Occupy Wall Street is the Jacob Marley at Wall Street's Christmas

OK class, before we get to the Christmas Holiday it is time to read a literary classic. We're going to pick one absolutely relevant to the world's situation today, Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, one of the world's most famous ghost stories.

Imagine if the rich had to see pain and poverty? Mike Bloomberg's friends,
like Ebeneezer Scrooge, can't handle that.

Today, I am watching as Mayor Bloomberg and his police commissioner Ray "Missile Boy" Kelly launch those they command in attacks on the pro-democracy demonstrators in lower Manhattan. This comes after a week of co-ordinated assaults by American governments on demonstrators seeking a fairer, more equitable, and more democratic societies across the country. Like the Assad government in Syria, the Obama Administration has little tolerance of this kind of upset, and these raids and assaults clearly have the support of the US Department of "Homeland Security."

Why the attacks? Well, CNN's mid-day anchor made it very clear Thursday. "People don't want to be inconvenienced," he said of the financial industry personnel who work around Wall Street. Right, "health?" "safety?" "cost?" No, those are excuses, the reason is, as Dickens made clear so long ago, that the rich simply do not want to look.

Dickens saw it all in 1843. He saw it right where #OccupyLondon sits threatened today, on the narrow streets of "The City" surrounding St. Paul's Cathedral. That's where Scrooge and Marley's offices sat. That's where early capitalists destroyed the fabric of British society in pursuit of personal wealth. And that's where the first Scrooges called on city authorities and the police to ensure that they did not see the problems they were causing.

the conflict between capitalism and caring has lived around St. Paul's forever

In New York City this has also long been a familiar pattern. In the late 19th Century NYPD boss Thomas F. Byrnes was famous for his "dead line" along Fulton Street. The poor were prohibited from crossing that line because they might be thieves, or might otherwise trouble those of wealth and power. If you are interested in that, Jack Finney's fabulous book Time and Againwill offer you a remarkable view of that time. So, Ray Kelly, who I knew when he first became a captain in the NYPD,1 is just following in a role long established.

That role, which - I need to say in defense of rank-and-file NYPD officers - is not a favorite of any good cops, is to serve as a private army in defense of the comfort of the wealthy and powerful. Because I worked in Brooklyn and The Bronx, I had little connection to that role, but it has always been around. And this, of course,is hardly limited to New York and London. We've seen police in cities across America used - very clearly - for these purposes this week.

Dickens fully understood these power relationships, and this issue is embedded throughout this short and remarkable book. And, it is a story your students, of any age, can access. They can read it (in many accessible forms), of course, or they can watch it in many forms. My favorites being George C. Scott's version, Mr. Magoo's version (yes! "Razzleberry Dressing"), and Alistair Sim's version.

Magoo's version isn't just great music, it is a fine telling

Now, I am not suggesting that you feed your students my socialist line of thought, but I think it is fully reasonable, "at this festive time of the year," to ask students if they see relevance in this story to the news of the world today?

And it is reasonable to ask why the society we embrace in our stories, is not the society we embrace in our economics or politics? And it is reasonable to ask how Charles Dickens might report on Occupy Wall Street or Occupy London?

I think it is long past time for our schools to stop being socially reproductive, to start preparing students who might decide to, and have the capability to, change the world for the better. In order to do that, we have to stop being afraid to ask our students the tough questions. And Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London, all the Occupy Movements, are asking tough questions, just as Dickens was in that Christmas of 1843.

So, let us bring Marley's Ghost to our Christmas season 2011. I truly think he'd have a great deal to say.

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?...Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!"

And, for your principal, just tell him, "my class is reading Dickens." Chances are, he or she will leave you alone.

- Ira Socol

1. When I first met Ray Kelly he was my C.O., brilliant, incredibly egotistical, a tad paranoid, but limited enough by his position to work with others. I am disappointed to see power corrupt.

Suggesting new ways to see school, education, disability, and learning design

Barbara Lindsey of the University of Connecticut asked me join her, her students, and colleagues Wednesday for a conversation about Universal Design for Learning and re-imagining education.

You can actually watch the whole Elluminate Session here.

Before the session, those participating sent me ten questions. They were ten great questions, and as I began answering them I began to see an "FAQ" developing... So I wanted to share this widely. This is part one - the first five questions with my suggested starting points in the search for answers. Part Two is here.

Q1: “I have a question about assessment. I think the idea of universal design is a great idea. But, if we start implementing different learning tools individually designed for each student, how do you end up with assessment?"

Consider what you are assessing... It has nothing to do with “disability” for us to understand that all students come into any classroom in different places, with different skills, and will be heading different places via different paths. http://education.change.org/blog/view/evaluate_that_-_schools_for_children http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2011/04/testing-cannot-be-anything-but.html


Does anyone really need an "exam" to assess any of the learning in this video? Could you
create a test that would meaningfully measure any of it?

Now, to me, there are two different kinds of courses, there are courses where demonstrated competence in a single skill is the point, to quote a structural engineering prof I once had (in a pass/fail grading system), “no one leaves my class knowing 95% of what it takes to make a building stand up.” http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2009/06/great-schools-3-profession-without.html So, in that course, 95% was “failing” except, there were no tests, and every student’s project, demonstrating their knowledge, was different. You didn’t have to be “perfect” - but your building design had to work.

The other kind of course, say, what I teach, involves moving students from where they are to a place they need and want to go. So there, I have to ask the students where they are at the start. I ask lots of questions, and ask them to respond to ideas, and then we have a point on the map for the students to begin their journey. My measures in a course like that are based in progress and effort and accomplishing what they set out to accomplish - or how they adapt if they have to change paths.

Q2: "Teachers need to interact with students but these students need to be willing to do so. What could be done in compulsory school (or even University) if students are not interested? How according to UDL we can try to motivate them?"

This may sound radical, but if a student doesn’t know why they’re in a class, they’re going to space out and not interact, and most students have no idea why they are in a class. Even though I can do architectural engineering and pretty good statistics, I still don’t know why I ever took any of the Algebra classes I took, whether I failed or got an A.So, step one, explain to students what this class will do for them, Not for their school career, but for them. Why are they - to put it in micro-economic terms - wasting their “opportunity costs” on sitting with you? If you can’t explain that, well, they should check out.Now, some students - oddly the ones we traditionally consider “good” students - have few internal motivations, and for them - because they rely on external motivation, we can bribe or threaten, which is what grades are. But in my experience that’s about a third or less of students, the rest don’t care about grades - and the ones who do will tend to be “pleasers” - students who only want to give “the teacher” whatever their teacher wants. Which isn’t learning - its compliance.

To work as Universal Design, courses need to be choice-based project-based learning, or passion-based learning. Every student simply cannot be doing the same thing at the same time (most of the time). The course has to be designed - from the start - to be flexible.
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2011/02/passion-based-learning.html
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2011/01/middle-school-that-works.html

Toolbelt Theory 2.0 v.2

View more presentations from Ira David Socol.

Q3: "Considering your experience with alternative education, are there non-traditional subjects or activities capable of raising interests among students of any level and that should be introduced to them? How could new technologies help with that?"

As in the question above, Passion-Based Learning is what raises interest, we need to connect what we are teaching to what students want and know they need to know. I don’t care if this is first grade, why would any kid work really hard to figure out a text they’re not interested in? Or in graduate school, if I can’t twist the class into something which matters to me, I’m not interested. Only when you’ve hooked kids through their interests and passions can you begin to expand their world by leveraging those interests.

Quoting Alan Shapiro and Neil Postman regarding what they described as their “judo theory of education,” “we are assuming (1) that learning takes places best not when conceived as a preparation for life but when it occurs in the context of actually living, (2) that each learner ultimately must organize his own learning in his own way, (3) that "problems" and personal interests rather than "subjects" are a more realistic structure by which to organize learning experiences, (4) that students are capable of directly and authentically participating in the intellectual and social life of their community, (5) that they should do so, and (6) that the community badly needs them."
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2009/05/great-schools-1-changing-everything.html

When it comes to new technologies, I think we need to build a new conception - I call my “ideas” “Toolbelt Theory” http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2008/03/csun-2008a-toolbelt-for-lifetime.html
and it is based in using learning technologies as we humans use any tools http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2011/03/writing-without-blocks.html http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2011/05/freedom-stick-and-massive-resistance.html
and as an overviewhttp://speedchange.blogspot.com/2009/05/width-of-world.html
also Karen Janowski http://teachingeverystudent.blogspot.com/ has built a great Wikispace filled with tools and ideas http://teachingeverystudent.blogspot.com/2008/08/free-tech-toolkit-for-udl-wiki-edition.htm

Q4: "According to your own experience, how do students face these new-non-scripted assignments? Did you need any previous "training"? Sometimes I feel that most students just want, "do A, B, and C in the X way", and they feel terrified otherwise."

The longer students have been in school the more they have been trained in compliance, and the more creativity scares them. Its fairly easy to get first graders to try anything http://adunsiger.com/   http://avivadunsiger.wikispaces.com/ much harder with university first years who, being typically the most compliant “pleasers” in their secondary schools, haven’t thought on their own in many years. But there are tricks. A middle school music teacher told me this week that he told students they couldn’t play a certain type of song in his band room unless they had written it themselves. Half the class began composing music. At universities I often ask students to base a part of their project on themselves, or create it for a family member, this makes originality a personal necessity.
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-help-students-see-differently.html 

Q5: "My question is contextualized in a school/high-school where teachers are sometimes just asked to become a nanny for 25-30 students. How do we deal with this individually? How can a teacher manage an appropriate environment for each individuality?"

I think teachers choose to become babysitters. I’ve never understood that, but they do. In order to break that, if this has become “the school norm,” you have to be really aggressive, and you have to be blunt with kids. Get them out of their seats, get rid of their chairs if you can, and get them out of the classroom.

See this classic film clip, using cartoons to get non-interacting kids talking

Blackboard Jungle, 1955

or read Alan Shapiro’s very blunt message to his “school without walls” students http://foody.org/3i/first_i_on_falling_apart.html
or read Tomaz Lasic’s blog http://tomazlasic.net/ he teaches in a school for extremely troubled students in Perth, Western Australia - including http://tomazlasic.net/2011/08/i-did-nothing/  http://tomazlasic.net/2011/08/a-kindred-soul-in-our-school/  http://tomazlasic.net/2011/09/can-scootering-save-schools/
or Deven K. Black from The Bronx, NY: http://educationontheplate.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/we-need-to-teach-so-that-kids-will-care/

- Ira Socol

"the realities of victims and the realities of observers are worlds apart"

Happy Valley/Omelas, Buffalo High School, the Occupy Movement, and our Classrooms

Back in 2008 I wrote a post about "Constructing Disability." I was writing from bed after a disastrous accident and week in hospital. That week gave me a lot of time to think, and I thought about my life, my education, and my role as an educator.

I wrote that we disable people, that we make people "less than fully human," by using a number of techniques:
1. Not bothering to know who you are.
2. Not really listening.
3. Assuming that "you" can't hear.
4. Infantilizing.
5. Making it look easy.

If the "scandals" at Pennsylvania State University seem to be an obsession of mine this week, please forgive me, but please understand that I see in the events in State College, Pennsylvania over the past two decades - and in the past week - too much that is too familiar in education. And, reading people's thoughts on this, and discussing them with "Penn Staters," who both tend to agree with me and tend not to, I find the parallels overwhelming.

And so, in need of processing by us all.

"I will start us off, (a Penn State student and survivor/victim of child sexual abuse wrote to the State College newspaper Sunday) because I have something unpopular to say. I see everywhere — in your editorials on your social media pages, in your subversively-written chalk messages printed all over campus — your desperate insistence that “We are still Penn State.”

"And each of these that I come upon creates in me a feeling of isolating sadness and emptiness. It reinforces in me what I have long felt -that the realities of victims and the realities of observers are worlds apart." 

In so many ways this echoes what I see with children who "are different" - the students who we call "disabled" or "special needs," the students we see as "unsuccessful," in their interactions with so many of our schools and so many of our classrooms.

Let us pray that we can forget about all of this and go back to football and alcohol
AP Photo by Gene J. Puskar

Matt Bodenschatz, in his letter to his community the day after Penn State's big "healing" day of football, describes three of the five techniques I describe above:
1. The student body and the institution are not listening to the victims
2. The student body and the institution are pretending that the victims cannot hear them
3. The student body and the institution, in the form of the football program, are pretending it is easy
And so, the actions of those surrounding the victims re-wounded those same injured parties.

The "public piety" of the organized events at Penn State Friday and Saturday which so disturbed columnist Charles P. Pierce, "Watching everyone on the field take a knee before the Penn State-Nebraska game, and listening to the commentary about how devoutly everybody was praying for the victims at Penn State, was enough to get me reaching for a bucket and a Bible all at once."..."These things cannot be prayed away. Let us hear nothing about "closure" or about "moving on." And God help us, let us not hear a single mumbling word about how football can help the university "heal" (Lord, let the Alamo Bowl be an instrument of your peace.)," were so tone deaf, so cruel in many ways, and so obviously geared to demonstrating how quickly the institution could recover and students could get back to ranking themselves as "the number one party school in America," that, of course, a victim - even a non-connected victim like Bodenschatz - felt assaulted all over again.

Which is little different than what John Holtfound, as the 1950s ended, regarding his students who were "different." "I asked them, "Well, what kind of names do you hate to be called?" We were off. Before the end of the period the board was covered with names. About half were what I expected, the usual ten-year-old insults­ - idiot, stupid, nuthead, fat slob, chicken, dope, scaredy-cat, etc. The rest surprised me. They were all terms of endearment. It was quite a scene. There were all these bright-faced, lively children, eyes dancing with excitement and enthusiasm, seeing who could most strongly express their collective disgust for all the names that adults might suppose they like most. Someone would say, “Dearie-ug-g-g-g-gh!” Chorus of agreement. Someone else would say, "Honey-ic-c-c-c-ch!" More agreement. Every imagi­nable term of affection and endearment came in for its share. Not one was legitimate, not one was accepted. No­body said of any term, "Well, that's not too bad.""

In Holt's classroom he discovered that every adult attempt to "help" these students was really more of an attempt by the adults to help themselves - to support the self-image of the caregivers - and each of those attempts wounded the students.

Which is the issue, we need to look beyond ourselves if we are to be capable of empathy, but we are all too rarely willing to do that.

Two friends, Punya Mishra and Michael Faris, brought a short science fiction to my attention last night, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Variations on a theme by William James) by Ursula K. Le Guin. Now Punya writes: (see Michelle at Sans Serif and John Scalzi at Whatever for other blogs on this)

"It is about a beautiful city called Omelas, a city of happy people unburdened by any pain or sorrow. But this happiness is the result of a faustian bargain—a bargain where the happiness of all is dependent on having one child bear all the pain and sorrow of the entire city. This child lives in a dark, basement room, neglected and in constant pain. The story says that many people, though initially shocked, learn to accept this and seek to lead fruitful lives in Omelas. However, the story concludes that, there are always a few, who walk away, from the city, never to return. The story asks the question of whether it is, “right for the happiness of many to be built on pain and sorrow for one.”

I know that my synopsis does not do justice to the story. Do read it for yourself right here. Yes, right now. I can wait.
"OK. Welcome back. Now wasn’t that a great story. I truly think it is one of the greatest stories ever written (at lease one of the greatest I have ever read).

"So now coming back to the sorry state of affairs at Penn State. It seems to me that the Happy Valley in some sense struck a bargain similar to the one in the story. The entire football and university staff who knew or suspected what was going on chose to turn a blind eye to what was going on. The graduate assistant who stumbled upon the scene in the showers chose to let the child suffer to protect the good name of the program. The suffering of one child was worth it in exchange for maintaining the reputation of the football team or the University. The students who rioted after the firing of Joe Paterno were willing to make the same choice as well."

And I will argue that the students praying at Penn State's football game as others hugged the statue of Joe Paterno, were making the same choice as well. And further, I would argue that those working with students who "are different" without fighting to change a system which builds dependence and second-class humanity, are also making that choice. Whenever we choose what is easier for our system, our budget, our classroom, our effort, rather than what is right for kids, we make that choice (see, Not Getting to Universal Design).

Making the choice: PSU student Alexander Pinquett hugs the
bronze Joe Paterno Saturday
Photo: David Swanson/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT

"We too often consult our own convenience, rather than the comfort, welfare, or accommodation of our children," William A. Alcott wrote in 1831, so, none of this is particularly new, nor, as I have said, is it rare.

This week the Buffalo, Wyoming school board, referring to a football coach who had passed out a "survey" to his players referring to people as "pussies" and "cry babbies" and people whose "butts are too easily hurt," said, “They accepted his resignation for his coaching and his other weight room activities. We’ve retained him as a school counselor, under administrative supervision meaning that we’re going to work on building his reputation back to where it needs to be.” Yes, you read it right, the issue for this school board, the choice they are making, is, "we’re going to work on building his reputation back to where it needs to be." Comfort, convenience, and the ability to not see the harm.

NYPD prepares to evict Occupy Wall Street camp. The threat that Mike Bloomberg's
friends might see, or even think about, their Omelas child was too great a discomfort
for the mayor (or his counterparts in Oakland and Portland) to handle.

And at the same time, clearly with tacit approval from Barack Obama's Department of Homeland Security, mayors from New York to Oakland to Portland, great "liberal" cities, made the same choice, evicting citizens who were choosing to be uncomfortable as a way of highlighting unfairness from public spaces, because these scenes might have forced the wealthy and powerful to see that child locked away in Omelas. And most of us stood by. And no major figure even resigned, as at least someone in Britain did over the absurdity of this.

"But this isn't about you. It’s not even about me," Matt Bodenschatz wrote Sunday, "Until and unless you find a way to do something genuine, lasting and sincerely sympathetic for someone at the receiving end of these very real, crippling crimes in our headlines — even if you never get to meet them or to know any of their names — then your indignation is unearned and misplaced."

And this is the most true thing of all. We are either walking away from Omelas, or we are not. The only other option is to break down that door, free that child, and destroy Omelas as it exists.

Are we willing to do that?

- Ira Socol

Darkness at Noon [Saturday]

Imagine being so afraid of a boss that you will not report the rape of a child? Not because you fear losing your job and your children going hungry, but just because your entire family is terrified of a dictatorial regime.

Imagine being so afraid of a boss that you will remain silent about horrific child sexual abuse for a decade, all while partying with the abuser.

Joe Paterno was a great humanitarian, we are told. He did so much good. Or/and, he is a scapegoat, "I do think Paterno was a scapegoat. Of course he was. I’ve already said that he had to be let go. But to let him dangle out there, take up all the headlines, face the bulk of the media pressure, absolutely, that’s the very definition of scapegoat," says a completely clueless Sports Illustrated writer named Joe Posnanski. "Joe Paterno has lived a whole life. He has improved the lives of countless people. I know — I’ve talked to hundreds of them. Almost every day I walk by the library that he and his wife, Sue, built. I walk by the religious center that tries to bring people together, and his name is on the list of major donors."

Perhaps if Penn State folks knew history,  they'd know that this "whole life" needs to be evaluated with a real set of measuring tools. Josef Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, pushed what took England 200 years into 30. Created a health care system. Defeated the Nazis.

Accomplishment does not equal a great leader. Iconic doesn't mean good. And folks, a man who places a football team, or even a friendship, above the safety of children - does that for at least a decade - is not "decent."

How scared must both Mike McQueary and McQueary's father have been of
Joe Paterno for them to behave as they did?

The Grand Jury Report is a horrific tale, but only a part of that horror is Sandusky's child abuse. What is perhaps equally awful is the culture of fear and intimidation - fear, intimidation, and brainwashing- which Paterno constructed at Pennsylvania State University.

beware all who are celebrated in bronze before death

Because, simply put, if Paterno had not ruled by fear, Sandusky would have been jailed or hospitalized in 1998, or surely in 2002. Joe Paterno's leadership is directly responsible for every act of abuse which took place after that night in March 2002 when an underling was so scared of his superiors that he failed to act as a human.

At each step, people didn't do the right thing because, hmmm, let's try this out... they so respected Joe Paterno that they thought they'd be fired for calling the police on a child rapist? Or, because they were afraid they'd be fired for calling the police on a child rapist and perhaps disrupting a university's football team?

Sara Ganim, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter who seems one of the few people in "Happy Valley" to have any guts, takes us through the disinformation process in PaternoLand:

"According to the grand jury, then, here is how McQueary’s eyewitness account became watered down at each stage:
McQueary: anal rape.
Paterno: something of a sexual nature.
Schultz: inappropriately grabbing of the young boy’s genitals.
Curley: inappropriate conduct or horsing around.
Spanier: conduct that made someone uncomfortable.
Raykovitz: a ban on bringing kids to the locker room.

"1995. 1998. 2000. 2002. 2008.

"These dates spanning 13 years share two common threads that run through the entire grand jury presentment. At each stage, boys voiced concern or pain or alarm at the conduct of Jerry Sandusky — or adults witnessed behavior they found troubling or alarming.
   
"And at each stage, other adults dismissed, minimized or failed to act upon those concerns."

And they "dismissed, minimized or failed to act" because they lived in fear of troubling their "great humanitarian" leader. Everyone, from janitors to the University's President - everyone, including McQueary's father (terrifyingly, a youth coach himself), was working overtime to make sure they did not trouble their iconic leader.

If they troubled him...? well, they were obviously doing this for a reason. What, exactly, was "Joe Pa's" leadership like that led everyone, at every level, to be so scared?

Wednesday night in "Beaver Canyon"

Paterno rewarded the silence. The university rewarded the silence. Of the 2002 graduate assistant coaches at PSU, one got a full time job the next year. "Sometime in 2002, Penn State football graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary walked into his team’s locker room and allegedly saw his team’s former defensive coordinator sexually assaulting a young boy. McQueary left, called his dad, told his boss, and went back to work. McQueary has been promoted ever since," says Indiana reporter Mac Engel who contrasts this case with that of Abar Rouse, the assistant coach who blew the whistle in 2003 on the crimes of Baylor University basketball coach Dave Bliss.

It may be telling that, despite apparent administration desires, neither Paterno nor McQueary could be fired in the decade since that night in the locker room.

But all this is only one part of the issue for Penn State and many other universities and schools. You can see on the faces of Penn State students and alumni, you can read it in their words, that an article of faith has been shattered for them. The Penn State University community was trained, was taught, to believe unquestioningly in Joe Paterno and the Nittany Lions football team.

Penn State basketball coach Rene Portland abused players
on sexual terms for decades, and it was no problem for
Paterno or the university.

This faith was so pure, so true, so embraced by seemingly all of this academic community, that even obvious problems were ignored. How, for example, could "St. Joe" - the most powerful man in the university's athletic department (everyone above him had once played for him) - have allowed the scandal that was Penn State's Women's Basketball Team to go on? As Michele Voepel writes at espn.com, "It took a quarter-century of people not speaking out, or looking the other way, or rationalizing that led to Portland having complete belief in her dictatorial power." Sound familiar?


Yesterday I wrote about tribalism and loyalty. Today, perhaps the bigger issue for any educational institution, the encouragement of doubt over faith. We cannot really be in the field of education if our academic communities teach unquestioning belief. Yes, I admire Tom Izzo at Michigan State, but that admiration doesn't go so far as to not doubt his judgement when he shows up on the Spartan Stadium sideline posing with "The Situation." That mistake is hardly a "deal-breaker" of course, but it should, and it did, raise questions in East Lansing about how field passes were being distributed for football games. When you are the very public face of an institution of higher learning, every message you send matters.

Tom Izzo making a bad photo choice, September 2011,
he took a lot of heat for this, as he should have.

And, everyone at a university deserves to be doubted. Everyone in education needs to be doubted. And not just in terms of their research and their "academics."

When a professor I had deep respect for demonstrated atrocious manners, sensibilities, and even inquiry skills, it made me wonder how open his research inquiry had been. Is that fair? Yes, it is. We are the whole of our parts. Can our academic openness truly rise above personal close-mindedness? We need to ask.

Similarly, when I watch professors with great research records discriminating against grad students because of gender or race, I need to ask deep questions about their research. Just as I may quote Heidegger, but only after very deep investigation, because I have to see, after a lot of reading, if I can separate truth from the other insanities of a pro-Nazi philosopher.

This is all part of an atmosphere of doubt and questioning which must permeate any community devoted to learning. Our students should wonder "why?" about everything. "Why do we have separate classes for maths and history?" "Why do we break up the day into periods?" Even, yes, "why should I listen to you?"

"Why are so much of our universities resources tied up in American football?" might be one question? "Why is the highest paid person on almost every D1 American campus an athletic coach?" could be another. These are the easy questions, and if these cannot be asked, no academic questions will really be asked either. Students, guaranteed, will be passive receivers of information rather than scholars.

Now, I know people at Penn State. I know brilliant people at Penn State. I have many reasons to see Penn State as a great university (even if people from State College can think that East Lansing is a "big time place"). And I suspect that they know what I'm saying here: that worship of, absolute faith in, anything or anyone has no place at a great university. That the kind of faith and belief Penn State encouraged in Joe Paterno is toxic to the learning environment.

So, the Pennsylvania State University has much to rebuild. It has let atmospheres of fear and faith to control their academic community. And rebuilding must go beyond firing the entire football staff and leadership of the athletic department, it must go beyond firing the President. This was a poisonous atmosphere, and those who were complicit in that - and we all know there were many - must be replaced by people with a different view. If it were me, I'd shop for a new administration from schools without major athletic programs, but... that's really not a requirement.

Beyond that, of course, we all need to look at our schools. Where has faith, belief, automaticity, replaced doubt, questioning, and conscious thought? And how can we undo that?

Questioning is the heart of learning, it belongs everywhere in your school.

- Ira Socol

Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noonis a classic novel about atmospheres of fear.

Myth v. Reality: This, from a reporter:

   "One of my beats (for the Centre Daily Times) was the courts and one day at the county courthouse I got a tip of an interesting lawsuit – Joe Paterno was suing Our Lady of Victory Church. The case was simple – Paterno’s son David, then 11, fractured his skull after he fell off a trampoline at the church and Paterno alleged negligence (David recovered fully and a settlement was reached).
   "I was told by my editors that I had to get a comment from Paterno, which made me nervous since I had never talked to the legend. I dialed his number and got him at home. I introduced myself and explained that I needed a comment on the lawsuit. I got a comment all right, but not what I expected.
   "Paterno launched into a stream of expletives, pretty nasty stuff, telling me how dare I ask him about a personal matter and he would talk about football but not his family. I tried to explain that he filed a public lawsuit in court and it was my job to get a comment. The berating started again and I so wished I had recorded it since I was stunned by his vehemence and use of language, so at odds with his public image (such a recording would have gone viral in today’s Internet era).
   "I got off the phone shaken and told my editors. When I asked what I should write, the response was, “Mr. Paterno has no comment.” When I shared my story around the newsroom, I was told it was not that much of a surprise. Paterno could be a dick, as I saw firsthand. One reporter told me that a group of middle school kids getting awards on campus were kicked out of their space early when Paterno decided he needed it for football purposes that day; that story was never written, since Paterno was the most powerful man on campus and lauded nationally and our paper was not about to rock the boat."

The Teaching of Tribalism

There are many young people demonstrating in the world today. All across the US and in many other nations people are building the Occupy Movement. In London, today, students are being attacked, as they ask for access to education, by the morally-challenged London Metropolitan Police and their own government.

But in State College, Pennsylvania last night there was an unusual demonstration. At least a few thousand students at the Pennsylvania State University came out into the streets to demonstrate their support for child sexual abuse and those who allow that crime to continue.

Penn State students attack the press for reporting about child sexual abuse

The students from Penn State would complain. They are, they will say, not supporting child sexual abuse at all. Rather, they are exhibiting loyalty. But that's the thing. These students are insisting that because Joe Paterno coached "their" team to 409 wins, because he has given "their" school much money, because Joe Paterno's iconic stature is important to them, Paterno's "dignity" is more important than the abuse of children.

It is a horrendous moral calculus, but not an unfamiliar one. Look at the Catholic Church. Look at the executives and staff of the corporations which destroyed the global economy. Look at Barack Obama's basketball loyalty to Arne Duncan. Look at the behavior of Donna Shalala at the University of Miami (Florida).

"Big-time athletic programs are not entirely unlike nation-states," Kate Fagan writes at Philly.com, "Everyone wears the colors, says the pledge, and sings the school anthem. Everyone worships the logo, recites the fight song, and reports up the chain of command."

Teaching tribalism. We do it all the time. In secondary school after secondary school across the United States we mix our national symbols with our local tribal symbols. And in both cases, our goal is to build tribal loyalty, and yes, tribal loyalty means that nothing is more important than "us" against "them."

Does it matter if them is "the Soviet Union" as it was in my childhood, or "Iran" or "Saddam Hussein's Iraq" or "Venezuela"? Or, for those banging around "Beaver Canyon" (a headline writer's dream) last night, the University of Nebraska? No, "brand loyalty" - tribal loyalty - skews the most basic morality which allows humans to share this planet.

It might be Katie Couric gushing over Navy Seals and breathlessly encouraging a war on Iraqis in 2003, or it might be Mike McQueary doing nothing after witnessing the brutal rape of a ten-year-old by a tribal elder in 2002. It might be The New York Times reprinting Dick Cheney's propaganda word for word, or it might be no one at Enron, or AIG, or Bank of America standing up and saying, "this is wrong" and reporting crimes in progress. Whatever, we teach our children - and you can watch those children in action on video from last night in State College, Pennsylvania - a twisted view of the world in which institutions matter more than people.

American children pledge allegiance
to their flag, 1930s

A friend of mine from the Netherlands, on her first trip to the United States, went to visit an elementary school. She came back to our big old house in Midwood, Brooklyn that afternoon shaking. "What's the matter?" I asked. "When I got there in the morning," she told me, "they made all of these little children stand up and chant some kind of loyalty oath!" She was horrified. "I've never seen anything like it except in films of the occupation." By "occupation," of course, she meant the German occupation of her nation during World War II.

Sometimes we need to hear these kinds of discordant observations. I never liked the "Pledge of Allegiance," I refused to say it once I hit seventh grade. Vietnam and then Chile and all. But I never connected it to the brutality of Naziism until Maria came from Amsterdam and held up a mirror.

I'm not claiming to be immune. Tribal loyalties - New Rochelle, NY. Bohemia and the Czech Republic. Ireland. Arsenal. The Derry City Football Club, the New York Mets, the New York Jets, the soon-to-be-Brooklyn Nets, the New York Rangers. I'm an American. I'm a New Rochelle High School Huguenot through and through. An Isaac E. Young [Middle School] Knight. I'll always be, conceptually, a member of the New York City Police Department. And yes, I am a Spartan, with deep if conflicted loyalties to a university where I have spent many years of my life.

Yes, as much as I want to remember being proud of Tom Izzo's willingness to kick his point guards off the team when necessary or to accept his own suspension for "minor" recruiting misdeeds of an assistant coach, as much as I quote Jud Heathcote's line after they lost an NCAA tournament game to a Georgia Tech shot taken two seconds after the final buzzer - "if you can be beaten by one referee mistake," Heathcote said, "you weren't far enough ahead" - I have also cheered for the football teams led by by the deeply ethically challenged George Perles, when we all knew he was bad for our university. I probably let myself wonder if Derry City really needed to get relegated for cheating on all their player contracts in 2009. I'm sure I find reason to defend NYPD officers at times when I should not. I haven't complained much about public money being wasted on Citifield or the Barclays Centre. All of those ethical lapses are part of the same socially constructed cultures which makes me listen to football games in the middle of the work day, or look up to see how Ray Rice has done each Sunday.

Fagan, then a 21-year-old University of Colorado basketball player, relates her role speaking to an NBC reporter regarding the conversion of female students into prostitutes to lure athletic recruits to Boulder. "As a 21-year-old in Boulder, I couldn't see the humanity - the women whose lives had been damaged - standing just outside our black-and-gold athletic gates. I pulled on my CU letter jacket and refused to understand why a few women wanted to destroy our athletic family. I explained to NBC that our sports teams were shiny and clean. Anyone claiming otherwise didn't understand what we stood for." She couldn't see the humanity, because she'd been trained in loyalty.

Fagan was, I'm sure, even then much more coherent than this Penn State undergrad commenting on YouTube, "Im guessing you didnt go to penn state cause you obviously have no idea. The things hes done for this university way out does anything bad that he has done in this case. The fact that he has taken this school from a small farming school that nobody has ever heard of to one of the best academic schools in the nation is remarkable. Penn State would barely even be a school if it werent for him. He has every right to feel that he is being mistreated because he is," but the impact of the university's training was the same: A moral calculus which means those you've been taught to deify need not conform to the rules, which means that almost any crime is secondary to your institutional loyalty, which means you no more go outside of the chain of command at your company or your school than you would if you were in the Mafia.

Loyalty is not all bad. Loyalty is essential to human society. But loyalty should never be taught as somehow involving unquestioning, or lack of doubting, or shutting off our moral compasses. As I asked yesterday, what would Mike McQueary have had to see happening in Penn State's football building that would have gotten him to call 9-1-1? The rape of a ten-year-old was not enough for this 26-year-old, steeped in PSU's concepts of loyalty, to over-ride his faith in a God-like Paterno and get him to pick up his phone. "McQueary locked eyes with the "boy" and Sandusky briefly and then quickly left the room" (says the Grand Jury report). What if he had seen a ten-year-old being stabbed to death? Would he still have walked away, gone home, talked to daddy and JoePa? And what about Paterno himself? What would McQueary have had to tell him to get him to dial 9-1-1? Maybe, "there are eight boys buried under our practice field"? How horrendous a crime would it have had to be for Paterno to move loyalty to Pennsylvania State University into 'second place'?

Germany, 1934-1945 - how could people not know?

When this involves others, we shake our heads. How could Germans in the 1930s and 1940s not have known? How could police officerscover up crimes? How could those guys at Enronhave slept at night?

And now it is time to stop shaking our heads, and to start asking questions of ourselves. It is time to take the kind of stock of ourselves which brought Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny to the floor of the Dail this summer, to discuss Ireland's deep tribal ties to the Catholic Church. It is time to assert that loyalty is great, but we must be very careful about how we teach it. This is, perhaps, a speech everyone at Penn State, and everyone involved in school athletics, maybe everyone involved in education, needs to listen to this week.

There have been few loyalties as binding as that between the Irish people and the Catholic Church,
and yet, the protection of children must matter more.

We owe our children more. We really do.

- Ira Socol

Cultures of Compliance

What, exactly, prevented a Penn State University graduate and grad student, from intervening to stop a crime in 2002, or from calling the police?

When Mike McQueary looked into the showers in Penn State's football team locker room that year, and saw a middle age man having sex with a 10-year-old boy, he chose to do nothing.

Why?

And, next question. When young Mr. McQueary told his faculty supervisor about his decision to do nothing the next day, what caused his supervisor, the highest paid public employee in the state of Pennsylvania, to do only the minimum. Actually, it is worse than that. The faculty supervisor not only did the minimum, he promoted the ethically challenged Mr. McQueary to a full time job. 

Kitty Genovese and where she was killed,
while many watched, and no one even called

The Penn State University football locker room showers

And no one in positions of power at Pennsylvania State University bothered to waste a minute of their precious time looking to help the victim of this crime. They were, as sports columnist Jason Whitlock notes, looking after their brand and their profits instead of looking out for children.

But why? Why would all these very educated men, or men and women, be so institutionally compliant that basic human morality was abandoned?

We've asked this question before, about Enron, about the Atlanta Public Schools, about Bank of America, AIG, Goldman-Sachs, the Bush Cabinet of 2002-2003, all places where people watched crimes in progress and did nothing - in sad Kitty Genovese style - but rarely have we had such a classic public illustration of compliance over-ruling basic social instincts as we have in the Penn State Child Sexual Abuse case.

I'm not going to spend too much energy here working on understanding the "criminal mind." I've spent enough time as a police officer trying to grasp the "why" behind truly deviant behaviour. My only guess is that some in any society deeply misread the selfishness limitation line which allows a society to exist. We either learn pretty early that we don't grab for everything we want, or we end up as thieves, rapists, Republicans, Tories, or Wall Street/City executives.

So, even if I could imagine why a guy like Jerry Sanduskey wants to pursue sex with people not mutually interested, I can't quite grasp where his social learning went wrong. But I can look around, I can see that Sanduskey lived in an environment, an environment built by his society, in which older men got to exercise absolute power over boys. He also lived in an environment which encouraged different rules, and different privileges, for different people. And he lived in an environment in which celebrity often appears to trump responsibility. So, nothing in Jerry Sanduskey's adult life was helping him to learn late lessons on living in a society which he had failed to absorb early. In this, he closely mirrors people like John Thane, the ex-Merrill Lynch chief executive. If Sanduskey or Thane missed out on "the rules" as two-year-olds, nothing in either of their environments was going to help them learn.

As for Paterno, well, imagine yourself learning that a 10-year-old was being abused by someone you knew in your - office, workplace, school, shop - and now ask yourself if you would do nothing more than call the next person up the line, and never ask another question? Arrogance? Disinterest? I don't know, but perhaps not the public face your organization desires.

What really interests me is then graduate assistant coach, now wide receivers coach, Mike McQueary. I do wonder, as Philly.com columnist John Baer does, "why a young, strong 6'4" recently former Division I athlete didn't stop the rape of a child in progress"? But I also know - those years as a cop again - that some people are interventionists by nature and others are not...

Yet, the biggest question is, why this young man, trained as a football quarterback, being groomed as a future football coach - a kid steeped in the leadership ethic of sport in education - did not even call the police?

Mike McQueary, man of action in 1996. Six years later, witnessing a major crime,
he did nothing, then went home and asked his dad what to do...

Mike McQueary
Wikipedia Commons Photo

What creates such a powerful interest in loyalty and stability that it completely over-rides the commitment to the best interests of children? And understand, I would not ask this question here if I did not think it had implications far beyond the ethically-challenged land grant university of Pennsylvania.

This was not one of those, "uh, not sure it matters" kind of thing McQueary watched that afternoon in 2002. It wasn't a friend driving five miles an hour over the speed limit, or someone having a few too many drinks, this was - first - one of the "big crimes." In New York City's Police Academy we were told that there were only five crimes for which you could use deadly physical force to "prevent or terminate." The acronym was "Mr.Mrs." - Murder, Robbery, Manslaughter, Rape, (forcible) Sodomy. McQueary observed one of those, and - second - he knew the victim of this crime to be a child.

What, one wonders, would McQueary have to see which might get him to call 9-1-1?

Or, the real question, why did Mike McQueary not call police within this "educational environment" when - and I'm guessing here - he would probably have intervened if he had observed the same scene in another place, say, in a park or library rest room?

I ask, because I often see people in education afraid to intervene, afraid to confront, afraid to report, when something involves people within the system. I spent years hearing about "the blue wall of silence," when I was a cop, but I knew then that, at least a New York City cop, was far more likely to turn in another cop, than lawyers or doctors were willing to turn in their peers. When I became involved in K-12 education, I remember saying, "a cop is far more likely to turn in a fellow bad cop (our term back in the 1980s was a holdover from the very old days of cheap phone calls, you, "dropped a dime" on someone) than a teacher is to do the same." And I thought, hell, cops faced more risk. You knew the person you were turning in had a gun.

We also confronted our peers a lot. I remember a fistfight breaking out in the "4-7" locker room over mistreatment of a prisoner. I remember a bunch of us standing in the street telling a narcotics officer we'd never come back him up again because of the crap he was pulling on people on the street. And, well, woe to anyone, of any rank or title, who messed with a child.

But somehow, in education, we choose "respect," "stability," and "caution," over action and intervention. Is it because a different personality type chooses education? Is it because education chooses different personalities? Is it because we train people, as Mike McQueary was trained, not to doubt? Not to challenge?

In every school I go to, people know if someone is causing harm to kids. But, in almost all of those situations, that person is not challenged, not reported. And if they are reported - counter to the anti-union nonsense floating through the media these days - the reports are made to respected Joe Paternos, who do nothing, because they too are afraid to doubt and challenge.

"We worship corporations and institutions. Our Supreme Court granted them First Amendment rights. The Fourth Estate, the alleged watchdogs of democracy, acts as their mouthpiece," Jason Whitlock wrote yesterday. "There should be no surprise that protecting Joe Paterno, Penn State, Happy Valley and Linebacker U — profit-generating institutions at the core of big-time college athletics’ amateur myth — appears to have taken precedence over the protection of children. It’s the era we live in. Institutions are valued more than human beings."

This isn't just true at Pennsylvania State University, or in their football program, it is true in far too many places. And in far too many places we train young people, like Mike McQueary, in our cultures of compliance, because we worship institutions, and we crave stability, and we place myths above human needs.

Joe Paterno and those above him at Penn State have been revealed for who they are. People who would choose to ignore "a 1998 case involving allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior by Sandusky investigated by campus police, the Centre County district attorney and the Department of Public Welfare," people who would not even look for the child victim of rape, people who would see these crimes as columnist Baer writes, as "collateral damage, I suppose, to maintaining the university's aura."

But we cannot let the questions stop there. We all need to ask ourselves if we are training Mike McQuearys in our schools. And if we are, we need to decide just what we are going to do about that.

- Ira Socol