I want to start up a dialogue with people involved in education, both teachers and students about a possible project that I think would be complimentary to the Generation We program Jabiz has been talking about so well.

The Generation We declaration and book (read it, it’s free to download!) have some excellent points. The platform it outlines is worth striving for: accessible health care, the protection and rehabilitation of our environment, an end to war, and a better, fairer educational system. The problem is that Gen-We puts an awful lot of importance on indirect action, voting with our wallets for “green” companies and voting with ballots for more progressive politicians. Important stuff, to be sure, but I’m not content with that, and I don’t think that real change is likely to come about if that is all we do. What we need is to start small, grow locally, and show the old guard what can be done, instead of turning to them for the answers.

While reading Generation We I kept coming back to an idea that has shaped a lot of my thoughts on progressive causes. It comes from the final line of the Industrial Workers of the World’s constitutional preamble. They are words that have stuck with me since I first read them early on in high school. “We are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” A “new society” because the current one is unsatisfactory, unfair, and dehumanizing, and because we can do better. “The shell of the old” because the world as it stands is a hollow one that has been carved out in an attempt to satisfy the insatiable greed of those who control it. From “within” because the best way to prepare to inherent the earth is to be a part of it. What better group to live by this than the students who will be handed, as Eric Greenberg says, “an unfair and unsustainable state of affairs.”

So, here are some ideas that I think will get us moving forward towards bringing about the kind of world that Gen-We.org points out is needed. Because underneath the flashy rhetoric and the misguided trust in the same systems that got use where we are today, Eric Greenberg is calling us to act and in order to act effectively, we need to organize. I would like to start a discussion about what students within the education system can do to start effecting real change.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the National Honor Society, which aims to “create enthusiasm for scholarship, to stimulate a desire to render service, to promote leadership, and to develop character in the students of secondary schools.”  My younger brother participates in a local chapter of the NHS and I’ve got to say that I’m disappointed in how the organization has failed to lived up to their stated purpose. The enthusiasm for scholarship has been replaced by a pat on the back and a better resumé for college applications. Rather than promote leadership, the shepherds of the NHS seem more intent on handing the students busy work so that they don’t stray too far out of line. Character? My brother’s chapter meet once a month for less than half an hour after school, where they make idle small talk. As for fostering a desire to render service, well, my brother’s project this term, the one community service assignment that the NHS advisor gave them, was to light a Christmas tree downtown. That’s hardly meaningful, important work. The National Honor Society will soon turn 90. I think it’s about time we got rid of it and built something better in its place. So what I’m proposing is both a rejection of the Ivy League chasing mindset that the NHS has embraced, and at the same time a reaffirmation and reinterpretation of the best things it originally hoped to achieve. Rather than focus on just high schools, I would like to see it available to college students as well. Instead of being managed by a cadre of principals in a National Council, I think it ought to encourage democratic decision making by all students involved. Here’s a update of the four major goals that I think would better enable progressive action and true education:

1. To nurture enthusiasm for learning. Learning is simultaneously living in the moment and for the future. It does not begin at kindergarten and it does not end after university. It does not take lunch breaks or summer vacations. We acknowledge that there is a fire inside everyone and even after years of systematic stamping out by the status quo, an ember still smolders away, ready to burst forth and burn, burn, burn if given the fuel it needs to grow and the air it has to breath. We intend to feed that flame by pushing for students’ rights to pursue dangerous ideas and decide for themselves what they want to learn, as well as by helping teachers understand that knowing the right questions to ask is often more important than knowing the right way to answer.

2. To develop our passions into talents, in order to improve and enrich the material and intellectual lives of people everywhere. This can mean organizing a local Food Not Bombs chapter, starting a community garden, performing street art, writing letters to the local press or the Wall Street Journal, spending time with the elderly at nursing homes, protesting outside a city council meeting or a party’s national convention, or raising money for a children’s hospital. We recognize that we all owe something back to the world that begat us. Do what moves you, but do it in a way that matters.

3.  To build our communities both locally and globally. We know that the people who can best decide what they want for their communities  are the community members themselves. We are all members of many social circles: our families, our friends, our schools, our towns and cities, our states and provinces, our countries,and our world. By sharing alternatives to the current models that dominate society and working hard to implement sustainable, egalitarian options and opening a dialogue with the community at large we will build camaraderie. We are international and hope to integrate, beyond all borders, in secondary schools and colleges the world over. We start by allowing each individual cell to decide upon the best actions to bring about the four goals. Decisions will be made democratically, with each member receiving one vote. Groups may choose to elect temporary spokespeople when needed for press interactions, or possible larger conferences. We’re all in this together. Let’s act like it.

4. To demand that those who have been granted power, be it by circumstance or public vote, be it in the form of economic or political clout, behave with character. As it stands, power is not distributed to all people fairly. While working towards a new and empowering future, we also acknowledge that we must not neglect the present. By opening an honest dialogue with community leaders we can work with those most capable of effecting change in the short term.

So, what do you think? How would you envision student organizations that help promote and develop Generation We’s ideas?

Mr. Kimi has added a Voicethread about character development that could use some attention. Finally, Aron sent me the following line in an email:

I don’t have much time right now but I know that I (and some others) have not really been participating in the Ning and IntrepidClassroom, but I think this is partly because we have not got a central goal.

To that I say this: The goal has always been to focus on the following topics: conflict resolution, global sustainability, peace activism, music and art as agent for social change, technology as a tool for social justice. The hope is to create a fluid, organic curriculum that engages all participants.

What that looks like depends on you the participants. My hope has always been that you, the members of Intrepid Classroom, would direct your own learning without the need for concrete assignments. I have suggested several projects, but most have been ignored.

The goal is for us to learn how to create a community of learners who work together for the simple reason of leanring from each other and teaching others. If you have an idea, share it with the Ning and get someting started. With the new chat feature we should be ablke to communicate more easily.

What I want most of out an education, I think, is to spark a dream in a child’s eye, a dream born out of authentic experience in a real world, and nurtured with the best care and support a society can provide.

You can find her at her blog Love and Logic or on her Ning profile. After much contact online, Lindsea and I realized that we would both me in San Francisco this summer, and so we decided to meet. I will not get into the play-by-play of what we did and how it all felt. I will leave that for a future post or maybe Lindsea can pick-up on that. Instead I will paint a very abstract sketch of how it all went down: the two of us met, drove around the city, watched a drum circle near Hippy Hill in Golden Gate park, went shoe shopping, went to an herb store in The Mission, took in the view at Twin Peaks. We blasted music by local Hawaiian bands and Modest Mouse in the car driving through The Castro. We talked about- Adolescence, sustainability, education, music, Hunter S. Thompson, responsibility, hypocrisy, politics, capitalism, apathy and revolutions. I thought about how- I wish my daughter would grow up to be as wise as the young woman by my side, who hours before was reading Kurt Vonnegut. I wondered whether or not I could ever meet her mother and thank her for raising such an amazing young woman. I relished the thought that I have a group of young people who I am cultivating worldwide to aid in the revolution and how that is all I have ever wanted from teaching. I wondered why I didn’t have teachers like me when I was Lindsea’s age. I probably would have avoided a lot of confusion, but then again maybe it is in that confusion that I learned the most important lessons.

It was a good day.

After our meeting, we promised to write blog posts detailing every facet of our meeting, but as it so often happens, we both let life steer us towards other priorities, other projects. That is until last week, when we re-connected and had a chat on Skype. We recorded the hour-long talk and below you will find my first Podcast. Lindsea is also on a Monday deadline to post her Podcast. I am very curious to see what she found important to highlight and how she will view our talk.

Please comment on your impressions of what we had to say. I would love to set up Skype calls with any of you and talk about anything you wish to discuss. I hope that podcasts become a regular part of IntrepidClassroom.

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Salutations, memorials, bromides: let us commence.

I want to talk about love — not romance, not love l-u-v.
I want to talk about a particular kind of love, this love: classroom teaching.

I have my posse of gaily clad classroom teachers behind me.

They like to be called college professors.
And we can’t all work for the government.

We gather together because of classroom teaching.
We have shown you our love in our work in the classroom.

Classroom teaching is a physical, breath-based, eye-to-eye event.
It is not built on equipment or the past.
It is not concerned about the future.
It is in existence to go out of existence.
It happens and then it vanishes.
Classroom teaching is our gift.
It’s us; it’s this.

We bring nothing into the classroom — perhaps a text or a specimen. We carry ourselves, and whatever we have to offer you is stored within our bodies. You bring nothing into the classroom — some gum, maybe a piece of paper and a pencil: nothing but yourselves, your breath, your bodies.

Classroom teaching produces nothing. At the end of a class, we all get up and walk out. It’s as if we were never there. There’s nothing to point to, no monument, no document of our existence together.

Classroom teaching expects nothing. There is no pecuniary relationship between teachers and students. Money changes hands, and people work very hard to keep it in circulation, but we have all agreed that it should not happen in the classroom. And there is no financial incentive structure built into classroom teaching because we get paid the same whether you learn anything or not.

Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, “I know how to add two numbers, but I’m not going to tell you.” And they laugh and shout, “No!” That’s so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?

Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing –
what does that remind you of?
Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results?
Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,
and is based not on gain and fame, but on love.

There are those who say that classroom teaching is doomed and that by the time one of you addresses the class of 2033, there will be a museum of classroom teaching.

Ever since the invention of wedge-shaped writing on a clay tablet, classroom teaching has been obsolete. It’s been comical. Why don’t we just write the assignments and algorithms on a clay tablet, hang it up on the wall, and let the students come who will to teach themselves from our documents?

Why, since the creation of writing with a pen on a piece of paper, do we still bother to have schools?

Why, since the invention of movable metal type, don’t we all just go to the library?

Why do we have to have class? Why do we need teachers?

Why, since the advent of the microchip, don’t we all stay home in our pajamas and hit send?

Technology is nipping at the heels of classroom teaching, but I perceive no threat.
How could something false replace something true?
How could a substitute, a proxy, step in for something real and alive?
How could the virtual nudge out the actual?

The other great threat to classroom teaching is the rush to data — data-driven education.
We must measure everything — percentages, charts, tables.

I’m not entirely opposed to this.
If data-driven education were a pie graph, I would have a piece.

But I was not educated and did not become a teacher to produce data.

I love the classroom.
I loved it as a student, and I love it as a teacher.
I can name every teacher I ever had:
Mrs. Mulshanok, Miss Williams, Mrs. Clark, Miss Bogan, Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Muys, Mrs. Parker, Mr. Eldridge, Miss Bush — and that’s just through sixth grade.
I could go on, I promise.

I loved coming to class: the chairs, the windows, unzipping my book bag.
And I loved my teachers.
There was content, I suppose, but that’s not what I remember.
I remember my teachers.
I remember being in the room,
and no data and no bar graph will be assembled to replace that, or even to capture it.

This week my students worked on dividing a pizza between two people, and they realized that if you make the line down the center of the pizza the two sides will be equal. After much trial and error, they came to this conclusion on their own, and I welcome you to try it. I think it’s really going to take off, and let this be where it begins.

When they take a standardized test, they will be able to fill in the bubble next to the pizza that is cut exactly in half. Do they know that will be the correct answer? Yes. But I don’t care that much. What I care about is how they got there, how they figured it out for themselves.

This skinny little high school senior got herself into Smith College by writing an essay about Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s theme, “The journey, not the arrival, matters.” It worked for me.

Standardized tests measure the arrival, but they have nothing to say about the journey, about having wonderful ideas. Do you know it/do you not know it is second, and how do you know it, and who are you, is first.

The only way this knowledge grows inside a student is with a teacher, a classroom teacher. Of course, my students will insist they did it themselves, and I don’t try to disabuse them of that.

But the work you graduates have done was in the classroom with your teachers.
That’s the miracle of today.
Why don’t we talk about it?
Because it doesn’t show up.
There’s not a bar graph for classroom teaching. There’s no data for classroom teaching, and yet it persists this year and the next year and the year after that.

Telling tens of thousands of people what to do is not teaching, it’s shouting, and there’s a lot of that going around.

Showing somebody how to do something exactly the way you’ve always done it is not teaching, it’s training. And there’s plenty of that, too.

But the reality that is neither shouting nor training is classroom teaching.
Nobody can touch it because nobody can point to it.
You have it forever.
When it grows inside you, it’s doing its work.

We can disappear.
We’ll never see you again, probably.
The chairs will be folded.
It will be as if we were never here.
There will be nothing we can count after today.
But not everything that counts can be counted.
Not everything that matters can be put into a pie chart.

The Board of Trustees has set a very great challenge for itself:
to educate us all for lives of distinction.
You are never going to be able to make a bar graph out of that.
That is immeasurable, and that’s what makes it so real.
I admonish you — because that’s my job — to think about the things that float away:
your love for your friends,
the smell of the lilacs,
the feeling your families have on this day.
You will have nothing to take with you.
The diploma you receive will be someone else’s.

Everything meaningful about this moment, and these four years,
will be meaningful inside you, not outside you.

I’ve been a classroom teacher for sixteen years–as long as you have been in the classroom. We started the same year. And I hope to go on for fourteen more years.
That will make thirty, and I’ll be done.

At the end of that time, someone will bring me a box, and I will put in it a ceramic apple somebody gave me thinking it would be symbolic somehow. I will have nothing, and that will be proof of the meaning of my work.

If you can point to something, you might lose it, or you might break it, or someone might take it from you. As long as you store it inside yourself, it’s not going anywhere — or it’s going everywhere with you.

This day is a day of love.
It’s a day of your family’s love for you,
your love for each other and your teachers,
and your teachers’ love for you.

In time, the bar graphs may tumble,
the clay tablets may crumble.
They’re only made of clay.
But our love
is here to stay.

Thank you.

Please pass it on to wherever it needs to go.