomplish those goals.

Working on ourselves is hard work. It's hard enough that we're often tempted to run here and there after easy and attractive goals without really thinking deeply about whether they truly matter. We then build creative programs to accomplish those unexamined goals, and by this time we can be so mired in activity that we might be described as being "caught in the thick of thin things."

And we live in a world of such compartmentalized work, of such high inter-dependency around tasks that have been determined and set for us, that we may not even feel that we have the luxury or time to work on ourselves so that what we do reflects our deeper beliefs and ideals.

But that's a trap. I don't believe we truly influence others in profound and important ways unless what we are doing reflects our being. The time we spend on ourselves--reading, thinking, sharing, exploring, caring--is not wasted time. It's building the foundation without which all the rest that we do doesn't really matter.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

"Libraries were full of ideas - perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons." - Sarah J. Maas

I worry about libraries. I know, you're thinking: really?

There's a movement to take library spaces and turn them into proactive, creation-facilitating, "maker spaces." I like proactivity, I like creation, and I like the maker movement. But I worry about our inability to articulate the value of libraries and librarians as sacred protectors of thinking, and in particular, of independent thinking.

The library as thinker-space has been a great protector of ideas, and of the ability to form ideas inside of sacred intellectual privacy. Traditionally, libraries have gone to great lengths to protect the privacy of what books you check out. They don't (traditionally) track your reading and progress, or report that to someone else for approval or review.

Why is privacy important?

In part, it's hard to think about ideas, to form new ones, or to challenge the status quo when you are not in charge of when and with whom you share your thinking. Thinking is not linear, it's complicated, and the social pressures associated with it being public at every stage make it hard for us to be independent. For important thinking, we need privacy as individuals.

I'm all for collaboration, but I'm not a good collaborator if I can't bring my own and developed individual capacity and independent thinking to the collaboration.

Privacy is also important because there are tangible dangers to group-think. This is why we protect the rights of individuals and groups to think differently than we do, even when we do not agree with them, and as long as they are not creating a tangible immediate threat. "Mob rule" is much harder when there are those capable of challenging it. A healthy society needs the vibrant give and take of civil dialog, of thoughtful people who think differently and are willing to engage in debate.

As the American Library Association's Privacy page states: "Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association." The full statement is a must read. So how is it we hear so little defense of privacy, and even hear thought-leading librarians, policy-makers, and industry executives tell us that privacy is dead, or that in the new world of invasive surveillance, "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."

I support the idea of being creative with library spaces and of "reinventing libraries." But if we forget, leave behind, or just don't understand the tangible value of libraries as places of intellectual inquiry and for the protecting the privacy of such inquiry, we will have made a grave mistake.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Sponsorship, Collaboration, and Consulting Opportunities

Since almost all of my LearningRevolution.com events are free, I depend on sponsorships, collaborations, and consulting income to make them happen... and you can help! Really!

If you or your organization is interested in working together on something below, please reach out to me. Alternatively, if you know someone else you think might be interested, you can either forward this to them or send me contact information and I'll reach out directly.

THE BIGGIES:
Four of these events have years behind them. Library 2.015 is in its fifth year, GlobalEdcon in its sixth, the School Leadership summit in its fourth, and ISTE Unplugged will be in it's TENTH year. The Student Technology Conference is only in its second year, but it was a big hit! Sponsorship opportunities at all levels are available for each conference, and just let me know and I'm glad to connect on what those opportunities are and how associating with them could help your organization.

STEVE HARGADON STUFF:
After an almost two-year hiatus, the Future of Education interview series is starting back up again. Still the same deep, longer format, but guaranteed to be a little edgier. Sponsorship available, but not for the faint of heart, since there are no sacred cows for me when we talk about education. I'm also available for consulting, or (like I did for Ning and Elluminate / Blackboard Collaborate), more intensive collaboration or association--let me bring my reputation for authentically valuable events to your organization. The Learning Revolution newsletter (sent to 130,000 weekly) is on summer break, but in August we'll fire up again and we take paid advertisements.

EVENTS / CONFERENCES THAT NEED A SPONSOR AND COLLABORATORS TO TAKE PLACE:
  • Adult Education Conference - virtual conference
  • Community College 2.0 - virtual conference
  • Digital Citizenship - looking for a big partner for this event (own digitalcitizenship.com)
  • Ed Tech Bootcamp - physical event, summer?
  • Education Film Festival - brainstorming right now to hold in conjunction with another event
  • Extreme School Makeover - could be an event or a program
  • Future of K12 - in person, deep-dive retreat series around the country
  • Future of Museums - held first time last year
  • Gaming in Education - held first time last year (BrainPOP was sponsor)
  • Homeschool Conference - have held two over the past two years, virtual event
  • Inventing the Future - ed tech and learning?
  • Learning 2.0 - virtual conference, run once before.
  • Learning and the Brain - virtual conference
  • Library Summit Series: Search / Curation / Future of the Book - thinking 2-hour Webinar style events
  • Maker Day - student-led event + template for others to hold
  • Maker Education - virtual peer-to-peer conference 
  • Modern Learning - would be a new event
  • Online Teaching Conference - would be a new even
  • PrivacyCon - virtual conference on and around privacy issues
  • Reforming Ed Reform - some kind of shorter virtual summit, maybe
  • Reinventing Higher Ed - maybe my #1 interest right now for a virtual, worldwide event
  • Reinventing Libraries - virtual or physical event
  • Reinventing School - could be a virtual or a physical event
  • Reinventing the Classroom - held first time last year (Promethean sponsored)
  • Reinventing.Education - did one, "What If" format, physical event potentially in different cities
  • Self-Directed Learning - virtual conference
  • STEM Conference - held two years ago (HP was sponsor)
  • Student Entrepreneurship - want this to be a twin event with the student technology conference
These are all events I'd like to see move forward, but the limitation is finding a sponsor and collaborators. Can't do everything--I wish we could!--so consider this a wish-list either for a company that would like thought leadership in an area and has a budget to do so, or an individual wanting to help make something happen. For all ideas I have suitable domain names already.

It's not easy juggling sponsorships to bring good virtual (and physical) events to life, but with your help let's keep making a difference in the education world!

See you online!

Steve

Steve Hargadon

steve@hargadon.com
916-283-7901 

"We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own." - Ben Sweetland

There are other well-known quotes which equate knowledge with light.
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” - Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Issac McPherson
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." - Attributed incorrectly to Yeats or Socrates, but actually from Plutarch ("For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting - no more - and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.")
"We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light." - Evelyn Dunbar 
"There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it." - Edith Wharton 
"The hero is the one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.  The saint is the man who walks through the dark paths of the world, himself a light." - Felix Adler 
Interestingly, in each quote, light is clearly free and the spreading of it is a gift. But the special significance of the main quote above is the recognition that in the giving of light to others, we are giving to ourselves as well.

What parents, teachers, humanitarians, and those who in any way serve others, know, is that we both become and feel better in that service. In the giving, we find ourselves.

Life and education are not a zero-sum games. To treat them as though they are is to take away our very humanity.

Monday, July 13, 2015

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of becoming." - Goethe

Stephen Jay Gould, in 1981, wrote a book entitled, The Mismeasure of Man. From Wikipedia:
The book is both a history and critique of the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology."
No matter how good the science refuting biological determinism, it seems like this debate between determinism and potential cannot actually be answered by science; or rather, that the social, cultural, and psychological beliefs by which we measure the science itself will (and should) always take precedence.

I cannot see the true potential of another human being through scientific measures alone. It would be like constructing an evaluation of the sound characteristics of a piece of music without regard for the context and emotion of the culture within which it was created, through which it is heard, and by which it impacts the listeners. A beautiful piece of music for me may be entirely different than it is for you.

Our desire to be rational and scientific presents pragmatic limitations when applied to people. Whether one is religious, spiritual, humanistic, or scientific, it's hard to argue with the degree to which the individual spirit often seems capable of overcoming any external assessment we might make. We also know that our expectations and beliefs about others can dramatically impact their abilities and performance (e.g., the Pygmalion Effect).

I don't believe that recognizing individual potential absolves us from carefully understanding, and working to address, very specific ways by which biology and environment shape human potential. It's just an unwillingness to believe that biology and environment are the only factors, and to be seduced or blinded by data.

Which is what's happening, in spades, in education.

Data used to help fulfill the potential of individuals is profoundly valuable. Individuals being taught to use data to assess their own performance and progress is critical. But data used as carrot and stick (or worse yet, as hammer), or with the belief that it tells you all you need to know, is a sorry excuse for the human work of helping other individuals. The further removed data is from its source, the less likely it is that it is actually telling you something valuable.

Why are we so increasingly trapped in a purely scientific view of students (and teachers and each other)? In part, because it's a shortcut to the real work of being with and supporting other human beings, of seeing their potential, treating them accordingly, and helping them "to become what they are capable of becoming." And in part because the scientific narrative suits those in positions of power and profit, providing the justifications for activities and products that purport to address their limited and shallow conclusions.

And, if we're being honest, it is in part because biology does impact destiny. Being short makes it hard to play basketball. Being symmetrically attractive does increase the attention paid to you. Being predominantly good at physical tasks was an advantage when life was lived mostly outdoors, and survival was harder--but now, is often a disadvantage (think of the student confined to a chair most of the day). Being good at cognitive tasks has become a huge advantage in the computing era.

But culture trumps biology, or at least it can, if that's a value we support. We do have schools with a core belief in the potential of every student, that work to help each student succeed no matter what. The good work of these schools is because of their cultures and their beliefs, not because they are scientifically run.

Gould's The Mismeasure of Man refuted biological determinism through the exposure of thinking fallacies (thereby using logic to refute "science"). My argument could be seen in the same way: sociology, perhaps, to refute "science."

But for me, it's more than that. It's a deep, core belief in the inherent worth and value of every person. That's a belief we have to decide if we hold.

Thursday, July 09, 2015

"Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it." - Harold S. Hulbert

This is hard. And it's not just true with children.

Years ago I read a great article about the prison warden Dennis Luther, who's philosophy of running a prison came down to "an unconditional respect for the inmates as people." He said: "If you want people to behave responsibly, and treat you with respect, then you treat other people that way." Luther's philosophy worked, and worked really well (in the six years before the article was written, there were no escapes, no homicides, no sexual assaults, and no suicides). So why didn't warden Luther's way of running a prison become the model?

Because being able to look beyond carrot-and-stick methods of dealing with other people is the mark of thoughtful cultures, and the for-profit prison model has trumped thoughtfulness pretty badly in the prison world.

And the same is true in education. So it was with interest that I read Katherine Reynolds Lewis's "What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?" article for Mother Jones. "Negative consequences, timeouts, and punishment just make bad behavior worse. But a new approach really works."

OK, well, everybody likes to believe that acting thoughtfully is "new," and maybe you can't get people to read articles that say, "guess what, ideas about treating people thoughtfully that have existed for millenia actually do work better than beating them up." But the article is very good, and describes the temptations and the problems with behaviorist thinking:
Teachers who aim to control students' behavior—rather than helping them control it themselves—undermine the very elements that are essential for motivation: autonomy, a sense of competence, and a capacity to relate to others.
My friend Jane Nelsen has been saying this kind of thing for decades as part of her Positive Discipline parenting books and work that she does. One of the most profound guidelines for my own life I heard from Jane: "control invites the very behavior you are looking to avoid."

So really, this isn't new. It's just hard. Carrots and sticks are shortcuts, time-savers, ways of avoiding being patient and understanding. But the truth is that they ultimately end up not being shortcuts, and they cost a lot of time to repair later, and they reflect more our inability to control our own behavior than anything else.

Food Is the Tobacco of Our Generation

A bold statement, to be sure, but I believe we will look back on our current food culture with the same how-did-we-let-that-go-on shock (anger?) that many of us experienced as the conspiracies of the tobacco industry were uncovered.

When large profits are involved, a perfect storm can form that combines blissful ignorance, willful blindness, and malicious deception. Which is why how we think about education--either as a form of intellectual capacity-building or as the compliant absorption of facts--is so important: education is either the foundation of intellectual restraint on aggregations of power and control, or it ends up actually be the enabler of the same.

For consideration:
  • Poor diets may lower children's IQDiets high in fat, sugar and processed foods are lowering children's IQ, a new study suggests. The report says that eating habits among three year olds shapes brain performance as they get older. A predominantly processed-food diet at the age of three is directly associated with a lower IQ at the age of eight and a half, according to a Bristol-based study of thousands of British children.
    http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/feb/07/diet-children-iq
  • Key brand names owned by tobacco companies (including food companies)http://www.lassencoe.org/tfree/6-8/Fact%20Sheets/Companies%20owned%20by%20Big%20Tobacco.pdf
  • The Perils of Ignoring History: Big Tobacco Played Dirty and Millions Died. How Similar Is Big Food?
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879177/: "Context: In 1954 the tobacco industry paid to publish the “Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” in hundreds of U.S. newspapers. It stated that the public's health was the industry's concern above all others and promised a variety of good-faith changes. What followed were decades of deceit and actions that cost millions of lives. In the hope that the food history will be written differently, this article both highlights important lessons that can be learned from the tobacco experience and recommends actions for the food industry. Findings: The tobacco industry had a playbook, a script, that emphasized personal responsibility, paying scientists who delivered research that instilled doubt, criticizing the “junk” science that found harms associated with smoking, making self-regulatory pledges, lobbying with massive resources to stifle government action, introducing “safer” products, and simultaneously manipulating and denying both the addictive nature of their products and their marketing to children. The script of the food industry is both similar to and different from the tobacco industry script. Conclusions: Food is obviously different from tobacco, and the food industry differs from tobacco companies in important ways, but there also are significant similarities in the actions that these industries have taken in response to concern that their products cause harm. Because obesity is now a major global problem, the world cannot afford a repeat of the tobacco history, in which industry talks about the moral high ground but does not occupy it."
  • Food Industry Pursues the Strategy of Big Tobacco by : Yale Environment 360
  • http://e360.yale.edu/feature/food_industry_pursues_the_strategy_of_big_tobacco/2136/: "Recently, Brownell and Kenneth E. Warner — a prominent tobacco researcher who is Dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health — met at a conference and began discussing the similar legal, political, and business strategies traditionally employed by “Big Tobacco” and the tactics now being used by “Big Food.” Struck by the common playbook that both industries have used and concerned about the public health impacts of industry actions, Brownell and Warner decided to explore the topic more deeply. The result was a paper published earlier this year in the health policy journal, the Milbank Quarterly: “The Perils of Ignoring History: Big Tobacco Played Dirty and Millions Died. How Similar Is Big Food?” As Brownell explained in an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, many of the tactics currently being used by Big Food now mirror those used by U.S. tobacco giants as they successfully fought Kelly D. Brownell off regulation for decades, thereby contributing to the deaths of millions of Americans."
  • Big Food is Much Worse Than Big Tobacco Ever Was
    http://authoritynutrition.com/big-food-is-much-worse-than-big-tobacco/
  • Food flavor safety system a ‘black box’ | Center for Public Integrity
  • http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/09/17465/food-flavor-safety-system-black-box: "But the organization responsible for the safety of most “natural” and “artificial” flavors that end up in foods and beverages isn’t part of the U.S. government. Rather, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association — a secretive food industry trade group that has no in-house employees, no office of its own and a minuscule budget — serves as the de-facto regulator of the nation’s flavor additives."
  • USDA Food Pyramid History
    http://www.healthy-eating-politics.com/usda-food-pyramid.html: "The USDA revised the food pyramid in 2010. As expected, the panel of "experts" advising the USDA were all proponents of the low fat, high carb diet. The wealth of gold standard research supporting a lower carb diet and reduced grain consumption was NOT reviewed, and sure enough, the pyramid continues to recommend the products that benefit agricultural and food processing interests."
  • A Fatally Flawed Food Guide by Luise Light, Ed.D
  • http://www.whale.to/a/light.html: "Carefully reviewing the research on nutrient recommendations, disease prevention, documented dietary shortfalls and major health problems of the population, we submitted the final version of our new Food Guide to the Secretary of Agriculture. When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry."

Wednesday, July 08, 2015

"For the love of money is the root of all evil." - 1 Timothy 6:10, King James Version of the Bible

I read something yesterday that stopped me in my tracks. From an essay entitled "The Treason of Intellectuals" by Chris Hedges (bold emphasis mine):
Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally. Benda wrote that intellectuals were once supposed to be indifferent to popular passions. They “set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence.” They looked “as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.” ...But once the intellectuals began to “play the game of political passions,” those who had “acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators.” 
I've been trying to figure out why my discomfort with direction of education, and ed tech, especially in the last few years, has felt intertwined with larger social issues, but in a way I wasn't fully sure I could pinpoint.

I can remember the genuine excitement of the movement to use Free and Open Source Software in schools. There was passion, creativity, and building computer labs for almost no money... but then there was a switch. Google came in with their free email services, and it turned out that no matter how compelling the philosophical and pedagogical arguments were for Open Source, it was actually the "free" aspect that carried the day. I remember realizing that Free and Open Source Software had been a surrogate for me, that what I really cared about was the approach to creation and participation that were a part of its ethos and that felt like they could change education.

That banner of change, and authentic excitement, got rebuilt around the use of Web 2.0 in education: teachers and students blogging, connecting through social networks, actively engaged in building their own learning networks and teaching each other. It was magical. And yes, like other educational technologies, Web 2.0 services had collaboration baked in and made the adoption of such pedagogical strategies much easier; but Web 2.0 was, again, a surrogate. Which we found out as free turned to paid, and as companies struggled, offerings changed, and created content disappeared.

We may be seeing the same cycle play out in the maker movement.

But hardest of all has been to see is the way in which so many authentic collaborators in the ed tech space, over the last ten years, have now become much less collaborative, as the continual money pouring in from corporations and foundations has had its inevitable influence.

In our New Testament quote above, there's valuable nuance. It's not money that is the root of all evil, it's the "love of" money. We all need to survive and to provide, and we can make conscious choices about what role we allow for money in education conversations.

But I'm worried that we've gone way, way too far down a path, both in education and in our larger industrial economies, of allowing money and profit to become so central to our decisions that we seem to have forgotten the danger that focus ("love") has on our ability to see clearly.

Especially because the lives of children are being impacted so significantly. What activities taking place now will we look back on with shock, that we actually become "stimulators of" instead of "checks on?" 

Tuesday, July 07, 2015

"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken." - Oscar Wilde

Every year or so our family spends an evening doing a personality test. We've done versions of the Color Code, Strengths Finders, Meyers-BriggsEnneagram, and others.

We have four children. They are now getting older, and the sibling tension that used to seem like a daily affair now rears its head much less frequently than it used to. But even so, the other night we spent a couple of hours taking one of the personality tests and talking about our individual results...

And the magic happened again.

In a very short period of time, we find we really are getting along and like each other again. :)

Perhaps it's because the tests are a reminder that we actually are different, and that we think and act differently. And this allows us to be a little more generous with each other, to recognize that we don't have to agree on everything, to like the same things, or to act in the same ways. We better appreciate each other.

But even more than that, I think, is the individual recognition that we don't have to measure ourselves against other people. There's a very real sense of personal relief in this process. It's like, as a family, we take one big collective deep breath. Because we have different talents and capabilities, perhaps part of what creates tension within us is the act of comparing ourselves to others, of seeing ourselves through a lens which magnifies our own faults or shortcomings. By focusing on comparisons, we miss not only the positive in each other, but the beauty of our own uniqueness. The personality-test process allows us to better appreciate ourselves.






Monday, July 06, 2015

"Ideas spread because they are good at spreading, not because they are inherently valuable." - Me

Ideas, or "memes," spread because they are good at spreading. That is, there's something about them that makes it easy for them to get passed around.

Think of a virus. The characteristic most important to a virus spreading is that it spreads quickly. Does it ultimately maim or incapacitate or kill its victim? Those things are really secondary to its ability to spread fast before the long-term results kick in, whatever they may be.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Sometimes ideas spread because they carry some deep and thoughtful meaning. But usually not. Deep and thoughtful ideas take more time and effort to understand and communicate, thereby limiting their virality or spreadability. Deep thinking is almost never the primary narrative, and attempts to make it so usually depend on simplifying it to a point where it can lose some of its most important value.

Simplified ideas, or ones that produce a jolt or a bang or a profit, spread much more easily. We might say, beware of popular ideas.

In education, Pasi Sahlburg calls this GERM: the Global Education Reform Movement. GERM is a virus infecting the nations of the world, one that simplifies education and learning largely to standardization, corporate management models, and test-driven accountability. Bright and shiny ideas that, not unrelatedly, carry the potential for corporate profits, and are the stock and trade of ed tech and Silicon Valley.

Come to think of it, they are the stock and trade of modern industrial culture.

The mark of a mature society is the ability to demand more than superficial thinking, to build deep and powerful secondary narratives. Are we willing to turn away from the barrage of streaming superficiality and instead read and talk about ideas of depth and value? To drill past the easy headlines and ask ourselves hard questions about how and why the world works the way it does right now?

Are we willing to actually help students develop their skills and competencies so that they can face the challenges ahead, instead of pretending that we are preparing most of them for anything other than low, entry-level, service work? Instead of pretending that the ideas being bandied about in most of our conversations on education are actually meaningful, and not just what they are: political sound-bites with no pedagogical pedigree?

Somehow, we must take a stand. Especially in education we must be willing to build those powerful secondary narratives that give us intellectual choices when faced with superficial and viral thinking. If we do not demand more in the education conversation, we doom both our students and ourselves to the sad consequences of viral, surface-level culture.

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is." - Ivan Illich

Warning, deep thinking ahead...

This quote profoundly expresses the way in which institutionalized forces, by having vested interests in things staying the same, don't really want for schooling to create independent thinking in students.

There are all kinds of ways that businesses depend on stable markets and ideas: any changes, no matter how profoundly there might be intellectual or moral arguments for them, will be threatening (consciously or unconsciously) if they look to alter existing patterns, power, or profit.

Illich argued that schools were the model for our institutionalized society, and that as such we needed to "deschool" society. The intriguing nuance is (my words, not his) that this process of protecting interests can actually lead institutions to perpetuating or contributing to the problems that they say they exist to solve.

People get promoted in organizations who are good at keeping the organizations relevant, at doing the things that strengthen the organization and not necessarily that solve the core problem the organization was formed around. It can even be argued that solving the problem would put everyone in the organization out of a job, and therefore is (consciously or unconsciously) disincentivized.

There's a lot of money tied up in prescribing medicines that wouldn't be there if you actually helped people change health habits, for example. There's a lot of money in people taking unnecessary financial risk that would disappear if you helped people become prudent savers. There's a lot more money in food "products" that keeps you wanting to eat more of it, than there is in healthy, unprocessed, food. You get the idea.

Each industry would say they exist to make people's lives better, but in our era of Internet information and dialog, increasingly and appropriately those narratives are being challenged.

Now, given the noble desires of those who have devoted themselves to education, how is it that schools not only work in the same institutionalized way, but actually seem to be the primary means of facilitating our compliant support for the larger institutionalized society model--setting the stage, is it were, and convincing us that we should listen to those who tell us to buy and do that which isn't good for us?

Perhaps it is as simple as the temptations of power. Large numbers of students, all locked into the same general model of institutionalized learning, present an incredibly tempting opportunity for making money or controlling outcomes. (So tempting that even the most progressive education reformers still cling to the core system, not wanting to radically shift the compulsory nature of school, but just to change the ideas that are being propagated to their own.) So of course, the language of education as liberating or empowering sits as a thin veneer over a system of compliance and control, allowing us to believe in the good without upsetting the apple cart--which I think we would if we really thought about the impact of schooling on most children.

There are many great, generous, caring teachers, administrators, and staff. Just as there are good doctors, bankers, and grocery store owners. But somehow we've accepted the larger institutional dynamic, and we even make excuses for it: "this is just how things work."

At some point, people start to get fed up. Especially as institutional illusions are confronted by dramatic realities. Such was the case with tobacco. It's increasingly becoming the case with food and banking. Not far down the road, I believe, are similar realizations about education as student loan debt and limited job prospects push us to really examine what schools do.

Institutions have a way of hanging on, of fighting to maintain their relevance. But the more we are thinking together about what really matters for children, youth, and young adults, the more prepared we'll be if we have to remake education.