In our continuing conversation on
Education Week, "
Bridging Differences," Deborah Meier and I exchange views about the significance of democracy schools for the larger society. She writes on November 26 about conflicts:
"It depends on what the issue is, how deep the disagreement as well as how important it is to live together afterwards. Sometimes a split is a step forward, not backward. But it's not a good habit. At Mission Hill it means that there's almost always a way to find a meeting place when a parent has a serious concern even if it takes time to find it. . Some are "easy," like homework. We were opposed to it, at least until 4th or 5th grade and only if we thought kids would not be stuck if parents were too busy doing something else. Some parents wanted homework very much. So we shifted to sending suggested activities home to all parents and mandated reading or being read to.
"We had a few parents who were upset that a teacher told her 3rd graders that Langston Hughes was homosexual. We took her worry seriously and helped her see that aside from respecting our own values we had to acknowledge the view of many other parents, about what was right. We thought more about when to bring up a famous person's sexual preferences and when not--and why. The parents appreciated the conversations and remained a stalwart ally.
"It helps that teachers have two years to get to know parents well, and time is set aside for family and school/teacher conversation, the staff has built-in time to talk together, that the school itself is diverse and thus we don't have to do all the talking!"
I reply in
Education Week, December 8.
Your stories about negotiating your way through differences with parents and families on issues like homework and sexual orientation are great - the stuff of everyday politics. And your embrace of tension, conflicts, and sometimes sharp divisions - "it depends on how important it is to live together afterwards" - is the first premise of citizen politics.
Citizen politics grows from the sense that we have to "live together afterwards," for all the differences and conflict. Politics in this elemental sense is the alternative to war and violence. In these days of deep divisions, fears, and fear-mongering, this is more important than ever.
So, your schools have been laboratories for such a politics!
I'm thinking a lot these days about how much examples of such politics are needed in the rising tide of acrimonious attack and bellicosity, especially from the Republican side. It reminds me of what I've read about the early 1940s.
Henry Luce, the publisher of
Life wrote an influential essay in 1941 called "The American Century." He accused Americans of vacillation in the face of Nazi dangers and said "the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
This sounds a lot like Republican candidates today. Marco Rubio's campaign theme, "A New American Century," explicitly brings back Luce.
But we need a response that is not narrowly partisan. Simply bashing Republicans isn't the answer.
In the early 1940s, there was another alternative - the vision of "the century of the common man" which Roosevelt's Vice President, Henry Wallace, articulated as the answer to Henry Luce in a speech in New York, May 8, 1942.
Wallace had been a Republican until he became Secretary of Agriculture and then Vice President for Franklin Roosevelt. His family had deep roots in the populist farmers' movement in rural Iowa. Wallace saw the war against fascism as about democracy, not American supremacy. He envisioned an egalitarian, democratic post-war world in which colonial empires would be abolished, labor unions would be widespread, poverty would end, and the US would treat others with respect. "We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis," he wrote. "There can be no privileged peoples."
Wallace's Century of the Common Man speech drew on the widespread sense of what Marilynne Robinson was getting in her
conversation with President Obama printed in the
New York Review of Books: "democracy...was something people collectively made." This created a culture of democratic respect.
I was struck by how people felt they were "making democracy" through work when I interviewed veterans of the Civilian Conservation Corps from the 1930s, who told me their work building parks which were "national treasures" changed their lives. There were many other "citizen workers" in those days -- citizen teachers, citizen business owners, and citizen politicians, among others. Lisabeth Cohen's
Making a New Deal describes vividly people's sense that the whole society was responding to the Great Depression.
Society has seen huge decline in the public dimensions of work and respect for people who do work (including teachers). Susan Faludi in her terrific book,
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, describes the changing identities of men, from African American shipyard workers to television executives and evangelicals, as work has been devalued. Men live "in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured only by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture." Older identities of "contributing to communities and building the nation" have largely disappeared. She argues that men are like Betty Friedan's "trapped housewives" of the 1960s.
I'm convinced this loss of public role has a lot to do with white men supporting candidates like Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.
We urgently need to remember histories of public work and publicize current examples that challenge dominant trends. So your schools and others inspired by them, it seems to me, are usefully described as democratic sites where people help to make democracy through their work. You were doing more than making decisions democratically -- you were making democracy.
