So I suggested a new framing that my comrade thought might be more compelling. In the simplest and broadest sense of it, isn’t it about moving towards a “world without bosses”?

The word “boss” is such a loaded one in our culture, evoking (at least in my mind) an old-school sense of a person who gives you orders, monitors your conduct, and does a high-stakes evaluation of your performance in your work. Someone who is higher than you on the org chart that you may strive to replace or just to mollify. Someone who “bosses you around”, which from my sense of that usage, is never intended to mean something positive. As a parent, I still have in my mind one kid challenging another kid’s bullying by saying, “You’re not the boss of me!”

It is interesting that the Wiktionary definition for the word “boss” cites its derivation from a Dutch word “baas”…

A term of respect originally used to address an older relative. Later, in New Amsterdam, it began to mean a person in charge who is not a master.

Prior to the modern era, most people had “masters”, as serfs to a lord, slaves to an owner, or indentured servants. The transition from feudalism to capitalism and the industrial age delegitimized the concept of “masters” and servitude in favor of a broadening sense of individual liberty. But now there were “bosses” who perhaps did not control every aspect of your existence, but did control the major part of your waking hours spent at work. The iconic gruff cigar-chewing foreman barking out orders in a dehumanized factory sweatshop or the “big boss” upstairs overseeing all the activities on the factory floor through a glass window.

In the conventional mythology of the 20th century everybody in the work world had a boss unless they were “the boss” at the top of the company food chain, or somehow running their own small business and therefore, “their own boss”. Even beyond the world of paid work, husbands and wives often referred to their spouse as “the boss”, or reminded their kids that mom or dad was “the boss” when the other spouse was not home to supervise.

In the world of education, even in the late 20th century and continuing into the current one, I hear teachers justify boring seemingly pointless school work by saying it prepares kids to grow up and live in the “real world” where one takes equally arbitrary orders for equally boring work from their boss. I guess that is unless you work hard enough and acquire enough degrees so you can get a job where you get to boss other people around.

I think we are ready as a society (and increasingly as an entire world) to be done with this whole “boss” thing, just as we jettisoned the whole “master” thing centuries earlier. Sure there will still be managers and supervisors in work places, teachers in schools and parents at home. But I think we have evolved to a point where people wearing these hats will not have to “boss” other people around to facilitate work, education and family life.

I think the work world may be farthest along in this transition, because there is real money to be made empowering workers at the bottom of the org chart to solve their customers’ problems without pushing all day to day decisions up to a manager. That approach saves companies a bunch of money, and makes customers happier when they can deal with real decison-maker rather than a flunky that has to check everything “with the boss”. It certainly works well in my work place, working in sales operations for a major health insurance company. That said, some companies still stick to the more conventional “bosses rule” paradigm, perhaps because ego and privilege trumps the potential greater financial success of the new model.

I am also seeing this new paradigm emerging in parenting practice. In my anecdotal experience, more and more parents who are framing their role with their kids as more along the lines of stewardship than control. That said, I think it would be fair to say this is still an unconventional approach, with a majority of parents still operating in the control model as traditional disciplinarians or the more contemporary “helicopter” parents, hovering over their kids’ lives and trying to stage-manage their paths forward.

As parents of two now young-adult kids, their mom and I had always been inclined toward parenting in a facilitative rather than controlling way. It was finally in our kids’ early adolescence (now some ten years ago) that we cut the last remnants of the control cord and trusted our kids as fellow human beings to tell us what they needed from us, but otherwise pursue their own path forward (be their own bosses that is). That really worked for us (and you can read more if your interested in two of my pieces, “Unschooling rather than Highschooling” and “Uncollege”).

As to education, particularly public K-12 education, as a parent looking on it indirectly (from the reports of students and teachers I know plus reading media coverage), it still seems to me a very recalcitrant control-obsessed institution. Unlike businesses and families, which both exercise a certain autonomy and self-governance, our public schools do not and are caught up in a massive controlling hierarchy including ubiquitous state and now federal mandates, labor vs management issues, increasingly standardized curriculum, and standardized testing ratcheted up to ever higher stakes. This all seems so much in the control model and so far from the more contemporary facilitative one.

I find our education system particularly frustrating to ponder because there are wonderful alternative school models out there – including Montessori and Waldorf schools – featuring that facilitative paradigm where young people play a key role in the direction of their own learning. There are even the very rare democratic-free schools scattered about, that put young people squarely in the driver seat of their own education. All these alternative approaches to learning remain on the periphery because they challenge the dominant control paradigm of public schools and therefore cannot pass muster as taxpayer funded learning venues, forcing them to be privately run, charge tuition, and as such be available only to the economic elite.

In my ever optimism, I feel like there is a mounting sense that our public schools need to move away from this whole “boss” paradigm of state and federal control toward a more facilitative model advocated by long-time teachers like Lynn Stoddard. Among other ideas, Stoddard advocates the U.S. Department of Education transition from issuing any mandates to being a purely educational best-practice research organization. But it is an open question (put forward in a recent piece by Ed Week blogger Anthony Cody) whether the rising critique of a “corporatized” American public education system exercising ever increasing control over our neighborhood schools is having any real effect on transforming that system.

So I for one, naïve Pollyanna that I might in fact be, will continue to cheerlead for an emerging (or at least imagined) “world without bosses”. That is the world I am planning to live in and hope I have some comrades and co-conspirators in that effort.

My understanding is that Time magazine has always represented the world view and biases of its founder Henry Luce and his second wife and successor, Clare Boothe Luce. Stalwarts of a moneyed New York establishment, Republican in that old school Nelson Rockefeller or Henry Cabot Lodge sort of thinking, prior to that farther right drift of the GOP starting with Goldwater in the 1960s to the various incarnations of the political right today.

I remember my mom, who was a Democrat and feminist activist in the 1960s and 70s, telling me that she always read Time to see what the other side was thinking. (One of many bits of wisdom she gave me – putting yourself in the shoes of your adversary to more effectively challenge that adversary.) So my mom, were she still alive and ticking today, would certainly alert me to take note of this new perhaps more egalitarian nod from one of the champion voices of the elite.

I for one would like to see this new century be all about “us”, the regular folks of the world, rather than “them”… highlighted members of some defined elite or even the iconic leaders (like Barak Obama for example) that may rise out of “us” but then grab the spotlight to lead and perhaps vicariously represent our aspirations. To the extent that people in the U.S. still live vicariously through celebrities – whether politicians, sports figures, media stars, etc. – I’m so ready for all of us to move beyond that! We can move our society forward without having to put so much stock in the beneficence of our anointed superstars!

The Time piece attempts to frame the historical context…

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the ’70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the ’80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

I would broaden that first sentence to add “led by a few iconic figures” to “chronicled by a few professionals”. Most of the protests called out above became crystallized around charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King, Lech Walesa, or even the Ayatollah Khomeini. Maybe that was just the elite few of the media calling out their perceived elite few leading the protest movements, one elite to another.

Setting the more recent context the Time piece says…

“Massive and effective street protest” was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history… 2011 was unlike any year since 1989 — but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in ’89 the regime disintegrations were all the result of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968 — but more consequential because more protesters have more skin in the game. Their protests weren’t part of a countercultural pageant, as in ’68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes…

Thinking of all the stories of the rebellions through the Arab world and the protest movements in the West (including the Occupy movement in the U.S.), it’s not that these movements have no leaders, it’s that they have hundreds of mostly unnamed leaders that motivate their own small community and the inspiration radiates through collaborative egalitarian circles.

I see my own writing in these terms, being a small witness to a larger human transformation from hierarchies of control to circles of equals. I guess that I might have a hundred people that read my blog on some sort of regular basis, either on my own site or on Daily KOS. I do my little part, along with any number of others, to witness and advocate for change, to keep trying to push the needle of human evolution forward. I do so leveraging the blessing of our new communications technology. Without the Internet facilitating all this social networking, how would I have any audience for my writing without appealing to and getting the blessing of elite media gatekeepers? And how would I have a way to tap into so much of the world’s accumulated knowledge and current thinking?

The piece paints the demographic and goals of the protesters…

It’s remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries’ political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they’re experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.

Maybe we are pining… but I think we are also developing that “third way”. Perhaps not yet in any grand sense, but in some sort of “thousand points of light” thing. Just read journals like Ode magazine and you’ll see the flickers. In a world still gripped for the most part by these traditional hierarchies of control there is (in my thinking at least) a strong underlying egalitarian disturbance of that control “matrix”.

Conventional wisdom is that a movement falters unless it quickly transitions from anger to a specific point by point agenda for change. But the many leaders of this movement may be seeing a new dynamic…

All over the world they are criticized by old-schoolers for lacking prefab ideological consistency, which the protesters in turn see as a feature rather than a bug. Miral Brinjy, a 27-year-old blogger and TV-news producer who grew up in Saudi Arabia and arrived in Tahrir Square on the first day of protests 11 months ago, doesn’t presume to have a precise picture of the new Egyptian government and society she envisions, but as she told me in Cairo last month, “I know what I don’t want.”

Maybe the new way forward is to keep calling out what you don’t like while you also keep stirring the political “pot”. Seems like it was the same deal with the Tea Party folks on the right, the lack of focus of their movement somehow made them particularly powerful in our new more egalitarian electronic media zeitgeist.

In each place, discontent that had been simmering for years got turned up to a boil. There were foreshadowings. In the U.S., the Obama campaign was in part a feel-good protest movement that galvanized young people, and then its shocking success and the Wall Street bailout produced an angry and shockingly successful populist protest movement in the Tea Party, which has far outlasted its expected shelf life.

Along with other 2009 protests in Tehran and London…

The Web and social media were key tactical tools in all three instances. But they seemed at the time to be one-offs, not prefaces to an epochal turn of history’s wheel.

Could it be that this is the year that we seem to have hit a tipping point in our now ever more “Global Village”. The “Arab Spring” followed by Spain, Greece, England, and then the U.S…

At the end of July, in an office in New York’s financial district, the proto-Occupiers met with some veterans of the protests in Spain, Greece and North Africa. To figure out what “Occupy Wall Street” might mean, they reconvened two days later at a come-one-come-all meeting — outdoors, for hours, in a park near that charging bronze bull, amid the thousands of unwitting passersby on an ordinary Wall Street workday.

There were leaders, but just not people who got anywhere near that iconic celebrity radar…

David Graeber, 50, a prominent anthropology scholar and soft-spoken pro-anarchism activist, showed up. Some standard leftists were pushing for a standard rally making a standard demand — no cutbacks in government social spending. Slowly but surely, Graeber and a pal, 32-year-old Greek émigré artist Georgia Sagri, nudged the group to a fresh vision: a long-term encampment in a public space, an improvised democratic protest village without preappointed leaders, committed to a general critique — the U.S. economy is broken, politics is corrupted by big money — but with no immediate call for specific legislative or executive action. It was also Graeber, a lifelong hater of corporate smoke and mirrors, who coined the movement’s ingenious slogan, “We are the 99%.”

For years, progressive activists have been spreading the mantra of “think globally but act locally”, but now we have the communication technology and the broadening savvy to use that technology to turn local action into global thought…

Globalization and going viral have been the catchphrases of the networked 21st century. But until now the former has mainly referred to a fluid worldwide economy managed by important people, and the latter has mostly meant cute-animal videos and songs by nobodies. This year, do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and real live protest went massively viral… One of the unequivocal generational virtues of these movements has been their use of the Internet and social media. Two years ago, scholars Nicholas Christakis (Harvard) and James Fowler (University of California, San Diego) published Connected, a groundbreaking study of social networks, which they summarize as “how your friends’ friends’ friends affect everything you feel, think and do.” The protests of the past 12 months look like a spectacular worldwide confirmation of those findings.

Marshall McLuhan would love it. A younger generation learning to “swim” in the “waters” of our new egalitarian electronic communications technology. Thousands of egalitarian broadcasters in conversation with each other and the rest of us, rather than just viewers of the broadcasts of the media elite.

Rand is something of a cultural phenomenon — the author of potboilers who became an ethical and political philosopher, a libertarian heroine. But Rand’s distinctive mix of expressive egotism, free love and free-market metallurgy does not hold up very well on the screen. The emotional center of the movie is the success of high-speed rail — oddly similar to a proposal in Barack Obama’s last State of the Union address. All of the characters are ideological puppets. Visionary, comely capitalists are assaulted by sniveling government planners, smirking lobbyists, nagging wives, rented scientists and cynical humanitarians.

Hey… I’m all about ideas, and even the nasty gnarly ones can have germs of truth or focus on a particular concept that can be turned on its head or otherwise torqued into something useful. I keep remembering Sally and my wedding video, when our friends Ladd and Stephanie pointed the camera at my mom and asked her for her thoughts on her son. My mom said that even in nursery school, though I was a shy kid, that I was the “idea man”. I like to entertain ideas, even ones my comrades and fellow travelers steer way clear of, and try them on for size at least to some degree and incorporate what I can before I move on.

This is exactly the case with my whole flirtation with libertarianism, at least with a “left” prefix attached to rip it out of its conventional set of assumptions (particularly around property rights). It was initially John Taylor Gatto‘s ideas that challenged the orthodox liberalism of my youth, growing up in the progressive college town of Ann Arbor Michigan. Gatto, a former public school teacher turned unschooling advocate, challenged the limitations on human self-directed learning and agency in general of the social-engineering championed by John Dewey and other progressive educational thinkers. I am no “Gatto-ite”, but there are enough germs of truth in his discomforting libertarian ideas that made me want to try some of them on for size.

I encountered a similar discomforting mentor forty years ago in my mom’s radical feminist friend Mary Jane Shoultz, who challenged a lot of other conventional liberal wisdom and my white male privilege. Some of her ideas stuck with me, and bore fruit decades later in my emerging world view.

And my mom herself was never completely comfortable with conventional liberal wisdom of the mostly male academia. She always bristled at the male privilege and lukewarm talk-the-talk-but-not-walk-the-walk support of most of her progressive political comrades from that community.

But getting back to Rand, as alluded to in the title of his piece, Gerson sees her ideas as “adolescent”, because they feature “testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism” that most of us grow out of. He sees her as a conservative enigma because she disdained Christianity and disliked Ronald Reagen.

Though his take on Rand may be right on, I don’t resonate with his adultist view of adolescence, and am also a believer in a life-long effort to test all sorts of boundaries (at least in terms of thought and conventional wisdom). I would have encouraged Gerson to consider presenting a more nuanced analysis of Rand’s ideas, rather than putting her up as a strawman to define himself (and presumably his fellow progressives) as everything that Rand is not.

Here is Gerson’s summary of Rand’s “Objectivist” philosophy…

Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible. “The Objectivist ethics, in essence,” said Rand, “hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.”

Though I am an atheist like Rand, I would disagree with her that reason is “everything” and religion is a “fraud”, along with parting company with her on her negative take on altruism, self-sacrifice and weakness. But in her statement, “The pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself”, I see at least the germ of an idea, which I believe to be at the heart of libertarianism. As much as possible we should be free to make our own choices and leave others free to make theirs.

I resonate with putting a premium on liberty and freedom. I have always rankled at being defined and pigeonholed by others and not being seen for who I uniquely am. The heart of my belief system is that human beings are at their best as free autonomous consciousnesses who develop their own agency and freely choose to express who they are and make community with each other, and are not coerced (even gently) to do so by community norms or some other external imperative. I would prefer not to interact with a person who is in community with me because convention says they should or they must and it is not fully of their own choosing.

I find at least some common ground with the portion of Rand’s statement that the pursuit of a person’s own happiness is the highest moral purpose, though I would substitute “development” for “happiness”. For me, the pursuit of ones own development (and evolution) and allowing others to do the same is a very high moral purpose. Though I believe in community, giving of oneself to others, and in a safety net; I am not my brother or sister’s “keeper”, and can only make myself of assistance if asked to do so. I do not believe in telling people (whether youth or adult) what to do “for their own good”.

Gerson offers what sounds like a blanket criticism of libertarian thinking based on Rand’s approach…

But both libertarians and Objectivists are moved by the mania of a single idea — a freedom indistinguishable from selfishness.

I suspect Rand was a provocateur who liked to say outlandish things to shake people out of their predefined “boxes”, including the above quote. As perhaps a “left-libertarian” (or at least experimenting with that personae), and not quite so much of a provocateur, I would say I am moved by the idea of a freedom distinguishable from selfishness.

More than one-third of Americans routinely sleep fewer than seven hours a night, which affects their concentration and general health, new government research shows. Insufficient sleep also impairs work performance and the ability to drive safely… “Over the last 20 years there has been a decline in overall sleep duration in adults,” said lead author of one report… Changing lifestyle habits, including longer workdays and late nights on the computer, have pared away much-needed sleep time, she noted. “Within our culture there seems to be a belief that sleep isn’t a part of overall essential health,” she said.

I believe I did some significant damage to my own health for a decade, particularly doing “late nights on the computer” and getting way too little sleep, as my way of “medicating” all the stresses and strains of my life at the time. I am now regularly taking blood-pressure and cholesterol medication, in my opinion, because of the effects of that decade of lack of sleep.

Given my own experience, I want to somehow contribute to the solution of exorcising our culture’s “work ’til you drop” mentality, which I believe is woven together with our “shop ’til you drop” ethos as well. All of which I believe contributed to our recent recession and all the extra stress that caused, adding to the vicious circle of overwork and “medication” for that overwork.

For the past thirty years I have been in volunteer and paid positions where I have recruited, coordinated, and otherwise worked closely with other volunteers. From that experience I have learned that when people can give what they give to others freely (while still being acknowledged for and feeling good about what they give) without it taking some sort of “toll” on them, that all is well. But when people as volunteers either push themselves or are pushed (pleaded with or coerced by others) beyond the point of giving freely to a place of feeling “owed”, then that is a recipe for burnout, dissension, and other trouble.

I have seen way too many volunteers (who could not say “no” to mine or someone else’s nth request that pushed them over that line) completely change there attitude and approach to their volunteer work. It is not a pretty sight, and I have learned to listen carefully to others, and to myself as well, to detect when that line may be being crossed. So when anybody asks me to do something these days that I am considering saying “yes” to, I always ask myself, “Can I give this freely?” If the answer is not clearly yes I have finally learned to say so. And when I ask a fellow volunteer to do one more thing, and sense that initial bit of resistance, I have learned to back off rather than push.

Given that this rule has proven to work very well for me working with volunteers, I am beginning to see its application to the world of paid work as well. It may seem counterintuitive to some, thinking that the very reason they are getting paid is precisely to mitigate the psychic toll it is taking on them. That is in essence the “work ’til you drop” mentality that I felt was lurking somewhere behind my colleagues email comment (though unintended I think) and seems endemic in our culture.

Understanding that I see my paid work as my “day job” and not what I would be doing with my time if money were not an issue, still I am happy to contribute what I do to the colleagues I work with and the company I work for. I am given the flexibility to approach my work and structure my time the way I want to, working a compressed week that gives me most of three days off each week (and plenty of vacation time to take additional days here and there when I really want to). I do things my way and am acknowledged for my singular contribution. Except perhaps for a particularly frustrating day, I leave work energized rather than spent. That all feels like I’m able to give it freely rather than having it take a toll on me.

I can even report that I generally get around seven hours sleep a night these days (and occasionally eight)! And as an immediate benefit, I find that I generally do not catch those colds that lately have been working their way through many of my comrades.

Given all the blessing of my work situation (including a living wage and more so and all the privilege that brings to me) I acknowledge that many of us work for less than that living wage, if we can find paid work at all. And others among us may be well paid but pay a heavy cost in long-hours, frustrating circumstances, bosses and other colleagues, or are otherwise stressed out by our jobs.

Those are real issues to deal with, so it seems to me critical that we don’t exacerbate those issues by piling on all this old Calvinist mythology that work and material success are noble, and work that goes beyond that and takes its daily toll is the noblest of all. A mythology and conventional wisdom that is always pushing people, the way I am now seeing things, to give more than they can freely give.

In fact, I am thinking that paying attention to what you and I and others can freely give, including having the opportunity to get at least seven hours of sleep a night, could well be transformative in all aspects of our society. Perhaps lessening all those things we do to “medicate” and compensate for the toll of what we give but cannot give without a price paid.

The Palmer Park Preparatory Academy

At Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, teachers are gradually assuming administrative duties to become the city’s first teacher-led school. An extended day, part of the district’s reform policy, gives the staff time every afternoon to compare teaching strategies. And finally, a new, pilot schedule for 7th and 8th graders… [an] attempt to get concrete about the much-touted but often vague concept of “differentiated instruction” for students, especially for those who have struggled to grasp key concepts and risk falling further behind.

Teacher-led schools are a time-honored practice, particularly in some alternative private schools like Waldorf, and in the iconic one-room school house of the American frontier. But apparently they are one of the current “flavors of the month”, gaining fresh attention in the past year, with schools in California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York being covered in the media.

As a parent, if I had had this option for my kids for middle school, I certainly would have taken a closer look. Regardless, I applaud them in two areas. First, in moving forward in our societal transformation from hierarchy to a circle of equals. Second in acknowledging (at least to a degree) that each human being learns at their own pace.

Prior to moving them to public schools, we had enrolled our two kids, Eric and Emma (now young adults), in a small private school for pre-K and through the early elementary grades. The school was staffed by the owner Brenda, an administrative person, and maybe a half-dozen teachers. Eric and Emma’s mom and I, as customers, had a lot of access to Brenda and our kids’ teachers, and they were open to listen to our thoughts on our kids, and were open to our suggestions on what would make the best learning environment for Eric and Emma.

Having a casual conversation to trade thoughts with Brenda and/or their teacher for a few minutes most days when I came to pick our kids up, I was totally spoiled by having access to the “education decision-makers” in my kids’ school experience. We discussed the things Eric and Emma were interested and not interested in, and how pragmatically to customize the school learning environment and methodology to best meet those needs. We would even bring Eric or Emma into those short informal discussions at times. Our kids, especially the more extroverted Eric, generally had their own thoughtful opinions on their school experience.

When we transitioned our kids to public school during the older elementary years, we were now interacting with the adult school staff within a massive district and state hierarchy. The school’s teachers and principal were for the most part more highly trained and skilled than Brenda and her staff, but it quickly became clear that the dynamic was completely different. Not only was the school much bigger than the little school they had previously attended, but the teachers and even the principal were not the “education decision-makers” we were used to dealing with (and had taken for granted).

First of all, access to the teachers and the principal was much more limited, and often (though not always) needed to be formally scheduled.

Some of our kids’ teachers were interested in discussing with us Eric and Emma’s personalities and proclivities, while others had a formula for teaching that they did not vary from and it was essentially “their way or the highway”, and our kids just had to go with the program.

But what was clear in dealing with all the teachers (and even the principal) on most matters of policy, classroom structure or teaching methodology was that they were just worker-bees following marching orders from higher up the food chain. Most of our kids’ teachers could not answer a question on their teaching methodology other than to say they had a required curriculum to teach.

As our son Eric in particular became more disenchanted with his school experience and began challenging his teachers when he felt the curriculum was boring or pointless, our lack of access to or a real relationship with most of his teachers and his counselor made it difficult to try and find solutions that worked for all parties. But even when we did get that access and develop relationships, many promising potential solutions were beyond the latitude of the teachers, counselor or principal to implement. Certainly customizing or differentiating Eric’s curriculum or learning environment was beyond the pale of these overtaxed, over-regulated and under-empowered adult school staff.

So getting back to the Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, though they still operate within a school district and state hierarchy, and have their marching orders, the school staff are at some level becoming “education decision-makers”, empowered to a degree to create an effective learning environment. For the kids attending the school and their parents, I have to think that this transition from hierarchical to more egalitarian school governance is a real plus.

When you are empowered and have real agency, you are looking for solutions and not on who to blame up the food chain. While many teachers I know blame administration or state mandates and regulations for not being able to optimize their school learning environment, the Palmer Park teachers took matters into their own hands…

The genesis of the changes occurred last summer, after a group of teachers at Palmer Park approached the district with the proposal to convert to a teacher-led arrangement, in which the school’s teachers take on the budgeting and management duties generally carried out by an administrator.

To make this work the teachers set up collaborative planning time at the end of every school day which lengthens their work day. But it was a trade-off worth having the added authority to customize their educational environment on even a weekly basis to better meet individual student needs. So I presume since the Palmer Park lead teachers are being trained in school administration, they will run their school without a principal, without a “boss” as it were. According to one of the lead teachers…

“It’s so much easier to move the kids and challenge them and address them when they need more attention.”

And in regards to the Palmer Park teachers’ effort to take steps to tailor the learning environment to the learner, I find it interesting that though the concept of “differentiated instruction” has been given lip-service in discussions of educational methodology for years, this fledgling effort to really implement it is framed as being highly unorthodox…

The concept appears to be relatively new to education as a whole. Only a handful of other schools, all in New York, have used data to create personalized student schedules, and none of them is currently teacher-led…

Interesting that, because there seems to be such synergy between teachers as decision-makers and looking at students as empowered ind

Discussions among those teachers homed in on how to boost attendance, keep students more engaged in their work, and minimize their frustration when they were struggling with lessons, said Ann K. Crowley, one of the lead teachers who will assume most administrative duties in the school… In consultation with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt officials, the teachers arrived at the idea of personalized schedules for all the students, varying on whether they need more-intensive instruction on basic concepts or are ready for more in-depth instruction. Using a data-analysis tool, the publishing group culled information from state, local, and classroom tests. Then the school placed students in one of three classrooms each in math and English/language arts with peers at the same level of performance.

Empowering youth to be “decision-makers” in their own lives is still the last mostly unexplored frontier of our society’s multi-century transition from hierarchical to egalitarian institutions. Most adults still think that children are… well… “children”, and (given the often pejorative use of that word) are generally considered incompetent to play a significant role in managing even their own lives.

But think outside that adultist box for a moment. Imagine what a learning experience it would be for say a middle-school student who was interested to participate in the administrative training that the Palmer Park teachers are getting, and then play a role in actually making the school day work. Does that sound ridiculous or transformative?

As school budget cuts continue and remaining budget is focused on maintaining teachers in the classrooms, could empowering students, side by side newly empowered teachers become the new flavor of the month?

In my dreams at least!

A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger… and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today… As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

My partner Sally and I have been vegans for nearly 20 years. We were initially motivated by personal health reasons, but soon after adopting this diet I read John Robbins’ book, Diet for a New America, which presented a lot of other reasons for we humans to move down the food chain to a plant-based diet.

The most compelling reason to me is the arithmetic that it takes seven to ten pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. With some seven billion people currently alive on Earth, and maybe one billion of them adopting an American-style meat & dairy based diet, our planet can barely grow the food to feed everybody. But as population increases and more people in the world adopt a meat & dairy based diet we are getting to a point where, put bluntly, some people will be starving so others can eat as they have become accustomed.

This not to mention the environmental impact of all the literal shit produced by billions of cows, pigs and chickens that are consuming all that grain that could be eaten by humans instead. Much more than apparently can be converted to use as agricultural fertilizer.

So imbued with this Malthusian logic, I continue to try to gently make the case for a vegan diet to other people in my circle.

I have found that I don’t respond well to other people telling me how to conduct my life, but I am always interested in hearing how other people may be conducting theirs in ways that are different from my own. So given that and applying the Golden Rule (my main ethical and theological principle), I find it is most respectful (and effective) to tell people that I’ve been a vegan for two decades and that this way of eating works well for me. Then if they ask me what motivated me, I say health initially, but then I share the problematic arithmetic of grain to meat.

Not that I can boast many converts in twenty years of trying, but I am hoping I can be one of the “hundred monkeys” that will eventually create a critical mass for change. But seeing this announcement from the UNEP may be an indication that the requisite number of primates may be significantly closer at hand.

I’m sure that the United Nations announcement will be met with a lot of denial. Most likely my fellow Americans on the political right will roll their eyes and say that this is yet another case where this world body is trying to interfere with our liberty to lead our lives as we wish. Or maybe that our best scientific experts can find ways to significantly increase crop yields beyond what has been managed already with ever increasing use of fertilizers (which apparently depletes the soil). Or finally that the world needs to lower its population anyway so some starvation is unfortunately part of bringing the planet back into balance.

But if you can get beyond denial and the divine right to consume animals and their products, there is a healthful life-sustaining (at both the micro and macro level) diet for you. Maybe you’ll be that hundredth monkey!

My dad’s generation views human beings as human resources. They’re the two-by-fours you need to build your house… For me, it’s a partnership between me and the employees. They’re not resources. They’re partners… Perhaps it’s time to toss the very word “management” onto the linguistic ash heap alongside “icebox” and “horseless carriage”… Its central ethic remains control; its chief tools remain extrinsic motivators. Is management, as it’s currently considered, out of sync with human nature itself?

That’s a really good question! Management was certainly an essential tool of the Industrial Revolution when it at least seemed efficient to view human beings as just one more mechanistic factor contributing to running the emerging factories and the rest of the supply chain that brought the products of mass production to the public. The harnessing and external control of human activity was such a revolutionary innovation (previously only practiced to this degree perhaps in the raising and use of large military forces) that it could in fact have been a very inefficient use of human capability while still giving the captains of industry a huge source of coordinated labor and profit.

Pink rightly calls out “management” as a human-invented technique that may have run its course as part of this generational transition…

We forget sometimes that “management” does not emanate from nature… It’s something that humans invented. As the strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed, management is a technology… that has grown creaky. While some companies have oiled the gears a bit, and plenty more have paid lip service to the same, at its core, management hasn’t changed much in 100 years.

And why, says Pink, has it “grown creaky”…

It presumes that to take action or move forward, we need a prod — that absent a reward or punishment, we’d remain happily and inertly in place. It also presumes that once people do get moving, they need direction — that without a firm and reliable guide, they’d wander. Management still revolves largely around supervision, “if-then” rewards and other forms of control.

And Pink looks at how the concept of management is more broadly applied in our society as…

Not merely how bosses treat us at work, but also how the broader ethos has leeched into schools, families and many other aspects of our lives.

Does the “management of human resources” in the workplace, in our schools and even in the intimate family settings diminish and even belittle what we are capable of as human beings? The solution that Pink sees emerging in the business world is the promotion of autonomy and self-direction…

This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction… A sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude. According to a cluster of recent behavioral science studies, autonomous motivation promotes greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school and, in sporting activities, higher productivity, less burnout and greater psychological well-being.

As a progressive perhaps “lefty parent” himself, Pink is convinced…

That our basic nature is to be curious and self-directed. And I say that not because I’m a dewy-eyed idealist, but because I’ve been around young children and because my wife and I have three kids of our own. Have you ever seen a 6-month-old or a 1-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age 14 or 43, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting.

So creating the enriched environment for fostering the continuation or reemergence of autonomy and self-direction goes well beyond the conventional wisdom of “empowerment” in the workplace, which according to Pink…

Presumes that the organization has the power and benevolently ladles some of it into the waiting bowls of grateful employees. But that’s not autonomy. That’s just a slightly more civilized form of control.

And Pink makes a critical clarification that autonomy and self-reliance are not about excessive individualism and the failure of a more communitarian ethos…

It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice — which means we can be both autonomous and happily-interdependent with others.

Pink advocates for work environments that leverage the natural power of human autonomy and self-direction, particularly the “Results Only Work Environment” or ROWE…

ROWEs are the brainchild of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, two former human resources executives at the American retailer Best Buy. ROWE’s principles marry the common sense pragmatism of Ben Franklin to the cage-rattling radicalism of American community organizer Saul Alinsky. In a ROWE workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time—or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it and where they do it is up to them.

You can read the Ode article for an extensive description of an example of implementing ROWE in a business environment. I immediately wonder if we could use some schools set up on a parallel model that we might call “ROLE” (Results Oriented Learning Environment) to unleash the learning process rather than trying to manage it with standardized curriculums, regimented learning environments and ubiquitous testing.