Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

Amidst the Trees, a School Grows in Chicago

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Amidst the Trees, a School Grows in Chicago

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete.

— Buckminster Fuller

Before these six acres were left to the trees, before the buildings were razed and the families displaced, before the $31 million promise or the thousands of visitors, and before there was ever a blueprint for a campus that might light a path towards the school of the future — there was the young woman on the bike with the 600-page plan under her arms, the one whose childhood teachers labeled her defiant, the one who set out alone to discover the world while still a teenager, who refused to take no for an answer, and who looked out at these abandoned lots and neglected tapestry and saw the culmination of everything those 600 pages had outlined.

For Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, it was an idea that had first taken hold of her as a child, and would not let go until she found a way to make it manifest in the world: Humans re-learning to live in harmony with nature — and schools as the vital containers in which that re-education could begin.

Before her twenty-fifth birthday, Ippel had already traveled to six continents to speak with educators, sit in classrooms, and look for patterns that might reveal the most irreducible elements of a transformative education — the design principles of a living, thriving school.

As a girl, she had always felt like she was hiding in plain sight. What she experienced as curiosity, her teachers saw as misbehavior. And what she felt as frustration, the adults in her life described as the price of the ticket.

You need to play the game, they instructed, to become a player in the game. Sit and get, so that one day you can stand and deliver.

But those rules never made sense to Ippel — or to the millions of others like her, whose natural iconoclasm, or wanderlust, or mischief, or undiagnosed trauma, or all of the above made it all but impossible to abide by The Game’s overarching rule: conformity.

In her travels, however, Ippel found a willing audience for her marked intensity and drive — and a more useful set of models for her musings about the best way to reimagine the timeworn thing we have always called “school.”

What she learned spilled across the pages of her ambitious proposal to the Chicago Board of Education. The Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC), she promised, would provide a new public educational model for the 21st century — one that prepared all students for an increasingly uncertain, interdependent, and ecologically fragile world. AGC’s curriculum would foster a schoolwide commitment to holistic wellness and sustainability that expanded from the inside out — developing healthier humans, communities, and ecosystems. And it would do all of this with the children whose well-being was usually the last to be addressed.

Twice, the city said no. The approach was “too sophisticated” for the community she wanted to serve. Topics like global citizenship and the environment would have to wait until basic literacy and numeracy improved. Recess was a luxury. Healthy food was a nice-to-have. Nature was a distraction.

Not true, Ippel insisted. Empowering students to make positive change would provide them with the motivation for academic growth. Before students could become stewards of the earth, they must first fall in love with nature.

In short, there were no shortcuts.

In 2008, on the third try, AGC’s application was finally approved, and Ippel and her colleagues got their chance. 

They spent their first year in the ground floor of a former dental tool factory that had been turned into a church. Founding teacher Meredith McNamara recalled needing to keep students quiet during funerals, and struggling to choreograph the daily, sometimes oppositional dance between theory and practice. “We discovered during that first year there are the ideas you have about how a learning experience should unfold,” she explained, “and then there are the realities and interests and needs of the kids in front of you, which, in the end, is all that matters. Whatever sparks their natural curiosity, that’s what you should do.”

In time, the school found its distinctive intellectual rhythm — six in-depth academic units a year, three curricular themes (responsibility for oneself, for one’s community and for the Earth) frequent field trips and speakers, and an integrated exploration of health and wellness. “As we evolved,” McNamara explained, “we realized we needed more structure for everything from community governance (i.e., becoming more democratic) to teacher collaboration (i.e., reserving two planning days at the start of each six-week cycle). We also realized just how confining the larger system of the city is, and how limiting it is to imagine our model, which depends on a certain type of physical space, in a place that’s not our own. It’s hard to teach kids to fall in love with nature if they’re never in it.”

Indeed, despite all its successes, AGC is still housed in two rented buildings, one of which is a former barrel factory, in the industrial landscape of the Garfield Ridge neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side. The campuses are separated by Cicero Avenue — a frequent thoroughfare for long-distance truckers — so the businesses that surround the schools are a mixture of automotive shops, fast-food restaurants, and motels. It’s a gray, flat section of the city, with scores of undeveloped lots alongside nearby residential streets and rows of well-manicured, single-story houses. 

More than 90 percent of AGC’s student body come from these nearby streets and houses. Two-thirds of them are low income. Three out of ten are learning English for the first time. And one out of four have special learning requirements.

To support the needs of these children, Ippel and her colleagues have done everything they can to create a greener landscape. An asphalt parking lot now features raised garden beds, a greenhouse, and some schoolyard chickens. The students grow their own vegetables, and eat what they grow thanks to an on-site chef working in a zero-waste organic cafeteria. Classrooms are lit by on-site solar panels; a wind turbine anchors the outdoor playground; rainwater gets collected from the greenhouse gutters. 

And yet.

“When we started AGC,” Ippel told me, “we always knew we needed a future home of our own design — an environment that fully reflected the vision of what we are trying to achieve here. To build a thriving world, we must design the template of a living school, and create a prototype so that others can do the same.”

And so, while her colleagues went on with the critical daily work of teaching and learning, Ippel went on the hunt for funding, and for a team of visionary designers from across the globe.

The team came first, and their work has engendered what critic Alexandra Lange describes as “the most architecturally ambitious design I’ve seen in the U.S.” In a section of the city in which healthy food options are scarce, more than half of the six-acre site will be reserved for neighborhood gardens, orchards, food forests, hoop houses, greenhouses, teaching kitchens and a community farm café and store. Instead of traditional classrooms, the school will be organized into Neighborhoods that get shared by grade-level bands. Each building will have a sloped roof, tilted toward the sun and covered with photovoltaic panels. On the shady sides, a clerestory window will let in cool northern light. Gutters running along the low points in the roof will collect stormwater for toilets and gardens. Students will move throughout the day along a series of meandering outdoor paths. And the campus will abide by the world’s most robust sustainability performance standards.

“It’s a flipped relationship with circulation space,” Ippel says. “Rather than breaking learning spaces up with hallways and walls and asking each educator to stay in one space with one group of students, teachers will circulate around the entire shared learning space throughout the day. The campus itself will be a living system — with geothermal wells, animals, a learning barn, and ample green space. We’re adding trees to improve outdoor air and remove air pollutants. We’re giving preference to building products and materials that are recycled, salvaged, rapidly renewable, or sustainably harvested. And we’re doing all of this using the same cost per square foot as the district, so that the ideas and design principles are accessible to anyone who hopes to replicate this approach in their own communities.

“Why would we all not do this? Why would we not make this the new standard?”

Good question. And in 2019, Ippel finally got some answers when, after seeing the school’s sustainable design and its possibilities for replication, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker authorized $31 million of state funds to support the school’s construction. 

Making the decision easier for the Governor, Ippel had already found the land on which AGC’s vision could eventually become a reality — a site that runs alongside the Stevenson Expressway, a few blocks from AGC’s current campuses, and about a mile from Midway Airport. It’s a patchwork of large tracts of overgrown grass, comprising more than forty acres in total, broken up by a cross of empty roadways, and currently housing little more than a well-spaced community of sturdy Oak trees. 

Its barrenness, in the shadow of the Chicago skyline, makes one wonder why it is barren, and what or who was here before. And, as you might suspect, the story of this land is a reminder of just how many other forces are always at play in our cities and communities, and just how far we still have to travel as a people.

That’s because AGC’s future home was also once the home of LeClaire Courts, a public housing complex of 600 two-story row houses that stretched along Cicero Avenue. Built in 1950, Leclaire Courts was an early attempt at integrated, low-rise public housing. And over the years, it became the home of thousands of African-American children and families. 

That all changed in 1999, when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced what he called “The Plan for Transformation.” It was a plan to demolish every remaining public housing complex in the city — more than 18,000 units. It would take ten years, the Mayor said, at a cost of $1.6 billion. It would ostensibly result in a slew of transformational public-private developments, and a bevy of new and improved public housing options. And it would guarantee most of the families that were going to be displaced a “right of return” once the old buildings were demolished and the new units were built.

In 2011, the Courts were torn down, and its families were displaced. The site has been barren ever since. And now, nearly ten years later, according to the Chicago Reader’s Lucia Anaya, “the list of LeClaire residents with a right to return has dwindled from 400 families to fewer than 40. Some no longer qualify for return or have died. Others have simply lost hope of ever returning and have made their temporary homes permanent.”

As a result, Garfield Ridge’s Black families, once the majority in the neighborhood, are now being joined in increasing numbers by Latino children and families. “Daley didn’t believe public housing developments could ever be assets to the neighborhoods around them,” writes Chicago native Ben Austen. His belief was that “the very landscape would be remade, the skyline altered, the street grid restored.” Anything less, the Mayor proclaimed, and “you wouldn’t have a city of the future. You’d have a city of the past.” 

But timing is everything, and the Plan was devised amid the real estate bubble of 2008. As money dried up overnight, Austen explained, “the poured foundation set exposed like a Roman ruin, harking back to an age that had yet to be.”

For residents like Tara Stamps, a CPS teacher who had grown up in one of the houses the city had destroyed, the feeling of displacement left a permanent scar. “Those were not just buildings,” she said. “Those were families. Those were communities.” The people who lived there “are rooted to the land. They have a blood memory there. Their grandparents and their aunts and their cousins and their favorite memories were there.”

So the story of this place does not begin with the young woman on the bike after all, just as our own stories do not begin with us. Instead, like all stories, they are a kaleidoscope of things and memories and people, equal parts beauty and tragedy, injustice and fairness — the dialectical legacy of homo sapiens, sunk into the soil of our shared landscapes.

Wherever we are, in other words, old bones are buried, stubborn legacies persist, and new life is bound to emerge. 

How willing are we to find the roots of the stories that shape us?

By her own admission, Berenice Salas wasn’t willing at all. She grew up in this neighborhood — the daughter of educators — and the only things she was certain of as a young woman were that she wanted to leave, and she didn’t want to teach.

Once she moved away, however, she felt the land of her family pulling her back. And when she heard what they were doing in a former barrel factory near her childhood home, she allowed herself to be pulled all the way in.

Now, as AGC’s elementary school principal, Salas sees her work as a part of something larger than herself. “This is the school I would have dreamt of growing up,” she told me. “We are creating our own little ecosystem — right next to the highway. The Southwest side has always been unfairly under-resourced. But we can be the anchor of something that is both very new and very old. My dad was a farmer in Mexico. This work makes me feel like I’m going back to my roots, and reestablishing what was lost. I’m continuing the work of my ancestors, but in a different way.”

For too long, this is the work that too many of us have tried to forget. 

For generations, we have practiced the logic of delusion, and the slow dance of collective suicide. 

And now we must remember — before it’s too late. 

“Our school lies at the crossroads of a great city,” Ippel says, “bounded by racial divisions and economic challenges. But our citizens are the seeds that will give birth to new gardens here, and new chapters of hope across the globe. Together, we can all be the seeds that inspire people everywhere to reimagine the structure and purpose of school.”

 

 

A Parent Guide to Home Learning During the Coronavirus

Posted on | by Sam | 10 Comments on A Parent Guide to Home Learning During the Coronavirus

My fellow grown-ups:

Now that the End Days are upon us (kidding/not kidding) and your kids are out of school for the foreseeable future, how should you structure their time?

This is both a helpful and an unhelpful question.

It’s helpful because we’re all about to huddle indefinitely in close quarters. Whereas just a week ago, we were still snarfing down breakfast in the car to get to school on time, we’re now about to drown in a sudden deluge of the most precious (and scarce) feature of modern life: time. 

It makes sense, then, that we would want to schedule the uncertainty of this time away. And amidst the fear and anxiety of the current moment, there are few things as universally familiar as our shared assumptions about what one is supposed to do at school:

45-minute class periods. Scripted lesson plans. The neat sequential order of a curricular march through time. 

Since school is highly structured, the thinking goes, one’s debut as a homeschooling parent should be the same. Worksheets. Assignments. Schedules. Tests!

On behalf of your children (and yourselves), I beg you — STOP.

In fact, over-structuring your children’s time at home will result in the worst possible outcome: a slapdash recreation of our most stereotypical assumptions about learning — which, not surprisingly, are not actually what kids need (or want) to learn.

As we now know from research (and our own lived experiences), learning is not passive, it’s not sequential, and it’s not neat or predictable. It’s emergent, and tactile, and contextual, and highly personalized.

So don’t think about recreating the images you have in your head of what school is supposed to look like, feel like, and do. Put away the worksheets, forget about the assignments, and let the perceived urgency of mastering the Three R’s slip gently from your white-knuckled grasp. Because the most important thing you can give your children during this period is not a crash course on their time tables; it’s your sustained attention and company.

Let me say that again.

The most important thing you can give your children is your sustained attention and company.

That being said, the wide open nature of these coming weeks need not feel like a daily process of reinventing the wheel. So try giving shape and intention to your days around these six endlessly-modifiable activities:

READ — Find a book that you’re interested in. Read it, preferably in front of your children. Help them find things to read that interest them. Don’t worry — and don’t be surprised — when the books they choose are not about fiscal policy or British history. Commit to reading together at some point each day, rather than scheduling the same daily reading time. And use your self-quarantine to, as a family, get hygge with it.

WATCH — Pick a wide range of movies, in a wide range of styles, that are both appropriate for your kids to watch but aren’t necessarily “kid movies” either (AFI’s list of the top 100 films of all time is a good place to start, or this list of 12 documentaries that will inspire kids to change the world). Watch them together, and then talk about them afterwards. Use your child’s natural fascination with all things screen-related to essentially set up an impromptu film course. 

Watch one a day. Make popcorn. Rinse. Repeat.

COOK — Make lots of meals together. Procrastibake. And when cooking, use these ten herbs, which help ward off viruses.

NOTICE — Use the slower, quieter pace of the coming weeks as a chance to deepen your level of attention to everything and everyone around you. As artist Jenny Odell writes in her must-read book, How to Do Nothing, “simple awareness is the seed of responsibility, and patterns of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality for ourselves.” 

The problem, as too many of us know all too well, is that the current way we pay attention is through the toxic filter of commercial social media, which has invaded our our lives so thoroughly that we use it to achieve the brief dopamine-fueled release of virtual likes, while the platforms themselves keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.

So let’s use this disruption of “business as usual” to pay closer attention to the things and people that surround us. “When the pattern of your attention has changed,” Odell explains, “you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world.”

The acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton agrees. “Silence is not the absence of something,” he said. “It is the presence of everything.”

WALK — Bearing the above in mind — and although big crowds are a no-no — fresh air remains the cheapest, most effective and natural form of mood calibration there is. 

Better yet, don’t just walk around the block — take a walk into nature.

This has become a lost art for many of us — but it is especially absent in our children’s lives. “Within the space of a few decades,” writes Richard Louv in his classic book, Last Child in the Woods, “the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment — but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading.”

So let’s use this expanse of time to take nature walks together as often as possible, and let’s try to pay close attention — to what we notice, hear, wonder, and see — as we do.

UNPLUG — Most importantly, do all of the above without your phone in your hand. Don‘t text in the midst of the movie. Don’t take selfies on your walk to let the rest of us know what you’re doing. Don’t live-tweet the juiciest quotes from the book you’re reading. 

Just stand back, pay attention, be together, and see what you notice that your previous pace had prevented you from ever seeing before. “Escaping laterally toward each other,” Odell promises, “we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.”

The (A)morality of Trump’s School Choice Plan

Posted on | by Sam

In his State of the Union address tonight, President Trump will renew a call for tax breaks in order to provide more scholarships for students to attend private schools.

The Education Freedom Scholarships would provide up to $5 billion in federal tax credits to individuals and businesses who donate to scholarships for families to use at private, faith-based schools or to fund homeschooling. “For decades,” Trump explained, “countless children have been trapped in failing government schools. We believe that every parent should have educational freedom for their children.”

To which I say, buyer: beware. 

And: it’s complicated.

As a resident of Washington, D.C., site of one of the country’s most ambitious school voucher plans to date, and a city in which half of the city’s students attend public charter schools, I feel like I’ve seen this movie before. And, for what it’s worth, I even support school choice. I helped launch a charter school here. My sons attend another one, and the city is beginning to see some real collaboration between its charter schools and the district. Good things are happening.

At the same time, I worry about what could happen if too many of us simply assume that the invisible hand of the modern school marketplace – or, worse still, the incentivizing hand of the federal official – is a sufficient strategy for ensuring that all children receive equal access to a high-quality public education.

One sees, for example, the horror stories from Michigan — aka Ms. DeVos’s former laboratory — where four out of five charter schools are run by for-profit entities (read that again). One sees the sizable discrepancy between the expulsion rates of charter and district schools in D.C. and elsewhere. And so one should take seriously the warnings of scholars like Harvard’s Michael Sandel, who urges us to think much more carefully about the role market-based thinking should have – scratch that, does have – in our lives.

“Markets don’t just allocate goods,” Sandel writes in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. “They also express and promote certain attitudes towards the goods being exchanged.” And what has occurred over the past thirty years is that without quite realizing it, we have shifted from having a market economy to being a market society. “The difference is this: A market economy is a tool – a valuable and effective tool – for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.”

Anyone who has closely followed the sturm und drang of American school reform over the past decade has seen evidence of what Sandel is describing. Our  growing reliance on — and resistance to — data-driven decision-making is a direct result of an ascendant technocratic faith in applying scientific rigor to the previously opaque art of teaching and learning. Economist Gary Becker sums up this thinking well when he asserts: “The economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior, be it behavior involving money prices or imputed shadow prices, repeated or infrequent decisions, large or minor decisions, emotional or mechanical ends, rich or poor persons, men or women, adults or children, brilliant or stupid persons, patients or therapists, businessmen or politicians, teachers or students.”

That’s a mouthful, and it captures the sea change Sandel wants us to see. Whereas in the not-too-distant past, economic thinking was restricted to economic topics — inflation, investment, trade — today it is being used to outline a new science of human behavior: one that assumes modern society will work best when human beings are allowed to weigh the costs and benefits of all things (including where to send their children to school), and then choose whatever they believe will yield the greatest personal benefit.

The part of me that agrees with that logic is the part that supports the basic idea of school choice. After all, we have tolerated a system of unequal opportunity in this country for too long, and there’s real merit in the argument that one’s zip code should not become one’s destiny. School choice in cities like mine gives everyone the same chance at a high-quality education, and empowers each family to set its own “shadow prices” – the imaginary values that are implicit in the alternatives we face and the choices we make – and then make their own decisions about where to send their children to school. As the rally cry goes, MY CHILD, MY CHOICE.

Who could argue with that?

Certainly not Texas Senator Ted Cruz, one of the legislative sponsors for the new plan. “Competition improves,” he asserted. “And in this case, injecting new money to give that freedom, to give that competition, to give that power of choice, will enhance the quality of education to kids all across the country.”

But here’s where it gets complicated.

In the end, should we define public education as a public good, or a private commodity? Will our efforts to unleash self-interest (which is, after all, what the economist seeks to economize) strengthen or weaken the connective tissue of our civic life? And will the current trajectory of the school choice movement unleash a virtuous cycle of reforms that improves all schools, or merely add another layer in our historic apartheid system of schooling?

On these questions and others, I agree with former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who, when asked by reporters in 1971 to offer his assessment of the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, said: “It is still too soon to say.” But I also agree with British sociologist Richard Titmuss, who argued that “the ways in which society organizes and structures its social institutions can encourage or discourage the altruistic in man, foster integration or alienation,” and strengthen or “erode the sense of community.”

President Trump’s myriad other amoral tendencies notwithstanding, our changing notion of community should be the central concern of anyone who cares about school choice. How can greater choice bring us closer to each other, and to a revitalized notion of civic virtue and egalitarianism? How can we ensure that school choice does not contribute to an even wider divide between the haves and the have-nots, and an even wider discrepancy between those who know how to negotiate the increasingly commodified assets of modern life, and those who are merely left to take whatever comes their way? And how can school choice reflect this basic truth about democracy – that while it does not require perfect equality, it does require that citizens share in a common life, one that is grounded as much in the “we” as the “me”?

These are the questions we must explicitly ask – and answer – if we want school choice to become a force for good. And we can’t do that without explicitly debating the extent to which market-based thinking can get us there. As Michael Sandel reminds us, “when market reasoning is applied to [an issue like] education, it’s less plausible to assume that everyone’s preferences are equally worthwhile. 

“In morally charged arenas such as these, some ways of valuing goods may be higher, more appropriate than others.”

Nature’s Design Principles: Processes

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Nature’s Design Principles: Processes

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

As far as conundrums go, there aren’t many more complex than the one that was facing South Africa back in 1991.

A year earlier, South African president F.W. de Klerk had ended Nelson Mandela’s twenty-seven year prison sentence; begun legalizing every political party that opposed him; and set out in search of a way to negotiate a peaceful transfer from a racist past to a racially just future. 

To help navigate such a landscape, de Klerk turned to an unlikely guide: Royal Dutch Shell, which for years had used the process of scenario planning — in which a set of carefully constructed, plausible stories are used to demonstrate different ways the future might unfold  — to guide its own internal thinking. 

Could the same process help a deeply divided nation envision its own possible futures, and contribute to creating a new reality in the land of apartheid?

As a member of the core facilitation team, Adam Kahane had his doubts. “Problems are tough because they are complex in three ways,” he says. “They are dynamically complex, which means that cause and effect are far apart in space and time, and so are hard to grasp from firsthand experience. They are generatively complex, which means that they are unfolding in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways. And they are socially complex, which means that the people involved see things very differently, and so the problems become polarized and stuck.”

The problem is that we can’t solve complex problems unless we change the ways we talk and listen. “Our most common way of talking is telling. And our most common way of listening is not listening: listening only to our own talking, not to others. But a complex problem can only be solved peacefully if the people who are part of the problem work together creatively to understand their situation and to improve it.”

And so, over the better part of a year, Kahane and his team worked with a diverse and representative group of twenty-two South Africans. They “breathed in” — observing the world as broadly and carefully as they could, and looking for patterns across what they saw and heard. They “breathed out” — debating with one another what they were noticing, and what it augured. They talked about all the things that might happen, as opposed merely to what they each wanted to see. And then, eventually, they shared these observations with their fellow countrymen and women in the form of four simple stories — one of which, Flight of the Flamingos, imagined a future in which the conditions were created to allow everyone, white and black, to rise slowly and together.

In a pre-Internet age, the team relied on analog means to share the stories, from inserting a 25-page booklet into South Africa’s national newspaper to conducting more than 100 workshops across the country. But because the stories were simple, compelling, and illustrative of the country’s possible paths, they provided a common language for the shared aspirations of a deeply divided people. And, despite its myriad problems since, South Africa’s transition of power was indeed peaceful, hopeful, and galvanizing.

“The way we talk and listen expresses our relationship with the world,” Kahane explained. Consequently, the essence of the scenario process in South Africa was “that a small group of deeply committed leaders, representing a cross-section of a society that the whole world considered irretrievably stuck, had sat down together to talk broadly and profoundly about what was going on and what should be done. More than that, they had not talked about what other people should do to advance some parochial agenda, but what they and their colleagues and their fellow citizens had to do in order to create a better future for everybody. They saw themselves as part of — not apart from — the problem they were trying to solve. They believed they could actively shape their future. And they understood that one reason the future cannot be predicted is that it can be influenced.

“If we want to change the systems we are a part of,” Kahane concluded, “we must first see and change ourselves.”

This, too, is the lesson of the natural world. 

“There is an inherent exuberance and flow to the processes by which living systems continuously recreate and sustain themselves,” explains Stephanie Pace-Marshall, who modeled the Illinois Math & Sciences Academy on the seven principles of living systems. “They are neither linear nor formulaic. Life is simply free to be and become. Processes are both the creative (novelty-generating) and self-regulatory (order-creating) ways our systems explore possibilities, measure and monitor achievement, generate and transmit information, and get their work done. They are the known and observable behaviors, observations and rules by which a system achieves and advances its learning purpose and objectives.”

Margaret Wheatley puts it more succinctly. “Who the organization is (its identity) is inextricably connected to how it is (its processes of learning and change).”

How, then, should we want our living systems to work — and how will we know when they are?

By this point, we hope it has become clear that the work to create a living school must always begin with the three fundamental seeds of growth in a living system: establishing a clear sense of individual and collective identity; facilitating an open exchange of any and all relevant information; and supporting a deep investment in relationships. These conditions are what allow living systems to begin planting seeds of change, through the property of emergence.

To remain vital and alive, however, a living school must also design its own seeds for regeneration: it must notice the patterns that emerge over time; it must implement its own processes for creation; and it must erect its own structures for operation — although not in the way we typically think about such things.

In a living system, for example — as opposed to a traditional hierarchy– structures are the last thing you add, instead of the first. Order, not control, is what marks systemwide health. And the relationship between the processes in a system and the purpose that animates it is so interwoven that, in the words of legendary activist Saul Alinsky, “it is impossible to mark where one leaves off and the other begins, or which is which. Process is really purpose.”

In this sense, the central design challenge of anyone who hopes to build a living school is the same as the one faced by Mother Nature: treating change as an essential source of creativity — not something to be resisted or feared.

“One of the most important roles we can play individually and collectively is to create an opening, or to ‘listen’ to the implicate order unfolding, and then to create dreams, visions, and stories that we sense at our center want to happen,” writes Joseph Jaworski, the man who led Shell’s scenario planning in South Africa. 

That’s what the processes of a living system should be designed to facilitate. 

When they are, as evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris explains, a spirit of interdependence takes root, which is the mark of a mature living system.  “Young immature species are the ones that grab as much territory and resources as they can,” she explains, “multiplying as fast as they can. But the process of negotiations with other species matures them, thus maturing entire ecosystems. Rainforests that have evolved over millions of years are a good example. No species is in charge — the system’s leadership is distributed among all species, all knowing their part in the dance, all cooperating in mutual consistency.”

Indeed, as you’ll see in the stories that follow, adopting processes that are both emergent and egalitarian is what helps form a truly ecological culture.

In the science of slime mold, we see one of Nature’s most remarkable adaptive processes: a single-celled organism and soil-dwelling amoeba that, when food is scarce, literally combines forces with its neighbors to become a multicellular, moving mass.

In the art of Andy Goldsworthy, we see sculptures that are always designed to be ephemeral as a reminder of the inevitability of decay, and the temporariness of all that is truly alive.

In the words of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, we hear an urgent plea for a different set of processes that can guide life on earth and restore a balance between us and our fellow inhabitants.

And in the work of Crosstown High in Memphis, we see what it looks and feels like when that thing we call “school,” and the processes by which we learn, are meant to occur as much outside the building as inside any classroom.

In each instance, what we find is evidence of the creative energy that gets unleashed when process and purpose are aligned. As psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains in his classic book, Flow, “The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness.“ 

And yet, as Paolo Freire pointed out, our work to find the processes that can provide a sense of order — to the world, and in ourselves — is never done. “I think that one of the best ways for us to work as human beings is not only to know that we are uncompleted beings but to assume the incompleteness. 

“We have to become inserted in a permanent process of searching,” Freire writes. “It means that keeping curiosity is absolutely indispensable for us to continue to be or to become.”

Diverse by Design: Episode 4 (Out of Many)

Posted on | by Sam

Fifty years of research suggest that one of the most important things we can do to promote social mobility in America is to give all children a chance to go to socioeconomically and racially integrated schools.

Why, then, are there so few that do?

In the final episode of this four-part series, two of Crosstown High’s students explain in their own words why their school’s diversity may be its most valuable factor — and challenge the rest of us to follow suit.

Nature’s Design Principles: Relationships

Posted on | by Sam

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

Everything you see has its roots

In the unseen world . . .

Why do you weep?

That Source is within you

And this whole world

Is springing up from it.

–Rumi

 

In the beginning, everything was connected.

Along the way, some of us changed our minds.

And now, in the shadow of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, our survival depends on our ability to rediscover the wisdom we have lost.

In the end, it turns out, everything is connected, and at every scale — from the cosmologic to the subatomic.

“Exalted we are,” writes the American biologist E.O. Wilson, “risen to be the mind of the biosphere without a doubt, our spirits uniquely capable of awe and ever more breathtaking leaps of imagination. But we are still part of Earth’s fauna and flora, bound to it by emotion, physiology, and, not least, deep history.”

“There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events,” says novelist Richard Powers. “The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. Forests mend and shape themselves into subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within.”

This sort of deep relational weaving is central to indigenous cultures the world over. As American activist Winona LaDuke points out, “teachings, ancient as the people who have lived on a land for five millennia, speak of a set of relationships to all that is around, predicated on respect, recognition of the interdependency of all beings, an understanding of humans’ absolute need to be reverent and to manage our behavior, and an understanding that this relationship must be affirmed through lifeways and through acknowledgment of the sacred.”

Several hundred years ago, however, a new story began to emerge in Europe — one that was fueled by the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and that would come to shape the later thinking of Descartes, Bacon, and Newton. It was a story that displaced us from the universal center, and urged us to no longer view nature as something to which we were bound, but something to be, in Bacon’s words, “hounded in her wanderings, and bound into service, and made a slave.”

When, in the 17th century, Decartes proclaimed Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I exist”), and Newton developed a mathematical formulation that could provide a consistent mathematical theory of the world (i.e., classical physics), the narrative shift that had begun centuries earlier had finally been completed — away from the notion of an organic, living and spiritual universe, and toward a mechanistic, linear world of separable parts. 

It’s the story that has dominated Western culture ever since.

Recently, however, its foundations have begun to crumble. New discoveries in the fields of quantum mechanics and electromagnetism have necessitated profound changes in concepts of everything from space to time to cause and effect. As Einstein put it: “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundations of physics to this [new type of knowledge have] failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.”

In fact, the natural relationship between parts and wholes confirms what some have been saying all along — that the universe is not a clock; it’s a cloud. “As individuals and societies,” explains Austrian scientist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of nature. Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities.” 

In fact, we are not just embedded in nature, but also to one another. “When you form groups,” writes Iain Couzin, who leads the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior at the University of Konstanz, “you suddenly have a network system where social interactions exist. We have traditionally assumed that intelligence resides in our brains, in the individual animal. But we have found the first evidence that intelligence can also be encoded in the hidden network of communication between us.”

This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature — a lesson that is equally true at the smallest scale.

“In the quantum world,” explains Margaret Wheatley, “relationship is the key determiner of everything.” Subatomic particles come into form and are observed only as they are in relationship to something else. They do not exist as independent entities. These unseen connections between what were previously thought to be separate entities are the fundamental ingredient of all creation.

“In this world, the basic building blocks of life are relationships, not individuals. Nothing exists on its own or has a final, fixed identity. We are all bundles of potential. Relationships evoke these potentials. We change as we meet different people or are in different circumstances.”

This is why the path towards creating a living school requires cultivating the individual and collective self-awareness that comes from understanding identity — who (& why) we are; applying information — what (& why) we notice; and strengthening relationships — how (& why) we connect. “Although each of these three domains has its own dynamism and motion,” explains educator Stephanie Pace-Marshall, “it is their confluence and synergy that create the generative landscape essential for individual and system wholeness, meaning, and connections. Relationships represent the dynamic, self-generating learning network of our systems, and they establish its capacity for collaborative inquiry.”

But what does that really mean in the work we do with one another in our communities, our organizations, and our schools? 

How can we attend more intentionally, and see more clearly, the webwork of ways in which we are all interwoven?

As you’ll see in the stories and examples that follow, a higher level of relational attunement is not just what allows us to build healthier cultures; it’s what allows us to comprehend the full weight of our spiritual role in the cosmos — to be, as Wilson put it, the mind of the biosphere itself.

“A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’” said Einstein, “a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and our feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion  to embrace all living creatures and the whole of Nature in its beauty.”

This is, in part, the gift of the art of Liz Lerman, who helps us see what a truly trans-disciplinary, trans-generational, trans-media approach to storytelling can reveal about who we are and how we connect.

It’s what we learn from the science of honeybees, whose deeply democratic, highly-effective form of life-or-death group decision-making helps demonstrate what a high-functioning collective intelligence can actually engender.

It’s what the work of UCLA psychology professor Dan Siegel makes visible, by providing us with a scientific definition of that most elusive of all human features — the mind — and helping us understand precisely what connects us both internally and externally.

And it’s what we can see and feel throughout the halls of Crosstown High, a public high school in Memphis, Tennessee that has crafted a student body, and a school campus, that are meant to tap the collective wisdom and shared culture of an entire city. 

“Mutuality is the principle of the individual body as well as the law governing the interplay of all bodies. It is the key to understanding reality,” explains biologist Andreas Weber. “To understand ourselves, we have to recognize ourselves in other living creatures. To be mirrored is a central element in the formation of human identity.”

Virginia Woolf put it another way. “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern. The whole world is a work of art . . . Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God.

“We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

The Art of Liz Lerman

Posted on | by Sam

Imagine, for a moment, a long, upright line that runs from top to bottom. 

At the top is art so separate from its culture that its greatness is measured by its uselessness.

At the bottom is art so quotidian that no one even thinks to call it art.

This, Liz Lerman explains, is the hierarchy of ideas under which almost all of us labor. 

And it is a false divide.

“Now imagine turning that line sideways to lay it horizontal,” she offers. “That way each of these poles exerts an equal pull and has an equal weight. If we are lucky enough, we can actually take the long highway between the sometimes opposing forces, discovering impulses that can feed our artistic impulses along the way.”

This is what it means to, as Lerman, says, “hike the horizontal.” And this is the journey she has been curating for all of us for the past five decades  — a journey that is designed to blur the lines between artist and citizen, artist and scientist, and artist and audience. 

Lerman’s career began as a young girl in constant motion — “up giant slides before my parents could stop me, racing into the flooded backyard to jump through the water, and begging for dance classes which I was finally allowed to begin when my family left California for Washington, DC, in the early 1950s.”

It continued through her teenage years, dancing in a ballet performance for President Kennedy, appearing in Life Magazine, and witnessing the tension between making art and living in a world that was alight with the civic friction of the civil rights movement. 

“What I realized,” she says, “is that dance is a birthright, and birthrights are easily stolen. It is the human connection to the body, and the body’s connection to the mind, that provides a ladder, a safety net, or a trampoline, enabling people to experience the spiritual. People use their bodies to learn their history. And so to make change at all, you first have to notice what is going on around you or inside you.”

This epiphany led Lerman to found The Dance Exchange in 1976, and to organize its work around four essential questions:

Who gets to dance? What is the dance about? Where is it happening? And why does it matter?

In partnership with her colleagues, Lerman choreographed and performed dances that were deeply grounded in both community issues and the communities themselves. The Dance Exchange performed in concert halls, but also community centers, children’s hospitals, and retirement homes.

“I wanted to document ways of seeing and being that have the power to change the environments we live and work in,” she explained, “and the encounters that we have with each other. I hunted for ways to maintain my commitment to the excellence of the concert world in a balance with the dynamic, meaningful, and equally challenging world of communities.”

Early in her career, this sentiment led her to make what was at the time a radical choice — a dance of performers both young and old. “I began to question accepted notions of who and what was beautiful,” she recalled. “It was then that I began to see that from an artistic point of view, we could change people’s lives, and from a community point of view, we could change how people interacted.

“The older people made it so easy to extend oneself, converse with strangers, and be big about it all. Older bodies make for great storytelling, beautiful movement, and a curious form of courage.”

What surprised Lerman the most, however, was the impact of the relationship between her oldest and youngest dancers. “I decided that they were dancing so well because they were so loved. The dance environment in which most of these students had grown up was harshly judgmental. It was a liberating experience that offered such unreserved appreciation for their dancing and admiration for their bodies.”

This formula is one Lerman has revisited throughout her career, one that eventually led her into a creative alliance with scientists, and multimedia performances about subjects ranging from atomic energy to the trauma of war to the double helix. “It’s by now well established that science and art have a lot in common,” she says, “as well as much to teach each other. Artists and scientists have a keen understanding that not knowing is fuel for the imagination rather than fuel for humiliation. There is nothing to hide.

“I think we are at our most successful when we make it possible for people to undergo a fresh understanding of their surroundings, of an idea, or of their own relationship to artistic experience. We look at a body and we see the person, the shape, the line, the personality. If we know the person or we know how to look deeper, we see their history as well. The same happens to us in a building or a park or our homes. We see the place, the shape, the line, the personality. If we look deeper, we can perceive their history too. When we allow ourselves to witness and respond to both things at once, we can learn much about ourselves, about the spaces and places around us.

“The opening and closing curtains bracket a moment in time; they are a pair of parentheses within the long, ongoing project of making sense of the world. The theater calls our attention, brings us together, makes us focus, asks us questions, makes us wonder, and then releases us out again into the chaos.

We each belong to many domains, and although we may live in one, we have a history, need, and empathy for others. We are dwellers in the transdomain.”

 

Nature’s Design Principles: Information

Posted on | by Sam

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

Amidst the deluge of daily life, what deserves our attention?

This is, relatively speaking, a new question for us to consider. 

Until recently, homo sapiens were an incremental species. Our ancestors only learned to read 200 generations ago. The first universities are just 1,000 years old. We didn’t even develop a germ theory of disease until the late 19th century. 

Before, in other words, it took many generations for big changes to occur. 

Now, however, we are experiencing multiple, massive shifts to the structure and flow of human life in a single generation. Whereas it took decades for the telephone to reach half of all U.S. households, it took just five years for cell phones to do the same.  And although it seemed laughable in 1965 when Intel’s Gordan Moore predicted that every other year we’d double the number of transistors that could fit onto a single chip of silicon, “Moore’s Law” has become the most enduring technological prediction of our time; indeed, today’s computer chips offer 4,000 times more performance than they did fifty years ago, are nearly 100,000 times more energy efficient, and cost about 60,000 times less to produce.

As a result, the Industrial Age has begun to give way to the Information Age, reshaping our timeworn frames for what is worth knowing — and who gets to decide.

Whereas in the past, we collected the world’s knowledge in an encyclopedia, in the present, we co-construct it via a Wikipedia.

What will we do in the future? And how can we survive the deluge of information in our modern, networked world without feeling as though we are drowning in, well, TMI? 

As always, the most valuable lessons for our human systems are to be found in the natural world, with its several billion years’ worth of trial and error. 

As you read in chapter one, a paradox of living systems is that each organism maintains a clear sense of its individual identity within a larger network of relationships that help shape that identity. But whereas establishing a clear sense of “who’s there” is the building block of any living system, the determinant of whether that system can evolve and adapt is its relationship to the very thing that is overwhelming us in our hectic modern lives.

This insight is counter-intuitive. Yet nature reveals that anything that disturbs a living system is also what helps it self-organize into a new form of order.

Growth comes from disequilibrium, not balance. 

And information is not power; it’s nourishment — but only when/if the information that is absorbed is the kind that is most meaningful and relevant to the system that absorbs it.

In scientific terms, this is known as a dissipative structure, a system that gives up its previous form in order to recreate itself into something new. And in practical terms, this is not how we have designed our schools, our organizations, or our civic structures — which are not only not “living” in any meaningful way, but are also likely to treat information as something to be guarded, repressed, or preferenced. 

“We suffer from a fundamental misperception of information,” says organizational theorist Margaret Wheatley. “We have treated it as a thing, as a physical entity, which has kept us from contemplating its other dimensions — the content, character, and behavior of information. We expect information to be controllable, stable, and obedient. We expect to be able to manage it. In the new science, however, information is a dynamic, changing element. Without information, life cannot give birth to anything new. Information is what allows for the emergence of a new order.”

Although our relationship to information has always shifted with each new innovation — from the alphabet to the printing press to the smartphone — the new order emerging around us has, in fact, been predicted for generations. 

In 1937, H.G. Wells envisioned a “sort of cerebrum for humanity, a cerebral cortex which will constitute a memory and a perception of current reality for the whole human race.” Generations later, Marshall McLuhan picked up the thread to suggest that Wells’ cerebrum had, in 1967, finally arrived. “Today,” he wrote, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.”

Today, of course, the global brain and body Wells and McLuhan anticipated is fully upon us — for better and for worse. What should we do with the daily flood of bits and bytes it is producing — and how should it impact the ways we think about preparing our children to build a better world?

As you’ll see in the stories that follow, the first step is to ask, amidst the deluge, “What’s meaningful” — and to follow one another’s answers wherever they may take us.

If an organization wishes to become more alive and adaptive, it must open itself to information the way a living system does. “Only information that truly challenges or illuminates our understanding or interpretation of our learning identity has the greatest potential to provoke meaningful changes in our thinking and behavior,” Wheatley explains. “We learn because the information matters. And it matters because it has personal significance to who we are now and who we wish to become. This is true for us as individuals. And it is true for our systems.”

“For so long,” she continues, “we’ve been engaged in smoothing things over, rounding things off, keeping the lid on (the metaphors are numerous), that our organizations are literally dying for information they could feed on, information that was different, disconfirming, and filled with enough newness to disturb our system into wise solutions. We need to have information coursing through our systems, disturbing the peace, imbuing everything it touches with the possibility of new life. We need, therefore, to develop new approaches to information — not management but encouragement, not control but genesis. How do we create more of this wonderful life source?”

This, then, is the work: To pay close attention to whatever helps shape, and reshape, our individual and collective sense of identity. To follow the meaning. And to know that in a living system, change is the only constant.

It’s what undergirds the science of feedback loops, which allow living organisms to maintain a sense of equilibrium.

It’s what prompted the Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar Zuabi to produce a one-person play that tells the story of Syrian refugees not in a single theater — but in myriad cramped kitchens across an entire metropolitan area.

And it’s what drives the adult educators of Reggio Emilia to model in their daily interactions with children a form of deep listening and emergent research that has yielded the finest (and most equitable) nursery schools in the world.

In the end, it may even result in a radically different conception of what we have up to now called school. “As the sheer volume of information increases,” write scholars Jal Mehta, Robert Schwartz, and Frederick Hess, “the portal associated with formal schooling begins to look increasingly restrictive and, in a world of direct access to information, increasingly dysfunctional. What qualifies as ‘official knowledge’ looks old fashioned in an age when there are many possible portals for access to information and many possible ways to attach meaning to that information through the process of learning. 

“Schools may not disappear entirely,” they suggest provocatively, “but they will no longer be able to claim a monopoly on what is worth knowing and how to know it.” 

To which one can only say: perhaps — but only if we can build the discipline, and find the space, to cut through the noise of our modern lives and focus solely on that which will help us build a better world, by design. 

Amidst the noise, we must find the signal. 

“Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility,” writes the author James Gleick in his book The Information.  “Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.”

The Art of “Oh, My Sweet Land”

Posted on | by Sam

For as long as we’ve walked the earth, we’ve made sense of the world through stories. And for thousands of years, the theater has been our most enduring place to share them — a darkened space in which we are invited to imagine alternate worlds, and have our senses activated through the magic of language, lighting, and set design.

It has not been the place we go to experience the sting of freshly chopped onions, or to hear the crackling sizzle of a heated pan. 

But a new play, and a new frame for thinking about how and where our dramatic stories can unfold, is changing all that — and making the theater a space in which all our senses can be brought to life in the service of generating a deeper connection to the stories we tell.

The one-woman play, Oh My Sweet Land, is the work of Amir Nizar Zuabi, an award-winning Palestinian playwright; and Corinne Jaber, a German-Syrian actress. It’s based on interviews with Syrian refugees in Jordan, and what unfolds over its 90 minutes is a visceral, personal look at the Syrian refugee crisis — and the brutal war that led up to it. 

The setting is simple and straight-forward: a woman of mixed Syrian-German parentage recalls her encounter with Ashraf, a Syrian man in Paris who charms her and then disappears, prompting the woman to set out in search of him — a journey that leads her to intersect with some of the millions of Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. 

In this production, however, the nameless woman is not speaking to us from a stage, but from someone’s private kitchen, a place in which only 20 or so people can fit — and a setting the production team only has access to about an hour before the show starts. And while she’s speaking she’s not blocking out rigid stage directions, but preparing kibbeh, a Syrian delicacy. “Since I came back, I make kibbeh again and again,” she says as the show begins, “as if I want to close a hole in my soul with these little pockets of warmth.”

Because of the setting, audience members are likely to be affected by more than just the language. “This man’s imprisonment matters so much more than a pan of onions,” wrote theater critic Alexis Soloski when the play was staged in New York City. “But you are sitting in a cream-colored Brooklyn kitchen and the stove is a lot closer to you than Syria. So it’s the onions that really trouble you. Because surely the steam has turned to smoke. Surely they are burning.”

For Zuabi, that fuller engagement of the senses is part of the point. “Where I come from, hospitality, feeding you, is a core value,” he said. “For me it was a no-brainer that the play needs to do with food and the sensuality of food, because it’s about a culture that’s under attack—not just about the horrors of Syria, but about celebrating what this culture is.” 

The intimacy of the setting adds another factor. “The way that this play has been written — it’s poetic, it’s personal, it’s intimate, it’s very vulnerable,” says Torange Yeghiazarian, who directed the play for its San Francisco run. “The storyteller opens herself up and shares intimate details that I hope will entice the audience to also open up and make themselves vulnerable. That’s why we’re having post-play conversations and sharing food. I feel like as a society we’re hungry for that kind of intimate and vulnerable conversation.”

Consequently, Oh, My Sweet Land and efforts like it are reframing the nexus between art and everyday life, in ways that can open us up to a broader emotional experience. “You might feel like a bit of a monster,” Soloski continues, “for fretting about those onions while Ms. Malouf describes people who have suffered torture and worse. Yet this is what makes Mr. Zuabi’s play so devastating. Because yes, it’s about kibbe and sex and stressful journeys across borders. But as you sit crammed together in that pleasant little kitchen, the play is also about our incomplete ability to wrap our heads around a war being fought half a world away, about our finite capacity for empathy. 

“Decent people can’t look away from what is happening,” the nameless woman tells herself. But people can and people do, like the woman who will soon look away from us as she removes the kibbe from boiling oil. So we go on — cooking, cleaning, watching plays — and we put slaughter out of our minds. What else can we do?”

Nature’s Design Principles: Identity

Posted on | by Sam

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

More than four hundred years after it was written, people around the world are still reading, performing, and wondering about Hamlet. 

Why?

The simple answer is because it’s the world’s most famous playwright’s most famous play. But the complex answer is because the title character and we, no matter our culture or our age, are kindred spirits. 

Like every young person everywhere ever, Hamlet has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist and a dreamer — a person more comfortable in the world of ideas than the world of actions. And he is in love.

But Hamlet is also the future king of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder — a duty that leads to his own untimely death in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read Hamlet is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his own sense of self and accepting the role society has assigned him to play. And so Hamlet’s struggle illuminates a central question we all must wrestle with — a question not coincidentally posed by the first two words in the play:  

“Who’s there?”

This is a new question for us, homo sapiens sapiens — the being who knows, and who knows he knows. That’s because for the great majority of our time on this planet, human beings have viewed the world almost entirely through the prism of “we,” not “me.” 

As foragers, we lived in unquestioning obedience to the unknowable marvels of the natural world. And in the earliest civilizations, we lived to serve the needs of our Gods in Heaven – and then, later on, their hand-chosen emissaries on Earth.

In these long chapters of the human story – which make up more than 93% of our history as a species – our ancestors were most likely to find comfort, and a sense of identity, through their ability to fit usefully and invisibly into a larger community.

To stand out from the crowd was undesirable, since, in reality, doing so could mean ostracism or death. 

To walk in someone else’s shoes was unnecessary, since, in effect, everyone wore the same shoes.

And to wonder about the world was to focus one’s gaze outward, or upward.

Over time, however, the human gaze has shifted. 

Beginning with the rise of the great religions, continuing through the citizen revolutions in France and the Americas, coursing through all of Shakespeare’s plays, and running right up to and through the age of social media and the Selfie Stick, we humans have begun to increasingly look inward – for better and for worse.

At the same time, a wave of new discoveries in fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology have taught us that our need to understand “who’s there” is more than just an exercise in navel-gazing; it is the way we deepen our empathic capacity to connect with our fellow creatures.

“We are learning,” says the social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, “against all of the prevailing wisdom, that human nature is not to seek autonomy — to become an island to oneself — but, rather, to seek companionship, affection, and intimacy. The conventional belief that equates self-development and self-consciousness with increasing autonomy has begun to lose its intellectual cachet. A growing number of child development psychologists now argue the contrary — that a sense of selfhood and self-awareness depends on and feeds off of deepening relationships to other people. Empathy, in turn, is the means by which companionate bonds are formed.”

“The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship,” explains psychiatrist Dan Siegel. “What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

As far as words go, empathy is a new one – it didn’t even appear until the early 20th century. It comes from the English translation of the German word einfühlung, which was used to describe the relationship between a work of art and its subject; it was later expanded to include interactions between people.

Those interactions, according to Rifkin, are what give rise to a deeper human capacity for making sense of the world. “Empathic consciousness starts with awe,” he contends. “When we empathize with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us to all other living beings.

“It is awe that inspires all human imagination. Without awe, we would be without wonder and without wonder we would have no way to exercise imagination and would therefore be unable to imagine another’s life ‘as if’ it were our own.”

In other words, we have slowly flipped the paradigm of human understanding: 

It’s not the world that makes us wonder; it’s our wondering that makes the world. 

Or, as the Chilean biologist-philosophers Francesco Varela and Humberto Muturana put it, “the world everyone sees is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others.”

This epiphany is changing more than just our understanding of the brain. In recent years, scientists in fields ranging from biology to ecology have revised the very metaphors they use to describe their work – from hierarchies to networks – and begun to affirm, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Going a step further, scholars like Siegel have even suggested that the very thing at the center of our most personal sense of self — the mind — may not be as distinct as we’d thought. “Mind emerges as much in relationships as it does from physiological, embodied processes including brain activity,” he explains. 

“Relationships are the crucible in which our lives unfold as they shape our life story, molding our identity and giving birth to the experience of who we are, and liberating — or constraining — who we can become. . . If we consider that our minds are a part of an interacting, interconnected system that involves our bodies and our brains, as well as the environment in which we live, including our social relationships, we may be able to reconcile how the mind is part of one system that seems to be in two places at once.”

That isn’t just flowery prose; it’s how living systems operate in the natural world — by existing and creatively organizing within and between a boundary of self. Although this boundary is semipermeable and ensures the system is open to the continuous flow of matter and energy from the environment, the boundary itself is structurally closed. 

A cell wall is a good example. It’s the boundary that establishes its system’s identity, distinguishes it from and connects it to its environment, and determines what enters and leaves the system. But because this meaning of “boundary” is as much about what it lets in as what it keeps out, the end result of this arrangement, according to the German biologist Andreas Weber, is a notion of self in which “every subject is not sovereign but rather an intersubject — a self-creating pattern in an unfathomable meshwork of longings, repulsions, and dependencies.” 

The Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Francisco Varela agrees. “Life is a process of creating an identity,” he says. Every organism is “a meshwork of selfless selves.” And these principles of life are universally applicable.

What’s true for the microorganism, in other words, is just as true true for the megalopolis.

But what does that really mean in the daily whir of our personal and professional lives? And how do we intentionally build our empathetic muscles in the service of building a living, thriving school? 

As you’ll see in the stories and examples that follow, our work begins with a commitment to hold the space, and make the time, to allow all members of a learning community — from the youngest to the oldest — to understand that each person’s sense of an individual self emerges, as Siegel puts it, from not only our inner life, but our “inter-life” as well.

The science of the human brain — particularly its bi-hemispheric structure — has allowed us to integrate two very different ways of making sense of the world, and our place in it. 

The art of the American writer James Baldwin is a direct challenge to the myths that have shaped our shared sense of what it means to be an American. 

The insights of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn offer a window into the ways our understanding of the mind shape our capacity for well-being. 

And the genius of the June Jordan School for Equity, a public school in San Francisco, is in its ability to foster a strong sense of collective identity that can provide clearer support to each student’s more precarious individual search for who they are, and what they value.

In the past, says Weber, “with our craving to build a new and better world we have thoughtlessly given up that one crucial sphere to which we are linked by the umbilical cord of life. We have attempted to sneak away from our Siamese connection with all other human beings. We have tried to escape from ourselves.”

In truth, we need to be many to become one — and one to become many.