With Deborah Meier

What does government as empowering partner look like in education?

The exchange below is adapted from a conversation which Deborah Meier, the great democracy educator, and I are having on Education Week about reviving education for the democratic way of life.

Dear Deb

Your mention of the Sanders campaign in your last blog and the one today "Inviting Policy Ideas for Democracy Schools," brings to mind that this election shows how many people, especially young people, are eager to help make change. But this is also the Age of Trump. Many people feel powerless and look for a savior.

Expanding government benefits of health and education is one thing. But we need to develop ideas that illustrate government "by" the people, not only "for" the people. How can we recover the idea that everyday citizens are supposed to be in charge, producers not only consumers, and government can be an empowering partner?

We worked on this in Reinventing Citizenship, an initiative I coordinated with the Clinton White House from 1993-95, developing ideas to overcome the gap between citizens and government. A team led by Carmen Sirianni, our research director, proposed a "Civic Partnership Council" to coordinate civic engagement practices across agencies. It influenced the 1995 Clinton State of the Union address and had support from William Galston, White House policy director. Polling by Stan Greenberg showed potential interest. But Washington politics thwarted the idea.

It's important to recall that government as empowering partner is possible. Jess Gilbert's terrific new book, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (Yale University Press, 2015) describes an extraordinary, little known case.

From 1938 to 1941, a group of agrarian leaders in the Department of Agriculture worked with land grant colleges, Cooperative Extension workers, and community leaders to develop a democracy initiative built on continuing education and cooperative land use planning. Supported by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, they included M. L. Wilson, undersecretary of agriculture, Howard Tolley, chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics and engaged intellectuals like the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, Charles Johnson, author of The Negro in American Civilization and others.

Against scholarship which argues that the Department of Agriculture in those years was led by technocrats, Gilbert shows that the agrarian leaders were "organic intellectuals of the Midwestern family-farming class." They created a counter-narrative that challenged the version of the American Dream where the ideal is making a lot of money. They respected local cultures, local histories, family farming, and ordinary people's intelligence. Wilson remarked, "I'm a great believer in the ability of the average man to find his way if he is given light."

Their philosophy, drawing on John Dewey, was education for a democratic way of life. "They believed that democracy required continuous learning, personal growth, cultural adjustment, and civic discussion," writes Gilbert.

The agrarian leaders worked with farm groups and unions, churches, youth clubs, professional and business groups, and government agencies. They trained about 60,000 discussion leaders. Tens of thousands of groups discussed topics ranging from family farming and soil erosion to the meaning of democracy. The effort also organized schools of philosophy to educate educators - developing what we call "citizen professionals" who think broadly about their work -- in topics such as the challenges facing modern societies. They sponsored lectures for hundreds of USDA employees on democracy, with leading intellectuals of the day.

All this conveyed the idea that democracy is something people make together, not simply consume.

The initiative ended in late 1941 after Henry Wallace left the department to become Vice President. The Farm Bureau, the big farmers' organization, mounted fierce opposition. Conservatives in Congress charged it with being "communist." All drew on the story line, developing on both right and left, that experts know best.

But the effort, called the Program Study and Discussion, was immense. Three million farm men and women took part in local discussion groups in every region of the country. Tens of thousands participated in 150 schools of philosophy. A lesson for our age of us-versus-them partisanship: all materials included critics of the administration from both left and right, as well as supporters. This was a "different kind of politics."

The effort also succeeded in launching a process of participatory land use planning across the country. Among other things, it helped birth soil conservation districts and generated plans for preventing soil erosion and fertility depletion and protecting family farms.

What policies can we propose that build democracy and agency in and around schools?

Harry

Dear Harry,

It's worth stressing that the habits that help sustain democracy and the habits that assist oligarchy are different--in dialect and substance. The relationship between means and ends is one of those things that good schools should be exploring. The trade-offs. Add to that your quote from M.L. Wilson about the belief in the intellectual ability of "ordinary" people--of those thousands of ordinary people who you describe in your letter.

The belief that "ordinary" human beings are extraordinary was reinforced for me when I became a mother and then taught 4 and 5 year olds. We are born theorists working out how the world works, persevering even when our hypotheses so often turn out to be wrong. Rare is the infant who gives up easily. This belief is now, for me, a fact not just a wish.

You and I are seeking new ways to embed these ideas, reinventing communities, into the world of schooling and the often alienated community of citizens which schools depend on. Perhaps only schools that are the centers for 5-18 year olds as well as adults can be sustained (this is what leads me to be less enthusiastic than I once was about schools of choice vs neighborhood-based schooling).

You ask: What legislation could a city, state or federal government invent that would, at the very least, shift the odds in favor of schools that are learning spaces for students, teachers and the citizenry they depend on?

Here are a few. Giving parents and teachers more time to talk together and parents paid-leave to visit their children's schools, maybe just as citizens? Money to improve facilities? Money to "waste" on lengthening the teacher's day, but not the student's? Funding for child-care and after school enrichment? Buildings that are free for community use? Exploring new ways to select principals democratically by the people who are its constituents?

Let's get a lot out on the table and argue about their importance-as well as their potential dangers.

Deb

Expanding government benefits of health and education is one thing. But we need to develop ideas that illustrate government "by" the people, not only "for" the people. How can we recover the idea that everyday citizens are supposed to be in charge, producers not only consumers, and government can be an empowering partner?

Last Sunday, January 17, in a sermon, "Prophecy and Politics," for Martin Luther King Day at Prospect Park United Methodist Church about my experiences as a young man in the civil rights movement, I addressed prejudices against working class whites.

Last Sunday, January 17, in a sermon, "Prophecy and Politics," for Martin Luther King Day at Prospect Park United Methodist Church about my experiences as a young man in the civil rights movement, I addressed prejudices against working class whites.

Last Sunday, January 17, in a sermon, "Prophecy and Politics," for Martin Luther King Day at Prospect Park United Methodist Church about my experiences as a young man in the civil rights movement, I addressed prejudices against working class whites.

My experiences in the civil rights movement made me conscious of such prejudices, especially among progressive professionals.

Martin Luther King, for whom I worked as a young man in the movement, was also aware of them -- and also deeply political in the older sense of politics, engaging the interests and perspectives of one's opponents. This led to understanding white prison guards whom many liberals saw simply as racist. As he put it in the "Drum Major Instinct" in 1968,

"When we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens [came to] the cell to talk about the race problem. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, 'Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You're just as poor as Negroes! The same forces that oppress Negroes oppress poor white people.'"

Politics like King's were at the heart of the grassroots "organizing" parts of the movement. When King assigned me to do community organizing among poor whites, I took these lessons about politics from King and others into the white mill village of East Durham.

Certainly I saw racial prejudice, which I also knew from my extended working class southern family. I also saw people like Basie Hicks, the community leader in East Durham who battled racial prejudice her whole life. She chased away the Klu Klux Klan when they came after me.

I also saw capacity for generosity. After people experienced collective power, when we were able to get action from the city on dirt streets, the neighborhood made connections with the black community across the tracks. I realized that narrow prejudices among poor whites often are rooted in powerlessness.

Perhaps most important, I saw the dignity and value of hard work, and also the invisibility and even contempt liberal professionals had for such work.

This was a community of mill workers and hair dressers, secretaries and police. People's identities drew from their sense that they made contribution to their families and also to their communities and the society. We got a glimpse of such grit and spirit on 9-11, when police and firefighters rushed into the collapsing buildings.

But more generally, blue collar work is devalued, and along with it blue collar workers. This was true in my experiences in organizing. Teachers across the street from Edgemont, the mill community, were very condescending toward "mill kids." At Duke, when I described the people in East Durham, faculty would ask, "Why in the world are you working with racist rednecks?"

Work, itself, especially manual work, has become even more an object of prejudice today. In Getting the Left Right, the political scientist Thomas Spragens shows how respect for work and working people among progressives in America has declined since the 1930s, replaced with pity for the poor. In a similar vein, Mike Rose in The Mind at Work shows the hidden intelligence and creativity at play in many different kinds of blue collar labor, from waitresses and hairdressers to plumbers and welders. He also shows the invisibility and devaluation of such labor across the popular culture.

Such devaluation has large cultural, psychological and political effects. Barbara Ehrenreich observes in the Nation that while blacks face harsh discrimination, they sometimes fare better in the popular culture:

"At least in the entertainment world, working-class whites are now regularly portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street-smart, and sometimes as wealthy as Kanye West."

Last year Anne Case and Angus Deaton won the Nobel Prize in economics through research that discovered working class white men 45- to 54-years old are the only group in America with declining life spans.

Declining respect as well as stagnating wages and loss of many blue collar jobs are the discontents which demagogues play upon with their divide and conquer strategies. Timothy Egan in his New York Times column, "Giving Obama His Due," last Saturday showed how liberals contribute through their stereotypes. He describes supporters of Trump as "xenophobers, defeatists and alarmists, the Eeyore Party with a Snarl." Not a hint of the idea that they may have legitimate grievances.

Though they may be objects of solicitude from professionals and in the mass culture, blacks, as well as working class whites, experience such devaluation.

There may well be grounds here for a new interracial political coalition that reaffirms the dignity and the value of work and working people.

Last Sunday, January 17, in a sermon, "Prophecy and Politics," for Martin Luther King Day at Prospect Park United Methodist Church about my experiences as a young man in the civil rights movement, I addressed prejudices against working class whites.

Last Sunday, January 17, in a sermon, "Prophecy and Politics," for Martin Luther King Day at Prospect Park United Methodist Church about my experiences as a young man in the civil rights movement, I addressed prejudices against working class whites.

The movement's politics of empowerment has been largely forgotten today. While Trump and Sanders tap anger, they express it in radically different ways. Trump employs a politics of scapegoating.