Lessons From Chile

The whole world was very much touched by the rescue of the copper miners in Chile. I've asked several friends why -- what made this such a compelling drama? The answers I got used differing words (of course), but I think they boil down to the distinction between "giving" and "getting". (I referred to that distinction in my first posting to this blog here.) One of my friends, as a case in point, was deeply moved by the Chilean President: he was there at the mine site to share that community's giving humanity.

The contrast between what we saw at that mine and what we've seen in some of our own disasters -- Katrina, as an example -- is a stark contrast. One of our former emergency management officials -- I won't use his name because he has been picked on enough -- has recently talked about the bureaucratic infighting that hampered relief efforts during and after Katrina -- the bureaucratic interests of the agencies often were more important than the mission.

This contrast, I believe, is squarely relevant to what Erica Goldson has told us about our education systems. Erica and her fellow students have been under the control of self-serving bureaucratic systems, while the controlling force in Chile is the love that those workers and citizens have for each other.

We all agree, surely, that what we saw in Chile is what we need and want and that what we saw with Katrina is what we don't need and don't want. And, surely, nearly all of us agree that we want students who can think creatively, not students who passively serve the interests of bureaucratic systems.

But we also disagree: we often want somebody else to take us from where we are to where we want to go and we have differing opinions as to who that somebody ought to be. Our political system, when it works well, serves to reconcile our differences; but our political system is more dysfunctional than it has been in my adult lifetime. (I've been in position to see that system close up for a lot of years.) The basic root of the dysfunction (I'm convinced) is that large numbers of citizens believe that they are being ignored or manipulated.

I don't know when we will manage to fix our dysfunctional political system. David Brooks of the "New York Times", in his October 15  column, puts it this way: "Nobody who walks into the valley of our political system emerges unscathed. Today's political environment encourages narcissism and inflames insecurity. Pols must continually brag about themselves....."

Brooks is correct (but he is dead wrong when, in other columns, he advocates such top-down techniques as standardized testing). When we look to the political system to reform public education we are turning the children over to a system that cares more about itself than about children's learning.

Erica Goldson told us, in compelling language, that what we're doing is wrong. The Chileans have showed us, also in a compelling way, how to do things the right way. As I personally view the situation, Erica has, on behalf of herself and all the grandchildren in the country, asked us to take on the fixing job; and the Chileans have reminded us that we (We the People, not we the manipulators) are capable of doing this kind of fixing job.

I believe that, certainly in the case of us grandparents and other elders, we have no ethical choice: we have to accept responsibility for putting communities back in charge of public education (and, also, of public policies). Let's thank the Chileans for reminding us that we citizens not only are obligated to each other but that we together have the ability to do what needs to be done.

I expect to get another reminder of the strength that is in communities when I attend the Chestnut Festival in eastern Kentucky. I'll have a report on that in a couple of days. As we add community-building initiatives to our inventory of successes, we can be more and more confident that we can and will do what needs to be done.

Bob Cornett