Expanding the discussion...

Teachers of eastern religions talk about expansive vs. limiting thinking. Expansive thoughts tend to broaden views, promote connection to others, reduce tensions, breed trust, and promote creativity. Limiting, or contractive, thinking tends to narrow perspectives, incite division and distrust, induce paranoia, and reduce thinking to stereotypes, platitudes, and dogma.

Leaders can promote expansive or contractive thinking by their actions. Do your leaders:

...encourage all staff, parents and other community members to talk with each other and among themselves, or separate individuals from each other by spreading stories and gossip, punishing those who talk, and initiating whispering campaigns?

...encourage thinking out of the box, or reward certain ideas with applause while discouraging others with mockery?

...work to create a consensus from multiple viewpoints, or work to create a voting majority that can crush dissent?

...dig for information to illuminate discussion, or cherry-pick information to support a viewpoint?

...do all their business in the open for all to observe, or maneuver behind closed doors?

...allow ample time for consideration, or rush to judgment?

...treat all equally, or play favorites?

...strive for diversity of thinking, or aim for uniformity?

...say the same things to all people, or tailor their speech to their audiences?

...match their actions to their words so all remains open and accountable, or say one thing and do another?

Are your leaders helping people work better together, or setting people against each other? No matter what they are doing, you can make the environment expansive rather than contractive by your own actions:

If you hear a story, check it out in person.

If you are bullied into silence, make a point of talking louder and encouraging those around you to open up. Bullying requires the consent of the bullied.

If your leaders humiliate people, including you, call them on it publicly.

If they narrow the discussion, open it again.

If someone's views are crushed, make a point of bringing those views forward again and standing in solidarity with the silenced, even if you do not support their viewpoint.

If you feel rushed, others probably do too, so pour cold molasses on the discussion.

If the door is closed, open it.

If someone whispers to you, respond at full volume.

If you are approached in private, draw another into the conversation. If that is not possible, make it clear that you will not keep what is said confidential. If the person talking with you is uncomfortable with that, you do not have to continue.

Refuse to listen to gossip. If you overhear it, don't pass it on. Ask the gossiper if he/she is speaking from first-hand knowledge or just repeating rumors. Stop stories in their tracks: the next one will be about you.

If things you hear make you uncomfortable about someone, march right up to that person and talk it out. Chances are your discomfort was groundless.

Contractive actions cannot shut people down as long as enough people consciously practice expansive behavior, any more than darkness can survive if you turn on the light.

A Reminder...

The School Board has 9 members. Each of them alone has no power, but together they set a course for the district. They elect a chair to create agendas and run meetings. That chair has no super-powers beyond those roles.

Board members can meet with individuals and groups between meetings of the full board, but their opinions carry NO weight except in the context of the larger group. Since the chair is no more than one of nine, he or she can serve as a center of communication between meetings, but no more.

The superintendent is an administrator, employed at the pleasure of the board and delegated to carry out the board's bidding. He or she carries no super powers beyond the direction set by the board. The superintendent is delegated to represent the board, not to pursue goals independent of the board's stated wishes.

The board stands between the communities, the state, and the schools, representing the interests of all three, yet is entrusted to stand against any of those interests if the welfare of the children is at stake. Its paramount duty is to stand as guardians of the welfare of ALL the children served by the district's schools. As such, members of the board must both represent and resist each of the above constituancies.

The strength of the board lies in it's diversity, not in it's unity of purpose, thus any attempt to bully or circumvent the board is a direct threat to the children of the district, and should be considered no less.

The One-A-Month Club

Being just a rural dweeb, I only now realized the wicked-grand movement I started in early 2004---You're Welcome!---by sending a piece published in my local paper and then forgetting about it---never took off. Like walking back to the garden for the first time in August and not being able to locate the radishes.

In Nov 06, by my calculations, I should have had the entire population of earth on board, and be marching by now shoulder-to-...whatever...with all sentient beings in the known universe. No Bush 2nd term, war eliminated, energy independence, global warming reversed, single payer health care, shared wealth, the Stock Exchange converted to a community greenhouse, suits in exile. Guess a few other charter members forgot too.

Back to the original 2004 scheme, contents updated to vers. 2.010 ...a veritable progressive Ponzi...Mary Kay for the soul...a Bernie M. for social justice:

* * *

Some of us don't belong. We don't play well with others.

We aren't Democrats or Republicans. We aren't rich. We are not connected. We don't belong to any Sierra Club. We don't dress cool. We still bend for pennies on the pavement. We are not powerful or pretty. We snack while watching TV and don't work it off later. We leave early, get home late, and get bone-tired. Vacation means home from work a week. Travel means driving so far we have to buy gas. Eating out is sitting instead of taking it home in a bag. Nobody would mistake us for Wall Street.

But there are a lot of us, and when we're all together we're big and scary. (Shit, some are scary by themselves.) We don't come together often since we don't belong, but we're beginning to feel our oats. We have not quite figured out why we're so pissed, though, so sometimes we switch sides mid-sentence and mis-spell stuff on posters.

We know we've been had ... and not just the last 10 years, but ever since we can remember. This isn't about politics anymore, but about class, wealth and greed. We don't belong, but we're not stupid.

So what do we do? Get out and organize? Yeah, right. Got some corporate campaign donors for us?

There's one kind of organizing that has real appeal where we live, though, and that's the pyramid scheme. Come to think of it, even the rich and savvy know you never lose with this one. Remember that lady who sent a dollar each to the top 5 in that letter and got a million back the next month? Remember the pension funds that....Need I say more?

How about this: Find one person this month. Get that person to find one more next month. The letters and undies parties we did before were just for practice. You know how to do it...now let's go for a big prize, like the right to go on living in civilized society.

Introducing The One-a-Month Club! Ta Da! We talk, and we convince one person a month that she or he can make a difference. We ask our recruit to find one other person a month. That's just about it, except we agree to do one extra task each month to make the world a better place. It can be anything: call a senator's office with an opinion, write a letter to the paper, drive a shut-in friend to vote, stand up and spout off in a meeting, send twenty bucks to Haiti, call back old One-a-Month recruits to see if they're still members. One thing, that's all.

For those who were sneaking a peek at the TV or going for a snack, let's recap those membership rules: 1. Find one person a month to join; 2. Take one action a month to make a better world: nothing snarky, evil, dishonest, disingenuous, underhanded, stupid, or otherwise Foxy-Newsy Tea Palin-ish allowed. If you can do that, welcome to the One-a-Month Club.

You won't get a newsletter or freebies -- no membership bumper sticker, jacket, or pink Caddy -- but you don't have to send money and you'll get your country back.

Of course, we're too dumb to understand anything like exponential growth. We can't figure out that one-a-month reaches 16 million people in 2 years, then 2 billion by the 2012 election. (Whoa, 2 billion? That's more than vote in India, Dude!)

* * *

The fatal flaw? In the glare of hindsight, it's painfully clear. It was just too much to ask.

How about 1-by-2? Talk to someone within two months and do six good deeds a year. In 5 years we could have one billion members. I could post a printable membership card to pass out...make it green so it could go in your wallet with all the one dollar bills and blend.

Nah, sorry, still asking too much. Let's just feel righteous and complain while washing Tupperware in Amway soap.

The Logical Tragedy of Benson, Vermont, from Gatto's Underground History

In 1995, just about one hundred years after the inception of modern institutional schooling in America, the little town of Benson in western Vermont set a national record by voting down its proposed school budget for the twelfth time. Charlie Usher, assistant superintendent in Benson, declared his bewilderment at the town’s irresponsibility. Mr. Usher suggested the task was to get "at the root of why people would be willing to let their schools fall apart..." I think Mr. Usher is right, so let’s see what we can turn up by using common sense. But first, to show how united in outrage Benson school officials were, Education Week, the bible of the teaching business, quoted Theresa Mulholland, principal at the Benson school (more on this shortly) as saying nobody in town had a good explanation for what they were doing: "I think they just want to say ‘No,’ " she said, as if those townspeople were ornery kids or retarded children. Benson just didn’t get it. Schools need lots of money, or, as Usher suggested, they fall apart.

The Education Week piece in which I read these things covered every single inch of a two-page tabloid spread, yet nowhere could I find a single word indicating the problem might just be that its taxpayers and voters didn’t regard the Benson system as their own. Nor is there even a hint Benson may have abandoned its belief that what goes on in school is an essential enterprise worth a substantial part of its income to promote.

So I read this newspaper account of a little town in Vermont and its defiance of the state school institution pretty carefully because I sensed some important message buried there. On the third run-through I discovered what I was looking for. Let’s start with Assistant Superintendent Usher. His title implies that hidden somewhere out of sight there is a Superintendent somebody, too. If you don’t find that odd it’s because I haven’t told you that the entire school district of Benson has exactly one school with 137 kids in it. A brand-new school with a principal, too. Apparently you can’t have a principal without an assistant superintendent giving orders to that lowly functionary and a superintendent giving orders to the assistant superintendent. Three high-ranking pedagogues whose collective cost for services is about $250,000—nearly $2,000 a kid. That’s nice work if you can get it.

The new Benson school itself is worth a closer look. Its construction caused property taxes to go up 40 percent in one year, quite a shock to local homeowners just hanging on by their fingernails. This school would have been rejected outright by local taxpayers, who had (they thought) a perfectly good school already, but the state condemned the old school for not having wheelchair ramps and other features nobody ever considered an essential part of education before. Costs of reaching code compliance in the old structure were so close to the cost of a new school that taxpayers surrendered. The bond issue was finally voted. Even so, it passed only narrowly. What happened next will be no surprise. Benson School turned out to cost a lot more than voters expected. I am skeptical that it cost more than the State of Vermont expected, though.

I have some personal experience with Vermont’s condemnation of sound school structures from the little town of Walden, hardly more than a speck on the map northeast of Benson in the most beautiful hill country you can imagine. A few years ago, four pretty one-room schools dating from the nineteenth century, schools still serving 120 kids with just four teachers and no administrators, were condemned by the same crew from Montpelier that gave Benson its current tax headache. I was asked by a citizen group in Walden to drive up and speak at a rally to save these remarkable community schools, beloved by their clientele. If I tell you when I woke in the morning in Walden a moose was rooting vegetables from the garden of my hostess’ home you’ll be able to imagine them better.

The group I came to speak for, "The Road Rats" as it called itself, had already defeated school consolidation the previous year. Montpelier’s goal was to close the little schools and bus kids to a new central location miles from home. Now Montpelier took off the gloves. If persuasion and seduction wouldn’t work, coercion would. Let’s call what happened "The Benson Maneuver," passing building code provisions with no connection to normal reality. This accomplished, Vermont condemned the one-room schools for violation of these provisions. All official estimates to reach new code standards were very close to the price of consolidating the little schools into a big new one.

Road Rat resistance would be unlikely to mobilize a voting majority a second time; the publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new. Our only hope lay in getting a construction bid low enough that voters could see they had been flim-flammed. It seemed worth a try. The Walden group had been unable to find a contractor willing to publicly oppose the will of Montpelier, but by a lucky accident I knew a Vermont master architect. I called his home in Montpelier. Two hours later he was in Walden touring the condemned buildings.

Vital to understanding why the state wanted these places closed so badly was that everything in such places worked against professionalization and standardization: parents were too close to the classroom to allow smooth "professional" governance to sneak by unnoticed. It wasn’t possible in such schools to float a scientifically prepared curriculum initiative without having it come under close and critical scrutiny. That was intolerable to Montpelier, or rather to the larger octopus the Montpelier tentacle wiggled for.

After inspection, my architect pronounced the official estimates to reach code compliance cynical and dishonest. They were three times higher than the work would cost allowing for a normal profit. My architect knew the principals in the politically well-connected construction firms which had submitted the inflated bids. He knew the game they were playing, too. "The purpose of this is to kill one-room schools," he said. "All these guys will be paid off one way or another with state work for forwarding the agenda whether they get this state job or not." I asked if he would give us a counter-estimate we might use to wake up voters. "No," he said. "If I did I wouldn’t get another building job in Vermont."

Let’s get back to Benson, a classic illustration how the political state and its licensed allies feed like parasites on working men and women. Where Education Week saw deep mystery over citizen disaffection, the facts put a different spin on things. In a jurisdiction serving only 137 children, a number which would have been handled in the old and successful Walden schools with four teachers—and no supervisors other than the town’s traditions and the willing oversight loving parents would provide because the students were, after all, their own kids—taxpayers were being forced to sustain the expense of:

A nonteaching superintendent
A nonteaching assistant superintendent
A nonteaching principal
A nonteaching assistant principal
A full time nurse
A full time guidance counselor
A full time librarian
Eleven full time schoolteachers
An unknown number of accessory personnel
Space, desks, supplies, technology for all of these
One hundred thirty-seven schoolchildren? Is there a soul who believes Benson’s kids are better served in their new school with this mercenary army than Walden’s 120 were in four rooms with four teachers? If so, the customary ways we measure educational success don’t reflect this superiority. What happened at Benson—the use of forced schooling to impose career ladders of unnecessary work on a poor community—has happened all over North America. School is a jobs project for a large class of people it would be difficult to find employment for otherwise in a frightening job market, one in which the majority of all employment in the nation is either temporary or part-time.

Forcible redistribution of the income of others to provide work for pedagogues and for a support staff larger than the actual teaching corps is a pyramid scheme run at the expense of children. The more "make-work" which has to be found for school employees, the worse for kids because their own enterprise is stifled by constant professional tinkering in order to justify this employment. Suppose we eliminated the first seven positions from the list of functionaries paid in Benson: the superintendent, assistant superintendent, principal, assistant principal, nurse, guidance counselor, and librarian, plus three of the eleven teachers and all those accessory personnel. We’d have the work those folks do absorbed by the remaining eight teachers and whatever community volunteer assistance we could recruit. This would still allow a class size of only seventeen kids per teacher, a ratio big-city teachers would kill to get, and hardly more than half the load one-room Walden teachers carried. Yet it would save this little community over half a million dollars yearly.

In our hypothetical example, we left Benson with eight teachers, twice the number Walden enjoyed in its two hundred-year experience with one-room schooling. Only a calculating machine could consider a large, consolidated school to which children must commute long distances as a real advance in human affairs. An advance in wasting time certainly. Consider this angle now: who in your judgment has a moral right to decide what size weight can be fastened on the backs of the working citizens of Benson? Whose decision should that be?

From a chart included in the Education Week article, I saw that Vermont school bureaucrats extracted $6,500 in 1995 for each student who sat in their spanking new schools. That computes at $162 a week per kid. Is it fair to ask how private schools provided satisfactory service for a national average of only $3,000 a kid, about $58 a week, the same year? Or how parochial schools did it for $2,300, $44 a week? Or homeschools for a mere $500 or $1,000, or about $10 or $20 a week? Do you believe public school kids were better served for the additional money spent?

Those other places could do it because they didn’t support an anthill of political jobs, political purchases, and political routines. These other types of schooling understood—some through tradition, some through analysis, some through trusting inner voices—that transferring educational responsibility from children, parents, and communities to certified agents of the state erodes the value base of human life which is forever grounded in local and personal sovereignty.


Footnote 5: Shortly after this twelfth defeat at the hands of local citizens, the state stepped in to override the judgment of the voters. In January 1996, the Vermont State Senate passed a bill to forcibly "lend" the Benson School District the full amount of its twelve-time citizen-rejected budget. Benson voters would now pay the full amount demanded by the school district plus interest!

Four Kinds of Classroom, from Gatto's Underground History

Jean Anyon, a professor at Rutgers, recently examined four major types of covert career preparation going on simultaneously in the school world, all traveling together under the label "public education." All use state-certified schoolteachers, all share roughly common budgets, all lead to intensely political outcomes.

In the first type of classroom, students are prepared for future wage labor that is mechanical and routine. Of course neither students nor parents are told this, and almost certainly teachers are not consciously aware of it themselves. The training regimen is this: all work is done in sequential fashion starting with simple tasks, working very slowly and progressing gradually to more difficult ones (but never to very difficult work). There is little decision-making or choice on the part of students, much rote behavior is practiced. Teachers hardly ever explain why any particular work is assigned or how one piece of work connects to other assignments. When explanations are undertaken they are shallow and platitudinous. "You’ll need this later in life." Teachers spend most of their day at school controlling the time and space of children, and giving commands.

In the second type of classroom, students are prepared for low-level bureaucratic work, work with little creative element to it, work which does not reward critical appraisals of management. Directions are followed just as in the first type of classroom, but those directions often call for some deductive thinking, offer some selection, and leave a bit of room for student decision-making.

The third type of classroom finds students being trained for work that requires them to be producers of artistic, intellectual, scientific, and other kinds of productive enterprise. Often children work creatively and independently here. Through this experience, children learn how to interpret and evaluate reality, how to become their own best critics and supporters. They are trained to be alone with themselves without a need for constant authority intervention and approval. The teacher controls this class through endless negotiation. Anyon concludes: "In their schooling these children are acquiring symbolic capital, they are given opportunity to develop skills of linguistic, artistic, and scientific expression and creative elaboration of ideas in concrete form."

The fourth type of public school classroom trains students for ownership, leadership, and control. Every hot social issue is discussed, students are urged to look at a point from all sides. A leader, after all, has to understand every possible shade of human nature in order to effectively mobilize, organize, or defeat any possible opponent. In this kind of schoolroom bells are not used to begin and end periods. This classroom offers something none of the others do: "knowledge of and practice in manipulating socially legitimated tools of systems analysis."

It strikes me as curious how far Anyon’s "elite" public school classroom number four still falls far short of the goals of elite private boarding schools, almost as if the very best government schools are willing to offer is only a weak approximation of the leadership style of St. Paul’s or Groton. What fascinates me most is the cold-blooded quality of this shortfall because Groton’s expectations cost almost nothing to meet on a different playing field—say a homeschool setting or even in John Gatto’s classroom—while the therapeutic community of psychologized public schooling is extremely expensive to maintain. Virtually everyone could be educated the Groton way for less money than the average public school costs.