Battle Creek, Detroit, Appalachia, and David Brooks

I've returned home after several days in Battle Creek and Detroit. I saw lots of good things. As a significant example, I observed an experienced teacher and athletic coach working with a group of young people in a "satellite site". The students were essentially responsible for their own learning, with Internet "distance learning" classes being important sources of their lessons. The teacher was functioning mostly as an advisor. These students, who had been doing poorly in regular classroom situations, were doing well, and the teacher was delighted -- he regards what he and the students are doing as being far more productive than are typical classroom situations. I told the teacher about students in a tiny town in the Appalachian region of Alabama who are publishing the town's newspaper and otherwise doing work that is important to their community. The Battle Creek teacher envisions that his students will also be reaching toward the community for projects that matter.

Also in Battle Creek, I saw people who are making effective use of community gardens as tools for building stronger communities; I even heard some discussion about connecting Battle Creek's young gardeners with gardeners in Africa. And I listened to a conversation about whether the top-down standardized tests do mostly good or mostly harm. One line of reasoning said that teachers need to feel pressure from bosses in order to stay focused on the task, and the other line of reasoning was that the real job of teachers is to help students learn to learn -- and that, therefore, teachers should be responding to their students more than to top-down bosses.

In Detroit I was privileged to spend some time with Grace Lee Boggs. Grace has the wisdom that comes from years -- she is 95 -- and her wisdom is linked to incredible vitality. She is, among many other things, participating in discussions to "reimagine work". She and her colleagues, who include some people who have been active in organized labor, know that the monotonous days of assembly lines are ending; and they realize that somebody needs to do some thinking about what the work of the future will be like.

I saw still more good things, including a cadre of highly dedicated teachers in a suburban community west of Detroit. But I also saw reminders of a pervasive bad thing: public schools require money, and that money is controlled by political/bureaucratic systems that, in the nature of the beast, seek to control what goes on at the bottom of the hierarchy. This disconnect between what the system demands and what children need puts teachers in the extremely difficult position of having to balance education with politics.

I saw no silver bullet solutions to this disconnect problem -- I didn't expect to. What I did see, however, were significant numbers of citizens who realize that connecting children with the life of their community is of long-term benefit to everybody. I saw some of those citizens in conversations with each other (in person as well as via Internet kinds of things). One of the key leaders in Battle Creek is even going so far as to help start a new blog, tentatively called "One Community at a Time", to enable communities to share their experiences.

Local citizens working together on behalf of everybody is what built our country. And local citizens working together are what can pull our country back together now. As David Brooks argues, in his New York Times column of November 12, the political movement that was so evident in the recent elections is cause for optimism. In Brooks' words, "I'm optimistic because, while our political system is a mess, the economic and social values of the country remain sound. This optimism is also based on the conviction that serious, vibrant societies don't sit by and do nothing as their governments drive off a cliff".

David Brooks had made the point in an earlier column that "working class" citizens are the key to fixing the political system. What I saw in Battle Creek and Detroit (and what I've seen in the mountains of Kentucky and Alabama and elsewhere) tells me that Brooks is correct: we ought to be optimistic because our citizenry is a good citizenry, with the capacity to subordinate selfish interests for the welfare of the country and the children. That said, it follows that, as the unselfish strength of our citizenry asserts itself, the political/bureaucratic system will defer to the citizens; and that means, among many other good things, that education policies will be transferred from the hierarchies to the communities.

I don't suggest that communities can do a perfect job of balancing education with politics. Communities can, however, do one crucially important thing that political/bureaucratic hierarchies cannot do: communities can see the children as individuals (not as abstract profiles). This difference -- the difference between profiles and individuals -- allows teachers to focus on the students (rather than on the politics of hierarchies).

I don't suggest, either, that it will be easy to convince the political/bureaucratic hierarchies that their proper role is to support public education, not to use schools as political pawns. I do suggest, however -- I know this from many long years of experience-- that when politicians and bureaucrats in capital cities see an unselfish citizenry standing together, those politicians and bureaucrats come down off their pedestals and join the public

David Brooks is optimistic that our good citizens will fix our broken political system (and I agree with him). That fixing will be done largely at the community level, which is where education must be fixed. And that's the core of what I think I've learned: fixing our political system and fixing our schools are part and parcel of the same thing -- they need to be fixed together.

Bob Cornett