Engaging the real questions might be fun

What are schools for? Nobody remembers.

Schools tend to be shaped by how people, at least tacitly, answer three questions: who are we? what future are we moving toward? and what tools and resources can we command?

Things have changed: the culture in which students are embedded; expectations for the future (and thus what and how people should be learning if they are to be prepared); and the technology of teaching, learning and communicating. The answers to all three questions are significantly different for most young people than they were ten years ago, and profoundly different than they were some decades ago when the liturgies of public high schools took shape. Honor Roll? Detention? Homecoming Week? Prom?

Schools have changed relatively little, mainly because of turf battles fought by the knot of organizations that we politely call “the education system”: teachers unions and school boards try to protect their monopolies, publishing companies try to reinterpret all new ideas back into the profitable forms of the past, various levels of government try to protect their relevance by getting in front of every new concern, pretending to lead while aggressively and often destructively following whatever trends they have the wit to perceive. The school reform movement has made schools very noisy and unstable in many ways, but they have had little impact of measures of learning.

Everyone knows we could do better, so lots of places are weary of intellectual mobilizations and deployments that lead only to more calls for mobilization and deployment. The Change Industry continues to spew forth buzzwords and workshops which administrators buy and roll out with the shallowest of understanding and the most flexible of commitments. Staffs are like the blind men trying to comprehend the elephant, each with different experiences and perceptions. Attempts to reach consensus with the cliched practices of small groups jotting phrases on big sheets of paper and then “reporting out” to the whole group facilitator, who jots on the whiteboard lists of cliches, the lowest common denominator of mindless phrases retained from the ideological propaganda that has replaced older forms of folklore.

In the fifties, everything was expected to be “efficient.” In the sixties, “natural” was good.
For a while everything was “interdisciplinary.” Then all good things were “authentic.” Now, the dominant adjectives are “diverse” and “inclusive”–all adding up to “respect.” But there’s no thought of collecting real knowledge to confirm or disconfirm anything. Data is collected sloppily and mindlessly to bolster Powerpoints to persaude someone or other that things are “being addressed.” As happened in ancient Rome when “success” and “appearances” drove out all weightier concerns, we now witness the rise of rhetoric and the decline of everything else.

And without intelligent adult guidance, many kids are pushed into useless post-secondary programs that guarantee nothing beyond unconscionable levels of debt.

It would be greatly energizing and considerable fun to seriously engage the real questions and to create new schools that used the enormous power of our new teaching tools to prepare kids for the real world which continues to flow into us and over us, changing everything except what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things” (which we can be sure will turn out to be what today’s youth most need to see and understand).

A few thoughts on planning an oral history project in China

I just returned from Changsha, China, where I was invited to a conference at Hunan Library to discuss my experiences with dozens of oral history projects in 33 rural communities in Montana, using high schoolers as the primary researchers. The sponsor of the conference was the Evergreen Education Foundation, which has been doing good work in rural China for many years.

Hunan Library

Hunan Library in Changsha, which hosted the conference in partnership with the Evergreen Education Foundation.

I confess I was a bit wary. It had been a while since I attended a conference sponsored by one of the big foundations or socialized with the tribe that gathers there. They tend to be people drawn to the humane slogans of late modernity which have replaced older traditions. It was all so familiar—the endless talk about more precise assessments, improved monitoring, better implementation and dissemination, and, of course, sustainability. Such concerns are expressed in a framework of humane aspirations, having to do with social justice. We are, after all, nice people. Still, to tweak Drucker’s phrase, doing things the right way is much easier than doing the right things.

I understand the need to be cautious when straying from our accountability rituals. The models are adapted from the corporate world where ambitious people have shown, if nothing else, that they can organize lots of people into vast projects focused on measurable outcomes. How else could the world be run from the commanding heights? Still, it seems important to have mixed feelings about how eagerly newcomers to such conferences are attracted to the bright lights and big names, how quickly they adopt the vocabulary and language of the people on stage. It could be tragic to mislead them.

I easily blended in with the veteran attendees as they shared experiences, enjoyed the buffets, greeted old friends and luxuriated in a reliable sense of deja vu. Lots of nice people. And it did feel nice to be there, invited to a conversation about humane values at a costly hotel where insiders gathered amid chandeliers and wine glasses, comfortable with warm dreams backed by resources. The allure of money—of being invited to the table—can be enchanting.

The real work

Weiming Tu

Weiming Tu, One of the most influential thinkers about China of our time. He is founding director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Peking University and Senior Fellow of Asia Center at Harvard University.

But will it work? Are we oriented toward the direction where we need to go? One topic that stayed on my mind throughout the conference—a topic that did not get enough attention, I thought–was how to understand governance more powerfully than the business accountability models we’ve all learned. The keynote speaker, Weiming Tu, founding director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Peking University and Senior Fellow of Asia Center at Harvard, spoke to the point, presenting a big picture view of what the real work that we now face may be.

His plea was essentially for better character education—through the classic liberal arts method of aiming at a moral outcome through intellectual means. Right reason will lead to right action. Our current plight, Tu suggested, is that we must regain the wisdom to make choices inspired by desires more intelligent than those inflamed by consumer culture. To so educate desire in China, Confucianism is important. “We need curriculum reform that includes Chinese classical learning in college but also in primary education,” he said. We need to foster a conversation between Enlightenment values and our older spiritual traditions. Though the Enlightenment has been the most powerful ideology in world history—practicing such values as rationality, liberty, equality and the dignity of the individual–and because of it the modern world is better than the pre-modern world, we have now arrived at a point where we see clearly that Enlightenment values alone are not enough. Without powerful spiritual values, a kind of anthropocentricism has emerged wherein reason has become mainly instrumental, aiming not at self-realization but at power. There is something “fundamentally discomforting” about current values, he said, which lead to the dominance of “Economic Man.”

He followed Samuel Huntington in calling for a conversation between Enlightenment values and Confucian values, as well as Christian values and those of other groups, aiming at clarifying principles that can be accepted by members of all religious traditions. The voice of spiritual humanism has become “quite feeble” in China.

If we do not know about invisible worlds–levels of meaning higher than money–and talk about them as though they matter, they will have little force in governing the world we are making. To a great extent, talking about them as though they matter, bringing them up in venues large and small, giving them form that makes them accessible, testifying in favor of them–this in itself may be our salvation. In the West, Socrates taught that we must ask the serious question: “What is the good life?” The good life, as he understood it, is to be forever asking the question again and again, in the light of each new circumstance.

Linking practice to big ideas

Yuelu Academy

Faith Chao, Director of the Evergreen Education Foundation, translated for us during our visit to the ancient Yuela Academy, founded during the Song Dynasty in 976 AD at what is now Hunan University. The Academy remained loyal to Confucian ideals of moral self-cultivation and community solidarity.

Most speakers focused on smaller issues—the practical matters involved in conducting and archiving oral history projects in rural places. Such matters are important and getting more thoughtful and precise about them is fundamentally important. But it would be unfortunate if we let the details distract us from taking Professor Tu seriously, from asking the obvious question: Can our oral history projects provide suitable occasions for the sort of conversations about higher values that, Tu said, we may need if humanity is to survive?

I believe they can.

To make such conversations likely, care may be taken in how the projects begin and how they end. Specifically, the projects should be planned with big questions to be explored–the enduring questions that take us to the heart of our humanity–made clear and explicit at the beginning; they should end with original writing by the researchers in which they grapple with the meaning of their findings with reference to the enduring questions that began their quest. It is not necessary to come to tidy conclusions, like the perfunctory little upbeat platitude that often ends “human interest” stories in small town newspapers, but it is important to ponder the truths of the human condition as they are manifest, sometimes subtly, in the transcripts that are being added to the record of human experience.

Big questions
To begin, enduring questions can be formed by reading significant texts, classic or contemporary, that relate to the topic to be investigated. Good interviewers have spent time gaining the background knowledge they need to ask real questions, and to demonstrate real interest to the interviewee, and gaining that background knowledge and creating a set of questions—both enduring questions to guide the researcher, and more specific questions to ask during the interview—can be done while reading deep and rich texts.

The focus should be on only few enduring questions–maybe three or four. Their purpose is not to limit the interviewing only to those issues that are clearly or directly linked to the big questions. Their purpose is to orient the researchers toward a general direction, which one might well forget at times while engaging the specificity of actual persons living through actual events. The focus, during interviews, should be on bringing as much love as one can bear in one’s attention to the interviewee, really listening and genuinely following his or her thoughts. Love is not often mentioned in how to guides to doing oral history, but it is love that most readily opens a speaker to a hearer, and it is the “secret” of many who excel at asking and listening.

This is not, of course, inconsistent with a quest for light on such questions as these:

What should we part with?
What should we keep?
What should never be for sale?
What should one never do for money?
In recent times, what has been lost or is being lost?
What has been gained or is being gained?
What goods are in conflict?
What has changed?
What has not changed?

Enduring questions serve to focus the interviewer, but they are not questions that usually will be directly asked of the subject, though if the conversation tends that way they may be.

The interviewer should remember that the mental movement from event to meaning can be slow and difficult—and often very personal–and the oral historian or journalist who hopes to avoid the hard work of thought by asking the subject the big question directly will usually be disappointed by the answer, which is most likely to come in the form of either confusion at the impossibility of simple answers to vast queries or vague platitudes and rambling attempts at making sense.

The focus most often should be on the interviewee’s memory and experiences, with an aim of hearing richly detailed narratives or careful descriptions. Few people can address big philosophical questions off the cuff in an articulate way.

Instead, when the interviewer asks open-ended questions that invite the subject to share experiences and think out loud, the interviewer is more likely to be surprised and delighted by the answers. A certain modesty is required. The interviewer should not ask leading questions, even if they are very big leading questions. It may help to keep in mind the observation of the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who in his last essay spoke of how “the shattering of larger coherences … has made relating local realities with overarching ones … extremely difficult.” Indeed. “If the general is to be grasped at all,” Geertz wrote, “and new unities uncovered, it must, it seems, be grasped not directly, all at once, but via instances, differences, variations, particulars – piecemeal, case by case. In a splintered world, we must address the splinters.”

Getting at what it means

A highlight of the trip for Valerie and me was a visit to a local middle school, arranged for us by Jingchao Yan--one of Dr. Faith Chao's staff.  We were accompanied by Ruth Olson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A highlight of the trip for Valerie and me was a visit to a local middle school, arranged for us by Jingchao Yan–part of Dr. Faith Chao’s staff. We were accompanied by Ruth Olson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

To grasp the general via the particulars—that is the work of essays or presentations that researchers should do as the culmination of their projects, which may be similar to the last chapter of a dissertation—the conclusions and recommendations. Though reflection should have been occurring throughout the work, frequent returns to the enduring questions to check how one’s understanding has changed or deepened, it is in synthesizing all one’s work into a final intellectual product or cultural artifact that reflection becomes the main work. If a student has read some Confucius on the duties of children, and then conducted an oral interview where a person talked about her particular family during a tumultuous time in the past, the attempt to write an accurate and truthful account of what happened and what it might mean will be time spent pondering what really matters in this life. Perhaps the Great Foundations could do worse than give such documents careful attention when the time comes to evaluate what has been accomplished.

In doing such work, might we be also teaching our young that the art of living is in part the art of ordering one’s life as a series of research projects, with “research” understood as the process of seeking information, knowledge and wisdom in many intellectual and spiritual modes, from various sources. Confucius understood that the way to govern a people well is first to teach them to govern themselves by wise principles. Christians also believe this.

It’s everyone’s story
Another thing that was on my mind was how a project in Montana might collaborate with a project in China. One way that comes to mind is simply to begin with the same, or similar, enduring questions. I suspect that we would find many things in common—and not just in the experiences of minorities. It would be one way of having a conversation across cultures about core values that we share.

It isn’t just indigenous people whose culture is being hollowed out or trammeled by the peddlers and prophets of late modernity. All of us who remain disinclined to live mainly for money or whose souls are not transfixed by Apple’s latest wonder sense that things are being pushed aside to make way for things of less worth. Any Confucian or Christian is likely to experience moments, sometimes important moments, when one’s deepest commitments are taken as nothing by market zealots or crusading ideologues. The displacement of Native Americans due to the faith that powerful men at their big tables had in their own wisdom, in their certainty that everyone’s duty comes down to assimilation to technological innovation and expanding markets is, I think, one of those historical occurrences that resonates for many of us. It’s a timeless metaphor. In typological terms, it is everyone’s story.

The twentieth century happened to us all.

The spread of ideology and dogmatism in the school reform movement

"We have in our time a very peculiar generation of scholars who all are clear about it:  ideologies are finished.  Each one in his way has taken this or that ideology and criticized it so that nothing is left of it.  Nevertheless, he does not quite see what to do afterwards, so we have a peculiar fence-straddling generation.  These people are very serious;  but their having seen that all is wrong still doesn't mean they know what is right. . . ." —Eric Voegelin

“We have in our time a very peculiar generation of scholars who all are clear about it: ideologies are finished. Each one in his way has taken this or that ideology and criticized it so that nothing is left of it. Nevertheless, he does not quite see what to do afterwards, so we have a peculiar fence-straddling generation. These people are very serious; but their having seen that all is wrong still doesn’t mean they know what is right. . . .” —Eric Voegelin

Much of teaching can be quite routine because both the material and the sorts of difficulties commonly encountered by people new to the material are familiar. But if the classroom is not to become merely another spiritual desert in the institutionalized existence of children born to late modernity, the teacher needs to maintain an openness both to the material and to the students. In the classroom, the language through which curricular knowledge lives combines with the minds of students to constitute a field of experience in which the teacher must act as a participant if he is not to rigidify and die, hardening into a mere enforcer of a system.

Symptoms of such a death include the repetition of linguistic formulas in response to questions, the assertion of bland moralisms by way of escaping uncomfortable facts, and the inability to provide concrete illustrations of whatever he is talking about and talking about and talking about. Dogmatism and refusals of the Question are the hallmarks of ideological systems, which are never true but always opposed to truth.

All our systems are wrong, to the extent that they obscure reality by erecting between us and the real world a second reality of language, routinely protected by interdictions on the asking of questions. Nearly all school reform programs are, of course, such systems.  Schooling in the age of reform has made both the life of the mind and the life of the spirit increasingly difficult, and we have few public forums where people can discuss education at the level of reality.  A staff that has been sufficiently cowed into unreality will, at the end of enervating hour or two of what is called professional development, have no questions. Institutions governed by ideology do not entertain questions aimed at the premises or the telos. Experienced practitioners recognize this and suffer the scotosis in silence.

The school change industry recruits participants who yearn to be a stars in the professional society which their studies or their position have opened for them. The usual panoply of goods is available to those who are willing to play: travel for conferences and site visits, release from mundane chores to sit at the big table, public praise, professional opportunities. Successful school reform leaders and consultants often have a fascination with conceptual schemes, and they mistake their ability to become fluent in such schemes for a grasp on reality.

As they master a second reality—the linguistic machine that underlies the reform plan—their sense of truth begins to shift and deform. Instead of accurate representations of the situations that practitioners actually face, they begin to judge as true those statements that are coherent with the conceptual scheme they have adopted. It can take considerable cognitive power to master complex conceptual schemes, such as Marxism or positivism, and some consultants find real intellectual pleasure in knowing their complicated things and in putting their knowledge on display.

Still, dogmatism is a formidable obstacle to anyone looking for truth and it is also the eternal enemy of teaching and learning.

The ALERT processes: student research beyond copy and paste

My last book is built on the framework of the ALERT processes.
Image

Teachers should big and enduring questions during the initial phase of immersion in a topic. Later, students should be invited to reflect on new information and experiences in the light of those questions. In this way, local studies can be linked to the enduring issues around which good curricula are organized.

By upholding high standards for the writing that undergirds all final reports and presentations, student work is kept accountable to district, state and national standards.

Good writing projects are most often good research projects appropriate to a digital age that calls on students to add original research to the published record, rather than copying and pasting from previous research.

Context: trying to tell the larger story

Hellgate Treaty of 1855

S.E. Paxson’s (1852–1919) rendition of 1855 negotiations between Isaac Stevens and chiefs of the Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreille tribes at Council Grove.

What was important about America was the experiment with rule of law linked to democratic processes. I’m ambivalent about using the past tense, but rule of law as a reality seems to me to be waning in America. It has powerful opponents, though they work not by attacking the phrase but by subverting how the words are understood.

Rule of law is, in essence, rule by principle. To make a law that will be applied equally to all members of a society, it’s necessary for them to abstract from the rather messy circumstances we always face to some more universal principle that most will consent to be governed by. When we encounter outcomes we don’t like, the work is to think more deeply and more clearly–to get beyond thinking merely “I don’t like this” to articulate a principle that would rectify the trouble while serving as a barrier to similar troubles in the future. That’s asking an awful lot of people, both intellectually and ethically.

Allotment on the Flathead Reservation and the consequent opening of the reservation to settlers who were not tribal members was, I think, an abusive use of law, orchestrated by powerful men for their own gain. Law is always susceptible to such abuse and it’s never hard to find examples of it.

I think it’s necessary to study and understand such abuses. We need to know what we are up against if we are committed to continuing the experiment. For me, the essential question is whether it is possible to subordinate power to principle. Can we encode our best understandings of justice into laws, and can we then use those laws to constrain the powerful and the greedy, who are always with us? Can we continue moving toward a world in which, ultimately, philosophy and ethics trump money and force?

I think the answer we get from the history of the nation’s dealings with natives is mixed.

We can find enough examples of low behavior and bad faith stratagems to satisfy a hundred Howard Zinns, who want to see the American experiment become something quite different. Such tawdry dealings are, to a great extent, the same old same old of human history. People with the power to do so gratifying their own appetites and lusts at the expense of weaker people is not uniquely American. It’s nothing new. It’s nothing we need to study American history to learn or understand. It was ancient before Columbus ever raised a sail.

What was somewhat new and somewhat different was that in America, middle ranking bureaucrats were dispatched to the wilderness to negotiate terms with small bands of hunter-gatherers, and that a hundred and fifty years later those sometimes vague and sketchy agreements are still taken seriously by the highest courts in the land, and that sometimes millions of dollars change hands based on some judge’s ruling about what those old words must mean.

There’s something noble in that, something hopeful. I think it would be a shame–and bad history–to teach what Joseph Dixon did without also attempting to make clear that he wasn’t the whole story.

Part of my teaching commitment is to increase young people’s ability to think at the level of principle. It’s something–but not enough–to feel bad when we see bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it. That’s something–where we start. It’s not, I hope, where we stop.

Remembering the songs

“Yai Ya!” my grandson called, as he opened the kitchen door and walked in. This happened nearly daily or several times a day once he was old enough to walk the few blocks from his parents’ house to ours. He didn’t knock, of course. And he was partly calling his grandmother and partly just announcing he had arrived. It was partly greeting and partly invitation. He was here! Where we were! It was good.

How many generations of young Salish boys showed up at their grandparents’ homes with just those words? How long had those syllables been echoing, more or less unchanged, through the abodes of people living in this valley? This place?

Place is a tricky concept to nail down, but I tend to enjoy all the various ways people have tried. They end up talking about the central realities of human life–story, memory, kin, tradition, culture and land. My grandson traces his heritage in this place we share back, on his father’s side, into the “time immemorial” that the Salish like to talk about. I trace my own heritage back to Kansas, and then to Maryland and then to the Irish highlands on one side, and back to Utah, and then Ohio, then Massachusetts and then to the London slums on the other. Those connections, of course, are also part of my grandson’s history.

In Remembering the Songs, I found the segment on Jerome Vanderburg, a Salish man who made his home a place of music, held my attention in the most interesting ways. I knew Jerome’s name and had seen him, but I didn’t know him personally and I knew little about him. My own children grew up alongside a girl, our next door neighbor, who was a relative of his–probably either a granddaughter or a niece. So watching the film was a little like eavesdropping a bit on a neighbor here–filling in the human world around me with a bit more detail, a bit more story, making the place I live a little deeper and richer.

But how to use it in the classroom?

I would start with how recognizable as a person Jerome is to me. My own family–both my mother’s and father’s lines, are full of people who found the meaning of life in family and noncareerist passions and enjoyments, such as music. My grandfather lost his farm during the Great Depression–and I heard somewhat vague expressions of disgust at the ways of bankers and government functionaries, who, I was given to understand, cared a great deal about money but about “the little guy” not at all. But such were not the main story in life. My people didn’t dwell on it. They found another farm–not as good and without reliable water–the dry farm, they called it–and survived, finding life’s satisfactions in family events and in nature.

I don’t think the story of being displaced by the big moneyed interests of modernity is a rare story, and I don’t thing it is overly entangled in race. I think it’s a story that speaks to many of us. I also think the question of how to live in a world of large powers that displace us and to a great extend surround us invites the attention of a great many people, including young people.

This suggests the direction of my explorations, at the moment.

Learning how stories matter

Both social disintegration and moral relativism lead to the same sorry conclusion: the liberal novel is a novel in which not much is at stake. And if you don’t have much at stake, you can’t have a good story. Santiago Ramos

My interest in the argument on Public Discourse about the decline of literature due to liberalism had more to do with the plight of students than with that of writers–that is to say, my interest has more to do with the narrative environment of young people than with the writer’s prospects for literary success. It no doubt remains true that life is a challenge in which both success and failure are really possible, and therefore it remains the case that our stories matter. But how true is it today that young people believe that novels contain the real stuff of life–the insights that lead to wisdom?

I believe that Solzhenitsyn, to follow up Ramos’ example, does tell a story that matters in, for example, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. If one lives in a regime which tries to suppress life’s chosen meanings, then one way to live well is to refuse to grant moral authority to that regime .  One can live amid meanings and trajectories to which society is indifferent or blind. Society may even set your daily tasks before you, compelling you to assist in the construction of its towers, but it may not dictate any meaning whatsoever.

But I share many assumptions with Solzhenitsyn. For one thing, I see modernism as a moral and intellectual dead end, and the his theme resonates in me–the challenge of living in opposition to a regime which is blind to the most important realities. I came to consciousness in a literary culture, and much of the experience that formed me came in the form of novels.

Truth and its envious imitators

Judgement of Solomon

Evil often presents itself as a parody of goodness. Though it's tempting to wash our hands of the confusion this causes, we must judge. The truth is the only defense good people have against bad people.

A young woman–a former student–told me recently she does not like to pay attention to politics because she feels helpless to affect what is going to happen. Who doesn’t know that feeling?

Educators once understood that their work was of a piece with the ongoing work of establishing justice in the world, and that the means to do this was to pursue the truth. It’s worth asking why we now live in an age of such moral confusion and who this benefits.

One of the realities of American public education today is that if one attempts to talk among teachers about truth as though it matters one will be quickly assailed by versions of Pilate’s question, “what is truth?”  Whose truth? It’s become something of an intellectual habit to balk at the very mention of truth, and to feel that warmth of being among the right sort of people–the righteous–to talk of nonjudgmentalism and tolerance.

It remains an inconvenient truth, nonetheless, that the work of judging is fundamental to preserving justice. Justice is inseparable from truth. We can’t see that the right things are done if we don’t know the truth about what happened. The primary defense good people have against bad people is the truth. One could hope that a profession that has made The Crucible part of its canon would understand and teach such things. Alas, that story seems more often used as a parable about distrust of the wrong sort of people–Puritans and anticommunists. Ironic.

I think an important question for teachers today is why intellectuals from the mid-twentieth century on have labored so hard to mystify and problematize truth. It’s a real question and I think there are true answers that are worth understanding. The answers are not immediately obvious though to those who have been subjected to years of ideological indoctrination.

The trouble is that the confusion–intentionally sewn and cultivated, I think–is quite genuine. Consider Alexander Solzhenitisyn’s passionate naming of ideology in Gulag Archipelago as the source of so much modern evil:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

We all recognize, at this stage in history, that true believers with their self-righteous finger pointing have done tremendous harm–that Eric Hoffer is correct when he asserts that most of the world’s evil is done by those who feel they are righteously engaged in crusades to destroy evil. The trickiness of recent decades can be glimpsed in the way that this truth has been distorted into ideological slogans that encourage a hatred of those who speak of truth as though it could be known. The cure for true believers, it is widely believed, is to disbelief assertions of truth, to say that there is no truth beyond “your truth” and “my truth” and to feel revulsion–hatred even–toward those who insist on talking about goodness and evil as if they exist out there in ways that demand that we take sides.

Still, it remains an inconvenient truth that the work of judging is fundamental to preserving justice. Most of our confusion is created by evil’s penchant for parodying goodness. Evil needs to work this way because it is absolutely uncreative. It only destroys.

Evil has no telos–purpose or goal–of its own. It is, at bottom, nothing–except opposition to goodness. Goodness is the only true game in the Cosmos–it is, in fact, our name for that true game. We can see evil’s agenda in the way that those who do evil are virtually required to pretend, even to themselves, that they are doing good. Rotten dictators do not usually say they are seeking power because they enjoy power, and that power is felt most keenly when we are harming or destroying another. When we harm a fellow we provoke the most pure and primal opposition and in overcoming that fully focused will of another we achieve the purest sense of our self’s will.  But the evil rarely admit this. What they say, generally, is that they are seeking some version of equality, fraternity, and liberty–because that is the true game.

In practice, it can be hard to tell who is telling the truth and who is lying. It’s so hard, sometimes, to tell what’s true that we are tempted to feel impotent and helpless, to wash our hands of the question. We note that partisans come to resemble each other, with each side making the same accusations of the other: they are lying, they have a hidden agenda of self-aggrandizement, etc. etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum till the end of time.

And yet, it remains an inconvenient truth that the work of judging is fundamental to preserving justice.

One ancient text that focuses on the problem is the story of the judgment of Solomon, from  1 Kings 3:16-28. In this story, two young women who both had an infant son came to Solomon for a judgment. One woman claimed that the other had rolled over on her own son while sleeping, smothering him, and had then switched the two babies to make it appear that the living child was hers. The other woman denied this and so both women claimed to be the mother of the living son and said that the dead boy belonged to the other. Each accused the other of lying. At a glance, they appear indistinguishable.

But who would therefore conclude that there is no difference between them? Who would be content to say that there is no truth or that we cannot learn what it is? Who would that benefit?

King Solomon called for a sword. He declared that the live son must be split in two, each woman receiving half of the child. The true mother cried, “Please, My Lord, give her the live child—do not kill him!” However, the liar, a bitter and jealous being, agreed with the judgment, “It shall be neither mine nor yours—divide it!”

Solomon thus brought to light the critical difference between the two women who superficially appeared the same. He gave the live baby to the real mother, who was motivated by love, and he revealed the false desire of the liar. She did not love the baby. She perhaps envied the baby’s mother, and so her desire was a form of imitation rather than something authentic. Her borrowed desire for the baby, which she may at some level have believed, stemmed from envy of someone possessed of a fulfilling desire. No doubt part of her wished she could feel the way she imagined the real mother must feel. So the empty woman acted in ways that inevitably transformed the one she envied into a rival. Her dishonest desire led her inexorably toward hate.

We can see this disturbing pattern at every level in our society, from high school drama between jealous girls or boys fighting over the same girl, to intense political contests,  to international war. It’s a grave mistake to underestimate the power of envy or to remain oblivious to the ways it destroys worlds. Part of the learning we have in store for ourselves in the present age is the wisdom that lies behind the tenth commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbour’s.

This story of Solomon’s Judgment should resonate strongly in an age when, for many, the dominant political passions are envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred. For those wanting a better understanding of where the truth lies, attention to desire remains the key. What do they seek? What will satisfy them? Could anything satisfy them?

For an excellent study of what great literature (Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Flaubert, Proust)  can teach us about good desire and its false parodies, read Rene Girard’s Deceit, Desire & the Novel.

Teaching amid time, change and the invisible world

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it. . . .
Hannah Arendt, Teaching as Leading

To do a good job, it’s important to believe that we have time. Hurrying would be a mistake. To hurry, the Chinese proverb tells us, is to eat soup with a fork. All the difficulties we face can be solved, if we think in long enough time frames. Some problems require years of work. Some require decades, and some require generations. Artists at their work experience time as the ground from which their sensibility bodies forth into the world. For them as for lovers, time is deep and endless. There is enough and more.

Time is the very stuff of life. What we make of it is ultimately all we are. Introducing young people to the depths of time and what has happened there is important work. We should help them to feel and understand time as an inexhaustible wealth.

Unfortunately, students in many schools experience time in the way it is experienced by prisoners and slaves: as a burden. Because they can do no work, but only tasks and chores, their identity becomes weak and faint. Hope fades. Time hangs. The clock barely moves. Desire asphyxiates. Those who have gone into our classrooms to study what happens there report that little happens. Things are controlled but not much occurs. People goof off, but not with much zest, and nobody really cares. Boredom and lethargy rule. When we pass through airports, we are reminded of the way the administered life drifts toward endless lines, endless forms, slow motion order and the pervasive feeling of impotence to accelerate or change the process. Time, the very stuff of life, is wasted.

There is another way to get no work done, and that is to dissipate ourselves in a thousand tasks. This is the plight of many of us today. Our modern world developed with and through our technologies of organizing time. In the early 1400s a new technology-clocks-changed people’s relationship to each other by increasing their ability to coordinate their activities. Clocks were too large and expensive for individual ownership, but huge clock towers were built in the centers of many towns. The periodic tolling of great iron bells drifted through the countryside. Folks suddenly able to coordinate individual schedules with new precision began to collaborate in ways they had not previously imagined.

Today, we live in an extraordinarily organized society in which all of us keep, or are kept by, schedules. Our highly elaborated and precise sense of time has allowed for a society organized to an unprecedented degree, within which nearly all of us are specialists. An artist ordering invitations for a show featuring his old-fashioned oil paintings might drop his sketch off at a quick print franchise on main street. He need not be at all aware of what happens next: with clocks ticking every step of the way, the design is digitalized and bounced off a satellite to a print shop in Hong Kong where the bits are reconverted to atoms, arranged as black patterns on white paper. The package of printed invitations is rushed to the Hong Kong airport and loaded onto a jet. Later that week, the artist picks up the finished job back on main street. This everyday task required the organization of hundreds of people. It’s the way we live now.

But though society has never been so organized and we know our lives are deeply entangled with other people’s lives, we have never been more isolated in private agendas and personal schedules. We rush to appointments and meetings, bumping others on their way to other appointments and meetings. Time, it seems, has become the scarcest of resources. Thirty seconds of “gray bar time”-waiting for a computer program to finish-can seem much too long. Each of us now has our own clock strapped to our arms and mounted on our dashboards, and we rush through the week without a village tower in sight. Time, the very stuff of life, seems to be running out.

For the most part, we did not shape the systems that now shape us. We don’t even know for sure who did shape them or what they are really up to. Because commerce has made the most visible and spectacular use of modern organization, we suspect that a lot of what is happening is because someone is making money. Though this may not be bad, enriching someone else is hardly a goal that brings people together. Instead, we tend to keep moving, trying to put aside a little something for ourselves. Time is money, it seems.

The world is moving faster and faster and change is the name of the game, the somewhat manic consultants keep assuring us. We need to forget faster and faster, just to make room for the new. Who remembers DOS commands?

At a town meeting not long ago the school superintendent became quite animated, talking about the pressures that rapid change put upon schools. His voice getting urgent, he cited statistics and painted a picture in which we were all going to become obsolescent if we didn’t do something. Our students were not prepared for the world that was forming around us. He was trained to keep up with the times. I wondered if that training had given him the perspective to distinguish between a fad and a trend. I wondered if it had given him the experience to set priorities wisely.

I suggested that if many things were changing too rapidly for schools to keep up, maybe more time should be spent studying things that changed very slowly, if they changed at all.

He looked perplexed. “What things might those be?” he asked.

Running a school, by his lights, was not all that different from playing a video game. Keep your eyes on the screen. Keep moving. Last year it was community service. Right now it is school-to-work. Whatever. Just react. Hurry. We need to change.

The unfortunate effect of such leadership is a kind of self-inflicted dementia. Dedication to staying in sync with rapidly changing fads leads schools to change directions with every shifting breeze of fashion. One school I worked for was like a person with Alzheimer’s, unable to remember from moment to moment what it was doing, what remained to be done or even who its friends were. We began lots of things but finished nothing. The bookshelves in the administrative offices were laden with unread binders, all that was left of abandoned projects that not so long ago had been touted as the solution to our worst problems.

Every apostle of change wants to retrain all the teachers, of course, so teachers were accustomed to being corralled into workshops and given lots of handouts and hearing lots of promises, but they knew there would be no follow through. Next year they would be on to something different. They would efficiently forget all this. They sat politely but they no longer really listened.

When I was studying to become an English teacher in the late 1970s, one of the books I was given to read was The Educated Imagination, first published in 1964 by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. Near the end of that book, Frye said that “The society around us looks like the real world, but . . . there’s a great deal of illusion in it, the kind of illusion that propaganda and slanted news and prejudice and a great deal of advertising appeal to. . .It changes very rapidly, and people who don’t know of any other world can never understand what makes it change.”

Might not this have been written this morning? Frye goes on to argue that the real world is not the one that’s changing. “The real world,” he says, “is the world of what humanity has done, and therefore can do, the world revealed to us in the arts and sciences. This is the world that won’t go away, the world out of which we built the Canada of 1942, are now building the Canada of 1962, and will be building the quite different Canada of 1982.”

The real world, like gravity, may be invisible. We do not see it but see its effects. The best education is about learning to apprehend, behind those effects, the things that do not change: the timeless patterns and the eternal forces. These are things that educators, even school superintendents, might usefully ponder, if they can find the time.

The Art of Slow Thinking

The most powerful education is not driven by markets or election cycles. Instead, it aims passing on cultural knowledge that has taken centuries to build and that will remain useful even after our business partners change and our transportation systems are re-invented. It’s okay that cultural mores and institutional practices change more slowly than markets. That’s their job.

“Don’t hurry,” should be the motto inscribed over every schoolroom door. But also, “Don’t stop. Don’t waste time.” Schools should primarily be caretakers of the slow knowledge we call wisdom.

Teachers should be less interested in high velocity markets and the shifting priorities of political election cycles than in passing on the techniques of intelligence–such things as how to evaluate evidence, how to use math to perceive patterns too large or too small for direct observation, what it takes to develop friendships and alliances, how to organize a town and hold it together, what it feels like to win a kingdom but lose your soul, how fights begin and how they end, how justice comes into the world and how it perishes, how to discern between things ephemeral and things of permanent worth and so on.

Change, of course, is assured–indeed, it is irrepressible. But the more things change, the more important it becomes that we learn to see what does not change, or changes only slowly. We need to know what is solid ground. We need firm footing to wrestle with what comes.

Familiarity with the past more than anything else provides us with that footing. In times of rapid change the institutions we most need to strengthen are those that preserve memory. The most reliable way to know something of the future is to know the past. It is long memory that encourages the longest possible view of the future.

In The Clock of the Long Now Stewart Brand reports that in 1980 the Swedish Navy received a letter from the Forestry Department announcing that the ship lumber that had been requested was ready. In 1829, the Swedish Parliament had ordered twenty thousand trees planted on Visingsö, in the lake Vätern. It took 150 years for an oak to mature and they anticipated a shortage of ship lumber during the 1990s. The move had been opposed by the Bishop of Strängnäs because he didn’t believe people would still have wars by then and even if they did ships would probably no longer be made of wood. Parliament overrode him. They got the details wrong but by thinking in the long term they did the right thing anyway. The worth of that mature oak forest today is beyond calculation.

Wisdom tends to come to older people because they have had to live with more consequences of bad choices. As people see and understand longer time frames, their thinking gets stronger and their decision making gets better. The same is true of institutions. Wendell Berry has noted that morality is nothing other than long-term practicality, and companies that rely on repeat customers tend to be more honest and fair than those who believe that tomorrow will always be a brand new game.

The single simplest thing to do to make schools more sensible institutions and to make the education they deliver of more worth is to develop institutional practices that lead people-administrators, teachers, board members, parents and students-to consider what is happening over much longer periods of time. Schools today need institutional practices and institutional goals that organize their daily labors around visions longer than a 45-minute period, longer than a semester, longer than a superintendent’s tenure, longer than this political cycle’s hot problem and longer even than a teacher’s career.

It may be helpful to think about what James P. Carse, religion professor at New York University, calls “the infinite game.” He says “a finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the game.” Football is a finite game. Gardening is an infinite game. A political campaign is a finite game. A family is an infinite game. A business deal is a finite game. A religion is an infinite game.

Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars built upon Carse’s thought. In a finite game, they pointed out, winners exclude losers. In an infinite game, winners teach losers better plays.

In a finite game, the winner takes all. In an infinite game, winning is widely shared.

In a finite game, the players’ aims are identical. In an infinite game, the players’ aims are diverse.

In a finite game, rules are fixed in advance to guarantee a single winner. In an infinite game, rules are changed along the way by agreement.

In a finite game, energy is focused in short-term, decisive contests. In an infinite game, energy is invested in the long term.

Finite games focus on how they end. Infinite games focus on how they continue.

Good schools, like good communities, good economies and good families, are playing an infinite game. They may include finite games within them, but they ensure that these games don’t displace the larger play or corrupt it. James Carse ends his book with a statement that bears further reflection: there is but one infinite game.

The story of that one infinite game is the right story for schools to organize their practices around.

Playing the Infinite Game

I have some thoughts about the infinite game and how it should be played. So do you. Here are the basics: it includes everybody, it involves all knowledge, and it includes all of the past and all of the future. That’s quite a bit. So where do we start?

We start with families. Family, suggests historian Elliott West, is the tool that can help students connect all the disconnections of time and place they face in the modern world. In a speech to the Montana Heritage Project he pointed out that “Families intertwine the chaotic details of every past time and bind them with the present and with us. For those of us interested in how societies have worked, families have always been the center of ordinary human lives. Their greatest power is to implicate you and me in the emotional world of real people who have come and gone, people we will join soon enough.”

He suggested that we study the past using our own families as a point of entry, and as a linking principle. Fortunately, recommending the study of family history as one of the animating principles of schools is not a quixotic thing to do. In fact, the evidence suggests that millions already feel this is just what they need and are flocking toward it. Just as people responded to the realities of their sedentary lives in the 1970s by taking up jogging and finding gyms, people today are responding to the feeling of disconnection in today’s world by flocking in vast numbers toward family history, which at its best is genuine history but with a personal connection.

Doing family history research is not simply about creating pedigree charts. Rather, it is about understanding the human experience. Through the internet, people are connecting not only with their distant ancestors, re-imagining the worlds they knew and pondering what they faced and how their world grew into our world, they are also connecting with like-minded people around the world. They are forming, of their own free will, ambitions on a massive scale. These ambitions will only be realized by shared effort. Stewart Brand points out that “Thousands of users of a program called Family Tree Maker are linking their research into a World Family Tree on the Web. So far it has tied together seventy-five thousand family trees, a total of fifty million names. The goal, once unthinkable, is to eventually document and link every named human who ever lived.”

Every named human who ever lived. Think about that for a moment, or maybe even for an hour.

Through a focus on family history research, students can be drawn to oral history, which involves reading, writing, speaking, listening, summarizing and analyzing as well as the fundamental work of turning towards elders with interest and compassion. They can be drawn to primary document research, which includes making a research plan, using finding aids, writing letters, evaluating conflicting evidence and synthesizing original conclusions. They can be drawn to published texts that treat historical periods, specific events, political history, personal experience and the rest of the human record.

But that’s not all. As they join the worldwide effort of others who are trying to understand the world through the work of finding their families, they will find that they can contribute to the world’s memory. They can discover what has been lost. They can contribute important information to the shared work.

The work of reconstructing the past is not a passing fad but a historical trend that cannot be turned back or stopped any more than the industrial revolution could have been halted. Those who decide to help with the work will find that history is on their side. In Thoreau’s terms, they will “meet with success unanticipated in commoner hours.”

They will begin to see that this work drives other work. They will see that in doing this work, the stories of various sects become entangled with one another. Muslims and Jews find each other connected through not just through their modems but also through the intertwined stories of their intertwined families.

Conducting family history research is a central human project at this time and as we do it we will put vast amounts of the world’s knowledge online and we will steadily increase all people’s access to it. The distributed research and linked computers of millions of searchers will exceed by many orders of magnitude the power of the government’s largest super-computers.

That woman in Ireland who is looking for an uncle who was last heard from somewhere in Montana in 1875-how is she to find what happened to him? The answer may lie on a gravestone in that cemetery just up the hill on the windswept prairies. If she had the name and the date on that gravestone, she could find an obituary, and if she had the obituary she might have the name of employers, information about historical events that touched his life. One thing leads to another and to another and, given time, to all things.

Right now there is work to do. The cemetery records, the courthouse records of real estate transactions and marriages, it can all be put online. Students who share this work and learn to organize information, to create and maintain data bases, to research and to write, and to place a value upon the human record will not be getting a provincial education. They will be stepping into the central story of our times.

To find every person who has ever lived, people in each village and town and city need to find those who lived there. While people in Scotland or China are finding your relatives there, you can help them find theirs where you are. Much of this is work that students can do. Much of it is work that grandparents can do. And much of it is work that they can share.

Schools that act as catalysts for this work will find support coming from every direction. They will find that students are motivated, teachers revitalized and communities re-engaged. They will, of course, continue other studies and they will still have proms and basketball games. The infinite game, after all, has room for us all with all our interests.

And though we start with families, we don’t stop there. Family history leads to community history, and community history leads to national and world history and history includes all other disciplines. As schools, in partnerships with museums and historical societies, begin to maintain community archives containing research done by students and other community members, these archives will become the most important institution in the school.

If you would like to test the educational value of such materials, you can conduct a simple test. Set up two tables in a classroom. On one table, put the most seductive materials you can locate from the large publishers of educational materials, with their four-color illustrations and lavish layouts. On the other table place some old photographs of the local neighborhood, a few old maps of the place and a collection of old newspapers. Bring some kids into the room and watch where they go and what they do. Be ready to be quiet for a while, because the students will not hear you. They’ll be buzzing with excitement, pointing things out to one another.

A good local archives will include long-term ecological studies, local geography, studies of transportation systems and public utilities and studies of local folkways and traditions. Caring for such a collection of local research and adding to it will be everyone’s responsibility. And the work that is done in such schools will not be ephemera, as most school work has been. It will be intended to last forever.

Joined in Time

Some of the work will be in file folders, awaiting the right researcher to take it farther. Some will be in published documents, that hold in place organized bodies of work that have been done. And some will be ready for publication online. Since the work is intended to last forever, it is not done in undue haste.

The collection will not seem grand at first. The first year it might have only fourteen biographical essays done by a senior English class. But fourteen essays is something, if it is kept. In ten years, the value will be more clear. There will be hundreds of documents, and teachers who had shown no interest at the beginning will begin to pay attention. Nearly every student in their classes will be able to find information on their own families. This will provoke further questions.

In twenty years, everyone will understand the value of what is being done. The archives will be quite large and everybody will have a personal interest in some part of it. Community members will come to the school to do their own research alongside students.

In doing the work, they will come to understand more and more of what it has meant and now means to be human. They will see the world from all its perspectives: that of victors, that of the defeated, that of women, that of kings, that of slaves. They might be brought to ponder the way consequences follow actions, not always quickly and not always fairly. They might meditate on justice. They might learn new songs. They might be stirred to compassion.

Maybe they learn that every life has its lessons to teach, and that if those lessons are learned then every life, no matter how hopeless it might have seemed, has its value. As Elliott West reminded us, “All of us sleep with ghosts. When we invite them into our own day, we learn about the world they knew, and how it grew into ours. But we do something more. We resurrect our humanness.”

In fifty years, people will have a hard time imagining a school without an archives. A school without an archives would be, would be-well, a place full of busy work, a place where time was a burden and people watched the clock and waited, a place where nothing that was done was real or permanent, a place where people thought mostly about token rewards and cliques, a place where people were bored and restless and angry-in other words, a place where people wasted the very essence of their lives: time.

Whoever you are, if you are still you might feel the stirring of ghosts, of lost souls returning, bearing gifts, walking the halls and towers of a vast library where all the voices of humanity speak as a stirring in the dust. Wherever you are, if you listen slowly enough, you might hear now the gentle tolling of a giant bell in a distant commons, calling you home.

It’s only a story, but a story already coming true.

The moral confusion of young people

Vico. I haven’t thought about him since I was an undergraduate. One of my philosophy profs in a “great books” program was writing a book on Vico, who he believed was hugely underappreciated, and so Vico seemed to creep into everything we read, from Homer to James Joyce, though I would be exaggerating if I suggested I understood the prof well enough to agree or disagree.

Now here comes Mark Signorelli at the invaluable Front Page web site talking about Vico’s argument about “the inescapably probable nature of our knowledge concerning human affairs, and the importance of educating youth in a way that prepares them to accept verisimilitude as a proper standard for political and ethical debate.” Maybe now I’m ready to understand what he was talking about.

Homecoming

We have allowed the success of science to forget older understandings of truth and knowledge that are more fitting the needs of our lives as persons among other persons. Over time, this has made life in relationships, including in civil communities, difficult for us: “Our young men, because of their training, which is focused on these studies, are unable to engage in the life of the community, to conduct themselves with sufficient wisdom and prudence; nor can they infuse into their speech a familiarity with human psychology of permeate their utterances with passion.”

Signorelli says that “by exalting the Cartesian standard of truthfulness into a universal standard, teachers were effectively undermining their students’ ability to reason on matters of an ethical or political nature, where the neatness and conclusiveness of science can never be reproduced.” He sees our current “imbecility” about political and moral matters as a consequence of applying the wrong standard of truth to such matters:

Exactly as Vico feared, we take the scientific standard of truth to be the sole and universal standard of truth; whatever is not scientifically verified, we assume, is not really true.  One symptom of this intellectual disease is that the modern mind indulges in the recurrent fantasy – played out every day in Psychology and Sociology Departments across the land – that an application of scientific methodology to human experience will somehow provide us with conclusive and substantive knowledge about ourselves.  And when this delusion falls apart, as it inevitably does, we swing just as wildly to the opposite extreme and declare that nothing true can be asserted regarding ethical or political topics.  Thus we oscillate endlessly between positivism and relativism – between sociobiology on the one hand, and post-modernism on the other – without ever discovering the grounds on which to establish some form of civil agreement.

The moral confusion that results has been incorporated into our teaching. Schools, governed more by fashion and politics than by philosophy, have responded to the age’s lack of moral clarity by abdicating moral education, except for slogans amenable to the diversity regime or those aimed at eliciting compliance with various school rules. “Respect” at school means complying with rules about wearing hats, and “responsibility” mean turning in homework on time.

This doesn’t seem to be working very well. Lost in Transition : The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Hilary Davidson, Kari Christoffersen, Christian Smith, Patricia Snell Herzog explores in some detail the moral confusion of young Americans. This sociological study from Oxford University Press is based on “in-depth interviews with a broad cross-section of emerging adults (ages 18-23) to investigate the difficulties young people face today, the underlying causes of those difficulties, and the consequences both for individuals and for American society as a whole.”

The findings that have gotten most attention are the author’s claims about the vacuity of moral reasoning among today’s young people:

We asked emerging adults to tell us about any experiences they have had facing moral dilemmas recently and how they went about resolving them. In the context of a larger discussion about moral rights and wrongs, goods and bads, we asked this question: “Can you tell me about a specific situation you’ve been in recently where you were unsure of what was right and wrong?” Their answers were revealing. First, one-third of the emerging adults who we interviewed (33 percent) simply could not think of any moral dilemmas or difficult situations that they had personally confronted in recent years. . . .Two-thirds of the emerging adults we interviewed (about 66 percent) proved simply unable to engage our questions about moral dilemmas in their lives. . . .The rest either think they do not face any moral conflicts or uncertainties, think that they do when in fact they really do not, or do not understand what “moral” means.

. . . the adult world that has socialized these youth for 18 to 23 years has done an awful job when it comes to moral education and formation. Moral individualism and relativism are simply intellectually impossible and socially unsustainable positions. Any college sophomore philosophy major should be able to handily deconstruct them both. Yet the majority of American youth have entered emerging adulthood committed to moral individualism. And a substantial minority of them have done the same with moral relativism. On these two elementary points, these emerging adults are simply lost. They are morally at sea in boats that leak water badly. That is not an acceptable situation. . . .

Schools are one of the most powerful socializing institutions of youth in American society today, along with families and the mass media. Public schools are the dominant institution among all school types. Before we interviewed our respondents as emerging adults, we had previously interviewed them twice, when they were still teenagers, some of them when they were as young as 13 years old. So we know a great deal about their lives before they entered emerging adulthood. One big theme that stuck out in our previous interviews was the fact that the schools, especially public schools, that our younger respondents attended studiously avoided talking about potentially controversial moral issues. Over and over again, these teenagers we interviewed reported that their teachers always sidestepped and evaded questions and problems that might generate disagreement or conflict in the classroom. “No, my teachers avoid controversies like that like the plague,” they would typically say. “Anytime anything that might make trouble or hurt someone’s feelings come up, they say we aren’t going there,” others confirmed. “Nope, we can’t talk about religion or them hot-button moral issues in school, ’cause they don’t want to open up that can of worms” was a typical report. In short, it appears that most schools, especially public schools, are not teaching students how to constructively engage moral issues about which people disagree. Quite the contrary, schools are teaching students that the best way to deal with difficult moral problems and questions is to ignore them. The moral pedagogy of most middle and high schools clearly seems to be: avoid, ignore, and pretend the issues will go away. Needless to say, that is naive and impossible. It actually resembles highly dysfunctional families that have sets of issues that nobody is allowed to bring up or discuss and that are instead carefully tiptoed around.

So, should we do something? According to Signorelli, we need to regain the standards of truth that are embodied in the great works of our own tradition. “Our task,” he says, “is simply the revival of humanist scholarship, in the schools especially, but in the broader culture also.  We must become regular readers again of Sophocles, Thucydides, Petrarch, Cervantes, Racine, Johnson, and Tolstoy, because a mind that is acquainted with their works will find it absolutely ridiculous to suppose that such authors do not state truth.”

My own reading has tended heavily toward such old authors in recent years, and the claims that Signorelli makes for such reading ring true for me. However, I don’t imagine any of this will have the slightest effect on public schools, if things are left to them.