In statehouses and cities across the country, battles are raging over the direction of education policy—from the standards that will shape what students learn to how test results will be used to judge a teacher’s performance.

Students and teachers, in passive resistance, are refusing to take and give standardized tests. Protesters have marched to the White House over what they see as the privatization of the nation’s schools. Professional and citizen lobbyists are packing hearings in state capitols to argue that the federal government is trying to dictate curricula through the use of common standards.

New advocacy groups, meanwhile, are taking their fight city to city by pouring record sums of money into school board races.

Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized, observers say, for rarely before has an institution that historically is slow to change been forced to deal with so much change at once.

I take heart in reading this because it appears that there may finally be emerging a profound challenge to the governance model of public education, an institution designed nearly 200 years ago to be governed in a highly centralized structure by a small powerful elite at the top of its hierarchy of control. Parents, teachers and (heaven forbid) students have never really been part of the governance structure of our public school system. Could there be some danger now that this situation could finally begin to change?

The Massive Human Development Control Machine

As a lifetime science-fiction fan, I imagine a dystopian sci-fi pulp classic about a mad scientist who invents a machine so powerful that it can control the growth and development of millions of people for more than a decade of each of their lives. By the time people are released from the machine’s control their minds have been reshaped in significant ways. Perhaps the mad scientist is even a benevolent megalomaniac, with the naivety and hubris to think, like the psychiatrist in Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi novella The Lathe of Heaven, that he is capable of wielding such a powerful tool for the betterment of humanity. Perhaps a consortium with a different agenda and worldview eventually seize the device to implement their own vision for how human development should be managed, as in the TV show Alias. Then finally the regular people rise up, like in V for Vendetta, and say that they are not going to take it any more, they will no longer let some cabal control their development.

Getting back to the less fantastical but still at times awe inspiring reality of the real world, it seems to be one of the continuing features of civilization that massive institutions are created and perpetuate themselves through the decades or even centuries. Institutions that end up being controlled by a small elite, possibly with some altruistic purposes, but exercising control over a large number of other people.

Is the public school system in the U.S., launched nearly two centuries ago by Horace Mann and a progressive political and intellectual elite, such an institution? By my reading of history, it was launched for the mostly altruistic reason of facilitating the “melting pot” to mold young immigrants into the educated citizenry needed to grow a successful republic. But also for a less savory reason, to maintain the power and values of a Protestant elite faced with the changing demographics of a country experiencing massive immigration by Catholics and Jews.

Whatever your take on its history, it seems clear to me that our public school system today is a massive institution where the actual participants in the educational process – students, their parents, teachers and even principals – have little or no say on how that institution is run. Attendance, What is learned, when it’s learned, how it’s learned and from whom, plus the general rules of engagement and behavior between school participants, has all been previously decided by faraway bureaucrats in the state capitol. Decided by expert “educrats” – that students, parents, teacher and principals, who spend much of their lives in our schools will never meet – that are controlling the development of over 50 million young Americans during 13 formative years of their youth.

Certainly many of us who are citizens, parents, young people, teachers and principals believe in the expertise of these educrats to identify the educational “best practices” and implement them in every school around the country. Those experts have been appointed by legislators that we have elected to represent our interests in building an effective education system. And there is a certain democratic equality logic to ensuring that every young person is required to go to school and required to learn the same agreed upon facts and skills. In concept at least, equality and fairness is maintained by mandating that every student learn the same thing in the same way. That way, if something different is happening at a school anywhere you know it must be wrong and should be corrected to get back to fairness. At least from a bureaucratic point of view, allowing education to be differentiated puts it in danger of becoming unequal.

The Problem Statement

So in our society’s transition from hierarchies of control by elites to a more egalitarian circle of equals, the challenge is to transform the governance of these huge institutions, like our public education system, that have for decades or even centuries chugged along practicing the old authoritarian model of decision making. In my opinion, using one’s resources and energies battling over what is being taught in school and how it is being taught is just a distraction! Once a more appropriate, more democratic decision making process can evolve in our schools, all other needed change can happen organically, based on the collected and shared wisdom and energy of all school participants – students, their parents, teachers, principals and other administrators.

Just Say No

From my life’s experience, plus my reading of history and political theory, the best way to challenge a huge bureaucratic institution and force it to transform and evolve is to resist its machinations in every possible way. Certainly an institution like our public school system can attempt to demand compliance by students, parents, teachers, principals and other school administrators with mandatory attendance, curriculum, methods, high-stakes testing, and pay for performance based on that testing. But bottom line, these are our schools, part of our common shared assets, managed by people we have elected, and the whole point is for them to add value to our lives. It is our choice to accept the services they offer or not.

The Argument for Compliance

I think there are still many among us who believe that in our complex contemporary society our development should be controlled from above, for at least five main reasons that I’m aware of.

1. Young people, generally referred to by the mostly pejorative term of “children”, are not capable of making any important decisions about their own lives, particularly their own development.

2. Teachers are mostly women, who in a male-centric society, historically and still to a large degree today, are not seen as appropriate decision-makers on how to design and manage a learning environment. It’s the same thing with cooking. Though most cooking is done by women, most professional cooks (“chefs” we call the best of them) are men. Female teachers need to be directed by male experts.

3. Using that same sort of women cook but men are cooks argument, parents, who facilitate the development of their children in many ways, are incapable of facilitating their education, and need to leave this sophisticated task to experts. Often there is an underlying belief here that most parents, since generally not formally trained in parenting skills, are incompetent. (It makes sense that a society that is obsessed with formal training assumes people without formal training are incapable.)

4. There is one best way to perform any function, including education. Once the consensus of properly trained experts defines that one best way, everyone else simply needs to be directed to execute that “best practice” over and over again. This is the logic of the assembly line of the industrial age in which our public school system emerged, where Henry Ford said, “You can have the Model T in any color as long as it’s black”.

5. The only way to ensure that public education in a democratic society is equally available to all people, given the massiveness of the institution and all the bias and privilege that still drives our society, is to mandate from on high that it will be exactly the same for everyone. Differentiated and non-mandatory learning is in too much danger of becoming unequal.

Cue the Rebellion – A Spectrum of Dissent

Each of these arguments that sway some or even most of us and prop up our hierarchical education system and its authoritarian governance can be challenged by the rest of us using forms of non-compliance, forms of “just say no”.

I read in the article referenced at the top of this piece…

“Every school reform has been about centralization or decentralization, and this is the first wave of federal centralization,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, pointing to the No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, and federal support for common standards and tests. “Now we’re waiting to see … whether there’s a rebellion against it.”

Okay… cue the rebellion. Everyone can do their part, different actions based on your vantage point. Some examples from the article.

1. From a superintendent of schools, Joshua Starr, in Montgomery County MD. If he’s not ready to say “no” he can at least say “wait”…

Though he supports the “right” standardized tests, Mr. Starr has become something of a hero to the anti-testing movement after calling in December for a three-year moratorium on standardized testing until the common core is fully in place… “I’ve got a big mouth, and I’m not afraid to open it. One of the things that concerns me is not enough practitioners speak up publicly,” he said… As policymakers, “we are not focused on the actual problems,” he said. “We still fall into this quick-fix, silver-bullet mentality.”

2. Former teacher Glenda Ritz defeated a pro-standards state superintendent in Indiana and is insisting on dialog and a slowdown on standardization fever…

He was booted out of office after just one term, losing to Democrat Glenda Ritz, a common-standards skeptic, in a surprising about-face for a state whose voters tilt to the GOP… And now, state lawmakers have voted to slow down implementation of the common core in a bill that was headed last week to the desk of Gov. Mike Pence… “There’s a dialogue in the education community here about the standards themselves. That dialogue did not get to happen in 2010.”

3. Flat out refusal by parents and teachers to support a process they have little or no say in, echoing our Revolutionary War challenge of “taxation without representation”…

In Chicago, parent and teacher groups are protesting plans to close a record 53 schools. In Charlotte, N.C., and Providence, R.I., students, parents, and other activists have dressed up as zombies to protest standardized testing. Teachers in a Seattle high school in January refused to give district tests.

4. Calls for resistance on social networks getting heard by supporters of standardization. (Facebook tends to be one of my venues for my “ministry” against educational standardization)…

Blogs and Twitter have helped carry those messages beyond those particular cities… “There’s vastly more screaming in every imaginable medium,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank that favors charter schools, as well as common academic standards and testing.

5. Though local school boards seem more and more irrelevant these days as more and more real decision making about education policy is being made at the state or increasingly the national level, still resistance to mandates from above needs to come from every level in the hierarchy…

Local school board races, which usually draw little attention, are now on the front lines—including in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Nashville, Tenn.

6. Not quite a “no” but a “not yet” from a teachers union leader, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers…

Just last week, Ms. Weingarten, in a speech in New York City, called for a temporary halt to all high stakes tied to the common core to give educators time to implement the standards.

7. Urging federal legislators to not take further action on education, lessening their role as a centralizing force. Perhaps an area where Congressional gridlock is a good thing, or at least has a silver lining…

At the same time, education is caught in a push for state and federal budget austerity and faces a Congress so gripped by gridlock that some educators are wondering if the withering Elementary and Secondary Education Act will ever get rewritten.

8. The simplest vocalization of “no”…

As he addressed the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was booed for his stands on a number of issues, including testing.

9. Parents and other citizens lobbying their legislators against standardized testing…

In one recent example, in Texas, critics upset in part with [educational publishing company] Pearson are trying to persuade lawmakers to scale back standardized testing in a state that served as inspiration for the NCLB law.

10. All told enough of us to invoke the “Hundredth Monkey Effect”…

“I do feel like we are at a point where large numbers of people are completely fed up,” said Pamela Grundy, a parent of a 6th grader in Charlotte, N.C., and a co-founder of Parents Across America, which is fighting high-stakes testing and other “corporate reforms”.

A Determined Insurgency

From my reading of history including the wisdom of anthropologist Margaret Mead, a determined insurgency, even if it is just a minority, is almost always successful eventually in transforming things. If we have the courage and stamina not to comply whenever the opportunity presents itself, I believe that the authoritarian educational governance model, which is the real culprit behind all this drive for standardization, will become so obvious and onerous that it will not be able to sustain itself. That is my hope at least.

Childhood in Dedham, Massachusetts

Jane right with brother John left and neighborhood friend

Jane Roberts was born in Dedham Massachusetts, outside Boston on December 29, 1923 to her father George Roberts and her mother Caroline Glaser Roberts. Her father had served in the US Navy in World War I on a submarine, was a talented tap dancer who performed in the Chautauqua Circuit but settled down to work in the jewelry business after marrying “Carrie” and starting a family. Her mother was a skilled executive secretary who also loved to have parties and entertain her guests playing the piano and singing. Jane’s brother John, who she has had a difficult relationship with all her life, was born two years later in 1925. Her best friend as a child was Margaret (Peggy) Early, the two of them used to explore the woods in their neighborhood, jump stumps and sled in the wintertime. Jane’s younger sister Patricia (Pat) was born when Jane was already 14 years old.

Jane with Aunt Rose & other family

Jane spent summers with her favorite “Auntie Rose” at her aunt’s cottage in Manomet Massachusetts, about 40 miles south of Boston and just a mile from the ocean. Jane’s mom, her aunt Rose and the other sisters were all excellent swimmers and Jane learned to be a strong swimmer as well.

The Family Moves to Watkins Glen New York

George’s jewelry business finally succumbed to the Depression in 1932 when Jane was nine years old. Unable to find work in the Boston area, George was offered a job by his father (Jane’s grandfather) Lee in the Watkins Salt Company in Watkins Glen, on the southern tip of Seneca Lake in upstate New York. George and Carroline rented a big house on the main street of the town just across from the famous Glen that gave the town its name, which became one of Jane’s favorite places to play. She also enjoyed swimming in the lake and roller skating on the smooth slate sidewalks of the town. Caroline rented rooms in the house out to travelers coming through town.

Binghamton, IBM & Tennis

Jane receiving IBM Club tennis championship trophy from IBM founder Watson

George did not like working for his tyrannical father, so after less than a year in Watkins Glen e found a job with IBM in nearby Binghamton New York, and moved his family there. They rented half of a duplex on Schiller Street not far from Recreation Park with its carousel and tennis courts. Caroline found a job as the executive secretary for Wendell P. Endicott, the co-founder of the Endicott Johnson shoe company, headquartered in Johnson City just east of Binghamton. She became very active in the PTA and served as president of the organization. Later she worked for the city of Binghamton in the social welfare department.

Jane taught herself to play tennis as a young teen watching others play and spending hours pounding the ball off the backboard with the cheap racket her father bought her. She became so good that in high school she began to enter and soon win local city and IBM country club tournaments. She was such a talented player that, given a good coach which she never had, she might have been able to become a professional tennis player, but lacking such a mentor, did not.

High School & Beyond

Jane & Jim

Jane graduated from Binghamton High School in 1941 and at her mother’s urging attended a teacher’s college not far from Binghamton. Jane attended classes there for less than a year before realizing that a career in teaching was not for her. Instead she enrolled in art school at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.

During her teens Jane enjoyed an active circle of friends that loved to attend dance concerts by the great swing bands of her era, including Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. She and her friends would also take weekend trips to New York City on the train. Jane loved the music of that era and loved to dance.

In this circle of friends, she met, dated, and eventually became engaged to Jim Fischette, an up and coming law student who hoped to marry Jane and move with her to Florida to start his law practice. Jane’s mother Caroline did not like Jim and Jane eventually and reluctantly broke the engagement off, a decision that she regretted for many years.

Eric & Jane

Marriage & Family

Also during that time, she met and befriended Ed (Eric) Zale, a young sportswriter for a Binghamton newspaper who covered her tennis tournaments. Eric had been accepted at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and suggested that he could help Jane get admitted as well. So she accompanied him to Ann Arbor, found a family to live with and work as a nanny and spent her first year establishing her residency in Michigan so she could apply the next year as an in-state student.

The next year Jane was admitted and went on to earn a bachelors degree in Sociology. Eric got his bachelors degree and went on to get a masters and finally a PhD in English. Jane and Eric married, and after graduation, Eric was hired as an English professor at nearby Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti Michigan. (See my piece “Jane & Eric Go to Ann Arbor”)

Cooper age 5 & Peter 2

Jane and Eric’s son Cooper was born in 1955, and his brother Peter in 1958. They bought a small two-bedroom house on Prescott Street in Ann Arbor purposely next door to a park so their kids would be able to play there. The tiny house featured a full basement where Cooper and Peter played and Eric had an office. Later they moved across town and rented a house on Martin Place, again adjacent to another park.

They had a difficult marriage, and finally in 1967 after Jane found out Eric had an affair with another woman, Jane initiated a divorce. Cooper and Peter continued to live with her in the Martin Place house and Eric eventually moved from Ann Arbor to Xenia Ohio where he began teaching English at Wilberforce University. (See my piece “Jane & Eric Get Divorced”)

Jane's painting titled "The Cocktail Party"

Jane as an Artist

Before moving from New York to Michigan, Jane had sent two years in art school at Syracuse College, and was an accomplished painter, preferring to work with oil paint on canvass.  With some notable exceptions, her work was generally abstract with no “content” in her paintings other than “form” set in “negative space”.  Her canvasses hung in the various rooms of the family’s house.  During the years after she and Eric divorced she focused a great deal on her art, often having a canvass set up in the living room with the smell of oil paint and turpentine in the air.

Years as a Single Parent

Jane 1968

Jane went through very difficult years as a single mother with two kids living on a limited income. She had bouts of depression, spent time in therapy, but was a good parent to her now teenage sons. She applied her energy and creativity to art, doing mostly abstract paintings with oil paints on canvas. In 1970, she arranged a summer for her and her sons in England on the cheap by working it out to trade houses with a couple in Oxford who wanted to spend a summer in Ann Arbor. (See my pieces “Taking Out the Trash” and “Bills on the Bed”)

Politics & Feminism

Jane became very active in local Ann Arbor politics in the early 1970s, serving as a campaign manager for several men who successfully ran for Mayor and City Council. She spent several years as well as a Democratic party precinct chair. She became known for her great parties with all the key political players in town. Her political work eventually led her to the women’s movement and particularly the campaign by the National Organization for Women for the Equal Rights Amendment. For her work with NOW, Jane received an “Uppity Woman Award”. She also was the publicity coordinator for a very successful 1975 Year of the Woman Festival. (See my piece “Politics 101″)

Two of her dearest friends of that period were comrades in the feminist movement, Carol Crane and Mary Jane Shoultz. Carol, who died of cancer in the early 1980s, worked as an investigator for the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and pursued several successful gender discrimination cases against the Ford Motor Corporation in Detroit. Mary Jane was and still is a feminist activist and philosopher. Another good friend of Jane’s, Marsha Federbush, was a key person in the fight for Title 9 of the Education Act of 1972 and the inclusion of girls in Little League. (See my pieces “Profound Kitchen Conversations”,  “My Feminist Aunts” and “Coming of Age at the Laundromat”)

Jane's head shot for selling real estate in 1980s

Real Estate & Remarriage

In the middle 1970s Jane got into the real estate business. She finally reconciled with ex-husband Eric and the two remarried in 1977. She moved to Ohio with him and they eventually bought a condo in the Dayton suburb of Centerville Ohio. Eric continued to teach at Wilberforce University and other area schools and Jane continued in the real estate business, working for the best firm in town, Irongate Realtors. She developed a longtime friend in her Irongate colleague Stephan Brown, who continues to send her yearly letters.

Jane’s younger son Peter went off to college at the University of Chicago in 1975 and her older son Cooper, graduating from the University of Michigan in 1978, moved to Los Angeles.

Return to the East

In 1983, Eric developed pancreatic cancer and died in the spring of 1984. He taught his university classes just about up to the day he died. In 1984, after tying up his affairs, Jane moved back East to Wolfeboro New Hampshire, a small resort town on the beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee, in the southern part of the state, two hours from Boston. Her sister Patricia (Pat), 15 years younger than Jane, lived there as well with her husband Raymond (Ray) Merena. Ray and Pat were very successful as co-owners of a coin company, Bowers and Merena, headquartered in Wolfeboro. They built a big beautiful house in the woods on the shore of the lake that Jane admired very much.

Jane blowing bubbles at niece Sarah's wedding

Jane lived by herself for fifteen years in a charming upstairs apartment in Wolfeboro on her limited Social Security income. She had a big porch off her bedroom that she enjoyed very much. She was within walking distance or a short drive to the Post Office (where she picked up her mail) and the IGA grocery store. The highlight of the year in Wolfeboro was a quirky local 4th of July parade right by her house down Main Street.

Jane again involved herself in politics and community activism. She served on the Board of Harbor House, an organization that helped women and children who were victims of domestic violence. Jane had a number of letters published in the weekly Granite State News and the Manchester Union Leader, New Hampshire’s preeminent daily newspaper.

Jane’s Sons Start Families of Their Own

Jane’s son Cooper married Sally Rosloff in 1983 in Los Angeles. Jane’s grandson Eric Roberts Rosloff was born in 1986 and her granddaughter Emma Lindsay Rosloff in 1989. Jane’s son Peter married Penelope (Penny) Christo in Cleveland in 1989. Jane’s granddaughter Elizabeth was born in 1993 and Charlotte in 1996.

Health Issues Emerge

In the late 1980s Jane developed an atrial fibrillation in her heart. For the next seven or eight years she was able to successfully control this condition through drug and electrical therapy. Eventually these therapies stopped working and her ailment began to affect the flow of blood to her brain, which slowly led to issues with the beginnings of dementia.

Jane Moves to Los Angeles

Jane in 1999

In 1999, Jane worked out a plan with her son Cooper and daughter-in-law Sally to move to Los Angeles. Cooper and Sally purchased a large house in Northridge with a guesthouse that Jane moved in to. She focused her first year in LA decorating her small house and organizing her affairs. She became a member of the Sepulveda Unitarian-Universalist Society, better known as “The Onion”.

Soon after her arrival in LA, she was officially diagnosed with mild diabetes, dementia, poor circulation, varicose veins and flat feet by her new physician, Dr. Michael Malamed. Though she had driven extensively up to the day she left the East, she was uncomfortable driving in the large urban environment of her new home. So her beloved Volvo sedan has sat unused the seven years she has been here. By 2005, though she still kept her furniture and other furnishings in it, she no longer felt comfortable sleeping alone in the guest house. Sally and Cooper moved her into a bedroom into the main house.

Jane’s Dilemma

Jane longed to return to the life she remembered “back East”, before health issues, which came to the fore after her move to LA, severely limited her activities. To her continuing dismay, family circumstances kept her here in Los Angeles, in proximity to Cooper and Sally. Moving to Cleveland where Peter and Penny lived was explored but turned out to not be an option. (See my pieces “Cross Country Train” , “The D Word” and “My Mom’s Last Good Fight”)

Jane’s Last Days and Death

By the beginning of 2006, due to her increasing dementia and disorientation, Jane was beginning to require 24/7 care, which was beyond what Sally and Cooper could provide at home. With the financial assistance of her sister Pat, Jane was moved to a small group home about 20 minutes drive from the house and Cooper continued to visit her regularly. (See my piece “The Last of Jane Roberts”)

In August 2006 Jane collapsed at her new residence and was taken to the hospital in a coma. Given the extent of her dementia, her doctors indicated that she had no hope of recovery, so after her younger son Peter arrived, all family members present agreed to take the breathing tube out and let her pass away.

Her ashes are buried, at her request, in the Calvary cemetery in Binghamton New York, next to her mom and dad, on a hillside with a beautiful view of the Susquehanna river down below.

The first was that gender was not a significant part of the nature of the individual human soul, just the “sexual plumbing” of the mammalian body our soul inhabits, despite our culture being built in every way around the supposed profound difference between men and women. A culture that seems obsessed with and even fetishizes whether your physical body has a penis, or breasts, vagina and uterus instead; and what that means to who you are and how you should be in the world.

The second was given that profound cultural divide between the genders, I became uncomfortable with the “men are from Mars” cultural expectations of my gender, and as a result increasingly uncomfortable in circles of men. Instead, I have gravitated to the world of women, and their insurgency to leverage the positive relational aspects of “women are from Venus”, while challenging its cultural limitations.

What follows is my best attempt at a narrative of my journey, from childhood to young adulthood, trying to navigate the minefield of gender expectations and find a safe and supportive place for myself in the world.

My Parents

Though I was born in the 1950s with all its conventionally stark division of gender roles, my mom and dad were a pretty unorthodox couple, with a much more egalitarian relationship than the norm. They had met each other when my mom was an amateur tennis champion in her hometown of Binghamton New York and my dad was a sports reporter for the local paper. They had been acquaintances and friends for a number of years before their relationship became a romantic one and they decided to get married. They were both intellectual and athletic, and both comfortable with parenting tasks ranging from changing diapers to throwing a ball.

I don’t think I got from them any clear difference as to how men were supposed to behave versus how women were, except perhaps that my mom was more extroverted and assertive, and my dad more introverted and passive-aggressive. I tended to be more like my dad in that way, though I think that the introversion was more a result of nature while my own passive-aggressiveness was a learned behavior. My mom generally used very little makeup and wore above the knee length skirts and casual collared shirts without bows or ruffles, except when they got dressed up for some fancy or formal event. In all aspects of their lives, at least that I witnessed, I don’t recall them behaving in stereotypically masculine or feminine ways.

If anything, my mom’s extroversion and assertiveness were closer to the masculine stereotype. When I behaved badly it would almost always be my mom rather than my dad who would call me out on that behavior. And in all aspects of her life, she was a person who took a backseat to no one, male or female.

The Girl Next Door

I think my parents’ egalitarian relationship carried over to my own with my young peers. My closest friend and playmate in my childhood was a girl my age who lived across the street (who I will call “Molly” for the purposes of this piece, not her real name). I don’t recall that the fact that Molly was a girl and I was a boy was very significant in our relationship. We were both into imagination play and spent many many hours together in my basement, our backyards, or her big attic bedroom. We quickly became best buddies and soon after complete soulmates.

The developmental plot thickened one day when our shared inquisitiveness led to a joint decision that we were going to take our clothes off and show each other our naked bodies. We were up in her wonderful attic bedroom which afforded us a lot of privacy from her parents downstairs, and I hid behind an overstuffed chair so we could not see each other as we jettisoned our shoes, socks, t-shirts, shorts and underwear. After verbal confirmation that we were both ready, we stepped naked into each other’s view. On careful examination of my play partner, triggering a quick look down again at myself, I realized that ninety-nine percent of our bodies were pretty much the same.

We noted and even commented on the one difference, that I had a little thingy poking out from between my legs and she had a little slit instead. This small detail was judged insignificant by our collective wisdom and we basked in the excitement of breaking convention and being naked together, with no one around to shame us into being otherwise. Molly’s slight anatomical difference was not the source of the excitement, it would have been just as thrilling to show all if we had both been boys. Our attic revelation had confirmed at least one difference between us, however minor. But whatever differences our parents and other humans had associated with these two varieties of human being, it never jibed with our experience of each other – comrades of the soul that we were.

Team Sports

In the early 1960s when I started playing little league baseball along with pickup basketball and football games in the nearby park, team sports were generally played only by boys. Both my parents were into sports, and though I can’t recall ever seeing my mom really play baseball, she was very capable of playing catch or pitching a ball to me and bragged that in her neighborhood as a kid she was so good at the game that she was always the first person picked (before any of the boys) in their pickup baseball games.

Though I really enjoyed and was generally good at team sports, I don’t recall bonding with the other boys I played with. It seemed there was an underlying competitiveness between boys in these sort of circumstances that I was never comfortable with. I recall this most in several games of dodgeball played at my teammates’ birthday or end of the season parties that I attended. To call these dodgeball games “vicious” would be an overstatement, but there was a martial fierceness to the way the more “alpha” boys tried to establish their dominance by intimidating the rest of us. Though I had my share of competitiveness and drive for alpha status, I rarely if ever shared that martial fierceness, preferring more collegial relationships with my teammates, that they mostly did not respond to.

What I learned from these experiences was a way of being in conventional male-dominated situations. If I could demonstrate a degree of competence at the required skills then my male comrades would accept me as long as I revealed little of myself beyond those skills.

Schooling in Conventional Notions of Gender

My school curriculum mostly reinforced the conventional assumptions of gender stereotypes, including the preeminence of men in intellectual, leadership and other directive skills, and the secondary supporting role of women with heightened relational skills. The bulk of the history we were taught featured the actions of male leaders, thinkers and adventurers. The bulk of the literature we were instructed to read and process was written by men and mostly about the interactions between men, with women playing generally a secondary role as objects of male passion or obsession. I keep thinking of books like Nabokov’s Lolita as emblematic of this, all about a man and his obsession personified in a young woman, and not really going inside the developmental narrative of that woman at all, presented as some sort of universal metaphor for the human condition.

And certainly the relational pressure-cooker environment of school classrooms, hallways, playgrounds and locker rooms (these venues perhaps producing the most profound curriculum learned in school) were all about reinforcing the conventional and often oppressive gender stereotypes and rankings. Girls valued for their pretty faces, sexy bodies, and not being “bitches”. Boys valued for their looks as well, but also their skill in academic, athletic, romantic, or even other more “nerdy” pastimes like theater, math or music. But everywhere a kind of oppressive boy versus girl, Mars versus Venus framing with way too many kids the same age jammed into the various school venues. I think forty plus years later I am still trying to fully reconstruct my self-esteem from my difficult experiences in those venues.

My learning from this profound relational “curriculum” was to keep my head down, avoid the gaze of others, and reveal as little of my real self as possible, while still functioning at enough of an academic level that I passed my classes and enough relationally that I wasn’t judged some kind of misfit in the school environment. It was up to my opportunities and experiences outside of school to develop a more evolved sense of gender roles and who I was as an individual in that spectrum of gender, including what is considered “masculine” and “feminine”.

Cooties and Sluts

One of the key aspects of conventional male gender identification when I was a child was the idea simply stated that “girls have cooties”, an endemic disease that can infect and disable boys who have too much contact with and empathy for girls. Given the presence of this contagion, the challenge for boys was to function in a world where half the people were female without contracting the disease. This was accomplished by either staying away from girls (particularly when other boys were around) or carefully circumscribing ones interactions with girls to make those interactions all about you and their relationship even subservience to you (Think The Rolling Stones “Under My Thumb”) rather than about them as fellow human partners in life.

Lacking say a more evolved older sister or other mentor a few years older to assure me that cooties was a bunch of crap, I took all this conventional mythology way too seriously, particularly after a horrific incident when I was eight years old. Recall my anecdote about getting naked with my fellow five-year-old soulmate Molly as my early idea about sharing real intimacy with a peer. Recalling that key moment in a joyous relationship, I confided in one of my third grade male classmates that I would “pull down my pants” for this girl in our class that I had a crush on.

The next day at school, as a bunch of us were all standing gathered by our classroom waiting to go out to recess, my male classmate revealed my intimate admission to everyone there assembled, including the girl I had a crush on. Adding to my initial mortification (which was huge) was the fact that our teacher called me up to her desk later to tell me that that was an inappropriate thing for me to say, rather than it being an inappropriate for my male classmate to reveal my confidence.

I never really recovered from that experience, and shared it with no one for the next thirteen years. What I was learning though, was that I was not safe around other men. Later incidents, though not so egregious, would just reinforce those rules of engagement. I witnessed many incidents through my preteen and early teen years where my male peers would gossip about and tease one of our peers if he was seen even briefly fraternizing with someone of the other gender.

I even participated actively in some of these bullying rituals. I recall one of my most egregious actions. In my sixth grade class we had an overweight, socially awkward boy in our class that some of the other alpha boys routinely teased. To get in with that male “elite” of my classroom peers, I went so far as to get special pencils made through mail order that were embossed with one of the most frequent scurrilous accusations made to bully him. The pencils were embossed with the name of the cutest girl in class, followed by “loves” and then his name. My pencils were an instant success with the crowd of other boys I was trying to impress, and the targets of our wrath, both girl and boy, were duly mortified and intimidated. Our teacher investigated, traced the pencils back to me, and had a private talk with me expressing how inappropriate my behavior was, but no further ramifications or restorative actions were taken. I was duly chastened, but the incident was a reminder that I could easily be the target of similar bullying.

Duly reminded, I can recall at age twelve sitting in my front yard talking to my female schoolmate who lived across the street. I was so intimidated by what could happen if seen with a girl, that when I noticed maybe fifty yards off one of my male friends coming across the park towards my house, without even excusing myself I left my female friend just sitting there while I headed out to intercept my male friend before he could see me actually cavorting with the enemy. A more confident kid maybe would have just blown off the teasing, but I was shy by nature, timid due to lack of self-confidence, and therefore more intimidated in these circumstances than others my age might have been.

School continued to provide me with negative experiences with my male peers and their bullying to enforce gender stereotypes. I remember in my eighth grade homeroom being cajoled by the more alpha males in my class to join in their derisive “cheer” (done quietly enough so our teacher at the front of the room would not hear) but audible to our female classmate who rumor had it had sex with one of our other male classmates. I reluctantly joined the “Give me an S… give me an L… give me a U… give me a T… what’s that spell…” chant, for fear of being the next target somehow of their scorn.

That’s how it worked… you participated in bullying others in the hope that you could curry enough favor to not become a target yourself. Though I knuckled under, it was not lost on me the ugliness of the situation, including the double standard where our male classmate who had claimed to have had sex with her (whether true or not) was subject to his male peers’ adulation rather than the negative judgement inflicted on his alleged partner.

Girlfriends & Girl Friends

Also in that same sexual politics war-zone of my eighth grade homeroom was another shy person, a young woman, that I had a crush on. I got it in my head that I would ask her to dance at the school “sock-hop”. She had come to the dance with her best female friend, and I followed the two of them around for the first two hours of the event like a stalker, trying to screw up my courage to talk to her and ask her to dance. I finally did and we danced for the last couple songs the band played and then sat until the end of the event drinking sodas together, me in heaven.

But the next school day in homeroom I would not even acknowledge her, despite the lobbying by her best friend who was also in the class. We had managed to dance below the radar at the sock-hop, but there was no way I was going to acknowledge we had any sort of relationship amongst all my male peers, and risk their focus and derision.

Moving deeper into adolescence as I transitioned from junior high to high school, I found myself generally more interested in my female rather than my male peers. It was certainly part my heterosexual hormones, but it was also that the intelligent young women who I encountered just seemed to be more interesting, open and real people to me. This was perhaps enhanced by the fact that I had gotten involved in a youth theater group, which like most other such groups, had way more young women than men in it. All the venues and situations that mounting theatrical productions provided – rehearsals, backstage and onstage encounters, intense collaboration at times – facilitated encountering and engaging with a number of intelligent and talented young women that I found very compelling acquaintances.

Inspired by my original relationship with my soulmate Molly across the street, though I did not actually get naked with any of these women, there was a sort of metaphorical joint self-revelation possible that did not seem possible with the vast majority of my male peers. Though throughout my high school years I continued being uncomfortable being identified as having a “girlfriend”, I did in fact develop a lot of friendships with young women which were very close but not romantic. In the instances where my female comrade wanted to go the romantic direction, she generally scared me off and there was often discomfort and misunderstanding all round.

Radicalized by my Mom & my Feminist Aunts

Yeah I was introverted by nature, timid perhaps “by nurture”, but I was also aware that there was something I was profoundly uncomfortable with regarding the “sexual politics” of romantic relationships between men and women. My parents’ relationship had been a train wreck and most of the other couples of their generation seemed to have similar problems.

My parents divorced when I was ten. Several years after, my mom went into a serious depression, and was even suicidal at times. During my earlier childhood years my parents (particularly my mom) had seemed like bigger than life iconic figures rather than a humble being like me struggling to love myself, grow, and develop. But living with my mom and my younger brother, and becoming my mom’s closest confidant, I began to see her as a struggling human being not unlike myself, rather than some mythic parental titan. Rekindling the realizations from my experiences with my soulmate Molly, I began to see my mom’s soul as another human being like me. Her essence, like Molly’s, was not some alien “female”, but only “human” like mine. I am probably not explaining it well enough, but it was a profound epiphany, accelerating a developmental trajectory that had begun a decade earlier.

After divorcing my dad and surviving (with the help of therapy) her deep depression, my mom developed a new group of friends in the early 1970s who were all getting involved in the women’s movement, particularly the campaign for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. These were intelligent, highly educated women, many married to male academics in our university town, who were becoming keenly aware of society’s double standards regarding the status of and opportunities available to women versus men. Certainly comparing them to their husbands, they seemed much more interesting and mature people. Several of them ended up divorcing those husbands as my mom had previously done with my dad, and plunging their anger and frustration into the campaign for women’s equality.

I spent many many hours in my teenage years in the company of these intriguing people, at parties and other group outings, listening to and coming to resonate with their compelling narratives and struggle for self and societal respect. Resonating because I too was struggling, often it seemed unsuccessfully, particularly for that self-respect.

I also spent many hours sitting in the rocking chair in my mom’s bedroom, often as she had all our bills spread out on the bed and she, ridden with anxiety, triaged what to pay given limited funds, and she would share with me candidly her aspirations, frustrations and fears. Learning to sit and listen while she vented, knowing that would somehow help her make it to the next day, I became comfortable with the difficult narrative of an adult female person in the turbulent milieu of the times. Gaining that awareness and comfort with her, I began to resonate more with her new friends as well, and their similar life narratives. They were happy to share and vent with me as well, and I became close with several of them, particularly Mary Jane and Carol. Mary Jane was a brilliant mind turned radical feminist intellectual, who took a liking to me and became a close mentor. Similarly Carol, who was a talented activist, a star investigator for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who had perhaps more pragmatic wisdom about “being effective” as a change-agent in the real world.

For me, the feminist canon of my mom, Mary Jane and Carol became in essence my ethical and spiritual framework as well, not unlike being drawn to and converted to some new religion, and exhibiting all the zeal of a convert. These three women were the charismatic “clergy” of a “faith” that was calling me to it, along with their more famous sisters I was beginning to hear and read about, including Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Smeal.

Common Ground with Fellow Male Game Nerds

The exception to all this predominance of women in my young life was a group of male friends I developed in high school and continued to be close with through my early twenties. What facilitated our closer connection was that we were all “game nerds”, into complicated historical military simulation board games. This was a world of “hobbyists” that attracted very few if any women, but appealed to a certain small subset of men who had decided to mostly abandon the conventional young adult world of parties and dating in favor of spending weekends in dark basements playing these complicated games. We were like cloistered monks taking a vow of chastity to pursue an esoteric quest to discover, experience and master all the world’s great military simulation board games.

There is a certain egoistic megalomania that seems to go with replaying famous military campaigns and trying to outdo the great generals of history. But given that, there was none of the stereotypical male “cock fighting” among us to try and establish some sort of pecking order. We were in fact more egalitarian, each bringing our own unique personas to our group and allowing each other moments to shine in a collaborative circle of equals. I have seen this similar dynamic among my own kids and their “game nerd” friends (now Dungeons & Dragons and computer role-playing games).

And with our long evenings together playing these complicated simulations into the wee hours of the night, often with significant beer, wine and/or marijuana consumed, we became very close. Familiarity, fatigue, shared passions and a good buzz tend to break down the pretense we often hide our deepest selves behind. Again it felt like we were engaging each other as souls, below the level of gender, beyond the protocols of Mars and maleness.

Female vs Male & Gay vs Straight

In 1978 I made the decision to leave my hometown of Ann Arbor and move to Los Angeles, leaving behind my “Feminist Aunts” and my circles of theater and wargaming friends, but taking the wisdom I had learned with me. My goal was to leverage a connection I had to work in the TV/Film business, even though it involved essentially rebooting my life in a strange new place where I knew hardly anyone.

My first two years in Los Angeles, working in entry-level jobs in the film business, I met a diverse array of people including a number of young adults like myself and older, male and female, gay and straight. Even though I was heterosexual, I found myself more comfortable with, and more attuned to, the gay men rather than the straight men I met. But most of my new acquaintances who became my lasting friends were women.

Somehow the women I was meeting seemed more mature, with more interesting multi-faceted personalities, and easier to engage with than the men. Having had previous experience of so many deep conversations with a range of women my own age and of my parents generation (including commiserating with them about difficult experiences they were going through) I found myself drawn to and at ease with the trials and tribulations of my new female acquaintances. That rather than being focused on trying to have sex with them like a good share of the men in our shared circles of acquaintances. Most of the men, particularly the straight men I met, seemed more petulant, one-dimensional, and in need of some serious growing up.

Toward this point of view, I attended several memorable parties that featured an assortment of gay and straight men. At one or two of the events, I was the only straight guy there and I learned to be totally comfortable with that, quickly learning the etiquette wisdom when I occasionally got hit on by another guy. At others there was a mix of gay and straight guys, side by side, begging some provocative comparisons. In my anecdotal experience, the gay guys generally were more emotionally honest, less guarded, and as a result seemed to have a lot more fun. Though my libido was definitely tuned to female types, I admired these seemingly more liberated souls, their lampoon of machismo, and tried to emulate some of the best of what I saw going forward in my own public persona.

Another memorable developmental experience in this regard was when I ended up doing some impromptu nude sunbathing (that getting naked thing again) with my girlfriend at the time, her ex-husband (a bisexual man) and his current partner (a gay man). It was a unique dynamic with the banter and jokes about one another’s “sexual plumbing” and libido, at first intimidating for shy me, but since they were so friendly and unthreatening about it, I eventually relaxed and participated, and it was profoundly liberating. My girlfriend’s ex also shared with me tales of his life as a gay man in the trendy scene of West Hollywood and taught me how to respectfully decline a pass from another man.

The learning out of that afternoon in the hot Los Angeles sun was the critical importance of sunscreen, but also the not so critical importance of gender and even sexual orientation as to who you uniquely were in the deeper levels of your soul. When the constricting taboos and conventions of traditional gender and sexual orientation roles are acknowledged but then put in perspective, a deeper level of connection is possible beyond the constraints of both.

Finding an Oasis in the World of Women

After these initial compelling developmental experiences in the “City of Angels”, perhaps preparing me in some way for what was to follow, I plunged again into the world of women, a world I had first become comfortable with in my teenage within the circle of my mom and her friends, my “Feminist Aunts”.

I had come to Los Angeles to work in film and TV and had an array of entry-level jobs in my new home’s featured industry during my first couple years living there. But I experienced a deep discomfort in this world where most of the people I had the occasion to meet through that work were men, and mostly people that I did not really connect with or care about. There seemed to be so much ego, so much pretense, so much putting on airs, and little of the real human connection between the people I was interacting with in my work and our after-work gatherings.

Souring on my new home and its denizens I had met, I made the difficult strategic decision to stay, but abandon “the business”, in favor of something else that felt more in my comfort zone. It was the fall of 1979, and the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment was heating up. Thirty-five states had already ratified the amendment; three more and it would be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution that, “Equality under the law should not be abridged or denied on account of sex”. So I gathered up the nerve to attend a meeting of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Organization for Women. In retrospect it seems pretty courageous, since I was a male type and I did not have a female friend to accompany me. But in fact, it quickly felt like coming home or at least arriving at an oasis after a long parched desert crossing.

The meeting was held in a nondescript office building in the Mid-Wilshire area of L.A. There were about 30 people attending, including what seemed like an inner circle that knew each other along with a fair amount of newbies like me who were drawn by the growing effort on behalf of the ERA. I was also pleasantly surprised to see a couple other men there. For the most part I was accepted and welcomed, and it was probably attending my second or third such meeting (my return demonstrating that I really at least felt I belonged there) that I was recruited by a very tall, handsome woman named Jane, probably seven to ten years my elder, to volunteer for the Communications Committee that she chaired.

My first “action” was very unlike the more mainstream legislative and political activities that NOW normally staged. There was a huge billboard not to far from the NOW office advertising Las Vegas with a huge picture of a busty, scantily clad woman decked up in feathers like a human peacock. Jane, another woman Judith, and I planned and executed a clandestine defacing of that billboard in the middle of the night, writing “Women are not chicks!” in big black spray-painted letters across it. (I thought it ironically humorous that the hardware store where we bought our tools of desecration had all sorts of signs that they did not sell spray paint to minors to try and prevent such “tagging” acts.) At maybe two in the morning, watching fitfully for police cars, we managed to scale the sign and carry out our tagging. Sexy older women and guerrilla political action… it resonated with that radical wannabe in me and I was totally hooked and bonded with these two as perhaps my new West Coast “Feminist Aunts”.

As I continued to attend LA NOW meetings, I was introduced by Judith to her lesbian partner Toni, the fifty-something current President of the LA NOW chapter and, as I soon learned, the “godmother” (read female “godfather” rather than the “fairy” variety) of Los Angeles feminism. Toni fit the part, the charismatic center of any smoke-filled room (literally, because she constantly smoked these thin cigar/cigarettes), hellaciously intelligent and a seeming endless font of insight, worldly wisdom and sarcastic wit. It was a rare venue where everyone else in attendance did not hang on her every word. From the beginning Toni liked me, even having the chutzpah to tell me I had “nice legs”.

With exceedingly fortuitous timing given my precarious financial situation at the time, Toni and her partner Judith offered me a job working for Judith’s NOW mail-order business, plus a free room to live in in their upstairs apartment where Toni’s elderly mom lived. In lieu of rent I was up there to help Toni’s mom when she needed it and to take her out to dinner, which she loved to do (and paid for my meal… such a deal!) In accepting this offer, I had traded my precarious situation for the shelter and nurturing of my new “Feminist Aunts”.

With no real connection to anything else in this big crazy city, I was more than happy to plunge my entire waking existence into the world of feminism, volunteering much of my time even beyond my “day job” boxing and shipping all the buttons, pins and bumper stickers that Judith pedaled as one of her contributions to the movement. After several months I transitioned to a much more significant role in the 1982 ERA “Countdown Campaign” as an elected vice-president of the Los Angeles NOW chapter and the paid volunteer coordinator of the Los Angeles Countdown Campaign office.

For the next two years my entire world was feminism, Toni and Judith and the other leaders of the ERA campaign in Los Angeles, and perhaps more than a hundred mostly women volunteers that I would daily meet, greet, train, assign work to and supervise. Despite the occasional volunteer who, on encountering me for the first time would wonder (sometimes out loud) what the hell I was doing there, I was completely comfortably and wholly accepted as part of the inner circle developing feminist credentials as good as any of the women there. It was like I had been given the keys to the city of women, and happily checked my gender at the door, joining other human souls fighting for equality.

Post Male Being & Parental Equivalent

Though I will always exist within the heterosexual male privilege which has been at the core of human civilization, I have continued for the past thirty years to allow my membership in the fraternal order of men to remain lapsed. I continue to be completely comfortable with the majority of the women I meet, work with, or otherwise interact with, while only occasionally being able to make the same level of connection with the men I encounter. With one exception, I would say that all the significant mentors in my life have been women. Though there have been a couple notable exceptions in my current job, for the bulk of my twenty-three years working in the corporate world I have been much more comfortable working with women managers.

Even my life-partner Sally, who I met volunteering for LA NOW, was a friend and comrade for several years before we developed a romantic relationship and eventually decided to marry. There is none of that “Mars/Venus” difference that separated us yet attracted us to each other. And later as parents, short of birthing and breastfeeding our kids, I can think of no significant difference in the parental roles we have played. We have just been two people, two souls, who partner with each other, respect each other, love each other, and continue to be comfortable spending the rest of our lives together.

Come this December she and I will have been married thirty years, raised a kid of each gender, run a household together, and interacted as a couple within a larger community of family and friends. During those three decades neither of us has defined any aspect of our life based on gender or been comfortable letting others do so. We rarely refer to each other as “husband” or “wife”, unless calling each other “partners” would totally confuse the person we are speaking to. There have been no “men are from Mars, women from Venus” divides between us. She’s never excused herself to engage in “girl talk” or I to “be with the boys”. I’ve never defined my chores as “honey dos”, but just my half of the household responsibilities. If someone asks if my daughter was a “daddy’s girl”, I still struggle coming up with something more clever to respond than a simple “no” followed by an incredulous look.

The number of occasions that others we are with want us to second their gender-based stereotypes we feel not unlike Beldar and Primaat, “parental units” from the from the planet Remulak in those classic Saturday Night Live “Coneheads” sketches from the late 1970s. Uncomfortably trying to diplomatically live within a thoroughly alien culture!

Like race, gender matters, and sexual orientation matters, because there is so much privilege at play based on those immutable characteristics, whether explicitly acknowledged or not. But given that, I have come to imagine a world someday where gender, though a notable part of a person’s biology, is not really a significant component of the unique human consciousness that animates this biped biological organism. And so far, I seem to have been mostly joined in that quest by other human beings who happen to be women.

It is a condition described clinically as a “spontaneous primary pneumothorax”.  It is a rupture of the tissue of the lung that causes it to deflate and allows the chest cavity to fill with air outside the lung making it hard for the lung itself to reinflate.  Such a rupture can be a secondary effect of an illness, or the result of some trauma like sudden or extreme air pressure change.  But in this case there was no illness or trauma, thus the “spontaneous” label.

When it happened to her two months ago, she was home alone and called the paramedics.  They came and checked her out and based on her symptoms at the time thought she probably had a pinched nerve, and the best medicine was just to take it easy for a day or two until it subsided.  After two weeks in pain, with a dry cough and growing chest cold symptoms, Emma finally went to Kaiser and they diagnosed that it was in fact a collapsed lung.  The doctors inserted a metal tube to drain the air and fluid in her chest cavity so the lung could re-inflate, and after a confirming chest X-ray in the morning, sent her home all better.  But for that 24 some hours Emma had the tube in her chest it was very painful, so painful that at one point they were giving her narcotics significantly stronger than morphine to control the pain.

So for this second occurrence the doctors last Sunday night inserted the metal tube again to do the drainage, and Emma and her boyfriend Luke spent the night in the emergency room at Kaiser Woodland Hills.  Since this was a reoccurrence, her doctors on Monday decided to do a minimally invasive scope procedure to find the lung tear and repair it so it would not happen again.  They transferred her to Kaiser Sunset where the procedure is done, but she had to wait until Thursday for the doctor to be available.

So this meant four very painful days again waiting with the metal tube in her chest, for the procedure which was finally done Thursday night.  After trying different pain meds in different doses (and resulting extreme nausea) her doctors finally settled on giving her a morphine pump, so she could administer the dose herself in smaller increments which she tolerated much better and controlled her pain.

The procedure Thursday night was successful and Emma spent the next two and a half days in the hospital (with the painful tube still in her chest and continuing to require the morphine) recovering to make sure the procedure was successful. Emma had an X-ray Sunday around noon, which confirmed that the procedure had successfully repaired the lung, and was finally released from the hospital around 5pm. She plans on being home for the next couple days recovering and catching up on her sleep. But she is also eager to return to her work at her micro-brewery restaurant on Wednesday (on a somewhat limited basis) since she is not supposed to lift more than ten pounds for the next three weeks. After that she should be good (or better) than before!

As you can imagine, quite an experience for Emma and her close family circle.  Particular kudos go to her, and her boyfriend Luke who has spent the bulk of his week in the hospital with her, including several nights trying to sleep in a chair in her room.  Also to her mom (my partner Sally) for playing the role of Emma’s advocate and addressing different issues that came up during the week, including the whole pain management issue which led to the successful use of the morphine pump.  And also to her larger circle of family and friends who gave her all sorts of thoughts and support on the phone, text messages, email and Facebook.  Our new world of social networking was a real blessing for a kid stuck in bed hooked to a bunch of tubes but in possession of a smartphone and her hands free to use it.

From my experience as a parent, watching my kids develop and go through the typical illnesses and other traumas, I am increasingly convinced that all such health issues are profoundly developmental.  At some metaphysical level they seem to assist us with some profound developmental leap that we are otherwise struggling with.

I went through such a developmental illness when I was 23, which happens to be Emma’s current age.  Mine was mononucleosis, and forced me to return to the Midwest after my recent move from my hometown of Ann Arbor Michigan to Los Angeles.  I spent four long pensive months living in my parents new house in Dayton Ohio, and struggled with whether to return to Los Angeles, where I had not yet found a life for myself.  I finally did decide to return (though I almost did not), and eventually met Sally and we had our two kids, Emma and her brother Eric, and this second 23 plus years of my life have unfolded.

As my dad always believed, and I have come to appreciate myself, life at its best is a series of adventures, not always successful, not always happy endings, but compelling narratives worth living, sharing with others, and spurring our fullest development as individual consciousnesses and as a species.

In his recent blog piece, “Why Would Anyone Want to Be a School Leader?”, Peter writes…

School leadership is hard…especially now. There are point scales to contend with, evaluations based on test scores, and budget cuts that result in the lay-offs of teachers and administrative colleagues. Some leaders who have been in the position for a few years have seen cuts to programs, and have a constant need to find creativity in a very uncreative time… On top of that leaders have students living in extreme poverty, an increase in the students with social-emotional issues, and in some cases are expected to take on the role of parents to students…and their parents…

Peter paints a picture that allows me to at least try to put myself in his shoes, though I have never been a school teacher or principal myself.  He and the teachers that he supervises are the key agents in a high-stakes societal exercise in social engineering by an array of institutional forces, including all levels of government, big business, labor unions, and other interests that are all part of what has been coined as the “education-industrial complex”.

When poor standardized test scores flag a school as underperforming, it is the school staff that most suffer the consequence, so they bear the weight of increasingly coercive and controlling authority of the state government.  School staff bear this increasing weight while having to manage the expectations of parents, plus the frustration of young people who must spend so much of their time and psychic energy in this institution.  An institution that is increasingly forced to put forward a standardized, even regimented and “uncreative” educational environment rather than be a fun place to learn things.

I think Peter’s challenge as the school principal, the onsite representative and mouthpiece of a faraway educational bureaucracy, is the most daunting of all.  He has the responsibility and authority to execute the orders from on high, but not the broader authority to always apply his best judgement as a caring person and skilled educator.  Here’s how he puts it…

Why would anyone want to be a school leader these days? Trying to do the right thing at the same time we are being guided by some education departments (i.e. state, federal) to do the wrong thing doesn’t seem to be worth the stress. If that is the way you feel, run away now. Schools need leaders who will fight the status quo at the same time they fight policymakers making education worse. Students and staff deserve better.

I can feel the passion, mitigated by frustration, of someone who wants to be of assistance to the teachers and the students in his school.  The strength of his own commitment to what he acknowledges is a very important but daunting task.  The level of his discomfort that this does not feel like the right approach to things.

Leadership – Mandate from Above or Consensus of Peers?

In our political institutions we follow a democratic approach to governance where we generally don’t assign leadership without the consent of the governed.  This is a foundational principle of our country, beginning with our revolutionary war mantra, “No taxation without representation!”  Though we still wrestle with plenty of inequities of privilege and power, this is at least the ideal we strive for.

Yet in our public educational institutions we follow the “enlightened despot” model of governance.  We convey power to our meritocratic experts, who we put at the top of a command and control structure where we rely on them to determine the “best practice” and then use their position at the top of a hierarchy of control to force everyone below them in that hierarchy to execute the determined “best practice”.

Just as with “taxation without representation” that led to the American Revolution, this top-down approach is problematic in schools, as exemplified when a public school gets a new principal.  Peter writes about the problems when a new principal comes to a school…

When new leaders enter a position, there are many staff who are ready to support them and others who do not trust them at all. It seems unfair, especially if the leader is new to the district. Shouldn’t all staff trust their new leader? As unfortunate as it may be, it happens and new leaders should understand why it happens.

Sometimes the lack of trust occurs because the staff had a previous leader who did not treat them well at all, and others times it happens just because of the title. There are staff, parents, and even kids, who don’t trust a leader because they have the title of principal… That has to be ok with new leaders if they plan on running a building. They can’t take it personal.

Unlike Peter, who is a paid employee and agent of the state, I have the luxury as an outsider in the peanut gallery to say that in my opinion this is a profound problem of the command and control “enlightened despot” governance model.  Some people will cheer a new “despot”, a new “sheriff”, if they feel that person is truly enlightened and making the right decisions.  But others will grumble.  Some of the grumblers respect the imposed authority but disagree with the decisions made.  Others feel that imposed authority is fundamentally disrespectful of the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

 As a principal within the “enlightened despot” governance model, as Peter points out, this goes with “running the building”.  And given that a majority of teachers in a school have willingly or at least grudgingly surrendered their own authority and accepted this governance model, the task of the leader is to demonstrate that they will act ethically and they are willing to be in relationship with their subordinates.  The best mitigation for leadership not granted by the led is trust.

Trust is something that is built one conversation and one action at a time. Every time a leader acts on an issue and every time they have a conversation with a one faculty member or the whole faculty, they are building trust. These conversations go into our emotional bank accounts.

Covey says, “We all know what a financial bank account is. We make deposits into it and build up reserves from which we can make withdrawals when we need to. An Emotional Bank Account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship. It’s the feeling of safeness you have with another human being”.

Peter uses the metaphor from leadership “best practice” guru Stephen Covey, looking at leadership as a transactional exercise of making “deposits” and earning interest before you can make “withdrawals”. Peter writes…

It is [un?]avoidable when working with staff that we make deposits and other times we make withdrawals. Deposits happen when we support staff members through a tough time or cover their class when they need to run out for an emergency. Deposits happen with kids when leaders engage with them and show they care. Deposits also happen when kids are treated with respect during times of discipline. If students see a school leader as “human” they are more likely to trust them.

But when it comes to the “withdrawal” part, I read the subtext about the underlying authoritarian governance model being completely problematic…

Withdrawals also happen and they can be devastating. They occur when leaders have to make decisions that staff does not agree with or when the leader makes a major mistake. School leaders are the bridge between the central office and the staff they lead. That bridge is not always clearly defined and school leaders will feel in the middle. There will be times when school leaders see both sides and other times when they don’t but have to follow through anyway.

Being in a situation that ends with a withdrawal of the emotional bank account is hard. However, if leaders did the work before these issues arise and built trust with their staff, the times they make withdrawals will not be as devastating as they could have been if the leaders did not do the work at all.

Peter accepts this governance model as the reality that he must live and work with.  I don’t think I could in his shoes, but then I would probably be quickly fired and replaced by a new principal that would accept it, and probably not one as humanistic as either Peter or I would strive to be.

Things to keep in mind

Peter then calls out his own set of seven habits (ala Covey) for school principals that I would heartily second…

* Be human

* Have tough conversations

* Instill laughter into your everyday practices

* Surround yourself with good people

* Check in on people

* Complete teacher observations with integrity

* Encourage teachers to be who they are

I posted a quick comment on Peter’s piece attempting to call out the underlying problem with the governance model that I thought he was not addressing…

I think we are missing the boat here, trying to run schools in an undemocratic “command and control” kind of governance rather than employing the governance model that our society was built around, democracy… There should rarely if ever be a case where “leaders have to make decisions that staff does not agree with”. Nor ones that students don’t agree with. Get students and staff in circles as equals, tell them the reality of standardization and high-stakes testing, and put it out there for general discussion, “so how are we going to make this place work?” Let students and teachers be key participants in that discussion and make it their business (not yours as the principal) to craft a solution. Leverage the beauty of our American system, democratic process!

I’m always appreciative when the blogger responds to the comments they receive.  Here’s Peter’s to mine…

Although I understand your unschooling model there are times as the school leader when not all staff will be happy with decisions that are made, even in a democratic model. Many staff and students may understand but not everyone will be happy, which is what I meant when I wrote that piece. For you to say that that should “rarely if ever” happen is a bit off the mark. I’m afraid I will have to respectfully disagree with this one. Even in democratic systems there are times when we do not always get what we want.

Rereading my comment, perhaps I overstate the power of a democratic consensus to at least satisfy people that they had a say and a vote, even if the majority voted against them.  Peter is right to say that good democratic process does not always satisfy people.  But I think I am still right in pointing out that being heard and having a vote, that is the democratic process, would be transformational.

But more and more these days I’m thinking this is an overly simplistic and unsophisticated approach to the world, that maybe sells tickets to some sort of framed contest between two opposing sides, but does not serve the cause of coming to some sort of compromise consensus on a pragmatic path forward for our society. What is needed I think is a different metaphor for constructive conflict that allows for an array of constituencies to form ever-changing relationships with each other.

Maybe a useful metaphor is imagining a small board that runs a small community organization. If there are just two board members then there is only one relationship between them, where say on any given matter they either agree or disagree. If there are four board members, there are six different relationships between any pair of the four of them, plus four different threesomes. That is a dynamic that allows for way more permutations of relationships and coalitions, just with two more board members.

In a culture like ours imbued with competition and the perhaps guilty pleasure of labeling winners and losers, when areas of conflict boil down to dualities it is a path of least resistance to frame a contest where one side “wins” and the other “loses”. When there are say three positions or constituencies involved then the whole “sides” thing breaks down and it doesn’t fit so well into the “contest” box anymore (except perhaps in voting someone off the island in a “Survivor” sort of contest).

Now that I suspect I have some of you completely confused, let me focus on a real world example of a problematic duality – the American two-party political system.

The Path of Least Resistance – The American Two-Party System

America has basically had a two-party political system since the founding of our country. First Federalists and Antifederalists, then Democrats and Whigs, and from the 1850s to the present, Democrats and Republicans. Certainly there have been a handful of “third parties” along the way that have come, played a significant role in an election or two, and gone. This group includes the Progressive/Bull Moose Party of Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft, the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs, the American Independent Party of George Wallace, and the Reform Party of Ross Perot. Beyond that there are an array of smaller political parties, like the contemporary Libertarian and Green parties, that have really not had much of a political impact. The very fact that they are often referred to as “third parties” belies the bias towards only two.

Given that two party system, the challenge for a successful Presidential candidate and the initial constituency they represent has involved two basic steps. Winning the nomination of either the Democratic or Republican party, then winning the runoff with the candidate from the other party. The conventionally accepted strategy is that you run to the left to get the Democratic or to the right to get the Republican nomination in the primary, and then run to the center in the general election to win the majority of the independents who will decide the election.

The Middle Gets Underrepresented

But behind this conventional strategy is the problematic reality, in today’s ideologically polarized political parties, that the most progressive faction of the electorate generally controls who wins the Democratic Party nomination and the most conservative faction, the Republican. Given that each of the two parties includes very roughly forty percent of the electorate, with maybe twenty percent, the “independents”, in the middle, the two candidates with a chance of winning the election generally represent the leftmost and rightmost segments of the electorate, the winner generally the one making the most effective appeal to the middle.

New parties, which often try to emerge to represent the pragmatic middle, generally fail because the nature of the two-party system stacks the deck against them. Even a compelling new party is unlikely to be successful winning elections for the first few election cycles it fields candidates. That means, if you are going to vote for a third party candidate that is closest to your own views, there is a strong argument that you are “throwing your vote away”, and just allowing either the Democrat or GOP candidate you would least like to see win. The efficacy of this argument pretty much dooms all third parties in a system built around two entrenched parties like ours.

But in this political calculus, the middle tends to lose out. The most moderate Democrats, plus the independents, plus the most moderate Republicans, generally more than half of the entire voting public, do not play the primary role in picking the successful Presidential candidate. We political progressives who tend to affiliate with the Democratic Party see this all too clearly in the GOP where the right always seems to call the shots these days. But I think the same dynamic applies on our Democratic side as well.

Changing the Process – Preferential Voting or the “Instant Runoff”

So how to get that majority perhaps in the middle better reflected in the Presidential candidates and Congress for that matter?

In my thinking, the best way to change the content of the agendas of our political leaders is to look at changing the process that elects them. A change that will facilitate “many political paths”, rather than discourage the rise of new political parties. The change I think is needed is what I originally heard called “preferential voting” and more recently heard under the catchier title, “instant primary”. This is an election process that allows people to pick a first and second choice (at minimum, but can be extended to more ranked choices), that would allow people to vote for say a third-party that they would most like to support, but also the Democrat or Republican as a second choice that are likely to win right now.

This would allow people to move away from voting defensively, against the person they are most concerned about, rather than for the person they think would do the best job. You could then use your vote to both support perhaps a new emerging party you thought was particularly compelling without “throwing away” your vote for one of the two candidates with a real chance of winning.

With the emergence of new parties facilitated rather than discouraged, they would have a real chance to grow over the election cycles if they had a compelling platform and approach to governance. As the dynamic of the electorate evolved, so better could the political parties representing that electorate. One could argue that our current political process has become moribund because the two parties are embedded in an ossified structure, and as such, each is controlled by its own set of vested interests, who by maintaining just 20 to 25 percent popular support can control one of the only two meaningful paths to power.

Politics as a Spectator Sport

My take is that the continuing prevalence of a more hierarchical patriarchal “us and them” view of democracy manifests in our elections becoming a horse race or often a grudge match between two competing teams, one which will be victorious and the other vanquished. The “winners”, while doing lip-service to representing all their constituents, are expected by many of their supporters to wield power in a directive power-over fashion that adds perhaps insult and injury to the losing side. Karl Rove somehow jumps to mind here (given perhaps my liberal bias), but I’m sure their plenty of people on “our side” who play this game in a similar manner.

Certainly framing politics and governance as a series of contests between two incompatible sides sells cars and erectile dysfunction medicine on television, and put Fox News followed by MSNBC at the top of the cable news ratings heap. Some would argue that this gets more people interested in politics and that’s a good thing. But making democratic process so adversarial and take-no-prisoners, serves in my mind to restrain rather than enhance a process which should really be about building intelligent compromise and consensus.

I think that rule of thumb is applicable for any advocacy, even beyond advocating for one’s own employment.  So when asked, “Do you believe in God?”, nowadays I am inclined to say “No, but…I appreciate the idea that there is a deeper level of connection between all of us and have my own metaphor for that connection.”

If the person asking believed in God they might not buy my answer.  There take may be that either you believe there is a deity or you don’t (or maybe you’re not sure). Isn’t this an unbridgeable chasm between the worldviews of the atheist and the “believer” (theist)? How can there be any common ground here?

Well I’m crazy enough to think that their can be common ground!  That we all can accept that there can be many spiritual paths all of which can be valid.  It was John Lennon’s inductive reasoning (arguing from the particular to the general) back in my teenage years that first planted the seed to move me beyond my own perhaps dogmatic secular humanism.  In his song “Whatever Gets You through the Night” Lennon builds a case for many spiritual paths, based on what works (or as our son Eric said three decades later, “whatever floats your boat”)…

Whatever gets you through the night ‘salright, ‘salright
It’s your money or life ‘salright, ‘salright…

Whatever gets you through your life ‘salright, ‘salright
Do it wrong or do it right ‘salright, ‘salright…

Whatever gets you to the light ‘salright, ‘salright
Out the blue or out of sight ‘salright, ‘salright…

Of course in one of Lennon’s more famous songs, “Imagine”, he puts forward a more dogmatic secualar humanist view of the cosmos which associates nationalism and religion with war and violence…

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

I too tend to imagine a world without deities, though I understand that particularly in the United States, this is still very much a minority position (though apparently gaining adherents).  But I do not want to be the victim of an “us and them” framing that excludes me from discussions about ethics and the greater meaning of life among believers because I somehow as an atheist lack “credentials” to talk about overarching metaphysical questions that guide our development and path forward in life.  If I truly believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, plus believe in the Golden Rule, then I need to invite those metaphysical discussions with both my comrades who are conservatives and progressives, and among those with the whole spectrum of belief in deities or not.

Though I define myself as an atheist, the search for deeper meanings and overarching narratives in life is very important to me, to help me guide my path forward from day to day and through the years.  In that way I find some kinship with people who are religious and who do couch their beliefs in terms of deities.  I see “god”, as they are defining it, as their chosen metaphor for that deeper level and deeper meaning of existence.  My own metaphors are different.  I think in terms of each person’s “consciousness” and its development towards greater knowing and unmitigated love rather than an external “god” and his/her/its expression of the “divine”.

I have gotten to this whole thing about metaphor from many sources.  From reading books like Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, about the power of metaphor and magic in real life and then experiencing aspects of that same sort of magic in my own life.  From reading the work of theologian Karen Armstrong about the idea of “mythos” and the efficacy of the god concept for so many people through our history.  From trying to find an overarching human developmental narrative to tie together all the history I have heard, read or seen presented in film and TV.  I see how mythology, including the stories contained in religious scriptures fit into that whole human history and development gestalt.

And from my understanding of that human narrative, I see the efficacy of framing the greater expressions of collective consciousness as deities, particularly in a society that has been so hierarchical and for the past 5000 years.  God, Goddess or the pantheon represented the human collective will triumphing over any individual warlord or other privileged person or elite group.  Though most religions were co-opted by the elite to control everyone else, still I see the basic spiritual urge coming from the unprivileged to set the will of the whole of humanity above any elite group.

In another related vein I think of the current scientific metaphor of “Gaia” as not inconsistent with this deity framing.  Gaia reflects the collective interaction of human beings and all the other life forms in our biosphere with a geologically dynamic planet below.  Thinking of it as a sort of sentient superorganism is a useful construct to describe the complex chaotic (as in chaos theory not disarray) system that it represents.  It also reflects that the collective is generally smarter than any one entity within that collective, which is why democracy has been such a powerful and effective organizing principle.

So given my continuing advocacy for moving from hierarchy to a circle of equals, and being cognizant of my mom’s wisdom of always trying to “be effective”, it is important that I try as an atheist to come to grips with the god concept, to show solidarity with my fellow human beings that I hope to influence.  It’s like what they teach therapists, to accept their client’s framing of the world when trying to help them better navigate it.  I mean throughout the history of the past 2000 years there have been components of all three of the Abrahamic religions – Kabbalism in Judaism, Unitarianism in Christianity and Sufism in Islam – that have envisioned the divinity within, rather than just above and beyond, we human beings.

As I see it, our human transition from hierarchies of control to a circle of equals is all about truly embracing the Golden Rule.  I suppose one might argue that “do onto others as you would have them do onto you” is just common sense and needs no religion or “great myth” to help advocate for it.  But unbridled patriarchy, with its “us and them” thinking, has been more about “do onto others before they can do onto you” and “the person with the gold makes the rules”.  The argument by Karen Armstrong and others is that the religions of the “Axial Age” were all about creating stories that put forward a narrative argument for the Golden Rule to counter that “us and them” thinking of the purveyors of hierarchy and control.  To the extent that I can play my small part in moving these religious traditions back toward promoting the Golden Rule, then I have truly honored my mom’s wisdom.

Los Angeles is an amazingly diverse megalopolis including so many immigrant communities struggling to build roots in our city and our country.  I have gotten involved with one such community…

Spring each year is my one big yearly effort to raise money for a critical community organization here in Los Angeles, North Valley Caring Services.  They are and organization that provides free services to youth and their parents in a very poor, at-risk, mostly Hispanic neighborhood in the Panorama City area of Los Angeles, just three miles east of where my partner Sally and I live.  For those of you who know the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, the neighborhood is located between the 405 freeway to the west and Sepulveda Blvd to the east and between Roscoe Blvd to the south and Nordhoff to the north.  One of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the whole city!

North Valley Caring Services program for their neighborhood includes…

1. Family Literacy Program – Giving both young people and their parents the opportunity to improve the literacy skills they will need for family life, work and schools

2. Youth Program – Includes organized sports, schoolwork assistance, a library, and a place for neighborhood kids to hang out after school before parents come home from work

3. Childcare Training & Certification – Training adults in the neighborhood to be certified child care providers and provide care for the small children of other neighborhood family members so they can work outside the home.

4. Breakfast Program & Food Pantry – Providing free hot breakfasts for neighborhood residents and free donated groceries.

Please consider making a donation in honor of my upcoming 58th birthday.  I have set up a PayPal site to collect donations from my friends and family.  Click this link to access my PayPal account and make a donation, or if you are more “old school”, email me at cooperzale@gmail.com for information about sending a check.  You can also find out more about the organization at their website.

I have been volunteering with the organization for the past seven or so years, focusing mainly on collecting food for their food pantry and assisting with their fundraisiing events.  It has been a great and humbling experience for me to fully understand the extent of my own economic privilege and the narratives of some of the most recent immigrants to our country whose history has been built around other immigrants’ stories, including different components of my own families of origin who came to the states at various times from various places in Europe.

I think it is critical that progressive people understand this history and these continuing mechanisms of control, so we have more of a chance to rise above these manipulations by controlling elites.  It is equally critical that we avoid advocating for these manipulations ourselves, in our efforts to create a more egalitarian narrative for human society going forward into the future.  Control, even by the forces of egalitarian ends, is still control, and diminishes the natural human spirit to control ones own destiny.

So here’s my list of such mechanisms, certainly not a comprehensive one, but some of the obvious bigees and a few others you might not have thought of.

War

From the beginning of recorded history 5000 years ago it appears that the first tool of control was organized violence by elites against other people (and other elites) to bring those people within their circle of domination and exploitation.  This has been such a powerful and effective tool that it has continued to be employed by ruling elites thru the ensuing fifty centuries.  It seems only recently to have lost much of its efficacy in the 20th century of our Common Era when the deadliness of the weaponry and the capability to field militaries of such scope led to mass slaughters of human beings by each other for no apparent reason other than following orders from the chain of command.

I want to differentiate war with just general grudges and acts of violence between individual people or clans.  War is all about mobilizing large numbers of people and weaponry within a hierarchy of command as a calculated tool of policy by ruling elites.  Though fomenting hate among the “troops” may be a tactic by the command structure to motivate morale, generally the motives for war are more rationally calculated to seize resources, defeat or diminish enemies, and to broaden spheres of control.

Chattel

The invention of chattel offset the human and material cost of war and allowed elites to increase their level of manipulation of the people under their control plus increase their capability to broaden their sphere of control.  People could be conquered and rather than being simply slaughtered or left free but forced to pay tribute (the latter creating the possibility for rebellion), they could be put to work as additional soldiers and laborers with a minimum of resources for their upkeep.  Thus a small elite with an effective use of warfare could build its capabilities to grow and dominate a huge empire.

It was such a compelling (addictive?) tool of control that male elites even designated women and children of their own clans as chattel.  I suspect that when you put yourself in the mode of dominating others it gets increasingly hard to draw the line of when to stop.

Religion

From reading about the historical theory of the “Axial Age”, my take is that most of the great religions that are still popular today emerged during the third millennia of civilization (the one before our Common Era, roughly from 1000 BCE to 0 CE) originally not among the elites but among the rest of us dominated by those elites.  My take is that the original goal of these religions was to challenge the ethics of organized violence and domination by elites by putting forward concepts like the Golden Rule and attempting to reign in corporeal warlords with, at least in the case of Judaism (and later key to Christianity and Islam), a more ethical heavenly authority figure they would have to ultimately answer to.

Human consciousness being thoughtfully imaginative beyond the day-to-day mundane aspects of existence, religion with its great narratives and metaphors has turned out to be a compelling metaphysical framework.  So much so, that it has to a large degree been co-opted by elites to give an ethical justification (think divine right of kings) to their continuing exercise of control.

Case in point is Constantine I, a Roman general/warlord in the third century CE who defeated his fellow Roman generals and seized complete control of Rome’s European empire, reworking the Christian religion to his ends of conquest, domination and control.  The link between church and state that he forged held complete sway in Europe for the next 13 centuries until it gave way to other means of control during the Modern Era.  The main “us and them” mechanism of control was a calculated kindling of antisemitism, which led to consistent separation and persecution, plus repeated slaughter of millions of European Jews during the most recent millennium of human history.

Commerce

The original practice of trade between peoples in different parts of the world has and continues to have a generally positive impact on human development with the sharing of human resources and the resulting sharing of ideas as well.  But the co-option of that trade by political and economic elites during the most recent five centuries in the form of mercantilism, capitalism, socialism, communism (the reality rather than the ideal) and colonialism became a tool of domination and control of people as a more “civilized” adjunct to continuing warfare.

More recently, the advances in advertising and marketing in the second half of the 20th century – leveraging all the latest research and techniques of the behavioral, social and communication sciences – are all about the manipulations of the individual mind towards the collective shifting of opinion, taste and values.  Media philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote a great book on this topic called The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, which takes apart a selection of the popular media and advertising of 1940s and 1950s American culture.  It’s all about trying to create exciting and compelling lifestyles built around the ever-increasing consumption of products and services.

Science

Though the best of science has represented the unquenchable human thirst for knowledge and efforts to facilitate human development, science like religion has been manipulated as a tool of “us and them” thinking, ranking and justifying hierarchies of domination and control.

Like the initial challenge religion presented to organized violence and domination during the “Axial Age”, scientific thought challenged the religious dogma of social control that held sway in Europe during the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment.

Though not perhaps to the degree of religious thought and practice, as science became accepted by controlling elites, it was often manipulated by those elites as justification for and a method of controlling the rest of us.  Charles Darwin’s breakthrough ideas about the evolution of species were reframed as justification for the endemic exploitation of colonialism and early industrialization.  Early social and biological science built around phrenology and eugenics justified racism and the supposed superiority of the northern European “race” over all other “races”.  Between religious and scientific antisemitism, the ground was prepared for sociopathic dictators like Hitler and Mussolini to rise to power and initiate the Holocaust.

Again, I don’t see the basic intent of science being to control people, but like religion rather to aid in our understanding of our place in the universe and how best we can chart a path for our lives.  But again, as a powerful and compelling methodology for charting our lives’ courses, history shows us that it is easily manipulated by elites for the purposes of control.

Public Education

From my reading of history, particularly the efforts of Horace Mann to launch the “Common Schools” in the U.S., universal state-controlled public education had both facilitative and manipulative motives behind it.  Offering every young person in the county the opportunity to get a basic education was seen as facilitating the next generations of an informed citizenry a working democracy required.  But the dark side of this was public education’s role in engineering the “melting pot”, reprogramming the children of immigrants with values consistent with and respectful of the country’s Protestant elite.

If public schools were mainly an academic exercise in education and normalization in the 19th century, in the early 20th circumstances led to this system being essentially taken over by the nation’s business elite.  Schools were reframed under the banner of “business efficiency” to produce professionals and more low-level worker bees for burgeoning American industry and commerce.  In the immortal words of business-trained public school system administrator Elwood Cubberley…

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.

Today this exercise in control continues with all states participating in standardization of curriculum and teaching methodology, plus using standardized tests based on that standardized curriculum to evaluate, rank, and thus control students, teachers and schools.  Even a politically progressive Obama administration is pushing for this standardization, including new national standards so that all states align their separate standards under federal control.

The complete control of individual human development is a very modern mechanism of elite control, developed by the Prussians in the 19th century when they conceived of the mechanisms to best build a totalitarian state.  Prior to that in human history, ruling elites did not have the administrative infrastructure and scope of reach to attempt to manage each child’s formative experiences to such a degree.

Food

It is amazing to me sometimes how this ancient control model continues to propagate itself through most aspects of our contemporary culture, including areas that at first glance would seem simple and straightforward, like the production, sale and consumption of food.

Even a hundred years ago, the great majority of food consumed by most people was “whole food”, naturally harvested plants or slaughtered animals that were either cooked or eaten raw, and also often combined in soup, stews or pies.  But with all the advances in chemistry, biology and “food science” since the 19th century, much of the food people eat in our society is manufactured instead.  Various components of plants and animals are separated from the “whole food” and recombined using modern culinary science (as hyped on the Food Channel) to create fabricated substances that are artificially high in fat, salt and sugar, and are engineered specifically to manipulate our sense of taste and smell and heighten our craving for such manipulated food.  To a large degree consumption of these manipulated foods is responsible for our nation’s problem with obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other “lifestyle” diseases.

Remember “Soma”, the socially shared drug in the dystopian classic Brave New World, that kept the population passive and accepting of a totalitarian state?  The argument could be made that much of the packaged, convenience and “fast” foods that most Americans consume to a large degree are such substances, designed as much or more so for their addictive qualities rather than their actual nutritional value.  Often the nutritional value that is removed in the manufacture process is then added back in to some degree by “fortifying” the product.

Moving Beyond Civilization and Control

Increasingly I am dedicating my own life to moving our society beyond the structures of privilege that define elites and the mechanisms of control that protect that privilege.  When we truly move to a circle of equals and forswear these techniques for domination and control I believe that it will be such a transformation of human society that the term “civilization” will no longer be an appropriate label for the way we choose to engage with each other.  One can argue that the whole concept of “civilizing” implied that this was an antidote to an earlier more natural state of human society that was cruel, savage and unknowing, and needed to be remediated, by force if necessary.

In fact the state of the art of anthropology and current understanding of our pre-civilization hunter-gatherer forebears, is that their society was anything but cruel, savage and unknowing.  The great organized cruelty and savagery has come to us with the broadening imposition of civilization and hierarchies of elite control over human beings that lived in small mostly egalitarian societies for 200,000 years.

Whatever form of organizing society we move toward beyond the privilege, elites and tools control deserves to be called something beyond the term “civilization”.

Seems like all the participants in the conventional schooling process are hating it more and more! Will we have to let the whole thing go down in flames before we get out of our state of denial and really transform the system, rather than this endless reform?

Striking a Nerve?

My comment ended with a link (as I usually do) to a blog piece I had previously written last October, “Let’s Have Real Discussion about Education Policy”,based on a snippet of a speech by President Obama on education policy last August on the 2012 election campaign trail at Canyon Springs High School in Las Vegas.  My piece featured my frustration that it seemed like all our mainstream political leaders were drinking the Kool-Aid of imagining an OSFA (one-size-fits-all) education system as the only possible path forward.  Typically, when I post such a link, I might get a handful of views of my piece linked to.  But since posting that comment and the link last Thursday, my blog stats show over 70 views of my piece based on that comment, way more than I’ve ever gotten before from any similar Education Week comment.

Here again is the snippet from Obama’s speech that inspired my October piece…

Education should not be a Democratic or a Republican issue. It’s an American issue. It’s about what’s best for our kids. And I haven’t just talked the talk, I’ve walked the walk on this. Over the past four years, we’ve broken through the traditional stalemate that used to exist between the left and the right, between conservatives and liberals. We launched a national competition to improve all our schools. We put more money into it, but we also demanded reform. We want teachers to be paid better and treated like the professionals that they are. But we’re also demanding more accountability, including the ability of school districts to replace teachers that aren’t cutting it.

Obama was using the classic rhetorical approach of staking his policy vision above the fray of petty political bickering, as part of the tried and true general election strategy of reaching out to undecided voters in the center between more polarized Democratic and Republican positions.  Though some on the right of the GOP and the left of the Democrats have a different take on the path forward for our public education system, certainly his election challenger, Governor Romney, had an education position not that different from the President’s.  Basically they both believed in standardization, high-stakes testing, teacher evaluation based on that testing, and encouraging the launch of charter schools to improve educational choice.  The biggest difference was Obama being more favorable to teacher’s unions.

So presumably one of the viewers of my comment that linked to and read my October piece made the following comment on my piece…

This is a beautifully written piece containing many interesting and thoughtful quotes by bright individuals who seem to understand learning. What is missing is what is missing in almost, if not all, political, theoretical, and editorial writings – how do we do what needs to be done? How do we transform education when government entities drive the educational bus, not trained educators? How do we transform education and meet the needs of all students, most specifically those who are drowned in poverty, abuse, mental health issues, Fetal Alcohol Affects/Syndrome, addiction… and the list goes on.

My commenter shared her credentials of over 30 years work in schools with young people who are burdened with the problems she mentioned above.  Based on that background, her take was that…

It is easy to teach those who are willing to learn, those with supportive families, those who are of higher intelligence – they are usually curious and creative and only need a little guidance. What is difficult is to develop a system that meets the needs of all students. Only when someone can provide a viable solution that our governmental entities will accept and fund, will we truly transform education. In the meantime, people like me will continue to do the best we can for every child for whom we are responsible, with fewer resources and more regulations. I agree with much of what is written here, all that is missing is the SOLUTION!

I appreciate and share her frustration! Though she is focused on kids with learning difficulties and I more on kids she refers to as “willing to learn”, I strongly believe that both groups are suffering in our standards-obsessed OSFA schools.  Yes there are certainly a number of kids in that latter category, who love school and enjoy following the academic direction of their teachers and successfully jumping through all the hoops they are presented with, and gaining self-esteem from real learning plus being awarded good grades for doing so.

But I’m convinced that there are many other kids who do not, whose natural love of learning is blunted by being constantly directed by adults (through academic rewards and punishments) rather than following their own muse.  Kids like our son Eric who bridled at that direction from his teachers, or like our daughter Emma, who seemed to be too dependent on the approval of her teachers and becoming a sort of “trained seal”.

The Path Forward

So what is “THE SOLUTION” that my commenter highlighted in all caps? Or at least a path forward to it?

I believe that path forward starts with moving away from rigid standardization (maybe “regimentation” is a more appropriate word) of school curriculum and the assumption that a learning environment for young people involves constant direction and instruction by adults.  Until we have more than a hammer (standardized instruction) in our society’s educational toolbox, I fear that we are going to continue to misperceive all learning as a nail that needs to be pounded in!

My commenter asks…

How do we transform education when government entities drive the educational bus, not trained educators?

It’s a great question!  From my reading of U.S. history, government has driven that educational bus since the beginning of the state-directed public education system in the 1830s.  Even the progressive ideas of the great educational minds of the early 20th century, particularly those of John Dewey and Maria Montessori, were short lived.  Dewey’s and Montessori’s approaches, which acknowledged the critical role of the student’s innate curiosity and drive to learn (beyond the state’s drive for a “melting pot” based on a uniformly educated citizenry) were set aside by a corporate takeover of public education leadership during the first three decads of that century. Teachers, being mostly women in a society where most leaders were expected to be men, have never been treated as real professionals and trusted with running public schools.  To the extent that unionization gave teachers more clout, it was still as “labor” rather than “management”.

I think that path forward to a solution starts with having a broad discussion about the full range of educational options, beyond the present assumption that all real education is a formal process that requires students to be sitting in front of teachers engaged in constant instruction and direction of their learning.  I think all stakeholders in the education process – parents, students, teachers, principals, bureaucrats, and legislators – have been guilty of harboring these very limited educational assumptions.  Add to that the hubris of legislators and bureaucrats that set all the most significant education policy, to think that they know best what others need to learn.  All of these stakeholders need to at least consider the arguments of Dewey and Montessori, and a number of other more contemporary alternative educators, that real learning starts with a self-directed learner, that I called out in my October piece.

Just as we have moved away from the idea of our society as a “melting pot” to one of a “salad bowl” that champions diversity in our culture, we need to champion real diversity in our education system.  Championing that diversity starts with backing away from the current obsession with ever-increasing educational standardization and high-stakes testing to enforce that standardization.

I think the Metlife Survey shows that, our teachers and principals as true education professionals, are increasingly disheartened by this trend.  The majority feel they no longer control the learning environment they offer to students, while still feeling responsibility for that environment.  In the world of standardized education, all real control is exercised by the standard setters at the state (and increasingly the national) level.  Principals and teachers are increasingly just following orders rather than being able to fully exercising their professional judgement.  I can only imagine the stress of being evaluated based on how well you teach a required subject that many of your students may not be interested in learning, and react with boredom, passive aggression, or outright hostility toward their teacher.

Instead, they could be energized by having more elbow room to enact a much broader spectrum of educational approaches beyond just conventional instruction of a standardized preset curriculum.  In such an environment, teachers and principals could better engage individual students in what the student is interested in learning rather than what the state demands they must learn.  The dynamic in a classroom where all the students are there because they want to be could make teaching a joy like it was meant to be rather than a grueling chore that it seems to have become.

Addressing the Challenge of Special Needs Students

Then my commenter asks…

How do we transform education and meet the needs of all students, most specifically those who are drowned in poverty, abuse, mental health issues, Fetal Alcohol Affects/Syndrome, addiction… and the list goes on.

To this question I don’t have any easy answer.  I think many progressives rightly point out that most of these are larger societal issues that belong in the realm of politics and the collective vision and action of a larger human community and cannot be relegated to schools to solve somehow in isolation from that political will or lack thereof.  This is where I believe that Obama is wrong when he says that education is not a political issue.

In my opinion, what we teach our kids, or choose not to teach our kids, is completely political.  According to a progressive educator like John Dewey, the circumstances of the larger community that a young person is growing up in, whether privilege or poverty, is compelling educational curriculum.  To choose to ignore that curriculum in favor of a generic standardized predigested math, science, language arts and social studies is a political decision.

To simply pass a state law that every public school large or small must be able to accommodate the developmental needs of every sort of young person with every sort of special need is a political act.  This is a bureaucratic approach that allows state educational leaders to say that they have solved the problem of equal educational access for all students, while in reality imposing an impossible mandate on many smaller schools, particularly charter schools.  A very different political approach to this issue would be to empower each local community to provide an array of schools and other alternative educational venues to accommodate those special needs, but not all needs accommodated by all schools.

The Need for “Many Paths”

To sum up here, I continue to be convinced that the solution lies in each community being able to provide for many educational paths, by providing an array of profoundly different educational venues, rather than just many instances of the same OSFA schools.  I do appreciate that this goes against the grain of conventional educational thinking that the majority of us are caught up in.  Our society has embraced educational standardization for nearly two centuries, and any number of generations of Americans have experienced only this conventional type of school.  Given that long embrace of such a limited view of how to facilitate human development, it is little wonder that the promotion of educational alternatives is such an arduous task, despite the mounting evidence of the failure of the OSFA school system.

But the fact that our our society has begun to embrace cultural diversity does give me hope that we can now finally embrace educational diversity as well.