Tag: Democracy

Spark Series: Jenny Finn

Posted on | by Sam

What does it mean — and require — to be free?

This is the question of American history — and we are, to put it mildly, horrible at answering it. 

As The Guardian put it last week, “the problem isn’t that American democracy is about to be overthrown; it’s that America isn’t much of a democracy to begin with.“

For that reason, tonight’s Spark Series event with Jenny Finn is a MUST.

In 2014, in the hills of rural Appalachia, Jenny founded Springhouse School, an intergenerational learning community “with life at its center.” 

As she puts it, “we are actively reimagining education and believe learning is a lifelong journey that should be centered around vitality, meaning, and cultivating wholeness to better serve the world’s emerging needs.”

Put another way: Springhouse is a community that understands what it means — and requires — to be free. ??

“If you feel unprepared from the inside out and are wondering what your gift is,” says Jenny, “we have a program that can help you get to know yourself more deeply.”

So join us tonight, January 12th, at 8pm EST via the usual link, so we can craft a better way forward, together.

This is how we #changethestory . . .

White People: This Is On Us

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on White People: This Is On Us

Four years ago, on the eve of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I made the dispiriting prediction that, regardless of who won (and, at the time, the notion that Donald Trump would win seemed inconceivable to most of us), America was witnessing the birth of a new civic (dis)order.

Four years later, in the shadow of another election, our world is both radically different — and dispiritingly similar. So it’s notable that the storyline of HBO’s dystopian, overwrought, and prescient 22nd-century series, Westworld, once again provides an edifying parallel to the real-life drama of 21st-century American public life.

If you haven’t watched it, Westworld is a show about a question at the heart of American identity: What does it mean to be free? — albeit in the context of watching what happens to our great-great grandchildren when their robot playthings become hip to the game and decide to exact some revenge.

In 2016, the show’s first season took place exclusively in an amusement park in which people paid obscene sums to act out obscene fantasies with humanoid robots whose memories would be wiped clean after each new day in an endless loop of unconscious servitude. But in 2020’s season three, Westworld (like our own) is in freefall. It turns out the owners of the park were secretly mining the data of their visitors in order to advance their own Orwellian notion of a more predictable social order. Meanwhile, a few robots have slipped the yoke, only to discover an outside world eerily similar to the one they’d just fled. As one character puts it, “They built the world to be a game — and then rigged it to make sure they always won.”

Which brings us to our own real-world dystopia — one in which Trumpian notions of “liberation” are merely a symptom of a much deeper malaise, and the Orwellian overlay is as relevant as ever, albeit in an even more chilling way than the worlds depicted in 1984 or on HBO.

That’s because, unlike the robots in Westworld or the proles in Oceania, we are not color-blind, but color-bound. And while this has always been true — the Peculiar Institution, after all, is America’s Original Sin — the Coronavirus pandemic has laid its enduring legacy even more nakedly at our feet. 

As The Atlantic‘s George Packer puts it, the virus has exposed America’s underlying conditions in ways that reveal us to be, in effect, a failed state: “in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; and around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.”

Here, too, the parallels between Real World and Westworld are instructive. 

”How did you get here?” multiple characters are asked throughout the series. “Start at the beginning.”

If we take that question and apply it to ourselves, there’s only one American intersection where all roads converge — from the unmasking of our runaway wealth inequality to the bands of masked protesters demanding the country re-open so they can get a tattoo or eat a cheeseburger:

In this land — our land — freedom is whiteness (just ask Amy Cooper).  And until that changes, we will remain trapped in our own endless loop of social, moral and spiritual decay.

As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie explains, citing the 1993 work of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness” has always been the defining characteristic of free human beings in America. To be white, therefore, is to have control over oneself and one’s labor, and to be subject to no one’s will but one’s own. And that tie between whiteness and freedom has only strengthened over the years — from Westward Expansion to Chinese Exclusion, or from Emmitt Till to Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.

“The great irony,” Bouie writes, “is that this conception of freedom, situated within racial hierarchy and meant to justify deprivation and inequality, has always been impoverished when compared with an expansive, inclusive vision of what it means to be free. And in the particular context of a deadly pandemic, the demand to be free of mutual obligation is, in essence, a demand to be free to die and threaten those around you with illness and death. Most Americans, including most white Americans, have rejected this freedom of the grave. But among the ones who haven’t are the people leading our government, which means that this ‘freedom’ remains a powerful — and dangerous — force to be reckoned with.”

Where to, then, from here?

In Westworld, the path forward leads to the most predictable, stereotypical end-goal of “revolution” — burn the motherfucker to the ground. 

But Westworld’s characters also deliver lines that could be seen as beacons for our own desperately-required awakening. There are rare moments in life, one of them explains, “when randomness interacts with your life to create a truly free space where you can make a choice — a bubble of agency.”

This pandemic, and all it has laid bare, is our bubble. Yet as I wrote four years ago, the actions required of us include, and are not limited to, the next presidential election. And for those of us who are “white,” the reality is that the bulk of this work is ours to do — not because of some modern-day Kipling-esque fantasy about white exceptionalism, but because to unwind such deeply entrenched notions of privilege, the people who receive the benefits must be the main ones to demand that the system(s) be unwound. 

To do so, however, as my friend Susan Glisson has wisely written, we must give ourselves the breathing room to question whiteness and its power over this nation. As Orwell himself once wrote, “the moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”

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.”

The Science of Honeybee Democracy

Posted on | by Sam

There may be no creature on earth more vital to our own well-being than the honeybee — the primary pollinator for fifty different fruit and vegetable crops that make up the most nutritious portion of our daily diet.

Less debatable, however, is whether this same bee is also the ideal model for our ongoing efforts to craft a more perfect union — or at least Shakespeare thought so, when he described honeybees as the “creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”  

But why? And how?

According to the American biologist Thomas Seeley, it’s because of the ways honeybees relate to one another — clearly, constructively, and collaboratively. “The process of evolution operating over millions of years,” he explains, “has shaped the behavior of bees so that they coalesce into a single collective intelligence. Just as a human body functions as a single integrated unit even though it is a multitude of cells, the superorganism of a honeybee colony operates as a single coherent whole even though it is a multitude of bees.”

Although there are many examples of this in honeybee behavior, the most illustrative occurs every year in late spring and early summer, when a beehive is most likely to get overpopulated. When this occurs, roughly one-third of the hive’s bees promptly elect to stay and rear a new queen — who will ultimately be chosen, no holds barred, from the current queen’s few surviving daughters — while the remaining two-thirds politely accept their eviction notices and leave with the old queen to set out into the great unknown and create a new colony.

When they depart, as many as 10,000 honeybees can form a swarm cloud as large as 60 feet across. Yet within minutes, the bees will quickly reassemble somewhere into a beard-shaped cluster, and then hang that way for the next several hours or days, awaiting word, while several hundred of the swarm’s oldest citizens spring into action as nest-site scouts and begin exploring a swath of the surrounding countryside — as large as 30 square miles — for a suitable new home. 

This is, to be clear, a life or death decision. 

To survive in winter, a hive must be able to contract itself into a tight, well-insulated cluster — about the size of a basketball. They must find a home that is high enough to avoid detection by hungry predators. And they must have space for the copious amounts of provisions — i.e., honey, as much as 44 pounds of it — that will have to sustain them until Spring. 

Despite these stakes, the swarm will make this decision within hours, and from as many as 30 different possible nest sites.  And they will do all of this democratically, without any central leader. Indeed, despite her name, the Queen Bee is not the boss of anyone, and a honeybee hive is governed collectively — a harmonious society of hexagonal cells wherein thousands of worker bees, “through enlightened self-interest, cooperate to serve a colony’s common good.” 

In a swarm, this happens when the nest scouts all set out in different directions in search of the perfect new home. When they think they’ve found one, they return to the group and offer a sort of “waggle dance,” a series of movements that outline the central characteristics of the proposed site, and invite other bees who agree on its merits to join them in waggle-dancing.

This continues as more and more scouts return, and gradually, a face-to-face, consensus-seeking assembly takes place in which an eventual winner is democratically determined. “One way to think of a honeybee colony, then, is as a society of many thousands of individuals,” Seeley explains. “But to understand the distinctive biology of this species of bee, it is often helpful to think of a colony in a slightly different way, not just as thousands of separate bees but also as a single living entity that functions as a unified whole.”

In that sense, the collective decision making of a bee swarm resembles an archetypal New England town meeting, one in which each decision reflects the freely given contributions of several hundred individuals; is informed by multiple sources simultaneously, even ones that are widely scattered; and is made by staging an open competition among the proposed alternatives. “In this way, Seeley continues, “the roughly three pounds of bees in a swarm, just like the three pounds of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective decisions.”

(Y)our move, homo sapiens . . .

What White People Need to Understand

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on What White People Need to Understand

Last night, I listened to David Remnick’s New Yorker podcast interview with James Comey to hear what he had to say about our 45th President, but what disturbed me more was what he had to say (at ~13:30) about the phrase “mass incarceration.”

“It connotes an intentionality,” Comey explained, “but there’s nothing mass about it. Everybody was charged individually, represented individually, and everybody appeared in front of a judge. I think you can talk about those systemic problems without making it sound like there was an intentionality where law enforcement decided it was going to round up huge numbers of black men.”

Riiiiiiiiiiight. . .

Then, this morning, another white man on the radio made me cringe. This time, it was National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, who was on NPR to talk with Steve Inskeep about a new book, but who ended up talking (at ~3:30) about the recent incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks in which two Black men were arrested for, well, being Black at a Starbucks.

“If it’s bad to reduce two black guys in a Starbucks to members of a category I distrust — it’s also bad to say that I’m responsible for the stupid mistake of a Starbucks manager in Philadelphia,” Goldberg opined. “Identity politics reduces people’s lived identity to these thin abstractions.”

“And you don’t like being blamed for that as a White person?” Inskeep asked.

“I don’t like thinking of myself as a White person,” Goldberg countered.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiight . . .

Thank God, then, for the Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt (also White), who wrote a piece in today’s paper that underscores what both Comey and Goldberg — and millions of other White Americans across the country — are unwilling or unable to see.

Hiatt’s column was an informal review of the new Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which opens later this week, and which features a stirring, disturbing outdoor memorial to the thousands of African Americans who were lynched in American towns and cities (both North and South).

The museum and memorial, Hiatt suggests, offer “an alternative, and overwhelmingly coherent, arc of the history of white supremacy” — a history that runs from the advent of slavery right up to and through the arrest of those two men at Starbucks. Until we as a country can confront the full weight of that history, says the Museum’s founder, Bryan Stevenson, we will never be able to transcend it.

In fact, in Stevenson’s view, the modern legacy of white supremacy is best seen in the inequities of our criminal-justice system. “Blacks were — and are — more likely to be suspended from school, denied parole and when freed from prison denied benefits, kept out of public housing, blocked from employment or professional licenses and, once again, prevented from voting,” Hiatt writes.

Are you listening, Mr. Comey?

Plainly, the color of one’s skin is still an arrestable offense in America, as we saw in Philly last week. So while it’s nice that Jonah Goldberg doesn’t want to be thought of as White, the reality is that we all inhabit a world that was built on these foundations, and in which those “thin abstractions” are all too real for too many of us. As Henry Louis Gates famously said, “I know race is an abstraction, but I still can’t catch a cab in New York City.”

In short, there are forces at play that benefit white people (#whiteprivilege), and forces that place black people at risk, and there always have been.  “There was this hope that this race stuff would just evaporate over time,” explains Stevenson, “but it doesn’t work like that. It is a serious disease, and if we don’t treat it, it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t go away.

“We’re not doomed by this history. We’re not even defined by it. But we do have to face it.”

Donald Trump, Westworld, & the Future of American Democracy

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Donald Trump, Westworld, & the Future of American Democracy

Is the 2016 presidential election the beginning, or the end, of American civic life?

I say it’s both.

Pessimistically, one can say we are witnessing the end of civility, honesty, and empathy, and the beginning of the end of our two-centuries-long experiment in a quasi-functional representative democracy. Yet I believe what this election must provide, no matter who wins on Tuesday, is a wakeup call from our collective somnambulism, and a willingness to confront the Brave New World we have already begun to enter – a world in which we can disappear into virtual realities of our own imagining, and therefore one in which our ability to be more conscious (of ourselves, our surroundings, and the invisible systems that hold us prisoner) must become the lingua franca of a renewed civic order.

Fittingly, the stakes are laid bare in HBO’s latest blockbuster series, Westworld, a story in which future citizens spend up to $40,000 a day exercising their most base impulses – sexual violence and murder chief among them – in a vast adventure theme park filled with blissfully unaware android “hosts.” These hosts are pre-programmed with narrative storylines. Their memories are then wiped clean after each new day of rape and pillage, resulting in an endless loop of unconscious servitude.

As the show’s co-creator Jonathan Nolan puts it, Westworld is an effort to explore issues surrounding artificial intelligence and “the idea that humans are getting ever better at immersing themselves in their narrative fictions.” Consequently, it’s a story that poses timely and provocative questions about the depths to which we humans will sink when the line between fiction and reality becomes almost impossibly blurred. As one of the hosts says, foreshadowing her own conscious awakening from the nightmare she inhabits (and quoting Shakespeare as she does so), “These violent delights have violent ends.”

On one level, the election results on November 8 will reveal how violent the end to our most recent binge of primal theater will be. On another level, though, we have been asleep at the wheel for a long, long time.

Indeed, Trump’s rise recalls the warnings in Erich Fromm’s 1941 classic Escape from Freedom, a book that was written in the shadow of Hitler’s ascent to power, and in which Fromm tries to articulate our dialectical relationship with freedom itself, and what that relationship tells us about ourselves and the societies in which we live.

Fromm’s thesis was that before we can understand the dynamics of any society’s social processes, we must first explore the dynamics of the psychological processes operating within the individual. Central to all modern societies and individuals, Fromm wrote, was man’s relationship with freedom itself, which he defined as “the fundamental condition for any growth.” Since the structure of modern society and the personality of modern man first began taking shape – beginning with the end of the rigid social structures and limitations found in the Middle Ages, and accelerating after World War One – we have become freer to develop and express our own individual selves and ideas. At the same time, however, we have become freer from a world that gave us, precisely because it was proscribed, more security and reassurance. “The process of individuation is one of growing strength and integration of the individual personality,” Fromm wrote. “But it is at the same time a process in which the original identity with others is lost and in which modern man becomes more separate from them.”

The dilemma of modern society and how it impacts us is the same: it has given us more space to develop as individuals – and it has made us more helpless. “It increased freedom,” says Fromm, “and it created dependencies of a new kind. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other.”

The danger, Fromm cautioned, is if we forget that “aloneness, fear and bewilderment remain; people cannot stand it forever. They cannot go on bearing the burden of ‘freedom from’; they must try to escape from freedom altogether unless they can progress from negative to positive freedom. The principal social avenues of escape in our time are submission to a leader, as has happened in fascist countries, and the compulsive conforming as is prevalent in our own society.”

Sound familiar?

Because of this anxiety – and this willingness to submit to someone who will do the thinking for us – Fromm believed that our capacity to think critically had dangerously dulled over time (and that was in 1941!). Ironically, however, this gradual numbing of our critical capacities doesn’t mean we feel more uninformed. On the contrary, the constant barrage of messaging so indicative of modern society tends to be designed in such a way as to “flatter the individual by making him appear important, and by pretending that they appeal to his critical judgment, to his sense of discrimination. But these pretenses are essentially a method to dull the individual’s suspicions and to help him fool himself as to the individual character of his decision.”

How will Fromm’s observations play out in a Trump presidency, where the ersatz becomes the law of the land? How will they play out in a Clinton presidency, where the fog of secrecy becomes the daily forecast? And how will they play out in either case, as the virtual world increasingly becomes part of the daily menu of possibilities?

British filmmaker Adam Curtis has an idea, and it isn’t encouraging. As author Jonathan Lethem wrote in a recent must-read profile of Curtis, “One of his central subjects, running through all his work, is the possibility that we’re listening to the wrong voices in public life, and in our own heads; that the ideas we find authoritative and persuasive about our politics and culture are in fact a tenuous construction, one at the mercy of bias, invisible ideological sway and unprocessed, untethered emotions (principally, fear).”

“This is the whole thing about ‘good and evil’,” Curtis explains. “It’s a naïve view of the world. The problem is bigger, it’s a system. But how do you illustrate something invisible?”

For Curtis, the problem is that the central ideology of our age is the lionization of the self – the philosophy of ‘freedom to,’ run amok. “That the self, being expressive, is the good thing. Expressing yourself through consumerism is central. So, the dilemma for artists is that however radical in content their paintings, their performance art, their video works, the mode in which they’re doing it — self-expression — feeds the strength of the very thing they’re trying to overthrow, which is modern consumer capitalism.”

That’s deep. It’s also terrifying. So how do we separate ourselves? How do we develop the capacity to live lives of positive freedom amidst the filtered bubble of our own devising? How do we become more socially conscious at the very moment our ability to disappear into all-encompassing virtual worlds becomes commonplace?

How do we wake up?

In this sense, we are more like the android hosts of Westworld than we may want to admit. As Curtis put it, “On a social-media network, it’s very much like being in a heroin bubble. The utopia they hold out is a world where machines make everything for you and you have endless leisure time, you become creative and everyone’s happy. And the only thing is, actually, everyone’s incredibly unhappy because they haven’t got anything to do. What we call our jobs today are actually fake jobs. We sit in our offices in front of our screens in order to get the money to go out and buy stuff. Our job is really to go shopping. And the rest of the time, we sit in our offices doing complicated managerial things, and when we’re not, we’re actually watching the internet. The internet is there to keep you happy during your fake job.

“You have to recognize that you’re part of the thing,” Curtis argues. “But the point about journalism is to try to portray the thing you are part of. I think that’s the best you can do.”

So cast your vote on November 8. Recognize that you are part of the thing. And let the real work begin.

The Beautiful Struggle

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on The Beautiful Struggle

I’ve yet to meet a grown-up who, at some point, hasn’t felt a bit like a hamster in the wheel – spinning mindlessly towards some opaque goal, and for some abstract, poorly understood reason.

Life can feel that way sometimes.

So you can imagine my surprise when, while visiting a small public high school in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco, I encountered a group of boys working on an indeterminate project out of plywood and a handsaw.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“We’re building a human-sized hamster wheel,” they replied.

Of course they were.

That’s because they were students at the June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE), where the goal of every adult is to help every young person see the world for what it is – and what it needs to become.

To do that work well, say co-directors Matt Alexander and Jessica Huang, a school must help children make sense of the world they inhabit. “This school was explicitly founded to be a force for social justice,” Huang explained, “and to do so for the kids in our city with the greatest need for it. We’re a college prep school, but our primary concern is not getting kids into college; it’s putting them in a position to have good options, and helping them see the both the oppressive aspects of our society, and the ways to make it better.

“The only way to get off the wheel,” she added, “is to realize you’re on it.”

Since its founding by a group of local parents and families in 2004, JJSE has resided in the same single-story building at the Southern edge of San Francisco, in a neighborhood that doesn’t even make it on to the tourist map.

For Excelsior’s longtime residents, the anonymity has been a good thing. Since its inception in the mid-19th century, Excelsior (which means “ever upward” in Latin) has been a refuge for working class families. Yet as median home prices continue to soar in San Francisco – and space remains finite – Excelsior is starting to gentrify, a development I heard about repeatedly during my time at the school.

“We’ve lost several of our strongest teachers in the past few years because they just couldn’t afford to stay in the city,” said Giulio Sorro, himself a longtime teacher at the school, and, like his colleagues, someone who embodies the best of the profession. “With more middle-class white parents moving in, we’re starting to hear new voices that see our black and brown kids not as assets but as deficits to their own kids. That’s going to change things. It’s already changing things.”

It may seem like the gentrification of a San Francisco neighborhood is a storyline that runs parallel to the lifeblood of a school that is trying to help its students become the first in their families to go to college, but at June Jordan, those sorts of incongruities are in fact the river running through the center of the school’s entire approach to learning.

The first hint of this occurs the moment you arrive, as I did on a recent sunny morning. The school, which shares space with a larger charter school, is surrounded by a ring of trees and greenspaces. Hillsides littered with houses, like favelas, poke up in the distance.

You must enter through a parking lot in the back, which is lined by a procession of graffiti. A particularly striking one near the school’s front doors, in colorful purple and a highly stylized script, quotes Martin Luther King to reinforce the spirit of the place:

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.


IMG_7911

At first blush, the inside of the school feels familiar: wide hallways lined with lockers, low ceilings, and hastily-tacked up posters for next week’s afterschool meeting or upcoming dance. Yet one thing, for a high school at least – let alone a high school serving young people whose lives have been disproportionately clouded by trauma and adversity – feels decidedly unfamiliar: the ubiquity of laughter and levity.

I asked Sorro about that, just before the start of his 9th grade Health class. “We have to redefine education,” he said while his students filed in around us. “What are we here for? Is it to compete with China and India? Is it to get into college? I don’t think it should be about those things.

“I believe good teaching is good teaching anywhere, but there’s a whole other mind-state here. Young people of color, coming from oppressed communities in America, it is set up for these kids not to make it – you can see it.”

In response, June Jordan’s diverse team of founders crafted a mission for the school that was designed to help young people of color “make it” in three key ways: as Community Members who live with respect, integrity, courage and humility; as Social Justice Warriors who stand against oppression and work to create positive change in themselves and their communities; and as Independent Thinkers who possess the intellectual skills they need to succeed.

There are other essential design principles. June Jordan is a small school – just 250 students. Students are assessed not by taking standardized tests, but by presenting detailed portfolios of their work. Teachers teach subjects, but their most important job is to integrate the school’s six habits of mind (perspective, relevance, original research, precision, evidence, and logical reasoning) into the curriculum. Every student has a personal advisor for all four years. And every member of the community – from students to parents to staff – has a meaningful, accountable voice that shapes the overall health and wellbeing of the school.

“Too often,” explained Mr. Alexander, who, like Ms. Huang, was a teacher at the school before becoming its co-director, “everyone in schools is driven by the spirit of compliance, or the idea that there is someone external to the school who needs to come in and turn it around. It’s the mindset of your job being to fix something, or to do something to people instead of building capacity or doing the work with people.

“But if you really believe in democracy,” he continued, “and you really believe that everyone has equal dignity and worth, then you have to build everyone’s capacity and let everyone be their best selves. The accountability has to go that way, too – our primary accountability is to one another, not to the state or to test scores. Our main job is to build that capacity and to recognize that everyone comes with strengths and abilities. But you have to create the space for people to develop that – and it’s really hard.”

I asked Alexander and Huang how the school went about doing that.

They talked about schema theory.

“We know from the research,” Huang began, “that your brain builds schemas, or organized patterns of thinking, in order to understand your environment. We’re hard-wired to look for patterns; it’s what kept us alive thousands of years ago. So everyone is doing this, all the time, and when it comes to education, we have an eerily consistent set of schemas we have all called on for generations. So the bulk of what we do is construct a new counter-narrative that helps kids see the invisible layer of schema that has held us all unnaturally in place for so long – from institutionalized racism, to inherited feelings about what a math class can and cannot be, to internalized notions of inferiority. This helps them start to figure out how to disrupt those patterns, and imagine a different set of possibilities.”

To make this more actionable, the school has developed a pedagogy that encodes what teachers like Sorro are setting out to do. Indeed, over years of work retreats, trial and error, and sustained, challenging, collegial revisions, June Jordan’s faculty and staff have articulated an approach that is, in their words, “expressly designed to help our students understand the forces of marginalization they have experienced growing up, and begin the process of freeing themselves from oppression, especially the internalized oppression which we see preventing so many students from meeting their potential.”

The physical manifestations of this are ubiquitous at the school – from a clear set of preferred teacher behaviors to the classrooms themselves, which feel like bursts of color and texture and collage, and in which probing academic and personal work is always in some vital stage of unfolding.

In one class, for example, students were using the facts from a real case to play out a scenario about sexual harassment and the creation of a hostile work environment. In another, a group was strategizing how best to show their support for students at another school that had recently experienced a widely publicized racist incident. And in Sorro’s classroom, each person was asked to briefly share one thing they did over Spring Break that had benefitted their health – and one thing that hadn’t.

“I went to Pismo Beach to drive ATVs,” said one young man, innocently enough.

“And why was that good for your health?” Sorro asked.

The answer he received was a reminder that part of the reason the school culture feels so light is because the burdens their students carry feel so heavy. “I have a lot of anxiety,” he explained, “and I have a real rage in me; sometimes going really fast is the only thing that can make me feel better.”

Later, after several other intense and highly personal recollections from the previous week, Sorro asked the group, “Is it always good spending time with family?”

“Family can be poison sometimes,” said one student. Sorro nodded calmly. Throughout the class, his demeanor stayed constant; he did not over-react to the highly charged stories, or under-react to the quotidian ones. “In my teaching I try to go to the depth and the heart of it all,” he explained. “You have to put it all out there. I believe in going to the pain – and to the love.”

That duality – the intellectual and the emotional, the pain and the love, the heavy and the light – is what makes June Jordan such a different place to go to school.

“We try to create space for real collegial accountability,” Huang explained towards the end of the day. “We have real honest conversations here about the things that matter to us. But that’s taken years to build – years to build.

“What it means now is that if you have an idea, you understand that it’s your land to work here. That’s an Emiliano Zapata line: ‘The land belongs to those who work it.’ No one is going to do it for you.”

I reflected on her words as I walked the hallways of the school, which were blanketed by quotes, murals, and personal reflections.

Written across an upraised fist above a doorway were the words of Shirley Chisholm: “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

Down another hallway, just past a mural honoring two former students who were shot to death, I saw a sign telling me: “Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.”

And then, just outside a classroom, I found the JJSE Secrets Wall, where all members of the community were invited to anonymously post a secret (no matter how silly or somber) – and, in so doing, perhaps feel less burdened by its weight.

I don’t like myself.

I smoke weed.

I tried to kill myself.

Depression rules my life.

I feel like my parents won’t be proud of me when I’m older.

I can’t live without my Playstation!

I grew up around drugs, police, and losing family.

It felt jarring to see such naked admissions posted so publicly, and in such an otherwise-traditional looking place. But that is precisely what makes the June Jordan School for Equity so special. Spend time here, and you will feel the dialectical pull of the world as it is, awash in both beauty and heartbreak; and the world as it ought to be – empathetic and equitable, devoid of the mindless churn of the human-sized hamster wheel, and reoriented around a different sort of body in motion: the wheel of democracy, which, though it grinds slowly, propels us steadily toward justice, and the society we seek.

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Has Oprah come to embody what’s wrong with modern American culture?

Posted on | by Sam

I’ve decided that if I were to pick one person who embodies the ersatz character of contemporary American cultural life, that person would be Oprah Winfrey.

Let me explain.

Over the course of her long career, Oprah has stood for much of the best of American public life.  In her daytime talk-show heyday, Oprah created space for people to reflect on their inner selves, to connect to big ideas, and to find a point of entry into a shared community of people who were committed to living better, fuller, more community-centered and empathetic lives. It’s for this reason that she has become so beloved, justly, by millions of Americans – and the scale of her success has felt all the more resonant because of the way she rose from humble origins to become a truly global phenomenon. She is Horatio Alger incarnate, or as close as we’ve ever come.

When I see Oprah these days, however, I see someone whose work increasingly reflects a dangerous conflation of America’s equally revered, slightly oppositional founding principles: capitalistic consumption; spiritual self-fulfillment; and democratic community-building. And the yield of that vacuous mixture is best embodied by her current “The Life You Want Weekend” tour.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, the vibe at these events is akin to a Great Awakening of the modern era – except whereas the previous Great Awakenings were purely religious revivals, Oprah’s events are more like what happens when you combine a deeply felt spiritual yearning with a deeply embedded profit motive. At the event in Auburn Hills, Michigan, reporter Jennifer Conlin chronicles a steady line of opportunities for people to pay at the altar of self-improvement – from a tiered $199 magazine/fan club subscription, to a $999 VIP upgrade, to a smaller set of items like t-shirts, hoodies, books and phone covers. By the end of the weekend, after Oprah’s appearance on stage triggered the audience’s wristbands to glow orange (like the sun), and attendees wrote vision statements for the future and took notes during self-help seminars, Oprah’s parting words seemed unintentionally revealing. “Thank you for your money,” she told everyone. “I know how hard you all work.”

Now, don’t get me wrong – events like these must cover costs, and there’s nothing wrong with ending up in the black. For lack of a better way to put it, doing ‘good’ and doing ‘well’ are equally valued aspirations of the American identity, and since our dual allegiance to capitalism and democracy isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, our ongoing challenge is to strike the happy medium between, in this case, profit motive and personal fulfillment.

The problem is when we assume that one’s conscience is heightened based on the products one consumes. That, in a word, is gibberish, and yet that is what Oprah has come to personify – whether it’s a giveaway of free cars, a magazine that highlights her favorite stuff (and only features her on the cover), or a highly monetized national tour of self-actualization. As one frustrated attendee put it, “I came here to be spiritual, not commercial.”

A capitalist economy depends on our insatiable desire for things. A spiritual life demands that we be free from the suffering of desire. And a democratic society demands that we unite in service to a shared society that allows our best selves to emerge.

How do we reconcile these three components of our aspirational civic order?

The first step is to start acknowledging the inherent tensions that exist between our democratic, our spiritual, and our capitalistic selves – and to stop trying to tend to them all at once. Oprah has become a larger-than-life guru because we asked her to be. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be at the nexus of the spiritual and the corporate worlds, as she is, and the ways in which that must distort one’s sense of reality. (Though this video paints a pretty vivid picture.) So to be clear, I’m not blaming her – I’m blaming us for what we’ve asked her to become, and what our neediness says about who we are, and who we think we aspire to be. It’s telling, for example, that the first words Oprah uttered at her Auburn Hills tour event were, “You came! You’re here! Why are you here?”

Why indeed. But here’s the thing – the path toward “turning up the volume in our lives” does not lead through a Toyota Prius dealership, a magazine subscription, or a suite of Oil of Olay bath products. The things Oprah once gave us – the sense of community, the relevant national conversations and lines of inquiry, and the iconic model of intelligent self-reflection – have been cheapened by her attempt to align them with things. We cheapen her legacy, and ourselves, by pretending that they can be. What we need is a room of one’s own, not merely something to OWN. And the reality is we can’t really have them both.

At some point, despite what Oprah is telling you, we all need to choose.

(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The Neuroscience of Democracy

Posted on | by Sam

In the ideal educational future, is there a single design principle that matters most in establishing the optimal learning environment for children?

That seems like a pretty important question to consider. And if you were to go by today’s leading reform strategies, you might conclude that the answer is, variably, greater accountability, better use of data, more strategic use of technology, or more personalization (all good things, by the way). Yet for my money, the design principle that matters most is the one modern reform efforts care about the least – the extent to which schools are creating true laboratories of democratic practice.

Continue reading . . .