Educating for Democracy

 

When I was in high school in the first half of the 1960s, the idea of democracy was integral to the curriculum. We were still in the midst of the Cold War—a situation made more dramatic by the space race.  But the country was also facing a Civil Rights battle, the early stages of the War in Vietnam, and the beginning of the youth rebellion, as early Baby Boomers reached their teen years inspired by the achievements of role models who had come of age in the late fifties.  Many of our teachers were WWII veterans or had family who fought in that war or in Korea. 

The post-war goal of creating citizens who could protect democracy and solve social problems was built into the social studies curriculum.  Ninth grade social studies devoted one semester to Pennsylvania history and another to the structure of government.  Tenth grade was western civilization.  Eleventh was U.S. history.  Twelfth grade was Problems of Democracy, a year-long focus on the Constitution and historical and current Constitutional issues. 

We graduated into the chaos of Vietnam, youth rebellion, the civil rights movement, rock and roll, and the technology revolution.  Interesting times, for sure.  That high school curriculum helped us steer our way through the social changes that surrounded us.

When I look around at the world today, I worry whether young adults in the 2020s are being prepared by their high school curriculum to respond to the social challenges of a multicultural, global society in a global information-based economy.  I checked out the social studies curriculum at my high school alma mater.  It looks like this:

            Ninth Grade:               Western Civilization

            Tenth Grade:               U.S. History

            Eleventh Grade:          Civics and Government, plus an Elective

            Twelfth Grade:            Electives

Elective choices include:  Western Civilization, Advanced Western Civilization, U.S. History, Advanced U.S. History, Civics and Government, World Cultures, Human Geography, Social Issues, and Psychology, along with some dual enrollment opportunities.

            I use my own alma mater as an example, confident that it is not too far from the norm. The curriculum potentially covers a lot of ground when you include electives.  The question, though, is whether everyone gets the basics needed for a graduating senior to successfully participate in the social, political, and civic environments of today’s global information society.  That is:  Are we educating our students to be effective citizens?

It is a question that came home to roost yesterday, when a large number of extremists invaded the U.S. Congress in a insurrection prompted by the sitting U.S. President that took four lives and embarrassed our nation internationally.  How do we, as a nation, educate ourselves out of this situation?  After January 20, the educational community should come together to ask what we can do to better educate our citizens—all of our citizens—to succeed in their role as citizens of a constitutional democracy.

A Lesson from James Madison

 

I am reading These Truths, Jill Lepore’s comprehensive history of the United States from 1492 to the present.  The chapter I’m reading now focuses on early attempts to organize a national government and the shift from the Articles of Confederation to the U.S. Constitution.  She notes that, in 1787, as this transformation was in process, James Madison drafted an essay called “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” in which he looked what a new Constitution must achieve. 

 

One concern, Madison noted, was “the people themselves,” the inherent danger that the majority represented to the minority.  “In republican Government,” he wrote, “the majority, however composed, ultimately give the law.  Whenever therefore an apparent interest or common passion unites a majority what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?”

 

In other words, Lepore writes, “What force restrains good men from doing bad things?  Honesty, character, religion—these, history demonstrated, were not to be relied upon.  No, the only force that could restrain the tyranny of the people was the force of a well-constructed constitution.  It would have to be as finely wrought as an iron gate” (p. 119).

 

It is a concern that is very relevant today.  The two major political parties have each moved to extremes, leaving the political middle ground with few champions in the parties, thus encouraging extremism.  On one hand, we cannot allow the majority to ride roughshod over minorities if we are to have a truly equal society.  On the other, we cannot let an elitist minority make it impossible for the majority to find a productive and happy life.  We need to honor a “well-constructed constitution” that protects all citizens from extremism.  Especially in today’s environment, we need to focus on keeping our government wed to the Constitution and not let idealogues lead us from it. 

 

It is amazing how Madison and the other framers of our Constitution continue to teach us.

Movies that Brighten the Day in the Midst of the Pandemic

The pandemic has given us time to watch again movies that we hadn't seen for many years.  In the process, we rediscovered two that, to our surprise, both were the work of Irish writer and director John Carney. 

The first was "Once," the 2007 story of a Dublin street singer/guitarist who meets a recent immigrant from the Czech Republic who plays piano at a local music store and who gives him the courage to gather together a group of musicians,  record a demo, and make his music his career. 

The second was 2013's "Begin Again."  Carney has moved the action to New York City, but the story line has echoes of "Once."  Keira Knightley plays a songwriter who is invited on stage at a local bar by a musician friend to sing a new song she has written.  In the audience is a drunken A&R man, played by a Mark Ruffalo, who has just lost his job, but who hears the beauty and potential of the song.  Ruffalo is superb as the A&R guy looking to find a reason to live again.  The music is great.

Carney wrote and directed a third musical--"Sing Street" (2016)--about a Dublin teenager who starts a band to impress a young girl.  I've not seen it yet, but look forward to it.

More recently, Carney has been the creative force behind "Modern Love," a series of half-hour dramas based on a New York Times column that gives readers a chance to tell the story of their own loves.  The first episode is about a young woman who finds that the doorman of her apartment building is quick to judge her boyfriends. 

In the midst of a worsening pandemic, my thanks to John Carney for brightening our evenings.

John Dewey and the Future of Democracy

The coming election, amid the awful combination of a resurgent pandemic, a troubled democracy, and rapidly evolving social issues, have me turning to John Dewey for a refresher course on what democracy really means and what we need to do to save ours.  Dewey is perhaps best-known today for his advocacy of the instrumentalist philosophy as it applies to education.  However, in the 1920s and 1930s, he published several books that dealt with the nature of democracy and the role of individuals and groups in a democratic society.

There is a continuing tension in American life between the ideal of the individual free from social restrictions, on one hand, and the idea that individuals carry a responsibility to the community, on the other.  The ongoing resentment about having to wear safety masks in the midst of the pandemic is one very good example.  Not wanting to pay taxes to support the health care of other people is another.  In The Public and its Problems (1927), Dewey attempted to better define the distinctions between the “individual” and the “public” in a democracy.  We celebrate our individuality, but, in the end, our lives as individuals cannot be totally separated from our lives as members of a community.  As Dewey says, “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated.  They exist and operate in association” (p. 23).  He notes that “The state. . . has no concern of its own; its purpose is formal, like that of the leader of the orchestra who plays no instrument and makes no music, but who serves to keep other players who do produce music in unison with one another” (p. 4).  

What about the public, then?  The public, says Dewey, 

“. . . arrives at decisions, makes terms and executes resolves only through the medium of individuals.  They are officers; they represent a Public, but the Public acts only through them.  We say in a country like our own that legislators and executives are elected by the public.  The phrase might appear to indicate that the Public acts.  But, after all, individual men and women exercise the franchise; the Public here is a collective name for a multitude of persons each voting as an anonymous unit.  As a citizen-voter, each one of these persons is, however, an officer of the public.  He expresses his will as a representative of the public interest as much so as does a senator or sheriff” (p. 75).

 

In 1939, as several European countries were turning their backs on democracy and in favor of totalitarian regimes, Dewey wrote a short book called Freedom and Culture.  He noted that, “A totalitarian regime is committed to control of the whole life of all of its subjects by its hold over feelings, desires, emotions, as well as opinions. . . Thus it is that the very things that seem to us in democratic countries the most obnoxious features of the totalitarian state are the very things for which its advocates recommend it.  They are the things for whose absence they denounce democratic countries” (p.16).   He noted that, while some see this as the result of a “collective hallucination,” it is essential that citizens recognize this in order to escape the “collective delusion—that totalitarianism rests upon external coercion alone” (p. 17).

            In Dewey’s vision, this represents the “moral factor” in social organization.  While total allegiance is the bind that holds people together in a totalitarian society, Dewey notes that all societies have a moral factor; “. . . for a number of persons to form anything that can be called a community in its pregnant sense there must be values prized in common” (p. 17).

Dewey quotes Thomas Jefferson as saying, “Nothing is unchangeable but inherent and inalienable rights of man” (Freedom and Culture, p. 119) and goes on to discuss three points that flow from that statement:  

·      First, he emphasizes that, to Jefferson, “. . . it was the ends of democracy, the rights of man –not of men in the plural—which are unchangeable” (p. 120).

·      Second, Dewey believed that the essence of Jefferson’s statement lies in the issue of states rights versus federal power,  “. . . for while he stood for state action as a barrier against excessive power at Washington, and while on the practical side his concern with it was most direct, in his theoretical writings chief importance is attached to local self-governing units on something like the New England town-meeting plan” (p. 121).  “There is,” Dewey wrote, “a difference between a society, in the sense of an association, and a community. . . Natural associations are conditions for the existence of a community, but a community leads the function of communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as joint undertakings engaged in” (p. 122).  In a modern industrial society, “economic forces have immensely widened the scope of associational activities.  But it has done so largely at the expense of the intimacy and directness of communal troupe interests and activities. . . The power of the rabble rouser, especially in the totalitarian direction, is mainly due to his power to create a factitious sense of direct union and communal solidarity—if only by arousing the emotion of common intolerance and hate” (p. 122).  This breakdown of the community into radically opposed factions signals a move toward totalitarianism.

·      Finally, Dewey noted, Jefferson held that property rights are created by the “social pact” rather than through inherent moral claims by individuals that government is morally obligated to maintain.  “The right to pursue happiness stood with Jefferson for nothing less than the claim of every human being to choose his own career and to act upon his own choice and judgment free from restraints and constraints imposed by the arbitrary will of other human beings—whether these others are officials of government, of whom Jefferson was especially afraid, or are persons whose command of capital and control of the opportunities for engagement in useful work limits the ability of others to ‘pursue happiness’”  (p. 123).

            Today, we are experiencing our own form of collective hallucination as the Trump administration uses lies and misrepresentations to create the misperception that his regime will protect the white working class while it works to make the rich richer.  Gone is any semblance that the federal government is concerned with the “rights of man” or the “public” as it was envisioned in the Constitution.

            Dewey’s concerns about totalitarianism in the 1930s are good lessons as we watch the 2020 election unfold amid the social and economic disruption that is being caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and by the daily abuses of the Trump administration.  As Dewey concluded in Freedom and Culture:

If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization . . .  An American democracy can serve the world only as it demonstrates in the conduct of its own life the efficacy of plural, partial, and experimental methods in securing and maintaining an ever-increasing release of the powers of human nature, in service of a freedom which is operative and a cooperation which is voluntary (p. 133).

 

References:

 

Dewey, John. (1927, 1957).  The Public and Its Problems. Athens: Ohio University Press..

Dewey, John.  (1989).  Freedom and Culture.  Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Press. 

After the Pandemic: Defining the New Normal

We hear a lot these days about “returning to normal” and even “the new normal.”  My sense is that the Covid-19 pandemic will ultimately be seen more as a punctuation mark than as a temporary aberration.  We will not return to the past, but will need to create a new future.  

One reason is that the pandemic is forcing us to accelerate our adoption of communications technologies.  We see it not just in the technology itself, but how we are using technology to accommodate the new social restrictions.  Increasing number of adults in all sorts of jobs are working from home, for instance, conducting meetings via computer conferencing systems like Zoom, sharing documents via email, etc.  We can expect that organizations will see a value in this beyond the need for social distancing and encourage some staff to work from home more often after the pandemic itself subsides.  This, in turn, will encourage the creation of work teams that go well beyond the local physical community, encouraging companies to hire staff who will continue to live at a distance from the workplace and, in the process, further encouraging the globalization of both the culture and the economy.  

We also see the beginnings of a vision of education as schools re-convene this fall and mix in-class with “remote” learning.  Many schools are offering three options: full in-classroom, a hybrid in which students study online four days a week and meet together once, and fully online instruction.  As institutions, their community constituencies, and students—become comfortable with these new options, it will generate a generation of students for whom remote working is a comfortable environment.  When they graduate, those students will be more comfortable in professions that allow them to work from home.

These two factors have put pressure on our current infrastructure, as witnessed by Zoom’s national “crash” as some K-12 schools and higher education institutions reconvened this week.  The pressure is on to create a stronger infrastructure for synchronous remote communications—what we used to call teleconferencing.  The new expectation will be that students must have universal access to classes and that professionals must have universal access to their work environment.  It is also easy to imagine the pressure on online publishing and international sharing of open educational resources (OERs) in this new educational “normal.”

At the same time, technology is eliminating geography and ethnicity as a way to define the limits of community.  The new normal of working at a distance will create new kinds of professional communities that are not defined by location but by the work itself and the broad societal impact of that work.  All of these factors will need to be addressed as we work to establish a new normal.   

The pandemic is occurring during—and perhaps accelerating—an important generational change, as Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) move toward retirement, giving GenXers and Millennials room to grow into their careers.  The oldest Boomers are now 74; the youngest are 56.  They currently account for only 21.9% of the total workforce, and the vast majority will retire within the decade. Meanwhile, the Pew Foundation reports that GenXers (born between 1965 and 1980) and Millennials (1981 – 1996) each account for a third or more of the American workforce.   Most members of this new workforce majority grew up during the technological revolution.  For them, email, the web, Zoom, twitter, etc., have been the norm most of their lives.  They will be quick to adapt to a new education and work environment embedded in the new technologies and to foster other social innovations in this new environment.  

In short, the new normal will be one marked by continuing change.  The immediate challenge will be to remind ourselves of the foundational principles on which the new normal must be based and to articulate them for this new environment.  As we move through the pandemic, it would be good to keep an eye out for innovations that could—or should—be part of the new normal, whenever that may come.

Learning from the Pandemic

This past spring, communities across the United States took steps to try to contain the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time of sometimes desperate innovation, as States closed businesses and schools and even churches to try to keep residents safe from infection. Many experts are now predicting that the coming months will see another rise in infections. Indeed, that is already the case in some parts of the country.

With that in mind, perhaps this summer is a particularly good time to begin to identify things that seemed to work, things that were good ideas but need some work, and things that we need to start thinking about so that we are better prepared when the next spike comes along. What did we do at the community, State, and national levels to respond to the pandemic? What lessons have we learned?  What innovations have been successful? What ideas need to be tested?  What do we need to avoid?

Here is one thought to get us started: As the pandemic closed businesses around the nation, one big concern was the huge increase in unemployment, especially among workers who may not have much savings. The federal government responded by giving each affected head of household a check for $1,200.  I suggest a somewhat different approach next time.  Instead of sending money directly to workers, give the money to employers so that they can keep employees on their payroll and, in the process, keep their health care and other benefits in place.  If businesses are not able to open for a while, employees will still have their jobs and receive some compensation and not need to start totally from scratch when the economy re-opens.

Similarly, we need to review how retail businesses adapted to continue to serve walk-in customers during this period. What practices should be mainstreamed? What physical changes to the retail environment can be adjusted to make a “new normal” work well for both customer and provider?

We’ve also seen widespread innovation in the use of online technology to keep both our K-12 schools and colleges/universities operating during the pandemic. Now, as pressures to re-open mount, is a good time to evaluate those experiences. What works best? What changes are needed to institutionalize new elements of the learning environment for the long term?  

What changes do we need to make in our health care system to ensure that we can more quickly and effectively respond to future pandemics? We are still in the midst of this crisis, but we should look at what has been done thus far, what worked and what didn’t, and prepare a new environment. Certainly, one issue is how we get medical supplies to the front line in a rapidly developing pandemic. What should be the role of the states? What should be the role of the federal government?  

There is much to be done. While the pandemic continues, we need to find some time and resources to review and to prepare for the next round and for the new normal that must follow.

Finding Community

Watching the Facebook postings these last weeks has been a struggle.  We seem to be living in a time when there are only extremes of thought.  One side, it seems, can win only if the other is utterly defeated.  Gone is the middle ground, whether it be the town square or the chambers of government where problems can be solved by people working together, finding compromise and, occasionally, even discovering new solutions that neither side can claim as their own. 

The other day, the continuing bad news surrounding Donald Trump prompted me to write on Facebook: “It is amazing how we have lost our sense of shared community over the past few years.”  Indeed, I have to wonder whether we even know how to define “community” in this new world—this global information society.

For many years now, I have looked to Wendell Berry on this issue.  Berry is a poet, novelist, and essayist who celebrates the rural, agricultural way of life that can still be found in rural Kentucky where he makes his home—a place that is not unlike rural central Pennsylvania, where I live in the cocoon of a college town surrounded by small communities.  Berry 

has made the question of localism a focus of his work for many years; in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, he described the idea of community this way: “…community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature” (Berry, 1992, 1993, p. 120).  In It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lectures and Other Essays, he delved more deeply into the role of community in the lives of individuals:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it.  To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it.  By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it.  By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place.  By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of pre-emptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world.  As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection.  And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy (Berry, 2012 p. 14).

            Technology has tended to make less urgent the idea of localism as a defining element of “community.”  In the old days, being part of a community meant that, in one way or another, you and other members were reliant on each other.  You may shop at my store, but your daughter teaches my grandson at school.  We are not strangers on the street.  We have interconnections at many levels that make us part of each others’ lives and prompts the “pre-emptive sympathy” that Berry writes about.  

            That said, the ideal of “community” also depended in the past on the ideal of “locality.”  Today, however, we also have other kinds of community in this technological age.  Today’s professional communities may be distributed nationally or internationally.  Like local communities, they may be very important to our careers and to our sense of personal identity.  They may offer many opportunities for “pre-emptive sympathy,” but they may lack the multiple layers of inter-connection that we find in local communities.  It is all complicated.

            The complexity of “community” in our times makes it difficult to tease out a shared sense of sympathy, affection, and caring based on our awareness of connectedness and shared responsibility for a “neighborly, kind, and conserving economy,” as Berry describes it.  The result is that we are left alone with our beliefs, which, left unexplored, tend then to transform into prejudices.

            The challenge for all of us is to seek out opportunities to share experiences, our talents, our philosophies of life in ways that bring us together.  Yes, we all can look at each other and find those things that set us apart from one another.  The real challenge, though, is to find those things that can help us see how we are connected.  Finding common ground, where we can come together and build a better community, is the real challenge of politics in a democracy.

References

Berry, Wendell (1992, 1993).  Sex, economy, freedom & community.  New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books.

Berry, Wendell (2012).  It all turns on affection: the Jefferson lecture and other essays. Berkeley: Counterpoint.