Democracy First

                Public education in America has always been conflicted, always trying to serve several functions or purposes at once.  David Labaree argues that there are three purposes of public education:  social mobility, efficiency, and democratic equality.  Even the work of Horace Mann and John Dewey had to satisfy the cry for making education relevant to work.  We make students start thinking about careers before they even get to high school, and students who apply to PELL grants have to have a certified area of study to get approved.  One of the most common complaints people who teach general education classes hear is the ubiquitous “I’ll never use this” argument, as if ‘use’ was restricted to what they have to do to get a job.  The assessment regime brought on by Bush’s NCLB reforms drives the efficiency purpose in today’s schools.  Teachers spend hours generating and collecting data that has little to do with anything except to prove the school is efficient.  What gets lost in the fog is the idea of democracy and education.

                When democracy is thought of as part of public education, it is usually framed as a subject or content area, as in making students pass a civics class.  It is as if democracy can be reduced to a set of state or national objects that can be measured in a multiple- choice test and then forgotten.  Americans are notoriously ill-informed about their own government.  (I once had a student tell me that they remembered learning that we had a bi-caramel form of government).  As Dewey, in particular, argued, democracy is a set of lived relationships and not something that can be memorized for Friday’s ten question true/false test.  In a society where education plays a more and more limited role in economic and social mobility and ‘work’ is a less and less reliable indicator of financial stability, the priorities we set for public education have to be realigned.  It makes no sense promoting efficiency if that efficiency doesn’t produce real outcomes for the students after they leave school.  It is time, if we want to rebuild the democracy in tatters all around us, to democracy the central purpose of public education.

                To make democracy central to the purpose of public education means changing the institutions that provide that education, both in their structure and their relationship to the communities that surround them.  The only way to build a democratic education is to bring democracy into the process, not as just a subject, but as an operating principle.  We still have schools that are creations of an industrialized society based on office and factory work.  We serve a narrow band-with of students, hoping to push enough of them into an economy that is no longer in synch with the education provided.  What we need are schools that are more interested in how knowledge is made than in the mindless transmission of information.

                Schools used to be an information rich environment, sometimes the only one in town.  Today, information is more readily available outside of school.  We do a terrible job of helping students navigate that environment.  We use tests that are more about distribution patterns than they are essential elements of learning, and we assume that every child/student should want to learn the same thing at the same time in the same way.  Brilliant.  If democracy is a set of lived experiences, those experience should be tied to the interests and specific circumstances of the learners.  A school in Flint, Michigan, for example, can teach everything we consider important by learning together about the water crises.  Instead of leaving school dulled into a stupor, they should continue learning and engaging their world.  Right now, some schools are at war with their communities instead of supporting their communities.  Let students practice democracy in their own learning instead of being directed to follow the narrow path some undereducated legislator prescribed for them.  Let teachers create and engage with students and parents.  Let them connect to the resources and problems in the local community so they can learn how to engage with and change the political system.  A democratic education is dynamic.  It feeds our desire to learn instead of killing it.  If you’re worried that we’ll lose the rigor or the foundational knowledge that we so often want school to provide, you’re ignoring the fact that we’ve already lost it.

               

Education and Democracy

                In 1916 John Dewey published Democracy and Education in the twilight of the Gilded Age.  He wrote about democracy being under siege by the newly felt powers of industrialization and promoted education as a remedy.  He saw the need to build democratic relationships and citizenship as proof that an educational system was needed.  A hundred years later, we are entering a new Gilded Age and democracy is once again under siege.  It is time to rewrite Dewey’s idea about the relationship of education and democracy to address the new realities and new threats we face.

                Dewey, and Horace Mann before him, faced an uphill battle in arguing for a free and public education for all.  Like Mann, Dewey’s ideas were wrapped up in the need for work.  In the age of robots and AI, it is questionable whether or not work should still play such pivotal role in education.  What the educational reforms in the last century brought us was a Fordist institution full of daily schedules, whistles and bells and teachers that operated like foremen.  Those schools prepared people to enter the new industrial workforce and even prepared a few of them to take managerial positions in the evolving economy.  Eventually, laws such as Taft-Hartley helped those workplaces become more democratic.  The explosion of the American economy after WWII set off three decades of economic expansion and investment in public education as both an economic and civic necessity.  America built schools to house the baby-boomers, expanded university access and kick-started the community college movement.  Heading into the 1980’s, it seemed like the central role education and educational access played were essential to American prosperity and civic involvement.

                Beneath the surface, however, the tides were starting to shift.  Nixon pushed to make university education less accessible to curtail the student demonstrations that he hated.  In the seventies, the connection between productivity and wages was severed, and while productivity soared, wages stagnated and declined.  Union membership started to decline, and the rift between the ‘silent majority’ and the universities started to grow.  The integration of public schools brought on by Brown v Board of Education started to stall out.  By the early 80’s, public education came under a withering thirty- year smear campaign launched by the Carnegie Commission Report, A Nation at Risk.  What followed were decades of manufactured and deceptive studies that purported to show the schools of America were failing.  All of this culminated in the George W. Bush program called No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  By then, the narrative was all too familiar.  Schools were gulags and teachers were unionized thugs.  Education need good old capitalistic competition to bring it around.  Hidden beneath this was the right-wing attack on public education because they didn’t want to pay for it or send their precious children to public schools.

                There were and are things that are certainly wrong with American schools, but these attacks exaggerated and sometimes falsified the data showing the decline of schools.  Students were not getting dumber, but politicians were, and their legislative programs devastated school communities by underfunding and over-regulating what went on in schools.  The post-secondary institutions were underfunded to the point that getting a college education was out of the reach of more and more of the population.  Education became and extractive exercise of charter schools and testing and text book giants eating up more and more of the money available with no corresponding uptick in performance. 

                Which brings us to this new call to rebuild the crucial role education plays in democracy.  A Jeffersonian democracy demands a well informed and well- educated electorate.  Any country that elects Trump as president obviously doesn’t have one of those.  We cannot simply remake the schools we used to have any more than we can recreate the economy and politics from fifty years ago.  We are going to have to rebuild our schools to reflect the current state of the economy and democracy.  I am going to spend the next few posts to this blog concentrating on how that might be done.

Re-Languaging Democracy 

                We tend to think of democracy as a thing, a series of institutions and laws that is meant to churn out some idealized result.  Maybe it’s time that we adjust the way we think about and conceptualize what it means to live in a democracy.  It is particularly important to do so in the midst of the assault on those institutions and laws currently underway.  If we want to revitalize our democratic roots, we have to radically and fundamentally re-language them.  We have a Platonic view of democracy even though it’s more Aristotelian in its essence.  We are trying to cobble together institutions and practices meant for an agrarian oligarchy that are hopelessly out of step with the broader enfranchisement and rapid access to information and communication of our era. 

                The most important thing to do is to see democracy as an experience and not just a governmental structure.  Too many people see the government as this ‘thing’ out there that is not really a part of their daily lives.  We claim to be a democracy, but we have always practiced more autocratic tendencies in our schools, our jobs and our families.  We offer one semester of High School civics as a band aid to the disparity between what we claim to value and how we really act.  Chomsky is famous for making this point.  When Dewey wrote about democracy, he saw it as a process of inquiry, one that had to expand participation and scope.  If we want to save or reclaim a democratic society we have to start teaching ourselves how to be a different kind of citizen, one that does more than vote sporadically in an election or two.

                The experience of democracy is hard work.  It means real engagement with people that are different from us and see the world from a different perspective than we do.  What we do now is to put these differences into a competition with each other and let the winner have their way.  If the process is contaminated with large sums of money, it’s easy to see how little understanding or accommodation ever happens.  In Dewey’s sense of inquiry, he strives to frame these conflicts as opportunities to learn and perfect our collaboration instead of playing a zero-sum game of diminishing returns.  Educating people to do this has to start very early in their lives; it can’t wait until they are adults already habituated to win at all costs.  Democracy is a way of making knowledge that reframes the way we understand the world through our encounters with others.

                One of our challenges is that there are so many more players in the game now.  Our democracy was never meant to be this inclusive.  Its institutions and practices served the oligarchs that designed it pretty well.  As long as they were mostly benign and progressive, the country thrived.  But that good thing never included everyone and never was meant to.  The great triumph of American democracy is that it ever so gradually pushed itself to actually include, albeit in often limited form, more and more people.  The institutions that were created by oligarchs have been modified to work for a more representative cross-section of Americans, although by no means all Americans.  One way to understand where we are politically is to recognize the regrettable, but probably inevitable, move by people who see their privilege being eroded to dial back and restrict the access so many have fought so hard to create.  It is no coincidence that their efforts have been so focused on schools.  The way we learn to think about our engagements in a common sphere are the key to what our democracy will look like.

                How do we learn to talk to each other and learn from each other?  One sign a democracy is in trouble is when it can no longer produce a “we.”  I’m not suggesting some homogenized “we” that erases our differences or back doors a hegemonic view.  But out of our individual and group identities we have to find a way to produce a “we.”  Not because we have to agree; we won’t.  Not because we have to all be the same: not happening.   We have to create it so we can engage each other in the process of change and renewal.  We are not looking for an ‘answer;’ we are looking for a beginning.  Dewey believed we can learn to do this.  He believed we could learn how to not just govern democratically but to think democratically.  I believe that, too.

A Modest Proposal (Part One)

                I try to be reasonable.  Most days I manage to at least look like I’m pulling it off.  Not today.  Today, I skipped my meds and am going to let you know how I really feel about all the political garbage I’ve been trying not to write about.  I can’t stand one more day of people thinking that simply electing a new president or congress will significantly change the course we’re on.  We keep watching the destruction of what is left of our country assuming that it will turn out all right in the end. Really?  Apparently, Mueller is about to end his long- awaited report.  Maybe it will blow the top off things, but it seems to me – after Barr finishes playing hide and seek with it – there is at least an equal chance it will end not with a bang but a whimper.  So here is my modest proposal – with all due apologies – or at least the first five things I think have to happen if we’re serious about turning things around.

1.        Disband the Republican Party and classify it as a terrorist organization:  Let’s stop pretending that the Republican Party is part of democratic society.  They nominated a candidate singularly unfit for the presidency and have obstructed every attempt to investigate and prosecute his wrong doing.  They are supporting and protecting a Russian asset who is destroying our alliances and will soon gut the economy.  They lack the basic civil decency to be ashamed of what they’ve done.  They should all be investigated as traitors and terrorists.

2.       Try Trump and McConnell for treason:  As bad as Trump is, Mitch may be worse.  It is his job to check Trump, and he refuses to do it.  He has violated the constitution in withholding a hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee and has aided and abetted Trump at every step of the way.  Together they have created a crisis that has locked the government into a pattern of gridlock where nothing ever happens.  That means that the bad guys are winning.  If you want to add Ryan to this list for what he did as Speaker, that’s fine with me. 

3.       Nationalize the wealth of the richest 1000 people in the country:  The idea that they have accumulated this wealth legally and with merit is absurd.  They rob the system in countless ways.  The own more than the rest of us combined.  They stole a trillion dollars in 08 and came back last year in the tax bill and stole a trillion more.  Think of that the next time you drive down a pothole invested freeway.  They can keep some arbitrary sum – maybe 100 million.  If they complain they should be sent to ‘reeducation camps’ where they watch videos of guillotines in action.

4.       Vacate every judgeship filled by Trump and McConnell:  All of these judges were appointed by a president who was elected illegally.  A president who is an asset of our greatest enemy.  They have no right to serve, and if left in place will erode the faith in the justice system and hamper real efforts at reform.  This is the most insidious thing Mitch has done.  They need to be removed now and filled by a new president and congress.

5.       Double down on the Green New Deal:  We have to start making a serious move on climate change.  This policy is a good start.  The real question is not “can we afford it?”  The real question is how can we not afford it.  Decentralizing energy will open up the economy and the society in ways that could profoundly change the way we live.

There’s more, but they are coaxing me into a quite room to take my meds. 

Languaging a New Order

                I’ve been writing about Maturana’s use of the word languaging as the way humans, all humans, bring forth a world they share and maintain with other people.  Harari calls these worlds an ‘imagined order.’  We all live in one of these imagined orders, and by living in them we change them.  The story we tell ourselves to create the imagined order is subject to the same process of autopoiesis that our material presence in the world is.  Just as we are always conserving the essential structural couplings that keep us alive while simultaneously adapting them, we do the same thing with the imagined order.  It seems reasonable to assume, that at some point the imagined order has been stretched and pulled so much that it loses its elasticity.  At that point, a new order has to emerge that sustains the balance and integrity of ourselves and our environment.  A new order could have disastrous consequences and end the society and individuals that follow it, or it could usher in a new and dynamic period that is energized by new possibilities obscured by the old order.  My contention is that we are at one of those crossroads. 

                We are living on the fumes of the Enlightenment, an imagined order that privileged freedom, democracy and most of all reason.  It was assumed that humans were essentially rational, and that by using that rationality they fashion a world of participatory governance and personal freedom.  For a while, it was a roaring success.  The great democracies of the world and the great advancements of science social policy were a clear advancement, a better imagined order, than the religious chaos of kings and princes fighting over the allegiance of their subjects.  Over the last two and a half centuries, the concepts of freedom and democracy evolved and became more inclusive.  In America, a democracy of oligarchs was pushed and expanded to become a much more inclusive and dynamic form of democracy.  Personal freedoms expanded to include greater economic, sexual and social options.  But over time, the autopoietic push and pull of these adaptations has hollowed out the ideas of the Enlightenment.

                Freedom is easy to understand in relationship to a tyrannical king or a despotic church, but what does it really mean today?  Absent the countervailing influence of order or duty, freedom becomes a toxic example of extreme uncoupling.  Democracy started out as a limited experiment for the few before morphing into enfranchisement of the many, but we can already see how the pursuit of power is trying to limit participation and access.  Perhaps most fundamentally, reason went from a universal tenet to a situational privilege.  As Derrida pointed out, reason depends on who is talking and where you stand in relationship to them.  As a result, the words that use to coordinate behaviors in our world now lack the power to do so.  We keep trotting out the same phasing only to confronted by people using the same language to point in a completely different direction.  We struggle to realign and sharpen what we mean, but perhaps, we should face the fact that we need a new story.

                In the American and French revolutions it was a new class of actors that lead the move to a new way of thinking about the imagined order.  They, in turn, were constantly pushed by new groups of people who wanted a new version of the story, one that included them and their desires.  We live in a moment where a mentally limited president uses the trappings of ‘America’ to induce racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic hatred.  The only people I see capable of telling a story consistent with what Lincoln called our ‘better angels’ are young women and people of color.  They are the most energized and inclusive voices on the stage, but they need to turn their languaging toward a new horizon.  It is too late to save this order; a new one must be created.  If democracy has a future it has to be an economic and environmental concept and not just a political one.  If freedom is going to be redeemed, it has to be in the context of social and environmental consciousness.  Capitalism can’t be saved.  They have a lot of work ahead of them.  May God bless them.

Languaging Realms Part Two

               

                Languaging realms shape, define and describe the world we bring forth and share with others.  To function properly, they have to include a mechanism(s) for checking what the realm creates and to align it with the coupling that the people in it have with their surroundings.  The danger of any realm is that it will be shut off from these mechanisms and continue to drift further and further away from a sustainable coupling.  What languaged reality convinced someone to cut down the last Easter Island palm tree, commit mass suicide in the jungle or throw more plastic into the ocean?  The consequences of a languaging realm sealed off from the impact it has on the sustainable relationship with its environment can be dire.  The question we face is how do we prevent that from happening.

                America has always had a fascination with realms that devolved into fantasy.  In his book, Fantasyland, Anderson recounts the numerous religious, conspiratorial and get rich quick movements that have littered American history, so unhealthy or unsustainable narratives have been with us for a while.  My sense is that there have been two changes along the way that have made the problem existentially more problematic.  The first is the leveling and destruction of authoritative gatekeepers, and the second is the increased specialization of the discourses of academic and scientific communities.

                Authoritative gatekeepers are problematic in their own right.  While they may tamp down the most outrageous and problematic ideas and conspiracies, they can be just as wrong as any other narrative and they also prevent open access to ideas.  I am citing them here not because I think we should return to them, at least not in their historical forms, but because their absence has exacerbated the flow of unreliable information.  The internet, of course, is the primary reason that this information is so ubiquitous.  We are drowning in factoids, and most people have no idea (or inclination) to want to sort through them or carefully evaluate them.  In short, we are a culture in a transitional phase which is unable to develop legitimate authority in the way we think about and disseminate information, which leads to all kinds of wild ‘truths.’  The best example of that is a president who tells thousands of lies and is still believed by a third of the society.

                To me, the more pressing issue is an educational establishment that has monetarized their specialized ways of thinking.  To be an ‘expert,’ means pulling yourself out of the daily and ordinary conversations of the street to take refuge in a rarified community of other experts.  The people excluded in this process, which is always the vast majority of us, become more and more estranged from the process and method that produces ‘knowledge.’  This becomes entrenched in an educational system that dispenses right answers instead of engaging students in how to connect to and make their own knowledge.  It isolates the knowledge makers from the consequences or application of their knowledge.  They either end up reading papers to each other in the nearly empty conference rooms of large hotels or selling what they know to people who then use it for their purposes.  Either way, instead of informing public opinion and thought, the knowledge produced is viewed with suspicion by every one not in the discipline.

                As a result, people who identify a periodic table doubt the validity of research on climate change.  Patients who spend thirty seconds on WebMD presume to lecture their doctors on what course of treatment they should follow, and everyone mistrusts everyone else’s motives and information.  We need to rethink the relationship between schools and information.  As Stiegler suggests in States of Shock, an expert only form of knowledge production is counterproductive.  The point is not that experts should ‘dumb down’ what they do, but they have to been in constant communication with the whole community and not just the few lost souls at their conference session.  They have to become multilingual in the sense that others can at least participate in deciding what should be studied.  Any language realm that limits participation to elites should expect the kind of isolation and marginalization many of them currently experience.  Authority should come from the validation of inclusion and not from the pulpit or the committee room.    

The Kids Are Alright

                There’s been a lot of noise lately about how the Democrats, and especially the new, young Democrats, should tone down their rhetoric and their policies.  The sentiment is that they have to pay attention to the broad middle of American politics.  Maybe, these voices say, they should consider running a political fossil like Bidden to not scare off the independent voters.  As a card carrying (Medicare and social security) old, white guy, I totally disagree.  The last thing we need at this point is a timid recalculation of our political landscape.  That timid approach has left democracy clinging by a thread and threatened the viability of not just our country but our planet.

                As the most incompetent president in the history of the republic takes time out of his “executive time” to lie to the nation about the scourge from the south imperiling our nation, we need an honest assessment of where we stand.  There aren’t very many of the pillars of 20^th Century America left standing.  We have allowed so much of what we all thought was foundational to our society slip away while we checked how many ‘likes’ we accumulated on Facebook.  Now is the time for a reckoning.  We are still the richest nation on earth, but most of that wealth is concentrated in a class of kleptocrats so small they make the age of the robber barons look paltry by comparison.  They have bought their way into the political process, changing every conceivable law, rule and regulation to their benefit.  Meanwhile, the standard of living for the majority of Americans has declined and their economic future is more insecure.  The response was to pass a tax law stealing another trillion for people at the top.  Our life expectancy is even declining.  Of all the industrialized countries in the world, we have the least mobility and the most segregated and stratified society.

                Our schools have been hollowed out by decades of assault by the right-wing plutocrats who no longer see any economic or social value in making your other people’s children are educated.  They want to stifle your child’s aspirations and dreams because it might syphon off a few pennies of their wealth.  We have created schools that operate more like prisons than schools and created a whole layer of political and administrative nonsense that prevents teachers from helping their students.  We have all but abandoned making an advanced education affordable for a larger and larger section of the population.  The policies that the Koch brothers and their allies promote are so extreme that they want millions stripped of their health care, which is polite way of saying they want to promote mass extinction.  All of this has been done in the light of day by politicians trying to make ‘sensible’ and ‘moderate’ policy.  Even the most basic right, the right to vote. Is under attack by those practicing this politics of exclusion.

                The political reality is rosy compared to the environmental situation.  As so much wealth has been concentrated in fossil fuel companies, we have protected their right to make and hoard money over the right the rest of us have to a world we can actually sustain and live in.  Fish are eating plastic and making it part of the food chain.  A mass extinction is underway that will threaten the diversity and sustainability of ecosphere in ways we can hardly comprehend.  If you own beach front property near an ocean, now is the time to sell and get out.  We are deluged with this information every day but we’ve become numb to it.  Meanwhile, the ‘moderate’ politicians make more tepid policy.

                This is the time for action.  People who want to redistribute wealth, shift from fossil fuels, open up voting, radically change and fund the educational system and fight the racist, misogynist and homophobic forces of moderation deserve our help and support.  Not to do all we can to help is like sending our grandchildren out back with a shovel to start digging their own grave.  This is their cause, their time, their moment to take charge.  If it looks a little extreme, that’s because we let it get this bad.  If it offends you, look the other way.  We blew our chance to make things better.  We sold whatever principles we had for a modest pension and a few municipal bonds.  The least we can do now is get the hell out of the way.