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?

If you were here last year, welcome back, if you are new- welcome. I think I may have found a new direction. I recently watched the video below, read the book, and wrote this review on my teaching blog.

While the entire concept may be a bit too conveniently packaged and a bit flawed, it can be a good text for several reasons:

• It is available online in PDF format
• It lays out a clear course of action
• It identifies issues, which we can work on after reading
• It sparks great discussions

I want to read this book with whoever is willing and see where it takes us. Whether you are a former Intrepid Classroom participant, a new student directed here by your teacher, or a teacher who stumbled here form Twitter, here is my plan:

Intrepid Classroom has always been about bringing young people and teachers together using web tools to facilitate discussion, interaction, collaboration, and connectivity. Beyond the confines of school, curriculums, and expected roles and interactions, I hope that Intrepid Classroom can be a place where we can simply be people dedicated to change not stigmatized by the labels of teacher/student.

One of the biggest criticisms of this site has always been the lack of structure or cohesion. Here is what I hope to do to solve that problem: I want to build a semester long curriculum around Generation We. I hope that we can gather a group of ten to fifteen teachers and students to have weekly readings, discussions, and eventually a final project that raises awareness of global issues and promote activism.

We can use any tool that will help us stay connected and collaborate. These will be modified and announced as necessary, but as always, we will use this blog and the Ning as starting points. I would like to have group meetings using Elluminate or similar tools. I want you to have a say in where we take this book and the idea it presents. I don’t have anything more concrete at this time, because I do not want to create an entire plan and have no one sign up.

Here is what you need to do if you are interested, and are able to commit the time regardless of “real” school commitments:

• Leave a comment on this blog post stating your interest. I will email you with details as soon as we have a group together.
• Join the Ning if you haven’t already done so.
• Watch the video.
• Share any ideas you have about the direction of this course.

I hope to start January 1st, so please commit by then. This course is open to anyone who is interested in learning more about collaborative activism, regardless of your age or affiliation with any school. Let’s get together, learn, converse, connect, and create real change.

I agree with Eric Greenberg when he says:

The problems of today will not go away if we just sweep them under the rug and ignore them. They will only get worse. We cannot rely on those bound by special interests or protecting their turf to enact great changes and create a new order of justice and fairness. We need the unjaded youth, with their energy, optimism, and sense of purpose, to lead the world out of the mess it is in and toward the full potential of mankind.

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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Borrowed from Dr. Scott McLeod. Any thoughts? How, where, and when do you do these things?