Category: Democracy

Why I Like Mad Men

Posted on | by Sam

(This post originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

It’s a recent Monday afternoon and I’m stuck in the dreaded middle seat on a cross-country flight. The woman next to me is a sixty-something Arizonan who seems determined to hold on to her youth. Her hair is in a ponytail, her skin is leathery and brown, her top is uncomfortably revealing, and she is wearing oversized Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and Monster Beat headphones. When the stewardess comes to take our drink order, I ask for a cup of coffee. She asks for two chardonnays.

There are four and a half hours remaining in the flight.

In desperate need of diversion, I pull out my computer and decide to watch the first and last episodes of season two of the wildly popular AMC series Mad Men. I’ve been an avid watcher of the show since it debuted back in 2007. I’ve also been in a lot of conversations with friends who don’t see what all the fuss is about. As I revisit the second season from the relative discomfort of my cramped seat in the sky — my neighbor growing ever sloppier as she watches reruns of Friday Night Lights — the fuss seems clearer than ever.

Mad Men is a quintessentially American show about disembodied desire and emotion. Set in the first few years of the 1960s, the show is filled with characters living in a gilded world of manicured lawns, highly prescribed social mores, and superbly cultivated capitalist longings. As befits a group of people who work in an advertising agency, the characters of Mad Men do not desire deeper meaningfulness and connections — they desire the freedom to pursue whatever it is they cannot have.

In this sense the show is a powerful and unsettling commentary on the tenuous marriage of democracy and capitalism. In a democracy, our love of freedom ostensibly stems from our shared belief in protecting for all people the inalienable freedom of conscience. The right to say what we must say. The right to worship one God, thirty Gods or no God. The right to speak up and advocate forcefully, and peaceably, for change. In short, self-determination at its fullest.

By contrast, Mad Men unveils how the sacred goals of a democracy can become cheapened by the relentless profane efficiency of a capitalist economy. In this world, freedom comes to mean freedom to do whatever one wants. The desires are material, the feelings deeply submerged and unarticulated, the actions of the characters feral and reckless. In short, self-obsession at its fullest.

All of these subplots are brilliantly woven together in the finale of season two, “Meditations in an Emergency,” a title taken from the famous poet Frank O’Hara.

“Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.”

On the outside, the characters in Mad Men are beautiful, and modern. But it goes no deeper, leaving us to watch people skimming the surface of each other, looking for a way to dive deeper, and ricocheting off the emotional carapaces that have been built up over time.

In the season two finale, Don Draper, the show’s mercurial, philandering lead and the creative genius behind his ad agency’s success, is staying in a hotel after his wife Betty discovers he has been having an affair. After Betty drops off the kids for a visit, she gazes longingly at a fancy dress in a department store display before returning to the hotel bar, grabbing a drink and having random sex with a nameless man. “To not thinking about things,” they toast, while the still-unresolved Cuban missile crisis looms in the background. Afterwards Betty returns to her empty family home. As she lingers at the back door, you expect her to break down in shame. Instead, she opens the refrigerator and casually devours a leftover chicken leg.

“The country is grey and / brown and white in trees / snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny / not just darker, not just grey.”

It may be that critics have already mined to death the way Mad Men lays bare the tendency for our society to cultivate an ersatz culture of conspicuous consumption. But the parallels between the early 1960s and today are what has propelled the show into the zeitgeist. We know, as the characters cannot, what awaits them in the second half of the 1960s — a whole-scale remaking of America as they know it, from the end of Jim Crow to the advent of mass student protests to the victory of landing a man on the moon. When someone makes a similar show in the future, and sets it in the early 21st century, I imagine future audiences will view us similarly – both aware and unaware of what awaits, dissatisfied with the current state of things, and not quite certain how to imagine anything different.

“It may be the coldest day of / the year, what does he think of / that? I mean, what do I? And if I do / perhaps I am myself again.”

Towards the end of the episode (and my flight), a character named Peggy finally shares a closely held secret with her former paramour, a married man named Pete, immediately after he drunkenly expresses his love for her.

“I had your baby and I gave it away,” she says. “I wanted other things.” Then, while Pete sits stunned and silent, she tries to explain how she feels.

“One day you’re there, and then all of a sudden there’s less of you and you wonder what happened to that part — is it living outside of you? And you keep thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll get it back.’ And then you realize, it’s just gone.”

At the same moment these lines are delivered on my computer screen, the retiree next to me begins to bob her head animatedly to the music on her ITunes – hip hop, I think – and raises her hand to the beat, audibly singing along in a drunken bliss, lost in the dream of somewhere else.

We have begun our descent.

Building Democratic Learning Communities

Posted on | by Sam

On July 28, I participated in a live web discussion about democratic learning communities with Classroom 2.0’s Steve Hargadon.

It was an interesting and sometimes chaotic discussion. While Steve was asking me questions, participants from all over the globe were also typing questions and comments in a dialogue box. So please excuse my occasional flightiness when Steve asked me a question — it’s because I was trying to have about ten conversations at once!

Click here to listen to the audio of the conversation, and please post any additional comments or ideas. Thanks!

Judicial Activism & the Yelp-ification of Voting?

Posted on | by Sam

As someone who never travels without his pocket U.S. Constitution, I loved that yesterday’s New York Times forced me to revisit the two sections that deal with Judicial and Executive power — Articles III and II, respectively.

The article about judicial power was a detailed analysis of the first five years of the U.S. Supreme Court under John Roberts’ leadership. (Spoiler alert: it was really conservative). What interests me more, though, is the ongoing tension between the lofty principles of our common law system (in which our law evolves over time, thanks to the wisdom and restraint of judges who interpret it) and the reality of how those principles get played out in real time (i.e., to the victor go the spoils, stare decisis — or the rule that judges aren’t supposed to go against prior precedent — be damned).

Now that the Court’s makeup favors a conservative bent, the left is up in arms and crying foul.  And yet this is exactly what happened a few generations ago, under the Earl Warren-led Court of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, under Warren’s leadership the left-leaning Court forged myriad new doctrines regarding civil rights and civil liberties and the very nature of the political system (Thank God!). And so, although I personally disagree with the direction this Court is taking us, I don’t see behavior that runs afoul of the Constitution. It’s an imperfect system, but you can’t only support judicial muscularity when it serves your own purposes. (On a related note, I have a new book coming out later this year on the First Amendment and how our understanding of it has evolved over time. Want to reserve an advance copy?)

Far more complicated was the recent New Yorker article about voting systems, and about how the U.S. lags behind other countries in its efforts to provide a fairer system. The antediluvian nature of our system will become even more pronounced when the stodgy old Brits, of all people, hold a May 2011 referendum on how Britain elects its leaders, likely resulting in an abandonment of the “first-past-the-post” system whereby whoever has the most votes wins. As the article points out, this sort of system only really makes sense if you always have two candidates. But anytime you have three or more, it’s a pretty lousy way to capture the true will of the people. And, not surprisingly, of democracies without any significant past era of British influence, only Nepal has chosen to elect its leaders this way.

As the article points out, the misbehavior of voting schemes in general has been known to social scientists since the mid-twentieth century. “That was when Kenneth Arrow, an economist at Stanford, examined a set of requirements that you’d think any reasonable voting system could satisfy, and proved that nothing can meet them all when there are more than two candidates. So designing elections is always a matter of choosing a lesser evil.”

So what should we do instead? Interestingly, one idea put forth is to rate our candidates the same way we rate restaurants or books online — by rating them across the range of a 4- or 5-point scale — and by using the 2000 election as an example of how it might work. “If a voter likes Nader best, and would rather have Gore than Bush, he or she can approve Nader and Gore but not Bush.” Both schemes give voters more options, and “would elect the candidate with the most over-all support, rather than the one preferred by the largest minority.”

I’m not saying I recommend this, but it’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? And just to provide some perspective, it’s not like changing how we vote in this country is a foreign concept. In fact, nearly one-fourth of our country’s total amendments to the Constitution (or 6 out of 27) have been about changing how we vote — and who can do it.

Which leads to a Monday trivia question — can you name the six voting-related amendments without looking? If you can (and we’re going strictly honor code here), I’ll send you a pocket Constitution of your very own. . .

How to Start a Movement, Part II

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on How to Start a Movement, Part II

Last week, I shared a video from TED about how to start a movement.

This Tuesday, my wife and I went to see the new movie Cyrus, and I watched the exact same principle unfold again. See for yourself (the clip is less than two minutes long, and it’s funny):

As with the TED video, John C. Reilly’s character demonstrates the guts of a leader by taking to the dance floor before any of his fellow party-goers were ready to join in. He could have crashed and burned — but Marisa Tomei’s character saves him, and starts to seed a movement by becoming his first follower. This gives the leader credibility — but only because he embraces her as an equal, which creates the space for others to join in as well. And then, sure enough, and shortly thereafter, a tipping point occurs and the whole energy of the party shifts.(Thank you once again, Human League.)

The scene has all the essential conditions of what defines a successful movement: a brave leader, a first follower who is embraced as an equal, and then, once the third and fourth people join in, a shift in the environmental conditions occurs that allows others to feel safe enough to join in as well. The clip is also a reminder that while it takes a leader to break the seal and roll back the rug at a house party, the first person to join in is really the one who seeds the possibility of a truly memorable evening.

In our field of public education, who, I wonder are the leaders capable of inducing first followers to start something bigger — and do so by embracing them as equals? And which first followers are most likely to bring others to a party (i.e., transformational movement in public education) that is actually FUN, assets-based and productive, and not, like so many current conversations in the field, depressing, deficit-based, and cartoonish in their simplicity?

Why We Celebrate — the (Religious) Origins of the Separation of Church & State

Posted on | by Sam

(In honor of the 4th, here’s a short excerpt from my 2005 book with Charles Haynes, First Freedoms: A Documentary History of First Amendment Rights in America –– about the origins of our commitment to religious liberty. It may surprise you . . .)

When New Amsterdam refused entry to a shipload of Quakers in 1657, the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church were happy to be rid of them. In a letter to Holland, two church leaders speculated the Quakers had sailed to Rhode Island — “for that is the receptacle of all sorts of riff-raff people, and is nothing less than the sewer of New England. All the cranks of New England retire thither. They are not tolerated in any other place.”

Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island would probably have taken that as a compliment. He envisioned Rhode Island as a haven for the cause of conscience, and the colony was the first place in America with no established faith, where every person had full religious liberty. It came as no surprise to him that dissenters, non-conformists, and “cranks” ended up in his colony. Where else could they go?

Williams himself needed a haven. He was one of the “riff-raff people,” banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 as a heretic and troublemaker. Why couldn’t Massachusetts Bay Colony tolerate Roger Williams? Ask John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay.

Before reaching the shores of New England in 1630, Winthrop was reputed to have stood on the deck of the ship Arbella to remind his fellow Puritans of their God-given mission in the New World. In his much-quoted sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” he preached that they had left England prepared to endure many hardships in order to establish “a city upon a hill,” an ideal Christian community for all the world to see.

Most of the passengers listening to Winthrop on the Arbella were reformers who despaired of ever “purifying” the Church of England of what they considered corruptions of Christ’s teachings. Unwelcome and often persecuted in their native land, they traveled to a New World seeking freedom to live and worship as they believed God intended.

But the liberty America’s Puritan forebears sought was religious freedom for themselves–not for others. And dissent from this vision of a “holy commonwealth” was not long in coming. In 1631, only a year after the arrival of the Arbella, a young clergyman named Roger Williams arrived in Massachusetts Bay. Williams’s fundamental objection to the colony was religious in nature. More Puritan than the Puritans, he called for the purification of the colony’s churches. This meant, among other things, complete separation from the Church of England.

Williams expressed his separatist ideas without concern for the political consequences or for his personal loss of position or money. His only abiding interest was to build what he called “a wall or hedge of separation” between the “Garden of the Church” and the “Wilderness of the World.” His concept of an uncorrupted church required a complete separation of church and state. For the church to remain pure, he argued, the government must not be involved in religious matters and churches should not be involved with affairs of state.

Williams also argued that every person must be given the freedom to accept or reject God’s call to salvation. Reason and scripture may be used to convince sinners, he believed, but force must never be used–especially by the state. He reminded his fellow Puritans of Europe’s long history of religious wars and divisions. Imposition of religion by the state, he argued, only leads to persecution and bloodshed.

“It is the will and command of God,” wrote Williams, “that a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God’s spirit, the Word of God.”

In other words, Williams was convinced that God required “soul liberty,” because God had created every person with freedom of conscience–the freedom to choose in matters of faith. This vision of religious liberty was in direct opposition to the vision of a new Israel proclaimed by Winthrop on the Arbella.

Given this radical departure from Puritan teachings, it is not surprising that Massachusetts Bay, struggling to survive the harsh conditions of New England and fearful that a hostile king would revoke their charter, banished Roger Williams in 1635. Once forced to leave Massachusetts, Williams founded the new colony of Rhode Island. In an extraordinary break with the precedents of history, the new colony had no established religion. Religious liberty was guaranteed to people of all faiths or no faith. Soon Jews, Quakers, and others not welcome elsewhere made their home there.

Few people in the seventeenth century imagined that this unprecedented experiment in Rhode Island could succeed. A society without divine sanction, especially one that allowed dissent, appeared to most observers to have written its own death warrant. But Rhode Island survived and soon became a haven for dissenters not welcome in Massachusetts Bay.

Roger Williams believed that many of the dissenters who flocked to Rhode Island were wrong in their religious ideas. But Williams’s views about other faiths, even his personal hostility to some, did not affect his wholehearted commitment to “soul liberty” for all who settled in the colony he founded.

God, Williams believed, had given people the right to be wrong.

Democracy in the Workplace

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Democracy in the Workplace

I’m in Las Vegas this week, attending Worldblu’s 2010 conference, at which Worldblu CEO Traci Fenton will honor the world’s most democratic workplaces. It’s an eclectic group of people and industries, and although there will be a few other educators at the event, it’s primarily an opportunity to learn what some forward-thinking folks in the private sector have learned about how the use of democratic principles can help create an optimal learning environment. In particular, I’m looking forward to hearing more from Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos and the recent focus of an extended profile in the New Yorker.

I’m also preparing to test-drive my belief that the core challenge in any organization — whether it’s an elementary school or an online shoe retailer — is to strike the right balance between providing a few clearly-defined, goal-oriented shared structures, and reserving enough space for individuals to feel free to express themselves, ad lib, try new ideas, and find ways to improve the overall flow of the organization. I’ll be blogging about it all week, so please stay tuned and share with me any questions you think would be particularly worth considering.

Name the Book Competition — We May Have a Winner!

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Name the Book Competition — We May Have a Winner!

First off, thanks are in order to everyone who has weighed in — either here or on Facebook — to offer such useful feedback on our ongoing search for a title to the forthcoming book of 50 learning stories. Yesterday, I had a long meeting with the publisher’s marketing folks, and when I explained to them the concept for the cover — a mosaic of images of either each author’s profile photo, or a montage of photos that remind them of the learning story they shared, or perhaps a combo of the two — I think we may have found our title:

Faces of Learning: 50 Inspiring Stories

Yes/No?

To What Do We Owe Our Fidelity?

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on To What Do We Owe Our Fidelity?

Today was one of those magical work days — not so much because it was chaotic and crowded (it was), but because it was jam packed with interesting people and conversations. It began with University of Gloucestershire professor Philip Woods (an expert on democratic leadership and school governance); it ended with the fabulous Traci Fenton of WorldBLU, an organization that is identifying, and helping to create, democratic business cultures around the globe; and it featured a remarkable mid-afternoon tea with Sir Ken Robinson — yes, that Sir Ken Robinson — who is writing a new book and imagining lots of new and powerful ways to connect people to their passions.

Through all these conversations and exchanges, I’ve been reflecting on a question I’d never thought of quite so explicitly before. It surfaced during my morning conversation with Professor Woods: “In the work that we do, to what do we owe our greatest fidelity?”

I think this question gets at the heart with the issue I have with both extremes of the current education reform landscape.

On one side is the old guard, for who I think the answer to the question would be either “the children” or “democratic learning.” I think both of these are the wrong answers, but for different reasons. Regarding the idea of our fidelity being owed to “the children” — well, of course, but what good does the answer do you except allow you to feel self-righteous, because the answer doesn’t tell you anything about where to start or how to go about the work itself. And I don’t think our primary fidelity is owed to “democratic learning” either — because although it’s hugely important, it’s also often (mis)interpreted primarily as a set of structures, and strategy should always precede structure if you want a finely tuned organization.

Conversely, I think the new guard would say they owe fidelity to the concepts of “achievement” and/or “accountability.” These, too, are the wrong words, and for more easily identifiable reasons. Achievement has come to basically mean basic-skills standardized reading and math scores. How could we owe our greatest loyalty to those, unless our sole purpose is to collect some personal bonus at the end of the year (hey, wait a minute). And the idea of accountability is a little too punitive and unimaginative as a superordinate goal. We can do better.

What was reaffirmed to me this morning, and throughout the day, is how I believe we must answer the question — we owe our greatest fidelity to learning, and to helping people create the optimal environments in which it can occur.

Being clear on what we’re most loyal to ensures that, strategically, operationally, organizationally, we will ask the question that gets to the heart of what matters most: Will ______ help our students learn how to use their minds well? If yes, do it. If not, don’t. Best of all, a fidelity to learning doesn’t preclude other priorities. Our focus will still be on the children. Our community will still create multiple opportunities for democratic decision-making (it’s a great way to help people learn, after all). Our efforts will still be on measuring how well or poorly we’re helping students achieve (in the fullest sense of that word). And our intentions will still be to hold ourselves and each other accountable to what we aim to do together. But it’s only by setting our narrowest focus on the true bulls’ eye — on learning, and on the core conditions required to support and nurture it — that we can create the greatest likelihood of success.

Name the Book Competition — Round 2

Posted on | by Sam | 19 Comments on Name the Book Competition — Round 2

On Thursday, I formally submit the manuscript for the book of learning stories (estimated release date – February 2011) and it still doesn’t have a working title. However, many of you have written to share your feedback, and I think it’s time for an updated list of finalists.

Remember — whoever submits the winning entry gets a $50 gift certificate to the bookstore of their choice.

  1. Learning to Matter: 50 Powerful Stories of How Learning Experiences Shape Who We Become (from Pennsylvania’s Charlotte Hummel)
  2. Minds on Fire: 50 Powerful Stories of Learning & Teaching — in School & in Life (from Virginia’s Bruce Price)
  3. The Book of Life: 50 Stories About the Life-Changing Power of Learning To Use One’s Mind Well (from Australia’s Troy Jones)
  4. Your nomination — just post a comment in this thread and share your idea.

OK, people — what should it be?

The Book of Learning Stories — Title Search

Posted on | by Sam | 10 Comments on The Book of Learning Stories — Title Search

I need your help in coming up with the title for the book of learning stories. Whoever submits the winning entry will get a $50 gift card to the bookstore of their choice.

Here are the three I have so far:

  1. The Learning Book: 50 Powerful Stories of Learning & Teaching — In School & In Life
  2. Learning Matters: 50 Powerful Stories of Learning & Teaching — In School & In Life
  3. “Dear Mr. Hatfield”: 50 Powerful Stories of Learning & Teaching — In School & In Life

Yes? No? Maybe? Something else? Talk to me . . .