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Home > Fall Forum > 1997
Schooling and "The Crisis of Relationships"
10th Annual Fall Forum
Nov 24, 1997
Democracy is not merely a set of juridical arrangements.
True, it requires some such arrangements. They aren't irrelevant. After all
democracy assumes adversarial relationships and self-interest; alliances and negotiations;
it takes for granted conflict, and all that goes with it even as it seeks the
widest and deepest concensus. It's built, as Thomas Jefferson notes, on the odd
idea that "self-government is more important than good government."
There are, short, no perfect recipes for good governance; and lots of different
forms have demonstrated that they can work. But none will flourish, and none will
satisfy for long where basic human relationships have been so eroded or underdeveloped
that no one trusts anyone--that a handshake no longer has meaning, one's word
no longer resounds with any reliability and no one can "count on" anyone. Where
there is no shared community of "selves."
Democracy cannot long survive widespread, even justified paranoia and deep-seated
fear of others. It requires a basic sense of trust in one's fellow beings, other
citizens--a generosity of spirit that suggests that there just might be a good
reason for what appears to be the other guys bad viewpoint--a reason to listen
to eachother even when we're "sure" we're right. It requires a mindset that suggests
that it just might pay off to step into each other's shoes for a few minutes;
we'd be stronger and wiser for it. A mindset that suggests that we might share
more in common than our differences at first blush suggest. At the heart of a
healthy civic life, in short, is a a belief in the viability of our relationship
to others--the bonds that unite us.
These have never been qualities that carried us far beyond family, tribe, community
or nation. In fact, such "trust" requires a suspension of disbelief in each other
that may even be naive--and can certainly be subject to accusations of sentimentality.
Indeed there are good and sound reasons for us not to trust "others". History
abounds in examples of misplaced trust. Balancing good sense and some hard-headed
sophistication with that necessary naivete regarding the generous intentions of
others is no easy task, but it's one democracy ultimately depends on. While I
love to quote Thomas Jefferson, it's equally important to remember that his democracy
was intended for a tiny elite--white, landed men!
But contemporary life is peculiarly bad at such relationship-building at any
and all levels. Both family, job and geogreaphic mobility drive us into private--me
and mine-- retreats. Few of us live in the same community we were raised in, many
of us move many times in our lives, and see no particular "place" as "ours." many,
if not most of our fellow citizens have no loyalty to place. Many of us don't
even have the same family for a lifetime. Jobs are no longer even advertised as
offering security. There's an enormous drive on to convince us, in fact, that
the mere desire for job security indicates laziness and is bad for the social
order! The long-standing role of unions in protecting job security is seen, like
job tenure arrangements, as counterproductive, inefficient, and possibly un American.
No wonder we face a crisis of relationships. We're fast losing all the places
where we might learn to build relationships, create bonds.
We know that human beings can better weather change if in their early lives
they have experienced strong and abiding ties, a deep sense of security. But these
new facts of life erode such early ties. And as schools take up more and more
of our lives, their flaws as relationship-building institutions becomes more glaring.
Whereas our grandparents spent 6-9 years, on the average, in school, kids today
spend 12-16 years. That is one reason why CES is so relevant and critical.
At a time when we need personalized ties more and more, our schools take up
more of our lives--and are increasingly more anonymous--filled with interchangable
parts, people who pass through children's lives and each other's lives in a purely
instrumental fashion.
The relationships, furthermore, of school age kids to other adults and other
adult institutions-also has become staggeringly more impersonal--bureaucratic.
Intergenerational relationships between youngsters and grownups are nearly nonexistent.
Even teen-work is largely at jobs in which coworkers are also other teens!
Meanwhile our schools are increasingly disconnected from nonschool adults.
Whereas in 1940 there were over a million Americans (in a population half the
current size) who sat on local school boards and "knew" schools, today there are
under 100,000 such citizens on school boards! There is no knowledgable citizen
public left to speak up for its public schools. Whereas as late as 1945 most Americans
attended schools of a few hundred, today the average school has a thousand students.
Neither children, teachers nor families know each other, and have any continuous
relationship with each other.
All this would perhaps be insoluble if it were true that we face a terrible
trade-off: if focusing on rebuilding schools that strengthen human relationships
were antithetical to building schools that strengthen children's intellectual
competence and the work skills they need to bring into adulthood. In fact, the
two go hand in hand. For the vast majority anonymity is not good for intellectual
growth, or workplace skills; only through powerful inter-generational relationships
are the young ever able to cross the boundary (in Mike Rose's phrase) into full
citizenship.
It turns out, I believe, that democracy offers us both an ideal "end" and not
coincidentally provides guidance on how to get there. Means and ends not unsurprisingly
jibe in the raising of our children. If we want responsible, caring and competent
citizens at the "end", we need responsible, caring and competent schools along
the route which model--on a daily basis--what such relationships can look like.
The schools our kids need must be built around trust; which means they must
waste their time on relationship-building. But such relationship-building doesn't
have to mean going off to rope climbing courses. It means creating authentic intellectual
communities, built around its central purpose--learning. From soup to nuts schools
need to count on the ordinary judgments of ordinary people--and by "counting on",
hold "accountable." They must see as their task building more and more responsibility
into each school, while also insisting that their daily work be public, their
results--including the data they rely on to make decision--open to inspection,
and their judgments accessible to others. It's around the exercise of such judgments
that good relationships--that have both a personal and a public aspect--can grow.
Thus the very relationships necessary for democratic life are part and parcel
of the central intellectual tasks of the school--not luxuries or add ons.
Like old political clubs, union halls, and community organizations--where the
purpose of the activity remained the glue that held together relationships between
often quite disparate people, so schools can create communities that teach often
very disparate communities how to go about trusting each other.
It's the glue that unites our nine common principles to the 10th one we've
adopted here today; and the manner in which we've done it--which at moments made
me impatient, irritated, has demonstrated the power of our new democratic structure.
It's a living example of how meands and ends go together. I feel extraordinarily
proud of us--because we've used democracy in just the way it should be used, to
hear each other out over and over again, listened when it was hard to listen,
until we could actually reach a common--even if not for each one of us "the" perfect--way
of expressing our ideals. I like what we came up with. Congratulations.
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