From the analysis of 40 years of polling results called out in the first piece “Americans’ Political Views Not So Far Apart”…

Political polarization among the public has barely budged at all over the past 40 years, according to research presented here on Jan. 27 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. But, crucially, people vastly overestimate how polarized the American public is — a tendency toward exaggeration that is especially strong in the most extreme Democrats and Republicans… “Strongly identified Republicans or Democrats perceive and exaggerate polarization more than weakly identified Republicans or Democrats or political independents,” said study researcher John Chambers, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida… The people who see the world split into two opposing factions are also most likely to vote and become politically active, Chambers said in a talk at the meeting. This means that while real growing polarization is illusory, the perception of polarization could drive the political process.

And from the second piece, “Yes, Washington is in fact more partisan now”…

Washington has never been more partisan, right? Or is that common lament simply a trick of nostalgia? A look at the numbers reveals that the problem is not, it turns out, all in our heads: over the last four decades, Congressional polarization has steadily increased… Since 1947, Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal advocacy group, has tracked the political positions of each Senate and House member, scoring how they voted each year on 20 key bills covering a variety of social and economic issues. (Many groups from across the political spectrum calculate lawmakers’ dedication to various ideologies and causes. The Signal is merely using this group’s data because it is collected over many years and is based on the controversial votes that reveal the fault lines in the House and Senate.)

The Problem Statement

As a political, history and anthropology junkie, this is a fascinating question to me. What the heck is going on here? What happened in the 1960s and 1970s that might have caused this growing ideological split between politicians (if not in the larger society, if you believe the polls cited above), progressive on one side and conservative on the other, leading to the “blue vs red” politics of today?

If you obsess about these things like I do, you may well have your own take on this. Here are some of my thoughts at this point. I’m sure you’ll have your own insights that I’m perhaps not factoring in.

Starting by Applying Eisler’s Thesis

My cultural analysis generally starts with Riane Eisler’s great book on the development of human society, The Chalice and the Blade, calling out the two profoundly different ways that human beings interact with each other. The chalice is meant to be shared with others and represents partnership, egalitarianism, and a world view of abundance or at least enough sufficient to be shared. The blade, on the other hand, represents authority, control, protection, and a world view of scarcity or at most not quite enough to go around.

I love the grand metaphors in Eisler’s title. In fact, my thinking generally starts from the abstract place of mythos and metaphor and moves from there into more rational concrete thought. I picture the voluptuous body of the pregnant and smiling young woman sharing the chalice versus the stern and muscular bearded father-figure brandishing the blade. Close your eyes and imagine encountering each of these two archetypal characters separately coming out of the mist. Imagine all the thoughts and feelings engendered by each visage, each imposing in its own way. Certainly encountering the figure wielding the blade, one would hope to have a blade oneself, just in case. While encountering the other figure with the chalice, one would put down ones own blade and hope to taste its content.

Eisler’s thesis is that human culture has generally been an uneasy amalgam of these two archetypes, woven to different degrees through every institution of society, the relative degrees of each changing over time. At its best, human society develops towards the sharing of the chalice and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, but often does so in a perceived context of fear and scarcity where we must ensure and protect “our own” (however we define that group) with coercion and violence if necessary from harsh realities of the world and aspects of our own flawed selves.

Applying Eisler’s thesis, the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. brought profound challenges to racial and gender hierarchy and privilege, and to a lesser extent perhaps, economic privilege. The Civil Rights movement was a profound challenge to the privilege of white people who occupied the top of a racial hierarchy with people of color at the bottom. The Women’s Movement challenged male gender privilege and took that challenge right into the home and even the bedroom. The “Hippies” and the sexual revolution (including the beginnings of recognition for gays and lesbians) challenged the general sense of societal propriety and conformity.

These were a profound series of challenges in these decades to a societal hierarchy and conforming behavior to support it that had been in place for at least a hundred years, since America had been torn apart by its Civil War. Though there had been a rise of a real political left in the early decades of the 20th century, by the 1950s those ideas had been marginalized as subversive “socialism” or “communism”. But beyond that, the majority of people grumbled but accepted their place in the economic, racial and gender hierarchies of control that held together American culture.

According to Eisler, human hierarchies of control generally maintain themselves through coercion and a resort to violence as necessary. Using that analysis, I would argue that the movements of the 1960s and 1970s profoundly challenged the existing hierarchies and thus brought forward the coercive and violent forces that held those hierarchies together. As Stephen Stills called out in his 1967 song “For What It’s Worth”, battle lines were being drawn. Some of us embraced these changes and others feared them, and it split the country like the Civil War, but this time on ideological rather than regional grounds.

So why were our political leaders apparently so much more impacted by this split than the public in general? My take is that our society to a large degree lives vicariously through celebrities and other public figures, including political leaders, that we identify with. We are a culture of spectators and consumers, rooting for our various “teams”. As such, we have entrusted our political leaders to concern themselves with this ideological struggle while we go on with or lives, watch from the sidelines, and boo or cheer as we feel is appropriate. Thus the statistics showing the greater ideological split between our legislators (on the proverbial gridiron) versus the people (watching and cheering from the bleachers).

Applying McLuhan’s Thesis

Another great influencer in my own deconstruction of our society is media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan argues that human society is transformed by changes in our prevailing communications technology. In his reading of history, the first great transition was the beginning of phonetic literacy and writing around 3000 years ago. The invention of a phonetic alphabet allowed the capture, transport and decoding (reading) of that human voice, creating a powerful magic that profoundly changed the capabilities of an individual human being to communicate with others, fostering the Axial Age.

The second was the 16th century development of movable type and the advent of printing in Europe, which McLuhan believes led to both the Reformation (with its challenges to the existing controlling hierarchies of the Church) and nationalism (feeling a kinship with everyone else reading the same newspapers printed in the same language).

Finally the 20th century development of electronic media – radio, cinema, and particularly TV (no Internet yet in McLuhan’s time) – has led to what he called a “retribalization”, described in his 1969 interview in Playboy Magazine…

The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems… are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media and bringing us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another.

I think McLuhan generally saw this as a positive transformation, as human beings transitioned from feelings of alienation as isolated individuals back to more of a collective consciousness (including his now famous concept of a “global village”). McLuhan say TV playing a critical role in this transformation, an electronic medium which found its way into most homes in America during the 1960s and 1970s when our political process seemed to be transformed. I particularly find it interesting the downside of this transition that he called out in the interview…

All our alienation and atomization are reflected in the crumbling of such time-honored social values as the right of privacy and the sanctity of the individual; as they yield to the intensities of the new technology’s electric circus, it seems to the average citizen that the sky is falling in. As man is tribally metamorphosed by the electric media, we all become Chicken Littles, scurrying around frantically in search of our former identities, and in the process unleash tremendous violence. As the preliterate confronts the literate in the postliterate arena, as new information patterns inundate and uproot the old, mental breakdowns of varying degrees — including the collective nervous breakdowns of whole societies unable to resolve their crises of identity — will become very common.

So to use my earlier analogy, perhaps our political leaders, representing us on the playing field in our spectator culture (the blue and red teams in ever greater opposition to each other) trying to win the game for their team rather than come to consensus, are playing out this “collective nervous breakdown”. The rest of us spectator types vicariously thrill in watching the game, cringing at the big hits and hard tackling, and rooting for our side. All this while also acknowledging at some level that yes, though it makes for entertaining sport, it is dysfunctional behavior when it comes to governing a country.

I would suggest that maybe we all need a profound rethink of our spectator focus, and commit ourselves instead to engage each other, particularly our fellow citizens on the other ideological “team” to discuss our differences and try to find the common ground (I think its there somewhere!) or at least come to peace that we respectfully disagree.

Hey… just my take based on applying the theses of two, what I would consider, “outside the box” thinkers, along with my own spin on their ideas. I would love to hear your thoughts on my take and yours as well!

But now I read that Apple is moving big-time into the textbook business, and I would hope that they would similarly challenge that entrenched corporate establishment as well. Certainly one can argue that big publishing companies like McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin, have encouraged what I would consider a damaging centralization, standardization and increasingly OSFA (one size fits all) approach to public education in order to expand and protect their markets for selling textbooks.

But in the intro to Jason Tomassini’s piece “Apple Unveils E-Textbook Strategy for K-12″ for Education Week, he calls out that Apple is now allying with rather than challenging the corporate educational “man”…

Apple Inc. announced aggressive new efforts last week to move into the K-12 electronic-textbook market, though educational publishers said the biggest news from the move is how the normally disruptive company is likely to help the publishing industry rather than challenge it. Through a partnership with three major K-12 textbook publishers—McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—Apple is offering interactive textbooks through its iBooks store at $14.99 or less.

These new corporate partners are the who’s who of the “educational-industrial complex”. Of course Apple has been a part of the education market for decades…

In its entirety, the announcement signals Apple’s intent to further deepen its market share in K-12 education. Sales of the iPad are outpacing Mac computers in the education sector, and Apple officials said there were 1.5 million iPads in use in education, more than 1,000 one-to-one iPad computing initiatives in K-12, and 20,000 education apps in the iTunes store.

Certainly public school systems have the potential to save money buying lots of virtual rather than hard-copy textbooks. But the bigger underlying narrative involves these big corporate dinosaurs looking to maintain their control over public education and their many billion dollar market for textbooks and testing materials.

Big business moved to a position at the helm of the U.S. public education system back in the first decades of the 20th century, as chronicled in Raymond Callahan’s book “Education and the Cult of Efficiency”. Corporate “reformers” attacked the U.S. public school system for its alleged “inefficiencies”, and the vulnerable educational establishment (with its mostly low status female teachers) essentially surrendered control of that system to new business-trained bosses, the corporate interests that supported those bosses, and the agendas of those corporate interests, including according to Callahan…

That educational questions were subordinated to business considerations; that administrators were produced who were not, in any true sense, educators; that a scientific label was put on some very unscientific and dubious methods and practices; and that an anti-intellectual climate, already prevalent, was strengthened. As the business-industrial values and procedures spread into the thinking and acting of countless educational decisions were made on economic or on non-educational grounds. (Calahan, pg 246)

So now in the 21st century Information Age we see the rise of the Internet as a brand new and potentially anarchic challenge to the entrenched interests, including corporate interests, of our previous Industrial Age. To try and hold on to power and market share in this new age, the old industrial age corporations need to adapt to these challenges.

For the big textbook publishers, that challenging new reality is that much of the knowledge of the world is now available to anyone and everyone for free on the Net. Perhaps a profound potential challenge to their current monopoly is the whole “Open Educational Content” movement, which is very fledgling at this point. Using these new Internet wiki-type tools, teachers have the capability to develop their own curricula and even “publish” their own hard-copy books, outside the purview of the big education publishers. Not a big challenge yet, because most states and school districts are locked into their relationships with the big publishers (that’s where the increasing standardization of curriculum plays into the big corporate textbook marketing). But down the road, maybe sooner than later if public schools continue to be strapped for funding, will school systems continue to invest billions in publishers’ products given they no longer have the monopoly as gatekeepers to the world’s established wisdom?

So it is certainly wise for these big corporate educational-industrial complex players to enlist powerful Information Age players to help protect their markets. Just as it continues to be in their interest to push for ever increasing educational centralization and standardization so they sell more “units” while having a smaller group of customers that they need to keep happy.

From Tomassini’s piece…

The publishers will give Apple a cut of the revenue; 30 percent in the case of individual consumers, and an undetermined amount when selling on a state or district level. It’s a mutually beneficial model akin to iTunes, publishers said, not a run around the publishing industry, as had been speculated and hinted at by Apple founder Steve Jobs before his death last year.

But is it really in Apple’s interest to surrender their role here as Information Age iconoclasts and perhaps sell their own corporate soul for the big bucks associated with the Industrial Age dinosaurs of the big ed biz? Is that really keeping faith with their youthful customer base and the new ideas branding that they try to represent?

Mr. Jobs had always taken an interest in education, and in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of the technology innovator, he is quoted as speaking of a “corrupt” state textbook-approval process, the massive textbook industry, and his hope to transform it… For textbook publishers, though, business won’t be as disrupted as Mr. Jobs may have hoped… Ms. Shore of Pearson Education said creating content for Apple would be no different from creating any other kind of textbook content. Pearson creates the content first, then adapts it to multiple platforms, whether it’s Apple, Android, Amazon, or print.

Will Apple become (like Microsoft founder Bill Gates) just another entrenched corporate interest protecting business as usual in education by joining the rest of the education-industrial complex in promoting testing-obsessed standardization and the teacher union busting corporatism and labeling of “failed” schools that seems to go with it?

Some critics believe the cost of the devices could prevent the innovative textbooks from being used by the students who need them most. By the end of the year, for example, McGraw-Hill will produce five Apple-only textbooks. If the textbooks can be used on Apple devices only, it could require cash-strapped districts to decide on Apple or a lesser education.

Certainly there is the potential for Apple’s Internet enabling technology to challenge rather than support the traditional book sellers…

Apple also unveiled a brand-new application called iBooks Author, which allows users to create and publish their own e-books. The tool can be used only on Macintosh computers, but books can immediately be published into the iBooks store… Lastly, Apple announced it is upgrading iTunes U, its directory for educational content for higher education, to allow teachers to create entire online courses.

This sounds more in line with what I mentioned above about the “Open Educational Content” movement, and would involve Apple more in their traditional insurgent role.

So the question is, will Apple continue to be a force for real change, perhaps giving poorer school districts (generally judged as “failing” in the No Child Left Behind standardization paradigm) the opportunity to develop their own curriculum online and redirect that big textbook budget line item to other needed improvements like attracting better teachers and improving their school infrastructures to keep pace with more well-to-do districts?

Its all TBD at this point!

A recent piece I read in Education Week, “Superintendents Push Dramatic Changes for Conn. Schools”, highlighted my discomfort with this discordant duality. From the intro to the piece…

The Connecticut classroom of the future may not be limited by a traditional school year, the four walls of a classroom, or even the standard progression of grades, based on a proposed package of unusually bold changes that are being advanced by the state’s school superintendents. Instead, the current system would be replaced by a “learner-centered” education program that would begin at age 3; offer parents a menu of options, including charter schools and magnet schools; and provide assessments when an individual child is ready to be tested, rather than having all children tested in a class at the same time.

As a broken-record advocate for “many educational paths” this all sounds very good to me. Build an entire infrastructure of different and differentiated learning venues, which in some cases is a school, in other cases perhaps a library, in other cases a “real world” venue like a work place or community center, and even a kids’ home. Leverage the Internet as well to link all these together, students with teachers (only when teachers are needed by the learners) or create new virtual venues beyond all the brick and mortar ones.

I certainly will bear witness to the idea that learning can happen outside the classroom. I know from my own experience growing up, plus watching my kids do the same, that most of my and my kids most profound learning happened outside of a school classroom and not under the direction of a teacher. That said, I know other kids who really resonate with that whole academic classroom milieu. For those kids that seek it out, great. But why as kids do we have to build our “school days” anchored around sitting on our butts in a generally information-impoverished classroom environment being spoon-fed instruction by a gatekeeper adult, unless that instruction is what we have individually decided we are seeking?

Finally the idea that mastering a particular body of knowledge should be done on the learner’s timetable rather than the state’s. And the related problem of all kids the same age having to learn the same thing at the same time. To me this is a remnant of a 19th century industrial paradigm that facilitated building a million Model T Fords, but not help kids transition to adulthood in the 21st century.

So starting to imagine all these wonderful transformational possibilities, I continue to read about what is motivating the council of the state’s school district superintendents to move forward with this plan…

“We’ve seen a not-so-subtle transformation in the education world from providing students with an opportunity to learn, to an obligation to be sure that every kid does learn,” said Frank H. Sippy, the superintendent of the 4,500-student Pomperaug Regional School District 15 and a member of the 16-person panel that developed the education transformation proposal. “We superintendents recognized we’re pretty well equipped to do the former, but not terribly equipped to do the latter.”

My heart sinks reading this. I am enough of a believer in people having the liberty to direct their own lives to feel that the state has no business going beyond giving every young person the opportunity to learn. You start forcing people to learn and there is a profound paradigm shift which corrodes the natural internally motivated urge every human being has to learn things.

Once it becomes the state’s obligation to direct rather than facilitate each person’s development, then it justifies the use of standardization and centralization to force schools to teach and students to learn. The justified use of force leads to all sorts of coercion and corruption that we see in all this teaching to the test and the inevitable cheating that is the collateral damage of that.

Then I read…

In 2008, at an annual policy conference that brought together 123 of the state’s 165 superintendents, the leaders talked about how the mission of education had shifted to the expectation that all students should be achieving at high levels.

I thought we progressive people had figured out that the goal is to offer people equal opportunity, not try to engineer equal results. That is the critique of progressivism that conservatives are always putting forward.

So here again is my ambivalence. Somehow whenever learning and human development are framed in terms of “education” and particularly in that learning venue we call “school”, it becomes a bureaucratic exercise where we are trying to do things to people rather than do things for people. The state of Connecticut is talking the language of learner-centered facilitation but accepting the obligation to have kids achieve concrete learning objectives rather than just ensure that they have the opportunity to do so. It seems like such a slippery slope!

So sill with some hope but also a great deal of concern I will continue to watch the unfolding events in Connecticut. Hoping that the benefits of making formal education more differentiated and more on the learner’s timetable will outweigh the costs of the state taking ever greater responsibility for the outcomes and direction of individual human development.

As far as I understand it, the premise of sending kids to school is that they will be given an opportunity to learn things, and in particular, the things that the larger community feels are important for kids to learn to become successful and productive adults. For many if not most people, behind that premise is the assumption that left to their own devices, kids would not learn these important things, and instead will just “get into trouble”, “stare at the TV”, “read comic books”, “play games”, etc.

Certainly in a lot of conventional thinking, kids “free play”, motivated by their own personal developmental needs (whatever they might be) is considered secondary to the formal learning that society generally compels them to undertake. And for the older youth, “playing games” is considered a waste of time better spent learning or doing something more “important”.

That assumption seems to persist in our culture despite what an observant parent or person who has studied child development will tell you, that young people are naturally motivated to learn and develop, interested in the world around them, and if not constantly redirected or otherwise kept away from those interests, continue to explore and learn voraciously. I suspect that many of us adults see our own lives as all about doing what we have to do rather than what we want to do, so whether we are projecting or applying some sort of convoluted logic, we figure that kids are not really interested in doing what they are supposed to be doing (that is learning) either.

As a parent of two now young adult kids, I certainly saw how much they were “learning machines” who loved to dive into things of interest to them. One of the main reasons their mom and I let them leave school and “unschool” during what would conventionally be their high school years, was because school (and particularly all the homework after school) had managed to turn most learning into a chore for them, rather than a passion.

Sure I had gone to school when I was a kid, including to a conventional high school as an older youth. But somehow back then in the 1960s and early 1970s it wasn’t so psychically draining. Maybe because there wasn’t nearly as much homework and there was none of the current standardized test obsession. Though in a mostly white middle-class university town there was the assumption that most kids would be going to college, I don’t recall my parents or my friends’ parents constantly trying to stage-manage our young lives toward that end. Also at my high school I don’t think they even took attendance, because I selectively would leave school during the day and miss one or more classes, but none of the school staff or my mom ever said anything about it.

For me as a kid, my life revolved around the things I did outside of school, and without the pursuit of those things that really interested me, my young life would have been mostly an exercise in compliance at school and perhaps boredom (or worse) at home. One of those compelling self-directed interests that weaves itself through my childhood, older youth and young adulthood was my fascination with the history and the “art” of war.

And that… is my extensive unschooling narrative that makes up the bulk of this piece.

Inspired by My Dad’s Experience in World War II

My dad had fought in World War II, and in the early 1960s when I was beginning to become aware of the larger world, that huge cataclysm was still burned deep into his consciousness and that of his peers. It was also still a significant part of U.S. popular culture. There were shows on prime time TV like “Combat”, war movies like “The Longest Day”, and comic books like “Sergent Rock” that I saw or read which gave me a perhaps simplistic, glamorized or nostalgic view of how it was.

So it was only a matter of time before I learned about the war and my dad’s participation in it. When asked, he was happy to tell me stories of several dramatic exploits. He had been a lieutenant in general Patton’s army, and the commanding officer of a squad of motorized light artillery that saw action in the last months of the war in the allies assault on Germany. I recall my fascination with his stories (and the other popular culture narratives) rather than any sense of fear or horror at the carnage. The grimmest of those stories was when he ordered his sergeant to shoot an unarmed prisoner, a German SS officer that refused to get on a truck with the other captured enemy soldiers. I was riveted by this story and the moral ambiguities of killing a man in cold blood, but in a circumstance where “martial law” was appropriately in force.

Like other compelling stories I was exposed to, these World War II narratives became starting points for my imagination play in the basement or the backyard of our house. Not sure whether I asked for them or my parents bought me them unsolicited, but I had a big set of three inch German and Allied plastic soldiers along with tanks, bunkers and other such stuff. I used them along with the “terrain” of our basement to recreate the dramatic battles of the War as I imagined them, based on listening to my Dad and voracious consumption of all manners of media on the subject, including history books about the real war that were part of my dad’s library, or borrowed from my school or the public library.

Discovering the American Civil War

My fascination with these massive armed conflicts broadened when I discovered the American Civil War, an event a full century previous but still very much burned into U.S. cultural mythology. Not sure what turned me on to this conflict, but I guess it was only a matter of time given my perusing of the military history sections of various libraries looking at their WWII books. Soon somehow I had two-inch plastic Civil War soldiers to play with as well and set up various blue vs gray scenarios in my basement, based on reading library books and discovering the heroically framed characters and narratives of Generals Grant, Sherman and Lee.

The American Civil War was still so much a part of popular culture that I remember being able to go to the neighborhood newsstand (a dark and wonderful place in my hometown of Ann Arbor called the “Blue Front”) and buy “Civil War Cards”, which were sold in batches of five or ten like baseball cards (including the bubble gum in every pack). They would have a picture on one side of a general, a battle, some logistical or other detail, or some particular dramatic or lurid moment, and then on the reverse side a paragraph or two describing the content of the picture.

I bought my share of cards that my allowance and other earned monies would finance, but I also set about making my own set of Civil War cards as well. I took a stack of three-by-five index cards from my dad’s stash and drew pictures in pencil on one side (including my stick-figure people) and then my own sentence or two of explanation written on the back. I can recall one of mine with the headline “Crushed!” on one side and my picture of a stick-figure soldier trapped under a broken-down cannon.

Combining History, Fantasy & Imagination in My Play

Of course my play in the basement and backyard was never a slavish reenactment of the stories I read or watched in the movies or on TV, but started from those narratives and then often involved some creative hybridization. The hybridized play scenario I remember the most was inspired at age seven by seeing the 1954 movie version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the 1961 movie based on Verne’s sequel Mysterious Island and the 1960 movie of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The latter involved 19th century archaeologists and adventurers discovering a secret plateau in South America populated by otherwise extinct dinosaurs. Verne’s two stories were driven by the submarine Nautilus and its obsessively brilliant Captain Nemo leading his own deranged personal crusade against war by trying to sink all the world’s munitions carrying ships (circa Civil War era).

Pulling elements from all three stories, and leveraging my Civil War soldiers, plastic dinosaurs, Lincoln Logs, and a “submarine” I built out of a cardboard shoe box, I created my own play scenario in our basement of Union soldiers discovering “Jinx Island” (actually the area of the basement around my dad’s desk) which was rich with metals and other minerals needed for the war effort. The problem was that the island was infested with dinosaurs and Nemo’s submarine patrolled the ocean waters between the soldiers’ home base and the island’s “mine” (the underside of my dad’s desk) they had built to extract its precious raw material. I recall spending hundreds of hours in our basement playing out any number of story scenarios in my imaginary construct.

An Emerging Interest in Strategy & Logistics

As a seven and eight year old becoming further aware of the larger world and its history, what really attracted me to these historic conflicts and the related real and imagined stories around them was the massive logistics. The moving of large armies by land and sea and the grand strategies of great generals that leveraged those logistics to the highest degree possible. I read about General Sherman’s “march to the sea” in the Civil War and how it was part of an overarching strategy concocted by Sherman and General Grant to carve up the South and destroy its ability to properly supply its armies in the field. I read about Napoleon, and millennia earlier Hannibal, marching armies across the Alps. (I recall drawn pictures in a library book of Carthaginian soldiers leading one of their war elephants up a precarious mountain pass.)

Discovering Avalon Hill’s “D-Day” & Historic Military Simulations

By age nine, my growing obsession with experiencing and re-imagining the history and logistics of military conflicts could not be satisfied by playing with toy figures in my basement. Lucky for me, by age nine (having the confidence of my parents to let me ride my bike into town to the several local toy stores) I discovered (at one of those stores) a board game called “D-Day”.

Sitting in the aisle of the store with the not yet purchased game in my lap (but enough accumulated allowance money in my pocket to purchase it) I read the rest of the words on the box cover…

Now you change World War II History in this realistic Tournament GAME by Avalon Hill

Whoa! Yes! This looked like it could be the next developmental step in pursuing my obsession.

I opened the (luckily not shrink-wrapped) box. My recollection (which may not be exactly right) was that on the top of the stack of stuff inside was a sheet of shiny cardboard with an array of half-inch squares, roughly half of them a pale blue and the rest a pale pink, with printed black numbers, letters and symbols on them. With my rudimentary knowledge of military formation indicators from reading all those military history books, I figured out that each square represented a military formation, divisions in this case. There were over a hundred on the sheet and they were cut in such a way to facilitate being easily punched out and separated.

Below that in the box were various charts on card stock and an entire booklet of rules. I was of course familiar with game rules, usually on the inside box cover or an a single sheet… but this was a booklet with pages of rules with sections titled things like “Initial Set-up”, “Movement”, “Combat” and “Victory Conditions”, with little embedded diagrams to illustrate things referenced in the section text. I read enough to understand that the game was a strategic level simulation of the Allies invasion of France in 1944.

I got more excited with each piece of box content that I carefully exhumed and examined (being well aware that I was in the store and hadn’t bought the thing yet), but the clincher was the four attached sections of heavy fiberboard in the bottom of the box that I tentatively unfolded to reveal a shiny multi-color map with a grid of hexagons imposed over it. Unfolded, it was a colorful maybe eighteen by twenty-four inch map displaying the real terrain (including coastline, cities, fortresses, rivers and mountains) of France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and southern Germany.

With great excitement and anticipation I quickly refolded the map and reclosed the box with all its contents, took it to the rather school-teacher looking older woman at the store cashier’s counter and bought the amazing thing and road it home in the pressure basket over the back wheel of my bike. I think it was probably a Saturday with nothing in particular I had to do, so when I got home I took the game down in my basement (my main imagination venue), opened it up, took all the components out and spent the next couple hours examining them all, reading and trying to figure out the rules. The more than a hundred half-inch cardboard game “counters” were printed with the designations and quantified movement and combat “factors” of historical German and Allied division-level military formations, including the American 3rd Armor division that my Dad was part of.

The Zen of Playing a Historic Simulation Strategy Game

Playing “D-Day” from beginning to end took anywhere from two to five hours. With the need to master the eight pages of rules before playing, I only occasionally had a friend willing to play the other side. So I quickly became acquainted with “solitaire” play, where I played both sides. Playing solitaire presented some interesting philosophical dilemmas for my ten-year-old mind. From what I had read about the histories of wars, one general often was successful because they disguised their intentions and then caught their counterpart by surprise. Given that I was playing both sides, there was no way I could do that. And given that at any point that I might be biased to one side or the other, how could I best manage that bias so the game played out evenly. I had to develop the discipline of taking the point of view of one side, making the best possible move all its units and resolving any battles initiated by that movement, then switching to the other side, its point of view, and then making the best possible moves for that side.

I can remember spending the most time and getting perhaps the most enjoyment out of setting up all the German units in initial positions to best defend against the Allied invasion. After playing the game a number of times (mostly solitaire) and seeing the consequences of various initial set ups I became fascinated with the question of whether there was in fact one best way to deploy all the German forces initially on the map. So I would set them up and then stare at the setup for an hour or more making slight adjustments in the positions of key units, counting out how many hexes they were from key positions they might need to reach (and thus calculating how many turns it would take) depending on which of six or seven choices of beachheads available to them the Allies chose to invade.

Wrestling With the Systems Behind the Simulation

I was not only intrigued by the historical content of the “D-Day” game, but also the components of the systems, rules and algorithms built into the game to simulate the aspects of conflict, including how a degree of uncertainty in the results of a particular military action was built into the simulation. By age 10 I was developing the capability to do some pretty abstract thinking, and this subject matter engaged that developing part of my mind.

I was intrigued by the use of very simple arithmetic abstractions to simulate key aspects of the real world situation. In “D-Day” the four key elements were the units, “zones of control”, the terrain, and the combat results table (CRT).

The capabilities of a particular unit (represented by a half-inch square of cardboard representing a real-life military formation or 15,000 to 20,000 men) was boiled down to three numbers printed on the unit’s counter – an attack factor, a defense factor, and a movement factor. The first two were the relative strength that the unit contributed to any battle it was involved in. The latter was the number of hexes of clear terrain the unit could move into in one turn. So for example, all Allied units and German tank and “mechanized” units had a movement factor of four, based on the fact that all the soldiers in these units had trucks and other vehicles for transport. German infantry and coastal defense units had a movement factor of three or two because their soldiers moved about on foot.

Every unit exerted “control” of the six hexes surrounding it. If an enemy unit entered one of those hexes it had to stop and move no further during that turn, and must attack all enemy units it was adjacent to, after all other units on its side were moved for that turn.

The effects of terrain (in “D-Day” particularly coasts, mountains, cities, fortresses and rivers) were simplified to an impact on movement (of mountains) and a multiplier applied to the combat factor of a unit based on the terrain. Though all other hexes cost one movement point to enter, and you could continue moving through additional hexes if you had unspent points in the unit’s movement factor, once you moved a unit into a mountain hex it could move no further in that turn. As to terrain’s impact on combat, the defense factor of a unit located on a city or mountain hex was doubled, and was tripled on a fortress hex. Coastlines and rivers had a similar impact on combat, but one based on the relative positions of the attacking and defending units. Units attacking across a river or a coastline had their attack factor halved.

Suffice to say that for this ten-year-old it was a revelation how, these fairly simplistic movement, terrain and combat rules, applied in their various permutations and combinations, added significantly to the strategic complexity of the game. The geography of the country being fought over, including the locations of mountain ranges, rivers and cities became particularly significant, in the overall strategy of attack and defense.

In the many hours I spent playing “D-Day” I became intimately familiar with the geography of France: its extended and not completely defensible coastline, the coastal cities and fortresses that made defending a particular section of that coastline so much easier, its difficult to traverse mountains in the south and northwest, and its numerous rivers in the northwest providing great defensive positions because they flowed mostly east to west rather than north to south. Eight years later, when I was backpacking through France, believe me, I always new where I was!

Finally, the success or failure of the Allied or German side in the game revolved around the results of the movements of each side and the subsequent battles that resulted from those movements. For the simulation to be roughly realistic, it had to give an advantage to the stronger force in a battle (as modified by the effects of terrain aiding the defense) but build in a certain amount of realistic uncertainty in the outcome. This was accomplished by a “CRT” (Combat Results Table) to be used to determine the results of a battle by adding up the combat factors of the attacker (as modified by terrain) versus those of the defender (as modified by terrain), expressing them as a ratio (1 to 2, 1 to 1, 2 to 1, etc.) and then cross-referencing that ratio with the result of a roll of a six-sided die to add that degree of realistic uncertainty to the outcome. Outcomes could involve one side or the other being forced to retreat, or part or all of the attacking of defending force being destroyed.

Having the best chance for success in a battle involved carefully planning out your moves so that units with a sufficient sum of combat factors attacked to get the best possible ratio relative to the sum of the combat factors of the units attacked. This could be maddening, because attacking units with a sum of 29 attack factors attacking defending units with 10 defense factors was still a 2 to 1 and not quite a 3 to 1 ratio, with the latter being a much better attack in favor of the attacker. You can imagine that I got really good at doing simple sums, multiplications and divisions quickly in my head.

By age 11 or so I was beginning to wrestle with these arcane thoughts about simulation systems design, a tussle that would continue and grow over the next decade of my youth and on into my adulthood.

Subsequent Games and Increasing Complexity

After my “deep dive” into the “D-Day” game, I was definitely hooked on these historical military simulations, and the Avalon Hill company produced a bunch of them that I subsequently bought or received as birthday or Christmas presents. Games for various theaters of World War II, including “Stalingrad” (the German invasion of Russia), “Afrika Corps” (the North African campaign), “Anzio” (the Allied invasion of Italy), plus games like “War in the Pacific” and “Midway” focused on the naval battles that dominated the war between the Americans and the Japanese. Other games for earlier wars, “Guns of August” and “Jutland” (World War I), “Gettysburg” (U.S. Civil War), “Waterloo” (Napoleonic Wars), and “1776” (U.S. Revolutionary War). All of these games involved a similar size of fiber board map, number of die cut cardboard units, plus similar rules for movement and combat (though somewhat different in the naval games), and similar combat results tables.

I continued to spend many hours pondering and playing these games, again occasionally with a friend but mostly on my own. The games motivated me to read more about the history of and surrounding these military simulations. Learning about the generals, their actual strategies, the historical results, and the larger context of the wars (to understand the implications if any of these conflicts had been won by the other side), made the pondering and playing that much more involving.

Given my penchant to create my own play scenarios, I even made a couple attempts at age 11 or 12 to make my own games, not based on anything historical but imagined battles. I drew my own gridded out maps with terrain and creating my sheets of units on paper with pen, pasting them on cardboard and then cutting them out. I used the same movement, combat rules and CRT as the Avalon Hill games. None were great successes, but I tried.

Exploring the array of Avalon Hill games kept me occupied and gave me a very needed diversion from three years of junior high school, where puberty, extreme shyness, mostly uninteresting curriculum, plus the aftermath of my parent’s divorce made for very difficult and trying times. Setting up a board game in my room, pondering and playing it, took me away from the real world into replaying and re-visioning the dramatic narratives of history.

When I reached my later teenage years the opportunity presented itself to take even a deeper dive. In high school, I found an entire circle of friends who were devoted to playing these military simulations, and through them became aware of other games by other game companies representing historical military simulations of larger scope and complexity. This was a group of guys that were nerds and geeks before there were personal computers and all the associated gaming and online culture to be the object of our passion. While other high school kids might have gone out on dates and such, this group would gather together weekend nights to play war simulations, either large complicated board games (behemoth successors to the Avalon Hill games I played when I was younger) or Napoleonic miniatures.

Dipping a Toe into Miniatures

The miniatures was an entire game-nerd sub-culture all its own, and a “crafty” and artistic one to boot. The games were played on a “board” that was anywhere from half to the full size of a ping-pong table. (In fact a lot of these kids lived in family homes with basement rec rooms or garages with ping-pong tables.) The “units” were miniature figures (generally one-inch or two-inch depending on the scale) made out of metal or plastic and mounted on square or rectangular stands, generally two, three, four, six or eight figures to a stand. The four main time-periods or genres for these miniature figures I was aware of were ancients (Greek, Roman, etc), Napoleonic, World War II and fantasy (with the whole Dungeons & Dragons spectrum of wizards, elves, dwarfs, haflings, men, orcs, trolls, etc, along with various sorts of mythical dragons and other critters). My experience was mostly with the Napoleonic variety.

There was a significant amount of money, research, craftsmanship and artistry involved, because you generally had to buy the unpainted figures, research the appropriate military garb for the period, then paint each figure to the appropriate specs and finally mount them to wood (usually balsa) stands. Building just one battalion of Napoleonic miniatures (maybe 20 to 30 figures either standing or mounted on horses), particularly with all the detailed painting work, could take 10 to 20 hours. And these were the days before the Internet, so the detailed pictures of uniforms, armor and other military garb needed to be looked up in books either purchased from arcane bookstores or found in the recesses of academic libraries.

I myself researched and built only one battalion of French regular Napoleonic infantry, a huge enough project from me who was not particularly craft-wise or artistically skilled with the paint brush. My friend Ned, who was a very skilled artist, built maybe a dozen units, including infantry, cavalry and cannons. He taught me how to use the metal seal from a wine bottle, cut down to a rectangle and bent to look like it was flapping in the breeze. Lucky for me, the French tricolor flag, simply strips of blue, red then white was relatively easy for me to paint.

Comparable to miniature train hobbyists, you would create battle terrain using cut pieces of foam to create hills and ridges then covered with a large sheet of green of brown felt to be the grassy or dirty ground. Rivers, streams and roads could be added by cutting strips of blue, brown or gray felt. Towns, farms, castles, fortifications or other structures could be bought or built in scale. And finally trees and bushes could be added for woods or just to place about to give that added touch. When all the figures were placed on such a decked out battlefield, it was quite a sight to see, and we spent many of a late-night hour in someone’s often poorly lit basement just admiring the tableau.

The mechanics of the miniatures games were pretty basic, you played with rulers and dice, plus charts consulted for movement ability, weapons fire, melee (hand to hand) combat and morale. In terms of simulation theory, I found the concept of morale interesting. Each unit had a morale “factor”, a number that represented the relative ability of the unit to continue fighting and not “break” (retreat or just completely disintegrate and flee the battlefield). A unit’s morale at any point was a combination of that intrinsic factor plus the condition of and around the unit. If a unit had sustained heavy losses, that decreased its morale. If an infantry unit was attacked by cavalry (and the infantry unit was not in the appropriate formation) that did so as well. Finally if another unit from the same side in the battle next to or even in line of sight of the unit in question “broke”, that would impact the morale as well. Finally to all these weighted factors the amount of a die or dice role would be added, to add that additional amount of randomness and uncertainty.

Though I probably spent at least one hundred hours playing miniatures, ultimately they did not engage me as much as some of the board games. As I mentioned earlier, my passion was for grand strategy and logistics, not the tactics and excitement of battle.

Wrestling with the Ethical Ambiguities

I can not share all this with you without expressing the ethical ambiguity, and my later discomfort at sharing my “hobby” with people I knew outside the military-simulation-game-nerd world. The kind of person I consider myself and try to present to the world is a peace-loving person who abhors war and violence. I was worried I would be perceived as a closet warmonger by my friends and acquaintances outside this small circle. That maybe at some level I was captivated by this, admittedly abstract, warmongering and megalomania.

But there I was (and there I am still at times today when I play one of these games solitaire) orchestrating an assault that, if it had been real, would kill or maim thousands of soldiers, taking the strategic point of view of the Nazi war machine or defending the Confederacy and its privilege to retain slavery. But despite these ambiguities, I continue to be gripped by the strategy and logistics of these huge human conflicts.

Diving Deeper into the Really Big Games

The sophistication and complexity of the games Avalon Hill and other games produced over the next ten years increased as my appetite for these simulations continued and my growing logistical skill and sophistication was challenged by that increasing complexity. It came to a peak in my late teens and early twenties, when my circle of fellow game nerds turned me on to a new generation of really big, really sophisticated military simulations. While other teens pursued romantic relationships and/or their sexual libidos, I lusted after these huge games with their sophisticated systems and high level of historical detail.

These mega games generally included…

1. Twenty to forty pages of rules, plus additional historic commentary, essays on game strategy, and extensive game scenario introductions

2. Hundreds or even thousands of cardboard counters representing units

3. Game boards that needed a ping-pong or other large table to lay them out on

4. Numerous charts and tables for combat, supply and other logistical considerations where numerical values and ratios were cross-referenced with a die roll (sometimes even two ten-sided dice instead of the classic single six-sided one) to add some realistic uncertainty to the results

5. Sophisticated game systems that took into account things like: separate yet integrated air, sea and land operations; supply; weather; limitations on command and control; politics and diplomacy; industrial development; technological development; and dynamics of strategic initiative flowing back and forth between the sides; partisans; and varying levels and conditions of victory that in some scenarios could allow both sides to “win” or “lose” a single playing of the game.

6. Set up time, before you even played the first “turn”, that might take an entire evening.

7. Play time for one complete game that could be one hundred hours or more (played realistically on successive days or weekends, though we rarely actually “finished” any of these big games, just played them until there was a consensus of boredom and wish to move on to something else).

8. When not played solitaire, the possibility for more than one player on each side for a distribution of command authority and the resulting need for collaboration.

During my teenage and young adulthood I probably spent over a thousand hours pouring over the maps, units, rules, charts and playing these sorts of big games, throwing myself whole-heartedly into their complexities and levels of historical detail and accuracy. Games such as…

1. “Drang Nach Osten” (In English “penetrating the East”) – A strategic level simulation of the German invasion of the Soviet Union from 1941 thru 1945.

2. “La Bataille de la Moscova” (The Battle of Moscow) – The 1812 battle of Borodino with Napoleon’s Grand Armee fighting the Russians at the gates of Moscow, with hundreds of units representing infantry regiments, cavalry squadrons and artillery batteries on a board the size of half a ping-pong table. It was one of a series of grand-tactical battle games, but on this big scale with complex rules and systems.

3. “Empires at Arms” – A strategic level simulation of the entirety of the Napoleonic wars, encompassing all of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic ocean.

4. “The World in Flames” – Perhaps the largest, most complicated and most extensive game I have ever encountered, a strategic level simulation of the entirety of World War II, playable with the extended editions from 1936 thru 1945 and beyond if necessary. The various maps, diplomatic matrix, and production “spiral” needed nearly 40 square feet of table space to deploy and represented nearly the entire Earth’s land masses and oceans. Literally thousands of units represented: all the historical division and core-level land units of over 30 participating countries; hundreds of actual ships (one counter for each, including aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, commerce raiders, and classes of submarines); and air squadrons of every type of fighter, tactical and strategic bomber, carrier and other naval aircraft, and air transports. One “turn” represented two months of game time and could take maybe ten hours to play and involved any number of separate “phases” until the turn finally ended.

So rather than having a girlfriend and going out on dates or to parties, I gained an intimate knowledge of all the capital ships in the Japanese navy of World War II, and particularly the varying capability of each of the Japanese carriers, the heart of their fleet. I had an in depth knowledge of the geography between the Confederate capital of Richmond Virginia and the Union capital of Washington D.C., including the strategic significance of the Shenandoah Valley and the wooded area they called “The Wilderness”. Every detail fired my imagination and I would often have more fun obsessing with pondering the map and setting up the game pieces in the absolute best initial positions (shades of “D-Day”) than actually playing the game.

Creating Our Own Big Games

My game-nerd friends and I had a creative side which we expressed by creating, or at least trying to create, some of these big sort of games of our own. We were inspired (or maybe better to say “driven”) to increase the scope, because the larger it got the more we felt like we were capturing the grandiosity of these huge conflicts.

To this end we focused in on the Avalon Hill game “Panzer Blitz”, which simulated tactical combat between German and Russian armies during World War II. Each game set came with several hundred units representing platoons of infantry, tanks and artillery, enough to form perhaps a full battalion of troops on each side. The game came with the requisite rules and charts, but also a set of three 9 by 24 inch “modular” maps that included terrain in such a way that they could be rearranged side by side or end to end with the roads and rivers connecting.

We quickly realized that we could actually combine multiple game sets to make for bigger battles. We even figured out how to photocopy and build additional copies of the modular game boards so we could create huge game maps that again filled a ping-pong table or the floor of my friend’s family’s basement rec-room. We researched the organizational hierarchies of platoons, battalions, regiments and brigades within German and Russian infantry and armored formations and experimented with various scenarios of throwing these formations against each other across the simulated rolling hills of western Russia.

We even played a “blind” variation of the game, trying to create more of the realistic “fog of war”. We would have two identical boards, separated by some sort of a divider (perhaps a couch in our friends rec room) to hide each player’s “board” from the other. A third person “judge” would determine which of your opponents units (infantry, tanks, artillery, etc.) you could see on your board based on lines of sight given intervening woods and hills. It was generally more fun for the two players but perhaps a boring evening for the person who wore the “judge” hat.

The Unschooling Legacy of All this Time Spent

So first of all, my acknowledgement (and perhaps condolences) for those of you who have slogged your way through this very very long piece. It just felt like it took this extensive a narrative to capture the full scope – length, breadth and depth – of my “deep dive” over some 13 years into this obsession framed as a “hobby”. If nothing else it documents an important and unusual thread in my young life that is still today part of what make me uniquely me. If I happen to have grandkids someday, they can read about their crazy grandparent!

But I think it also provides an extensive personal account of thousands of hours of researching, collaborating, pondering, plotting, preparing, and “playing”. All completely motivated by my own quest to understand some of the arcane and detailed knowledge around just one of a myriad of human endeavors. Leveraging at least somewhat unfettered personal curiosity and passion for learning. I suspect I spent several thousand hours during my teenage years in this personal pursuit, and I suspect undergoing a lot more profound deep learning and personal development than that facilitated by my formal schooling.

Looking back in retrospect four decades later, we were driven by a fascination, even a “love” of the history, the strategy, the logistics as well as the systems we would need (in terms of maps, units, scenarios, charts and rules) to simulate military history, employ those strategies, and manipulate those logistics.

As I wrote at the top of this piece, in a lot of conventional thinking, kids “free play”, motivated by their own personal developmental needs, is considered secondary to the formal learning that society generally compels them to undertake. This conventional thinking extends to older youth, “playing games” instead of learning or doing something considered more “important”.

I certainly did not submerge my entire youth playing military simulation board games. There were other “unschool” type “deep dive” pursuits I was involved in extensively in my teen years, like spending several thousand hours in mounting and participating in theater productions or spending ten weeks backpacking through Western Europe.

I also spent the required 6000 or so hours in school during my adolescence, taking a not so deep dive into a range of subjects that the State of Michigan wanted me to learn. There were interesting classes, books and teachers along the way (experiences I learned from and was glad to have had), but like most bureaucratic exercises (not designed to be personalized), looking back I’d say that at least half those hours spent were not the best use of my time. In retrospect, it might have been better spent invested in one of my two “deep dives”, or maybe indulging in a third or forth in some other area.

Coming back to the present, one of the things that sets me apart in my “day job” from other people who wear the hat of business or systems analyst is my ability to synthesize, format and present information in a clear, concise and compelling format, using color and various formatting constructs creatively to aid in the easiest, most intuitive capture and presentation of the material to the reader or viewer. The thousands of hours I spent on my obsessive “hobby” acquainted me with over a hundred different games and their presentations of a range of systems and content information in artifacts such as maps, units, charts, rule manuals, diagrams and more. In playing the games, often many times, I had to really use all these artifacts and developed an extensive sense which worked better than others and why. This included the use of tables, charts, formatting of text components, and the use of color to add meaning rather than just make things more “colorful”.

I can only speculate on what other unique skills I could have brought to my adult life if I had had the opportunity to control more of my own time. Being able to more selectively choose the elements of the education the State of Michigan provided that were of most interest to me, so I could spend more of my time and psychic energies taking the “deep dives” that are so much about who I uniquely am today.

So like my current employer (and since my personal cataclysm of a bad bicycle accident two years ago followed ten weeks later by removal of a three-centimeter blood clot from my skull) I am all about my own health maintenance. For me, that maintenance includes eating a plant-based, whole-food, low-fat diet; leading as balanced a life as I possibly can; and maximizing the joy while minimizing the stress in my life.

Where I find a great deal of that joy these days is when (literally and metaphorically) I have my feet under me and I am moving forward, rather than sitting on my ass! Though I have what is conventionally a very sedentary job (spending the bulk of ones day sitting in front of ones computer or in a meeting) I don’t accept that conventional framing. I am up, on my feet and moving about as much as I can wrangle at my job site during my work day.

That day starts with a half-hour walk to the train station for a short train ride to work. Particularly it is cool and crisp and gets my blood flowing and my brain processing better than any cup of coffee.

At my desk I have found I can invert one of those empty 11 by 17 cardboard ten-ream paper boxes in front of my computer monitor, set my keyboard and mouse on it, and do much of the work at my computer standing up rather than sitting down. It helps here that I’m left-handed actually, since to make room for my mouse on the left side of the box I can move the keyboard to the right with the keypad dangling off the right side (since I don’t use the keypad). I know there are expensive desk arrangements that raise and lower, but this works quite well, is simple to do and undo, and costs nothing. I generally can spend several hours a day working in this upright position, even able to move my feet in place while I do so.

Over the past few years I have acquired the ability to facilitate meetings over the phone, particularly those where all the other participants are on the phone as well. Many of the meetings and work sessions I am called on to facilitate are of this sort, involving co-workers calling in from all over California or the entire country. Even when I’m not the facilitator, many of the other meetings I participate in are such conference calls as well.

For all these meetings that I participate in on the phone, I put on my wireless headset, and since it has about a forty foot range, I can walk around the “neighborhood” around my cube while I am engaged in the meeting. I can pace, look out the nearby windows, refill my water glass in the kitchen and generally keep my body in motion. If it is a “web meeting”, where I need to see what’s on my computer screen (or I am typing things on-screen for others to see and comment on) then at worst I can stand in front of my monitor with my mouse and keyboard on box arrangement.

This works so much better for me than sitting in a meeting room, where my brain tends to shut down and I have to fight with dozing off (if I’m not the meeting facilitator). I think up to eighty percent of the meetings I participate in I am able to do over the phone.

Then I build into my day generally three twenty-minute walks around my work campus. This is where I do all my best strategic thinking, how I should proceed on a particular project, what’s on the critical path of my workload, or what I have to be most cognizant of in a work session I’m about to lead. When I am walking briskly I have the maximum blood flow to my brain and therefor my mind is working optimally. When I am outdoors and can “look long” at distant objects that somehow promotes more “longsighted” strategic thinking. I tend to be more “shortsighted” when I am staring at cube walls only a few feet in front of me. Sometimes I will even do part of a meeting, where I am basically just listening in, on my cell phone and headset while I take one of my walks.

I have found that my body is my avatar and my corporeal orientation is the metaphor that drives my metaphysical orientation to the world. So if I am “off my ass”, “on my feet” and even “moving forward” physically, it seems those metaphors play out in the work that I am doing as well. I get a lot of kudos on my meeting facilitation skills and the quality of the documents I create, and I am convinced that leveraging these metaphors helps me do so.

It has come time for Unitarian Universalists to admit that we have honored free thought over love as an institutional commitment, and to consider the possibility that our obsession with personal freedom of belief has caused our organizations spiritual harm. We have developed a congregational culture that honors intellectual dominance over love and tenderness. We are brilliantly conversant when voicing opinion, but do not know how to engage each other as vulnerable persons in need of hope, grace and healing, leaving it to the self-identified victims in our congregations to motivate and then control most discussion of what it means to love, to welcome and to accept.

There are probably less than 700,000 “UUs” in the United States today (I among them), and not much more than a million in the entire world, and the denomination has soul-searched over the last several decades to find the missing keys to significant growth. The denomination has particularly struggled to gain adherents beyond its white Anglo-Saxon Protestant roots into communities of color. UUism is often criticized as a religion of the head rather than the heart, and thus of limited appeal to most people.

From the Wikipedia article on “Unitarian Universalism”…

Unitarian Universalism is a religion characterized by support for a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning”. Unitarian Universalists do not share a creed; rather, they are unified by their shared search for spiritual growth and by the understanding that an individual’s theology is a result of that search and not obedience to an authoritarian requirement. Unitarian Universalists draw on many different theological sources and have a wide range of beliefs and practices.

Historically, both Unitarianism and Universalism have roots in the Christian faith. Contemporary Unitarian Universalists espouse a pluralist approach to religion, whereby the followers may be atheist, deist, theist, polytheist, or have no label at all.

My Take on the Essence of UUism

As a white male UU who does not believe in deities but believes that consciousness continues from life to life (so not your conventional atheist either) I agree that UUism at its best is a mix of both heart and head. But I disagree with Weinstein that, “Love is more important than freedom”. I see these two concepts together as being at the essence of what UUism is all about, at least for me. My dear friend Toni, who led the service when my partner Sally and I married, embodied that essence in a poem she had written that she read at the conclusion of the service, “Love that holds close with open arms”.

Some of us fall short in our humanity because we fail to embrace our fellow people with love and respect, we fail to hold them close. But then many (if not most of us) who participate in that positive embrace do so with closed rather than open arms. We expect and even demand that the people we love believe and behave the same as we do.

“Love that holds close with open arms” to me is the best of UUism, and our denomination’s “ministry” perhaps to the larger human community. It is having the love and forbearance to give each other the liberty to be who we are, with the hope, but not the expectation, that we will find common ground and community together. It represents a true commitment, in both head and heart, to egalitarianism and moving beyond any sort of “us and them” hierarchical thinking.

Not that we UUs always succeed at practicing this egalitarianism, this love with liberty, that we preach! We tend to be uncomfortable with people who don’t define themselves as political progressives or liberals, at least implicitly creating a “Republican free zone” with our attitudes.

But to our credit, like the Quakers, UUs are big proponents of democratic process in society at large and in how we run our own congregations. A longtime joke about UUs in this regard says that when a good Christian dies they go to heaven, but when a good UU dies they go to a discussion about heaven. Behind this joke is the fact that to a truly observant UU (like the Quakers), a well-run meeting (that encourages the active participation of all participants as a circle of equals) is a sacrament and essentially a sort of worship service.

UUism at Its Best with Its Older Youth

In my opinion, nowhere is that commitment to egalitarianism and “love that holds close with open arms” more evident than in my own experience of the YRUU older youth camps and conferences that my own kids participated in at the UU deBenneville Pines facility north of Redlands CA and other Southern California UU venues. (See my piece, “Camps, Cons & Compasses” for more details.) I cannot think of another older youth program that allows young people such freedom to govern their own events and their own community. I can think of no other denomination that has more egalitarian “right relations” between adults and youth.

Subject to Elitism

But as Reverend Weinstein points out in her piece, UUs can suffer from an intellectual elitism while at the same time championing egalitarian ideals.

Being a small denomination that many people have never even heard of, we UUs tend perhaps to have a bit of an inferiority complex (the underside of elitism) and are quick to note famous Unitarians include key figures of the white mostly Protestant intelligentsia of Britain and particularly the U.S. Four U.S. Presidents – John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft – plus America’s second First Lady Abigail Adams (a women’s rights advocate in her own right) and even our current President’s mom, Stanley Ann Dunham. Great writers and figures in the arts like Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, E.E. Cummings, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Pete Seeger, Rod Serling, Frank Lloyd Wright and Paul Newman. Philosophers and social commentators like John Locke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, John Dewey and Buckminster Fuller. Other social activists and scientists like Paul Revere, Horace Mann and Clara Barton, Linus Pauling, Joseph Priestley, and Albert Schweitzer.

UU Roots in the Life and Work of Michael Servetus

Perhaps there is no better embodiment of the strengths and weaknesses of UUism, than in the life and work of the man credited as the progenitor of the Unitarian side of UUism, Michael Servetus. He was a brilliant scholar, Renaissance man and challenger of conventional wisdom about God and religious authority. Here is a paragraph from his extensive biography in Wikipedia…

Michael Servetus (also Miguel Servet or Miguel Serveto also Miguel De Villanueva or Michel De Villeneuve; 29 September 1511 – 27 October 1553) was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation. His interests included many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages. He is renowned in the history of several of these fields, particularly medicine and theology. He participated in the Protestant Reformation, and later developed a nontrinitarian Christology. Condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike, he was arrested in Geneva and burnt at the stake as a heretic by order of the Protestant Geneva governing council.

Apparently, Servetus was as insufferable as he was brilliant. From what I’ve read he felt that no one was his intellectual equal, including his theological nemesis John Calvin. Calvin’s theology is arguably one of the key threads of American culture. (See my piece “American Calvin”.)

A great book on Servetus’ life (that reads at times like a Dan Brown novel) is Out of the Flames. Episodes from his life included talking his way of a guilty plea in his first trial for heresy. The second time he was caught, tried and convicted, but he end up escaping from prison, going underground, and reemerging with a completely new identity to become a renowned cartographer and doctor under that new identity. Finally, tempting fate with his usual chutzpah, he decided to drop in on a service being led by his arch nemesis. Calvin recognized him, had him arrested, tried and burned at the stake, with the heretical text he had written tied to his leg.

In the simplest terms, Servetus challenged the conventional Christian belief that Jesus Christ was an aspect of God and essentially believed that he was a regular human being like the rest of us. Jesus was not our “lord” in some hierarchical sense, but more an egalitarian exemplar of what all human beings could aspire to be. Even today, such a belief would be considered by many Christians to be very heretical.

Here’s Wikipedia on Servetus’ legacy…

In recent years Michael Servetus has also been credited with being one of the modern forerunners of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience in the Western world. A renowned Spanish scholar on Servetus’ work, Ángel Alcalá, identified the radical search for truth and the right for freedom of conscience as Servetus’ main legacies, rather than his theology. The Polish-American scholar, Marian Hillar, has studied the evolution of freedom of conscience, from Servetus and the Polish Socinians, to John Locke and to Thomas Jefferson and the American Declaration of Independence. According to Hillar: “Historically speaking, Servetus died so that freedom of conscience could become a civil right in modern society.”

That freedom of conscience is what I see as the synergy of love and liberty embodied in “love that holds close with open arms” and the ministry of Unitarian-Universalism at its best.

What happened in the early 20th century I lay out in my previous piece, “Education and the Cult of Efficiency”, based on a book by the same name written by Raymond Callahan and published in 1962. In his book Callahan documents how an educational “crisis” was fabricated at the turn of the 20th century for a range of reasons, starting with selling newspapers and magazines. Says Callahan…

The material achievements of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century were responsible for two developments which were to have a great affect on American society and education after 1900. One of these was the rise of business and industry to a position of prestige and influence, and America’s subsequent saturation with business-industrial values and practices. The other was the reform movement identified historically with Theodore Roosevelt and spearheaded by the muckraking journalists. (pg 1)

Read Callahan’s book (or at least my piece summarizing it) for all the historical detail. But essentially, to blunt a media assault on education for its supposed business inefficiency, the U.S. public education system did its best to adopt business values that trumped academic values to better “prove” its efficient use of public funds to teach America’s youth a pragmatic curriculum that would make them more effective worker-bees for the burgeoning American industrial society. This also led to letting people trained in business management, rather than educators, take the reins of the U.S. public education system. Says Callahan…

The tragedy itself was fourfold: that educational questions were subordinated to business considerations; that administrators were produced who were not, in any true sense, educators; that a scientific label was put on some very unscientific and dubious methods and practices; and that an anti-intellectual climate, already prevalent, was strengthened. As the business-industrial values and procedures spread into the thinking and acting of educators, countless educational decisions were made on economic or on non-educational grounds. (pg 246)

Given that school teachers were mostly women, a male-centered society in the first half of the 20th century was comfortable accepting a cadre of male business executives increasingly assuming positions of control over these female teachers, and accepted those executives lack of credentials as educators. These were business trained administrators like Franklin Bobbitt, Leonard Ayres, and Elwood Cubberley, who according to Calahan…

Represented a new type of school administrator… They not only manifested a great interest in and admiration for businessmen and industrialists, but they resembled these men in their behavior. They were active in introducing and using business and industrial procedures and terminology in education, and they centered their attention almost exclusively upon the financial, organizational, and mechanical problems… And they in turn as leaders played a leading role in shaping the new “profession” of educational administration and, through it, the American schools. They did this through their speaking and writing and teaching, and they did it also by setting personal examples of the way to succeed in education. (pg 180)

With businessmen at the helm of the education system, is it any wonder that by mid century that system had transitioned into a huge market for business. Not coincidentally, this was the era when big corporate educational foundations still active today were launched, like the Carnegie Foundation (1905) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1913). Cubberley famously said…

Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specification for manufacturing come from the demands of the twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specification laid down. This demands good tools, specialized machinery, continuous measurement of production to see if it is according to specifications, the elimination of waste in manufacture, and a large variety in the output. (pg 152)

American business was more than happy to provide those “tools” to a growing public education “market” for textbooks, testing protocols, consulting and more. States assumed every increasing control of education and, particularly after the Sputnik crisis in 1957, ever increasing standardization and government funding. Paul Peterson, director of Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard Kennedy School, used the term “Education-Industrial Complex” (borrowed from President Eisenhower’s 1961 speech coining the term “military-industrial complex”) in a 2008 commentary Peterson wrote…

Around 1970 or thereabouts, the educational-industrial complex was hammered into place: School boards gave teachers collective bargaining rights. State governments assumed greater responsibility for financing the schools. The courts instructed schools on the civil liberties of their students. Regulations multiplied. America gained a federal Department of Education. And state and federal dollars poured into the system.

According to education blogger Dave Chandler from his piece “More of the Same: Obama and Schools”…

Our ‘education’ establishment is very much about preserving a multi-hundred-billion-dollar spending machine. Corporations make tremendous profit from selling high tech hardware and software to virtually every school district in the nation. Textbook companies and testing companies and education consulting companies and pension investment advising companies and public relations firms and bond dealers… Then there are the politicians who get campaign contributions from the above mentioned special interests and the ‘educrat’ administrators who make hundred thousand dollar a year salaries.

Other than defense, where else is their such a market with so few paying customers (the 50 states and now the federal government) with so much money to spend? Some of the biggest corporations that have made great profits tapping into this market throughout the century include Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Pearson PLC, and Scholastic.

And is there any wonder that there is great corporate support for ever more standardized curriculum, pedagogical approaches and testing protocols, pushing us toward ever more educational decision-making authority being wielded by a small well-heeled group of governmental customers that sellers curry favor with. It all contributes to a stable and growing educational marketplace. Such a deal!

In the meantime there is increasing evidence that all the “reform” efforts of the past 30 years have done little or nothing to improve the educational outcomes for our kids. But the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, more recently joined by the Gates Foundation and Broad Foundation, go on pushing for educational standardization.

Certainly if students and teachers were left to their own devices to develop curricula, the market monopoly of the big education corporations might be in jeopardy. One could make the argument that there is plenty of free curriculum on the Internet that teachers and/or students could access instead of purchasing and lugging around all those big heavy textbooks, constantly being updated to accommodate the perhaps planned obsolescence of the latest standards revision as part of our seemingly perpetual reform.

I must admit to not having done enough research on all this yet, but I’m really concerned that in all this focus on for-profit charter schools and private school vouchers we have missed the real “corporatization” of education. It may well be a horse that left the barn a long time ago!

So as we see from the Occupy movement, the answers to educational transformation probably will not come from either the feds or the states, both of which have for generations been in bed with the business community when it comes to public education. Change is going to have to come from the grassroots, challenging the longstanding centralization of educational power in state capitols plus the more recent efforts at increasing control by the federal Department of Education. And by challenging educational standardization of curriculum further enforced by high-stakes testing.

Given the huge power structure arrayed above us, perhaps the best we can do initially is to find every opportunity to just say “no”. Be, to paraphrase former U.S. President George Bush Sr, “a thousand points of no”! Some initial signs of these thousand points are certainly teachers fighting back against increasing state control of their profession and teachers and parents using chartering and other statutory mechanisms in some instances to “take over” their local school.

Also a bell-weather I hope is California governor Brown & state schools superintendent Torlakson who so far are saying no to continuing state participation in the federal No Child Left Behind program and its coercive Department of Education waivers that are being put forward by Arne Duncan as an alternative. Brown, who is a pragmatic administrator with a “small is beautiful” orientation, may well grasp that standardization and high-stakes testing (though adding profits to school vendors) are not adding more value to actual schools.

So my hope is that by saying no in enough contexts, and perhaps with the extra push of tight budgets, we can back away from our current business-friendly one-size-fits-all approach to giving our young people opportunities to learn. There are plenty of compelling alternative approaches to learning out their that remain sidelined to all but the most economically advantaged among us because they can’t pass muster against the current narrowly framed educational standards.

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 working definition of “adultism” is…

The disrespect and discrimination against young people (simply because they are not adults) that exists beyond the legitimate responsibility of adults – parents, teachers and others – to provide guidance and a developmentally appropriate environment for young people to mature to adulthood. The abuse of adult privilege beyond what is legitimate adult stewardship of youth.

The applicable definition of the word “stewardship” in Wiktionary is…

The act of caring for or improving with time.

And in Wikipedia…

Stewardship is an ethic that embodies responsible planning and management of resources. The concept of stewardship has been applied in diverse realms, including with respect to environment, economics, health, property, information, and religion, and is linked to the concept of sustainability. Historically, stewardship was the responsibility given to household servants to bring food and drinks to a castle dining hall. The term was then expanded to indicate a household employee’s responsibility for managing household or domestic affairs. Stewardship later became the responsibility for taking care of passengers’ domestic needs on a ship, train and airplane, or managing the service provided to diners in a restaurant. The term continues to be used in these specific ways, but it is also used in a more general way to refer to a responsibility to take care of something belonging to someone else.

My own current working definition, as I see the concept applied to adult interaction with young people, is…

Facilitating a person’s development by creating an enriched environment, including keeping them safe until they can adequately fend for themselves.

So what does this look like in the real world? My first reaction is that I know it when I see it. But I think it is a useful and interesting exercise to try to call out some examples. So here is a list of ten random examples that came to me, framed in terms of parenting (but broadly applicable to teachers and other adult-youth mentors as well). I’m going to first call out an instance of what I would consider legitimate adult stewardship of youth (particularly of younger youth) and then a related behavior that I would say crosses the line into adultism.

1. Stewardship: Making the effort to live in a safe neighborhood by a park so my kids (8 and 10) can go out and play on their own and walk or ride their bike to neighborhood friends’ houses or local stores and libraries. Adultism: Requiring my kids to clear everything they do with me and exercising veto power over which friends they can see based on my own projection of who my kids are and therefore what sort of person they should be playing with.

2. Stewardship: Buying basic “imagination” toys like blocks, human figures, vehicles, Tinker Toys and other construction toys that I know from observing my kids that they love to play with. Then creating a space in the house where my kids can play to their hearts content with these toys. Adultism: Conditioning all toy purchases to my kids getting good grades in school or successfully executing what I have defined as good behavior.

3. Stewardship: Having only healthy food in the house and no “junk food”. Adultism: Requiring my kids eat healthy food (and maybe a dessert as a reward for eating ones meal) but then eat a fair amount of junk food myself in front of them.

4. Stewardship: Letting my kids watch the TV shows they want, except for those with graphic violence or adult sexual themes, but taking the time to explain the reason for those prohibitions and encouraging rather than discouraging dialogue with the kids on these rules. Then to help them develop their media savvy, noting the shows they watch, and particularly any commercials, to point out my take on persuasion tactics and underlying values conveyed or implied. Adultism: Exercising complete control over everything they watch and explaining that control only by such statements as “because it is inappropriate” or “because I say so”, without further explanation or without accepting further questions or discussion.

5. Stewardship: Putting plastic safety plugs in all the power outlets so my very young kids do not accidentally electrocute themselves, and generally removing breakable objects from low tables and shelves that they can reach. Adultism: Leaving these plugs and breakable objects within my very young kids’ reach and then constantly chiding them not to touch them and even punishing them when they do.

6. Stewardship: Not letting my kids use knives and other dangerous kitchen utensils until they have been taught how to use them and demonstrate a sufficient level of mastery to be safe. But then offering that teaching as soon as they show interest. Adultism: Teaching my kids to use kitchen knives but constantly badgering them with repeated instruction (beyond what you would do with an adult you have taught) even after they have demonstrated their ability to be safe.

7. Stewardship: Giving my kids opportunities to go to libraries, museums, galleries, movies, concerts, sporting events, based on my perception of their interest and as feasible, but respecting their right to say no. Adultism: Taking my kids to venues that I feel they should go to even after they indicate from previous visits that they are not interested, and even chiding them for their lack of that interest.

8. Stewardship: Being available as much as feasible to drive my kids to friends houses and other locations they want to go to but cannot get to on their own. Adultism: Maintaining tight control over who my kids visit and places they go beyond concerns for their safety. Dismissing their requests that don’t fit neatly into my ideal schedule without discussion or compromise.

9. Stewardship: Making sure my kids demonstrate an ability to swim before letting them play or swim in the deep end of a pool on their own. Adultism: Making an arbitrary judgment that a kid is “too young” without actually observing their ability.

10. Stewardship: Facilitating a group of young people (like Scouts, a youth group associated with a religious denomination, or something less formal) to follow a predetermined agenda based on the conventional expectations for the group. Adultism: Not seeking the consent or at the very least advice of the young people in the group in regards to the group’s agenda. Continuing to control every aspect of the group even when the young people indicate that they can exercise some or all of that control themselves.

Reviewing the above list, I acknowledge there are some gray areas here. My point is not to preach but to pose some examples that I hope will clarify my conception of both “stewardship” versus adultism.

As always I am interested in your thoughts, and I acknowledge that I am still formulating specifics on this dichotomy in my own thinking. I put my thoughts forward for the purpose of facilitating a continuing thoughtful discussion on this very important subject.

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.