Plain Stupid

The Kentucky legislature is considering prohibiting young people from dropping out of school before the age of 18. (It's 16 now). And a major newspaper is saying hooray, citing such "facts" as that high school graduates make more money than dropouts and that dropouts are more likely to end up in jail than are those with diplomas. (One of my friends, a criminal justice professor, wonders whether it's osmosis that's the reason two extra years of boredom can be so beneficial. However, if osmosis, or something equivalent, doesn't work my friend says that two extra years of forced acquiescence will be good preparation for jail.)

Dee Hock, the founder of the Visa credit card organization, and author of the remarkable book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age", posed the question as to why he sometimes resorted to top-down command and control methods even though he knew that such methods were the opposite of what is needed. His answer was "Plain Stupid!"

Everybody will agree, if they think about it, that marking time in a classroom is not the same thing is learning. Our best educators have, for many years, been telling us that education is effective only when the students are active participants. But we keep right on with the top-down methods: more standardized testing, more coercion of teachers and students, more of the same old thing. More "Plain Stupid!"

I have confessed to some stupid things I've done: when I was an ambitious young bureaucrat I regularly used top-down coercive methods and thought that was all right. But I didn't call myself stupid; I was saying that it is in the nature of political/bureaucratic hierarchies to issue top-down mandates. I'm now ready to admit, however, that our problem is not merely a systems problem, but it is rooted in human nature: we like to feel special.

Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, in an article in "Newsweek", (January 31), helps put things in perspective. I quote briefly from Sonnenfeld: "Top leaders, like artists, are fueled by the desire to leave a lasting legacy. I have termed this the 'heroic mission'. In his book, ‘The Denial of Death', Ernest Becker wrote that the leader is on a quest for immortality -- he or she must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to work life, show that he counts more than anyone or anything else".

Looking at education from the vantage point of the legacy of a political leader -- or a corporate leader or a high-ranking bureaucrat -- children's learning is not what’s important: the leader needs to satisfy his "heroic mission" imperatives. It is impossible -- obviously impossible -- for people or organizations who don't know a child as an individual to be of as much help to that child as can, say, a grandmother. A child and a grandmother (or, even better, a combination of grandmother, parents, neighbors, and dedicated schoolteachers) can do highly important learning, but that doesn't translate into "heroic mission" credits.

What I'm saying -- what I think I've learned -- is that there is a fundamental conflict between what children need and what "heroic mission" adults are seeking. That conflict, as of now, is being resolved in favor of adults. And that's Plain Stupid!

We know, as one of my wise old friends puts it, that "There are two kinds of governments -- those in which the citizens fear the government and those in which the government fears the citizens." King George III believed that our Founding Fathers were supposed to fear him; it took a war for the King to learn his lesson. We don't face a war over fear -- at least, I don't think we do—but we do face conflict. We citizens -- We the People –can minimize the conflict by helping our government hierarchies and the corporate bosses understand that top-down techniques of coercion do damage to children's learning.

The best way to achieve the needed understanding is to show that learning through active participation is superior to learning by coercion. We can do this, as one important example, by listening to Grace Lee Boggs, that remarkable lady in Detroit whose life's work is proof that children can be assets rather than problems. As Grace has demonstrated, young people can be highly valuable partners in community-based social entrepreneurship. As other important sources of understanding, we can draw upon examples from the best of the world of homeschooling, from "alternative" schools, from vocational agriculture, and from other sources in which partnership outranks fear. (I regularly cite, as one of my favorite examples, the Linefork community in southeastern Kentucky, where young people and elders are working as partners in restoring the American Chestnut tree to the forests. That example is spreading.)

The political part of the equation will, I feel sure, essentially take care of itself as youngsters and adults become partners in real-life projects. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 million grandparents in the country, every one of which is on the side of partnership rather than fear. (And that doesn't count the many millions more people who have grand parent type love and respect for young people.) I don't believe there is a politician in the country who would willingly advocate techniques of fear while grandparents are watching.

David Mathews of the Kettering Foundation puts the political issue this way: "Citizens are not customers of government, they own the store". He is correct.

The bottom line is clear: if we don't replace fear with thoughtful respect for children, we are Plain Stupid!

Bob Cornett