Undermining Democracy: "Compassionate Conservatism" and Democratic Education

...Ron 74 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 Berger's story of the small school in Shutesbury, Massachusetts (An Ethic of Excellence) is probably one of hundreds...

...After a half-hour class discussion, Darrell's view was winning, so I set the rock aside...

...The collective bodies that once did some of this "thinking" and "acting" on behalf of the lower and working classes have been hard hit...

...Compassion for our fellow citizens is the first victim of such stress...

...We should choose another direction, reclaiming the intellectual openness and ingenuity that once made us the forerunners of a democratic future...

...Huck was, in many ways, an abused child, but he enjoyed something, notes Mintz, that "too many children today are denied and which adults can provide"—the opportunity to use their childhood in ways that sustain their dreams, not just their worries and fears...

...Schools that base their practice on road tests are not easy to replicate...

...One recent study of high school students found that only 35 percent thought that people with profoundly disagreeable ideas had a right to publish their ideas...

...Today, connections that link the young to the world of adults have grown attenuated...

...Similarly, the hand as an extension of the mind, designed to do more than turn the dial, is still critical for building the future...

...Current policy leads to more and more centralized power over children and family life, as well as to intellectual rigidity and narrowness...

...Forty years of experience in schools have shown me the amazing capacity for "abstract" learning and empathy within every child...

...America's prominence in science and technology was built upon our respect for imagination and the practical arts...

...today with a population many times as large there are less than fifteen thousand boards—mostly powerless except for floating bonds...

...Even if tests were far better than they are (and in fact, they are appallingly limited even at measuring important skills)—the high-stakes focus undercuts even the best use of testing...

...We barely even teach the subject, so concerned are we about algebra...

...It will, however, take more than schools to close the real achievement gaps—not just the testing kind...

...Figuring out how to do the one is much like figuring out how to do the other...

...or what punishment fits what crime...

...We can start to provide that opportunity by renouncing the mania that's driving our kids into ever-narrower grooves, starting at an ever-earlier age...

...In most places in this nation neither parent, teacher, nor principal has the power to decide if it's in the child's best interest to be "held over...

...These twin capacities—open-minded intelligence and empathy—make the idea of democracy fragile but not utopian, feasible for the long haul if we don't depend too much on luck but count instead on nourishing both minds and emotions...

...we would think more about it...

...But this is not such a case...

...It wasn't writ in the stars...

...We still all agree, for example, that only a small part of the task of becoming a driver involves reading the driver's manual and learning to pass the written portion of the driver's test, no matter how arduous we might make the test...

...They must live in settings where they witness grown-ups with real standards...

...However, more to the point, if a foreign enemy sought to undermine our democracy, it would be hard for them to come up with a better design than the schools we have...

...We have created this untenable fact of life—this divide between the real world of adults and the real world of schools...

...Like Starbucks, the best schools share many characteristics...

...To preserve that respect, we have to tamp down our enthusiasm for text-based learning as the only source of achievement or competence...

...It seemed uncontroversial, except to Darrell, who interrupted as I was steamrolling a rock into the nonliving box: he had a contrary opinion...

...I was very happy when the conservative American Enterprise Institute issued a call for a forum to defend "The Value of Play...

...Many years ago, I learned as a teacher of five-year-olds that they had an amazing potential for tackling difficult ideas...

...Teaching democracy, if we take it seriously, may be as hard as teaching modern science...

...Woe unto us if we decide that rigor requires us to dispense with the road test altogether, which is effectively what we are doing in our schools...

...Was nonliving the same as dead...

...But it is not only democracies that have citizens...

...Fourth, they need schools that belong to their communities and families and know them well...

...So I try to imagine an educational system devoted to nurturing democracy...

...But schools are also the essential vehicle for tackling the citizenship gap, the hopefulness gap, the kid/adult gap...

...We barely have time to contemplate our own children, much less their schooling...

...This article is adapted from a talk given at the Forum for Education and Democracy in Chicago in spring of 2006...

...That accounts in part for my long-term optimism...

...Part of that "real education" is witnessing at close hand how adults disagree and yet make decisions...

...And another: when I ask audiences how many of them know Robert's Rules of Order, very few students raise their hands, and afterward others ask me what in the world I was talking about—even though these are the rules governing virtually every powerful decision-making body in our land...

...No wonder my contractor in upstate New York complains that he hires graduates who passed the math test but don't know how to use a ruler...

...FQUALLY DANGEROUS is our mindless acceptance of the idea that the real vilI lains are the people who know the kids, their families, and their circumstances best— the local community, not to mention parents and, above all, mothers...

...But there are different ways to move forward...

...If the polls show that parents trust their teachers (even if they'd like a second opinion from time to time), then it's due, so we're told, to their self-interested bias...

...No one should be for fluff, or softness, or too much focus on affect or mindless self-esteem...

...And this is a form of adult authority too sadly lacking...

...What had been a dry lesson turned into a fascinating monthlong adventure—on a topic nearly as complex as democracy...

...Still, looking at history's arc, democracy seems a fragile and almost unnatural idea...

...It's not a right or left idea...

...And the adults on the television and computer screens are not a substitute...

...The closest we get to it is the more neutral concept of being civic-minded...

...The poor need democracy as much as the rich (surely as much as do the Iraqis...

...or whether science or history should be taught at all in the early grades, and if so, exactly how...

...Not easily, but it is all do-able...

...Today we are far behind...

...No one, right or left, would sacrifice our children's future for the sake of a frivolous present...

...In the ensuing weeks, I discovered how complex the neat division actually was...

...But it's the focus on narrowly defined "academics"—starting more or less at birth—that is, I would argue, a frill...

...But they are destroyable on order, and many have been destroyed in the recent decades of federally backed high-stakes testing...

...We never have used them very well to pass on plain practical smarts...

...What the poor need, our critics argue, is something different, something more like a boot camp with a boot-camp approach to intellectual skill and authority...

...It can't happen where we avoid uncertainty because it doesn't fit the multiplechoice format, or where children's thirst for independence or their hands-on delight with real craftsmanship is called fluff—too time-consuming, untestable...

...Another example: 72 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 although we worry about citizens who don't understand calculus, we are apathetic about citizens who are easily fooled by "lying statistics...

...The motives of the supporters of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which fixes in law our misplaced obsessions, vary considerably...

...it won't save lives...

...Nor are we adept at using schools as a means of teaching and supporting ideas (we prefer "just the facts, ma'am...

...Study after study reports the same worrisome news: the average citizen does not take the Constitution seriously and flatly disagrees with many of its key provisions—especially when it comes to the Bill of Rights...

...One of the things that happy schools have in common is that their students and teachers think they are special, not standardized, not mass-produced, not shaped to someone else's prescription...

...A proudly conservative Republican administration has become, in David Brooks's words, "the accountability cop" over America's countless communities— because they don't trust us...

...Is any of this possible in public schools...

...Everyone complains, but the gerrymandering somehow slipped by us...

...Study after study tells us that our children's futures depend on reconnecting...

...The best schools keep their eye on the prize—the kids—and not just on the anonymous higher authorities...

...In fact, for a decade or longer before the test craze hit us, hundreds and hundreds of such schools were founded, mostly in urban settings, that demonstrated that this kind of schooling needn't be the exception, and that parents of all persuasions, incomes, and colors can embrace such schooling...

...It was a modest and essential step when it came to civil rights...

...It was always an unlikely claim...

...We must, regrettably, take control away from the bleeding hearts—parents and teachers alike—and focus on what the higher authorities can measure...

...In 1983, A Nation at Risk—the basic text of the current wave of school reform—argued that America's prosperity and security had been threatened more by its educators than by any foreign enemy...

...Ideology smacks of partisanship, so we fall back on patriotic clichés and rituals...

...The current test-oriented approach to defining "academics" deprives the least powerful children of precisely what academia at its best offers: the ability to use one's mind freely, with agility, and with self-discipline...

...Is it because these ideas are too abstract and difficult...

...Yet such a system is hardly even a third-place contestant in most reform packages...

...Our children are at risk in this vast shift of power away from the home, the school, and the local community...

...Example: I was teaching a simple prescribed lesson on living and nonliving things...

...Still, they have together helped to remove democracy from our schools...

...Now, we are in a century that will challenge the ideas underlying democracy as never before, and the odds on its survival seem about even—so long as we depend on word of mouth and happenstance...

...It's because we are naturally capable of arguing about, and learning about, hard questions, and of imagining ourselves in the shoes of others that it's possible but not inevitable— that democracy can win...

...Those of us who advocate a different kind of childhood are on occasion labeled elitist: we fail, it is said, to confront the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children, which requires us to DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION throw overboard the frills of childhood and, not coincidentally, the frills of local democracy...

...Restoring the idea of "play" as a valuable intellectual tool need not be a partisan topic...

...We take for granted, for example, that partisan gerrymandering has made voting seem pointless in the vast majority of the districts that elect our Congress...

...IT'S NOT ONLY conservatives who have turned our schools into Dickensian drudge mills, but liberals too, and some of our staunchest civil rights advocates...

...Democracy rests on both intellectual skepticism and empathy, which are the underpinnings as well of play...

...Although we are a nation born out of ideology, Americans are not comfortable with ideologies...

...This, in turn, leads me to believe that although democracy is not the natural state of the species, it is not unnatural either...

...Ending recess, ignoring arts and crafts, shop, and music—these are signs of peril to the human intellect...

...DISSENT I Fall 2006 n 73 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION If meeting deadlines, accepting responsibility, speaking clearly, weighing evidence, working with others, trying stuff out—if all this counts, as the people who know the kids know it does, then we need an alternative examination system, because none of the above counts a whit on the only tests to which our children are now subjected...

...Choice is harder to produce in small communities and can even be divisive of democratic community...

...That gap closely mirrors the evergrowing economic and social inequalities in our society...

...And to this end, they say, we must give up our love affair with local democracy...

...And in the process they'll probably do a damn sight better at narrowing the testing gap, though test scores alone cannot be the measure of their success...

...She has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer, and public advocate and is the author of several books on progressive education...

...Year by year it is harder to make the case for the practicality of democracy...

...But in the process some of us grew overfond of the idea that federal intervention is the answer to everything, and others saw a chance to dismantle public education "as we know it" through federal mandates...

...Our challenge is to reverse the process...

...Second, they must live with adults who take responsibility for decisions and stand by them—exercising that fundamental capacity of citizenship: human judgment...

...Steven Mintz in the closing chapter of his astute history of childhood—Huck's Raft—reminds us that Huck and Tom, for all their sorrows, had "many ties to a host of adults, some of whom were family members, but many of whom were not...

...They are built around real people in real communities, and as such are not intended to be replicable on order...

...and citizens everywhere have obligations— just different ones depending on the kind of political system they live in...

...Or to decide what is the best way to teach Jack—not "Jacks," but this one student in particular—how to read...

...Schools for democracy are quintessentially always an act of collaboration with families and communities—expressions of America's grassroots vitality and ingenuity...

...We did not intend to let our young drift, subject to the relentless pressures of a consumer-driven, media-driven society, but we did it—in our own lifetimes...

...Occasionally, "citizenship" makes it...

...Many one-school towns have managed to build both progressive practice and communal democracy...

...It is a time when kids are bursting with energy, intelligence, and capacity for learning— and we spend it boring the majority of them to death, systematically disengaging them from their native intelligence and compassion...

...DEBORAH W. MEIER is currently on the faculty of New York University's Steinhardt School of Education as senior scholar and adjunct professor as well as board member of the Coalition of Essential Schools...

...The leisure that democracy requires of its citizens—the leisure to contemplate, reflect, and exchange ideas with one's fellows— hasn't been so scarce since the end of the last century, when the forty-hour week at last became "secure...

...but unlike Starbucks, each rests on the authority of those who know the kids best...

...If the schools are to close the gap between black and white or between the United States and its foreign competitors, then the "joy of learning" is a luxury that will hurt the most vulnerable in the long run—this is the message daily driven home by NCLB supporters...

...And they need a real education— not test prepping—even more than the rich...

...More important, they will provide the groundwork for tackling the staggering divide between the haves and have-nots...

...They must, in short, be surrounded by grown-ups whom the young can imagine becoming and would like to become...

...Unions and civic groups no longer play as central a role as they did in my youth, for example, in telling and then enacting a different story...

...it might even make sense to think of them together...

...Meanwhile, decisions we might have a say in making, if we understood statistics, are made without our voice or influence...

...ALL HAPPY FAMILIES are, Tolstoy notwithstanding, not alike—although, like all happy schools, they have some things in common...

...What an extraordinary waste of an extraordinary period in the life of a human being...

...We don't trust ideas or intelligence...

...There's always that other part, the road test...

...A lot of what we value might be thrown out...

...The proof of their success lies in the longitudinal stories of their graduates, all of them...

...For the last fifty years, first in the name of civil rights, we have moved the big educational decisions from the school level to the state and now the federal level...

...These are schools of "choice"—although not complete choice—within existing public school buildings and districts...

...As long as education remains a topic that practitioners and "intellectuals" rarely join in discussing, much less practitioners and ordinary citizens, it seems unlikely that we will use schools to pass on the democratic idea—or much else in the way of ideas...

...When I was born there were two hundred thousand school boards...

...DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 75...

...Article after article on education reminds us the nation's future depends on schools, but whether they list three or thirty goals for schooling, rarely does the word "democracy" appear even in passing...

...If rocks were hard to classify, how about a few leaves that once were on trees...

...Schools that aim at authentic work, attested to by independent experts, where decisions are made by those who must carry them out (including the kids), are able to produce productive members for their communities— even if the communities are very different...

...We've done this with wisdom and luck—and because of the unrelenting pressure of "the people," organized in one way or another...

...The second is authentic learning...

...It's worth noting that modern scientific ideas don't fare much better in public opinion polls...

...It might save us money...

...They will often be traditional to the core, and many will not live up to the potential I see in them...

...It doesn't work...

...Then we were ahead of the world's work-time norms...

...First of all, kids must see that adults care about getting things right for reasons beyond scores...

...Third, they need schools that provide safe opportunities to explore their own life-sustaining and joyous powers under the guidance of adults the world respects...

...There I DISSENT / Fall 2006 • 7 I DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION was, with a collection of items to he placed in one of two bins—living or nonliving...

...They see the job of DEMOCRAT IC EDUCATION adults as one of nurturing intelligence and empathy and openness to the world, while cherishing their children's uniqueness...

...We can hardly argue that we've paid much attention to how it is passed from generation to generation...

...That's one reason liberals fear a Constitutional Convention...

...Every parent, not just authoritarian ones, knows that there are times when saying "no" may seem mean and heartless but is, in fact, essential for the child's long-term best interest...

...But that's a matter for argument and persuasion, and the alternative to persuasion in this case is a cure worse than the disease...

...The test given to immigrants applying for citizenship asks more questions about the design of our flag than the character of our Constitution...

...These schools do not emblazon the word "progressive" on their shirtfront, but they often take John Dewey many steps forward...

...Mostly, we count on word of mouth and the happenstances of growing up...

...The good news is that this was up from 25 percent before they took a course on the topic...

...at times it may be as counterintuitive...

...While the well-off can hire "thinkers" and "doers" (lobbyists) to tell their story and protect their interests, the less well-off have to scramble to make sense of things...

...That cannot happen in settings where everything that young people (and their teachers) have a natural curiosity about—such as when a leaf ceases to be alive—or that appeals to their enthusiasm for challenge and risk-taking is labeled a frill...

...This old-fashioned idea can be reinvented in modern guise...

...For the first time in our history we have more, not fewer, dropouts, all in the name of "rigor" and "high standards...

...How could that be how explain it to the young...