Warren Buffett Agrees With Erica Goldson

When I set out to write this posting my intention was to encourage some creative conversation about community-based projects, but I got distracted by the national attention being given to education reform. The public schools are in a mess, we are being told, but silver bullets are on the way: more top-down coercion -- more of the robotic systems that Erica Goldson describes.

My first reaction was a combination of anger and dismay -- anger that grown-ups would run over children's learning and dismay that we citizens are letting it happen. But I reminded myself that we're faced with a problem that has been around for a very long time and it will be fixed when we citizens commit ourselves to doing the fixing. I forced myself, you might say, to remember that this blog is an "Academy", a place for thoughtfulness.

Then, as luck would have it, I watched part of a televised discussion in which college students -- Columbia University majors in business -- asked questions of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. The questions mostly dealt with the economics of business, but one student asked Mr. Buffett how his classes at Columbia had helped him with his career. I can't quote Mr. Buffett's answer exactly (the transcript is here), but he referred to a number of professors who had encouraged him to pursue his own interests; those professors had inspired him and it was inspiration that he regards as the valuable part of his time at Columbia.  Warren Buffett and Erica Goldson are saying fundamentally the same thing.

I regard the Buffett interview as significant, not because he is wealthy and famous, but because he is wise and he wants to share his wisdom. Warren Buffett, as I see it, represents the same kind of national resource as does the 89-year-old Kentucky man who is inspiring the 12-year-old boy regarding the American Chestnut restoration. (I told about that man here.)

One of the wisest of my elderly friends put it this way: "Life itself is the classroom". When the top-down people -- those who treat the children as robotic rather than as individual humans -- come to realize that we (We the People) understand what my friend understands, which is what Warren Buffett understands (and what many millions of us understand), the top-down silver bullet proposals will become irrelevant (and they'll go away).

I'll stop for now except to briefly call attention to a man I regard as the most insightful educator-journalist in the country. Marion Brady, who lives in Cocoa, Florida, is on the children's side. You can learn all about Marion's thinking from his website, but I'll briefly quote from his recent (September 22) letter to the editor of "Education Week": "We give assignments that send kids off to the library or the Internet to read what someone else has written and then say it in their own words. When we do that we're asking him to sharpen a skill but it's a far lesser skill than the one we should be promoting, and it invites plagiarism. What should concern us isn't the originality of student words, but the originality of student ideas". The Brady letter closes with these words: "There's an easy way around the problem. Don't send students to the Internet of the library to look and then write. Send them out into the real world".

My basic message to Erica Goldson (and everybody else) is that we're not alone, not by a longshot.

Bob Cornett

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The Grand Communities Academy

I herewith offer the first posting to this blog.

The immediate impetus for starting this blog is the valedictory speech made by Erica Goldson at her high school in New York state (Coxsackie/Athens). But the need for community-based partnerships has been obvious for a long time. As many of the finest educators in the country have long been telling us, the top-down coercive systems that are now so common in public education are the opposite of what is needed. But the people in charge of those hierarchical systems are seldom hearing the best educators.

Erica Goldson does a powerful job of summing up what is wrong. She says, as an example of her words: "We are more than robotic bookshelves, conditioned to blurt out facts we were taught in school. We are all very special, every human on this planet is so special, so are we all deserving of something better, of using our minds for innovation rather than memorization, for creativity, rather than futile activity, for rumination rather than stagnation?”Erica is saying what Albert Einstein famously said: “Imagination is more important than information”.

Erica's speech is more significant than mere words about education. As a grandparent, I feel what Erica is saying at a personal level. I have lots of grandchildren (twenty-five, counting great-grandchildren), but there's nothing unique about my feelings: every grandparent knows, as I know, that grandchildren are special humans. What Erica has done is to issue a call to action -- a call to correct a problem that requires the best efforts of all of us-- young and old.

Let's ponder for a moment. Are there thoughtful people anywhere who would argue that young people should be more like robots  than humans? If there are such people I have never seen them -- and I guarantee that there are no such grandparents. There are, however, large numbers of organizations that are run by systems designed to control what goes on in the organization; such organizations have big bosses at the top, little bosses near the bottom, and middling bosses in between. In these top-down organizations the big people do the thinking and the little people do as they are told. There was a time in our history when experts believed that more control from the top and less latitude at the bottom constituted good management. (I recall being told by a worker at a Ford assembly plant that there was a sign outside his plant saying "Leave your brain at the factory gate.” What that man was saying was no doubt figuratively true -- the workers got the message that thinking was not allowed -- even if the sign wasn't literally there.) The best experts in management have long since rejected such self-defeating elitism, but many business organizations are nevertheless still run from the top down. In the case of governments, from the earliest civilizations we have had big bosses (such as kings) at the top doing the thinking and the controlling; and those top-down attitudes are still very much around, even in countries that have "democracies".

Here, I’m convinced, is the crux of our problem. Even though thoughtful people would not want young people to be like robots, the political/bureaucratic systems in charge of public education are caught up in the culture of top-down management. It is those systems that are responsible for treating Erica Goldson as part of  a robotic assembly line instead of a human.

I recently read that there are seventy million grandparents in the United States. That assures us that we have seventy million people who are committed in their DNA to treating young people as humans. But there are large numbers of adults who receive "special interest" largess of one kind or another from the top-down systems. As of now, it is the special interest groups who get the attention of legislators and bureaucrats who establish public policies; and consequently the top-down control systems are having their way. Robotics are in and humanity is out.

I know something about bureaucratic systems (as do a number of my closest colleagues); I have spent many years in and around public agencies at state, local, and federal levels. I realize, in hindsight, that I have been guilty myself of using top-down control techniques even when I should have known that those techniques were contrary to the public interest. I therefore know firsthand that, unless the current crop of bureaucrats is markedly better than those in my days -- they're not -- they can convince themselves that serving the system is the same as serving the public. To apply this to Erica Goldson's situation, the bureaucratic systems that are in place are fully capable of treating Erica as a robot and, at the same time, convincing themselves that what they're doing is in the best interests of Erica's learning.

My vision for this blog is that it can pull in participants who understand both bureaucratic systems and education and who, therefore, can become a source of in-depth understanding as to how to combine sound management and sound educational methods with common sense. The people who can develop and share the needed understanding are out there, I'm sure. I've just learned, as a potentially important case in point, that the Provost at Columbia University, Dr. Claude Steele, has a deep understanding of why we humans do some of the foolish and self-defeating things that we do. (I think it would be great if Dr. Steele and Erica Goldson could team up -- they're only 100 miles or so apart.) Dr. Steele is (to me) a recent "discovery", but I know, and know about, other deep thinkers whose expertise and wisdom can help us get where we need to go.

There's more at issue here than young people's learning: our democracy is at stake. I need not elaborate much on that point -- we can see everywhere we look that we've more and more been outsourcing our thinking to "one eyed experts" (I borrow this term from Wendell Berry, my favorite Kentucky writer and deep thinker.) And we see all around, also, that our political systems are not working properly -- citizens are being left out. Our Founding Fathers would surely be dismayed if they could see how "We the People" has so often become "We the Special Interests".

I recently re-read the book, "Democracy in America", written by the remarkable young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured our country in 1831. Tocqueville reminds us that the strength of our country, from the start, has been the communities. And, perhaps of even greater importance, he reminds us that the community strength is based on equality. Americans worked together as equals, with everybody participating as thinkers and doers; the citizens were humans, not robots.

There have been news reports recently that large numbers of African-American males are dropping out of school before they finish high school. The missed schooling is bad enough, but some of my more thoughtful African-American friends tell me that the problem goes deeper: many of those young men are, in effect, dropping out of society. This is a very serious matter, and it can't be fixed by top-down robot techniques. Here is yet another reason why we need to join with Erica on behalf of humanity and common sense.

There is no procedures manual for putting community common sense back into learning, but intergenerational partnerships that benefit the community constitute a general approach that can work. I've been involved in a number of such projects, including an initiative to restore the American Chestnut tree to the Appalachian forests. (This once-important tree was essentially destroyed by blight some 6 to 8 decades ago.) A tiny rural community in southeastern Kentucky has formed an intergenerational club -- they're calling it the "Taproot Corps" -- and they're committed to bringing the Chestnut back to their community. They will, among many other things, be having a "Chestnut Festival" where the young people will participate in demonstrating the Chestnut restoration project. One of my favorite experiences in that community was watching a 12-year-old boy and an 89-year-old man talking about when the Chestnut used to be alive and the importance of bringing it back. That was a deeply passionate conversation -- it was learning at its very best.

The reason I choose to cite that Chestnut project is that the project illustrates all aspects of the difference between top-down hierarchy and community. Work is being accomplished -- real work that is highly important to that community. And the work is being done by people who are equal in status -- there are no one eyed experts looking down on mere citizens. The driving motivation is, in the words of one of my elder friends, "giving, not getting". And, as perhaps the most difficult factor to understand from outside the community, the citizens and public officials are practicing the essence of effective democracy: they are working together on behalf of everybody. Absent is the kind of special interest bargaining that typically goes on in the world of political/bureaucratic hierarchies. There is no kow-towing to officials with power and money. This is "We the People" democracy, democracy based upon shared vision and trust.

We need to acknowledge that getting from top down to community -- from robot to human and from elitism to equality -- cannot happen easily. Nobody is going to abolish human nature, including the part of human nature that is narrowly self-serving.  The reality of our human nature requires that we patiently gear up for the long haul. And gearing up for the long haul is something we seldom want to do; we much prefer quick and easy solutions -- silver bullet solutions.

There is an old quotation that goes a long way towards summing up our situation: "We don't know what we don't know". One-eyed experts don't know, as an important example, what children learn outside school (they are paid not to want to know what they don’t know.) And, when not knowing and not wanting to know are added together, we can easily find ourselves believing that schooling and learning are the same thing; and, from there, it is a very short step to believing that top-down tests and other mandates are just what the students need. Erica Goldson's distinction between robotics and humanity can easily become invisible when we allow ourselves to believe the patently wrong notion that more learning takes place in school than in life.

Here, I believe, is where we elders and our young partners can make our biggest contribution. We elders have lived long enough to have acquired some of the "wisdom" that is in life. And, in the case of young people, they have not yet come to believe that they've already learned so much that they don't need to be concerned with what they don't know. What this means is that community-based citizens, old and young, are better equipped to understand about learning than are top-down hierarchies. We are obligated—our citizenship requires it—to see to it that our understanding is put back into public education.

My colleagues and I do not view this blog as belonging to us – most of us (including me) just barely know what a blog is. Instead, we view this as functioning as something of a cooperative, with people participating because they share common goals. My son's secretary, Cathy Giles, very much shares those goals and she knows a good bit about things like blogs. Cathy, who is a grandmother, is busy with her day job in my son's real estate appraisal office but she has volunteered to help get the blog off the ground.

We have chosen to use the word "Academy" because we want to emphasize that the partnership is about reasoning, not about power seeking. We don't need power; we have power, the power that "We the People" got from our Founding Fathers. 

Although we envision this blog as being "commons" property, we are advised that, at least early on, somebody needs to exercise a degree of editorial control. I don't know how to do that and, as a matter of fact, I don't know much about anything except for what I have learned by living a long time (and by having so many wonderful grandchildren and great-grandchildren.) What I am doing with this posting is little more than expressing confidence that lots of people care about the things that Erica Goldson is reminding us about. If my confidence is well-placed—if people do care as much as I believe they do—we can figure out how best to come together.

I’ll stop (for now) with one admonition: the woods are full of people who are very smart-- so smart that they believe that smart people in distant locations are capable of designing mandates that serve children’s learning better than can the people who know and love the children as individuals Such people are too smart, too smart to believe that mere citizens (such as grandparents and other community-based elders) have an essential role to play in helping equip young people for life. These are not mean people—they don’t intend to support systems that bully children and their teachers; they don’t know any better. It’s our job, using the wisdom that life has provided us, to explain the facts of life and learning to those who don’t know any better. The best way to do the explaining job (I believe) is to set examples—examples of the kind that I’ve seen in that mountain community. (And the worst thing we can do, as Erica Goldson has helped explain, is to look to the hierarchies to fix what’s wrong. When we look to the hierarchies instead of to each other in the communities we go into a world that is by nature biased in favor of top-down systems. When we do that we sell out our grassroots understanding, and the result is that we become part of the problem.)

Bob Cornett

Georgetown, Ky.