The system design is not our fault. Its perpetuation is our problem.

I often tell American educators that if we are succeeding with a third to a half of our students, it is only because our educators are trying so hard. The system, after all, was designed and built with the intent to fail 80% of students before 8th grade ended, so we are far exceeding our "design capability."

I've written lots on this... the most accessible versions here as a One, Two, Three, Four, Five part series on the history of our system. It's an ugly story of a system designed to fail most our children, designed to create compliant factory workers and miners, designed to limit the opportunities for the poor to move between socio-economic classes, and designed to ensure an unchallenged power structure. And for 180 years it has done those things with intentionality, whether the hands on the wheels were Henry Barnard and Ellwood Cubberley, or Bill Gates and Salman Khan.

From age-based grades and grade-level-expectations, to textbooks, Carnegie Units, chairs and desks, the teaching wall, and the shape of our classrooms, we were handed a set of horrible paradigms - a virtual war against childhood - and asked to somehow lead our nation into a future...

That's the basic truth, it isn't our fault that our schools are literally built from the ground up to work against us. But, if we are not fighting to change that system every day, from whatever position we hold in education, that is our fault. If we are educators, we begin that profession with a commitment to children, and that is a sacred trust.

The change needed is radical. It is essential that we redefine almost everything about our schools, which is a very difficult task to undertake, but we have a system that is somewhere between 50 and 120 years behind the curve, and that should promote some urgency.

Misunderstanding Cognition

By the time our educational system, whether in the US or the British Empire, was codified and permanized between 1890 and 1910, it was already deeply behind, locked in the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States - the arrival of the railroad, steamboat, telegraph, and mass produced print media - and in the "Second British Empire" in Englland-dominated lands - a place of simply processing the spoils of the colonies. Of course both were already history, as the Boer War had proved to the United Kingdom and the arrival of airplane, cinema, telephone, and phonograph were proving in both environments.

Whether colonial resentments and migration, or the new cognitive authority of the motion picture, the "sit and git," "same for all," step-by-step filtering system of the educational design was already failing these nations, no matter what racist apologists for the past like Woodrow Wilson might say.

We know the failure because of the willingness of all these nations to rush into war with no critical thinking from 1898 to 1914 (including the ease of media manipulation). We know the failure because it remained the "non graduates" - from Henry Ford to Frank Lloyd Wright to the Wright Brothers - who dominated the new economy of the time.

Almost 50 years ago, Polaroid introduces the Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat era.

Notice that photography is no longer about memory, but is instead an
instantaneous social connectivity tool. Kids passed dirty pictures too...

Since 1910 the divide between reality and education has grown exponentially, rushing at breakneck speed over the past fifty years. Schools missed the critical changes even in print literature - from John Dos Passos USA Trilogyin the 1930s to the Beatsin the 1950s to Tom Wolfein the 1960s - and so - contemporary language continues to elude most teachers of the English language. Schools missed the impact of film literature on culture, the impact of visual media in general. Mass media, always minimally and poorly taught, has failed us from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds (really? can't tell news from drama on the radio?) to the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Schools missed the revolution in interpersonal communications which was created by the telephone, the automobile, the urbanization of the world, and eventually the contemporary technologies of chat, mobile devices, email, Twitter, et al...

This still horrifying bit of 8mm movie film (not even yet "Super 8") represents a
key moment in the citizen journalism we all know today. 50 years ago in November...

Each of these changes, despite what many in education will tell you, alters cognition because it alters cognitive authority - that which allows someone to believe something. We know how quickly this happens too. During the Spanish American War American filmmakers understood the need for people to see "moving images" so clearly that they faked them. Thirty years earlier a "cyclorama" might have been clear truth, now, something else was essential.

Scholarly material: The Gettysburg Cyclorama seemed
definitive until film appeared.

What is truth now? We were all reminded last week that if truth once came from organizations like NBC News and CNN, that's no longer true at all. So how do our students decide if they can trust us?

If your answer remains, "because I (or the book) told them," it may be time to go, because few will believe you, even if some pretend to for grading purposes. They know that educators lie - they make up silly simplifications because they think kids are stupid. They teach stuff even a casual Google search proves untrue, whether in math or social studies. They make up rules which lack any logic. They divide up subjects and time with no regard to how humans learn. They test in ways which measure nothing important. And thus, in the cognitive authority structure of this century - our students' century - educators, "we," have proven wholly unreliable. And no amalgam of initials after your name or collected diplomas on your wall will change that.

So we need to doubt everything. Question everything. Engage in "Zero-Based Design" thinking, which imagines that we can start from the ground up, instead of inheriting a dysfunctional structure. And we need to act. As an Iowa superintendent said on Monday, "This is urgent, we can't keep doing this to kids."

The system is not our fault, but every day we continue to tolerate it is. We need a sense of urgency. For our kids' sake.

- Ira Socol

Christmas, Zombies, the Common Core, Neoliberalism, and Democratic Voice

On the F train on Christmas Eve my spousal equivalent, born and bred in the Protestant American heartland, turned to me and said, "I'm the only blond in this car." "Probably on this train," I answered.

In New York City Subway art, tourists (and odd old women) are denoted by blond hair

And I recalled how, in the decade previous to this one (when the century was new) I asked - in front of a classroom full of young teachers to be - for all those students with blond hair and blue eyes to stand up.

"You know," I then told this Midwestern grouping, "it is more common today for a child to be born with AIDS than with blond hair and blue eyes." Then I paused, let them sit down, and we began to wonder about how we define "the other" and about how we define "normal."

I do not know if it is indeed, "more common today for a child to be born with AIDS than with blond hair and blue eyes," which I later indicated to the students and asked them if they might use their phones to find an answer, but, you probably get the point.

Which brings me to stories from my niece, a New York City schools teacher in an elementary school in the Borough of Queens. She told two theologic-confusion stories from her incredibly diverse student population:

At Christmas 2011 a boy from India asked why Christmas was such a big holiday. "You do all this because one god had one baby?" "Well, we only have one God," my niece replied, and there is only one child. This didn't really help solve the boy's confusion.

*****

At Easter 2012 a boy from China tried to figure out that holiday. When my niece tried to explain the resurrection, the boy said, "So he was alive, then he was dead, then he was alive again?" "Yes," my niece replied. "Ohhh," the boy said, holding his arms out straight in front of him and waving them up and down, "Zombie Jesus."

"You can't do that anyplace else in the school," my niece told him when she stopped laughing, "people really believe this." "Grown ups too?" he asked. "Grown ups too," my niece said. "Which grown ups?" he asked, wondering, of course, who in this American school he might be able to trust.

"Our" Anglo-American-Christian "core beliefs" are, quite often, a baffling mythology for others. As are "our" (essentially) religious commitment to market capitalism, "our" belief in linear - point A to point B - storytelling, and "our" (American) ignorance of history or "our" (English) refusal to acknowledge history. These accepted "norms," these structures of thought, which lie at the heart of the American "common core" and the English "e-bacc" of Michael Gove, and the "educational reform" efforts in the US, Canada, England, and Australia, are the very things which put our "Nation[s] at Risk." They are not a solution, they are the problem, and always have been, going back to the era in which public (or, in England, "state") education was created.

"America has long been known–despite our problems–as the country of freedom, innovation, and wealth.  There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is our democratic and free public education system.  Prior to NCLB in 2002 and Race to the Top eight years later, standardization was limited to SAT and ACT tests, NAEP and PISA tests, and graduation exams for Advanced Placement courses.  We valued music, art, drama, languages and the humanities just as much as valued science, math, and English (for the most part).  We believed in the well-rounded education.

Now, the Common Core State Standards has one goal: to create common people.  The accompanying standardized tests have one purpose: to create standardized people.  Why?  Because the movers and the shakers have a vested interest in it.  It’s about money and it’s about making sure all that money stays in one place." - Kris A. Nielsen 2012

Do we want "common people"? or is this effort by those with money and power, from ALEC to Bill Gates to Eli Broad to Goldman-Sachs, "how democracy ends" as the teacher quoted just above says?

Venn Diagram by Kris A. Nielsen

Democracy, like invention, requires uncommonalities, requires difference. Invention comes from (a) discomfort, combined with (b) thesis (an idea of how to solve the discomfort) plus (c) antithesis (a challenge to the thesis based in differing views), which leads to (d) synthesis - that new idea. Democracy, of course, in order to be democracy, requires constant invention, based in constant discomfort with how things are, combined with radically differing competing world views. Democracy is essential for invention, because it allows challenge to ideas. Invention is essential to democracy, because it allows creation of new answers. And our educational reform concepts, our Common Cores and E-baccs, allow neither to exist. And those who embrace these "answers" without apology are opposing all that is good about our nations and our economies.

My Venn Diagram of forces shaping US public education in 1850, the "Prussian Model"
imported by Henry Barnard was originally developed to ensure consistent training in
obedience for future imperial troops, and to discover potential fully-compliant low level officers.

The British Empire version looks slightly different in 1860: "Democracy Doubters"
includes those preserving unequal voting and the House of Lords, and "wealth schools"
represents the English "public school" (private) system.

What these diagrams share is the commitment to compliance and a matched citizenry which is easy to sell to and easy to derive labor from. What the resulting schools share is a failure to allow human accomplishment. It is important to note that even the very "best" American institutions of education could not hold Sergei Brinn or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg - people of ambition with all the gifts of American wealth. Even the most "radical" of American colleges could not hold Steve Jobs. But this is not new, Alexander Hamilton could not gain admission to The College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and dropped out of Kings College (now Columbia University). Scott Fitzgerald could not handle more than half a day of primary school and dropped out of Princeton. Frank Lloyd Wright never graduated from either high school or university. The education systems we have inherited from that mid-19th Century have consistently, and intentionally, restricted who is allowed to succeed. We can easily build long lists of dropouts who have found great success - often because family wealth or connections allowed them alternative paths - but the biggest tragedy are the millions and millions dumped by these systems who found nothing but despair, mixed with the even greater number of millions who "succeeded" in these systems only to find the meaningless of mediocrity and powerlessness.

If American education has been successful at all, as Yong Zhaoargues, it is because teachers and building and local administrators have subverted the system, not because they have followed or embraced it.

"Dr. Zhao grew up in China and immigrated to the US in the 1990’s. From his perspective he sees that China seems to want an education that America seems eager to throw away. This is one that respects individual talents, supports divergent thinking, tolerates deviation, and encourages creativity. At the same time, the US government is pushing for the kind of education that China is moving away from. This is one that features standardization of curricula and an emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests. He wonders why Americans who hold individual rights in high regard would let the government dictate what children should learn, when they should learn it, and how they are evaluated."

Yong Zhao at ISTE 2012

It is the rule-shattering schools, from Summerhill in England to the 3Is and Parkway School of the 1970s, to low-compliance schools like SLA and Monticello High School today which have always produced the most interesting, most culturally competent, most innovative students. Those schools have/had a shared cultural commitment to freedom and democracy, to difference and synthesis. They are focused on educating all kinds of students with communal support, not focused on the neoliberal ideal of creating an all-the-same population based solely on individual resources.

"Neoliberalism is an ideology and set of policies that privilege market strategies over public institutions to redress social issues (Kumashiro, 2008). Such policies champion privatizing formerly public services, deregulating trade, and increasing efficiency while simultaneously reducing wages, deunionizing, and slashing public services (Martinez & Garcia, 2000; Tabb, 2001). Neoliberalism defends the rights of the individual and uses the ideology of individual choice to promote the idea of a meritocracy “that presumes an even playing field” (Kumashiro, p. 37). Unfortunately, within education, these policies work to challenge the legitimacy of public schooling by promoting vouchers, charters, and other quasi-private schools while privatizing services that were once the domain of public institutions, such as curriculum development and testing (Lipman, 2005). By focusing on the rights and responsibilities of individuals, neoliberal policies have resulted in increasing accountability systems that place blame and punishment on individual students and teachers rather than on the inequitable school systems that have inadequately served them. Rather than improving quality of education, this vicious circle creates school climates characterized by compliance, conformity, and fear." Bree Picower 2011

"Compliance, conformity, and fear," the toxic mix which is product of the "common core," of the directives of Michael Gove, of "educational reformers" from Wall Street to Sydney. This is "the place" where kids who sit still in chairs for three hour long exams are the norm. Where everyone finds the the same plot and the same theme in the same stories, even if the plot is irrelevant. Where every kid always raises their hand before speaking and happily stares straight at the eyes of every authority figure. Where every child dreams of growing up to be a blond, blue-eyed, straight, protestant, just like the dolls we sell them.

2006 film, "The Water is Wide" from Pat Conroy's first (originally self-published) book.

Somewhere out there we need more teachers, more administrators, more parents, and more citizens who, despite their own educations in compliance, will challenge this. Who will say that "we." like all successful human societies, need differences, need diversity of views, need creativity, need play, need imagination, need refusals to conform.

Somewhere out there we need more heroes. Educators, parents, citizens, humans, who will take the risks needed to create a better place for kids, rather than just 'going along' that path of least resistance.

Here, today, in the middle of the Twelve Days of Christmas, when we celebrate, yes, just one child of one god, is a good time to recall that building an earthly heaven requires risk and sacrifice, and not risk aversion and compliance.

- Ira Socol

Can our President multitask?

In the 1990s there was a joke going around that President Clinton was "one Ritalin pill a day away from being a great President," and maybe that was true.

And in the 1970s, Jimmy Carter seemed to be keeping track of a million things at once...

And I thought of this while fighting with Justin Hamilton who tweets as @EDPressSec about the Department of Education's plan to strip away alternative testing from Special Education students.

The guess is that President Obama neither knows about this nor is interested

This is a huge issue, one which the Department of Education's Press Secretary refused to discuss.* It is huge because forcing special needs students to take inappropriate tests is abusive. And because the goal would seem to be - based on other actions of US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan - to be to force ever more public schools into being listed as "failures" by the national government. That, in turn, seems a political move designed to enrich certain Obama fundraisers who have invested heavily in privatized education.

But one of my Twitter pals noted something quite important: "likelihood of this issue having risen to Obama's attention? Probably zero, though...."

And yes, President Obama, for all his brilliance, for all his education, is a highly traditional learner and thinker. A straight-line, one issue at a time guy. And this week, for clear reasons, he is focused on Osama bin Laden and Pakistan and Al Qaeda. Just as in his first two years in office he focused first on the economy, then on health care.

Is that the kind of leadership this century needs? Or should "ADHD" and that much-questioned "multitasking" be a required part of 21st Century leadership descriptions?

This question, unlike the two things at the top of this post, is not a joke. It is a vital query into both leadership and education. For President Obama, the child of two very brilliant, but two very traditionally trained learners (one via US system, one via British system), seems the quintessential "industrial age" learner and leader. And we need to consider that, and wonder if that is working for us.

This is not to suggest that leaders should not delegate authority or utilize the incredible power of community cognition and collective intelligence, but in order to harness the power of those things a leader must see as much as possible, all the time - what David Packard called, "management by walking around."

"Why should you bother to get up off your ass and regularly tour the building, the warehouse, the delivery and shipping area? Aren’t you too busy? But that’s the danger: not knowing what is going on in all areas of your business can see you too busy managing the wrong things: you become a “Busy Fool”. You should, as often as you can and without indulging in irritating micro-management-style techniques, step over the filters and barriers that stand between you and the people on the ground. Your direct reports will often not want to tell you certain things at certain times. They will often deliver news in a certain way. Go and find out for yourself: see reality without the sugar-coating." - Colm McCormack

HP Video Explaining, "Management By Walking Around"

This isn't just a post-war Silicon Valley idea, this is classic "natural" human learning, and "natural" human leadership, rooted in human evolution.

As Peter Gray of Boston College recently wrote, early human hunter-gatherer learning fed a non-linear, widely-focused, very open learning structure, which created leaders who probably saw the world in much more connected terms than any "scientifically-trained" scholar of today:

"Hunter-gatherer children were the freest human children ever to have walked the earth. Hunter-gathers believed that children learn through their own, self-directed, self-initiated play and exploration, so they allowed their children unlimited time for such activities. In a survey of hunter-gatherer researchers that I helped to conduct some years ago, all said that the children in the group that they had studied were free to explore on their own, without adult guidance, essentially from dawn to dusk every day. They were allowed such freedom beginning at about age 4 (the age at which, according to hunter-gathers, children "have sense" and do not need to be watched regularly by adults) on into their mid to late teenage years, when they began to take on adult responsibilities. By providing children with food and other subsistence needs, and by not burdening them with many chores, hunter-gatherer adults allowed their children ample time to educate themselves."

This kind of open education form, which when you think of it, might closely parallel what a rebellious Bill Clinton or a farm-raised Jimmy Carter experienced growing up, seems to produce a very different learning and leadership style than the highly formalized educations of young George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

"What kind of mother was she? At least where her son was concerned, she was never without a workbook. She placed a great emphasis on manners; from an early age, Barack Obama was exquisitely polite. Into him Ann [Dunham Obama] Soetoro drilled a sense of duty to the world, the importance of hard work, the need to give back." "Most of all she stressed—by example as much as anything else—the value of education. It determined the geography of Obama’s early years. His mother typed and corrected his homework. From his memoir, we know about the 5 a.m. study sessions."

This is formalized, linear, "education as work," training, and it sunk in, creating in the current US President an extremely formalized, careful, single-focused learning and leading strategy. It is thus not, as I have sometimes charged, that "Obama doesn't care about children or education," rather, as my friend suggested, it is that the needs of children in America and the education system simply do not reach him - he has handed them off to a basketball-buddy-subordinate, and these issues are not in his current curriculum. Even when he goes to a school, he usually sees nothing because his "5 a.m. study sessions" have been about something else, and even when he answers an honest school question honestly, his current curriculum has not trained him to compare his human thoughts with his scientific policies. 

It is as if Henry V wouldn't bother to observe the winds at Agincourt because that was someone else's job. It is as if Henry V didn't bother to worry about the morale of his soldiers at Agincourt because they "know their jobs."

This does not mean that President Obama makes bad decisions, clearly, deeply focused choices such as the stimulus plan and the raid on Osama demonstrate a high-quality of decision-making. Rather, it is that President Obama makes too few decisions. His mother never let him learn to choose to study or not, or where, or how. His very traditional private schools never allowed him to choose where to sit, or whether to go to class. He learned that learning came from books or carefully constructed experiences. One suspects that he never really learned to look around in wonder.

Though yes, unlike his presidential predecessor, he did learn to ask questions, he learned to ask academic questions, the kinds of questions which have answers, not the big open questions of childhood - the kind of questions which only create more questions.

David Russell wrote a piece on how American Neo-Liberalism was the cause of America's viciously anti-child "education reform" movement, and I cannot argue with that, but perhaps the bigger issue is why this nonsense is so accepted... and I'm here to suggest that it is suggested because it offers a 'certainty of answers' to our 'rationally trained scientific managers' such as America's President. If you never actually see or hear students or teachers, if you never actually gaze around yourself without preconception, then you turn to a subordinate like Arne Duncan and want one sentence assurances that you are doing the right things.

But I'm not really writing about global educational policy here, or about Barack Obama. I'm writing a question: what kind of learning, what kind of leadership, is your school, is your classroom, training your students for?

"The most important and general way by which hunter-gatherer adults helped their children learn was by providing an always supportive, always trustful environment. To educate themselves, children need to feel emotionally secure and confident. By trusting children to know what is best for themselves and by making that trust apparent, adult hunter-gatherers provided the conditions that all children need, if they are to feel confident about taking control of their own lives and learning. Because all adult members of the band cared about and provided for the emotional and physical needs of all of the children, and because it was a cultural taboo ever to deliberately hurt a child, the children grew up feeling that others were trustworthy, which is a prerequisite for becoming trustworthy oneself. In such an environment, children's instincts for self-education flourish. That is as true today as it ever was.

"The secure child, raised in a setting where others are loving, trusting, and nonjudgmental, and where the tools and examples needed for education are available but not forced upon anyone, vigorously and joyfully undertakes the natural childhood task of self-education. Unfortunately, in our schools, we replace security with anxiety as the foundation for learning, and we keep children so busy doing what they are told to do that self-education becomes essentially impossible. In schools we "teach" in ways that subvert children's natural instincts to learn and that replace trust and security with distrust and anxiety." - Peter Gray

- Ira Socol

*Justin Hamilton graduated from Houston's public schools when former Bush, Jr, Secretary of Education Rod Paige was in charge. Paige, it turns out, lied about all of his districts graduation and academic statistics, so what education Mr. Hamilton actually received might be up for debate.

Returning School to Humanity

"Not to present a romanticized view," Richard Altenbaugh writes in The American People and Their Education: A Social History, "but preindustrial work moved at a very distinct pace and maintained a different culture than industrial labor." 

In the 20 years before the American Civil War, education's purpose and design changed in the United States as the economy changed. Without ascribing any utopian ideal to that "preindustrial" world Altenbaugh describes, we can clearly say that time and patterns of work followed something which might be described as "natural" directives. Workers had things to do, obviously, but when and how they were done represented individual - or family - responses to the world as it existed that moment.

Describing Lynn, Massachusetts - the shoe manufacturing capitol of the US in the early 19th Century - Alan Dawley wrote in 1976 (quoted and paraphrased by Altenbaugh 1979 p. 70), "Women decided when to boil tallow for candles, when to darn socks, and when to bind shoes. Men chose when to repair the front stoop, when to manure the garden, and when to bottom shoes. Running errands, a boy exploited this time to play games with friends. Work paused for relaxed meals, or when customers or visitors stopped, or simply to pass the time gossiping or debating politics."

"Because of task-oriented work, there was no standard length to the workday or workweek," Altenbaugh continues, relying on social-historian E. P. Thompson (1967). "The duration of work depended on the completion of the task. Such irregular work rhythms caused bouts of leisure to be followed by frenetic periods of labor. And no sharp demarcation existed between work and social intercourse."

And, naturally, the same social structure extended to education. Students came to school when they could (or would), after necessary family chores were finished, when the weather allowed, when the manufacture or farming schedule allowed. All students shared one classroom, there were no subject divisions or separation between skill building and content. This extended from the schooling for the youngest all the way up. Reading a biography of Alexander Hamilton, I was struck by the complete informality of his experience at Kings College (now Columbia University) in New York - no real classes, no specific reading requirements, a fully individualized course of study which would be virtually unknown today even in American doctoral programs.

And yes, students entered the classroom wherever they "were" and worked forward. Since the Prussian/Pietist concept of age-based grades had yet to be transplanted to the "New World" there were, as yet, nothing like grade-based curricula or grade-based expectations.

thanks to James Socol for the image

Which brings us, momentarily, to today. After 150 or so years of life within the "Second Industrial Revolution," work in America has changed radically. Jobs in the United States, and in Europe, and Australia, etc, are, today, largely of two types: Service and Creative. Both of these job types require very high degrees of flexibility (both time and job task), collaboration, independence, observation, and multi-tasking. As the waiter must scan the room effectively, and support co-workers, and extend tasks based on conditions, the creative worker (see Mozilla Corporation headquarters above "no sharp demarcation existed between work and social intercourse") must flip between individual and group work constantly, keep track of multiple elements, and operate in a purely task oriented environment. These skillsets have far more to do with the lifestyle of the preindustrial society than they do with that of the Ford Assembly Line worker of 1920. Even within "industry" the demands have changed. In 1960 the GM worker bolted the rear bumper onto the Buick and paid no attention if the tail pipe - installed "up the line" - was falling off. Now, that kind of "single-tasking" is completely unacceptable.

Yet our schools remain firmly about training those 1920 Ford workers or 1960 GM workers. Oh, yes, many schools are trying - and fighting the Obama Administration - to include collaboration and creativity, but that is within the "specified" curriculum. The far more important "Hidden Curriculum" and the entire so-called "reform movement" (of Gates, Duncan, Rhee, Vallas, Klein, et al) is devoted to education as a system of manufacturing industrial workers. ("The hidden curriculum is no hidden at all, it is the curriculum," Lynn Fendler))

Let's drop back in time again, to the days of New England mill owners trying to get workers trained in the concepts of work shifts and specific time schedules. Where did they turn for this training? To the nascent "common school" of Henry Barnard. Barnard could be blunt: "The primary object in securing the early school attendance of children, is not so much their intellectual culture, as the regulation of the feelings and dispositions." The function of the form being created for schools was not to enhance education, it was to enhance conformity and submission to the emerging industrial culture.

"As a result, apprenticeship and generalized vocational choice transmitted through family lines gradually were replaced by formal schooling and vocationally oriented training to better accommodate the realities of an industrial job market. Inevitably, schools took on the task- especially the burden of socializing the nation's youth for entry into the workforce. How the individual functioned within the schooling process- attendance, grades, and graduation - became the primary means of determining preparedness for work" (Jacobs and Phillips 1979). 

So, we expect students to be "on time" not because it is educationally important - in an individualized education program why would it be? - but because we are training workers to be on time. We create "standards" for each grade level not because it is educationally important - why is it important to study American History and Central European History at age 13? - but because we are teaching single-tasking and work conformity. We test individually, blocking collaboration (which we call "cheating") not because it is educationally important - why wouldn't we ask the humans around us to share their knowledge? - but because we are manufacturing workers for that assembly line. 

While people worry about testing averages, about whether schools should be run as public goods or for corporate profit, about the number of school days, about what topics to emphasize, the real question, as the 21st Century rolls on, needs to be the very designed structure of our schools. They were created by a certain kind of society for a certain kind of economic reality. Whether that was ever good or bad is a question for another time, but for today I believe we need to begin to return our schools back to the "natural humanity" of the time before the assembly line began to rule our lives.  

- Ira Socol

John Lindsay and the Audacity of Hope

New York Mayor John V. Lindsay might be best remembered for columnist Jack Newfield's quote about him: "He gives good intentions a bad name."

As Lindsay is remembered this season, with a major exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York and with a documentary from New York public television station WNET-13, I would like to offer a counter assessment. I do this not just in a continuing attempt to set the historical record straight against what I consider the "historical fictions" of America's right ("Lindsay proved that big government doesn't work, he bankrupted the city." "Ronald Reagan won the Cold War." "The Great Society was a total failure."), but because the Lindsay Administration in New York City can tell us a lot about how we, as a society, perceive and build change. And that is very important for those of us seeking to re-imagine education.

For in the Lindsay Administration all hopes were welcomed, all changes were considered possible, all things which might promise an improved life were worth experimenting with, aesthetics mattered as much as spreadsheet numbers, feelings and empathy were more important than control and efficiency, and the general public was actually asked to "Give a damn."

This wasn't job lip service. Cars were kicked out of parks and the public was welcomed in. Museums went from stodgy palaces of the elites to welcoming institutions for everyone. College access was promised to all high school graduates - an idea almost 4 decades ahead of its time. Cleaning the air was considered important, long before the Feds began to enforce this idea. Cops were asked to influence crime through presence and community policing rather than through force. Schools were built. Subways were air conditioned so everyone might have quieter more comfortable commutes. Zoning was re-crafted to encourage public spaces. Cheap theater tickets were distributed - a system which remains a boon to tourists, the Broadway industry, and middle-class New Yorkers to this day. Historic buildings were protected. Racial integration was expected.

Did it all work? Hell no. We know that. The parks didn't have enough money to keep up with maintenance once user traffic tripled. The early air conditioners in the subway broke down and the newer-style windows didn't open much. The City University System (CUNY) lacked both the money and the faculty will to make "Open Admissions" work. Everything from clean air requirements to non-discriminatory hiring expectations to historic preservation scared businesses, which often moved away from regulations to New Jersey.

But, let me state the obvious, perhaps because of all these attempts, or - at least "obviously" - in spite of them, New York City survived 1965-1975, something many cities in the US really did not (see Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Newark, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Oakland, et al). Sure New York lost population (almost 10%), lost jobs and industries, and found itself bankrupt financially (primarily though, to be clear, because taxes levied in New York City supported the entire state and a large part of the nation - not because New York City lacked the requisite wealth). Those losses, however, were minimal compared to almost any other American city, and in 1976 that "bankrupt" New York could easily welcome the world to the completely successful American Bicentennial celebration. New York could hardly be said to have "collapsed" under Lindsay's "big government socialism."

The Urban Coalition's Give a damn campaign.

Give a damn

The heart of the Lindsay Administration was in the dual notions of equality and true opportunity. The belief system was that it was better to try and fail than to not try. The ethos was framed in the simple slogan of the Urban Coalition: "Give a damn." And so even if the immediate impact was not obvious, even if the failures mounted up, the results transformed New York City and created the possibility of future success.

For the first time the City University undergraduate population began to reflect the emerging diversity of the city, and today, CUNY's wonderfully diverse system is one of the best in the world.

For the first time since the advent of the automobile the parks system became dedicated to quiet and clean air, and the parks system was celebrated as a jewel. Without that cultural shift the volunteer efforts which have restored the parks could not have begun.

After years of "post war" neglect in favor of highways, the Subway system was again viewed as vital and essential. Giuliani's "restoration" would not have happened if Lindsay hadn't preserved what was there, and focused attention on it.

Cultural institutions became central to the life of the middle class in New York City. Museums flourished as the city embraced, first, The Museum Mile, and then other centers of culture. The TKTS booth on Times Square democratized theater audiences. Shakespeare appeared in The Park, the New York Philharmonic quickly followed.

And despite the many disasters (Ocean Hill/Brownsville and Frank Serpico being the top two), New Yorkers, for the first time, felt they had real input into their policing and education systems.

This was powerful stuff, and it remains powerful stuff.

45 years later

This matters 45 years later because we now live in an age when leaders spend more time telling us what is not possible than in trying to make our dreams into realities. We're told that Americans can't have a health care system as good as those in most similar nations. We're told that the best we can do is having a few good schools in a few states. We're told poverty is unsolvable - almost impossible to even make a dent in. We're told we can't have a real rail transport system. We have US Senators and Congressmembers who even tell us that we can not even put those who've killed Americans on trial.

On Twitter I listen daily as "educational reformers" prattle on about all we cannot do, we can only save a few kids, they say, so we'll segregate those few into Charter Life Boats while we watch the rest drown.

Everywhere in education I see people afraid to try, afraid even to run with great ideas which great teachers are proving in their classrooms. Brits can boycott dumb high stakes tests, but Americans are afraid. Few are willing to risk fighting the anti-child, anti-teacher tide flowing from Washington (and now from Westminster).  

The New York Times correctly titled their exhibition review "You Can Fight City Hall." Because that is what the Lindsay Administration meant. It was a time and a mindset that said we need to aim for the best we can be, and if that doesn't work, we'll pick ourselves up and try again.

1965 Campaign

1969 Campaign or watch the full video

Watch these campaign ads, visit the virtual exhibits (or the real ones if in or around New York), and remind yourself of what risk in the name of good looks like for a society.

Maybe we can recapture just a bit of that.

- Ira Socol