Page 1.7: Sections 33-37
33. MORE REASONS, MORE SOLUTIONS
More Recent Developments
In this section we’ll see some more reasons why liberals schools should be built, and also how they help solve modern democracy’s main problem of growth and maintenance. For example, another reason Dewey wanted to build a more liberal public school model concerned the weak results of a conservative system. If a book-centered conservative model was really the best, then wouldn’t all the facts they teach be better remembered and used more often outside of school? Obviously the model doesn’t match the results. Not only do such facts remain shallow and weak, but tests show they’re soon forgotten once students leave school. How many 30-somethings remembers even 10 academic facts they learned in school, out of the thousands they studied? Personally my own active and holistic experiences with teachers and sports are much more vivid than the content of just about any academic class I took; I remember my English teachers much more than I remember anything they taught. Such ‘holistic’ experiences -- involving the entire body-mind -- are the result of more than just silent reading and writing. So, such results were yet another reason Dewey said our conservative public schools are not helping students get prepared for a creative and productive life after they graduate, but are, instead, helping the corporate class whose profits depend on workers being passive, obedient to their supervisors, and accepting of what they were given to work on. If so, then such schools are serving the business class, rather than helping build a more vibrant and satisfying democracy.
To Dewey that conclusion seemed obvious. But he just didn’t stop there. He also asked himself what can our public schools look like in which were taught democratic habits of intelligent learning and independent decision-making? To build those kinds of intelligent habits students needed practice to actively test constructive ideas solving challenges in the real world, with their entire body-mind. If not, then their ideas too would begin fading like a morning mist -- use it or lose it! Of what use to all students is merely reading about Othello's irrational jealousy unless students actively feel the dangerous results of irrational jealousy? After all, how many young students are really as jealous and possessive as Othello? A few, maybe, but that’s about it. And if so, why waste students’ time and effort studying them? They could be learning so many more useful skills and knowledge in more liberal student-centered schools. For example, doesn't learning the important idea of respect for others really weaken all feelings of jealousy and excessive control over others? So why make all students feel they’re not really educated unless they've redd Edward DeVere, a.k.a. William Shakespeare? How many really great people never heard of him, much less redd what he said?
No doubt, de Vere himself would say Fie on such folly! He wrote his plays to be produced and acted, not merely redd, so wouldn't the best way to honor his work be to have students perform them? Unless ideas become more actively felt on a conscious level, even the best ideas are merely the skeletons and shadows of the best knowledge and wisdom, not their living and breathing images.
Another reason why learning in our public schools should be activity-based can be seen with one of Zen Buddhism's most important ideas: Attention. Without carefully attending to and focusing on one’s work, its intrinsic feelings are lost to consciousness, and thus remain less than the best knowledge; it remains subconscious at best. So, without actually practicing and building the habit-art of keeping one's attention focused, in a relaxed and constructive way, then Zen’s most important idea remains just that, a word, and hence much less than real wisdom. Real wisdom means being able to use ideas to keep improving one’s habits, and practicing that art is a life-long challenge.
Of course by the same logic, one of our modern era’s most important liberal words -- democracy -- means little unless one has actually focused one’s attention onto practicing democratic actions, and learning what they actually feel like in one’s muscles. Just like any real and active knowledge, such feelings can grow only with physical practice and testing, not by merely reading about it. Only as someone actually feels how important it is to, say, vote and give people their equal rights do they feel some of democracy’s energy and meanings.
Are such educational ideas really too radical? I'll just mention one recent public school experiment along these lines. A few miles north of San Diego, California is the small school district of Encinitas. They've begun experimenting with teaching students some different character habits, to help strengthen student attention skills. They’ve begun asking children to practice a little relaxing yoga during the day, to sit quietly and comfortably for a few minutes and feel what attending to one’s breathing is like. Such experiments can help liberate students from the daily grind of learning more and more book-facts, and they can also help students know how important working in a relaxed way feels more useful than staying tense all day. No doubt it's just a small-scale experiment, but from small acorns often grow mighty oaks.
Thus, improving our schools and making them more student-oriented makes it easier for them to learn other important habit-art, like intelligent experimental testing of ideas, and seeing they skills they’d like to learn more about. It's yet another great educational challenge for us liberals. How can we get teachers and students to give students more freedom to learn, and then in that process also begin teaching them how important democratic freedom is, and how it keeps growing?! In other words, how can we get parents to see how academic facts can become more vibrant and meaningful by giving students the freedom to actively practice them, so they can then know best how to keep building new habits as life keeps changing and new learning are created?
Here's another reason liberals should focus on building such schools. Modern democracy as a vibrant and growing social institution is still in its infancy; its modern forms are less than 300 years old. It may sound like a long time, but on a cultural scale it’s still short. What’s more, a child-centered Deweyan learning model is even younger, at only about 100 years old. Those are 2 good reasons more liberal schools remain an important mission for us. Anyone looking objectively at the world’s oldest democracy can easily see how feudalistic it still is. Only about 300,000 people own most of country’s wealth; they continue controlling the political class with campaign donations and media dominance; and our military retains the same feudalistic form it’s had for thousands of years.
Human population itself is another reason why more liberal schools should be built. Without them teaching students how to act more intelligently with the reproductive powers, more areas of poverty and ignorance will continue growing, thus creating the need for more police and prisons. Human populations have recently soared into the billions, and our new communication tools have just begun growing, so there are more reasons for such liberal schools. It’s now a common fact: the more women are educated to feel such facts, the less need they feel to reproduce and have more than one or two children. What’s more, conservatives too aren’t just standing around. As we’ve seen from the very beginning of this book, they’re still very active helping pass restrictive education laws like NCLB. Little wonder, most of our public schools today are still undemocratic and book-centered, rather than child-centered. Not enough people have yet realized other educational models are available, and in many respects better for democratic as well as human health itself!
More About US Education History
US education history also furnishes us with many other reasons for building more liberal schools. No doubt, the most important reason is our still conservative public schools. In 1888 Charles Eliot, then Harvard University President, redd a paper about school subjects, or curriculum, to a National Educational Association convention, and from there 3 commissions were formed to offer their own pictures of educational excellence. However, public schools at the time were very different than today. At that time almost 90% of teenagers didn’t even go to high school, much less college; after Grammar School they went to work helping build the new nation’s roads, railroads, and cities, thus helping increase family income. At that time the typical high school graduate was a white male from a well-educated and wealthy home, and they usually had habits of obedience to their elders as well as reading habits. Thus, conservative book-centered schools felt normal for them. Parents could often afford nannies who redd books to them and then tutors or boarding schools focusing on more book-work. Thus, given a still racially segregated society, it was natural for people like Eliot to say our public schools should remain book-centered. Science and math facts, for example, were neatly broken down into easily teachable ideas throughout the system. Thus, a conservative book-centered education became the basic model of excellence, rather than the more progressive student-centered activity model, with its experimental learning habits. In that model, books were merely useful tools for guiding constructive building projects; and today, of course, computers have become the new storehouse of academic ideas.
Thus, with Mr. Elliot’s help, and few laws for compulsory school attendance, a conservative book-centered curriculum and learning method continued catering to a very small social segment, even as Dewey was building his Lab School at Chicago. Compulsory education for all children was still a relatively new idea, and so building more schools for the 90% who didn't go to school would have meant higher taxes for everyone, and many people with racist feelings just weren’t really to build schools for minority African students, or to hire more teachers. Many preferred segregated separate-but-equal school systems. Only about 50 years earlier was the first state-funded teacher-training school opened, as well as the first women’s college. Only yesterday, so to speak, did Mississippi become the last state to pass such laws in 1917. Many simply felt plumbers, carpenters, and railroad workers didn’t need school; they needed work clothes. Even though Thomas Jefferson had recommended a 2-track vocational-academic school model in 1779, a few years before Franklin died, government officials generally ignored the democratic idea of universal education until millions of immigrants started flooding into the US. As a result, such laws were passed while Dewey too began writing about the need for more vocational schools. The Industrial Revolution helped make the vocational school idea more practical. But again, it may be asked: with about 70% of students still not going to college, is there anything but our own conservative education bureaucracy and parental ignorance standing in the way of building more liberal student-centered public schools?
Dewey, of course, saw many other reasons for building such schools. Not only do conservative schools ignore teaching more useful democratic habit-arts, but they also leave many young folks with weak work habits in a work-based economy. Even computer work can be stressful. What’s more, even vocational schools often ignore learning intelligent work habits; they often teach students how to run factory machines and avoid serious injuries like getting strangled while working. So, couldn’t they too be better serving students by also teaching them how such tools and work can be used to help keep growing a better democratic society for all people? Couldn’t they be teaching more useful democratic character habits? Or should they keep allowing students to think making and keeping as much money as possible is the best habit to practice? Also, shouldn’t all students be learning to intelligently judge what our factories are making by their actual results, like building more powerful guns, bombs, aircraft, and even polluting cars, or should we instead use our factories as tools for helping make our communities safer and more enjoyable for everyone? Why shouldn’t every neighborhood have a park where young children can safely play and exercise?
Such reasons help us Deweyan liberals keep such educational questions as alive and vibrant today as they were 100 years ago. Why should any of our public schools be used mainly to keep profit-obsessed industrial captains and military leaders supplied with more obedient and greedy workers? Why shouldn’t students also learn how to use their work as a tool for social improvement and change, rather than a way to build a fat bank account? Why shouldn’t students even begin learning more about their collective power for saying how our factories and corporations are run, and how their profits are spent? The more they don’t, the more dangerous and stressful life can become. Should such important democratic student character habits continue growing, or should they graduate with disrespectful habits like telling a date to either ‘put out or get out’?
Economic feudalism is another reason why more liberal schools should be built. Why shouldn’t students start feeling all the ways they can use their collective power more democratically in the workplace; it’s called economic democracy! If, not, then even college educated engineers will continue designing products to rapidly become obsolete, rather than remaining useful for a number of years. It’s been a common result since the 1950s. Young car engineers were made to help build flashy-looking air polluting cars that soon rusted out, thus creating the need for a new car every few years. Then in the 70s, new electronic tools began growing yearly, also encouraging more such tools to be built! ‘New and improved’ became a standard advertising phrase; who wants the old and useless? ‘Planned obsolescence’ became a reality, while workers continued supporting pension and healthcare plans even though they merely increased the cost of their products and created higher salaries for corporate CEOs! Health was all but ignored in our public schools, thus creating the need for such plans. Through it all, however, the idea of economic democracy was ignored as workers kept themselves out of the corporate decision-making loop, and thus remained vulnerable to corporate decisions made by small boards of directors. So, by not learning to use their collective economic power intelligently while in school, to help produce the best results for themselves, life remained more precarious at best, thus creating yet another reason why our conservative public schools should be liberalized. In them students were taught to merely accept the work they were given, and so when they went to work in corporations it was easy to make them accept what they were given, make and sell as many things as possible, even worthless stocks and insurance policies, or soon-to-break-down cars or gadgets. What did they care; they were making good money?
Ethics? Integrity? Honesty? Intelligence? Helpfulness? Such words were rarely even mentioned in public schools, much less formally studied in them. Corporations simply didn’t want their workers thinking about such things; the more they did, the more trouble they might cause. Given such jaded, short-sighted, cynical, greedy, and selfish business ethics, many became part of the problem, rather than the solution for building a more intelligent democratic nation, where profits were intelligently recycled for everyone benefit, not just stockholders, and where politicians weren’t reduced to daily begging for more campaign funds. The US economy emerged from World War 2 as the big winner, and wealthy CEOs weren’t about to reduce their money-making power, and so became yet another reason to build more liberal democratic schools. Sure, they gave workers healthcare and pension plans, but then passed on the cost for them to consumers in the form of higher prices; it was normal business practice, but eventually foreign car makers in, say, Japan, would force many automakers into bankruptcy. Thus, undemocratic economic habits keep making life highly unstable and dangerous.
People may feel such reasons aren’t really worth all the trouble for building more liberal schools, but when they’re added to all the reasons already mentioned, like gang violence, crime, expensive prison growth, and of course wasting billions of tax dollars to build over 1,000 military bases around the world and now drone aircraft helping kill innocent civilians, such liberal schools may be seen as the best investment we can make in building a safer and more satisfying world for everyone. To those who say our military is helping bring desperately needed civilized habits to many uncivilized tribal areas, we liberals can say decent business ventures, where people are treated with respect and decency while making a decent living wage, can help civilize even the most backward counties on earth.
In a recent article dated 1-10-13, the Wall Street Journey published yet another reason for building more liberal schools. It cited a study showing the US ranks 17th in life expectancy among 1st world nations; first is Switzerland, then Australia, and Japan. For us liberal Deweyans it’s yet another reason for building more liberal public schools where health is at the center of attention, as is the freedom to learn what students want to learn. No doubt, many other medical statistics could also be cited, but space is limited. So, again, Dewey's liberal student-centered democratic model keeps offering a better educational solution for millions of people in the US and around the world. The recent use of community service projects, at the high school level, is one hopeful solution, but why not make them central in all our public schools? Wouldn’t, say, young police officers start seeing their neighborhoods differently?
Another reason for building more liberal democratic schools: they teach students more about what’s actually going on in their world. Ignorance is the poison to all democratic forms of life, economic, political, military, or educational. Without accurate knowledge and facts it’s more difficult to keep improving any of those systems. Without such facts students merely keep accepting, say, the fact of greed and its harmful social results, like taking more millions to off-shore banks to avoid taxes, as well as highly profitable corporations. It’s also easier for people to keep losing their life savings, and even homes sometimes, to pay off medical bills while insurance companies pay off politicians not to build a decent health system for everyone, not just for the wealthy among us. The more our conservative public schools keep ignoring how students can help improve all such challenges with their collective power, the more such challenges will continue making their lives more stressful and dangerous.
No doubt, some conservatives will start talking about ideas like creeping socialism and communist ideas, but these days it’s become much easier for liberals to also talk about all these harmful social results from maintaining a feudalistic economy, society, and nation. In the world’s oldest democracy, a few hundred thousand enjoy living like royalty while millions are made to pay the price for such lifestyles! For us liberals, building, say, public banks whose profits go back to the people, rather than to Wall Street mega-banks, are becoming another collective option for balancing a few banks’ already huge money power.
Another liberal solution to economic instability can start growing in more democratic liberal schools. Students too can begin connecting themselves with their political system, and even start pressuring elected politicians to increase import fees on foreign goods. Such tariffs would help create more jobs in the country. Why shouldn’t students begin feeling what such collective power is life, so they can keep practicing it all through life?
Conservatives who readily wail against socialism and collectivism are being ignored by more and more people. Such ideas may have scared fearful people in the 1950s, but today more people realize all governments are forms of collective socialism, created and maintained with socialized tax monies, even for the military. Are we to believe our military should be ended just because it’s a socialistic organization? What we liberals do say, however, is it should become more democratic, rather than feudalistic and male-dominated. Individually, people have little social power, but collectively people have the power to move mountains. What’s more, once that kind of collective democratic habit is learned, then it’ll be passed on to children even if our schools don’t teach it. However, such useful habits can begin growing even at the primary school level, with more student freedom to study what they want, and to also work collectively on social improvement projects. They’re the best ways to keep growing feelings of intelligent democratic power useful for balancing concentrated forms of feudal power, and for improving everyone’s life.
More Hopeful Signs
Earlier I mentioned a New York Times article about life expectancy. It also mentioned the first report of the New York Education Reform Commission; the full report should be available later in September, 2013. Among many reform ideas it mentions "...making schools a hub for healthcare and social services..." (The New York Times, 1-2-13, Commission Recommends Core Changes in Education). That idea is certainly one we liberal progressives can work for. What better place to give future doctors and nurses some real healing experience than in their very own neighborhoods? After more than a decade of Republic rule New York schools are still basically a conservative book-centered system. It also has the highest funding for schools in the US, and yet some areas of the state still produce some of the lowest high school graduates in the country, not to mention low test scores! For us liberal Deweyans, such results are more reasons for experimenting with more progressive kinds of learning activities. Conservatives, of course, might say such results are caused by teacher unions whose members aren’t teaching academic facts like they should. Even if there is some truth to the idea, is that any reason to keep ignoring more liberal kinds of learning activities? Isn’t it possible such weak results like low test scores and graduation rates are more the result of defining excellent education as mere book-learning? Isn’t it possible such a system is really a rather unnatural learning system itself, where most all students are kept psychically chained to their books while not actively learning so many other important democratic and character skills, like intelligent experimentation. In fact, for us liberals, merely more money can never make a basically unnatural system better until it recognizes and changes all the false and unhealthful assumptions it’s based on!
The Wall Street Journal article cited above by Louise Radnofsky goes on to say: “The study by the federally sponsored National Research Council and Institute of Medicine found the US near the bottom of 17 affluent countries for life expectancy, with high rates of obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease and arthritis, as well as infant mortality, injuries, homicides, teen pregnancy, drug deaths and sexually transmitted diseases.” It makes one ask the question, how should we define the phrase ‘affluent society’? With such results, why should we keep believing conservative politicians when they say the US is really an exceptional nation. Such results proved we all exception in creating such weak social results! How can a nation be affluent and exceptional with such social results? And worst of all, many of those results are the result of weak public schools! Obesity, diabetes, and heart and lung diseases are often the result of ignorance about how the human body works, what foods make it work best, and how such healthful diet exercise habits can be intelligently built and practiced all through life. If so, then aren’t they yet more reasons why more liberal schools should be built, where all personal and social forms of democratic health and at the center of attention, rather than on the sidelines?
Dewey was one of the first philosophers to accept such new educational and social challenges, and thus build a more liberal education model based on student needs, so they could more easily learn what practical kinds of excellent habits feel like. For him such schools, and their role-playing, game, and constructive activities, can begin improving all such weaknesses, including the typical student hatred of school. In more liberal schools students can begin feeling their actions each day help mold important habits helping make their lives more intelligent here and now.
What’s Happening These Days?
As we’ve seen, his liberal model has been successfully confined by conservatives to mainly a private school location; the Dalton School in New York is one such example. As we’ve seen, since the 1950s conservatives have waged a kind of education war against liberal democratic schools, in addition to economic and political kinds of war against labor unions and progressive politicians. Since Plato, the basic conservative social model has been undemocratic at best, anti-democratic at worst, and so people around the world allow feudalistic systems to keep living. Thus, it's still very difficult for liberal and progressive people to gain more democratic control of the very institutions their taxes pay for. In many ways, conservative subjects and teaching methods have remained as solid as concrete; in general teachers too like to use only books as their main learning tools, even though the subjects are secular. It makes their jobs physically easier than working in more active democratic schools, where students are free to work on different projects at different times and so life in general is less controlled and more life-like.
In the first chapter we mentioned some facts about the conservative education law entitled No Child Left Behind (NCLB). It celebrates a system which, in some ways, teaches, say, mathematics the same way it was taught in Plato's day. Arithmetic and geometry are still largely abstract subjects taught from books and disconnected from practical use in life. Such a conservative learning program was made into legal concrete in 2002 when the act was signed into law by conservative President George W. Bush. In effect, however, the warm-sounding law sets conservative ideas in stone the same way concrete sets bricks in a wall. Perhaps a few more words about it might help more people see many more reasons why a conservative educational model works basically to support and maintain our still largely feudalistic economic, racial, political, and military status quo.
The NCLB law basically chains students AND teachers to academic book facts and standardized tests, rather than teaching students useful employment and character skills. At selected times all students in the same grades, regardless of their different social classes, are required to take the same standardized tests, and the results are then used to judge the quality of teaching and the school itself. Test scores are required by law to go up year after year or the school will be given an unsatisfactory rating and teachers' jobs will be endangered if scores don’t keep improving. Then, if such low ratings continue for 5 years, teachers risk losing their jobs and schools risk losing federal dollars. Thus teachers too become mere lackeys of conservative testing corporations; they must teach such facts or find other work. Conservatives, of course, argue it's the best way to make teachers accountable for their pay, and the most scientific way to judge student learning and preparing them for today’s jobs. In reality, however, to many liberals it seems the warm-sounding law is yet another example of the system conservatives want and need to keep profits flowing and minorities restricted to society’s rather menial jobs. For decades, racially biased drug laws, for example, have worked to produce the same results.
No doubt, if educational excellence is defined in such a narrow way, as merely learning a certain set of academic facts and reading skills, then NCLB does show how well teachers are teaching. However, for we Deweyan liberals, in today’s world such a narrow and artificial definition of educational excellence is simply not all young people need to become law-abiding and productive citizens after high school. Today students are facing many challenges for making life itself more productive and less stressful. In today’s world, given all the junk food and drugs available, excellent character and health habits of diet and exercise are needed now more than even before. Even the Wall Street Journal is acknowledging the depth and seriousness of that educational model.
Also, the NCLB itself requires schools provide military recruiters with student information so they can more easily contact undereducated graduates and hopefully recruit more of them for more warfare. True, students can request their school not provide such information about them, but unless they do, the school will automatically provide contact information to local military recruiters, who, like corporate leaders, love to have students who already know how to passively accept and do what they’re told to do. So, again, we liberals ask: How are we to build a more intelligent and peaceful democratic world unless our schools help teach students other habits than mere obedience to those in authority?
For us Deweyan liberals, then, the NCLB is just another form of conservative educational concrete; worst of all it's very undemocratic. It's basically a system for discovering which students can easily learn abstract trivia, and thus be more useful to our feudalistic corporations and military branches. What’s more, it also neglects teaching the vast majority of students what’s going on in their world here and now, and also how to make useful intelligent contributions to their own neighborhoods even before they graduate. Sky-high unemployment rates for that age group around the world are also pointing to such conservative educational weaknesses. Thus, to us liberals, the conservative NCLB law is merely that, and certainly isn’t the best one for building a more vibrant and working democracy. Just look where such laws are coming from -- the Bush family itself. George Bush and his younger brother Jeb, the ex-governor of Florida and possibly the next Republican president in 2016, continue saying it’s a good education model; no doubt to such corporate people it is. In reality, however, it continues being used to build more charter schools using non-union teachers, and to also helps give public tax money to conservative church schools. If students' test scores don't go up, then parents might become eligible for federal voucher money for sending a child to even a private religious school. So, naturally, powerful conservative foundations, like the Bradley Foundation, have poured millions of dollars into the charter school movement, no doubt helping weaken one of the most liberal Democratic supporting groups in the country -- teacher unions. Recently, in opposition, Democratic Representative Dwight Bullard said: "We're supposed to be turning out productive citizens, not just test-takers."
Such conservatives wants students learning, say, more math skills to pass the next math test, rather than teaching them how math facts can be used to keep improving both themselves and life itself. However, wouldn't we all be a lot better off if students learned about the mathematics of health, or building, or banking instead? Otherwise children will continue feeling vulnerable and psychically cutoff from much of life itself. Why allow only engineer graduates to see how math facts can be used to build new objects?
In conservative schools reading itself has become another form of psychic concrete, rather than a tool useful for helping students build their own reading, writing, and thinking skills. With such teaching “Shakespeare” has become merely another frustrating requirement for already busy students. The English language has changed so much in the last 4 centuries it’s almost impossible for even white students today, much less minority students, to understand much of what the bard wrote. In many ways even English literature has become frozen just like church doctrine was in the Middle Ages, rather than actually learning to feel how such ideas can be used here and now, like how hesitating at something may produce dangerous results, like Hamlet learned.
In conservative schools, many of the subjects Aristotle suggested have been neatly simplified and frozen for students from 1st grade to high school senior; teachers are basically free to assign whichever book-problems they want. As a result, however, students stay disconnected from the very communities they’re growing up in, and thus feel their challenges and weaknesses are really someone else's job, not theirs; thus life often remains habitually unintelligent and dangerous. In a democratic nation, however, it’s everyone’s responsibility to keep building a better world. Our own conservative schools thus continue promoting the feeling education is merely learning more eternal and unchanging ideas, in religion, history, physics, chemistry, and literature, rather than how to intelligently use such ideas creatively in the real world. Scientific facts have become the new secular dogma; E = mc2 is a new kind of god. No doubt, scientific facts are our most useful and reliable mental tools, but unless students learn to use them intelligently, they’re soon forgotten and ignored and life remains stuck in the same routine ruts. In liberal classes, however, such ideas are merely ideas to keep role-playing with, humorously as well as seriously.
No doubt, to many teachers, researchers, and scholars a conservative learning model is best; it reduces life itself to mere ideas, and writing more articles about it. Sometimes they’re important, but often such habits keep those people separated from life and its challenges. What’s more, only a small percentage of students actually become teachers, researchers, and scholars. That’s perhaps conservative education's greatest weakness, solidified with the NCLB law. It radically discriminates against some 70% of students who want to work after high school, and who need to know what intelligent work and character habits feel like, like trust, honesty, and a cheerful helpfulness. Such skills are useful in all work, not just in some professions. So why shouldn't all students start learning how to actually use ideas for improvement even in the 1st grade? If they don’t, then both they and the public will almost certainly continue seeing less than excellent social results, even in ‘affluent societies’, and thus more need for expensive government programs. Then, after working for a while, and learning a little more about life's important feelings, they'll be better equipped for college work if they want it.
No doubt, our profit-addicted corporate sector loves to hire obedient and money-hungry people; that economic system is thus dependent on conservative schools where obedience is a normal part of everyday life. Our still feudalistic economic system is thus aided and abetted by our own conservative schools and the NCLB law. In fact, much of business life has become basically a weeding out process, looking for those who aim to do a corporation's bidding, regardless of the social results; the movie Erin Brockovich shows what can happen when profits become more important than people. And our most recent deep economic recession of 2009 has again taught us that fact; Wall Street salespeople and managers didn't much care about what they were selling, just how much they were selling and how many millions they were making in the process. In reality, however, those who kept selling economic scams to others became a danger and menace to the public good, as those who’ve lost their homes and jobs now well know. Would the situation have been any better if more students had been trained to practice honesty in their schools on a daily basis? We'll never know for sure, but why should that stop us from experimenting with such character studies now? Isn’t honesty still the best policy, at least most of the time? As mankind’s first little stone tool maker can show us, what's most important is how we use our tools and facts to make life more democratic, safer, and more productive for those in our own communities.
34. CHARTER SCHOOLS
I've divided this important section on charter schools into 6 short parts: Reforming Education; Evolution of Charter Schools; Their Basic Mission; Their Funding; Their Results, and Their Possible Future. Much of this information comes from an internet article on charter schools.
Real and Status-Quo Reforms
The more parents and students learn more about educational options and models, the more they’ll feel the difference between real and trivial reforms; charter schools are a reform effort within the conservative model, but by no means must they stay within that model.
It’s probably safe to say, most of the so-called education reforms over the last 60 years have remained confined to a conservative model. In general, they all continued assuming the basic conservative idea: teaching academic book-facts are the most important goal of education. Charter schools are yet another example within that model, but they are offering some interesting educational alternatives to the public school model. As we’ll see, however, recent studies show they too often keep students anchored to their books while also helping break the political strength of more liberal teacher unions. Both goals are definitely part of the conservative agenda, and have been for most of the 1900s. Part of the No Child Left Behind law says student test results should be used to help judge how good a teacher is, and many, if not most, charter schools think that’s a good idea!
A Basic Reform Challenge
Why are school reforms going on within a conservative model of education? It’s fairly easy to answer that question. For one thing, it’s basically the only public school we have, and so few university professors or bureaucrats want to openly criticize its basic assumptions. To do so might endanger their own jobs, as well as donations to their universities. Occasionally you might hear an education college professor say something like too many students don’t know how to think critically, but that’s often as strong a statement as they’ll make. Even though they know about Dewey’s liberal model, few, if any, professors are willing to speak out more openly about making our public schools more democratic places of learning, where students actually learn to think and talk critically about events going on here and now! Heaven forbid they should rock the conservative education boat, sailing around our country now for at least the last 60 years. Again, universities depend on wealthy alumni donations to keep increasing their investment endowment, and even liberal professors would like to have more money for studies they want to conduct. The fact is, many such universities have become for-profit monopolistic corporations themselves, and so can keep raising tuitions and student fees much faster than inflation rates! Also, many wealthy students are conservative to begin with, don’t want to hear many liberal ideas, and so colleges remain very careful about whom they hire. What’s more, both book publishers and many public school teachers support the conservative education status quo, so why should they endanger their own incomes and comfortable jobs?
Like any other human institution, however, our public schools too can keep evolving and improving to teach more democratic habits of power-sharing and equal rights. Such democratic habits are the most intelligent weapons against concentrated feudalistic power. At their heart lives the art of critical thinking itself; it depends largely on teaching students how to ask critical questions about any current event. So, the more parents and students keep practicing that habit-art, the easier it becomes to start actually thinking critically and constructively; seeing the results of political, economic, and education actions help empower students to ask such questions. Thus, it becomes easier to see another weakness in a conservative book-centered model. Its books about history, science, and math continue distracting student attention from learning more about current events, and thus asking critical questions about them.
Learning more about Dewey's liberal education model is also distracted, not only in school but outside of it too. When is the last time you heard anything about Dewey’s liberal model of education, either in school or even on public television? Thus, parents too simply don’t know about different education models. So, how can parents and students ask intelligent critical of their local principals and teachers when they’ve been educated in conservative schools only? They have no ideas to compare them to. Most parents were told in school what trivial facts to learn, and also given the questions to answer, rather than learning to ask about their own schools or learn what they want to learn. Thus, it’s rather easy to keep school reform ideas within a conservative model. It certainly doesn’t mean they must remain within that model, but it makes experimenting with more liberal ideas more difficult, like giving students more freedom to learn the skills and knowledge they want, and also to build more community service learning projects. Knowing more about such liberal ideas makes it easier for both parents and students to ask more critical questions about their local schools, like what kinds of knowledge are more useful than merely academic book-knowledge, and how schools can become more natural places of learning with more active projects?
Such critical kinds of educational questions are, for us liberal Deweyans, far from trivial. In fact, they help people start thinking about the very kind of habits we want to teach the next generation, feudal or democratic ones. For us liberals the strength of our democracy itself depends on teaching such liberal habits! Without such habits, any reform, whether conservative or liberal, remains merely an idea. In fact, the less such critical questions aren’t asked about what’s going on here and now, the more millions of people remain psychically disconnected from reality, more likely to lose their jobs, salaries, and benefits, as well as increase their debt while a small wealthy minority keeps growing obscene wealthier.
So again, to us Deweyan liberals, all democratic progress itself depends on first knowing about what’s going on here and now, asking how all actions can be made more democratic and equal, and then having the freedom to test different ideas. That reform model continues to be used by conservatives and liberals. Conservatives know democratic habits help weaken their power, and so they’re taken great care to build schools where children are distracted from learning such critical habits! They continue telling people their model is best for getting a good job, when in reality they continue making it easier to keep making more money for themselves, and thus controlling more and more of life! Feudalistic models of any kind help make our world what it is today – a collection of local tribes many of whom are hostile to anyone outside them! Thus conservative habits continue on. Thousands of years ago conservative religious leaders discovered they could keep people obedient to a feudalistic status quo by telling them god was punishing them for their sins with plague and natural disasters; such ideas kept most people distracted from actually seeing how to make life better for everyone, not just a few. As a result, we liberals can now see real education improvement as being today where science was a few hundred years ago, merely at the start of its growth.
Charter schools are yet another conservative reform idea. They’re similar to religious reforms within Christianity in the 1500s; they too existed with a conservative theistic model of life and nature. Even 200 years ago liberal democratic reforms like equal rights were merely written about, rather than allowed. In fact, as US story teaches us, the property-owning and business white men who wrote our Constitution wanted to keep political democracy to an absolute minimum. They wanted the power to tax whomever they wanted, use force to collect such taxes, and not even give much democratic power to the president, the people, women, and especially not to students. At a time when powerful European feudal monarchies were causing widespread social and personal havoc, such a feudalistic government controlled by a small upper class was best for keeping them in power.
Since then, however, democratic habits have continued growing, and with Dewey’s help reached the topic of school management as women demanded the right to vote and people demanded more democratic power at both the federal and state level. The educational lesson for us liberals should be clear: even the most entrenched and powerful feudalistic system is organic and thus can be improved, even our conservative public and charter schools. Certainly, conservatives who want to keep all forms of feudal power in place will keep working against such education reforms. Even today conservatives in many states are actively working to keep normally liberal voters from voting at all! But such civilized social tensions and contests, even though they may be repulsive and obnoxious on moral grounds, help make life more interesting and meaningful. To have an intelligent cause in life makes life that much more meaningful. And so again, it’s up to people at the local level to decide which school model they want their socialized tax money to support; the democratic seeds planted by Constitution framers continue growing, and that’s the best sign of a healthful and vibrant political system.
Why do we liberals need such democratic schools and systems? For the same reason we needed to build experimental science – the socially useful and liberating results both systems produce! The more democratic schools become, the less harm small feudal groups of people can cause to greater numbers of people. How many thousands of children died during the Children’s Crusade in the early 1200s merely because 2 or 3 religious extremists said it should happen? Even today doctors are coming out of profit-oriented university med schools with personal debts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they in turn are helping create the need for government to build a better healthcare system, one where people don’t go bankrupt merely because they need a serious operation or prolonged treatment. Liberal schools where health is the main topic of study will help reduce the need for such programs, even for those politicians who now get healthcare paid for with public taxes. If wealthy folks can educate their children at the best private schools, and learn useful practical skills, then why shouldn’t everyone be able to build such schools for their children?
Today, too many young folks are still coming out of conservative high schools and colleges with a head full of trivial academic facts, and yet can’t get a good paying job to pay the rent and grocery bills, much less pay off their huge education debts. Many have simply moved back in with their parents. Such weak education results keep telling people we need better schools; such feelings are essential to any meaningful school reforms. They help make people listen more easily to liberal ideas about public schools, and how they can be improved. Thus talking critically about our ideas is our present reform challenge. Why should parents and teachers keep believing their conservative schools are best when in fact they have several weaknesses? For us liberals, it’s a healthy first baby-step on the road to building a more vibrant, peaceful, and productive democratic nation, where just and helpful business actions replace often violent and destructive military actions, and where everyone can learn the useful skills and knowledge they choose to know. So now, with that said, let’s look more closely at the charter school reform movement.
Evolution of Charter Schools
One of the newest conservative educational experiments of the last 20 years is called the Charter School movement. The idea began growing in the late 1980s, when conservatives were looking to keep increasing their feudalistic social power not only in the corporate, but in the education world as well. From the start schools were designed to teach democratic skills and habits. Almost certainly, their main purpose was to weaken teacher union power, which, for decades, had been helping elect Democrats. At the time the charter school idea fit nicely into the conservative plan to weaken all union power, both educational and labor. Also, such schools would weaken the many laws teachers had paid state legislators to pass, so charter schools would be easier to build. To many for-profit conservatives during the Reagan years, such laws were limiting their efforts to build more schools where investors could begin making some money in education. For such conservatives all socialized institutions were, by definition, less than best.
So, in the late 1980s the president of the rather conservative American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, began talking seriously about creating more schools of choice, as they were then called. In essence, they were pitched as a school reform movement, but certainly they were always planned to be within the conservative education book model. Shanker still was working such a model, where students were kept distracted from learning more about democratic habits by learning more academic book-facts.
No doubt, dissatisfied parents too injected some positive energy into the movement. Child dissatisfaction with the conservative and moderate education model was, and still is, a common fact of life, and parental dissatisfactions echo such feelings. What percentage of children really like their conservative schools? As we’ve seen, in many cities 30% to 50% are rejecting them. Then, as today, students in the lower economic classes, where book-facts are not well respected, often complain to parents about not liking school. So, parents are already sensitive to reform ideas, even if they are conservative. How can they criticize a conservative model when they don’t know about any other options? Ignorance is far from bliss; it’s dangerous!
No doubt, such parental and student feelings too were another reason the first charter schools began growing within a conservative learning model! That’s probably the most important fact for us liberals to see. What we liberals question is the soundness of that model itself! We question the basic orientation of such schools; it should be changed from a book-oriented to a student-oriented model. We believe, with good reason, such public schools would be much more user-friendly for both teachers and children, so work would become easier and children would learn more about what they want to learn.
So, to many parents and business-oriented politicians charter schools looked at first like they might work, especially for those inner city children whose parents naturally wanted their children better educated than they were. Like all parents they too wanted them to get a good paying job, and thus be better able to live a better life for themselves. As we'll see later on, however, either for-profit or non-profit charter schools have not been the so-called educational magic bullet to produce such results. As we've been seeing throughout these pages, many economic factors, like corporate globalization, job-outsourcing, monopolistic corporate mergers, stagnant wages, and shrinking labor union power have made such hopes even more difficult to realize. Good paying jobs have become fewer for most everyone in the last 40 years. Add to that economic reality the fact charter schools remain within the conservative book-based model, and the hope of finding a good job after high school has continued remaining a serious problem for 18-24 year olds, unless, of course, one's family is well connected in the business community.
The charter school reform, then, started out as an interesting idea, but has become basically a pro-business, anti-union reform movement. Little wonder much of the public isn’t buying into the idea. Such schools were designed mainly to relieve teachers and administrators of excessive educational red tape; incompetent teachers could be more easily fired and schools had fewer regulations to deal with. If such regs were reduced, the logic went, teachers would have more freedom to teach students more knowledge, schools would have more power to hire good teachers, students would learn more, score better on tests, and then get into a good college or university. But it should be noted once again: students themselves were excluded from any input into what kinds of schools they would like to have! It was as if a patient was excluded from any input with their doctor over their own health care and treatment! In short, charter school students remained enslaved to their books, their academic facts, and to taking tests about those facts. It was either that or quit school, which, by the way, large numbers have done.
A few years after the movement began growing rapidly in California, Arizona, and Michigan, on 9-8-95 the L.A. Times ran an article “Bold Plan Would Slash Red Tape for Schools.” It told about the new charter school reforms.
What is educational ‘red tape’? Essentially such laws help build a safe school environment, set teacher qualifications, school year length, subjects taught, teacher duties, and school safety and maintenance rules as well. Critics said such laws often require much more paper work from teachers and administrators during the school year, as well as restrict other educational experiments. Those are fundamental problems for any monopoly, even public schools. How can new intelligent ideas be experimented in any such system?
At one time science itself faced that kind of monopolistic problem. Aristotle’s philosophic idea of Final Form helped restrict experimental science from growing even in the 1200s. It played the same kind of restrictive role as education red tape has played recently. If, say, all objects eventually reach a final stage or form of development, why bother experimenting to learn how things actually change and move? If the final stage of, say, all rocks is to reach the center of the earth, then why study how they can actually move and change here and now? Like many education laws, his final form idea actually closed down experimentation and study, rather than open it up to an infinite future of intelligent experimentation. Only when people like Roger Bacon in the 1200s and Galileo in the 1600s began ignoring Aristotle’s idea did our strongest experimental knowledge begin growing.
In effect, then, education red tape helped maintain a conservative feudalistic system, run by a few people and often protecting those even incompetent teachers. Teacher unions often helped create such red-tape. Often they paid legislators to make it very difficult to fire teachers, even though they may be incompetent; doctors often acted in much the same way through the AMA. In the 1700s capitalism’s godfather Adam Smith celebrated competition as the engine of economic progress, but since then real-world corporations have demonstrated competition and diversity are to be avoided as much as possible. Such competition depresses profits, as John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie discovered in the 1800s with their oil and steel companies. Thus they kept working to reduce it. In the real world monopoly is highly desirable for maximizing profits and reducing reform efforts, even if it means protecting incompetent workers or ruining the environment. Public schools became another example of such a monopoly, and charter schools became, at first, a way to break it up.
Teacher unions often worked throughout the 1900s to protect their education monopoly. For them competition or even democratic sharing of power with students became mere textbook ideas, unless – and this is a very important point – people can focus and concentrate their political power and start better regulating anti-competition monopolies, like Teddy Roosevelt started doing in the early 1900s, when more and more people began voting for progressive candidates. So, promising to give parents more educational choices, many districts began experimenting with so-called charter schools. It fit into a conservative agenda; for decades before 1993 conservatives had been working to weaken all labor power; such power made it more difficult to get pro-business conservative Republicans elected.
In the quest to keep breaking up teacher unions, conservatives offered charter schools as a way to achieve that goal. Teachers are certainly no exception to helping pass laws making their work more secure. They too want job-security and good pensions like everyone else. For example, they helped increase the age of students to stay in school, so they would get more public tax money and increased salaries in the process. They also wanted to hire more teachers, so they also supported laws about required classes, like algebra and geometry. They also wanted students must earn a certain number of credits before they graduate, and also wanted teacher salaries set. In short, a whole set of education laws were passed, and in that process intelligent educational experimentation became more difficult, like firing incompetent teachers.
Charter schools began growing as a reaction to such laws. In them it’s much easier for principals to hire and fire whomever they want, thus job security is much less stable as is pay and working conditions. In fact, somewhere around 50% of charter school teachers are fired within the first 5 years! Often they simply haven’t learned to make children learn what many of them have little interest in learning – academic book-facts. So, as time went on, many teachers didn’t want charter schools to keep growing; they threatened the conservative non-profit public school model itself.
No doubt, the aim of rolling back some education regulations is a good one. The California Education Code, for example, is now over 7,000 pages of rules and regulations, keeping the all-important control of what students should learn out of neighborhood control. In effect, the code legalizes merely another system of monopolistic feudalism, controlling local actions by a few powerful bureaucrats. It’s also why many of our schools have remained conservative over the last century, and recently have become even more tied to teaching academic facts with the NCLB and Common Core Standards laws. Both conservatives and liberals help create their own red tape; it helps keep the political, economic, and educational status quo in place, thus making the growth of democratic habits more difficult. For decades the American Medical Association helped restrict the number of students in med schools, thus making it easier for doctor salaries and costs to stay artificially high!
Obviously, not all such red tape laws are bad; it’s best to put safety regs into law. Who wants unsafe schools? But, teacher contracts often made it difficult to fire any teacher, even the worst ones. Thus was born one aim of charter schools. Conservatives and moderates started going to state capitals in places like California, Arizona, and Michigan to help pass new education laws, making it easier for charter schools to grow. They're freer to hire non-union teachers, and also fire those who aren't producing better standardized test results. According to the Times article cited above: “In the past, the California Teachers Assn. has opposed the creation of more charter schools, which also operate independent of the state’s education code.” And a recent law in Illinois said a 75% majority union vote was needed for teachers to strike; in effect it’s another undemocratic law against majority rule.
In the late 1990s the movement was well under way. Democrat Delaine Eastin, the former California State Superintendent of Public Instruction said, “she plans to free school districts from virtually every rule in the education code” in order to help “create individualized learning plans for each student.” Sounds great, rights, but, sadly, her rhetoric has not even come close to matching reality. Today, solidly democratic California has not only endorsed the No Child Left Behind law, but also the new and stricter Common Core Standards!
No doubt, in the late 1990s many parents bought into such reform rhetoric. Even liberals like myself hoped at the time it would be another positive baby-step to a more liberal democratic student-centered Deweyan model of educational excellence. Holding teachers more accountable for teaching academic facts also seemed like a good idea to most people, conservatives and liberals. After all, who wants teachers wasting public tax money merely passing out the same boring assignments year after year, sitting behind their desks, and promoting students year after year, regardless of that they learn? To us Deweyan liberals, those are just a few results when people allow their neighborhood public schools to keep a conservative learning model in place. And what’s more, many religious conservatives also hoped the new charter schools would make it easier to put religious studies back into schools, and thus make more secular liberal habits more difficult to learn. For them, the less young women know about birth control and abortion, the better. In a later article The Times concluded: “Charter Schools are an experiment worth building on.” (4-27-98)
Thus, charter schools started out as a hopeful reform movement. Firing an incompetent teacher, for example, became almost impossible because of all the legal red tape. Such laws also helped create extra duties and work for teachers and administrators, like helping more high school seniors earn more college credits before they graduate. After all, the need to make work as easy as possible is felt by teachers as well as corporate CEOs; both want to make their jobs more secure. Thus, there’s a perpetual danger in any kind of institution: more security and power often become the ultimate aims of their actions, rather than working for the public and student good. More recently, we’ve seen the same kinds of actions from the National Security Agency; they keep defending their power to collect phone and internet data from everywhere they can. Again, such organizations are modern versions of medieval fiefdoms.
Also, some profit-oriented conservatives and moderates felt such schools would be another chance to take more tax money from people. Why shouldn’t schools become profitable for their investors; after all, we do live in a capitalist economy where profits are often the only goal worth working for. Educational red tape prevented such schools from being built, so conservatives simply began paying legislators to legalize charter schools. As we saw earlier, in 2002 conservative Republican President George Bush 2 signed into law the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. With it, just about all liberal models of education, and their emphasis on character excellence, were banished to Valhalla, so to speak. They also helped reduce teacher union power, as teacher qualification laws were relaxed as well as union membership requirements. In fact, most of the country’s roughly 5,000 charter schools today do not have unionized teachers working in them or getting pensions supported by public taxes. And, as we’ve seen, NCLB also gave administrators a way to judge good from bad teachers; if their students’ standardized test results were low they might be fired. We'll see more about charter school results a little later.
With NCLB, however, even charter schools became smothered in red tape. Such schools must teach a standard conservative book-centered curriculum, as well as administer yearly standardized tests to some students. That part of the law has been the most obnoxious to many teachers and students around the country; recently in Chicago a strike just before the 2012 election helped call attention to the problem. For us Deweyan liberals, of course, such academic testing is just one of 3 important pillars of an excellent education, the other 2 being useful job skills and character training. To us liberals, all definitions of good schools should include those 3 educational pillars. Another important result of a good school is knowing how many high school graduates find decent employment within a year after graduation, and also how many become involved with the law and drugs as well as prison? Aren't those results just as important to public welfare as is learning useful facts? Such results are important. If Martin Luther King Jr. was right, then character excellent is the main way people should be judged, not merely by the facts they know or their skin color. What use is knowing a lot of trivia and yet not be trustworthy and respectful of others and the law?
Also, I’ll just briefly mention one other recent university reform movement, called on-line classes taken over the internet. They might be a way for more students around the world to get more education at much less expense. Early studies of such classes, however, are showing some serious weaknesses with the idea. For example, even though they sometimes enroll huge numbers of students from around the world, they are also showing a very high drop-out rate as well. No doubt, people are working to solve that problem. The idea, though, does promise to do what liberals have been trying to do for decades -- individualize and democratize education. Now, if only they would also start offering character classes, they could become the liberal schools of tomorrow Dewey wrote about. As more and more people get personal computers, their potential for such classes only grows stronger.
In short, for us Deweyan liberals, charter schools just haven't been much of a democratic reform movement at all! They're not teaching many employable skills or excellent character habits, and so people continue believing they need a college education to get a good job. But recently, as a result of our 2008 economic meltdown, even that idea is rapidly becoming out of reach due to the steep rise in college costs. Who wants to be tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they even start working? Such debt is working today in much the same way religious sin worked in the Middle Ages; in both cases people become obliged to learn stressful habits, obedient work habits in the first case, and obedient religious habits in the second case.
The Charter School Mission
At the start of the charter school movement there were 2 main goals. The first was to reduce legal educational red tape, thus making it easier for charters to grow. They became more independent and self-governing while still operating within a conservative academic model. That idea aimed at merely administrative reform. To us liberals, however, it was yet another so-called trickle-down reform model. It was similar to the conservative trickle-down economic model of Ronald Reagan. In the 1980s conservative Reagan economists said better laws would make it easier for a few people to become wealthier, and they in turn would use their wealth to create more jobs; liberals called it the trickle down model of economics. So too, in the late 1900s conservatives said better education laws would automatically create better schools where students would learn more facts and knowledge. Even a large majority of teachers (over 65%) and administrators said students would automatically learn more academic facts if teachers had more freedom from extra work and duties. However, as time went on for both models, actual results have proved them both to be little more than myth, rather than sound economic or educational thinking! Sure, a lot more people have become billionaires, and a lot more jobs have been created. The problem is they’ve been created in places like Vietnam, India, Pakistan, and China! And tests scores too have been mixed at best.
The second goal of charter schools was to make teachers more responsible for students learning academic facts. Many parents certainly bought into that idea. According to conservative and moderate educators, low public school test scores meant teachers just aren't doing their job, and so should be fired. The idea became solidified into law with NCLB. If the school itself showed a pattern of such low test scores, then it could be completely shut down, and students given the choice to attend another school, where teachers knew better how to cram more academic trivia into students, or parents could get money to send their kids to another school, even a private religious school!
But again, for us Deweyan liberals, both those goals are naive, short-sighted, and shallow for defining educational excellence! For one thing, the second goal is disrespectful of child development itself! Study after study has shown students are best able to learn abstract facts in their junior and senior high school years. Until around 8 years of age they learn what their senses tell them the world is like, and then to about 14 they like to practice their building skills. The adolescent brain finally develops it's most mature form in the later teen years, so, before that, it’s much wiser to keep developing children’s constructive physical abilities, habits, and knowledge, so they can gain some useful skills and experience before they’re more capable of learning abstract ideas and subjects.
As we’ve seen, such ideas are anything but new. Thousands of years ago Plato himself realized students were much better at abstract thinking after 2 years of military training from 18-20, after they've had some real world experience. Thus, to us Deweyan liberals, the charter school mission looks like merely another form of conservative and moderate union-busting work while continuing to ignore basic child development and character excellence from its model. For such people children should learn obedience to traditional ideas more than anything else.
It’s also worth noting, as the charter movement continued on into the conservative Bush 2 administration, weakening teacher unions only increased. In fact, weakening labor unions in general had become a major part of the conservative agenda all over the world. In fact, since conservative Washington lawyer Lewis Powell wrote his famous memo in the early 1970s about what a conservative agenda should look like, union-busting was a major objective. Vietnam protests around the country, as well as the Women’s Liberation Movement and abortion legalization convinced many conservatives they needed a definite plan of action; if not, their entire way of life would soon dissolve. Then, in 1980, conservatives found their savior in Ronald Reagan. Since then, with the help of globalization economics and outsourcing of jobs, union membership has gone down from around 30% to 7% today. Needless to say, it's helped make the wealthy class even wealthier, and the poorer classes poorer; some 50 million people today use government food stamps to help pay food bills. In other words, it looks like we've entered another conservative built Gilded Age; we now have similar extreme wealth differences to the early 1900s. Also, there just doesn't appear to be much difference to students between public and charter schools; both keep students anchored to their books and teacher control.
Charter School Funding
No doubt, like any other movement, the charter school movement depends on the public buying into the system. It may aim at replacing our public school system, but unless the public supports the system and its results, it cannot keep growing. Like Alexander’s empire, charter schools are in many countries, like the US, Canada, Great Britain, Chile, New Zealand, and even Sweden, but their roots are only a few inches deep. Naturally, a major problem is funding, either from taxes or private investors or both. Often it's been a mixture of the 2, with for-profit schools growing mostly in California and Arizona. Even with private and public funds, funding remains a problem; parents are still far from convinced charter schools are the best educational solution for their children. Recently, a number of wealthy foundations have been chipping into the charter school pot as well. Orgs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Edyth and Eli Broad Foundation, the Wal-Mart Walton Family Foundation, and of course many other smaller investors have been supporting charter schools, hoping more parents would send more of their kids to them. After all, who wouldn’t like to see a nice return on their investment, test scores increase, and more students going to college? But, once again, for reasons already mentioned, such hopes are proving very difficult to realize.
As of August, 2005, one study reported charter schools spend about 20% less money per pupil than their public school counterparts. As a result, growing the charter school movement has been difficult in many places where public funds are scarce. In Canada, for example, the movement’s roots are shallow and weak, at best. What’s more, a later study in 2008 found charter schools have only about 60% to spend on students compared to public schools. In short, the public isn’t buying into the charter movement. No doubt, their kids are coming home from such schools with the same depressed feelings they have for conservative public schools. And of course we liberal Deweyans like to cite still another important comparison between prison and school funding. Public schools often spend something like $10k a year on students, but in some states spend about $30k a year on prisoners! Little wonder the for-profit prison system aims to increase its share of that tax money pie. More and more investors are getting into the for-profit prison business. In California, prison spending is about $50 billion a year, and what CEOs worth their stock options don't salivate at the chance of tapping into that taxpayer funded gold mine? Many feel they can certainly keep prisoners jailed for a lot less than that.
More conservative red tape also makes it easier for wealthy foreign investors to buy a piece of the charter school pie. If, say, they invest $1 million in such schools they can automatically get visas for family members. In other words, charter schools have become yet another way for wealthy foreigners to make some money from US taxpayers, as well as help family members become citizens! Win, win, win situation, right? Unless you’re a student in conservative charter schools; for them such schools aren’t much different from the public schools they’re gone to; they’re both obsessed with teaching more book-facts, solidified into law with NCLB.
Be that as it may, many foreign investors too are helping build charter schools here in the US, taking a chance on making more money with their money. It's not all investor-oriented however; many inner city charters get even more public funding than their public school cousins. But the educational bottom-line question, so to speak, remains: Do charter schools actually teach more kids more academic facts and thus make them ready to go out into the world after high school, get a good paying job, and start making some useful and constructive contributions to our nation? Sadly, it doesn’t seem so. We liberals are not surprised either; in fact, we’d be surprised if the results were any different. Based on recent test results, the corporate private sector has not really found an educational magic wand preparing students for constructive work after school or success in college.
Charter School Test Results
As usual, conservatives, moderates, and liberals have their own sets of results they say should be looked at. Overall, however, charter schools often produce lower test scores for their students. Naturally their defenders say such results really depend on a number of other factors besides school. What other factors? Well, like area of the country, student motivation, parental involvement, and many social factors. On the whole, however, charter school test results themselves are not encouraging, for teachers as well as students. Teacher drop-out rates from such charter schools are a little higher than they are for new public school teachers – more than 50% after 5 years. Again, for we Deweyans that’s to be expected too. Charter teachers on the whole work longer hours, often for less pay, in fiscally unstable schools, and are less trained to teach kids what they don’t need or want to learn. All of those conditions make the charter school mission more questionable.
For example, California Charter Academy was publicly funded, ran a chain of 60 schools with a $100 million budget, and even they went bankrupt in 2004; hundreds of thousands of teachers and students suddenly had no schools to go to! Did any investors actually make any money from that situation, and if so, how much? Those are important facts all parents should know. The recent financial collapse of 2008 is simply another example of the tax payer being fleeced by the government for tens of billions of dollars merely to avoid Great Depression 2! It might help more people to ask: What’s worse, another depression or a $10 trillion debt? Some choice, eh?
How about test results? Are charter schools producing higher student test scores? Alas, that idea too is now more hope than reality. As you would expect, a number of different studies have been done by universities, and on the whole charter schools have not lived up to expectations. For example, probably the most important study ended in 2009, conducted by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO for short). They found charter school test results are about the same or lower than most public schools: 17% of charters came up with better test scores; 37% produced lower test scores; and the rest scored about the same as public schools students. So, around 85% of charters have not raised test scores. In other words, students still aren’t buying the charter school model of education any more than they’re buying conservative public school models. Why should they? The book-centered model itself is basically unnatural and artificial! Thus, charter schools are not the answer to many of our serious social problems. And what’s more, we Deweyan liberals say they probably never will be if they remain founded on mere book work. Again, that conclusion is based on solid findings about child psychology itself. The more schools divorce such facts from teaching students how to constructively use their ideas, the sooner students will forget such facts. And the more conservative schools continue ignoring teaching intelligent character habits useful in a democracy, the more social problems will continue growing, like unemployment, crime, and drug abuse.
Another study about test results was conducted by the American Federation of Teachers itself, Albert Shanker’s organization, and they too found about the same results, even though they at first were in favor of such schools. And yet a 3rd study, a National Center for Education Statistics study, actually found charter school student test scores to be lower than public school scores! When it rains, it pours, right?
We Deweyans say such weak results are all but inevitable when charter schools stay rigidly and routinely anchored to teaching mere book-based facts. The basic problem is an artificial assumption about child learning abilities. Conservative schools might make teaching easier, but they make learning more useful skills and knowledge more difficult! Now, thanks to NCLB, in both public and charter schools, students either learn what they must learn or drop out. Even if they come back to school later on the choice is still the same. What makes it a little easier later on is their brains have become more mature and interconnected, so learning more abstract book-facts becomes a little easier.
One conclusion at least seems obvious to us Deweyan liberals. Conservative charter schools continue ignoring the most important part of educational excellence -- democratic character development. Few students really relish being enslaved to book-facts, and having little freedom to learn what they want, like how to become more intelligent and independent people. In general, conservatives want the freedom to teach their children religious habits they feel are important, while liberals want the freedom to make schools more active places of democratic learning. For us liberals, computers and books are the proper place for such facts, but until robots are programmed to intelligently use such facts, only humans can practice character excellence.
To be as clear as possible, we liberal Deweyans say all schools based on teaching mainly academic trivia, whether public or charter, cannot achieve educational excellence. The more they neglect formally teaching democratic habits of character excellence, and allow students greater freedom to learn what they want, the weaker their educational results will be, and the more tax dollars will be wasted as well! For example, about 70% of all prisoners go into prison addicted to some kind of drug. And what’s worse, most leave prison not learning any kind of employable skills, leaving them just as vulnerable to criminal temptations as they were when they went to prison. Not surprisingly, some 60% quickly return to prison, all at taxpayer expense. We liberals say such results are what more taxpayers should be learning; such results keep telling us our conservative book-centered public and charter schools have a systemic weakness built into them; they favor a small book reading social class, and thus discriminate against all other non-reading classes? Thus, our conservative public schools are far from fulfilling their mission of educating the public.
For us liberals, a healthy democracy simply doesn’t need regimented, obedient, undereducated people blindly stumbling through life. Upon such habits rode the ancient, medieval, and early modern world. They were in place long before Plato was a teenager! The entire 1100 year medieval period is simply more evidence of those habits, and it's why liberals are still mainly talking about more democratic political, economic, and educational models. We see yet more evidence of their results in the modern Muslim world today, where conservatives want the power to keep creating Muslim-dominated religious political systems; even Israel is becoming more of a religious theocracy, rather than a democracy. As a result, they’re both increasing the artificial divisions among people, rather than lessening them, often in the name of racial purity. Only more liberal kinds of education can change that dangerous and war-provoking reality into a more humanistic world! For students of history, that part of the world today looks much like war-torn Europe did in the 1500s and early 1600s. Without more liberal habits, we can expect to see such actions in the Muslim world for centuries more.
Slowly, it seems, more liberals and independents are waking up to the importance of education conservatives have known about for thousands of years! They’ve known schools play a key role in the growth of any kind of system, whether it’s democratic or feudal. Democracy can thrive and grow only if people finally realize how important their own neighborhood schools really are. We need more people thinking critically and independently, and the usefulness of that idea was seen clearly a few years ago. A huge energy company called Enron suddenly collapsed overnight and workers lost their jobs. Enron leaders kept telling their passive workers everything was fine and wonderful even as it was collapsing and they were selling their stock as quickly as possible! One day workers went to work and discovered Enron was gone!
The more people are taught to merely accept and obey their supervisors or political leaders, whether corporate, military, political, or education leaders, the more vulnerable they become to others’ decisions. It’s one thing to use words like economic health, corporate excellence, and worker greatness, like Enron leaders used, but it’s another thing altogether to keep track of what those leaders are actually doing here and now. Liberal schools focus on actively teaching students to do just that – keep track of what people in power are doing with their power. All such critical skills helping students see words as just words, and actions are what’s most important. Such skills grow stronger only as students are free to learn more about other peoples’ actions. More intelligent and respectful actions thus become the keys to all forms of intelligent democratic and personal excellence, rather than schools making everyone take the same courses year after year and expecting everyone to keep learning the same useless academic facts. Not only is it psychologically unrealistic, but socially it keeps people artificially distracted from life, and divided into tribes, thus making life more dangerous than necessary.
Some Final Thoughts
Such criticisms and ideas may sound too harsh to conservatives, but are they? In fact, most every school principal learns about Dewey’s liberal educational ideas during their doctoral work. However, conservative laws like NCLB keep restricting the experimentation with such ideas. For us liberals then, conservative laws and control of the government is the main problem. They keep the public largely ignorant about liberal ideas, like Dewey’s, and so keep restricting and delaying those ideas and habits. Also, recently much of our corporate-owned media has become another conservative force against such ideas. Newspapers and TV both depend on corporate sponsors for funding, and thus don’t want to offend them. Is there thus a corporate conspiracy to keep the public from learning such ideas? It does no harm to assume there is. All democratic habits help weaken all forms of concentrated feudalistic power, even newspaper and TV power. What’s the harm in assuming all corporations have a great interest in not allowing the public to hear such ideas? And it’s another reason why printed books and the Internet are more important than ever for helping growing such habits.
Over 8 years ago the well-respected Washington Post (12-29-04) was learning more about charter schools, and their weak results were already being reported. One writer, Amy Wells, noticed their test results were rather weak. In some charters, children learned more academics, in some they learned less, but in most there was little difference. But when is the last time you redd an article about Dewey’s liberal educational ideas? It simply makes it more difficult for the public to learn more about them, like student choice and character development.
In truth, however, our own actions at the neighborhood level are the most important actions to focus on. As more democratic-minded parents and students learn more about liberal educational ideas, and how they help build intelligent democratic habits, charter school may yet prove to be another tool for growing such habits, and making life better for all law-abiding people. How can students learn more about character excellence and feel the joy of active learning without drugs unless they’re liberated from their desks, allowed to carefully and safely go out onto the school grounds and into their neighborhoods, and start working intelligently to make them safer and more livable for everyone?
In any school system there is always room for improvement, even in wealthy places like Beverly Hills, Chicago's North Shore, and New York's Upper East and West Sides, not to mention our run down and bank-neglected inner cities! Just because bankers have given up on such neighborhoods doesn’t mean they can’t be made more vibrant and profitable one intelligent step at a time. It can all begin with building more liberals kinds of schools, where teachers aren’t afraid to have more active classrooms focused on teaching students about intelligent community service projects. As many in China, India, and the Muslim world are learning today, there is much more to life than merely having as many children as possible. Sooner or later it becomes counterproductive and harmful. So, the more we waste those pre-teen and teenage years learning soon-forgotten academic facts, the more we allow the wealthy and powerful to keep running our country mainly for their benefit, and even running it into the ground now and then for their benefit. Not possible? It’s happened in Detroit recently, and many other cities as well.
The less students are encouraged to learn what’s happening here and now, and then think intelligently more improving life, the less control they’ll have over it! Dewey was merely another in a long line of educators who agreed with such practical ideas. It’s what we enjoy doing with our facts, skills, and money here and now that’s most important for our futures, not how many facts, skills, and money we have. Liberals the world over will thus keep such ideas actively growing while working to build more democratic habits.
Learning liberal character habits is certainly not dead, but it is sleeping in most of our conservative public and charter schools, and in the minds and actions of honest and caring taxpayers. Some school districts around the country are beginning to focus more on service learning projects; they’re taking students out from behind their desks and into their communities to begin working intelligently on improvement projects! When such active learning projects are based on intelligent planning, they will begin ending the artificial and harmful conservative monastic isolation between students and their social world, and between students themselves, helping put students in touch with real life and fellow students.
Around the country there are, as of 2009, many such active and constructive programs, one being in the Long Beach School District just south of Los Angeles. However, since our economic meltdown in 2008, such programs have dwindled. Still, to us Deweyans, probably the best educational baby-step parents and taxpayers can take is to create their own intelligent service learning programs for all public and charter school students, kindergarten through high school! Nothing can develop the best character habits of kindness, enjoyment, fulfillment, and helpfulness more than intelligently learning to enrich others' lives. Why should even young children not enjoy growing flowers for senior citizens, reading to them, and playing ping pong or chess with them? Isn’t chess a great game for thinking intelligently about the future? No doubt, John Dewey himself would heartily agree with such intelligent programs for students of all ages! It’s good psychology; it’s good citizenship; it’s liberal educational excellence at its best. After all, aren’t facts promoting both psychological and physical health really the most useful facts to know? And shouldn't we be judging student excellence not only by the facts they know, but also their intelligent work record and helpful actions?
35. REALITY SCHOOLS – AN INTRODUCTION
This and the following 4 sections will describe in more detail a liberal Deweyan type of education. It’s based on 4 important liberal skills, namely building healthy physical, psychological, economic, and democratic habits. Then, in Section 40 the book concludes with some suggestions for building such schools. This section, then, introduces those 4 important skills with a few more thoughts first about conservative school weaknesses, and then about those 4 skills themselves. To help introduce these topics I've added a few more quotes on education which have been inspirational to me from the beginning.
Plato: Attention to health is the greatest hindrance to life ...
Siddhartha Gotoma (Buddhism's Founder): Perceiving (passion’s power) ... the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, ... for forms, ... for the impressions ... and whatever sensation, ... for the ear ... for sounds ... for the nose ... for odors ... for the tongue ... for tastes ... for the mind ... for ideas ... . ... by the absence of passion he becomes free ... and he is no more for the world ...
John Dewey: To keep the process (of intelligent growth) alive is the function of educational subject matter. … An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory (and ideas).
… Recognition of the natural course of (child) developmental sets out with situations which involve learning by doing.
… A large part of the art of instruction lies in making new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough from which helpful suggestions may spring.
… Pupils who have stored their ‘minds’ with all kinds of material which they have never put to intellectual uses are sure to be hampered when they try to think.
… it is important that education should use a criterion of social worth. Study of mental life has made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate tools and materials, to construct, and to give expression to joyous emotion.
… Mere amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life makes mind wooden; (mental) elasticity disappears. Since the mass of pupils are never going to become scientific specialists it is much more important that they should get some insight into what scientific method means … experimental science has demonstrated there is no such thing as genuine knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of (constructive testing).
… (learning) methods used today, studying texts rather than life itself, has been handed down from medieval times.
… Education through occupations combines more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method.
… we can measure the dawn of a serious faith in education by willingness to pay the highest wages going to those who actively direct the education of the youngest. …
...To cover so much (academic) ground with every pupil, to have each one go through the same motions as every other, is the same thing as to discourage originality and depress (democratic) individuality. The aim of natural development says to parents and teachers … make health an aim; normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of the body.
… imagination is the sole method of escape from mechanical methods of teaching.
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness. (emphases and additions are my own)
Pericles of Athens: ... the greatest gift to the city is not in public speeches but daily beholding her power in action, in being like lovers to her.
Author: Learning to enjoy, even passionately, testing our ideas experimentally liberates all our senses to warmly and respectfully embrace this world’s greatest challenge: to make its energies friendlier, more satisfying, and more playfully peaceful, rather than allowing them to remain uncontrolled, hostile, and dangerous. We liberals have absolutely no desire to ignore any of our world's delightfully sensuous energies within which all our ancestors evolved, and within which we all grow and live now and as long as life exists. To ignore such natural energies only perpetuates their dangers.
I cited the quote from Siddhartha’s Fire Sermon again; it represents a point of view even many modern Buddhists now reject, but that has been practiced for thousands of years by mystics everywhere.
A Few More Thoughts about Conservative Schools
In the early 1900s scholarly Dewey described many of the weak and unhealthful results of conservative book-oriented schools I’ve talked about all through the preceding pages:
“...the typical point of the old education: its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method ... the center of (learning) is outside the child. It is in the teachers, the textbooks, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate activities (and needs) of child(ren) ….
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from its inability to utilize the experiences (students) gets outside of school in any complete and free way within the school itself; (also students are) unable to apply in daily life what (they are) learning at school. That is the isolation of the school -- its isolation from life ...
… first, the lack of any organic connection with what the child has already seen and felt and lived makes (schoolwork) purely formal and symbolic. ... The second evil is lack of motivation. There are not only no facts or truths which have been previously felt but there is no craving, no need, no demand (for such knowledge). ... The third evil is that even the most scientific matter, arranged in most logical fashion, loses this quality (of discovery) by the time it gets to the student.” (The School and Society—S&S, 34, 75, 202-204; emphasis and additions are my own)
As a result, children in such conservative schools will often openly distract teachers with interruptions and disruptive actions. Often, it’s simply to prevent more unwanted book assignments. Even small children sense the frustration when they’re asked to do what they don’t want to do. For some students such disruptive actions become a habit. As test results keep telling us, an unending stream of book assignments usually means more boring and useless work for most students. Obviously, the more that happens, the easier it is for administrators to act like prison guards, teachers to quit, and thus make learning in our public schools more chaotic and difficult. Many students often drop-out rather than continue such work, often from fear of failing; many of their parents have unhealthful learning habits too. Perhaps the worst one is not caring to learn more about a liberal learning model. It’s understandable; years ago many of them were also conditioned to ignore such work. In short, conservative schools can be compared to doctors forcing patients to use medicine they have absolutely no need for!
I found some more recent criticisms from John Holt, another critic of conservative schools. He’s a Canadian but such schools operate all over the world. One of his books is titled Underachieving Schools. In it he talks about one result of focusing too much on mere book work: “Concerning the seclusion practiced by schools ... students learn how to live without learning to pay much attention to what’s happening right around them; in most schools students have no contact with the real world, real things, or real people.”
His solution? Parents should simply demand teachers start safely taking their students out of the classroom and into the real world, to learn more about life itself and also how to improve it. (20, 28, 30) In fact, on every school grounds in America, there is an entire universe of meanings and objects waiting to be discovered, and are thus useful for expanding a child’s feelings and ideas about life. Such safe and controlled exploring helps make school a place of active discovery and enjoyment instead of boring and stressful silent reading and writing. No doubt, for at least the first 3 primary school years such activities should be the center of attention, like visiting police and fire stations, corporate offices, building sites, city halls, and even filming and music studios. Such activities start giving students a better feel for what kinds of options and skills are useful in the adult world, and thus give their school work an emotional goal and direction. And then they can also start learning the healthy physical, psychological, economic, and political habits useful in a democratic society.
A related result for Holt can be described as a weak educational quality. What’s that mean? Basically it means not building useful habits like psychological health. For example, even in the early grades Holt saw an excessive reliance on tests: “… tests are used mainly as rewards and punishments to help justify what the educational bureaucracy ‘masters’ demand the students should know.” (55) As we’ve seen many times before, the 2002 NCLB law in fact chains both students and teachers to learning more academic facts and test-taking, as if they’re the be-all and end-all of education! He also echoes many of Dewey’s ideas by listing 7 more unhealthful learning results from activities like the grading system:
1. “… (tests) focus on answers, which are less important than the (experimental) METHODS one uses to solve a problem, and (also) grades reinforce cheating behaviors; 2. Focusing on grades minimizes the learning of experimentation and reasonable risk taking, both important audacious (skills) useful for new discoveries; 3. (Poor) (g)rades can damage one’s self esteem and diminish one’s personal power; 4. Grades reinforce the idea: life really is a kind of rat-race of competition, when in reality teamwork techniques of solving problems are more useful; 5. Grades help promote this idea: life isn’t something to be improved, but merely a giant machine grinding people down; 6. Students (feel) little better than slaves, rather than improvers of society; 7. And perhaps most important: the focus on grades diminishes the joy of learning, a joy useful throughout life.” (39)
He continues with 2 more criticisms of conservative schools:
“... (conservative schools) generally have two businesses, each of which cancels the other’s effectiveness. Those two roles are (1) acting as an educator, and (2) acting as a jailer. In almost all schools most of the time children are treated like convicts in jail. They have little choice about what to study, what problems to solve, what questions to ask, and are generally restricted by rules that make hall passes and teacher permission necessary. In effect such schools retard the development of self-esteem in students, as well as severely limit learning to subjects merely redd about." (72, 134, 137) (additions are my own)
In short, he describes enslaving schools, rather than liberating and empowering schools, and, as we’ve been seeing, such schools can be called conservative and liberal schools. Also, he sees conservative book-oriented schools as resembling “… an assembly line structure: children enter the system, move conveyor-like through the grades, have their heads ‘filled’ with ideas (for a short time), and verbal concepts -- what is too politely referred to as knowledge -- after which they’re sent on their way.” (142) He also cautions parents about conservative kinds of book-oriented teachers; he says “... teachers often don’t care what students think, care about, or want to know; what counts is what others decide they should learn and practice.” (107)
No doubt, reading and writing skills, the kind encouraging more thoughtful question-asking, are psychologically healthful for the growth of all democracies, whether students go into business or college. However, there’s a fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals about the ultimate aim of education. In general, conservatives say they want to build well-rounded students with a book-centered model, whereas we liberals say that model is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about child psychology and learning, as well as a basic disrespect for individual needs and desires. In more liberal democratic schools those needs and desires become the center of attention.
And a much more recent study compares the drop-out rates in urban and suburban public schools; its results are disturbing as well. A 2009 report commissioned by a non-profit organization, run by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his wife Alma, offered some sobering statistics about high school graduation rates in 50 cities. For example, Indianapolis, IN produced the lowest graduation rate of about 30%, while Mesa, AZ graduated about 77% of its 2005 freshman class. But when the figures were added up and divided by 50, the average drop-out rate for urban schools was depressing at best, at about 47%, while that for suburban schools was about 30%.
Such fundamental educational differences naturally result in fundamental reform differences. For example, a conservative remedy has been proposed by one director of a study suggesting teacher training is the problem. In a New York Times article of 4-22-09, entitled Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates, Marguerite Kondracke said, "This urban-suburban graduation gap has developed partly because teacher quality is not the same from classroom to classroom." Attacking teacher incompetence is a continuing theme for conservatives. No doubt, we liberals can agree with that idea in some ways. For example, young urban are still under the illusion all children hunger for more book knowledge and facts; that illusion, plus laws saying children must learn more of them, is the main problem with conservative public schools. As we’ve seen on a continuing basis, we Deweyan liberals say that education model is deeply flawed. It focuses more on training students to be corporate and military followers by having everyone passively obey their teachers and follow their orders. Such habits have been useful all during the Middle Ages, but they certainly have little use in our blossoming democratic world. As we’ve seen throughout these pages, that’s the fundamental weakness in conservative book-centered schools; they simply ignoring teaching individual students intelligent and healthy habits for living in a democratic system! When is the last time you used any idea from Shakespeare in daily life, or any algebraic or geometric fact? So, again, a fundamental conservative flaw still ignores teaching habits of democratic health and respecting different student learning needs! By now such ideas should be well implanted in the reader’s mind.
College graduation rates also reflect book-centered weaknesses. What percentages of the 30% who do go to college actually get a degree after 4 years? An article by Larry Gordon in Section 1 of the Los Angeles Times of 11-14-91 entitled Drop-Out Rate Unchanged, Study Finds cites some interesting numbers. Latinos, African Americans, and Anglos getting 4 or more years of college are roughly 9%, 11.8%, and 21.8% respectively. In other words, not only are about 70% of students not going to college, but of the 30% who do go, only about 1 in 5 white students actually graduate from college, and the number is much lower for Latinos and African-Americans. Are those results helping produce a well-rounded and healthy democratic citizenry with healthy character habits? Colleges mainly teach more academic trivia, much of which is also useless outside its ivy-covered walls, but which is very useful for bankers and universities who finance student loans and debt!
So, again, we Deweyan liberals continue asking this question: Is such a book-based learning model really the best one? As more evidence it’s not always the best model, I would please ask the reader to consider some of the actions of our 36th and our 40th presidents, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Academically, both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Clinton were very gifted students; they both could easily learn many academic facts and statistics, but does that skill alone automatically make them excellent presidents? Not always. Mr. Nixon was overly worried about the Democrats and Vietnam, and Mr. Clinton has said he regrets some of his decisions.
For us liberal Deweyans excellent intelligence means much more that knowing a lot of facts; it also means using one’s knowledge to make life better for as many people as possible is the most important result of all, rather for the benefit of a few. For those with political power that idea becomes even more important. It takes good judgment to see which actions will produce the best results for the most people, and judging by that idea of excellence both men made some serious mistakes. For one thing, probably in the quest to satisfy a few powerful corporate donors, Mr. Clinton helped end some very useful banking regulations which eventually helped produce the Great Recession of 2008, and from which millions of people still haven’t fully recovered 6 years later! He simply told people some useful laws weren't really needed any more, when in fact ending them helped set the stage for huge banks to create a very unstable housing market bubble which burst in 2007, thus helping increase our public debt by hundreds of billions of dollars! It was either that or see Great Depression 2 spread around the world!
And for us progressive liberals that’s certainly not the only mistake in judgment he made. I’ll just briefly mention a few results from his signing the business-friendly North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He told people it would help end illegal immigration from Mexico by creating more jobs there and thus helping keep their workers in country. In fact, however, the result was to put thousands of Mexican farm workers out of work who then joined violent drug gangs! Some 70,000 Mexicans may have been killed in their drug wars since then!
No doubt, both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Nixon helped improve life for millions of people in other ways, like reforming welfare, for example, and opening up China to the West, but the point is, merely academic knowledge doesn’t automatically make someone intelligent and excellent politicians or people, and the sooner students begin feeling that fact, the sooner they’ll be better able to elect better people to conduct the public’s business. Such ideas and feelings can begin growing in elementary schools by teaching students how to look at what results their ideas might produce, and then choose those aimed at helping the most people. Should we allow our leaders to mainly keep helping a small number of already obscenely wealthy people become even wealthier, or should we demand they do what’s best for as many people as possible, as Jeremy Bentham suggested in the 1800s?
The Well-Rounded Student
Well, what’s wrong with the conservative goal of producing so-called well-rounded students capable of solving their own problems? It certainly sounds like a worthy goal. Such people might say ‘well-rounded’ students know some basic academic facts about many different subjects, and thus have useful information for intelligently solve their own problems. After all, intelligent problem solving is a habit-art useful throughout life. However, for we liberals that goal becomes translated into the conservative book-oriented public schools we have today, and their results are much less than acceptable. After all, how strong can a problem-solving habit grow when students are given little practice using it with real life situations? How does merely learning more and more facts give students any real problem-solving skills for real life situations, like how to deal with controlling and abusive parents, bullying students, lack of friends or money, learning useful business or service skills, choosing intelligent and caring representatives, making basic repairs on their possessions, and a host of other real-life challenges operating throughout life? Clearly, despite the fine-sounding goals of conservative educators, there seems to be a huge disconnect between their words and the methods used to actually build such habits.
If book-work really was the best way for students to get prepared for solving real-world challenges, then why would we still have such serious social problems like gang-violence, crime, and unemployment, not to mention expensive government programs to prevent such actions? So, we liberals confidently ask: How can merely teaching students more English, history, math, and science facts make students better able to answer their own challenges intelligently? Don’t such great-sounding goals like becoming a well-rounded student need to be taught with more practical and active role-playing exercises, so as to best teach our 4 important habits of health? How can, say, useful business skills be taught, like how to cook healthy foods, keep honest accounting records, or how to dress and speak confidently and forcefully without actually practicing such skills? So again we say, ignoring such useful learning skills merely keeps students much less than well-rounded for life itself. In fact, during all such learning activities useful skills like reading and writing would be learned more naturally and less stressfully.
Healthy character habits would thus become much easier to feel and learn during such activities. Respect for others and our just laws are 2 such skills. For example, in our recently sexually integrated military it's estimated some 19,000 disrespectful and abusive sexual assaults occur every year, and yet over 80% of them go unreported. Why? The military system itself must work against spending their money on such trials and convictions! So, even if formal charges are brought to a commanding officer’s notice, it often dies there! With merely the signing of a paper unit commanders can even void any conviction they please, especially if it involves an officer! Such disrespectful and unjust actions are often justified in the name of maintaining unit cohesion and military discipline! (Truthdigger of the Week article, posted at Truthdig.com, 3-16-2013)
Clearly, then, we Deweyan liberals have a fundamental different between methods for building well-rounded, truthful, and justice-loving students. We say actually practicing such habits is a much better way of learning them, and the more they’re ignored, the more obnoxious and expensive corrective measures we’ll continue seeing in the adult world. No one really knows, for example, how many fewer civilian sexual assaults would happen on children and adults if students were trained from 1st grade to actually know what respect from themselves and others feels like, and what to do if they don’t get it from those around them? The challenge of building such well-rounded living skills will be much more deeply felt in liberal schools, where active practice compliments reading about such basic democratic habits of excellence. So, again, we can begin seeing why schools focusing more on actively teaching students such habits are much more useful to the growth of a democratic society, where every law-abiding person has equal opportunities and options. Why should any students be forced to accept any kind of disrespect from anyone, including parents and grandparents? Should we really believe democratic equal rights apply only to adults and not to children – the weakest and most vulnerable among us to psychological problems? Isn’t that what democratic and psychological health is all about, namely being free from such fear and allowed to keep learning what we want to learn? Shouldn’t such respect really be the bedrock habit of all healthy well-rounded education goals in every democracy, useful even in military organizations? As we’ve seen in World War 2, without such skills war becomes merely another way to justify brutality and murder of innocent people, as is happening even today with our so-called drone warfare.
By now, it should be obvious how our own public tax supported conservative schools are simply now respecting individual student learning needs under the NCLB law. Especially in our poor inner city schools, NCLB is simply not working to keep more kids in school, give them the useful skills to begin a career, and thus begin contributing to our nation’s economic growth and their well-being. For us liberal Deweyans, to become truly well-rounded in a democratic society all children need to actively learn more useful kinds of healthy habits, like economic business and character habits. Without being free to choose a career for themselves, and start feeling what excellent habits that choice demands, students will almost certainly remain emotionally disconnected for their schools, and thus graduate both physically and emotionally unready for many of life’s great opportunities.
In earlier sections I mentioned some results when schools insist on clinging to this idea of making all students academically well-rounded, rather than behaviorally well-rounded. Even Albert Einstein was psychologically abused in such German public schools. In second grade he was already so bored with other subjects besides math and science, his teacher told him he would never amount to anything! And, also in college, his educational needs stay focused on physics and mathematics; the rest of his classes aiming to build a well-rounded person really didn't interest him very much. Thank goodness he had his own questions to ask and answer, and so all but ignored other ones.
Within a few years after college, however, and with the help of his very intelligent but possessive wife Mileva, he built a better-working model of physics than Newton himself! He kept learning what he wanted to learn, eventually using new experimental evidence to change Newton’s basic assumptions about time, space, and matter being unchanging objects! What would nature act like if the only absolute were light's speed? What would life look like if one rode on a beam of light? What a question! Would light itself be bent as it comes close to planets and stars? Would time itself run differently in different places? Could gravity itself bend and warp space?
No doubt, most students are not Einstein, but how many students would become more productive citizens earlier if they too were allowed to define well-roundedness as learning what they wanted to learn, and study what they wanted? Even though he didn't read much poetry or literature, who would call Einstein educationally deprived? He knew his limits, and what else can we expect of educated people. But, he had the mental toughness and curiosity to keep asking questions about nature that interested him most, and the character toughness to keep trying to answer them. Eventually such questions led to our new modern relativity model of nature, where no unchanging objects exist and matter is merely another form of energy, not an eternal substance! In effect, he validated an always changing model of nature talked about by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, where no objects are unchanging and eternal; matter is continually being changed into energy in the stars, and when they explode they then create the heavier atoms of which we are all made, like carbon and oxygen! And of course Relativity Theory helped give Dewey the confidence to build a new liberal philosophic model of life, nature, and education based on experimental learning itself; what is there to conserve in an always changing nature, besides the excellent habit-art of intelligently experimenting to keep testing our improvement ideas?
According to the conservative goal of creating academically well-rounded students, Einstein failed, as must everyone else! Such academic facts are soon forgotten. It’s yet more evidence showing how narrow, limited, and artificial that goal was in German public schools, in existence since the 1500s! And by continuing to disrespect individual student needs and religious beliefs, they helped pave the way for Hitler’s brutally tragic Third Reich. Such results should be enough to show how crucially important liberal public schools are in every society. Without such schools, medieval habits and feudalistic organizations will almost certainly continue on; at least that’s my prediction.
Thus, for us liberal Deweyans, we focus on building useful habit-arts centered on body-mind health in a democratic society. We say knowing more about how the human body actually works, including intelligent diet and exercise habits and psychological habits of enjoying the learning process itself, are behavioral skills no mere book can teach anyone! True knowledge about them can only be learned from actively practicing them. Also important are building economic and democratic kinds of healthy habits, so children can more intelligently make their way through our capitalist and democratic systems with less stress and more confidence.
In fact, feudalistic conservatives have felt the danger of such schools even in the 1950s. As mentioned earlier, they actually asked Republican President Eisenhower to denounce Dewey by name and his education model as well. And why else would conservatives have passed NCLB and Common Core Standards laws? Such events alone should be enough evidence and motivation for liberal parents, students, and teachers everywhere to keep working and building such schools in their own neighborhoods as soon as possible. No other institution can do more to ensure the continued growth and spread of democratic habits than such schools. Without them it’s much easier for greedy conservatives to keep control of our economic, political, and educational systems.
Conservative schools may thus remind people of Mark Twain’s famous comment: I never let school get in the way of my education! It’s a witty and ironic observation, but in another way it’s depressing too! Why should anyone allow our tax-supported public schools to keep getting in the way of a child’s education? Ignoring that situation merely continues weakening our democratic society? Why should taxpayers keep seeing their children educated in conservative schools, hoping what the next generation merely reads will somehow teach them what an educated person acts like? Won't having more fun learning what they want to learn help lower our drug abuse problems, and a host of other unhealthful habits like violence and disrespect? Because our public schools are PUBLIC institutions, shouldn't they be helping educate everyone with active experimentation and role-playing? Shouldn’t such schools help build more educated students who know what excellent character habits actually feel like, and the useful results they often produce? The more they don't, the more we all pay for such unintelligent results in higher taxes for more government programs! Isn’t such logic wonderful, for both true conservatives and liberals? No doubt, Twain himself would probably agree.
Wealthy Folks and Our Conservative Schools
Wealthy folks have more economic power and thus more tools for adjusting to an ever-changing world; money gives them the power to hire more intelligent advisers, and thus learn more useful skills and make more intelligent decisions. One example is the recent increase in preschool attendance. Such schools help their children become more comfortable in our conservative book-oriented schools, where such knowledge remains central. Just recently, for example, a Stanford University education professor, Sean F. Reardon, published an article in the NY Times, on 4-29-2013, called No Rich Child Left Behind. In it he described how the difference between rich and poor student test scores is growing larger and larger in the past few decades. Since Republican Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981-1989) the rich have become richer, while our poor and middle class incomes have remained rather stagnant. As mentioned earlier, some 90% of income growth has become controlled by the top 1%. As a result, wealthy folks have been better able to spend more money on private preschool training when children are taught even before they go to kindergarten such book knowledge is best. Thus those children are better prepared to work in our conservative book-dominated schools, and thus get better grades all through school. It’s called preschool enrichment, and for which the federal Head Start program was designed to help less well-off students get such training.
Lately, however, conservative Democrats and Republicans have cut back government spending, and so poorer children often aren’t as well prepared for book-learning as are kids from wealthier families! So, it becomes easier for them to get into and pay for a college education, meet more people with similar money-making habits, and continue dominating our economic and political systems. “Money,” writes Professor Reardon, “helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and ... access to preschool test preparation tutors ...” But then he also says, “It’s not clear what we should do about all this. ... improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children. ... Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper and lower income families.” No doubt, because children are so eager to please their parents, those who expect their children to be successful in school help motivate children to actually be successful. It’s another example of adjusting to our conservative education system. Such events show us more clearly why some 70% of kids don’t go to college after high school.
However, we Deweyan liberals don’t hesitate to mention again at least 6 weaknesses in building such book-oriented preschools. For one thing, such enrichment affects only a small number of children, thus continues supporting class differences; 2, it reduces democratic equal opportunities for everyone; 3, our democracy itself remains weak and unequal, instead of becoming stronger and fairer for everyone; 4, perhaps worst of all, even if such “cognitive enrichment” programs were available to poor students, it would do little to build much more useful and important character habits of excellence – what some have called one’s survival kit; 5, it would thus continue making our schools a kind of academic rat race, where students stay focused on high grades, rather than helping build more intelligent, kind, respectful, and caring habits, honoring just laws and equal rights for all; and 6, even if the government were to help more preschoolers, it probably would do little for that 70% majority of students who want to get out into life and start earning some money.
In short, for us Deweyan liberals, we need better schools, not merely better preschools where students are conditioned to keep passively accepting a conservative learning model. Building more liberal schools is the main challenge for us democrats, not preschool opportunities for all.
Hopeful Signs
As the last few elections tell us, these days liberalism is far from dead; it’s still very much alive and growing stronger in many places, like California and more recently in New York with now a very liberal mayor. The Working People’s Party is another small example of that growth. The liberal challenge, then, is simply to keep such reform habits growing, especially in our public schools. In a recent article by one of American’s most respected liberals at the Nation Magazine, Katrina vanden Heuvel describes in a Washington Post editorial on 4-30-2013 some of the weaknesses of standardized testing. She writes,
“It’s no wonder that parents, educators, and students are spearheading a small but growing revolution to opt out of standardized tests. ... more and more students across the country are boycotting tests that many say are increasing stress, narrowing curriculum and, at worst, leading to the kind of cheating exposed in the recent Atlanta Public Schools scandal.
... how can students be tested on material they haven’t learned?
...it’s time to pay attention to the parents who are standing up for their kids by walking out of testing centers. And it’s time to invest our efforts and resources into what really matters – teachers teaching and students learning.”
All well and good, as far as generalities like ‘teachers teaching and students learning’ go. The obvious question, however, is what should teachers be teaching and students learning? Unfortunately Ms. vanden Heuvel leaves that most important question unanswered. In fact, where she leaves off, this book begins. The question leads us liberals to the topic of body-mind health itself and active kinds of experimental learning.
As we’ll see in the following 4 sections, the following question will be answered in more detail. How can teachers keep teaching more about physical, psychological, economic, and democratic health, and how can students best learn such excellence habit-arts? So, once again, only democratic might can make more liberal schools right. And the more they make that choice, the easier it becomes to start teaching and learning such skills. Among other things, they teach students how to intelligently judge people, by their actions and their results, rather than by their looks or what sexual tribe they belong to. It’s a very important part of democratic health.
Psychologically healthy habits of judging others by their actions are most important in a democracy. Without the habit of holding people accountable for their disrespectful actions, either to others or our just laws, and also teaching them more intelligent kinds of skills, too many students simply keep thinking they can do whatever they want whenever they want. And the more that happens, the more afraid people will be to speak up and demand they make amends and learn better habits! Confidence and self-esteem feelings are already rather weak in many children, and unless strengthened they will continue weakening the very moral fiber of our nation. In liberal schools, however, such psychologically healthy habits are an important part of the learning process from 1st grade on! They’re a sign of both personal and democratic health.
The following 4 sections, then, will help parents, students, and teachers know about more intelligent options for what to teach, and what to learn. They will also empower more people with ideas to test their own neighborhood schools, and see what they’re already doing here and now; they give people more power and confidence to ask local principals what their basic philosophy of education is, and how much it relies on book-work and teacher-given assignments. Then, with such knowledge, they can start making plans together to make teaching more enjoyable, and learning more relevant in today’s capitalist and democratic society, one grade at a time! Such a slow and small baby-step approach to school improvement is essential; it allows both teachers and students to learn different educational habits more naturally and less stressfully.
36. REALITY SCHOOLS: BIOLOGICAL HEALTH
A Liberal School Weakness?
Thus we come to the first of 4 skills upon which liberal schools can be built, skills which are best learned with active and intelligent kinds of experimentation. For better or worse, nature has encouraged we humans to grow two very useful skills. One skill is food processing; it’s very efficient for most people. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of the food we eat is turned into useful bodily energy. Compare that number with the energy efficiency of a steam engine, which is only about 7%, and you get some feeling for how efficiently we can liberate food energy for practical uses, or for excessive purposes too, like becoming overweight. So, the more we neglect teaching such facts and healthful eating skills to the next generation, the more their lives are endangered by abusing the marvelous food processing skills we have. In fact, in the US obesity is becoming a serious personal and social problem for millions of people. And then the second skill is knowledge processing. No other animal at the earth has ever been better at learning and using knowledge and facts than we humans.
Obviously those 2 skills are always interacting on a biological level, but for descriptive purposes they’ll be divided into 2 different sections, this one focusing on biological health, and the next on liberal psychological health – on what knowledge is useful and how it is best used.
However, before looking at some of Dewey’s reasons for replacing the book-centered conservative learning model with practical kinds of experimentation, we’ll first look briefly at what some may see as a weakness with his liberal educational model.
In Democracy and Education, for example, it seems Dewey really didn’t want to suggest any kind of study importance, not even biological, psychological, economic, or political health. He wrote:
“…We cannot establish a hierarchy of values among studies. … every study in one of its aspects ought to have just such ultimate significance. … poetry … ought to be a good appreciated on its own account ... the attempt to distribute distinct sorts of value among different studies is a misguided one ... any education (lacking) poetry … has something the matter with it...” (248)
Such thoughts seem to follow when students become free to choose what they want to learn more about. So, did Dewey, in fact, reach that conclusion, and if so, then shouldn’t we also reject teaching any specific studies, even the 4 health studies mentioned? Is that what he meant by saying there should be no hierarchy of values among studies? And if so, then shouldn’t all liberal schools look like the Summerhill model, where students can learn anything they want? Or did he mean students should also learn some skills while learning what they want?
Here, the second idea is taken to be his meaning. No doubt, every experience creates raw poetic feelings. Even Einstein, for example, could have expressed many of his ideas poetically, if he had wanted to. In fact, poetic feelings can be felt even in those students working to make their school grounds more beautiful: Solar energies keep dancing and warmly embracing people and plants alike, in a kind of cosmic symphony. In fact, such poetic feelings were expressed by Plato’s main philosophic inspiration, the great mathematician Pythagoras.
Obviously, the more such poetic feelings are felt and written about, the more powerful a poetry-writing habit becomes, and they’re still useful as well. As older people know, many of the songs they grew up with and sang in the shower often keep popping into their heads; they’re really simple poems. So, again, why say such habits shouldn’t be learned, or any entertainment habit for that matter, if, of course, students want to learn them? After all, some poems can help build a very well-paying career, and thus become another great way to help those less well off than ourselves. Even greeting cards express poetic feelings. They’re so popular in Los Angeles an entire high school has been built for them.
No doubt, because such skills are excellent low-stress ways to make good money, Dewey might be the last person to say students shouldn’t be free to learn more about them. However, what he would object to is forcing everyone to study them at the same time! For him, the whole conservative model of group learning is disrespectful of democratic freedoms, rights, and feelings. Why shouldn’t schools honor the same kinds of freedom practiced in the real world, where people have the freedom to learn different skills at different times? No doubt, some students might have an urgent need to express their feelings poetically, but most don't. Thus, to make all children practice such skills makes children academic slaves, rather than respected members of a democratic society. How can any healthy democracy based on equal rights continue blooming unless such freedoms are respected in schools, homes, governments, and religious organizations? What’s more, Dewey mentions some definite habits schools should aim at teaching, like 1. managing resources and overcoming problems intelligently with experimental testing; 2. interacting respectfully with others; 3. knowing something about artistic excellence; and 4. intelligent character development. Such ideas I’ve simply renamed here as different forms of health. Number 1 is what I mean here by economic health; number 2 by psychological health; number 3 by constructive experimental health; and number 4 by character or physical health.
Testing 1, 2, 3, Testing, Testing
In the late 1890s, at the Lab School he built at the University of Chicago, Dewey began experimenting with how best to improve 5 basic weaknesses he saw in the conservative learning model. For him such schools
1. isolate school learning from home learning;
2. reduce a child's learning to mere book-ideas about art, history, math, science, and any other subject;
3. ignore experimental testing skills;
4. ignore helping students expand their awareness of what’s going on here and now, and, of course,
5. ignore democratic character development.
As we’ve seen, the ability to concentrate and focus one’s attention on current events is a democratic skill important all through life. Without it, it becomes that much easier for those with economic power to continue controlling political power. Also, without more active kinds of learning projects, many students resort to mindless daydreaming and sometimes disruptive activities. No doubt, similar arguments could be made against the other conservative weaknesses as well. For those interested in reading more about his educational plan for elementary students please read his The School and Society’s Postscript. And for those who want more information about his use of occupational studies and experimental learning, see Chapter 6 in the same book.
So, the Lab School challenge became creating a program where all such weaknesses were strengthened, and learning became not only more natural, but more intelligent and socially thoughtful as well. With science’s experimental testing art he found his best weapon against all such conservative weaknesses, and thus simply replaced a passive book-learning model with the consciously intelligent use of experimental learning! With it students would first feel a challenge or goal, create a plan to achieve it, and finally start actively testing the plan to see its results. In essence, that was the new definition of intelligence modern science had been practicing for about 300 years before the Lab School was even built. Thus, intelligent experimental learning was put at the core of liberal schools, simply because it’s the most powerful learning art in an always changing world, whether it’s used to learn more about law enforcement, medical science, computer work, or construction skills.
For Dewey, such intelligent experimentation was the only skill anyone could practice in an always changing nature. It thus made all a life a series of experiments to test ideas. Earlier we saw how even conservative Plato and moderate Aristotle too kept experimenting with different ideas to solve the problems they discovered in their work, and thus learn nature’s truth. That was their ultimate goal. Especially Plato’s early dialogues show how Socrates too practiced an experimental learning art. He would ask someone to define an idea, examine it for its results, find it wasn’t logical, and then call for another idea to be tested. Many of their writings we have today are the more or less finished product of their thinking experiments all through life!
Aristotle, for example, saw the many problems created by Plato when he assumed nature is really a dualism of both spirits and matter. That one assumption alone created unsolvable problems, as Plato himself discovered as he examined the results of that dualistic assumption, and so he too kept experimenting with different ideas to avoid those problems. For example, how can we ever know anything about spirits if they’re totally non-physical and all our knowledge depends on sense-experience? As a result, he too kept experimenting with different ideas. Soon after Plato died, however, Aristotle simply began experimenting with a different assumption about nature, namely eternal Forms were material, not spiritual. The result is the Aristotelian system we have today, where eternal and unchanging Form-objects are embedded within natural objects, not in a completely different spirit-realm, thus allowed eternal Truth to be known.
Thus, Dewey had some very good reasons for assuming all learning must be experimental in an always-changing nature. If so, then why not teach students how to intelligently use the art of experimental testing to solve their own learning challenges and reach their own personal goals? Even though a book might suggest solutions, they still needed to be tested, and their results seen. Such reasoning seemed completely logical. Thus, helping students CONSCIOUSLY feel what intelligent experimental testing is like should be the basic aim of all public schools! To ignore it merely kept students immature and unready for life.
What’s more, as students exercised their freedom to learn what they wanted, they could also learn other kinds of healthful habits useful in a democratic society, like personal, psychological, economic, and political habits. In such schools they would, for example, begin learning healthy psychological ideas like how to best keep improving all their own personal weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. The active habit-art of experimental testing would help teach all such healthy habit-arts if they were actively practiced. It would also empower students to keep improving both their social weaknesses too, like unlawful discrimination and unintelligent greed.
So, whether we like it or not, experimental testing is really our only learning art, but students should also be taught how to use it intelligently to keep improving life itself. Thus, the teaching challenge for our public schools became first telling students about that learning art, and then actively practicing it to help students start feeling how it can be used to achieve their goals. Better to be consciously intelligent rather than subconsciously unintelligent, right?
Dewey’s also mentions the following thoughts about experimental learning:
1. Only experimental learning can best build any form of excellent habit-art. After feeling a weak, excessive, or unhealthful weakness, only active experimental testing can allow students to feel in their entire body-mind what an improvement is like! And best of all, experimental testing is a habit-art useful on both personal and social levels, to improve any personal or social weakness! The educational challenge is thus to first challenge students with models of excellence, in, for example, law enforcement and medicine, and then show how students can start learning such skills experimentally. With such experiences students can begin learning other important skills, like intelligent question-asking, creative thinking and planning, and active testing.
2. Only active, sense-based, and organic experimental testing has the power and vibrancy to best overcome both teacher and student boredom – a major weakness of book-centered schools. Only intelligent experimentation makes learning an active adventure in discovery. When consciously practiced outside of school, experimental learning helps keep students intelligently connected to themselves and their communities, and inside schools it helps students keep enjoying learning’s surprises and drama. Anyone who’s noticed how children’s playground equipment and our many electronic gadgets have evolved over the years, can see how continual experimental improvement has become a most valuable modern habit-art. Such creative habits best begin growing only with intelligent experimentation and testing.
3. Encouraging students to use an intelligent experimental testing art best breaks down the artificial barriers between learning in school and outside it. After all, experimentation goes on outside of school on a daily basis. However, active and intelligently creative experimental testing in school helps make students act more intelligently outside of school. It helps them ask intelligent questions, make better plans, and test their ideas more carefully. It also encourages students to speak up about their own feelings and frustrations, thus bringing those important skills to a conscious level of awareness and attention! It also gives them a more realistic feeling for learning any new habit with a series of baby-steps, as well as a deeper respect for habits themselves. It also gives students the best learning tool to make their own lives less frustrating and unhealthful.
In that process students will not only become more sensitive to feeling frustrations, but also for ways of reducing them as well. After feeling, say, a parent is frustrating them, then, instead of merely accepting the situation, the next step is to make a plan to improve the situation, and then experimentally testing the plan. It not only promotes our most reliable and excellent learning skills, but also energizes and empowers students to take a more consciously intelligent control of their own lives, as well as feel more confident about helping others who are frustrated, and thus begin expanding their social consciousness as well.
In short, with continued use, the intelligent habit-art of constructive and creative experimentation will help build confidence in young folks, and not only for students but for teachers as well! It helps make both learning and teaching a more enjoyable and more natural adventure, rather than merely another boring book assignment to read and grade. No doubt, personal problems will be discovered, like wanting to learn different things at different times, but isn’t learning to help each other what people in a healthy democracy practice? Isn’t that how building individual habits of respect best keep growing?
4. Finally, only intelligent experimental learning habit-arts BEST fuse and unite what conservative learning models separate: mental learning from physical testing. All through life the body is never separated from the mind, and yet book-centered schools keep encouraging such feelings. Such an artificial separation of body from mind was celebrated by both conservative Plato and even moderate Aristotle in their psychology models. And, those kinds of body-mind separation lived all through the Middle Ages, as people continued believing merely their ideas about Spirit-Objects came from a spiritual mind-soul completely different from the body. In fact, such a separation continues living at the foundation of many different religions today; without it there's no justification for any idea about an afterlife or for any religious ritual. In short, experimental learning restores the unnatural separation of body and mind to a holistic idea of body-mind. For us Deweyan liberals, the more people are liberated from such a separation, the freer they become to start consciously using experimental testing to keep changing our feudalistic authoritarian world into a more peaceful and creative democratic one.
In fact, all forms of body and mind separation are based merely on assumptions having no objective evidence. History teaches us it’s been used for thousands of years to produce 2 very unhealthful results: 1. It convinced people a better life could be theirs after death, and 2. It also justified religious leaders’ demands for obedience to them. With those 2 results, most of history has unfolded, with all its religious warfare, disease, pain, suffering, and ignorance.
With the growth of democracy and science since 1600, both those ideas and habits have become much weaker and more questionable. We liberals, therefore, continue encouraging liberation from both those kinds of habits, especially in our public schools today. Our Constitution Framers also knew how dangerous it was for the government to encourage such a separation of body and mind, enshrined as it is in the First Amendment. To us democratic liberals who now accept experimental learning as our only method of learning, we celebrate the union of body and mind in our liberal schools. With it is based all our ideas of humanity being part of the same species, and thus sharing a true kinship and respect. The whole history of creative experimentation, dating back to the first stone toolmaker over 2 million years ago, is why we see separating body from mind in any way is artificial and less than excellent! Our best knowledge -- experimental knowledge -- requires both intelligently creative ideas and physical testing.
For us liberals, then, the best cure for student boredom and disruptive antics is the use of experimental kinds of learning what students themselves choose to learn. Learning about, say, democratic equal rights, habits of tolerance, and respect for personal differences, as well as building useful employment skills, should be just as actively experimental as learning about history, poetry, math, and science! For us Deweyan liberals, that’s the best educational antidote to all such conservative weaknesses. For example, it’s one thing to know about clothing and fashions of long ago, but it's another thing altogether to actually allow students of fashion to actually make such clothes. If nothing else, such experimental learning helps build healthier feelings of humility about our own ideas, and also confidence about how to make their ideas more satisfying.
Perhaps best of all, however, with experimental testing skills students will be better able to answer one of philosophy’s greatest questions: What is truth? Experimental testing helps students feel people know some truths when they can use them to actually build a model of those ideas. In short, students best know the truth about ancient clothing when they can actually make those clothes! And by extension, they can best know about physical, psychological, economic, and political health only as they actually practice such skills! It’s been a liberal pragmatic definition of truth for thousands of years already. So, why shouldn't even 1st graders begin hearing the words 'experimental learning' on a daily basis, no matter what they want to study and learn about? It's one thing to merely talk and think about beautifying a schoolroom with flowers, but such ideas BECOME truth only after such flowers are grown. Likewise, the ideas of a healthy meal or democratic respect BECOME true only as they’re practiced.
Three Basic Stages of Child Development
OK, so a group of people decide to build a liberal school, where active experimentation is practiced on a daily basis. Where can they start? Well, echoing some earlier thoughts, they might want to review some basic ideas of child development itself. As we saw earlier, those ideas began growing on a formal level early in our modern era, in France during the 1700s. So, to help see what activities liberal schools can use to make learning easier, we can briefly mention those 3 main stages again, and some activities for each stage.
The Early Stage: 5-8
Until about 8 years of age Dewey said kids keep learning more about their world mainly with their senses; they keep feeling, smelling, and tasting of the world around them. So, at this stage of development it’s best to focus on sense-based activities, like, for example, eating healthful foods and exercising activities; to say the least, such skills are very important all through life. Cooking skills too can be easily taught at this early stage, helping strengthen their ideas about healthy foods and also their creative skills for making bland foods like vegetables taste better. At this early stage of development it also becomes easier to start learning more about the world around them, with its plants and pet animals as well. Merely learning how to train them with food rewards to learn new habits and skills also begins laying the foundation for psychological health as well, which we’ll see more of in the following section. After all, we humans are animals too and thus can learn new skills with the help of rewards the same way animals learn new skills. It also increases respect for animals, something many ill-educated children don’t have.
Also, even 1st graders can start talking about what they think are healthy foods, and then comparing them to what others have discovered are more nutritious foods to eat. That way 2 other very important skills continue growing, namely good talking and listening skills. Students can even be encouraged to start drawing their own diet and exercise books while using their visual and hand-eye coordination skills. Sense-based active and intelligent cooking arts can also begin teaching the all-important experimental learning skill, and begin building important feelings about their own bodies and their organs, tissues, and bones. How do we best keep all those parts of us healthy? Thus physical health skills begin growing as well. Such active kinds of sense-based learning in the first 3 years of school will then help build some important subconscious feelings for more abstract chemistry studies latter on at the 3rd level of development, the abstract mental level. In fact, all through schools they can continue learning more about what chemicals like vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates help keep their body-minds healthy, and why.
If such sense-based learning is useful all through life, both in and outside of school, if they help build more excellent healthy habits, and if actively experimenting with them helps make school more enjoyable, informative, and interesting, then why shouldn’t even kindergarten children have the freedom to begin learning about such skills? Because younger students are sense-oriented, they can begin learning about such ideas by, for example, seeing and feeling plastic models of both men and women, and perhaps even working to build their own models as well. They can begin sensing what different internal organs feel and look like, how they’re arranged inside their bodies, what their names sound like, and how they help people live better.
Perhaps best of all, such useful bodily facts will not only start increasing student respect for everyone’s body and physical health, thus keep growing their important social consciousness as well. The magnificent organs in their own body are in everyone’s body, and thus everyone becomes more amazing and awesome! From there, then, so many other important health facts can keep growing all through their school years. Such sense-based learning can begin opening up other important ideas, like biology, evolution, and anthropology. They can be asked questions like how did life begin, what did our early earth look like, how did those organs evolve, and how many millions of years has this process been going on? All such questions set the stage for their more abstract academic work in high school.
Also, to keep increasing their feelings of respect, they can also be asked how all those organs work together as a very complex chemical machine, completely in the dark! Such questions begin creating a sensitivity to chemical structure. Feelings for comparative anatomy too can begin growing while they’re learning how to become intelligent lawyers, doctors, engineers, carpenters, computer programmers, and plumbers. How do their own organs compare to, say, their pet animals, or wild animals? Why, for example, are lion and tiger intestines much shorter than human intestines? Does it have something to do with their meat diet? What does a liver look like and where does it fit in the human body? What does it do? What kinds of flowers smell and look best, and how are they best grown? What kinds of trees are best for planting in their neighborhoods? What kinds of healthy vegetables and fruits smell and taste best, and what chemicals best makes them grow?
Also, healthy character and economic skills can begin growing as well. What's the best way to help other people build healthy habits? What does cooking do to some foods? How can we build a community garden, how much would it cost, and what are some good ways of raising money to build them? What kinds of plants are best for preserving physical health? And what kinds of exercises are best to practice and perhaps teach to retired folks? All such sense-based skills, knowledge, and character habits can start growing in the first 3 years at liberal schools. With the dissolution of multi-generational families living in one house, it’s become more of a challenge to teach young folks about some elderly challenges, like obesity, diet, and dental care.
Not only are such practical physical health habits and skills useful throughout life for athletes, scholars, workers, homemakers, and everyone, but they also form a more solid mental basis for more abstract studies in high school and college, and not only for future doctors and nurses.
Learning such sense-based practical health skills can easily fill a child’s first few years at school, and as they do they can also help build feelings for other kinds of health, like psychological, economic, and political. Why shouldn’t teachers be trained to tell 1st graders they will continue learning more about their own bodies until they graduate high school, so they’ll become as healthy as they want to make themselves? Psychologists tell us many students often have a tough time adjusting to all the physical changes they’ll go through before they graduate; early maturing girls and late maturing boys especially seem to have adjustment and self-image challenges. Needless to say, focusing on physical health all through these years will help prepare students for such changes, and the new feelings they might cause.
Also, young students can start learning how to sense when someone needs some help overcoming their challenges, and thus start building their sense of social helpfulness; it’s yet another very useful habit to us liberal Deweyans. All such sense-based activities can begin growing and becoming stronger with active practice until students are around 8 years old.
Even in kindergarten children can keep using all their senses to learn more about plants and their importance; some are useful and some are dangerous. Thus, their awareness of life’s dangers continues growing. With the help of actively growing plants experimentally they can begin feeling some elementary biological facts about a very important life form; without plants no people could live for very long. They can begin feeling how their own bodies are dependent on plants for all their food. After all, all meat products are really second rate plant food! And the more simpler forms of life are studied, the easier it is to feel how organic life has evolved over billions of years of natural trial-and-error. In that way children can continue feeling more of life's amazingly great depth, variety, complexity, and majesty. After all, for many billions of miles around our planet, no other heavenly objects can make a better home than our earth, and so learning how to take good care of it becomes yet another useful feeling growing in young students where sense-based projects are the center of attention.
No doubt, some students would want to know more, and so would be motivated to teach themselves how to read and write as well. Reading to young students about our great biological history, and encouraging them to find and grow present-day models of that history also builds useful skills. After all, fern plants have been growing for hundreds of millions of years. Such activities are a great way to keep increasing the desire to learn more about our earth, their own bodies, and physical health, as well as feel more comfortable in nature itself. For thousands of years people were taught to feel our natural world was full of evil spirits and devils. Such feelings are no longer considered wise or acceptable.
Normally children love to be redd to and no doubt such books about their own bodies would help increase their interest in reading. How do their bodies work? What was life like for dinosaurs and fishes? Dental health too can become a much more important study; after all, having 32 teeth is really having 32 chances to die from one abscessed tooth, and even many parents are still grossly undereducated about dental health. What happens in our mouths only 20 minutes after eating a sugary and fatty piece of chocolate cake, or a huge hamburger or steak? What happens in our bodies after eating such food? How quickly do harmful teeth-destroying bacteria begin growing if we don’t clean them right after eating such foods? What does it feel like to intelligently clean one's teeth? What does it feel like to exercise intelligently? How can someone best learn to run a mile within 10 minutes; all at once, or in small steps? What’s the best way to begin learning how it’s done? There are indeed so many different healthy skills to experiment with and actively feel, even in the lower primary grades. The more we ignore such skills, the more we only hamper our children and our nation. As war keeps teaching us, immaturity and ignorance is harmful to both personal and social health.
The Middle Stage: 8-14
Then, from 8 to 14 children seem to go through a constructive period in their lives. As their bodies continue growing they want to learn how to use tools to build and repair things, and so it becomes a great opportunities to continue using their senses for learning more about life with beautification and repair projects, both in school and the real world. For us practical liberals, the sooner children feel they can help make their world a more useful and beautiful place to live, they begin feeling the world is theirs for intelligently improving. Thus, not only physical health continues growing with active kinds of tool use, but also psychological feelings of health continue growing as well. Also, with such active building projects, they’re continue learning more about what’s going on in their own neighborhoods and cities, and thus keep expanding their feelings for how important psychological, economic, and political health is for everyone’s benefit.
Such knowledge and skills are physically empowering, rather than just abstract book knowledge. Physical health remains an important topic at this stage of development, as it does all through life, but learning such constructive skills and knowledge teaches students how to preserve their health while they work. After all, we all have our limits for physical work, and the sooner they’re learned, the better off students will be. Some students are morning people, and work best at that time of day; others work best later in the day.
Obviously, all through life we are all biological creatures; even conservatives admit that. The challenge, then, is to build public schools celebrating physical health while students continue learning constructive kinds of skills all through the system. Why shouldn’t even blindfolded 3rd graders be able to take human internal organs out of a model, feel and identify them, and then reassemble them?! And why shouldn't 5th graders be able to say what each basically does, and what foods are best for them, like vitamin A being good for the liver and eyesight, and vitamin C useful for fighting colds, flus, and other harmful infections? Such active experimental projects help make taking tests about useful ideas also too easy to pass. How else can we expect students to practice physical health in adulthood when they have almost no intelligent cooking and eating skills?
Even in ancient Greece a similar educational ideal was chiseled into their most sacred shrine at Delphi: Know Yourself; its twin saying was Nothing in Excess! Aristotle took such advice so seriously, and was so loyal to moderation, it became the foundation for both his ethical and political ideas. Without such moderation many of our daily actions are left without a rudder for growth and guidance, and without experimental intelligence, such ideas become much more difficult to practice. Dewey’s, however, was much more loyal to the democratic public good, an ideal both Plato and Aristotle rejected as the foundation for healthy political habits; both said slavery was ok and even completely natural.
I remember my mother helping me build a soap-box racer when I was about 11; it was a great learning experience about intelligent building, and how to use books as tools, rather than as ends in themselves. We first went to the library, got a book about plans for soap-box racers, then bought some wood and I built one. Not only was it a great confidence builder for me, and increased my respect for and skills with tools, but it also taught me another important life lesson: cars are often much more trouble than they’re worth! Pushing that heavy wooden car around the neighborhood was much more work than I thought! It took a while but about 30 years ago I finally simplified my life and learned to live without one! Even in Los Angeles I don't miss having a car at all; after all, walking, buses, and trains are much safer ways to get around, much less expensive, more respectful to our planet and other people, and allow me to spend money on more important things, like helping others less well off. So, building that racer helped me feel what intelligent experimental learning is like, and how to use book-ideas intelligently to help reach some personal goal I set for myself, rather than merely reading more and more books about soapbox racing. Needless to say, tying the use of books to a building project has been useful for building all the books I’ve written so far.
All such healthful and constructive work-skills during this period can become more easily learned merely because children are naturally ready to learn them. And, such physical healthy skills can keep growing all through high school, even for those going on to college. What college kid doesn’t need to fix their car from time to time? Such skills also encourage young students to keep asking good questions and thus thinking more logically about their work. Thus they keep confidence alive and growing, and knowledge, and also helps make school even more enjoyable and better connected to the real world. The more they are, the more they learn about our current social challenges, like population control, and how zoos may become just about the only places left for many animal species.
Then, as students are encouraged to stand and tell other students about their own experimental construction projects, they’ll continue building more confidence about a very important democratic form of health – sharing their feelings and ideas. Such feelings are at the very foundation of a healthy democracy, where everyone’s equal rights and opportunities are a part of everyday life, and if they’re not, then working to see they are. In ancient Greece, for example, both democracy and good speaking evolved also together. As we'll see in the next section, our huge and powerful corporations often work to minimize knowledge about the harmful and destructive results of their work, and so keep making life more dangerous and precarious for everyone. Big tobacco, drug, and oil corporations come easily to mind, not to mention greedy banks and insurance companies.
Also, with active constructive learning projects both in and outside of schools between 8 and 14 years old, for both girls and boys, students can find it easier to begin learning more about building an excellent work habit-art, another habit useful throughout life. What’s the easiest way to saw a board, drill a hole, fix a car, or make a meal? What else besides actually working on such projects can teach how to work without unnecessary muscle tension? How important is spinal posture with such work. How can life itself become less frustrating and more enjoyable without such healthful constructive skills and knowledge? At the middle stage of development, students shouldn’t just be left to work routinely, but intelligently with teachers and older parents or student mentors helping students learn what intelligent work feels like. It’ll also make athletic exercising easier and more rewarding as well; isn’t that too another kind of work?
Are such healthy physical work habits really necessary? Well, how much useless muscular tension do you carry around on a daily basis? How much during the day do you feel tense, frustrated, and even angry? Don’t such feelings really reflect on-going physical tensions? How many people do you see trying to stretch out their irritating and tense shoulder and neck muscles while they work? How often have you seen bus drivers or cashiers trying to shake such stressful tensions out of their neck and shoulder muscles while they're working or even sitting quietly? Wouldn't all such painful tensions be lessened if children learned first how to feel them as they’re working, and then also how to relax them too? How many people today are really damaging their physical health by relying on harmful relaxing drugs like alcohol, prescription drugs, coffee, and tobacco, not to mention illegal drugs? Even athletic exercise itself can feel much more rewarding when people learn how to work without stressful tensions. I, for one, began feeling how to relax while jogging, and it eventually helped open up an entirely new way of practicing all my daily routines. How many times have you noticed how tense and impatient you felt merely standing at a corner waiting for the light to change, and yet didn’t know how to simply relax and let go of it? No doubt, learning to work with a minimum of useless stress and tension takes some time, but then again, what useful habit doesn’t take time to learn?
The point is, by focusing on learning such intelligent building and work habits in our public elementary schools will be useful all through life, whether in college or the business community. Such healthy physical skills help make life feel more livable and enjoyable, less stressful, more serene, and more productive.
Again, there's nothing really new in such ideas, but there is something new in saying our public tax-supported schools should be teaching such healthy skills, knowledge, and character habits on a formal basis beginning at the elementary level. As we saw earlier, Jesus too probably began building his carpentry skills before his teenage years, but today, however, such healthy projects for pre-teens have become almost non-existent in our public schools. To us liberals, ignoring such skills is not only a big mistake, but it helps make schools less than enjoyable places to be. And the more that happens, the more learning itself become a chore.
Will such schools be difficult and costly to build? Perhaps at first many adult supervisors will be needed to better tell students about such ideas. But after a while older student-mentors studying to be teachers and craftspeople can help younger students learn how to intelligently work with constructive tools, boys and girls included. Why shouldn’t girls too learn to work as intelligently as boys? Equality is another sign of political health. Knowing how to make elementary repairs to cars, homes, and offices increases confident feelings for solving larger challenges. Too many people today are convinced such skills shouldn’t be taught to all students; they’re often afraid their children won’t learn all the book-facts they feel they should learn to become doctors and lawyers and engineers! Such people often continue thinking high standardized test scores really mean educational excellence. But in liberal schools based on health and practical learning, young doctors and lawyers can start practicing such skills even before they graduate high school, as can carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.
We liberals say such healthy kinds of constructive experimental work help produce much better results than book-centered work. They help students feel what democratic equality feels like. So, we say students should begin feeling what intelligent constructive and relaxed work-habits feel like. I mentioned earlier how Behaviorism's founder, Dr. John Watson, taught himself to build an entire house by the time he was 18! Such building skills helped him feel confident for other challenges as well. Eventually he went to college, learned how to write well, and built a new Behavioral version of human psychology. Dewey's version was called Functional Behaviorism, but both needed habits of organization, confidence, and thoroughness to complete the work.
In short, the better students learn to work intelligently in school, the more they feel what healthy work is like. Therefore, we liberals say caring and helpful parents, teachers, and church leaders too can help strengthen such constructive habit-arts at school, home, and church. After all, most children naturally want to please adults and get their approval more than anything else, and so learning healthy constructive habits becomes much easier when those outside of school also encourage such work. Both high drop-out rates from conservative book-dominated urban schools, as well as ever-shrinking education dollars, make our homes and churches even more important for building healthy construction skills in the next generation.
The more we ignore such skills, the more vulnerable our own homes and businesses become. An endless stream of natural disasters keeps telling us nature does not respect civilization, and thus the more people will need to rely on government help. In truth, our wealthiest 1% keeps working to expand their control of tax money, like with billion dollar subsidies to big farms and corporations. Knowing how to improvement any situation with constructive actions will help reduce such forms of greed. Also, the sooner such skills are learned, the less need there’ll be for spending socialized tax monies to fight gang violence, crime, as well as for correcting all the unhealthful results of personally weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, like harmful diet and exercise habits.
Today, science is collecting a lot of information about how important healthful diet and exercise habits are, not only for physical health, but psychological and social health as well. They’ll all organically related. In fact, much of corporate-produced food today is proving to be counterproductive for health itself, with excessive amounts of sugar, unhealthful fats, excessive salt, and refined grains! The more such food is eaten, the more people build what’s called a 'metabolic syndrome'; it's a fancy way of saying unhealthful diet-arts produce a number of very dangerous physical health conditions, like obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart and stroke problems too. In fact, such over-eating is now estimated to cause about 50% of all diseases, and the more taxpayers pay the medical bills, the less money is available to keep building more liberal schools where health is a top priority. More healthy constructive food-preparing habits can start reducing such weak social results.
We already have grossly unbalanced government budgets, paying out more than we take in. It’s largely because for the past 40 years conservatives and moderate politicians have kept making their wealthy donors even wealthier and even reducing taxes during wartime, as President Bush did during the Iraq war! In turn, wealthy folks then buy many of our TV and radio stations to keep important health and economic facts away from the American public! When’s the last time you heard any kind of meaningful discussion on network channels about what our schools could be doing to better prepare students for life’s challenges, or what our huge banks and corporations are doing around the world to keep taking more money from people? Instead, we keep getting reports on how US test scores compare to other countries, making people believe they are the mark of excellent schools.
Our electronic media could be used as one of the great educational tools even invented, and yet many mainstream shows today are simply not helping people build habits of physical health. Many focus on mainly gossip, disaster, and police blotter reports, often creating feelings of adoration, horror, and fear. All 3 feelings are not very helpful for building either personal or social habits of democratic health unless they’re tied to asking people to help others when disaster strikes. In other words, it seems more and more, our own conservative public schools are also helping grow such unhealthful feelings. In response to that challenge, Dewey and other liberal democrats like him, naturally wanted our schools to start teaching more practical kinds of physical health, rather than keep ignoring how the wealthy keep getting wealthier, and how our politicians keep becoming more dependent on their wealthy donors. With such skills it became easier for more people to feel how they could help build a stronger democracy, as well as more intelligent students.
The Abstract Stage: 15 and Beyond
Then, lastly, there’s what I call the abstract academic period. No doubt, adult brain development begins growing at puberty, around 12 or 13 in most kids. As a result, young folks become better at learning abstract facts of all kinds, like math, history, science, politics, economics, and also reasoning better too. For those going on to college, these years can be devoted to learning more book-facts and seeing life on a more abstract level than before. However, even for those not going to college right away, abstract ideas can also help mentally anchor many of the skills they’ve learned, like ideas in chemistry, biology, and physics, as well as ethics and politics. What car mechanics doesn’t need to know about electricity and how to diagnose repair problems, or a fair price to charge their customers? So, at this stage of development, future plumbers and electricians, as well as doctors and lawyers, can more easily learn more abstract ideas, especially useful ethical ones like honesty, trustworthiness, and helpfulness? Such abstract studies can help young folks become even better prepared to live in our complex capitalist society. Abstract political ideas too can be put into a healthy physical framework, with the help of voting and debating skills. Students can learn more about asking candidates how they list their loyalties, like to the public good, corporate good, an active or passive federal government, regulations, and what the role of government should be? Are they most loyal to conservative or liberal ideas, and if so, then what are they and why are they better? All too often our public schools all but ignore teaching such healthful democratic skills, and thus keep allowing elected people to keep working for things besides the public good.
Here’s one example of what I mean. My Democratic US Representative has recently announced his loyalty to the President’s plan to pass a very controversial trade treaty called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It could produce a host of obnoxious results for all taxpayers in many nations while allowing corporations to control even more public tax money. He’s chosen to keep his loyalty to the president and large corporate donors, and be less loyal to the public good! For us liberal Democrats, however, such loyalties are the basic reasons to vote for or against any candidate! Thus democratic health itself rides on such loyalties, and how candidates list their importance. In my own case, if he doesn’t change those loyalties and start working for the public good, I’ll probably vote for someone else next year who is more loyal to protecting and enlarging that good. In my view, we don’t need more concentrated feudal corporate power; we need more popular democratic power. Such abstract thinking about political health can continue deepening at this 3rd level of physical development, on all political levels -- city, country, state, and federal. Why shouldn’t students be called into political debates as least as often as they’re called into sports pep rallies!
Useful and Harmful Results
No one is born with such knowledge and skills, and yet they continue being ignored almost completely within our own conservative public schools. If they’re taught at all it’s on a book-centered academic level, rather than an active experimental level. Thus, far too many children feel as Plato did, that physical health should be ignored. In this day and age of so many kinds of harmful foods, and more dangerous corporate power, that idea is simply no longer acceptable. The harmful medical results of such ignorance increases costs for all us in one way or another. In fact, physical pleasure and enjoyment are a large part of physical health, so why not teach even young students how to intelligently enjoy learning such knowledge and skills? Since when does school have to be serious, sullen, and somberly quiet?
On the harmful side, ignoring such basic skills of physical health in effect divides and separates students from their own bodies, and isn’t that the ultimate educational sin? Isn’t that what conservatives have been doing to people for thousands of years with otherworldly religious ideas? Isn’t that habit really at the root of our ignorance about curing such physical diseases? For we liberals, that was conservative philosophy’s and religion’s great original sin against humanity; they ignored learning about our own physical bodies while teaching irrelevant rituals and ideas, thus keeping both women and men separated from themselves and from building more intelligent habits of physical health and pleasurable enjoyment. In fact, for centuries in Western civilization people were taught pleasure is the road to hell itself! In excess it can be, but as liberal Atomists like Epicurus said, in moderation it is the road to enjoying the few short years of life anyone has. As liberal educator and essayist Michael De Montaigne suggested in the 1500s, individualizing such useful knowledge encourages students to learn more about their own body-minds, and thus become more empowered to intelligently direct their own daily actions.
Learning more about physical health also helps students see we all have different strengths and weaknesses, as well as how they might help others help themselves become healthier. Even young students can teach themselves to choose the foods their own digestive systems can use best, regardless of what parents tell them to eat. Don’t even children have a right to practice and build healthy habits and skills? Are we to keep saying students must be 18 before they have the right to know what physical health feels like? No doubt, many dentists and doctors would answer that question with a yes.
Liberal schools where physical health is encouraged will also help students set aside some time each day for a little healthful exercise, even if it’s only a few minutes for stretching out and walking a little. As many senior citizens know full well, even small amounts of low stress exercise are better than none. Older students too could help and encourage younger ones. How many millions of dollars change hands each year in Health Spas and Clubs, trying to improve weak and unhealthful exercise habits? Wouldn't their physical health be improved if students started building such habits in school, when unhealthful habits haven’t become strong and propulsive? Young students often need just a little encouragement to start learning about such important habits, rather than deciding which local gang has the best drugs for sale and where to get the best junk food. The sooner students learn it’s best to help police make such dealers pay for their crimes and disrespect, the easier it’ll be to keep making themselves healthier and exercising more. Such spas and clubs can then take exercise to higher levels.
As we’ve seen earlier, active, healthful, and enjoyable dramatic arts like writing and role playing are yet other important ways to physical health. In fact, such habits are useful in just about all human actions. For Dewey, learning to talk about ideas was the greatest invention in all of earth history. With its growth we became more separated from the animal kingdom than ever before, and more dominant in it as well. How many students in exercise class would love to make fun of dull and boring athletes who aren’t interested in much else besides hitting knee-high curve balls or catching another touchdown pass? Small, short, dramatic scenes, written and performed by teams of students in any academic class, can be a great way for students 8-14 to learn more healthful reading and writing skills, as well as healthful cooperative and joyful verbal skills. How many young students would love to act like bacteria and viruses, or older students as greedy politicians always on the lookout for wealthy campaign donors, or greedy bankers always scheming for more money? Such habits lead naturally to the topic of psychological, economic, and political health as well. What greedy student in a psychology workshop wouldn’t benefit from having fingers hit and going to school-jail after stealing someone else’s property? With such healthy role playing activities it would also be much easier to feel what kinds of actions build character excellence, and also help students find the group they most naturally fit in with.
Such healthful and enjoyable learning activities would also help students get a feeling for respect in their own actions. No doubt, some people are more dangerous than others, but it’s because of their actions, not the way they look. After all, many actions are excessive; some students may become overly fearful and neurotic about germs and fear touching anyone else, or compulsively start washing their hands every 5 minutes. But if we don't start teaching such basic healthful skills to children, they'll continue living in an immature and more dangerous psychic world.
Some Useful Social Results
Perhaps the most important social result of such physical health studies all through schools would be lessening taxpayer healthcare costs! Even today, taxpayers are paying more than necessary for healthcare; as health and insurance costs increase, so do taxes! In fact, our conservative public schools where physical health is ignored only increases the chances for obnoxious results to keep growing. So, the more young folks know about how to keep their physical body-minds healthy and in ship-shape shape, no matter what they study, the better off our entire society becomes! Such useful skills should no longer remain ignored in our public schools, even though many such facts have only recently been discovered. True, only in the 1930s were viruses discovered; electron microscopes had to be invented first, but why shouldn’t high school students be free to build their own microscopes, keep learning about cold and flu viruses, how merely sharing bodily fluids can produce dangerous results, and how to intelligently protect their health. How much did ignoring such healthy ideas and skills in our public schools contribute to our current AIDS tragedy? Shouldn’t everyone learn more about such physical health skills while they’re in school? No one is completely immune from such dangers.
Our Liberal Soapbox!
We Deweyan liberals say it is time people begin making our own conservative public schools places where health becomes the center of attention once students step into school. In them students will begin learning more about themselves and what’s going on in their own bodies, writing and performing scenes about them, learning to work in healthy ways, and thus build feelings about physical health into their muscles and brains. Such skills can also help educate parents too. After all, what have we got to lose besides more sickness, tragic deaths, and higher healthcare costs and taxes? With more active and enjoyable experimental projects more excellent healthy habits can keep growing on both personal and social levels. In fact, all such studies and feelings can begin growing in the elementary grades, and continue growing all through high school as the work becomes more abstract. How many bright high school students would love the challenge of building an electron microscope for their school? Who knows? They might even be able to build a vaccine against tooth decay, and thus change dentistry forever! Why shouldn’t such students be free to build their own health workshops where students are asked to talk freely about their food and exercise habits, and, more importantly, how best to build better ones. Drug resistant bacteria are already becoming more of a threat to everyone, and so everyone can help lessen their growth a little. We’ll see more about such psychological health in the next section.
Physical Health on a Social Level
So-called super-bacteria are becoming a greater threat to everyone’s physical health. For example, each year drug companies make about 18 tons of antibiotics, of which about 15 tons are sold to cattle, sheep, hog, and chicken farmers. They’re used to kill dangerous bacteria living inside those animals, so they’re safer to eat. However, when not enough antibiotics are given to animals, it allows drug-resistant bacteria to evolve, and thus increase dangerous diseases and sicknesses. And what’s worse, some drug companies sometimes pay politicians and people at the Food and Drug Administration to look the other way when it comes to even giving them information about what they’re doing! Such disrespect for the public good is, in fact, dangerous to peoples’ lives! In fact, for many big profit-hungry corporations, the general operating rule seems to be this: keep people as ignorant as possible about what we’re doing; the less people know about what we’re doing, the easier it is to keep taking as much of their money as is possible! For more see David Kessler’s informative New York Times article entitled Antibiotics and the Meat We Eat, 3-27-13.
From this liberal soapbox we Deweyans say, the more such healthful knowledge is regulated and controlled by the government, the easy it becomes to avoid any unhealthful social results. What can it mean for our schools? Well, why shouldn’t concerned and caring high school students regularly test in their labs how healthy the animal foods and water are in their own neighborhoods? After all, what public good is there in merely knowing bacteria exists if it doesn’t help students to make life safer and more healthful? Why aren’t there Nobel prizes for great student work too, so better research and testing tools can become more widespread?
We liberals say people have the power to start building more liberal schools where loyalty to health and the public good is the highest priority, or at least equal for a student’s right to choose what to study. No doubt, some doctors might object, but wouldn’t such healthy student skills help free doctors to concentrate on those who really need specialized help? With the growth of DNA facts, knowing how to use such knowledge to help those with genetic diseases has become more important than ever before. Recently, a Democratic congress finally passed an important healthcare reform bill, the Affordable Care Act; it helps more low income people better afford healthcare. But wouldn’t it be more intelligent to build more liberal schools where physical, psychological, economic, and political health were also taught while students learn the job skills for work after high school? What is more important, learning almost useless and soon forgotten academic historical and mathematical facts, or teaching students what healthful habits to build, and how best to build them? At Plato’s school in ancient Greece its motto was Let No One Ignorant of Geometry Enter Here. We Deweyan liberals say it is time the motto of our public schools becomes: Let No One Ignorant of Health Leave Here! Such schools would be celebrated much more by parents and students than our conservative book-centered schools.
To put it bluntly, to us liberals ignoring such studies is educationally tragic, not only for students, but for our social health as well! How many college graduates still have weak and unhealthful feelings for excellent diet and exercise habits, or for working with as little useless tension as possible, or how not to keep abusing their bodies with excessive alcohol and drug use to just relax and fall asleep? In fact, with the growth of science has also come a whole new set of health challenges, and the less students learn about them and how to answer them intelligently, the more unhealthful their own lives become.
For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors roamed freely and actively, but that all began changing with the growth of cities only about 5 thousand years ago, and our schools have not been doing much to teach more intelligent and stress free habits for living in those cities and building excellent schools. Thus, to better answer our new physical health challenges, we need better schools where more intelligent habits besides reading books are taught. So, with more time devoted to building healthful habits, even young students can begin feeling not only their own health, but also how their teachers and schools are caring for them as people, rather than just desk sitters and test takers. The whole humane feeling of communal friendliness becomes almost non-existent in schools where testing and book-facts are the center of attention. They continue disconnecting students from their own neighborhoods. Like military sergeants, many teachers feel they too need to dominate and control their troops-students!
In fact, all nations are now challenged to build such liberal schools: China, Russia, Muslim, African, and Western. Even undeveloped countries are beginning to feel the need for schools where practical kinds of healthy skills are taught on a daily basis. They’re the best insurance against the on-going growth of greedy feudalistic institutions around the world. Teaching more healthful habits to students helps them see and feel all other people have the same challenges, and so should be helped when necessary, and imitated when admired. Wouldn’t such healthful feelings make peace that much easier to continue growing, rather than war after war after war?
Thanks to our growing and powerful women's movement, more women are finally becoming a greater part of our male-dominated, warring, and overly competitive institutions. Our nation is becoming more democratically healthful! Many women are now unafraid to ask new questions and bring a fresh healthier set of values to life, and so female students too should be asked to practice such skills. Should anyone tolerate greed or disrespect in any of its forms? No doubt, our huge male-dominated and profit-hungry defense industries and stockholders might object to teaching such skills, but then again, buggy whip makers objected when cars were first being built. Again, for us liberals, this world is ours for the making, and belongs to all of us, rather than merely to those few who continue wanting a feudalistic status quo to stay forever in place.
In fact, here in the US, supposedly the world's most advanced nation, there's a lot of evidence we're still health primitives! It seems we've skipped civilized habits of serenity, taste, elegance, grace, intelligence, and enjoyment, and gone from frontier brutality to greedy, decadent, and indulgent economic and political lifestyles, based on extremes of wealth and education. For example, researchers tell us no one needs more than 3 ounces of meat a day in a healthy diet, and yet many people are eating that much at one meal! Few people still don’t realize all the natural toxins they're putting into their bodies with such foods, toxins created when an animal’s killed but when its muscle cells keep living and producing waste material.
What’s more, unhealthful adult and even childhood obesity is skyrocketing; if it isn’t improved, then in a few decades most people may be driving their electric wheelchairs from work straight to kidney dialysis or the pharmacy! Then the wealthy can begin making more money by investing in expensive wheelchair builders rather than cars, then ship such factories overseas to make even more money? It wouldn’t be so bad, except many now ship profits to off-shore accounts and thus avoid taxes altogether. Is it any wonder we liberals want to teach the next generation what healthy political habits feel like?
True, we may be only at the beginning of building such schools, but even that fact can be motivating. Over-population too is rapidly becoming another health challenge, as both India and China are showing us. Only for a few centuries now has science been relatively free from intolerant religious control, and in some ways that alone makes teaching more healthy population habits a challenge around the world. Few students even today have begun discovering how easier life becomes when families are limited in size.
And in this new 21st century we might see yet another major biological revolution, as scientists learn how to use their new genetic knowledge to continue improving human physical weaknesses, disabilities, and defects. Until then, however, people need to know more about physically healthy habits, and for that there is no better place to start than our own public schools. One thing seems certain: If we don't start teaching children more about healthy habits and skills, and how they can best be built with active kinds of practice and rewards, then we simply keep making life more expensive, stressful, and frustrating for everyone. What have we got to lose, besides old and routine, unintelligent, feudalistic, unhealthful habits?
Such healthful studies will also help grow more intelligent healing and medical habit-arts. Why shouldn’t elderly folks with various medical problems be free to share their health situations with students, giving them a chance for some real creative thinking and testing about healthy actions here and now? What's the best way to help mildly depressed people start enjoying more of life? How important is moral encouragement for building an intelligent exercise habit? Shouldn’t students be free everyday they’re in school to intelligently experiment and learn more about health and the results of unhealthy habits? Why shouldn’t even young students learn to take a person’s blood pressure, heart rate, and lung health, and then see how they vary after exercising or eating certain foods? Shouldn’t there be a physical health workshop in every public school? What's the best way to keep teeth clean and healthy, so their dentist can figure out another way to pay off their huge med-school loans? Doesn't causing med-students to have, say, a $100,000 debt when they graduate merely cause health costs to stay just this side of an arm-and-a-leg, with maybe a kidney as interest? Who wants to stay in debt for years, and it helps many of our smartest people will begin thinking more and more about making money than about public health, and also using our money-based political system to help them.
37. REALITY SCHOOLS: PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH
People and young students often don’t realize there’s more to psychological health than merely knowing things they shouldn’t do. Don’t lie, is one example. For the first 5 years of life many students are told what they shouldn’t do. All such negative statements, however, leaves them ignorant about what they can do to practice psychological health, like acting intelligently, respectfully helping others, and obeying just laws. It’s yet another reason for our public schools to focus more on psychology’s more positive actions, like feeling joy, working in a relaxed way, how to respect others, earning honest money, making our society more democratic and fair for everyone, and so on.
With such habits psychological health touches all 3 of our other kinds of health as well as character health! For example, it’s one thing to tell students, respect others, but liberal public schools also use role-playing as a main learning tool for teaching students what such ideas feel like in practice. Often respect means simply not saying anything to someone, and allowing people to go about their business peacefully and lawfully. So, in a psychology lab, students get the chance to first make a list of the healthy skills they could learn, a list of the skills they want to learn, listen to other students saying what they’d like to learn, and then working with students to actively practice them joyfully and happily. There simply is no better way for young students to start learning what such important psychological habits feel like. No one is born with an inbuilt instinct to know what any kind of psychological skill feels like.
Why teach such skills to even young children? After all, not all students will need such practice, especially those lucky enough to have respectful, nurturing, and caring parents. That may be true, but far from everyone is so lucky; many children have disrespectful parents who often simply order them around and threaten punishment if they don't obey, or don’t know the best skills to teach. As a result, many children grow up feeling the way they were raised is normal, right, and healthy. As we’ve seen, for centuries many children were taught Africans should be enslaved and discriminated against.
In a democracy, however, mere obedience to status quo habits is far from psychological health. On the contrary, it often requires intelligent social actions like protests, staying in contact with elected representatives, asking to know where their loyalties are on different issues and actions, and holding them responsible for their actions. So, to keep ignoring such skills on a formal level in our conservative public schools simply weakens our entire democratic system. When is the last time you redd a student book about economic or political health, much less psychological health? Conservatives know full well, the less students are taught about such useful personal and democratic skills and habits, the easier it is to keep using their economic and political power to keep getting more powerful. And, since 1944, when the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created by the corporate community, that kind of feudalistic economic and political power has become more globally oriented, as the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man so vividly describe.
A Liberal Model
Once again, for thousands of years philosophers have defined human nature, or human psychology, with liberal, moderate, and conservative ideas. So, before getting to some specific educational ideas about a liberal model of psychological health, this very important section will start with a little historical review.
Since ancient times liberals like Democritus and Protagoras suggested the art of building habits useful in a democratic society always involved active and intelligent body-mind practice! Today we call that active process building one’s psychological health; more poetic types have called it building one’s survival kit. Only with habits like equality and sharing power equally could democratic systems grow at all. They knew only such habits would empower people to take a greater control of their lives, learning goals, and governments as well. The conservative alternative, like at Sparta for example, was to let a small class keep control of the government, and with their military habits keep endangering everyone’s life. In any case, however, even thousands of years ago liberal Greeks said such active learning lives at the heart of any kind of health, including democratic health and freedom. The more a person practices respect for all people, the stronger it becomes. They saw so clearly, only in democratic societies could everyone’s freedom and liberty keep expanding and growing all through life.
Such practical thoughts about learning any habit-art, then, were put at the heart of their liberal models of psychological health, where they remain to this day. Only practice can encourage students to intelligently control the growth of both personally and socially healthful habits, and so the actual knowledge of such skills lies within a person’s own actions, muscles, and intelligent choices – in their body-mind. Even for many ancient Greek liberals, then, we are all self-determining; we are all what we actively practice! For them, conservative ideas like fate, or the gods controlling human actions, are merely a myth, even though Socrates and Plato believed in them. Even moderate Aristotle agreed to a degree with such liberal ideas of practical health; Democritus’s writings helped convince him of it.
Thus, for such liberals, both Plato’s and Aristotle’s model of psychological health learned by reasoning alone was merely one step in the process of building a healthy democratic psyche -- one’s psychological health. No doubt, Protagoras saw reasoning as merely the 2nd step in that learning process. Our reason and practical common sense can merely suggest ways to improve any weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts. For example, young Greek men had almost no knowledge of how to intelligently debate and defend themselves in court, or vote intelligently in the Athenian Assembly. Such habits were weak and made them vulnerable to those who had better persuasive skills, or a politician who argued for unwise policies. Protagoras thus sensed the need for teaching such democratic skills, and so offered to teach them for a fee to those wanting to learn more democratic skills. In that kind of active educational process, little by little, more men learned about psychological health! The more they practiced such skills, the better they got at defending themselves in court, speaking intelligently in public, and questioning those with other ideas. In Athens any citizen could offer any idea to the Assembly for its approval to become law, much like our democratic initiative and referendum processes do today.
Liberal doctors like Hippocrates, too, taught the same kinds of psychological health though active study and learning. Medical students actively studied diseases, medicine effects, and the results of giving them to different people. So, their active method of learning helped build a liberal model of psychological health alive to this day. Hippocrates saw there was just no better way to learn more about disease and medicine in an ever-changing world than actively studying all its different cases. Thus, for such liberals, intelligent experimental learning skills were placed at the core of psychological health even before Aristotle was born.
Such liberal models of building one’s psychological health on a daily basis helped doctors keep feeling physical health always depends on individual patient reactions to different medicines here and now. That idea too challenged the conservative status quo of believing health for everyone could be reduced to just a few simplified ideas. It was one thing to say, like conservatives said, sickness and health were the result of just 4 moving bodily fluids, but it was another thing altogether to see the results of different medicines and eating actions in ill people. In fact, those simplified conservative ideas of sickness and health continued throughout the Middle Ages in the practice of bleeding ill people to restore fluid balances. Even George Washington was bled to cure a sickness. That's how strong some habits can be when a more liberal model of psychological health as intelligent experimentation isn’t taught in schools to the next generation! In general, then, it may be said conservatives often wanted life to be much simpler than it really is, and so kept ignoring experimentation to know more about nature.
As a result, thousands of years ago the liberal Greek educational challenge became teaching students what actions are most intelligent, healthful, and less stressful, especially in a democratic society. Democratic Dewey couldn’t have agreed more. He too felt experimental learning, equal rights, enjoyment, playfulness, pleasure, creativity, and fun were very important learning tools for energizing a healthy democratic psyche. And what’s more, all such skills and habit-arts are best learned one day at a time, and one step at a time. All such habits rest on feelings and they take time to grow and mature. Plato too recognized this fact: the more habits are practiced, the stronger they become.
Conservative and Moderate Models
What set him and moderates like Aristotle apart from liberals were the skills they recommended by learned. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato were much more respectful of religious ideas like fate, and divine power -- the gods – for helping build any kind of psychic health. The saying, we are all puppets of the gods, sums up their model of a healthy psyche; it’s one in which people practice respect, obedience, and submission to the gods, so they will grant some people special skills and knowledge. For them psychological excellence could be learned by only a few. Such ideas, however, become even more amazing when they couldn’t even prove such health-controlling objects existed, much less what kinds of respect they demanded. Even in their day there was a tremendous diversity of worship habits, and how can we know which one is right? It’s yet more evidence of how strong their own religious habits were.
In Christianity, then, the idea of divine power was defined as divine grace. Only by divine grace could Christians become saved and eligible for an eternity of heavenly bliss after death. So, naturally, their model of psychological health was based on feelings and habits of submission to, and acceptance of, those Christians with religious authority; the idea went back to Plato himself. For centuries, then, a religiously conservative model of psychological health remained in place even as plague after plague, and war after war kept sweeping across Europe.
Such a model of psychological health simply assumed only religious leaders really knew some deeper kinds of Truth, and so should be obeyed, like the ideas of sin and forgiveness. In such a model psychological health retreated merely to one’s inner feelings and motives, not one’s good works. We are saved by grace alone, said Christianity’s founder, Paul of Tarsus. No doubt, they encouraged helpful social actions like building hospitals for the sick and dying, but the most important part of their model of health remained confined to one’s inner feelings and motives. The entire feudalistic model of both health and redemption rested on such inner feelings and motives. One could live an horrendous life and if they would sincerely repent on their deathbed they could go to heaven.
Such a model of psychological health based on inner feelings and motives was also celebrated by the New Testament writers of John’s Gospel in the 1st and 2nd centuries. In fact, they too called attention to one’s inner feelings, or as it was then called, the health of one’s soul. In fact, for them such feelings became the Kingdom of Heaven itself! Those more relaxed, serene, and confident feelings of being saved allowed many to believe they were in fact already feeling what heaven was really like. They said the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. With that idea those writers brought such subconscious inner feelings to a conscious level and said they were the most important part of psychological health! Without them one could not be saved and redeemed. Feelings like being born again and feeling god’s grace became more important than learning more about nature. Thus, their original insight about the usefulness of some inner bodily feelings were used to build another mystery religion separating and dividing people into different religious tribes, and also feeling only their tribe knew eternal Truth. Such feelings continued blocking people from seeing all people as merely people. It’s often the result of conservative models of psychological health; even Plato felt all non-Greeks were inferior barbarians. Once those kinds of feelings are said to be absolutely True, forcing others to obey and submit becomes justified and all but inevitable! And, with such a narrow and passive model of psychological health it becomes easier to see why active kinds of experimental learning became almost non-existent in their schools.
Slowly, as those religious conservatives built more of their schools and churches, it became easy to teach such skills to the next generation. Not many questioned how even such skills rested on actively learning certain habits, like praying, worshipping, confessing one’s sins, and building more awe-inspiring churches. In such grand ornate and opulent cathedrals it became even easier to feel people really were in a heavenly holy place. Since the pyramids were built around 3,000 BCE, architecture had been a useful tool for religious conservatives; the Parthenon itself was a temple for Athena’s statue. They helped achieve their goal of social power over people, just like greedy capitalists today want monopolistic economic power over people.
Anyone not accepting the Church’s model of psychological health as absolute Truth was dangerous and thus could not be tolerated. For centuries even cold-blooded murder and torture was used to protect their monopolistic power, as it still is in many places of the world, like Afghanistan for example. And, as we’ve been seeing in these pages, today economic monopolists use laws and police to enforce their models of psychological health -- submission to and acceptance of their power and their ideas. And, for both religious and secular conservatives, democratic liberty, freedom, free thought, and individuality are dangerous, and so should be suppressed at much as possible, especially in our public schools.
For us liberals, however, the obnoxious and disrespectful personal and social results of a conservative model simply should not be tolerated in a democratic society. Results like great class divisions of wealth and poverty, limited medical and educational opportunities for the poor, and thus diminished lives, are simply unacceptable to us who see all people as people. Thus is a brief description of our current cultural wars. The more conservatives control a society, the more difficult it becomes to build schools where democratic models of psychological health are encouraged, like helpful and constructive habits of equality, as well as democratic forms of social power like labor unions, democratically run corporations, and more liberal governments aimed at promoting the public good. For us liberals, such divisive and warping social results simply should not be tolerated anymore; the entire kingdom of enjoyable and peaceful feelings living within our own muscles should be used to build a more humane and democratic society.
No doubt, both Aristotle and Plato knew about liberal models of psychological health, with their focus on learning nature’s small truths slowly and experimentally. But, they had simply been trained to want more than small facts of natural knowledge. They both felt nature had some eternal and unchanging objects making natural movements eternally the same. Also, they believed only a few people were talented enough to learn nature’s eternal Truths. As a result they built models of nature and psychological health so a few would have a way to learn about them. With such models they both battled liberal sophist models of psychological health. Since the 1600s, however, life itself has shown ancient liberals like Democritus and Protagoras were psychologically much wiser, more robust, more humble, and better adjusted to living in an always-changing nature. Experimental learning and its thousands of small truths have become our strongest and most reliable tools in the war to keep improving nature and better controlling its dangerous results. What’s more, in that model no one learns any habit-art without actively practicing it! The on-going existence of schools themselves tells us that idea rests at the heart of all psychological models!
Assessing Conservative Models
To us liberals, such conservative models of psychological health should be judged on their results and motives. No doubt, many churchmen really believed they were saving a person’s soul by burning them at the stake, but unless all their supernatural ideas can be proved to exist, they have really no social justification for any discriminating actions. It would be like accepting the belief in harmful Martians living on the moon’s dark side without any real and objective evidence!
In short, to us liberals, a conservative model of psychological health based merely on inner feelings generally ignored the usefulness of objective kinds of natural knowledge. It explains why our most powerful scientific revolution is only a few centuries old, whereas conservative governments have been in place for thousands of years! In fact, social forms of narrow and feudalistic power remain a threat to millions of people today denying them of equal rights, opportunities, and to live as they see fit. Both Middle East and Western conservatives may continue fighting to teach their models of psychological health, but on those grounds we liberals have a right to oppose them. For us liberals, the best kind of psychological health is produced when people work together intelligently and peacefully to share equally in any rewards of their work, thus promoting feelings of equality and freedom. In fact, as we’ll see in the next section on economic health, capitalism itself can be criticized on the actual social results it produces, as the new Catholic Pope Francis has recently said himself. Capitalism has a proven record of producing many useful goods, but a much less admirable record of distributing those goods to the people and sharing their profits equally.
What’s more, even conservative habits of psychological health, like obedience and acceptance, help create a rather ironic situation worthy of Socrates himself. For example, to teach their feudalistic values and habits of psychological health, both conservatives and moderates had to use an active liberal model of learning; the more children practiced such values, the faster they learned to feel them. Two especially useful habits during the Middle Ages centered around the ideas of heaven and hell. The first told people they could achieve the best results possible, an eternity of blissful living, if they merely obeyed their leaders. And the second made people fearful if they didn’t obey those leaders. Who wants to burn in hell for all time? People like Robin Hood who may have actively worked to decrease differences in wealth were simply hunted down and killed; even kings were trained to fear excommunication, even though there wasn’t any objective evidence for either heaven or hell. Even today, such ideas like trickle-down economics, and corporate personhood, continue working to make people accept the feudalistic status quo system and all its disrespectful results. As we’re seeing more and more today, in many places such ideas are growing weaker. More and more people have accepted the liberal model of health as based on objective evidence.
Dewey’s Model of Psychological-Political Health
About psychological health, scholarly Dewey wrote this in School and Society:
“Earlier (Aristotelian) psychology regarded mind as a purely individual affair in direct and naked contact with an external world. At present (however) the tendency is to conceive individual mind as a function of (localized) social life -- as not capable of operating or developing by itself, but as requiring continual stimulus from social agencies (like teachers, parents, and fellow students). (Traditionally) mind was supposed to get its filling by bringing the child (to) geography, arithmetic, grammar, etc. … it was forgotten the maximum appeal (of knowledge) could be secured only when the studies were presented from the standpoint of the relation they bear to the life of the society.
… the older psychology was … of knowledge, of intellect. Emotion and (enjoyment) occupied an incidental place. Much was said about sensation -- next to nothing about (feelings and) movements. There was discussion of ideas, but the possibility of their origin in and from (local social) action was ignored. Now we believe the intellect, the sphere of sensation and ideas, is but a ‘middle department which we sometimes take to be fixed … it can have but one essential function -- the formation of defining the (future) direction which our activity shall take.’ (98, emphasis and additions are my own)
In other words, for Dewey, psychological health is best focused on learning to enjoyably guide intelligent actions here and now, and with their results keep building more useful personal and social habits. What is the good, Dewey might ask, of believing any mere academic fact or idea really reflects eternal Truth, or then use those ideas to maintain one’s economic, political, or social power by attacking those who disagree? That is what much of the Middle Ages were about, as is much of our current economic power structure, the so-called richest 1%, about 3 million people in the US. If nothing else, such facts teach us to feel life’s dangerous possibilities when people gain too much power, whether economic or religious.
Naturally such ideas have some very important results for public school education too. For example, in a healthy democracy, psychological health means, among other things, not allowing power to become too concentrated in any form! Recently, economic forms of power have become so forceful and self-serving they continue disrupting and endangering millions of innocent people trying to live better lives. So, the educational lesson becomes clear: to teach even young students more liberal habits where power is shared and all students have a say in how their schools and studies should be run! In such schools, the principal will often tell students what options they have with their schools, and encourage debate about what options should be experimented with. Why shouldn’t even young students begin feeling how such liberal habits of psychological health are best learned with active kinds of experimental practice? The sooner such feelings and habits start growing, the easier it becomes to practice such democratic habits all through life. Intelligent liberals need much more than inane negative ads to get our votes at election time; we need real debate and discussion between candidates. For us, peoples’ taxes alone give them a right to say how they should be spent! Such health isn’t gained by merely reading more psychology books, but actually practicing such vibrant democratic habits in our public schools. Without such skills, our democratic republic has, in so many ways, regressed back to a feudalistic system of concentrated and dangerous power.
Building Early Psychological Health
We turn, then, to some more suggestions about teaching a more liberal model of health in our public schools. For young students in the first 3 years of school, such habits can best start growing with sense-based learning experiences. For example, they can be allowed to sense what flowers they like best, and then asked to vote on where they should be planted, what foods should be cooked and eaten, what aromas are pleasing, and perhaps what pet animals they should touch, feel, and even train to learn new skills. In such ways they begin building their own individual kinds of psychological health, and democracy’s health as well. The more students are allowed to talk about such options, and look at their results, the more forward-looking they become, as well as intelligent too. What’s more, the more they see students make different choices, the more respect and honor they learn to feel for democratic diversity and differences. Some may like tulips, others roses, and so 2 different teams form and begin planning how to grow such flowers and where to plant them. And, when they get better at reading in the 2nd stage of development, they can learn how to make even more intelligent choices. Also, drawing such activities is another sense-based skill encouraged at this level. Why shouldn’t some children enjoy the feel and sight of drawing such events? How else can we discover who has artistic talent unless we give children the encouragement and freedom to first learn about such options, and then express their choices?
Other useful sense-based skills to be encouraged are talking and communication skills. They’re a big part of physical health too, aren’t they? How many young folks leave high school and know very little about intelligent talking skills, like what humorous talking sounds like, what good questions can be asked, and how much can be said with just a few words. According to Plato, the Spartans were excellent at saying much with just a few words, so the more students hear good speakers, and talk to a group themselves, then the easier it’ll be for them to build more healthful speaking and thinking habits. As the ancient Athenians taught us, such speaking skills lie at democracy’s heart. When used intelligently, to keep making life safer and more enjoyable, the easier it becomes to notice disrespectful and dangerous actions both in and outside of school.
Young students often like to hear what other students are learning about, especially if it's humorous too. Talking excellently also helps build good question-asking skills, thus increasing curiosity as well. Such communication skills are useful throughout life, and not just in school, thus liberal schools will take great pride in helping young students learn such habits with daily practice.
In liberal schools, confident, relaxed, and caring speaking on everyone’s part becomes another important sign of psychological health. And the earlier it’s learned, the easier it becomes to practice it all through the school years. In liberal public schools a quiet classroom is often a sign of sleeping students. So, why shouldn’t students have, say, an hour a day to merely relax and hear what other students have been working on, and what obstacles they’re discovered? Even if students merely say they don’t have much to say, it’s still better than saying nothing at all. For us liberals, it’s simply another important part of psychological health. Such skills can also help build one's humorous habit, as students begin feeling how their words and ideas can make fun of the social status quo. The healthful skill of satire can thus begin growing, a skill useful throughout life. For example, a child might say how a parent worked so hard for a new car only to discover global warming is a growing threat. Isn't that what our humorists do on a daily basis -- help us feel the humorously healthy absurdity and folly of our own actions?
Young students can begin learning such liberal habits of psychological health, but only if they and their teachers have the freedom to teach such habits. Thus, they’ll begin to feel how useful freedom is when they’re not allowed to practice it, and are told to write a book assignment instead. Needless to say, the more that feeling of freedom grows, the stronger our democracy grows. In such ways children can also begin learning how enjoyable work is another big part of psychological health. In a psychological lab they can begin feeling health doesn’t just mean listening to others, or voting now and then, but also how to enjoy feeling the results those actions produced. What’s the sense in, say, growing beautiful tulips unless you take the time to see and feel them? If such habits weren’t useful all through life, then the phrase, ‘take the time to smell the flowers’ would be meaningless.
For us Deweyan liberals, these first 3 years of school are tremendously important; they set the tone and standard for the rest of their 9 years in public education. For example, their sense-based work will make it easier for students to begin learning another important skill of psychological health, namely, how to intelligently resolve personal differences. Working in teams will naturally produce some differences of option, and so intelligent and useful skills like conflict resolution and anger management can start growing with, of course, the teacher’s help. When a teacher takes the time to call everyone’s attention to a difference of opinion, and to how it can be resolved peacefully, then students will start learning how such skills work, as well as when and how to use them.
Luckily, all such healthful habits can begin growing in the first 3 grades, when students are naturally sense-dominated, and so already are learning with sense experience. Such learning helps weaken all habits of over-thinking and over-reasoning about life, and keeps students focused on feeling the results of their actions, and how to make them even better.
With simple sense-based learning it’s easy to make learning not only enjoyable, but intelligence as well. It’s easy to feel enjoyment with projects like using food rewards to teach pet animals new skills, drawing colorful pictures, and feeling what it’s like to build a little garden with other students. It not only keeps us connected to our biological roots, but also to important skills of practicing intelligent actions. Obviously, the skill of working to produce some future result, like making a pet animal exercise before getting a food reward, makes life easier in many cases. Feeling enjoyment and fun, while working on such constructive sense-based projects, is a healthful psychological skill useful throughout life. If life is a series of experiments, then why not learn to experiment intelligently?
Learning how it feels to intelligently and smoothly use rewards of, say, food, to teach a pet new skills also makes it easier to feel our kinship and similarity to the non-human world. Not only can such work can thus become the foundation for comparative anatomy studies later in high school, but they also help students see animals learn basically the same way people learn, with the help of enjoyable and pleasant rewards. No doubt, a line should be drawn somewhere, like forbidding students to train alligators to fetch the morning paper, but I think you see my point. Such sense-based projects make it easier to teach students how to reward themselves for learning a new habit! What kinds of rewards are best, and how often should they be given. Such work also makes it easier to educate their own children more intelligently if and when they have them. And, even such simple enjoyable projects also prepare students to study more abstract psychological ideas in high school. There, it’ll be easier to read more about other psychological models and their useful ideas, like talking about our feelings in a Freudian model, and role-playing in a Gestalt model. All such useful projects start helping students know more about themselves and also about others as well. What kid in any country wouldn’t like to have a cute little baby alligator until they learn they might lose a hand or a foot one day? Intelligent life is the art of drawing limits, isn’t it?
Another useful and important behavioral skills students can start feeling in these early years is learning to work in a relaxed way. The more students can stay relaxed, the easier it is to keep working and not grow their fearful ideas and feelings of failure and worthlessness. If we can't learn anything without the help of our muscles, then learning to work in a relaxed way only makes us healthier learners. Why stay tense when its results can become counterproductive? In short, why remain our own worst enemy and fail to become our own best friend? Feeling we love and respect our self makes learning that much easier.
Thus, relaxed working becomes another worthy goal to teach, and students should be told that, so they can add it to their list of skills they want to learn, like truth telling and good talking habits. Being relaxed and able to laugh easily at many of their mistakes makes it easier for students to stay loose, focused, and attentive to learning more about what they’re interested in. It makes schools and life itself more enjoyable, and really, what better habit-art can we give ourselves than that one? Such a skill, slowly brought to conscious awareness with a little daily practice in a psychology lab, keeps increasing student confidence about their own body-mind and its healthful possibilities. On a personal level, for years my own neck and shoulder muscles were overly tense; often I’d come home and do a shoulder stand for a few minutes, just to stretch out those muscles and feel more relaxed. Eventually it increased my feelings about such tensions and even helped me learn how to relax them. That was years ago, and the habit was so strong I still haven’t completely lost such tension, but it’s gotten easier to let go of it.
Even exercising can be done with a relaxed body-mind, but only if students are helped to see what that skill means and feels like. Otherwise, fatigue and stress build tiring work habits. With overly tense muscles even reading and writing can become more difficult and frustrating. I know more relaxed feelings have had a positive effect in my life, so why shouldn’t students have the freedom to experiment with such habits, especially those who are already overly tense and afraid? Learning to let go of useless bodily tension helps make all work and actions easier and more enjoyable. It might be described as learning to work and act with a heightened feeling of serenity and peace; judging by what I see in the world, it’s a skill many people could use in their daily lives.
Students can also begin learning about abnormal feelings as well, like obsessive-compulsive, passive-aggressive, and hypochondria. No doubt, young students often don’t have such habits, but why shouldn’t they start learning about them in grades 1-3? They could even be demonstrated by students themselves, especially those working to become counselors and therapists. Such sense-based knowledge will help students identify problems in others as well as themselves. Are their feelings and actions becoming unhealthful, and if so what can they do about it. Superstitious feelings and actions are still widespread around the world, so why shouldn’t young students begin hearing about them and learning how to improve them? Isn’t such knowledge yet another sign of psychological health? How dangerous are recurring scary dreams, and what can be done about them?
In such ways the entire subject of abnormal psychology can begin opening up to students, and used to help them keep their own actions healthful and enjoyable. Once students are free to start talking about their own feelings in a safe and nurturing school setting, then it becomes much easier to let go of such fears, as well as learn to overcome their challenges at home. In fact, the more students hear others talk about what may be their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful feelings and actions, the easier it becomes to start sharing their own feelings with others and start learning more intelligent ways of acting. With such knowledge their own parents will be seen more objectively and perhaps even be able to help them too.
Gestalt psychologists too encourage enjoyable role playing even for young students, to learn more useful skills and habits, like humor and creativity. Who wants to play the pet alligator role today and help teach students how dangerous some animals can be? How will someone feel when they're turned into a slave and made to obey someone else? Wouldn't such healthy role playing help reduce the still powerful habits of disrespectful dominance practiced in so many places? Such actions have no place in a respectful liberal democracy, and role-playing can begin teaching young students that idea. The more students feel the results of being treated like a slave, the more difficult it becomes to treat someone that way. And what applies to slavery and bullying can apply to any selfish and disrespectful habit, like stealing, lying, breaking just laws, and so on. Active sense-based role-playing adds a feeling element to learning that’s often lacking in conservative book-oriented schools. Thus, not only can such role-playing produce healthier and more deeply felt psychological habits, but more excellent character habits as well. A big part of liberal psychological health is actively showing people what a joyful person can act like, and also all the different ways of intelligently showing respect for others, like smiling and speaking joyfully when someone talks to us, rather than acting depressed and joyless. No doubt, everyone feels like that some time, but when it’s on-going it can become very dangerous and disruptive. Caring intelligently for others is another foundation of a healthy democracy.
Psychological Health in the Middle Years
Then, in the middle years of development, roughly from 8 to 14, psychological health can be practiced in more complex ways with more difficult and challenging construction projects. For example, learning to see creatively and imagine how their schools and neighborhoods can be improved, and then actually working with tools to test their ideas in wood and metal shops, helps students achieve another quantum level of psychological health. Again, such habits are essential to a healthy democracy. At this 2nd stage of child development, psychological health aims at enjoyably teaching more complex practical and intelligent kinds of building skills. Pet animals, for example, can be taught more complex habits by breaking down the process into small baby-steps of learning.
Also, in a psychological workshop, these students can keep learning about practical kinds of mathematics and reading by first build a list of improvements in both schools and neighborhoods, organizing them in order of importance, then estimate how much they might cost, how they might raise the needed money, how city officials and caring foundations might be able to help, organize the building project itself, and so on. Such activities will continue teaching students how interrelated and organic life really is, rather than being separate and distinct subjects. For example, voting on which projects should be worked on first is another democratic skill useful all through life. After all, not all forms of improvement are equally useful and valuable! Sound like a familiar idea? Thousands of years ago democratic Athenians like Protagoras and Pericles would have insisted on practicing that skill!
At this 2nd stage of growth individual differences and student diversity can also continue growing, as students continue learning more about what’s most important to them. But why shouldn’t even those students wanting to be a lawyer or doctor also have a role to play in such projects. After all, legal and medical events happen with any projects, so there’s a role to them as well. Some will also want to learn more about using computers to build things, like student businesses of, say, trading video games with others. And some will want to see if they can learn more about plumbing or pottery making with such projects, or perhaps creating works of fine art and selling them. In such schools where students are liberated from learning the same set of academic facts as everyone else, they will have a much better chance for exploring their own feelings as well as learning how to express them intelligently and constructively. And no doubt best of all, such projects will help make joining the honest money-making workforce after high school that much easier too.
So, quite naturally, we liberals say until such an active and liberating student-centered model of psychological health is practiced, many of our current personal and social weaknesses will continue on, the worst of which are passive and obedient habits to a feudalistic social, economic, and political status quo, and equally important are juvenile and adult crime, drug selling and abuse, and unemployment.
Also important at the 2nd stage of development are constructive reading and writing too. At this time students can continue learning more about creative writing, for example, and even reading humorous speeches to a student audience on a regular basis. As Dewey has said, the creation of talking skills about 100,000 years ago was the greatest invention in all of natural history. It began building the skill of thinking with ideas and words, and thus became the main reason our knowledge skills have become the greatest in all of earth history. Sad to say, never once did such events happen in my entire school career, as if both writing and reading such speeches was a cardinal sin and should never be allowed! We Deweyan liberals say the time for neglecting such useful skills is over in all liberal public schools. When students are the center of education, such skills are celebrated on a weekly basis, rather than being ignored.
As economic and manufacturing conditions continue changing, it calls for new and more healthful psychological habits of learning. Thus, the sooner students know how to intelligently build such skills, the better off they’ll be. Such new modern challenges like criminal behavior and greed help justify experimenting with building more liberal schools, where children are liberated to start building more useful skills. The sooner such intelligently constructive habits are learned, the more difficult it’ll be for feudalistic centers of power to keep making life more dangerous for everyone. The more students are allowed to protest social injustices, the better they’ll get at reducing such centers of power and making life better for everyone. In the past decade alone we’ve also seen the dangerous global results of our feudalistic military-industrial complex wreaking havoc across the Middle East and south Asia. The more students realize they can join together to help improve those excessive events, the healthier our own democracy will become.
Later Kinds of Psychological Health
Then, in the 3rd stage of growth, psychological health can express itself more abstractly, with students reading more about different psychological models. Thus, at this level more intellectual projects can be encouraged, like writing articles, stories, scripts, poems, and songs celebrating psychological health and their role in helping build a stronger democracy and safer world. In other words, the forms of liberal democratic psychological health can become more abstract and intellectual, as well as more physically active with protests and useful social work. At this stage of psychological development, schools will look more like the adult world than ever before, where people keep learning what they want. The more that happens, the easier it’ll be for students to enter into that world and be psychologically ready to make some positive contributions to life. Even young student lawyers and doctors can begin making some positive social contributions even before they graduate.
In a world where many people still practice violent and disrespectful habits, are there any better habits to teach other than intelligent reasoning and acting? They help grow a more respective and peaceful democracy where all young folks, both boys and girls, can actually start contributing to democratizing our still feudal economic and political systems. Learning more about how to intelligently see where such habits are still practiced, like in many of our corporations, helps student become better organized at demanding a more equal sharing of wealth-power. If not, then powerful corporations will continue growing a wealthy upper class by paying workers subsistence wages while getting hundreds of millions in tax-free income. We Deweyan liberals say, as the next generation approaches adulthood, they should be intellectually free to more clearly see what’s going on, and also actively organize against all forms of greed, whether economic or social. Such skills are the very heart and foundation of all healthy democracies. We see it happening today with corporations like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. Protestors are hitting the streets as executives in those companies keep taking advantage of a tax loophole and thus take tax-free millions from profits while workers have trouble making ends meet and paying for necessities. Such feudalistic activities are the natural enemies of all liberal democrats everywhere!
Also, with learning more about economic and political events here and how, it becomes easier for students to realize the world they’re about to enter is growing more feudalistic, not less. For about the past 40 years corporations have been working to break union strength, concentrate their decision-making power even more in their small boards of directors, and also build such tax loopholes into the tax code. As a result, executive pay and profits have skyrocketed, worker wages have gone flat, and unemployment is still too high for many people. Students in more liberal democratic schools and homes will have more freedom to focus on such results making their own lives less than satisfying.
Another subject worthy of intellectual study and action centers at our still feudalistic Supreme Court, especially since the current conservative court has allowed millions in corporate money to make its way into the political arena. It’s all been justified by merely 5 unelected conservatives saying corporations are people, and so have the same rights of free speech (Citizens United, 2010) Why shouldn’t more democratic high school students ask exactly what citizens are they talking about, conservative corporate executives or middle class citizens? And, why should anyone keep accepting the fact of 5 unelected Supreme Court Judges having so much power over 300 million people? It’s not democratic, it’s feudal! Such intelligent questions help build the intellectual powers in the next generation, and can give hope to democratic students as they learn most states already have some form of popular vote for their state Supreme Court members, so how can we go about changing our federal system? Such studies make it easier for students to get in touch with events in the real world.
All abstract knowledge becomes easier in this 3rd stage of development. As students become more able to learn, say, chemical facts, it’ll be easier to base their healthy habits on them, and thus unite ideas to the healthful feelings they already have. Chemical knowledge makes it easier to see why refined sugar and flour products are less healthy than other foods, and how little in the way of fats they’ll need to stay healthy. Excess food energy merely makes it easier for the body to keep growing cancers of all kinds. With such abstract knowledge they’ll be better able to follow the logic and understand why too much animal flesh is not healthy for them. They’ll connect the knowledge about the human food processing system with facts about animal toxins and waste products produced by animal cells even after the animal is killed, and how cooking can even make such toxins more toxic!
And of course exercise too can become more abstract with biological book-facts uniting their feeling about healthful exercise habits they’re been building for years! For example, muscle health is best promoted with mild warm up exercises, so as not to tear muscle tissue. And bodily responses can become more abstract by keeping information on blood pressure and heart functions both during and after exercising. In such ways exercise and eating will become even more scientific and more intelligent as well.
In more liberal public schools, then, feeling those new abstract levels of intellectual power and thinking also gives them the power to learn more abstract written information from electronic and book sources. They’ll become better able to research and find the ideas they’re looking for, rather than read through an entire book looking for what they need. As a result, they’ll feel new confidence as they keep making intelligent plans for their constructive work projects. At this stage of their lives students will not only have the physical skills to, say, build a school green house, or a useful chemistry lab for testing the air, water, and soil around them, but also the abstract skills to draw up more detailed plans, thus making their building projects more like an architectural science.
And of course at the higher adult levels of psychological health students may even learn the subtle art of helping people by simply asking them a few simple questions: how’re you feeling; how’s your mom or dad; what do you feel like protesting today? Some may even learn to enjoy frustrating those who are planning to hurt or harm others, or at least tell the authorities if they do. To such students, harmful and undemocratic actions deserve to be confronted as soon as possible; to ignore them merely increases their possibility. Even morbid feelings and habits can be felt, played with, and perhaps improved too.
Psychological health during these high school years leads naturally to social kinds of democratic expressions. For us, above all else, every person is part of our human race, and so deserves respect at least until they act illegally or disrespectfully. That democratic model of psychological health is not only respectful, but also actively holds people responsible for their actions. The more those skills grow, the easier it becomes to live in the adult world, where only a few people take responsibility for their actions, especially in the government. Even President Nixon claimed he really didn’t know what was going on with his closest advisers and their Watergate capers. And, of course at this abstract level of growth, abstract laws themselves can be judged by their results. Does, for example, welfare laws make people dependent on the government, or help them keep learning more useful skills so they can better support themselves? Thus, such debates about many different abstract ideas become much more powerful during this stage of development. What’s the best way to respect just laws, and should all workers share equally in the profits from their work? Does merely smiling help make us happier? How important is the skill of wisely helping others? What’s it like to be treated as a 2nd class citizen merely because of one’s sex, skin color, or religious habits? Is intelligence really an adverb? What is freedom?
Such intellectual debates can be much more of a learning experience at this stage of development. They can also help students see intelligence itself is not something one finally acquires, like a ring or a necklace, and after which it stops growing. At the more abstract levels of high school it’s easy to see intelligence is an adverb; it’s merely a skill to keep making our actions more intelligent than before. It keeps modifying an adjusting our actions in the best sense of that word. Freedom, too, is never finally achieved, so that one is completely free once and for all. No. It’s an organic habit-art growing all through life! An intelligent skill keeps asking us how we should act here and now to produce the best results. Thus, at this abstract level of learning, students will begin feeling many of mankind’s most important questions, the answers to which become the foundation for everyone’s psychological health.
Without more liberal democratic schools teaching such habits of psychological health, we’ll no doubt continue seeing political results like the Nazis in the 1930s, Russia in the 1950s and 80s, the US in the 1960s and 2,000s, conservative Republicans since the 1980s, and fundamental Islamists since 2,000. They all more or less ignored democratic kinds of health, and focusing on providing a few with fortunes while sending others to fight and die for it. Knowing even intellectually a little something about such actions will begin making it easier to feel what people like Eugene Debs said about war early in the last century: the wealthy and powerful have always started the wars, and the poor have always fought and died in them. The more liberal schools keep growing, the more students will be liberated from becoming those kinds of slaves to those in power, and the weaker all feudalistic habits will become.
Today, more and more people are realizing slavery in any of its forms, even in schools making students read and study the same abstract academic facts together, makes it more difficult to learn more intelligent democratic habits. Such schools are far from a liberal model of psychological health, and yet many today still say they’re the kinds of schools we need. As conservative educators like, for example, Michele Rhee have recently learned, more and more people are rejecting that idea. Her lack of democratic feelings about individual student needs and wants, and her conservative ideas of educational and psychological health based on abstract knowledge and testing, helped create results so obnoxious to people in Washington, D. C., they soon took her educational power away. To us liberals that was yet another sign of liberal psychological health expressed intelligently through the ballot box; conservative models of enforced and blind obedience to largely useless academic book-facts simply have no place in a democratic society. And for those interested in reading a great article about how useless standardized tests are in the real world, please see the Washington Post article Four Lessons on new PISA scores – Ravitch (12-3-2013) It puts such testing in a more liberal perspective.
What Caring People Owe to the Next Generation
Admittedly, in liberal schools these health-based skills are infinitely more important than memorizing largely useless book-facts. For us, they attack a number of weaknesses in conservative public schools. Might such habit-arts reduce the number of recent mass school killings we’ve been seeing around the nation, or very high unemployment numbers for high school grads, or crime rates and drug use? No one knows for sure until they’re actually experimented with. But, almost certainly, we’ll never know what the personal and social results will be if we keep enslaving students to more and more book-knowledge! In any case, however, many of our on-going destructive and wasteful social problems keep telling us we should try a more liberal learning model based on health even at the elementary level, before students learn anti-social habits.
With just these few ideas and suggestions mentioned above we can begin feeling how Behavioral psychology and a liberal model of health can be used as two liberating skills. Teaching such skills even at the elementary level will start empowering students to live more intelligent lives in their homes, churches, and schools. If not, then parents with excessive and unhealthful habits will eventually pass them on to their children, and to their children, and so on, thus perpetuating many of our serious social problems. Don’t’ we owe it to the next generation to teach such kinds of skills all through their formative years? After all, what students don’t want to become better at overcoming unhealthful obstacles in their lives, and learn more about what health can mean in a democratic society? What abused children wouldn’t like to have more intelligent ways of confronting abusive parents or peers?
If so, then don’t we all owe it to the next generation to start teaching such skills in our public schools, converting them one year at a time? Our own public schools are excellent places to start empowering students to intelligently fight against excessive kinds of punishment, as well as learn more constructive skills? We’ve got physics labs and chemistry labs, so why not take our public schools to the next educational level and start building physical, psychology, economic, and political health labs too? How many 9 year olds, for example, would love to keep experimenting with training their favorite pet animal, I mean besides those who have fish for pets; I’ve yet to see a trained gold fish? After all, many adults earn good honest money with such skills. And, wouldn’t it be much more comforting to know the neighbor taking its pet alligator for a little after-dinner walk has trained it not to bite off someone’s foot yet? Chalk that last idea up to yet another lame attempt at humor, but better a lame attempt than no attempt, right?
One more important result for the next generation can be mentioned. The more children learn about such healthful skills, the easier it’ll be to teach them to their own kids, spouses, business clients, and perhaps even their pet alligators, although odds are against that last idea. It bears repeating once again: over 90%, 90% mind you, of the young men and women in our prisons today have had their body-mind’s warped and disabled with excessive abuse and violent punishment. That’s the bad news. The good news is the remaining 10% are probably gays and lesbians who’re there by choice trying to help teach and liberate them from their own strong destructive feelings and habit-arts! With more liberal democratic schools where health is the main learning goal, such results would become weaker and less troublesome.
If more children were taught more healthful psychological skills, it would not only reduce individual frustrations and anxieties, but also reduce the cost of maintaining such prisons for the next generation. How can we fulfill our on-going desires to give the next generation a better world unless we start teaching them how to intelligently keep building it? So, again, where is the harm in helping liberate the next generation psychologically from its own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, and increase their chances for living in an oppressive-free, respectful, and helpful environment? How else will our supposedly ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ actually help make people free and brave unless those excellent psychological skills are practiced in our homes, public schools, and churches?
No doubt, the next generation may thank us for building such schools, and thus helping them reduce the cost of, say, spending around $50 Billion every year just for prisons in California. With a little elementary math that averages out to around $30,000 a year per prisoner, while public school spending for each student is around $11,000 per pupil. And, as a New York Times article of 10-23-2013 by Marc Santora reports, “The city paid $168,731 to feed, house, and guard each inmate last year.” Don’t such numbers for California help create around 20,000 reasons per student to see such skills are taught in our public schools? There seems to be no limit to those venture (vulture?) capitalists who want to keep taking more of the public’s money with for-profit prisons and charter schools. Imagine how much more enjoyable and productive our public schools could be for students if they had an extra $20,000 a year per pupil to spend on student community service projects. And such public schools would finally provide all those who complain about higher taxes, and yet have no educational plan for reducing them! Wouldn’t it be a win for students and taxpayers, but more importantly, a loss for all those greedy people who live and breathe to keep taking more of the public’s money? To such people any form of socialized system, except the military, is a target for attack.
Thousands of years ago many Chinese intellectuals realized more police is certainly not the best long term remedy for non-violent criminal behavior. By the time people get to adulthood such habits are already strong will-power, and thus more difficult than ever to reconstruct and improve. No doubt, even kind-hearted Confucius cracked down on criminals when he was given the power, but he also realized the more socially involved and respectful young folks learn to act, the less need there will be for prisons later on.
Since the early 1900s and Dewey’s work in Behavioral psychology, teachers and principals began seeing what important healthy psychological skills are useful in a democratic society. Even in the 1950s my 6th grade teacher was already skilled at reading student personality traits from the way they wrote; handwriting too is another behavioral way students express their feelings! So, when should the next generation start learning what actions are best for building a more democratic society, I mean besides yesterday? What's to be gained from keeping the next generation ignorant about all these healthy habits? Doesn’t it merely make it easy for those with economic power to keep taking more money from them?
No doubt, even conservatives will often say our public schools should teach children how to solve their own problems. On an abstract level, at least, they say independence is a worthy habit to teach. But with laws like NCLB, real active opportunities to learn such skills are reduced to almost zero. It’s yet another example of conservative hypocrisy – saying one thing and doing the opposite! In liberal schools building such intelligent habits becomes active and real. Such independent skills also make it easier to keep seeing what those with economic and political power are doing with their money. Why keep the next generation merely chained to their books around 80% of the time? It merely helps perpetuate a feudalistic status quo in a democratic society.
Today, more of us liberals are beginning to realize the best remedy for wasteful prisons and unemployment lines is not more drug laws, de-humanizing jails, more impersonal courts, overworked public defenders, or more ineffective probation officers. Those remedies, though sometimes helpful, use public monies that could be much better spent building more liberal health-oriented public schools for the next generation. Once such destructive feelings and actions become propulsive adult habits, then it’s much more difficult to teach more intelligent healthful skills quickly, like they could be taught to young students. If not, then many more people will continue spending decades in prison wasting valuable public taxes, when, with more intelligent skills, they could start contributing to national health in their teen years. Is that the kind of public school system we want to hand to the next generation?
If not, then it’s really up to each of us adults here and now to start organizing and building more liberal kinds of public schools in our own neighborhoods, one grade at a time, one year at a time. Such schools will start liberating the next generation to spend their tax dollars on more enjoyable and rewarding systems than the ones we have now, like our present circular self-perpetuating school-to-jail-to-release-to-back-to-jail system! Prison guards would be much more useful to society if they were hired to teach law enforcement skills to the next generation. In truth, each one of us have some responsibility for helping the next generation become liberated from such a system. No one knows how much our prison population would start shrinking if children simply were taught what the law is, and rewarded for respecting it too. If we want more psychologically healthful law-abiding citizens, then we need to start teaching young folks both what respectful laws are, and how to enjoy obeying them. Why shouldn’t public school success be judged, in part, by how many of their graduates get jobs after high school, and stay out of legal troubles for 10 years, rather than by just how many kids are graduating and what their standardized test scores are? The sooner students learn being in a disrespectful gang is not a sign of intelligence, the better off we all will become. The sooner disrespectful-acting students are taught more intelligent kinds of habits, the better off all of us will be.
33. MORE REASONS, MORE SOLUTIONS
More Recent Developments
In this section we’ll see some more reasons why liberals schools should be built, and also how they help solve modern democracy’s main problem of growth and maintenance. For example, another reason Dewey wanted to build a more liberal public school model concerned the weak results of a conservative system. If a book-centered conservative model was really the best, then wouldn’t all the facts they teach be better remembered and used more often outside of school? Obviously the model doesn’t match the results. Not only do such facts remain shallow and weak, but tests show they’re soon forgotten once students leave school. How many 30-somethings remembers even 10 academic facts they learned in school, out of the thousands they studied? Personally my own active and holistic experiences with teachers and sports are much more vivid than the content of just about any academic class I took; I remember my English teachers much more than I remember anything they taught. Such ‘holistic’ experiences -- involving the entire body-mind -- are the result of more than just silent reading and writing. So, such results were yet another reason Dewey said our conservative public schools are not helping students get prepared for a creative and productive life after they graduate, but are, instead, helping the corporate class whose profits depend on workers being passive, obedient to their supervisors, and accepting of what they were given to work on. If so, then such schools are serving the business class, rather than helping build a more vibrant and satisfying democracy.
To Dewey that conclusion seemed obvious. But he just didn’t stop there. He also asked himself what can our public schools look like in which were taught democratic habits of intelligent learning and independent decision-making? To build those kinds of intelligent habits students needed practice to actively test constructive ideas solving challenges in the real world, with their entire body-mind. If not, then their ideas too would begin fading like a morning mist -- use it or lose it! Of what use to all students is merely reading about Othello's irrational jealousy unless students actively feel the dangerous results of irrational jealousy? After all, how many young students are really as jealous and possessive as Othello? A few, maybe, but that’s about it. And if so, why waste students’ time and effort studying them? They could be learning so many more useful skills and knowledge in more liberal student-centered schools. For example, doesn't learning the important idea of respect for others really weaken all feelings of jealousy and excessive control over others? So why make all students feel they’re not really educated unless they've redd Edward DeVere, a.k.a. William Shakespeare? How many really great people never heard of him, much less redd what he said?
No doubt, de Vere himself would say Fie on such folly! He wrote his plays to be produced and acted, not merely redd, so wouldn't the best way to honor his work be to have students perform them? Unless ideas become more actively felt on a conscious level, even the best ideas are merely the skeletons and shadows of the best knowledge and wisdom, not their living and breathing images.
Another reason why learning in our public schools should be activity-based can be seen with one of Zen Buddhism's most important ideas: Attention. Without carefully attending to and focusing on one’s work, its intrinsic feelings are lost to consciousness, and thus remain less than the best knowledge; it remains subconscious at best. So, without actually practicing and building the habit-art of keeping one's attention focused, in a relaxed and constructive way, then Zen’s most important idea remains just that, a word, and hence much less than real wisdom. Real wisdom means being able to use ideas to keep improving one’s habits, and practicing that art is a life-long challenge.
Of course by the same logic, one of our modern era’s most important liberal words -- democracy -- means little unless one has actually focused one’s attention onto practicing democratic actions, and learning what they actually feel like in one’s muscles. Just like any real and active knowledge, such feelings can grow only with physical practice and testing, not by merely reading about it. Only as someone actually feels how important it is to, say, vote and give people their equal rights do they feel some of democracy’s energy and meanings.
Are such educational ideas really too radical? I'll just mention one recent public school experiment along these lines. A few miles north of San Diego, California is the small school district of Encinitas. They've begun experimenting with teaching students some different character habits, to help strengthen student attention skills. They’ve begun asking children to practice a little relaxing yoga during the day, to sit quietly and comfortably for a few minutes and feel what attending to one’s breathing is like. Such experiments can help liberate students from the daily grind of learning more and more book-facts, and they can also help students know how important working in a relaxed way feels more useful than staying tense all day. No doubt it's just a small-scale experiment, but from small acorns often grow mighty oaks.
Thus, improving our schools and making them more student-oriented makes it easier for them to learn other important habit-art, like intelligent experimental testing of ideas, and seeing they skills they’d like to learn more about. It's yet another great educational challenge for us liberals. How can we get teachers and students to give students more freedom to learn, and then in that process also begin teaching them how important democratic freedom is, and how it keeps growing?! In other words, how can we get parents to see how academic facts can become more vibrant and meaningful by giving students the freedom to actively practice them, so they can then know best how to keep building new habits as life keeps changing and new learning are created?
Here's another reason liberals should focus on building such schools. Modern democracy as a vibrant and growing social institution is still in its infancy; its modern forms are less than 300 years old. It may sound like a long time, but on a cultural scale it’s still short. What’s more, a child-centered Deweyan learning model is even younger, at only about 100 years old. Those are 2 good reasons more liberal schools remain an important mission for us. Anyone looking objectively at the world’s oldest democracy can easily see how feudalistic it still is. Only about 300,000 people own most of country’s wealth; they continue controlling the political class with campaign donations and media dominance; and our military retains the same feudalistic form it’s had for thousands of years.
Human population itself is another reason why more liberal schools should be built. Without them teaching students how to act more intelligently with the reproductive powers, more areas of poverty and ignorance will continue growing, thus creating the need for more police and prisons. Human populations have recently soared into the billions, and our new communication tools have just begun growing, so there are more reasons for such liberal schools. It’s now a common fact: the more women are educated to feel such facts, the less need they feel to reproduce and have more than one or two children. What’s more, conservatives too aren’t just standing around. As we’ve seen from the very beginning of this book, they’re still very active helping pass restrictive education laws like NCLB. Little wonder, most of our public schools today are still undemocratic and book-centered, rather than child-centered. Not enough people have yet realized other educational models are available, and in many respects better for democratic as well as human health itself!
More About US Education History
US education history also furnishes us with many other reasons for building more liberal schools. No doubt, the most important reason is our still conservative public schools. In 1888 Charles Eliot, then Harvard University President, redd a paper about school subjects, or curriculum, to a National Educational Association convention, and from there 3 commissions were formed to offer their own pictures of educational excellence. However, public schools at the time were very different than today. At that time almost 90% of teenagers didn’t even go to high school, much less college; after Grammar School they went to work helping build the new nation’s roads, railroads, and cities, thus helping increase family income. At that time the typical high school graduate was a white male from a well-educated and wealthy home, and they usually had habits of obedience to their elders as well as reading habits. Thus, conservative book-centered schools felt normal for them. Parents could often afford nannies who redd books to them and then tutors or boarding schools focusing on more book-work. Thus, given a still racially segregated society, it was natural for people like Eliot to say our public schools should remain book-centered. Science and math facts, for example, were neatly broken down into easily teachable ideas throughout the system. Thus, a conservative book-centered education became the basic model of excellence, rather than the more progressive student-centered activity model, with its experimental learning habits. In that model, books were merely useful tools for guiding constructive building projects; and today, of course, computers have become the new storehouse of academic ideas.
Thus, with Mr. Elliot’s help, and few laws for compulsory school attendance, a conservative book-centered curriculum and learning method continued catering to a very small social segment, even as Dewey was building his Lab School at Chicago. Compulsory education for all children was still a relatively new idea, and so building more schools for the 90% who didn't go to school would have meant higher taxes for everyone, and many people with racist feelings just weren’t really to build schools for minority African students, or to hire more teachers. Many preferred segregated separate-but-equal school systems. Only about 50 years earlier was the first state-funded teacher-training school opened, as well as the first women’s college. Only yesterday, so to speak, did Mississippi become the last state to pass such laws in 1917. Many simply felt plumbers, carpenters, and railroad workers didn’t need school; they needed work clothes. Even though Thomas Jefferson had recommended a 2-track vocational-academic school model in 1779, a few years before Franklin died, government officials generally ignored the democratic idea of universal education until millions of immigrants started flooding into the US. As a result, such laws were passed while Dewey too began writing about the need for more vocational schools. The Industrial Revolution helped make the vocational school idea more practical. But again, it may be asked: with about 70% of students still not going to college, is there anything but our own conservative education bureaucracy and parental ignorance standing in the way of building more liberal student-centered public schools?
Dewey, of course, saw many other reasons for building such schools. Not only do conservative schools ignore teaching more useful democratic habit-arts, but they also leave many young folks with weak work habits in a work-based economy. Even computer work can be stressful. What’s more, even vocational schools often ignore learning intelligent work habits; they often teach students how to run factory machines and avoid serious injuries like getting strangled while working. So, couldn’t they too be better serving students by also teaching them how such tools and work can be used to help keep growing a better democratic society for all people? Couldn’t they be teaching more useful democratic character habits? Or should they keep allowing students to think making and keeping as much money as possible is the best habit to practice? Also, shouldn’t all students be learning to intelligently judge what our factories are making by their actual results, like building more powerful guns, bombs, aircraft, and even polluting cars, or should we instead use our factories as tools for helping make our communities safer and more enjoyable for everyone? Why shouldn’t every neighborhood have a park where young children can safely play and exercise?
Such reasons help us Deweyan liberals keep such educational questions as alive and vibrant today as they were 100 years ago. Why should any of our public schools be used mainly to keep profit-obsessed industrial captains and military leaders supplied with more obedient and greedy workers? Why shouldn’t students also learn how to use their work as a tool for social improvement and change, rather than a way to build a fat bank account? Why shouldn’t students even begin learning more about their collective power for saying how our factories and corporations are run, and how their profits are spent? The more they don’t, the more dangerous and stressful life can become. Should such important democratic student character habits continue growing, or should they graduate with disrespectful habits like telling a date to either ‘put out or get out’?
Economic feudalism is another reason why more liberal schools should be built. Why shouldn’t students start feeling all the ways they can use their collective power more democratically in the workplace; it’s called economic democracy! If, not, then even college educated engineers will continue designing products to rapidly become obsolete, rather than remaining useful for a number of years. It’s been a common result since the 1950s. Young car engineers were made to help build flashy-looking air polluting cars that soon rusted out, thus creating the need for a new car every few years. Then in the 70s, new electronic tools began growing yearly, also encouraging more such tools to be built! ‘New and improved’ became a standard advertising phrase; who wants the old and useless? ‘Planned obsolescence’ became a reality, while workers continued supporting pension and healthcare plans even though they merely increased the cost of their products and created higher salaries for corporate CEOs! Health was all but ignored in our public schools, thus creating the need for such plans. Through it all, however, the idea of economic democracy was ignored as workers kept themselves out of the corporate decision-making loop, and thus remained vulnerable to corporate decisions made by small boards of directors. So, by not learning to use their collective economic power intelligently while in school, to help produce the best results for themselves, life remained more precarious at best, thus creating yet another reason why our conservative public schools should be liberalized. In them students were taught to merely accept the work they were given, and so when they went to work in corporations it was easy to make them accept what they were given, make and sell as many things as possible, even worthless stocks and insurance policies, or soon-to-break-down cars or gadgets. What did they care; they were making good money?
Ethics? Integrity? Honesty? Intelligence? Helpfulness? Such words were rarely even mentioned in public schools, much less formally studied in them. Corporations simply didn’t want their workers thinking about such things; the more they did, the more trouble they might cause. Given such jaded, short-sighted, cynical, greedy, and selfish business ethics, many became part of the problem, rather than the solution for building a more intelligent democratic nation, where profits were intelligently recycled for everyone benefit, not just stockholders, and where politicians weren’t reduced to daily begging for more campaign funds. The US economy emerged from World War 2 as the big winner, and wealthy CEOs weren’t about to reduce their money-making power, and so became yet another reason to build more liberal democratic schools. Sure, they gave workers healthcare and pension plans, but then passed on the cost for them to consumers in the form of higher prices; it was normal business practice, but eventually foreign car makers in, say, Japan, would force many automakers into bankruptcy. Thus, undemocratic economic habits keep making life highly unstable and dangerous.
People may feel such reasons aren’t really worth all the trouble for building more liberal schools, but when they’re added to all the reasons already mentioned, like gang violence, crime, expensive prison growth, and of course wasting billions of tax dollars to build over 1,000 military bases around the world and now drone aircraft helping kill innocent civilians, such liberal schools may be seen as the best investment we can make in building a safer and more satisfying world for everyone. To those who say our military is helping bring desperately needed civilized habits to many uncivilized tribal areas, we liberals can say decent business ventures, where people are treated with respect and decency while making a decent living wage, can help civilize even the most backward counties on earth.
In a recent article dated 1-10-13, the Wall Street Journey published yet another reason for building more liberal schools. It cited a study showing the US ranks 17th in life expectancy among 1st world nations; first is Switzerland, then Australia, and Japan. For us liberal Deweyans it’s yet another reason for building more liberal public schools where health is at the center of attention, as is the freedom to learn what students want to learn. No doubt, many other medical statistics could also be cited, but space is limited. So, again, Dewey's liberal student-centered democratic model keeps offering a better educational solution for millions of people in the US and around the world. The recent use of community service projects, at the high school level, is one hopeful solution, but why not make them central in all our public schools? Wouldn’t, say, young police officers start seeing their neighborhoods differently?
Another reason for building more liberal democratic schools: they teach students more about what’s actually going on in their world. Ignorance is the poison to all democratic forms of life, economic, political, military, or educational. Without accurate knowledge and facts it’s more difficult to keep improving any of those systems. Without such facts students merely keep accepting, say, the fact of greed and its harmful social results, like taking more millions to off-shore banks to avoid taxes, as well as highly profitable corporations. It’s also easier for people to keep losing their life savings, and even homes sometimes, to pay off medical bills while insurance companies pay off politicians not to build a decent health system for everyone, not just for the wealthy among us. The more our conservative public schools keep ignoring how students can help improve all such challenges with their collective power, the more such challenges will continue making their lives more stressful and dangerous.
No doubt, some conservatives will start talking about ideas like creeping socialism and communist ideas, but these days it’s become much easier for liberals to also talk about all these harmful social results from maintaining a feudalistic economy, society, and nation. In the world’s oldest democracy, a few hundred thousand enjoy living like royalty while millions are made to pay the price for such lifestyles! For us liberals, building, say, public banks whose profits go back to the people, rather than to Wall Street mega-banks, are becoming another collective option for balancing a few banks’ already huge money power.
Another liberal solution to economic instability can start growing in more democratic liberal schools. Students too can begin connecting themselves with their political system, and even start pressuring elected politicians to increase import fees on foreign goods. Such tariffs would help create more jobs in the country. Why shouldn’t students begin feeling what such collective power is life, so they can keep practicing it all through life?
Conservatives who readily wail against socialism and collectivism are being ignored by more and more people. Such ideas may have scared fearful people in the 1950s, but today more people realize all governments are forms of collective socialism, created and maintained with socialized tax monies, even for the military. Are we to believe our military should be ended just because it’s a socialistic organization? What we liberals do say, however, is it should become more democratic, rather than feudalistic and male-dominated. Individually, people have little social power, but collectively people have the power to move mountains. What’s more, once that kind of collective democratic habit is learned, then it’ll be passed on to children even if our schools don’t teach it. However, such useful habits can begin growing even at the primary school level, with more student freedom to study what they want, and to also work collectively on social improvement projects. They’re the best ways to keep growing feelings of intelligent democratic power useful for balancing concentrated forms of feudal power, and for improving everyone’s life.
More Hopeful Signs
Earlier I mentioned a New York Times article about life expectancy. It also mentioned the first report of the New York Education Reform Commission; the full report should be available later in September, 2013. Among many reform ideas it mentions "...making schools a hub for healthcare and social services..." (The New York Times, 1-2-13, Commission Recommends Core Changes in Education). That idea is certainly one we liberal progressives can work for. What better place to give future doctors and nurses some real healing experience than in their very own neighborhoods? After more than a decade of Republic rule New York schools are still basically a conservative book-centered system. It also has the highest funding for schools in the US, and yet some areas of the state still produce some of the lowest high school graduates in the country, not to mention low test scores! For us liberal Deweyans, such results are more reasons for experimenting with more progressive kinds of learning activities. Conservatives, of course, might say such results are caused by teacher unions whose members aren’t teaching academic facts like they should. Even if there is some truth to the idea, is that any reason to keep ignoring more liberal kinds of learning activities? Isn’t it possible such weak results like low test scores and graduation rates are more the result of defining excellent education as mere book-learning? Isn’t it possible such a system is really a rather unnatural learning system itself, where most all students are kept psychically chained to their books while not actively learning so many other important democratic and character skills, like intelligent experimentation. In fact, for us liberals, merely more money can never make a basically unnatural system better until it recognizes and changes all the false and unhealthful assumptions it’s based on!
The Wall Street Journal article cited above by Louise Radnofsky goes on to say: “The study by the federally sponsored National Research Council and Institute of Medicine found the US near the bottom of 17 affluent countries for life expectancy, with high rates of obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease and arthritis, as well as infant mortality, injuries, homicides, teen pregnancy, drug deaths and sexually transmitted diseases.” It makes one ask the question, how should we define the phrase ‘affluent society’? With such results, why should we keep believing conservative politicians when they say the US is really an exceptional nation. Such results proved we all exception in creating such weak social results! How can a nation be affluent and exceptional with such social results? And worst of all, many of those results are the result of weak public schools! Obesity, diabetes, and heart and lung diseases are often the result of ignorance about how the human body works, what foods make it work best, and how such healthful diet exercise habits can be intelligently built and practiced all through life. If so, then aren’t they yet more reasons why more liberal schools should be built, where all personal and social forms of democratic health and at the center of attention, rather than on the sidelines?
Dewey was one of the first philosophers to accept such new educational and social challenges, and thus build a more liberal education model based on student needs, so they could more easily learn what practical kinds of excellent habits feel like. For him such schools, and their role-playing, game, and constructive activities, can begin improving all such weaknesses, including the typical student hatred of school. In more liberal schools students can begin feeling their actions each day help mold important habits helping make their lives more intelligent here and now.
What’s Happening These Days?
As we’ve seen, his liberal model has been successfully confined by conservatives to mainly a private school location; the Dalton School in New York is one such example. As we’ve seen, since the 1950s conservatives have waged a kind of education war against liberal democratic schools, in addition to economic and political kinds of war against labor unions and progressive politicians. Since Plato, the basic conservative social model has been undemocratic at best, anti-democratic at worst, and so people around the world allow feudalistic systems to keep living. Thus, it's still very difficult for liberal and progressive people to gain more democratic control of the very institutions their taxes pay for. In many ways, conservative subjects and teaching methods have remained as solid as concrete; in general teachers too like to use only books as their main learning tools, even though the subjects are secular. It makes their jobs physically easier than working in more active democratic schools, where students are free to work on different projects at different times and so life in general is less controlled and more life-like.
In the first chapter we mentioned some facts about the conservative education law entitled No Child Left Behind (NCLB). It celebrates a system which, in some ways, teaches, say, mathematics the same way it was taught in Plato's day. Arithmetic and geometry are still largely abstract subjects taught from books and disconnected from practical use in life. Such a conservative learning program was made into legal concrete in 2002 when the act was signed into law by conservative President George W. Bush. In effect, however, the warm-sounding law sets conservative ideas in stone the same way concrete sets bricks in a wall. Perhaps a few more words about it might help more people see many more reasons why a conservative educational model works basically to support and maintain our still largely feudalistic economic, racial, political, and military status quo.
The NCLB law basically chains students AND teachers to academic book facts and standardized tests, rather than teaching students useful employment and character skills. At selected times all students in the same grades, regardless of their different social classes, are required to take the same standardized tests, and the results are then used to judge the quality of teaching and the school itself. Test scores are required by law to go up year after year or the school will be given an unsatisfactory rating and teachers' jobs will be endangered if scores don’t keep improving. Then, if such low ratings continue for 5 years, teachers risk losing their jobs and schools risk losing federal dollars. Thus teachers too become mere lackeys of conservative testing corporations; they must teach such facts or find other work. Conservatives, of course, argue it's the best way to make teachers accountable for their pay, and the most scientific way to judge student learning and preparing them for today’s jobs. In reality, however, to many liberals it seems the warm-sounding law is yet another example of the system conservatives want and need to keep profits flowing and minorities restricted to society’s rather menial jobs. For decades, racially biased drug laws, for example, have worked to produce the same results.
No doubt, if educational excellence is defined in such a narrow way, as merely learning a certain set of academic facts and reading skills, then NCLB does show how well teachers are teaching. However, for we Deweyan liberals, in today’s world such a narrow and artificial definition of educational excellence is simply not all young people need to become law-abiding and productive citizens after high school. Today students are facing many challenges for making life itself more productive and less stressful. In today’s world, given all the junk food and drugs available, excellent character and health habits of diet and exercise are needed now more than even before. Even the Wall Street Journal is acknowledging the depth and seriousness of that educational model.
Also, the NCLB itself requires schools provide military recruiters with student information so they can more easily contact undereducated graduates and hopefully recruit more of them for more warfare. True, students can request their school not provide such information about them, but unless they do, the school will automatically provide contact information to local military recruiters, who, like corporate leaders, love to have students who already know how to passively accept and do what they’re told to do. So, again, we liberals ask: How are we to build a more intelligent and peaceful democratic world unless our schools help teach students other habits than mere obedience to those in authority?
For us Deweyan liberals, then, the NCLB is just another form of conservative educational concrete; worst of all it's very undemocratic. It's basically a system for discovering which students can easily learn abstract trivia, and thus be more useful to our feudalistic corporations and military branches. What’s more, it also neglects teaching the vast majority of students what’s going on in their world here and now, and also how to make useful intelligent contributions to their own neighborhoods even before they graduate. Sky-high unemployment rates for that age group around the world are also pointing to such conservative educational weaknesses. Thus, to us liberals, the conservative NCLB law is merely that, and certainly isn’t the best one for building a more vibrant and working democracy. Just look where such laws are coming from -- the Bush family itself. George Bush and his younger brother Jeb, the ex-governor of Florida and possibly the next Republican president in 2016, continue saying it’s a good education model; no doubt to such corporate people it is. In reality, however, it continues being used to build more charter schools using non-union teachers, and to also helps give public tax money to conservative church schools. If students' test scores don't go up, then parents might become eligible for federal voucher money for sending a child to even a private religious school. So, naturally, powerful conservative foundations, like the Bradley Foundation, have poured millions of dollars into the charter school movement, no doubt helping weaken one of the most liberal Democratic supporting groups in the country -- teacher unions. Recently, in opposition, Democratic Representative Dwight Bullard said: "We're supposed to be turning out productive citizens, not just test-takers."
Such conservatives wants students learning, say, more math skills to pass the next math test, rather than teaching them how math facts can be used to keep improving both themselves and life itself. However, wouldn't we all be a lot better off if students learned about the mathematics of health, or building, or banking instead? Otherwise children will continue feeling vulnerable and psychically cutoff from much of life itself. Why allow only engineer graduates to see how math facts can be used to build new objects?
In conservative schools reading itself has become another form of psychic concrete, rather than a tool useful for helping students build their own reading, writing, and thinking skills. With such teaching “Shakespeare” has become merely another frustrating requirement for already busy students. The English language has changed so much in the last 4 centuries it’s almost impossible for even white students today, much less minority students, to understand much of what the bard wrote. In many ways even English literature has become frozen just like church doctrine was in the Middle Ages, rather than actually learning to feel how such ideas can be used here and now, like how hesitating at something may produce dangerous results, like Hamlet learned.
In conservative schools, many of the subjects Aristotle suggested have been neatly simplified and frozen for students from 1st grade to high school senior; teachers are basically free to assign whichever book-problems they want. As a result, however, students stay disconnected from the very communities they’re growing up in, and thus feel their challenges and weaknesses are really someone else's job, not theirs; thus life often remains habitually unintelligent and dangerous. In a democratic nation, however, it’s everyone’s responsibility to keep building a better world. Our own conservative schools thus continue promoting the feeling education is merely learning more eternal and unchanging ideas, in religion, history, physics, chemistry, and literature, rather than how to intelligently use such ideas creatively in the real world. Scientific facts have become the new secular dogma; E = mc2 is a new kind of god. No doubt, scientific facts are our most useful and reliable mental tools, but unless students learn to use them intelligently, they’re soon forgotten and ignored and life remains stuck in the same routine ruts. In liberal classes, however, such ideas are merely ideas to keep role-playing with, humorously as well as seriously.
No doubt, to many teachers, researchers, and scholars a conservative learning model is best; it reduces life itself to mere ideas, and writing more articles about it. Sometimes they’re important, but often such habits keep those people separated from life and its challenges. What’s more, only a small percentage of students actually become teachers, researchers, and scholars. That’s perhaps conservative education's greatest weakness, solidified with the NCLB law. It radically discriminates against some 70% of students who want to work after high school, and who need to know what intelligent work and character habits feel like, like trust, honesty, and a cheerful helpfulness. Such skills are useful in all work, not just in some professions. So why shouldn't all students start learning how to actually use ideas for improvement even in the 1st grade? If they don’t, then both they and the public will almost certainly continue seeing less than excellent social results, even in ‘affluent societies’, and thus more need for expensive government programs. Then, after working for a while, and learning a little more about life's important feelings, they'll be better equipped for college work if they want it.
No doubt, our profit-addicted corporate sector loves to hire obedient and money-hungry people; that economic system is thus dependent on conservative schools where obedience is a normal part of everyday life. Our still feudalistic economic system is thus aided and abetted by our own conservative schools and the NCLB law. In fact, much of business life has become basically a weeding out process, looking for those who aim to do a corporation's bidding, regardless of the social results; the movie Erin Brockovich shows what can happen when profits become more important than people. And our most recent deep economic recession of 2009 has again taught us that fact; Wall Street salespeople and managers didn't much care about what they were selling, just how much they were selling and how many millions they were making in the process. In reality, however, those who kept selling economic scams to others became a danger and menace to the public good, as those who’ve lost their homes and jobs now well know. Would the situation have been any better if more students had been trained to practice honesty in their schools on a daily basis? We'll never know for sure, but why should that stop us from experimenting with such character studies now? Isn’t honesty still the best policy, at least most of the time? As mankind’s first little stone tool maker can show us, what's most important is how we use our tools and facts to make life more democratic, safer, and more productive for those in our own communities.
34. CHARTER SCHOOLS
I've divided this important section on charter schools into 6 short parts: Reforming Education; Evolution of Charter Schools; Their Basic Mission; Their Funding; Their Results, and Their Possible Future. Much of this information comes from an internet article on charter schools.
Real and Status-Quo Reforms
The more parents and students learn more about educational options and models, the more they’ll feel the difference between real and trivial reforms; charter schools are a reform effort within the conservative model, but by no means must they stay within that model.
It’s probably safe to say, most of the so-called education reforms over the last 60 years have remained confined to a conservative model. In general, they all continued assuming the basic conservative idea: teaching academic book-facts are the most important goal of education. Charter schools are yet another example within that model, but they are offering some interesting educational alternatives to the public school model. As we’ll see, however, recent studies show they too often keep students anchored to their books while also helping break the political strength of more liberal teacher unions. Both goals are definitely part of the conservative agenda, and have been for most of the 1900s. Part of the No Child Left Behind law says student test results should be used to help judge how good a teacher is, and many, if not most, charter schools think that’s a good idea!
A Basic Reform Challenge
Why are school reforms going on within a conservative model of education? It’s fairly easy to answer that question. For one thing, it’s basically the only public school we have, and so few university professors or bureaucrats want to openly criticize its basic assumptions. To do so might endanger their own jobs, as well as donations to their universities. Occasionally you might hear an education college professor say something like too many students don’t know how to think critically, but that’s often as strong a statement as they’ll make. Even though they know about Dewey’s liberal model, few, if any, professors are willing to speak out more openly about making our public schools more democratic places of learning, where students actually learn to think and talk critically about events going on here and now! Heaven forbid they should rock the conservative education boat, sailing around our country now for at least the last 60 years. Again, universities depend on wealthy alumni donations to keep increasing their investment endowment, and even liberal professors would like to have more money for studies they want to conduct. The fact is, many such universities have become for-profit monopolistic corporations themselves, and so can keep raising tuitions and student fees much faster than inflation rates! Also, many wealthy students are conservative to begin with, don’t want to hear many liberal ideas, and so colleges remain very careful about whom they hire. What’s more, both book publishers and many public school teachers support the conservative education status quo, so why should they endanger their own incomes and comfortable jobs?
Like any other human institution, however, our public schools too can keep evolving and improving to teach more democratic habits of power-sharing and equal rights. Such democratic habits are the most intelligent weapons against concentrated feudalistic power. At their heart lives the art of critical thinking itself; it depends largely on teaching students how to ask critical questions about any current event. So, the more parents and students keep practicing that habit-art, the easier it becomes to start actually thinking critically and constructively; seeing the results of political, economic, and education actions help empower students to ask such questions. Thus, it becomes easier to see another weakness in a conservative book-centered model. Its books about history, science, and math continue distracting student attention from learning more about current events, and thus asking critical questions about them.
Learning more about Dewey's liberal education model is also distracted, not only in school but outside of it too. When is the last time you heard anything about Dewey’s liberal model of education, either in school or even on public television? Thus, parents too simply don’t know about different education models. So, how can parents and students ask intelligent critical of their local principals and teachers when they’ve been educated in conservative schools only? They have no ideas to compare them to. Most parents were told in school what trivial facts to learn, and also given the questions to answer, rather than learning to ask about their own schools or learn what they want to learn. Thus, it’s rather easy to keep school reform ideas within a conservative model. It certainly doesn’t mean they must remain within that model, but it makes experimenting with more liberal ideas more difficult, like giving students more freedom to learn the skills and knowledge they want, and also to build more community service learning projects. Knowing more about such liberal ideas makes it easier for both parents and students to ask more critical questions about their local schools, like what kinds of knowledge are more useful than merely academic book-knowledge, and how schools can become more natural places of learning with more active projects?
Such critical kinds of educational questions are, for us liberal Deweyans, far from trivial. In fact, they help people start thinking about the very kind of habits we want to teach the next generation, feudal or democratic ones. For us liberals the strength of our democracy itself depends on teaching such liberal habits! Without such habits, any reform, whether conservative or liberal, remains merely an idea. In fact, the less such critical questions aren’t asked about what’s going on here and now, the more millions of people remain psychically disconnected from reality, more likely to lose their jobs, salaries, and benefits, as well as increase their debt while a small wealthy minority keeps growing obscene wealthier.
So again, to us Deweyan liberals, all democratic progress itself depends on first knowing about what’s going on here and now, asking how all actions can be made more democratic and equal, and then having the freedom to test different ideas. That reform model continues to be used by conservatives and liberals. Conservatives know democratic habits help weaken their power, and so they’re taken great care to build schools where children are distracted from learning such critical habits! They continue telling people their model is best for getting a good job, when in reality they continue making it easier to keep making more money for themselves, and thus controlling more and more of life! Feudalistic models of any kind help make our world what it is today – a collection of local tribes many of whom are hostile to anyone outside them! Thus conservative habits continue on. Thousands of years ago conservative religious leaders discovered they could keep people obedient to a feudalistic status quo by telling them god was punishing them for their sins with plague and natural disasters; such ideas kept most people distracted from actually seeing how to make life better for everyone, not just a few. As a result, we liberals can now see real education improvement as being today where science was a few hundred years ago, merely at the start of its growth.
Charter schools are yet another conservative reform idea. They’re similar to religious reforms within Christianity in the 1500s; they too existed with a conservative theistic model of life and nature. Even 200 years ago liberal democratic reforms like equal rights were merely written about, rather than allowed. In fact, as US story teaches us, the property-owning and business white men who wrote our Constitution wanted to keep political democracy to an absolute minimum. They wanted the power to tax whomever they wanted, use force to collect such taxes, and not even give much democratic power to the president, the people, women, and especially not to students. At a time when powerful European feudal monarchies were causing widespread social and personal havoc, such a feudalistic government controlled by a small upper class was best for keeping them in power.
Since then, however, democratic habits have continued growing, and with Dewey’s help reached the topic of school management as women demanded the right to vote and people demanded more democratic power at both the federal and state level. The educational lesson for us liberals should be clear: even the most entrenched and powerful feudalistic system is organic and thus can be improved, even our conservative public and charter schools. Certainly, conservatives who want to keep all forms of feudal power in place will keep working against such education reforms. Even today conservatives in many states are actively working to keep normally liberal voters from voting at all! But such civilized social tensions and contests, even though they may be repulsive and obnoxious on moral grounds, help make life more interesting and meaningful. To have an intelligent cause in life makes life that much more meaningful. And so again, it’s up to people at the local level to decide which school model they want their socialized tax money to support; the democratic seeds planted by Constitution framers continue growing, and that’s the best sign of a healthful and vibrant political system.
Why do we liberals need such democratic schools and systems? For the same reason we needed to build experimental science – the socially useful and liberating results both systems produce! The more democratic schools become, the less harm small feudal groups of people can cause to greater numbers of people. How many thousands of children died during the Children’s Crusade in the early 1200s merely because 2 or 3 religious extremists said it should happen? Even today doctors are coming out of profit-oriented university med schools with personal debts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they in turn are helping create the need for government to build a better healthcare system, one where people don’t go bankrupt merely because they need a serious operation or prolonged treatment. Liberal schools where health is the main topic of study will help reduce the need for such programs, even for those politicians who now get healthcare paid for with public taxes. If wealthy folks can educate their children at the best private schools, and learn useful practical skills, then why shouldn’t everyone be able to build such schools for their children?
Today, too many young folks are still coming out of conservative high schools and colleges with a head full of trivial academic facts, and yet can’t get a good paying job to pay the rent and grocery bills, much less pay off their huge education debts. Many have simply moved back in with their parents. Such weak education results keep telling people we need better schools; such feelings are essential to any meaningful school reforms. They help make people listen more easily to liberal ideas about public schools, and how they can be improved. Thus talking critically about our ideas is our present reform challenge. Why should parents and teachers keep believing their conservative schools are best when in fact they have several weaknesses? For us liberals, it’s a healthy first baby-step on the road to building a more vibrant, peaceful, and productive democratic nation, where just and helpful business actions replace often violent and destructive military actions, and where everyone can learn the useful skills and knowledge they choose to know. So now, with that said, let’s look more closely at the charter school reform movement.
Evolution of Charter Schools
One of the newest conservative educational experiments of the last 20 years is called the Charter School movement. The idea began growing in the late 1980s, when conservatives were looking to keep increasing their feudalistic social power not only in the corporate, but in the education world as well. From the start schools were designed to teach democratic skills and habits. Almost certainly, their main purpose was to weaken teacher union power, which, for decades, had been helping elect Democrats. At the time the charter school idea fit nicely into the conservative plan to weaken all union power, both educational and labor. Also, such schools would weaken the many laws teachers had paid state legislators to pass, so charter schools would be easier to build. To many for-profit conservatives during the Reagan years, such laws were limiting their efforts to build more schools where investors could begin making some money in education. For such conservatives all socialized institutions were, by definition, less than best.
So, in the late 1980s the president of the rather conservative American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, began talking seriously about creating more schools of choice, as they were then called. In essence, they were pitched as a school reform movement, but certainly they were always planned to be within the conservative education book model. Shanker still was working such a model, where students were kept distracted from learning more about democratic habits by learning more academic book-facts.
No doubt, dissatisfied parents too injected some positive energy into the movement. Child dissatisfaction with the conservative and moderate education model was, and still is, a common fact of life, and parental dissatisfactions echo such feelings. What percentage of children really like their conservative schools? As we’ve seen, in many cities 30% to 50% are rejecting them. Then, as today, students in the lower economic classes, where book-facts are not well respected, often complain to parents about not liking school. So, parents are already sensitive to reform ideas, even if they are conservative. How can they criticize a conservative model when they don’t know about any other options? Ignorance is far from bliss; it’s dangerous!
No doubt, such parental and student feelings too were another reason the first charter schools began growing within a conservative learning model! That’s probably the most important fact for us liberals to see. What we liberals question is the soundness of that model itself! We question the basic orientation of such schools; it should be changed from a book-oriented to a student-oriented model. We believe, with good reason, such public schools would be much more user-friendly for both teachers and children, so work would become easier and children would learn more about what they want to learn.
So, to many parents and business-oriented politicians charter schools looked at first like they might work, especially for those inner city children whose parents naturally wanted their children better educated than they were. Like all parents they too wanted them to get a good paying job, and thus be better able to live a better life for themselves. As we'll see later on, however, either for-profit or non-profit charter schools have not been the so-called educational magic bullet to produce such results. As we've been seeing throughout these pages, many economic factors, like corporate globalization, job-outsourcing, monopolistic corporate mergers, stagnant wages, and shrinking labor union power have made such hopes even more difficult to realize. Good paying jobs have become fewer for most everyone in the last 40 years. Add to that economic reality the fact charter schools remain within the conservative book-based model, and the hope of finding a good job after high school has continued remaining a serious problem for 18-24 year olds, unless, of course, one's family is well connected in the business community.
The charter school reform, then, started out as an interesting idea, but has become basically a pro-business, anti-union reform movement. Little wonder much of the public isn’t buying into the idea. Such schools were designed mainly to relieve teachers and administrators of excessive educational red tape; incompetent teachers could be more easily fired and schools had fewer regulations to deal with. If such regs were reduced, the logic went, teachers would have more freedom to teach students more knowledge, schools would have more power to hire good teachers, students would learn more, score better on tests, and then get into a good college or university. But it should be noted once again: students themselves were excluded from any input into what kinds of schools they would like to have! It was as if a patient was excluded from any input with their doctor over their own health care and treatment! In short, charter school students remained enslaved to their books, their academic facts, and to taking tests about those facts. It was either that or quit school, which, by the way, large numbers have done.
A few years after the movement began growing rapidly in California, Arizona, and Michigan, on 9-8-95 the L.A. Times ran an article “Bold Plan Would Slash Red Tape for Schools.” It told about the new charter school reforms.
What is educational ‘red tape’? Essentially such laws help build a safe school environment, set teacher qualifications, school year length, subjects taught, teacher duties, and school safety and maintenance rules as well. Critics said such laws often require much more paper work from teachers and administrators during the school year, as well as restrict other educational experiments. Those are fundamental problems for any monopoly, even public schools. How can new intelligent ideas be experimented in any such system?
At one time science itself faced that kind of monopolistic problem. Aristotle’s philosophic idea of Final Form helped restrict experimental science from growing even in the 1200s. It played the same kind of restrictive role as education red tape has played recently. If, say, all objects eventually reach a final stage or form of development, why bother experimenting to learn how things actually change and move? If the final stage of, say, all rocks is to reach the center of the earth, then why study how they can actually move and change here and now? Like many education laws, his final form idea actually closed down experimentation and study, rather than open it up to an infinite future of intelligent experimentation. Only when people like Roger Bacon in the 1200s and Galileo in the 1600s began ignoring Aristotle’s idea did our strongest experimental knowledge begin growing.
In effect, then, education red tape helped maintain a conservative feudalistic system, run by a few people and often protecting those even incompetent teachers. Teacher unions often helped create such red-tape. Often they paid legislators to make it very difficult to fire teachers, even though they may be incompetent; doctors often acted in much the same way through the AMA. In the 1700s capitalism’s godfather Adam Smith celebrated competition as the engine of economic progress, but since then real-world corporations have demonstrated competition and diversity are to be avoided as much as possible. Such competition depresses profits, as John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie discovered in the 1800s with their oil and steel companies. Thus they kept working to reduce it. In the real world monopoly is highly desirable for maximizing profits and reducing reform efforts, even if it means protecting incompetent workers or ruining the environment. Public schools became another example of such a monopoly, and charter schools became, at first, a way to break it up.
Teacher unions often worked throughout the 1900s to protect their education monopoly. For them competition or even democratic sharing of power with students became mere textbook ideas, unless – and this is a very important point – people can focus and concentrate their political power and start better regulating anti-competition monopolies, like Teddy Roosevelt started doing in the early 1900s, when more and more people began voting for progressive candidates. So, promising to give parents more educational choices, many districts began experimenting with so-called charter schools. It fit into a conservative agenda; for decades before 1993 conservatives had been working to weaken all labor power; such power made it more difficult to get pro-business conservative Republicans elected.
In the quest to keep breaking up teacher unions, conservatives offered charter schools as a way to achieve that goal. Teachers are certainly no exception to helping pass laws making their work more secure. They too want job-security and good pensions like everyone else. For example, they helped increase the age of students to stay in school, so they would get more public tax money and increased salaries in the process. They also wanted to hire more teachers, so they also supported laws about required classes, like algebra and geometry. They also wanted students must earn a certain number of credits before they graduate, and also wanted teacher salaries set. In short, a whole set of education laws were passed, and in that process intelligent educational experimentation became more difficult, like firing incompetent teachers.
Charter schools began growing as a reaction to such laws. In them it’s much easier for principals to hire and fire whomever they want, thus job security is much less stable as is pay and working conditions. In fact, somewhere around 50% of charter school teachers are fired within the first 5 years! Often they simply haven’t learned to make children learn what many of them have little interest in learning – academic book-facts. So, as time went on, many teachers didn’t want charter schools to keep growing; they threatened the conservative non-profit public school model itself.
No doubt, the aim of rolling back some education regulations is a good one. The California Education Code, for example, is now over 7,000 pages of rules and regulations, keeping the all-important control of what students should learn out of neighborhood control. In effect, the code legalizes merely another system of monopolistic feudalism, controlling local actions by a few powerful bureaucrats. It’s also why many of our schools have remained conservative over the last century, and recently have become even more tied to teaching academic facts with the NCLB and Common Core Standards laws. Both conservatives and liberals help create their own red tape; it helps keep the political, economic, and educational status quo in place, thus making the growth of democratic habits more difficult. For decades the American Medical Association helped restrict the number of students in med schools, thus making it easier for doctor salaries and costs to stay artificially high!
Obviously, not all such red tape laws are bad; it’s best to put safety regs into law. Who wants unsafe schools? But, teacher contracts often made it difficult to fire any teacher, even the worst ones. Thus was born one aim of charter schools. Conservatives and moderates started going to state capitals in places like California, Arizona, and Michigan to help pass new education laws, making it easier for charter schools to grow. They're freer to hire non-union teachers, and also fire those who aren't producing better standardized test results. According to the Times article cited above: “In the past, the California Teachers Assn. has opposed the creation of more charter schools, which also operate independent of the state’s education code.” And a recent law in Illinois said a 75% majority union vote was needed for teachers to strike; in effect it’s another undemocratic law against majority rule.
In the late 1990s the movement was well under way. Democrat Delaine Eastin, the former California State Superintendent of Public Instruction said, “she plans to free school districts from virtually every rule in the education code” in order to help “create individualized learning plans for each student.” Sounds great, rights, but, sadly, her rhetoric has not even come close to matching reality. Today, solidly democratic California has not only endorsed the No Child Left Behind law, but also the new and stricter Common Core Standards!
No doubt, in the late 1990s many parents bought into such reform rhetoric. Even liberals like myself hoped at the time it would be another positive baby-step to a more liberal democratic student-centered Deweyan model of educational excellence. Holding teachers more accountable for teaching academic facts also seemed like a good idea to most people, conservatives and liberals. After all, who wants teachers wasting public tax money merely passing out the same boring assignments year after year, sitting behind their desks, and promoting students year after year, regardless of that they learn? To us Deweyan liberals, those are just a few results when people allow their neighborhood public schools to keep a conservative learning model in place. And what’s more, many religious conservatives also hoped the new charter schools would make it easier to put religious studies back into schools, and thus make more secular liberal habits more difficult to learn. For them, the less young women know about birth control and abortion, the better. In a later article The Times concluded: “Charter Schools are an experiment worth building on.” (4-27-98)
Thus, charter schools started out as a hopeful reform movement. Firing an incompetent teacher, for example, became almost impossible because of all the legal red tape. Such laws also helped create extra duties and work for teachers and administrators, like helping more high school seniors earn more college credits before they graduate. After all, the need to make work as easy as possible is felt by teachers as well as corporate CEOs; both want to make their jobs more secure. Thus, there’s a perpetual danger in any kind of institution: more security and power often become the ultimate aims of their actions, rather than working for the public and student good. More recently, we’ve seen the same kinds of actions from the National Security Agency; they keep defending their power to collect phone and internet data from everywhere they can. Again, such organizations are modern versions of medieval fiefdoms.
Also, some profit-oriented conservatives and moderates felt such schools would be another chance to take more tax money from people. Why shouldn’t schools become profitable for their investors; after all, we do live in a capitalist economy where profits are often the only goal worth working for. Educational red tape prevented such schools from being built, so conservatives simply began paying legislators to legalize charter schools. As we saw earlier, in 2002 conservative Republican President George Bush 2 signed into law the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. With it, just about all liberal models of education, and their emphasis on character excellence, were banished to Valhalla, so to speak. They also helped reduce teacher union power, as teacher qualification laws were relaxed as well as union membership requirements. In fact, most of the country’s roughly 5,000 charter schools today do not have unionized teachers working in them or getting pensions supported by public taxes. And, as we’ve seen, NCLB also gave administrators a way to judge good from bad teachers; if their students’ standardized test results were low they might be fired. We'll see more about charter school results a little later.
With NCLB, however, even charter schools became smothered in red tape. Such schools must teach a standard conservative book-centered curriculum, as well as administer yearly standardized tests to some students. That part of the law has been the most obnoxious to many teachers and students around the country; recently in Chicago a strike just before the 2012 election helped call attention to the problem. For us Deweyan liberals, of course, such academic testing is just one of 3 important pillars of an excellent education, the other 2 being useful job skills and character training. To us liberals, all definitions of good schools should include those 3 educational pillars. Another important result of a good school is knowing how many high school graduates find decent employment within a year after graduation, and also how many become involved with the law and drugs as well as prison? Aren't those results just as important to public welfare as is learning useful facts? Such results are important. If Martin Luther King Jr. was right, then character excellent is the main way people should be judged, not merely by the facts they know or their skin color. What use is knowing a lot of trivia and yet not be trustworthy and respectful of others and the law?
Also, I’ll just briefly mention one other recent university reform movement, called on-line classes taken over the internet. They might be a way for more students around the world to get more education at much less expense. Early studies of such classes, however, are showing some serious weaknesses with the idea. For example, even though they sometimes enroll huge numbers of students from around the world, they are also showing a very high drop-out rate as well. No doubt, people are working to solve that problem. The idea, though, does promise to do what liberals have been trying to do for decades -- individualize and democratize education. Now, if only they would also start offering character classes, they could become the liberal schools of tomorrow Dewey wrote about. As more and more people get personal computers, their potential for such classes only grows stronger.
In short, for us Deweyan liberals, charter schools just haven't been much of a democratic reform movement at all! They're not teaching many employable skills or excellent character habits, and so people continue believing they need a college education to get a good job. But recently, as a result of our 2008 economic meltdown, even that idea is rapidly becoming out of reach due to the steep rise in college costs. Who wants to be tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they even start working? Such debt is working today in much the same way religious sin worked in the Middle Ages; in both cases people become obliged to learn stressful habits, obedient work habits in the first case, and obedient religious habits in the second case.
The Charter School Mission
At the start of the charter school movement there were 2 main goals. The first was to reduce legal educational red tape, thus making it easier for charters to grow. They became more independent and self-governing while still operating within a conservative academic model. That idea aimed at merely administrative reform. To us liberals, however, it was yet another so-called trickle-down reform model. It was similar to the conservative trickle-down economic model of Ronald Reagan. In the 1980s conservative Reagan economists said better laws would make it easier for a few people to become wealthier, and they in turn would use their wealth to create more jobs; liberals called it the trickle down model of economics. So too, in the late 1900s conservatives said better education laws would automatically create better schools where students would learn more facts and knowledge. Even a large majority of teachers (over 65%) and administrators said students would automatically learn more academic facts if teachers had more freedom from extra work and duties. However, as time went on for both models, actual results have proved them both to be little more than myth, rather than sound economic or educational thinking! Sure, a lot more people have become billionaires, and a lot more jobs have been created. The problem is they’ve been created in places like Vietnam, India, Pakistan, and China! And tests scores too have been mixed at best.
The second goal of charter schools was to make teachers more responsible for students learning academic facts. Many parents certainly bought into that idea. According to conservative and moderate educators, low public school test scores meant teachers just aren't doing their job, and so should be fired. The idea became solidified into law with NCLB. If the school itself showed a pattern of such low test scores, then it could be completely shut down, and students given the choice to attend another school, where teachers knew better how to cram more academic trivia into students, or parents could get money to send their kids to another school, even a private religious school!
But again, for us Deweyan liberals, both those goals are naive, short-sighted, and shallow for defining educational excellence! For one thing, the second goal is disrespectful of child development itself! Study after study has shown students are best able to learn abstract facts in their junior and senior high school years. Until around 8 years of age they learn what their senses tell them the world is like, and then to about 14 they like to practice their building skills. The adolescent brain finally develops it's most mature form in the later teen years, so, before that, it’s much wiser to keep developing children’s constructive physical abilities, habits, and knowledge, so they can gain some useful skills and experience before they’re more capable of learning abstract ideas and subjects.
As we’ve seen, such ideas are anything but new. Thousands of years ago Plato himself realized students were much better at abstract thinking after 2 years of military training from 18-20, after they've had some real world experience. Thus, to us Deweyan liberals, the charter school mission looks like merely another form of conservative and moderate union-busting work while continuing to ignore basic child development and character excellence from its model. For such people children should learn obedience to traditional ideas more than anything else.
It’s also worth noting, as the charter movement continued on into the conservative Bush 2 administration, weakening teacher unions only increased. In fact, weakening labor unions in general had become a major part of the conservative agenda all over the world. In fact, since conservative Washington lawyer Lewis Powell wrote his famous memo in the early 1970s about what a conservative agenda should look like, union-busting was a major objective. Vietnam protests around the country, as well as the Women’s Liberation Movement and abortion legalization convinced many conservatives they needed a definite plan of action; if not, their entire way of life would soon dissolve. Then, in 1980, conservatives found their savior in Ronald Reagan. Since then, with the help of globalization economics and outsourcing of jobs, union membership has gone down from around 30% to 7% today. Needless to say, it's helped make the wealthy class even wealthier, and the poorer classes poorer; some 50 million people today use government food stamps to help pay food bills. In other words, it looks like we've entered another conservative built Gilded Age; we now have similar extreme wealth differences to the early 1900s. Also, there just doesn't appear to be much difference to students between public and charter schools; both keep students anchored to their books and teacher control.
Charter School Funding
No doubt, like any other movement, the charter school movement depends on the public buying into the system. It may aim at replacing our public school system, but unless the public supports the system and its results, it cannot keep growing. Like Alexander’s empire, charter schools are in many countries, like the US, Canada, Great Britain, Chile, New Zealand, and even Sweden, but their roots are only a few inches deep. Naturally, a major problem is funding, either from taxes or private investors or both. Often it's been a mixture of the 2, with for-profit schools growing mostly in California and Arizona. Even with private and public funds, funding remains a problem; parents are still far from convinced charter schools are the best educational solution for their children. Recently, a number of wealthy foundations have been chipping into the charter school pot as well. Orgs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Edyth and Eli Broad Foundation, the Wal-Mart Walton Family Foundation, and of course many other smaller investors have been supporting charter schools, hoping more parents would send more of their kids to them. After all, who wouldn’t like to see a nice return on their investment, test scores increase, and more students going to college? But, once again, for reasons already mentioned, such hopes are proving very difficult to realize.
As of August, 2005, one study reported charter schools spend about 20% less money per pupil than their public school counterparts. As a result, growing the charter school movement has been difficult in many places where public funds are scarce. In Canada, for example, the movement’s roots are shallow and weak, at best. What’s more, a later study in 2008 found charter schools have only about 60% to spend on students compared to public schools. In short, the public isn’t buying into the charter movement. No doubt, their kids are coming home from such schools with the same depressed feelings they have for conservative public schools. And of course we liberal Deweyans like to cite still another important comparison between prison and school funding. Public schools often spend something like $10k a year on students, but in some states spend about $30k a year on prisoners! Little wonder the for-profit prison system aims to increase its share of that tax money pie. More and more investors are getting into the for-profit prison business. In California, prison spending is about $50 billion a year, and what CEOs worth their stock options don't salivate at the chance of tapping into that taxpayer funded gold mine? Many feel they can certainly keep prisoners jailed for a lot less than that.
More conservative red tape also makes it easier for wealthy foreign investors to buy a piece of the charter school pie. If, say, they invest $1 million in such schools they can automatically get visas for family members. In other words, charter schools have become yet another way for wealthy foreigners to make some money from US taxpayers, as well as help family members become citizens! Win, win, win situation, right? Unless you’re a student in conservative charter schools; for them such schools aren’t much different from the public schools they’re gone to; they’re both obsessed with teaching more book-facts, solidified into law with NCLB.
Be that as it may, many foreign investors too are helping build charter schools here in the US, taking a chance on making more money with their money. It's not all investor-oriented however; many inner city charters get even more public funding than their public school cousins. But the educational bottom-line question, so to speak, remains: Do charter schools actually teach more kids more academic facts and thus make them ready to go out into the world after high school, get a good paying job, and start making some useful and constructive contributions to our nation? Sadly, it doesn’t seem so. We liberals are not surprised either; in fact, we’d be surprised if the results were any different. Based on recent test results, the corporate private sector has not really found an educational magic wand preparing students for constructive work after school or success in college.
Charter School Test Results
As usual, conservatives, moderates, and liberals have their own sets of results they say should be looked at. Overall, however, charter schools often produce lower test scores for their students. Naturally their defenders say such results really depend on a number of other factors besides school. What other factors? Well, like area of the country, student motivation, parental involvement, and many social factors. On the whole, however, charter school test results themselves are not encouraging, for teachers as well as students. Teacher drop-out rates from such charter schools are a little higher than they are for new public school teachers – more than 50% after 5 years. Again, for we Deweyans that’s to be expected too. Charter teachers on the whole work longer hours, often for less pay, in fiscally unstable schools, and are less trained to teach kids what they don’t need or want to learn. All of those conditions make the charter school mission more questionable.
For example, California Charter Academy was publicly funded, ran a chain of 60 schools with a $100 million budget, and even they went bankrupt in 2004; hundreds of thousands of teachers and students suddenly had no schools to go to! Did any investors actually make any money from that situation, and if so, how much? Those are important facts all parents should know. The recent financial collapse of 2008 is simply another example of the tax payer being fleeced by the government for tens of billions of dollars merely to avoid Great Depression 2! It might help more people to ask: What’s worse, another depression or a $10 trillion debt? Some choice, eh?
How about test results? Are charter schools producing higher student test scores? Alas, that idea too is now more hope than reality. As you would expect, a number of different studies have been done by universities, and on the whole charter schools have not lived up to expectations. For example, probably the most important study ended in 2009, conducted by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO for short). They found charter school test results are about the same or lower than most public schools: 17% of charters came up with better test scores; 37% produced lower test scores; and the rest scored about the same as public schools students. So, around 85% of charters have not raised test scores. In other words, students still aren’t buying the charter school model of education any more than they’re buying conservative public school models. Why should they? The book-centered model itself is basically unnatural and artificial! Thus, charter schools are not the answer to many of our serious social problems. And what’s more, we Deweyan liberals say they probably never will be if they remain founded on mere book work. Again, that conclusion is based on solid findings about child psychology itself. The more schools divorce such facts from teaching students how to constructively use their ideas, the sooner students will forget such facts. And the more conservative schools continue ignoring teaching intelligent character habits useful in a democracy, the more social problems will continue growing, like unemployment, crime, and drug abuse.
Another study about test results was conducted by the American Federation of Teachers itself, Albert Shanker’s organization, and they too found about the same results, even though they at first were in favor of such schools. And yet a 3rd study, a National Center for Education Statistics study, actually found charter school student test scores to be lower than public school scores! When it rains, it pours, right?
We Deweyans say such weak results are all but inevitable when charter schools stay rigidly and routinely anchored to teaching mere book-based facts. The basic problem is an artificial assumption about child learning abilities. Conservative schools might make teaching easier, but they make learning more useful skills and knowledge more difficult! Now, thanks to NCLB, in both public and charter schools, students either learn what they must learn or drop out. Even if they come back to school later on the choice is still the same. What makes it a little easier later on is their brains have become more mature and interconnected, so learning more abstract book-facts becomes a little easier.
One conclusion at least seems obvious to us Deweyan liberals. Conservative charter schools continue ignoring the most important part of educational excellence -- democratic character development. Few students really relish being enslaved to book-facts, and having little freedom to learn what they want, like how to become more intelligent and independent people. In general, conservatives want the freedom to teach their children religious habits they feel are important, while liberals want the freedom to make schools more active places of democratic learning. For us liberals, computers and books are the proper place for such facts, but until robots are programmed to intelligently use such facts, only humans can practice character excellence.
To be as clear as possible, we liberal Deweyans say all schools based on teaching mainly academic trivia, whether public or charter, cannot achieve educational excellence. The more they neglect formally teaching democratic habits of character excellence, and allow students greater freedom to learn what they want, the weaker their educational results will be, and the more tax dollars will be wasted as well! For example, about 70% of all prisoners go into prison addicted to some kind of drug. And what’s worse, most leave prison not learning any kind of employable skills, leaving them just as vulnerable to criminal temptations as they were when they went to prison. Not surprisingly, some 60% quickly return to prison, all at taxpayer expense. We liberals say such results are what more taxpayers should be learning; such results keep telling us our conservative book-centered public and charter schools have a systemic weakness built into them; they favor a small book reading social class, and thus discriminate against all other non-reading classes? Thus, our conservative public schools are far from fulfilling their mission of educating the public.
For us liberals, a healthy democracy simply doesn’t need regimented, obedient, undereducated people blindly stumbling through life. Upon such habits rode the ancient, medieval, and early modern world. They were in place long before Plato was a teenager! The entire 1100 year medieval period is simply more evidence of those habits, and it's why liberals are still mainly talking about more democratic political, economic, and educational models. We see yet more evidence of their results in the modern Muslim world today, where conservatives want the power to keep creating Muslim-dominated religious political systems; even Israel is becoming more of a religious theocracy, rather than a democracy. As a result, they’re both increasing the artificial divisions among people, rather than lessening them, often in the name of racial purity. Only more liberal kinds of education can change that dangerous and war-provoking reality into a more humanistic world! For students of history, that part of the world today looks much like war-torn Europe did in the 1500s and early 1600s. Without more liberal habits, we can expect to see such actions in the Muslim world for centuries more.
Slowly, it seems, more liberals and independents are waking up to the importance of education conservatives have known about for thousands of years! They’ve known schools play a key role in the growth of any kind of system, whether it’s democratic or feudal. Democracy can thrive and grow only if people finally realize how important their own neighborhood schools really are. We need more people thinking critically and independently, and the usefulness of that idea was seen clearly a few years ago. A huge energy company called Enron suddenly collapsed overnight and workers lost their jobs. Enron leaders kept telling their passive workers everything was fine and wonderful even as it was collapsing and they were selling their stock as quickly as possible! One day workers went to work and discovered Enron was gone!
The more people are taught to merely accept and obey their supervisors or political leaders, whether corporate, military, political, or education leaders, the more vulnerable they become to others’ decisions. It’s one thing to use words like economic health, corporate excellence, and worker greatness, like Enron leaders used, but it’s another thing altogether to keep track of what those leaders are actually doing here and now. Liberal schools focus on actively teaching students to do just that – keep track of what people in power are doing with their power. All such critical skills helping students see words as just words, and actions are what’s most important. Such skills grow stronger only as students are free to learn more about other peoples’ actions. More intelligent and respectful actions thus become the keys to all forms of intelligent democratic and personal excellence, rather than schools making everyone take the same courses year after year and expecting everyone to keep learning the same useless academic facts. Not only is it psychologically unrealistic, but socially it keeps people artificially distracted from life, and divided into tribes, thus making life more dangerous than necessary.
Some Final Thoughts
Such criticisms and ideas may sound too harsh to conservatives, but are they? In fact, most every school principal learns about Dewey’s liberal educational ideas during their doctoral work. However, conservative laws like NCLB keep restricting the experimentation with such ideas. For us liberals then, conservative laws and control of the government is the main problem. They keep the public largely ignorant about liberal ideas, like Dewey’s, and so keep restricting and delaying those ideas and habits. Also, recently much of our corporate-owned media has become another conservative force against such ideas. Newspapers and TV both depend on corporate sponsors for funding, and thus don’t want to offend them. Is there thus a corporate conspiracy to keep the public from learning such ideas? It does no harm to assume there is. All democratic habits help weaken all forms of concentrated feudalistic power, even newspaper and TV power. What’s the harm in assuming all corporations have a great interest in not allowing the public to hear such ideas? And it’s another reason why printed books and the Internet are more important than ever for helping growing such habits.
Over 8 years ago the well-respected Washington Post (12-29-04) was learning more about charter schools, and their weak results were already being reported. One writer, Amy Wells, noticed their test results were rather weak. In some charters, children learned more academics, in some they learned less, but in most there was little difference. But when is the last time you redd an article about Dewey’s liberal educational ideas? It simply makes it more difficult for the public to learn more about them, like student choice and character development.
In truth, however, our own actions at the neighborhood level are the most important actions to focus on. As more democratic-minded parents and students learn more about liberal educational ideas, and how they help build intelligent democratic habits, charter school may yet prove to be another tool for growing such habits, and making life better for all law-abiding people. How can students learn more about character excellence and feel the joy of active learning without drugs unless they’re liberated from their desks, allowed to carefully and safely go out onto the school grounds and into their neighborhoods, and start working intelligently to make them safer and more livable for everyone?
In any school system there is always room for improvement, even in wealthy places like Beverly Hills, Chicago's North Shore, and New York's Upper East and West Sides, not to mention our run down and bank-neglected inner cities! Just because bankers have given up on such neighborhoods doesn’t mean they can’t be made more vibrant and profitable one intelligent step at a time. It can all begin with building more liberals kinds of schools, where teachers aren’t afraid to have more active classrooms focused on teaching students about intelligent community service projects. As many in China, India, and the Muslim world are learning today, there is much more to life than merely having as many children as possible. Sooner or later it becomes counterproductive and harmful. So, the more we waste those pre-teen and teenage years learning soon-forgotten academic facts, the more we allow the wealthy and powerful to keep running our country mainly for their benefit, and even running it into the ground now and then for their benefit. Not possible? It’s happened in Detroit recently, and many other cities as well.
The less students are encouraged to learn what’s happening here and now, and then think intelligently more improving life, the less control they’ll have over it! Dewey was merely another in a long line of educators who agreed with such practical ideas. It’s what we enjoy doing with our facts, skills, and money here and now that’s most important for our futures, not how many facts, skills, and money we have. Liberals the world over will thus keep such ideas actively growing while working to build more democratic habits.
Learning liberal character habits is certainly not dead, but it is sleeping in most of our conservative public and charter schools, and in the minds and actions of honest and caring taxpayers. Some school districts around the country are beginning to focus more on service learning projects; they’re taking students out from behind their desks and into their communities to begin working intelligently on improvement projects! When such active learning projects are based on intelligent planning, they will begin ending the artificial and harmful conservative monastic isolation between students and their social world, and between students themselves, helping put students in touch with real life and fellow students.
Around the country there are, as of 2009, many such active and constructive programs, one being in the Long Beach School District just south of Los Angeles. However, since our economic meltdown in 2008, such programs have dwindled. Still, to us Deweyans, probably the best educational baby-step parents and taxpayers can take is to create their own intelligent service learning programs for all public and charter school students, kindergarten through high school! Nothing can develop the best character habits of kindness, enjoyment, fulfillment, and helpfulness more than intelligently learning to enrich others' lives. Why should even young children not enjoy growing flowers for senior citizens, reading to them, and playing ping pong or chess with them? Isn’t chess a great game for thinking intelligently about the future? No doubt, John Dewey himself would heartily agree with such intelligent programs for students of all ages! It’s good psychology; it’s good citizenship; it’s liberal educational excellence at its best. After all, aren’t facts promoting both psychological and physical health really the most useful facts to know? And shouldn't we be judging student excellence not only by the facts they know, but also their intelligent work record and helpful actions?
35. REALITY SCHOOLS – AN INTRODUCTION
This and the following 4 sections will describe in more detail a liberal Deweyan type of education. It’s based on 4 important liberal skills, namely building healthy physical, psychological, economic, and democratic habits. Then, in Section 40 the book concludes with some suggestions for building such schools. This section, then, introduces those 4 important skills with a few more thoughts first about conservative school weaknesses, and then about those 4 skills themselves. To help introduce these topics I've added a few more quotes on education which have been inspirational to me from the beginning.
Plato: Attention to health is the greatest hindrance to life ...
Siddhartha Gotoma (Buddhism's Founder): Perceiving (passion’s power) ... the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, ... for forms, ... for the impressions ... and whatever sensation, ... for the ear ... for sounds ... for the nose ... for odors ... for the tongue ... for tastes ... for the mind ... for ideas ... . ... by the absence of passion he becomes free ... and he is no more for the world ...
John Dewey: To keep the process (of intelligent growth) alive is the function of educational subject matter. … An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory (and ideas).
… Recognition of the natural course of (child) developmental sets out with situations which involve learning by doing.
… A large part of the art of instruction lies in making new problems large enough to challenge thought, and small enough from which helpful suggestions may spring.
… Pupils who have stored their ‘minds’ with all kinds of material which they have never put to intellectual uses are sure to be hampered when they try to think.
… it is important that education should use a criterion of social worth. Study of mental life has made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate tools and materials, to construct, and to give expression to joyous emotion.
… Mere amassing of information apart from the direct interests of life makes mind wooden; (mental) elasticity disappears. Since the mass of pupils are never going to become scientific specialists it is much more important that they should get some insight into what scientific method means … experimental science has demonstrated there is no such thing as genuine knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of (constructive testing).
… (learning) methods used today, studying texts rather than life itself, has been handed down from medieval times.
… Education through occupations combines more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method.
… we can measure the dawn of a serious faith in education by willingness to pay the highest wages going to those who actively direct the education of the youngest. …
...To cover so much (academic) ground with every pupil, to have each one go through the same motions as every other, is the same thing as to discourage originality and depress (democratic) individuality. The aim of natural development says to parents and teachers … make health an aim; normal development cannot be had without regard to the vigor of the body.
… imagination is the sole method of escape from mechanical methods of teaching.
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness. (emphases and additions are my own)
Pericles of Athens: ... the greatest gift to the city is not in public speeches but daily beholding her power in action, in being like lovers to her.
Author: Learning to enjoy, even passionately, testing our ideas experimentally liberates all our senses to warmly and respectfully embrace this world’s greatest challenge: to make its energies friendlier, more satisfying, and more playfully peaceful, rather than allowing them to remain uncontrolled, hostile, and dangerous. We liberals have absolutely no desire to ignore any of our world's delightfully sensuous energies within which all our ancestors evolved, and within which we all grow and live now and as long as life exists. To ignore such natural energies only perpetuates their dangers.
I cited the quote from Siddhartha’s Fire Sermon again; it represents a point of view even many modern Buddhists now reject, but that has been practiced for thousands of years by mystics everywhere.
A Few More Thoughts about Conservative Schools
In the early 1900s scholarly Dewey described many of the weak and unhealthful results of conservative book-oriented schools I’ve talked about all through the preceding pages:
“...the typical point of the old education: its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method ... the center of (learning) is outside the child. It is in the teachers, the textbooks, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate activities (and needs) of child(ren) ….
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from its inability to utilize the experiences (students) gets outside of school in any complete and free way within the school itself; (also students are) unable to apply in daily life what (they are) learning at school. That is the isolation of the school -- its isolation from life ...
… first, the lack of any organic connection with what the child has already seen and felt and lived makes (schoolwork) purely formal and symbolic. ... The second evil is lack of motivation. There are not only no facts or truths which have been previously felt but there is no craving, no need, no demand (for such knowledge). ... The third evil is that even the most scientific matter, arranged in most logical fashion, loses this quality (of discovery) by the time it gets to the student.” (The School and Society—S&S, 34, 75, 202-204; emphasis and additions are my own)
As a result, children in such conservative schools will often openly distract teachers with interruptions and disruptive actions. Often, it’s simply to prevent more unwanted book assignments. Even small children sense the frustration when they’re asked to do what they don’t want to do. For some students such disruptive actions become a habit. As test results keep telling us, an unending stream of book assignments usually means more boring and useless work for most students. Obviously, the more that happens, the easier it is for administrators to act like prison guards, teachers to quit, and thus make learning in our public schools more chaotic and difficult. Many students often drop-out rather than continue such work, often from fear of failing; many of their parents have unhealthful learning habits too. Perhaps the worst one is not caring to learn more about a liberal learning model. It’s understandable; years ago many of them were also conditioned to ignore such work. In short, conservative schools can be compared to doctors forcing patients to use medicine they have absolutely no need for!
I found some more recent criticisms from John Holt, another critic of conservative schools. He’s a Canadian but such schools operate all over the world. One of his books is titled Underachieving Schools. In it he talks about one result of focusing too much on mere book work: “Concerning the seclusion practiced by schools ... students learn how to live without learning to pay much attention to what’s happening right around them; in most schools students have no contact with the real world, real things, or real people.”
His solution? Parents should simply demand teachers start safely taking their students out of the classroom and into the real world, to learn more about life itself and also how to improve it. (20, 28, 30) In fact, on every school grounds in America, there is an entire universe of meanings and objects waiting to be discovered, and are thus useful for expanding a child’s feelings and ideas about life. Such safe and controlled exploring helps make school a place of active discovery and enjoyment instead of boring and stressful silent reading and writing. No doubt, for at least the first 3 primary school years such activities should be the center of attention, like visiting police and fire stations, corporate offices, building sites, city halls, and even filming and music studios. Such activities start giving students a better feel for what kinds of options and skills are useful in the adult world, and thus give their school work an emotional goal and direction. And then they can also start learning the healthy physical, psychological, economic, and political habits useful in a democratic society.
A related result for Holt can be described as a weak educational quality. What’s that mean? Basically it means not building useful habits like psychological health. For example, even in the early grades Holt saw an excessive reliance on tests: “… tests are used mainly as rewards and punishments to help justify what the educational bureaucracy ‘masters’ demand the students should know.” (55) As we’ve seen many times before, the 2002 NCLB law in fact chains both students and teachers to learning more academic facts and test-taking, as if they’re the be-all and end-all of education! He also echoes many of Dewey’s ideas by listing 7 more unhealthful learning results from activities like the grading system:
1. “… (tests) focus on answers, which are less important than the (experimental) METHODS one uses to solve a problem, and (also) grades reinforce cheating behaviors; 2. Focusing on grades minimizes the learning of experimentation and reasonable risk taking, both important audacious (skills) useful for new discoveries; 3. (Poor) (g)rades can damage one’s self esteem and diminish one’s personal power; 4. Grades reinforce the idea: life really is a kind of rat-race of competition, when in reality teamwork techniques of solving problems are more useful; 5. Grades help promote this idea: life isn’t something to be improved, but merely a giant machine grinding people down; 6. Students (feel) little better than slaves, rather than improvers of society; 7. And perhaps most important: the focus on grades diminishes the joy of learning, a joy useful throughout life.” (39)
He continues with 2 more criticisms of conservative schools:
“... (conservative schools) generally have two businesses, each of which cancels the other’s effectiveness. Those two roles are (1) acting as an educator, and (2) acting as a jailer. In almost all schools most of the time children are treated like convicts in jail. They have little choice about what to study, what problems to solve, what questions to ask, and are generally restricted by rules that make hall passes and teacher permission necessary. In effect such schools retard the development of self-esteem in students, as well as severely limit learning to subjects merely redd about." (72, 134, 137) (additions are my own)
In short, he describes enslaving schools, rather than liberating and empowering schools, and, as we’ve been seeing, such schools can be called conservative and liberal schools. Also, he sees conservative book-oriented schools as resembling “… an assembly line structure: children enter the system, move conveyor-like through the grades, have their heads ‘filled’ with ideas (for a short time), and verbal concepts -- what is too politely referred to as knowledge -- after which they’re sent on their way.” (142) He also cautions parents about conservative kinds of book-oriented teachers; he says “... teachers often don’t care what students think, care about, or want to know; what counts is what others decide they should learn and practice.” (107)
No doubt, reading and writing skills, the kind encouraging more thoughtful question-asking, are psychologically healthful for the growth of all democracies, whether students go into business or college. However, there’s a fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals about the ultimate aim of education. In general, conservatives say they want to build well-rounded students with a book-centered model, whereas we liberals say that model is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about child psychology and learning, as well as a basic disrespect for individual needs and desires. In more liberal democratic schools those needs and desires become the center of attention.
And a much more recent study compares the drop-out rates in urban and suburban public schools; its results are disturbing as well. A 2009 report commissioned by a non-profit organization, run by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his wife Alma, offered some sobering statistics about high school graduation rates in 50 cities. For example, Indianapolis, IN produced the lowest graduation rate of about 30%, while Mesa, AZ graduated about 77% of its 2005 freshman class. But when the figures were added up and divided by 50, the average drop-out rate for urban schools was depressing at best, at about 47%, while that for suburban schools was about 30%.
Such fundamental educational differences naturally result in fundamental reform differences. For example, a conservative remedy has been proposed by one director of a study suggesting teacher training is the problem. In a New York Times article of 4-22-09, entitled Large Urban-Suburban Gap Seen in Graduation Rates, Marguerite Kondracke said, "This urban-suburban graduation gap has developed partly because teacher quality is not the same from classroom to classroom." Attacking teacher incompetence is a continuing theme for conservatives. No doubt, we liberals can agree with that idea in some ways. For example, young urban are still under the illusion all children hunger for more book knowledge and facts; that illusion, plus laws saying children must learn more of them, is the main problem with conservative public schools. As we’ve seen on a continuing basis, we Deweyan liberals say that education model is deeply flawed. It focuses more on training students to be corporate and military followers by having everyone passively obey their teachers and follow their orders. Such habits have been useful all during the Middle Ages, but they certainly have little use in our blossoming democratic world. As we’ve seen throughout these pages, that’s the fundamental weakness in conservative book-centered schools; they simply ignoring teaching individual students intelligent and healthy habits for living in a democratic system! When is the last time you used any idea from Shakespeare in daily life, or any algebraic or geometric fact? So, again, a fundamental conservative flaw still ignores teaching habits of democratic health and respecting different student learning needs! By now such ideas should be well implanted in the reader’s mind.
College graduation rates also reflect book-centered weaknesses. What percentages of the 30% who do go to college actually get a degree after 4 years? An article by Larry Gordon in Section 1 of the Los Angeles Times of 11-14-91 entitled Drop-Out Rate Unchanged, Study Finds cites some interesting numbers. Latinos, African Americans, and Anglos getting 4 or more years of college are roughly 9%, 11.8%, and 21.8% respectively. In other words, not only are about 70% of students not going to college, but of the 30% who do go, only about 1 in 5 white students actually graduate from college, and the number is much lower for Latinos and African-Americans. Are those results helping produce a well-rounded and healthy democratic citizenry with healthy character habits? Colleges mainly teach more academic trivia, much of which is also useless outside its ivy-covered walls, but which is very useful for bankers and universities who finance student loans and debt!
So, again, we Deweyan liberals continue asking this question: Is such a book-based learning model really the best one? As more evidence it’s not always the best model, I would please ask the reader to consider some of the actions of our 36th and our 40th presidents, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Academically, both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Clinton were very gifted students; they both could easily learn many academic facts and statistics, but does that skill alone automatically make them excellent presidents? Not always. Mr. Nixon was overly worried about the Democrats and Vietnam, and Mr. Clinton has said he regrets some of his decisions.
For us liberal Deweyans excellent intelligence means much more that knowing a lot of facts; it also means using one’s knowledge to make life better for as many people as possible is the most important result of all, rather for the benefit of a few. For those with political power that idea becomes even more important. It takes good judgment to see which actions will produce the best results for the most people, and judging by that idea of excellence both men made some serious mistakes. For one thing, probably in the quest to satisfy a few powerful corporate donors, Mr. Clinton helped end some very useful banking regulations which eventually helped produce the Great Recession of 2008, and from which millions of people still haven’t fully recovered 6 years later! He simply told people some useful laws weren't really needed any more, when in fact ending them helped set the stage for huge banks to create a very unstable housing market bubble which burst in 2007, thus helping increase our public debt by hundreds of billions of dollars! It was either that or see Great Depression 2 spread around the world!
And for us progressive liberals that’s certainly not the only mistake in judgment he made. I’ll just briefly mention a few results from his signing the business-friendly North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He told people it would help end illegal immigration from Mexico by creating more jobs there and thus helping keep their workers in country. In fact, however, the result was to put thousands of Mexican farm workers out of work who then joined violent drug gangs! Some 70,000 Mexicans may have been killed in their drug wars since then!
No doubt, both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Nixon helped improve life for millions of people in other ways, like reforming welfare, for example, and opening up China to the West, but the point is, merely academic knowledge doesn’t automatically make someone intelligent and excellent politicians or people, and the sooner students begin feeling that fact, the sooner they’ll be better able to elect better people to conduct the public’s business. Such ideas and feelings can begin growing in elementary schools by teaching students how to look at what results their ideas might produce, and then choose those aimed at helping the most people. Should we allow our leaders to mainly keep helping a small number of already obscenely wealthy people become even wealthier, or should we demand they do what’s best for as many people as possible, as Jeremy Bentham suggested in the 1800s?
The Well-Rounded Student
Well, what’s wrong with the conservative goal of producing so-called well-rounded students capable of solving their own problems? It certainly sounds like a worthy goal. Such people might say ‘well-rounded’ students know some basic academic facts about many different subjects, and thus have useful information for intelligently solve their own problems. After all, intelligent problem solving is a habit-art useful throughout life. However, for we liberals that goal becomes translated into the conservative book-oriented public schools we have today, and their results are much less than acceptable. After all, how strong can a problem-solving habit grow when students are given little practice using it with real life situations? How does merely learning more and more facts give students any real problem-solving skills for real life situations, like how to deal with controlling and abusive parents, bullying students, lack of friends or money, learning useful business or service skills, choosing intelligent and caring representatives, making basic repairs on their possessions, and a host of other real-life challenges operating throughout life? Clearly, despite the fine-sounding goals of conservative educators, there seems to be a huge disconnect between their words and the methods used to actually build such habits.
If book-work really was the best way for students to get prepared for solving real-world challenges, then why would we still have such serious social problems like gang-violence, crime, and unemployment, not to mention expensive government programs to prevent such actions? So, we liberals confidently ask: How can merely teaching students more English, history, math, and science facts make students better able to answer their own challenges intelligently? Don’t such great-sounding goals like becoming a well-rounded student need to be taught with more practical and active role-playing exercises, so as to best teach our 4 important habits of health? How can, say, useful business skills be taught, like how to cook healthy foods, keep honest accounting records, or how to dress and speak confidently and forcefully without actually practicing such skills? So again we say, ignoring such useful learning skills merely keeps students much less than well-rounded for life itself. In fact, during all such learning activities useful skills like reading and writing would be learned more naturally and less stressfully.
Healthy character habits would thus become much easier to feel and learn during such activities. Respect for others and our just laws are 2 such skills. For example, in our recently sexually integrated military it's estimated some 19,000 disrespectful and abusive sexual assaults occur every year, and yet over 80% of them go unreported. Why? The military system itself must work against spending their money on such trials and convictions! So, even if formal charges are brought to a commanding officer’s notice, it often dies there! With merely the signing of a paper unit commanders can even void any conviction they please, especially if it involves an officer! Such disrespectful and unjust actions are often justified in the name of maintaining unit cohesion and military discipline! (Truthdigger of the Week article, posted at Truthdig.com, 3-16-2013)
Clearly, then, we Deweyan liberals have a fundamental different between methods for building well-rounded, truthful, and justice-loving students. We say actually practicing such habits is a much better way of learning them, and the more they’re ignored, the more obnoxious and expensive corrective measures we’ll continue seeing in the adult world. No one really knows, for example, how many fewer civilian sexual assaults would happen on children and adults if students were trained from 1st grade to actually know what respect from themselves and others feels like, and what to do if they don’t get it from those around them? The challenge of building such well-rounded living skills will be much more deeply felt in liberal schools, where active practice compliments reading about such basic democratic habits of excellence. So, again, we can begin seeing why schools focusing more on actively teaching students such habits are much more useful to the growth of a democratic society, where every law-abiding person has equal opportunities and options. Why should any students be forced to accept any kind of disrespect from anyone, including parents and grandparents? Should we really believe democratic equal rights apply only to adults and not to children – the weakest and most vulnerable among us to psychological problems? Isn’t that what democratic and psychological health is all about, namely being free from such fear and allowed to keep learning what we want to learn? Shouldn’t such respect really be the bedrock habit of all healthy well-rounded education goals in every democracy, useful even in military organizations? As we’ve seen in World War 2, without such skills war becomes merely another way to justify brutality and murder of innocent people, as is happening even today with our so-called drone warfare.
By now, it should be obvious how our own public tax supported conservative schools are simply now respecting individual student learning needs under the NCLB law. Especially in our poor inner city schools, NCLB is simply not working to keep more kids in school, give them the useful skills to begin a career, and thus begin contributing to our nation’s economic growth and their well-being. For us liberal Deweyans, to become truly well-rounded in a democratic society all children need to actively learn more useful kinds of healthy habits, like economic business and character habits. Without being free to choose a career for themselves, and start feeling what excellent habits that choice demands, students will almost certainly remain emotionally disconnected for their schools, and thus graduate both physically and emotionally unready for many of life’s great opportunities.
In earlier sections I mentioned some results when schools insist on clinging to this idea of making all students academically well-rounded, rather than behaviorally well-rounded. Even Albert Einstein was psychologically abused in such German public schools. In second grade he was already so bored with other subjects besides math and science, his teacher told him he would never amount to anything! And, also in college, his educational needs stay focused on physics and mathematics; the rest of his classes aiming to build a well-rounded person really didn't interest him very much. Thank goodness he had his own questions to ask and answer, and so all but ignored other ones.
Within a few years after college, however, and with the help of his very intelligent but possessive wife Mileva, he built a better-working model of physics than Newton himself! He kept learning what he wanted to learn, eventually using new experimental evidence to change Newton’s basic assumptions about time, space, and matter being unchanging objects! What would nature act like if the only absolute were light's speed? What would life look like if one rode on a beam of light? What a question! Would light itself be bent as it comes close to planets and stars? Would time itself run differently in different places? Could gravity itself bend and warp space?
No doubt, most students are not Einstein, but how many students would become more productive citizens earlier if they too were allowed to define well-roundedness as learning what they wanted to learn, and study what they wanted? Even though he didn't read much poetry or literature, who would call Einstein educationally deprived? He knew his limits, and what else can we expect of educated people. But, he had the mental toughness and curiosity to keep asking questions about nature that interested him most, and the character toughness to keep trying to answer them. Eventually such questions led to our new modern relativity model of nature, where no unchanging objects exist and matter is merely another form of energy, not an eternal substance! In effect, he validated an always changing model of nature talked about by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, where no objects are unchanging and eternal; matter is continually being changed into energy in the stars, and when they explode they then create the heavier atoms of which we are all made, like carbon and oxygen! And of course Relativity Theory helped give Dewey the confidence to build a new liberal philosophic model of life, nature, and education based on experimental learning itself; what is there to conserve in an always changing nature, besides the excellent habit-art of intelligently experimenting to keep testing our improvement ideas?
According to the conservative goal of creating academically well-rounded students, Einstein failed, as must everyone else! Such academic facts are soon forgotten. It’s yet more evidence showing how narrow, limited, and artificial that goal was in German public schools, in existence since the 1500s! And by continuing to disrespect individual student needs and religious beliefs, they helped pave the way for Hitler’s brutally tragic Third Reich. Such results should be enough to show how crucially important liberal public schools are in every society. Without such schools, medieval habits and feudalistic organizations will almost certainly continue on; at least that’s my prediction.
Thus, for us liberal Deweyans, we focus on building useful habit-arts centered on body-mind health in a democratic society. We say knowing more about how the human body actually works, including intelligent diet and exercise habits and psychological habits of enjoying the learning process itself, are behavioral skills no mere book can teach anyone! True knowledge about them can only be learned from actively practicing them. Also important are building economic and democratic kinds of healthy habits, so children can more intelligently make their way through our capitalist and democratic systems with less stress and more confidence.
In fact, feudalistic conservatives have felt the danger of such schools even in the 1950s. As mentioned earlier, they actually asked Republican President Eisenhower to denounce Dewey by name and his education model as well. And why else would conservatives have passed NCLB and Common Core Standards laws? Such events alone should be enough evidence and motivation for liberal parents, students, and teachers everywhere to keep working and building such schools in their own neighborhoods as soon as possible. No other institution can do more to ensure the continued growth and spread of democratic habits than such schools. Without them it’s much easier for greedy conservatives to keep control of our economic, political, and educational systems.
Conservative schools may thus remind people of Mark Twain’s famous comment: I never let school get in the way of my education! It’s a witty and ironic observation, but in another way it’s depressing too! Why should anyone allow our tax-supported public schools to keep getting in the way of a child’s education? Ignoring that situation merely continues weakening our democratic society? Why should taxpayers keep seeing their children educated in conservative schools, hoping what the next generation merely reads will somehow teach them what an educated person acts like? Won't having more fun learning what they want to learn help lower our drug abuse problems, and a host of other unhealthful habits like violence and disrespect? Because our public schools are PUBLIC institutions, shouldn't they be helping educate everyone with active experimentation and role-playing? Shouldn’t such schools help build more educated students who know what excellent character habits actually feel like, and the useful results they often produce? The more they don't, the more we all pay for such unintelligent results in higher taxes for more government programs! Isn’t such logic wonderful, for both true conservatives and liberals? No doubt, Twain himself would probably agree.
Wealthy Folks and Our Conservative Schools
Wealthy folks have more economic power and thus more tools for adjusting to an ever-changing world; money gives them the power to hire more intelligent advisers, and thus learn more useful skills and make more intelligent decisions. One example is the recent increase in preschool attendance. Such schools help their children become more comfortable in our conservative book-oriented schools, where such knowledge remains central. Just recently, for example, a Stanford University education professor, Sean F. Reardon, published an article in the NY Times, on 4-29-2013, called No Rich Child Left Behind. In it he described how the difference between rich and poor student test scores is growing larger and larger in the past few decades. Since Republican Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981-1989) the rich have become richer, while our poor and middle class incomes have remained rather stagnant. As mentioned earlier, some 90% of income growth has become controlled by the top 1%. As a result, wealthy folks have been better able to spend more money on private preschool training when children are taught even before they go to kindergarten such book knowledge is best. Thus those children are better prepared to work in our conservative book-dominated schools, and thus get better grades all through school. It’s called preschool enrichment, and for which the federal Head Start program was designed to help less well-off students get such training.
Lately, however, conservative Democrats and Republicans have cut back government spending, and so poorer children often aren’t as well prepared for book-learning as are kids from wealthier families! So, it becomes easier for them to get into and pay for a college education, meet more people with similar money-making habits, and continue dominating our economic and political systems. “Money,” writes Professor Reardon, “helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and ... access to preschool test preparation tutors ...” But then he also says, “It’s not clear what we should do about all this. ... improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children. ... Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper and lower income families.” No doubt, because children are so eager to please their parents, those who expect their children to be successful in school help motivate children to actually be successful. It’s another example of adjusting to our conservative education system. Such events show us more clearly why some 70% of kids don’t go to college after high school.
However, we Deweyan liberals don’t hesitate to mention again at least 6 weaknesses in building such book-oriented preschools. For one thing, such enrichment affects only a small number of children, thus continues supporting class differences; 2, it reduces democratic equal opportunities for everyone; 3, our democracy itself remains weak and unequal, instead of becoming stronger and fairer for everyone; 4, perhaps worst of all, even if such “cognitive enrichment” programs were available to poor students, it would do little to build much more useful and important character habits of excellence – what some have called one’s survival kit; 5, it would thus continue making our schools a kind of academic rat race, where students stay focused on high grades, rather than helping build more intelligent, kind, respectful, and caring habits, honoring just laws and equal rights for all; and 6, even if the government were to help more preschoolers, it probably would do little for that 70% majority of students who want to get out into life and start earning some money.
In short, for us Deweyan liberals, we need better schools, not merely better preschools where students are conditioned to keep passively accepting a conservative learning model. Building more liberal schools is the main challenge for us democrats, not preschool opportunities for all.
Hopeful Signs
As the last few elections tell us, these days liberalism is far from dead; it’s still very much alive and growing stronger in many places, like California and more recently in New York with now a very liberal mayor. The Working People’s Party is another small example of that growth. The liberal challenge, then, is simply to keep such reform habits growing, especially in our public schools. In a recent article by one of American’s most respected liberals at the Nation Magazine, Katrina vanden Heuvel describes in a Washington Post editorial on 4-30-2013 some of the weaknesses of standardized testing. She writes,
“It’s no wonder that parents, educators, and students are spearheading a small but growing revolution to opt out of standardized tests. ... more and more students across the country are boycotting tests that many say are increasing stress, narrowing curriculum and, at worst, leading to the kind of cheating exposed in the recent Atlanta Public Schools scandal.
... how can students be tested on material they haven’t learned?
...it’s time to pay attention to the parents who are standing up for their kids by walking out of testing centers. And it’s time to invest our efforts and resources into what really matters – teachers teaching and students learning.”
All well and good, as far as generalities like ‘teachers teaching and students learning’ go. The obvious question, however, is what should teachers be teaching and students learning? Unfortunately Ms. vanden Heuvel leaves that most important question unanswered. In fact, where she leaves off, this book begins. The question leads us liberals to the topic of body-mind health itself and active kinds of experimental learning.
As we’ll see in the following 4 sections, the following question will be answered in more detail. How can teachers keep teaching more about physical, psychological, economic, and democratic health, and how can students best learn such excellence habit-arts? So, once again, only democratic might can make more liberal schools right. And the more they make that choice, the easier it becomes to start teaching and learning such skills. Among other things, they teach students how to intelligently judge people, by their actions and their results, rather than by their looks or what sexual tribe they belong to. It’s a very important part of democratic health.
Psychologically healthy habits of judging others by their actions are most important in a democracy. Without the habit of holding people accountable for their disrespectful actions, either to others or our just laws, and also teaching them more intelligent kinds of skills, too many students simply keep thinking they can do whatever they want whenever they want. And the more that happens, the more afraid people will be to speak up and demand they make amends and learn better habits! Confidence and self-esteem feelings are already rather weak in many children, and unless strengthened they will continue weakening the very moral fiber of our nation. In liberal schools, however, such psychologically healthy habits are an important part of the learning process from 1st grade on! They’re a sign of both personal and democratic health.
The following 4 sections, then, will help parents, students, and teachers know about more intelligent options for what to teach, and what to learn. They will also empower more people with ideas to test their own neighborhood schools, and see what they’re already doing here and now; they give people more power and confidence to ask local principals what their basic philosophy of education is, and how much it relies on book-work and teacher-given assignments. Then, with such knowledge, they can start making plans together to make teaching more enjoyable, and learning more relevant in today’s capitalist and democratic society, one grade at a time! Such a slow and small baby-step approach to school improvement is essential; it allows both teachers and students to learn different educational habits more naturally and less stressfully.
36. REALITY SCHOOLS: BIOLOGICAL HEALTH
A Liberal School Weakness?
Thus we come to the first of 4 skills upon which liberal schools can be built, skills which are best learned with active and intelligent kinds of experimentation. For better or worse, nature has encouraged we humans to grow two very useful skills. One skill is food processing; it’s very efficient for most people. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of the food we eat is turned into useful bodily energy. Compare that number with the energy efficiency of a steam engine, which is only about 7%, and you get some feeling for how efficiently we can liberate food energy for practical uses, or for excessive purposes too, like becoming overweight. So, the more we neglect teaching such facts and healthful eating skills to the next generation, the more their lives are endangered by abusing the marvelous food processing skills we have. In fact, in the US obesity is becoming a serious personal and social problem for millions of people. And then the second skill is knowledge processing. No other animal at the earth has ever been better at learning and using knowledge and facts than we humans.
Obviously those 2 skills are always interacting on a biological level, but for descriptive purposes they’ll be divided into 2 different sections, this one focusing on biological health, and the next on liberal psychological health – on what knowledge is useful and how it is best used.
However, before looking at some of Dewey’s reasons for replacing the book-centered conservative learning model with practical kinds of experimentation, we’ll first look briefly at what some may see as a weakness with his liberal educational model.
In Democracy and Education, for example, it seems Dewey really didn’t want to suggest any kind of study importance, not even biological, psychological, economic, or political health. He wrote:
“…We cannot establish a hierarchy of values among studies. … every study in one of its aspects ought to have just such ultimate significance. … poetry … ought to be a good appreciated on its own account ... the attempt to distribute distinct sorts of value among different studies is a misguided one ... any education (lacking) poetry … has something the matter with it...” (248)
Such thoughts seem to follow when students become free to choose what they want to learn more about. So, did Dewey, in fact, reach that conclusion, and if so, then shouldn’t we also reject teaching any specific studies, even the 4 health studies mentioned? Is that what he meant by saying there should be no hierarchy of values among studies? And if so, then shouldn’t all liberal schools look like the Summerhill model, where students can learn anything they want? Or did he mean students should also learn some skills while learning what they want?
Here, the second idea is taken to be his meaning. No doubt, every experience creates raw poetic feelings. Even Einstein, for example, could have expressed many of his ideas poetically, if he had wanted to. In fact, poetic feelings can be felt even in those students working to make their school grounds more beautiful: Solar energies keep dancing and warmly embracing people and plants alike, in a kind of cosmic symphony. In fact, such poetic feelings were expressed by Plato’s main philosophic inspiration, the great mathematician Pythagoras.
Obviously, the more such poetic feelings are felt and written about, the more powerful a poetry-writing habit becomes, and they’re still useful as well. As older people know, many of the songs they grew up with and sang in the shower often keep popping into their heads; they’re really simple poems. So, again, why say such habits shouldn’t be learned, or any entertainment habit for that matter, if, of course, students want to learn them? After all, some poems can help build a very well-paying career, and thus become another great way to help those less well off than ourselves. Even greeting cards express poetic feelings. They’re so popular in Los Angeles an entire high school has been built for them.
No doubt, because such skills are excellent low-stress ways to make good money, Dewey might be the last person to say students shouldn’t be free to learn more about them. However, what he would object to is forcing everyone to study them at the same time! For him, the whole conservative model of group learning is disrespectful of democratic freedoms, rights, and feelings. Why shouldn’t schools honor the same kinds of freedom practiced in the real world, where people have the freedom to learn different skills at different times? No doubt, some students might have an urgent need to express their feelings poetically, but most don't. Thus, to make all children practice such skills makes children academic slaves, rather than respected members of a democratic society. How can any healthy democracy based on equal rights continue blooming unless such freedoms are respected in schools, homes, governments, and religious organizations? What’s more, Dewey mentions some definite habits schools should aim at teaching, like 1. managing resources and overcoming problems intelligently with experimental testing; 2. interacting respectfully with others; 3. knowing something about artistic excellence; and 4. intelligent character development. Such ideas I’ve simply renamed here as different forms of health. Number 1 is what I mean here by economic health; number 2 by psychological health; number 3 by constructive experimental health; and number 4 by character or physical health.
Testing 1, 2, 3, Testing, Testing
In the late 1890s, at the Lab School he built at the University of Chicago, Dewey began experimenting with how best to improve 5 basic weaknesses he saw in the conservative learning model. For him such schools
1. isolate school learning from home learning;
2. reduce a child's learning to mere book-ideas about art, history, math, science, and any other subject;
3. ignore experimental testing skills;
4. ignore helping students expand their awareness of what’s going on here and now, and, of course,
5. ignore democratic character development.
As we’ve seen, the ability to concentrate and focus one’s attention on current events is a democratic skill important all through life. Without it, it becomes that much easier for those with economic power to continue controlling political power. Also, without more active kinds of learning projects, many students resort to mindless daydreaming and sometimes disruptive activities. No doubt, similar arguments could be made against the other conservative weaknesses as well. For those interested in reading more about his educational plan for elementary students please read his The School and Society’s Postscript. And for those who want more information about his use of occupational studies and experimental learning, see Chapter 6 in the same book.
So, the Lab School challenge became creating a program where all such weaknesses were strengthened, and learning became not only more natural, but more intelligent and socially thoughtful as well. With science’s experimental testing art he found his best weapon against all such conservative weaknesses, and thus simply replaced a passive book-learning model with the consciously intelligent use of experimental learning! With it students would first feel a challenge or goal, create a plan to achieve it, and finally start actively testing the plan to see its results. In essence, that was the new definition of intelligence modern science had been practicing for about 300 years before the Lab School was even built. Thus, intelligent experimental learning was put at the core of liberal schools, simply because it’s the most powerful learning art in an always changing world, whether it’s used to learn more about law enforcement, medical science, computer work, or construction skills.
For Dewey, such intelligent experimentation was the only skill anyone could practice in an always changing nature. It thus made all a life a series of experiments to test ideas. Earlier we saw how even conservative Plato and moderate Aristotle too kept experimenting with different ideas to solve the problems they discovered in their work, and thus learn nature’s truth. That was their ultimate goal. Especially Plato’s early dialogues show how Socrates too practiced an experimental learning art. He would ask someone to define an idea, examine it for its results, find it wasn’t logical, and then call for another idea to be tested. Many of their writings we have today are the more or less finished product of their thinking experiments all through life!
Aristotle, for example, saw the many problems created by Plato when he assumed nature is really a dualism of both spirits and matter. That one assumption alone created unsolvable problems, as Plato himself discovered as he examined the results of that dualistic assumption, and so he too kept experimenting with different ideas to avoid those problems. For example, how can we ever know anything about spirits if they’re totally non-physical and all our knowledge depends on sense-experience? As a result, he too kept experimenting with different ideas. Soon after Plato died, however, Aristotle simply began experimenting with a different assumption about nature, namely eternal Forms were material, not spiritual. The result is the Aristotelian system we have today, where eternal and unchanging Form-objects are embedded within natural objects, not in a completely different spirit-realm, thus allowed eternal Truth to be known.
Thus, Dewey had some very good reasons for assuming all learning must be experimental in an always-changing nature. If so, then why not teach students how to intelligently use the art of experimental testing to solve their own learning challenges and reach their own personal goals? Even though a book might suggest solutions, they still needed to be tested, and their results seen. Such reasoning seemed completely logical. Thus, helping students CONSCIOUSLY feel what intelligent experimental testing is like should be the basic aim of all public schools! To ignore it merely kept students immature and unready for life.
What’s more, as students exercised their freedom to learn what they wanted, they could also learn other kinds of healthful habits useful in a democratic society, like personal, psychological, economic, and political habits. In such schools they would, for example, begin learning healthy psychological ideas like how to best keep improving all their own personal weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. The active habit-art of experimental testing would help teach all such healthy habit-arts if they were actively practiced. It would also empower students to keep improving both their social weaknesses too, like unlawful discrimination and unintelligent greed.
So, whether we like it or not, experimental testing is really our only learning art, but students should also be taught how to use it intelligently to keep improving life itself. Thus, the teaching challenge for our public schools became first telling students about that learning art, and then actively practicing it to help students start feeling how it can be used to achieve their goals. Better to be consciously intelligent rather than subconsciously unintelligent, right?
Dewey’s also mentions the following thoughts about experimental learning:
1. Only experimental learning can best build any form of excellent habit-art. After feeling a weak, excessive, or unhealthful weakness, only active experimental testing can allow students to feel in their entire body-mind what an improvement is like! And best of all, experimental testing is a habit-art useful on both personal and social levels, to improve any personal or social weakness! The educational challenge is thus to first challenge students with models of excellence, in, for example, law enforcement and medicine, and then show how students can start learning such skills experimentally. With such experiences students can begin learning other important skills, like intelligent question-asking, creative thinking and planning, and active testing.
2. Only active, sense-based, and organic experimental testing has the power and vibrancy to best overcome both teacher and student boredom – a major weakness of book-centered schools. Only intelligent experimentation makes learning an active adventure in discovery. When consciously practiced outside of school, experimental learning helps keep students intelligently connected to themselves and their communities, and inside schools it helps students keep enjoying learning’s surprises and drama. Anyone who’s noticed how children’s playground equipment and our many electronic gadgets have evolved over the years, can see how continual experimental improvement has become a most valuable modern habit-art. Such creative habits best begin growing only with intelligent experimentation and testing.
3. Encouraging students to use an intelligent experimental testing art best breaks down the artificial barriers between learning in school and outside it. After all, experimentation goes on outside of school on a daily basis. However, active and intelligently creative experimental testing in school helps make students act more intelligently outside of school. It helps them ask intelligent questions, make better plans, and test their ideas more carefully. It also encourages students to speak up about their own feelings and frustrations, thus bringing those important skills to a conscious level of awareness and attention! It also gives them a more realistic feeling for learning any new habit with a series of baby-steps, as well as a deeper respect for habits themselves. It also gives students the best learning tool to make their own lives less frustrating and unhealthful.
In that process students will not only become more sensitive to feeling frustrations, but also for ways of reducing them as well. After feeling, say, a parent is frustrating them, then, instead of merely accepting the situation, the next step is to make a plan to improve the situation, and then experimentally testing the plan. It not only promotes our most reliable and excellent learning skills, but also energizes and empowers students to take a more consciously intelligent control of their own lives, as well as feel more confident about helping others who are frustrated, and thus begin expanding their social consciousness as well.
In short, with continued use, the intelligent habit-art of constructive and creative experimentation will help build confidence in young folks, and not only for students but for teachers as well! It helps make both learning and teaching a more enjoyable and more natural adventure, rather than merely another boring book assignment to read and grade. No doubt, personal problems will be discovered, like wanting to learn different things at different times, but isn’t learning to help each other what people in a healthy democracy practice? Isn’t that how building individual habits of respect best keep growing?
4. Finally, only intelligent experimental learning habit-arts BEST fuse and unite what conservative learning models separate: mental learning from physical testing. All through life the body is never separated from the mind, and yet book-centered schools keep encouraging such feelings. Such an artificial separation of body from mind was celebrated by both conservative Plato and even moderate Aristotle in their psychology models. And, those kinds of body-mind separation lived all through the Middle Ages, as people continued believing merely their ideas about Spirit-Objects came from a spiritual mind-soul completely different from the body. In fact, such a separation continues living at the foundation of many different religions today; without it there's no justification for any idea about an afterlife or for any religious ritual. In short, experimental learning restores the unnatural separation of body and mind to a holistic idea of body-mind. For us Deweyan liberals, the more people are liberated from such a separation, the freer they become to start consciously using experimental testing to keep changing our feudalistic authoritarian world into a more peaceful and creative democratic one.
In fact, all forms of body and mind separation are based merely on assumptions having no objective evidence. History teaches us it’s been used for thousands of years to produce 2 very unhealthful results: 1. It convinced people a better life could be theirs after death, and 2. It also justified religious leaders’ demands for obedience to them. With those 2 results, most of history has unfolded, with all its religious warfare, disease, pain, suffering, and ignorance.
With the growth of democracy and science since 1600, both those ideas and habits have become much weaker and more questionable. We liberals, therefore, continue encouraging liberation from both those kinds of habits, especially in our public schools today. Our Constitution Framers also knew how dangerous it was for the government to encourage such a separation of body and mind, enshrined as it is in the First Amendment. To us democratic liberals who now accept experimental learning as our only method of learning, we celebrate the union of body and mind in our liberal schools. With it is based all our ideas of humanity being part of the same species, and thus sharing a true kinship and respect. The whole history of creative experimentation, dating back to the first stone toolmaker over 2 million years ago, is why we see separating body from mind in any way is artificial and less than excellent! Our best knowledge -- experimental knowledge -- requires both intelligently creative ideas and physical testing.
For us liberals, then, the best cure for student boredom and disruptive antics is the use of experimental kinds of learning what students themselves choose to learn. Learning about, say, democratic equal rights, habits of tolerance, and respect for personal differences, as well as building useful employment skills, should be just as actively experimental as learning about history, poetry, math, and science! For us Deweyan liberals, that’s the best educational antidote to all such conservative weaknesses. For example, it’s one thing to know about clothing and fashions of long ago, but it's another thing altogether to actually allow students of fashion to actually make such clothes. If nothing else, such experimental learning helps build healthier feelings of humility about our own ideas, and also confidence about how to make their ideas more satisfying.
Perhaps best of all, however, with experimental testing skills students will be better able to answer one of philosophy’s greatest questions: What is truth? Experimental testing helps students feel people know some truths when they can use them to actually build a model of those ideas. In short, students best know the truth about ancient clothing when they can actually make those clothes! And by extension, they can best know about physical, psychological, economic, and political health only as they actually practice such skills! It’s been a liberal pragmatic definition of truth for thousands of years already. So, why shouldn't even 1st graders begin hearing the words 'experimental learning' on a daily basis, no matter what they want to study and learn about? It's one thing to merely talk and think about beautifying a schoolroom with flowers, but such ideas BECOME truth only after such flowers are grown. Likewise, the ideas of a healthy meal or democratic respect BECOME true only as they’re practiced.
Three Basic Stages of Child Development
OK, so a group of people decide to build a liberal school, where active experimentation is practiced on a daily basis. Where can they start? Well, echoing some earlier thoughts, they might want to review some basic ideas of child development itself. As we saw earlier, those ideas began growing on a formal level early in our modern era, in France during the 1700s. So, to help see what activities liberal schools can use to make learning easier, we can briefly mention those 3 main stages again, and some activities for each stage.
The Early Stage: 5-8
Until about 8 years of age Dewey said kids keep learning more about their world mainly with their senses; they keep feeling, smelling, and tasting of the world around them. So, at this stage of development it’s best to focus on sense-based activities, like, for example, eating healthful foods and exercising activities; to say the least, such skills are very important all through life. Cooking skills too can be easily taught at this early stage, helping strengthen their ideas about healthy foods and also their creative skills for making bland foods like vegetables taste better. At this early stage of development it also becomes easier to start learning more about the world around them, with its plants and pet animals as well. Merely learning how to train them with food rewards to learn new habits and skills also begins laying the foundation for psychological health as well, which we’ll see more of in the following section. After all, we humans are animals too and thus can learn new skills with the help of rewards the same way animals learn new skills. It also increases respect for animals, something many ill-educated children don’t have.
Also, even 1st graders can start talking about what they think are healthy foods, and then comparing them to what others have discovered are more nutritious foods to eat. That way 2 other very important skills continue growing, namely good talking and listening skills. Students can even be encouraged to start drawing their own diet and exercise books while using their visual and hand-eye coordination skills. Sense-based active and intelligent cooking arts can also begin teaching the all-important experimental learning skill, and begin building important feelings about their own bodies and their organs, tissues, and bones. How do we best keep all those parts of us healthy? Thus physical health skills begin growing as well. Such active kinds of sense-based learning in the first 3 years of school will then help build some important subconscious feelings for more abstract chemistry studies latter on at the 3rd level of development, the abstract mental level. In fact, all through schools they can continue learning more about what chemicals like vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates help keep their body-minds healthy, and why.
If such sense-based learning is useful all through life, both in and outside of school, if they help build more excellent healthy habits, and if actively experimenting with them helps make school more enjoyable, informative, and interesting, then why shouldn’t even kindergarten children have the freedom to begin learning about such skills? Because younger students are sense-oriented, they can begin learning about such ideas by, for example, seeing and feeling plastic models of both men and women, and perhaps even working to build their own models as well. They can begin sensing what different internal organs feel and look like, how they’re arranged inside their bodies, what their names sound like, and how they help people live better.
Perhaps best of all, such useful bodily facts will not only start increasing student respect for everyone’s body and physical health, thus keep growing their important social consciousness as well. The magnificent organs in their own body are in everyone’s body, and thus everyone becomes more amazing and awesome! From there, then, so many other important health facts can keep growing all through their school years. Such sense-based learning can begin opening up other important ideas, like biology, evolution, and anthropology. They can be asked questions like how did life begin, what did our early earth look like, how did those organs evolve, and how many millions of years has this process been going on? All such questions set the stage for their more abstract academic work in high school.
Also, to keep increasing their feelings of respect, they can also be asked how all those organs work together as a very complex chemical machine, completely in the dark! Such questions begin creating a sensitivity to chemical structure. Feelings for comparative anatomy too can begin growing while they’re learning how to become intelligent lawyers, doctors, engineers, carpenters, computer programmers, and plumbers. How do their own organs compare to, say, their pet animals, or wild animals? Why, for example, are lion and tiger intestines much shorter than human intestines? Does it have something to do with their meat diet? What does a liver look like and where does it fit in the human body? What does it do? What kinds of flowers smell and look best, and how are they best grown? What kinds of trees are best for planting in their neighborhoods? What kinds of healthy vegetables and fruits smell and taste best, and what chemicals best makes them grow?
Also, healthy character and economic skills can begin growing as well. What's the best way to help other people build healthy habits? What does cooking do to some foods? How can we build a community garden, how much would it cost, and what are some good ways of raising money to build them? What kinds of plants are best for preserving physical health? And what kinds of exercises are best to practice and perhaps teach to retired folks? All such sense-based skills, knowledge, and character habits can start growing in the first 3 years at liberal schools. With the dissolution of multi-generational families living in one house, it’s become more of a challenge to teach young folks about some elderly challenges, like obesity, diet, and dental care.
Not only are such practical physical health habits and skills useful throughout life for athletes, scholars, workers, homemakers, and everyone, but they also form a more solid mental basis for more abstract studies in high school and college, and not only for future doctors and nurses.
Learning such sense-based practical health skills can easily fill a child’s first few years at school, and as they do they can also help build feelings for other kinds of health, like psychological, economic, and political. Why shouldn’t teachers be trained to tell 1st graders they will continue learning more about their own bodies until they graduate high school, so they’ll become as healthy as they want to make themselves? Psychologists tell us many students often have a tough time adjusting to all the physical changes they’ll go through before they graduate; early maturing girls and late maturing boys especially seem to have adjustment and self-image challenges. Needless to say, focusing on physical health all through these years will help prepare students for such changes, and the new feelings they might cause.
Also, young students can start learning how to sense when someone needs some help overcoming their challenges, and thus start building their sense of social helpfulness; it’s yet another very useful habit to us liberal Deweyans. All such sense-based activities can begin growing and becoming stronger with active practice until students are around 8 years old.
Even in kindergarten children can keep using all their senses to learn more about plants and their importance; some are useful and some are dangerous. Thus, their awareness of life’s dangers continues growing. With the help of actively growing plants experimentally they can begin feeling some elementary biological facts about a very important life form; without plants no people could live for very long. They can begin feeling how their own bodies are dependent on plants for all their food. After all, all meat products are really second rate plant food! And the more simpler forms of life are studied, the easier it is to feel how organic life has evolved over billions of years of natural trial-and-error. In that way children can continue feeling more of life's amazingly great depth, variety, complexity, and majesty. After all, for many billions of miles around our planet, no other heavenly objects can make a better home than our earth, and so learning how to take good care of it becomes yet another useful feeling growing in young students where sense-based projects are the center of attention.
No doubt, some students would want to know more, and so would be motivated to teach themselves how to read and write as well. Reading to young students about our great biological history, and encouraging them to find and grow present-day models of that history also builds useful skills. After all, fern plants have been growing for hundreds of millions of years. Such activities are a great way to keep increasing the desire to learn more about our earth, their own bodies, and physical health, as well as feel more comfortable in nature itself. For thousands of years people were taught to feel our natural world was full of evil spirits and devils. Such feelings are no longer considered wise or acceptable.
Normally children love to be redd to and no doubt such books about their own bodies would help increase their interest in reading. How do their bodies work? What was life like for dinosaurs and fishes? Dental health too can become a much more important study; after all, having 32 teeth is really having 32 chances to die from one abscessed tooth, and even many parents are still grossly undereducated about dental health. What happens in our mouths only 20 minutes after eating a sugary and fatty piece of chocolate cake, or a huge hamburger or steak? What happens in our bodies after eating such food? How quickly do harmful teeth-destroying bacteria begin growing if we don’t clean them right after eating such foods? What does it feel like to intelligently clean one's teeth? What does it feel like to exercise intelligently? How can someone best learn to run a mile within 10 minutes; all at once, or in small steps? What’s the best way to begin learning how it’s done? There are indeed so many different healthy skills to experiment with and actively feel, even in the lower primary grades. The more we ignore such skills, the more we only hamper our children and our nation. As war keeps teaching us, immaturity and ignorance is harmful to both personal and social health.
The Middle Stage: 8-14
Then, from 8 to 14 children seem to go through a constructive period in their lives. As their bodies continue growing they want to learn how to use tools to build and repair things, and so it becomes a great opportunities to continue using their senses for learning more about life with beautification and repair projects, both in school and the real world. For us practical liberals, the sooner children feel they can help make their world a more useful and beautiful place to live, they begin feeling the world is theirs for intelligently improving. Thus, not only physical health continues growing with active kinds of tool use, but also psychological feelings of health continue growing as well. Also, with such active building projects, they’re continue learning more about what’s going on in their own neighborhoods and cities, and thus keep expanding their feelings for how important psychological, economic, and political health is for everyone’s benefit.
Such knowledge and skills are physically empowering, rather than just abstract book knowledge. Physical health remains an important topic at this stage of development, as it does all through life, but learning such constructive skills and knowledge teaches students how to preserve their health while they work. After all, we all have our limits for physical work, and the sooner they’re learned, the better off students will be. Some students are morning people, and work best at that time of day; others work best later in the day.
Obviously, all through life we are all biological creatures; even conservatives admit that. The challenge, then, is to build public schools celebrating physical health while students continue learning constructive kinds of skills all through the system. Why shouldn’t even blindfolded 3rd graders be able to take human internal organs out of a model, feel and identify them, and then reassemble them?! And why shouldn't 5th graders be able to say what each basically does, and what foods are best for them, like vitamin A being good for the liver and eyesight, and vitamin C useful for fighting colds, flus, and other harmful infections? Such active experimental projects help make taking tests about useful ideas also too easy to pass. How else can we expect students to practice physical health in adulthood when they have almost no intelligent cooking and eating skills?
Even in ancient Greece a similar educational ideal was chiseled into their most sacred shrine at Delphi: Know Yourself; its twin saying was Nothing in Excess! Aristotle took such advice so seriously, and was so loyal to moderation, it became the foundation for both his ethical and political ideas. Without such moderation many of our daily actions are left without a rudder for growth and guidance, and without experimental intelligence, such ideas become much more difficult to practice. Dewey’s, however, was much more loyal to the democratic public good, an ideal both Plato and Aristotle rejected as the foundation for healthy political habits; both said slavery was ok and even completely natural.
I remember my mother helping me build a soap-box racer when I was about 11; it was a great learning experience about intelligent building, and how to use books as tools, rather than as ends in themselves. We first went to the library, got a book about plans for soap-box racers, then bought some wood and I built one. Not only was it a great confidence builder for me, and increased my respect for and skills with tools, but it also taught me another important life lesson: cars are often much more trouble than they’re worth! Pushing that heavy wooden car around the neighborhood was much more work than I thought! It took a while but about 30 years ago I finally simplified my life and learned to live without one! Even in Los Angeles I don't miss having a car at all; after all, walking, buses, and trains are much safer ways to get around, much less expensive, more respectful to our planet and other people, and allow me to spend money on more important things, like helping others less well off. So, building that racer helped me feel what intelligent experimental learning is like, and how to use book-ideas intelligently to help reach some personal goal I set for myself, rather than merely reading more and more books about soapbox racing. Needless to say, tying the use of books to a building project has been useful for building all the books I’ve written so far.
All such healthful and constructive work-skills during this period can become more easily learned merely because children are naturally ready to learn them. And, such physical healthy skills can keep growing all through high school, even for those going on to college. What college kid doesn’t need to fix their car from time to time? Such skills also encourage young students to keep asking good questions and thus thinking more logically about their work. Thus they keep confidence alive and growing, and knowledge, and also helps make school even more enjoyable and better connected to the real world. The more they are, the more they learn about our current social challenges, like population control, and how zoos may become just about the only places left for many animal species.
Then, as students are encouraged to stand and tell other students about their own experimental construction projects, they’ll continue building more confidence about a very important democratic form of health – sharing their feelings and ideas. Such feelings are at the very foundation of a healthy democracy, where everyone’s equal rights and opportunities are a part of everyday life, and if they’re not, then working to see they are. In ancient Greece, for example, both democracy and good speaking evolved also together. As we'll see in the next section, our huge and powerful corporations often work to minimize knowledge about the harmful and destructive results of their work, and so keep making life more dangerous and precarious for everyone. Big tobacco, drug, and oil corporations come easily to mind, not to mention greedy banks and insurance companies.
Also, with active constructive learning projects both in and outside of schools between 8 and 14 years old, for both girls and boys, students can find it easier to begin learning more about building an excellent work habit-art, another habit useful throughout life. What’s the easiest way to saw a board, drill a hole, fix a car, or make a meal? What else besides actually working on such projects can teach how to work without unnecessary muscle tension? How important is spinal posture with such work. How can life itself become less frustrating and more enjoyable without such healthful constructive skills and knowledge? At the middle stage of development, students shouldn’t just be left to work routinely, but intelligently with teachers and older parents or student mentors helping students learn what intelligent work feels like. It’ll also make athletic exercising easier and more rewarding as well; isn’t that too another kind of work?
Are such healthy physical work habits really necessary? Well, how much useless muscular tension do you carry around on a daily basis? How much during the day do you feel tense, frustrated, and even angry? Don’t such feelings really reflect on-going physical tensions? How many people do you see trying to stretch out their irritating and tense shoulder and neck muscles while they work? How often have you seen bus drivers or cashiers trying to shake such stressful tensions out of their neck and shoulder muscles while they're working or even sitting quietly? Wouldn't all such painful tensions be lessened if children learned first how to feel them as they’re working, and then also how to relax them too? How many people today are really damaging their physical health by relying on harmful relaxing drugs like alcohol, prescription drugs, coffee, and tobacco, not to mention illegal drugs? Even athletic exercise itself can feel much more rewarding when people learn how to work without stressful tensions. I, for one, began feeling how to relax while jogging, and it eventually helped open up an entirely new way of practicing all my daily routines. How many times have you noticed how tense and impatient you felt merely standing at a corner waiting for the light to change, and yet didn’t know how to simply relax and let go of it? No doubt, learning to work with a minimum of useless stress and tension takes some time, but then again, what useful habit doesn’t take time to learn?
The point is, by focusing on learning such intelligent building and work habits in our public elementary schools will be useful all through life, whether in college or the business community. Such healthy physical skills help make life feel more livable and enjoyable, less stressful, more serene, and more productive.
Again, there's nothing really new in such ideas, but there is something new in saying our public tax-supported schools should be teaching such healthy skills, knowledge, and character habits on a formal basis beginning at the elementary level. As we saw earlier, Jesus too probably began building his carpentry skills before his teenage years, but today, however, such healthy projects for pre-teens have become almost non-existent in our public schools. To us liberals, ignoring such skills is not only a big mistake, but it helps make schools less than enjoyable places to be. And the more that happens, the more learning itself become a chore.
Will such schools be difficult and costly to build? Perhaps at first many adult supervisors will be needed to better tell students about such ideas. But after a while older student-mentors studying to be teachers and craftspeople can help younger students learn how to intelligently work with constructive tools, boys and girls included. Why shouldn’t girls too learn to work as intelligently as boys? Equality is another sign of political health. Knowing how to make elementary repairs to cars, homes, and offices increases confident feelings for solving larger challenges. Too many people today are convinced such skills shouldn’t be taught to all students; they’re often afraid their children won’t learn all the book-facts they feel they should learn to become doctors and lawyers and engineers! Such people often continue thinking high standardized test scores really mean educational excellence. But in liberal schools based on health and practical learning, young doctors and lawyers can start practicing such skills even before they graduate high school, as can carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.
We liberals say such healthy kinds of constructive experimental work help produce much better results than book-centered work. They help students feel what democratic equality feels like. So, we say students should begin feeling what intelligent constructive and relaxed work-habits feel like. I mentioned earlier how Behaviorism's founder, Dr. John Watson, taught himself to build an entire house by the time he was 18! Such building skills helped him feel confident for other challenges as well. Eventually he went to college, learned how to write well, and built a new Behavioral version of human psychology. Dewey's version was called Functional Behaviorism, but both needed habits of organization, confidence, and thoroughness to complete the work.
In short, the better students learn to work intelligently in school, the more they feel what healthy work is like. Therefore, we liberals say caring and helpful parents, teachers, and church leaders too can help strengthen such constructive habit-arts at school, home, and church. After all, most children naturally want to please adults and get their approval more than anything else, and so learning healthy constructive habits becomes much easier when those outside of school also encourage such work. Both high drop-out rates from conservative book-dominated urban schools, as well as ever-shrinking education dollars, make our homes and churches even more important for building healthy construction skills in the next generation.
The more we ignore such skills, the more vulnerable our own homes and businesses become. An endless stream of natural disasters keeps telling us nature does not respect civilization, and thus the more people will need to rely on government help. In truth, our wealthiest 1% keeps working to expand their control of tax money, like with billion dollar subsidies to big farms and corporations. Knowing how to improvement any situation with constructive actions will help reduce such forms of greed. Also, the sooner such skills are learned, the less need there’ll be for spending socialized tax monies to fight gang violence, crime, as well as for correcting all the unhealthful results of personally weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, like harmful diet and exercise habits.
Today, science is collecting a lot of information about how important healthful diet and exercise habits are, not only for physical health, but psychological and social health as well. They’ll all organically related. In fact, much of corporate-produced food today is proving to be counterproductive for health itself, with excessive amounts of sugar, unhealthful fats, excessive salt, and refined grains! The more such food is eaten, the more people build what’s called a 'metabolic syndrome'; it's a fancy way of saying unhealthful diet-arts produce a number of very dangerous physical health conditions, like obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart and stroke problems too. In fact, such over-eating is now estimated to cause about 50% of all diseases, and the more taxpayers pay the medical bills, the less money is available to keep building more liberal schools where health is a top priority. More healthy constructive food-preparing habits can start reducing such weak social results.
We already have grossly unbalanced government budgets, paying out more than we take in. It’s largely because for the past 40 years conservatives and moderate politicians have kept making their wealthy donors even wealthier and even reducing taxes during wartime, as President Bush did during the Iraq war! In turn, wealthy folks then buy many of our TV and radio stations to keep important health and economic facts away from the American public! When’s the last time you heard any kind of meaningful discussion on network channels about what our schools could be doing to better prepare students for life’s challenges, or what our huge banks and corporations are doing around the world to keep taking more money from people? Instead, we keep getting reports on how US test scores compare to other countries, making people believe they are the mark of excellent schools.
Our electronic media could be used as one of the great educational tools even invented, and yet many mainstream shows today are simply not helping people build habits of physical health. Many focus on mainly gossip, disaster, and police blotter reports, often creating feelings of adoration, horror, and fear. All 3 feelings are not very helpful for building either personal or social habits of democratic health unless they’re tied to asking people to help others when disaster strikes. In other words, it seems more and more, our own conservative public schools are also helping grow such unhealthful feelings. In response to that challenge, Dewey and other liberal democrats like him, naturally wanted our schools to start teaching more practical kinds of physical health, rather than keep ignoring how the wealthy keep getting wealthier, and how our politicians keep becoming more dependent on their wealthy donors. With such skills it became easier for more people to feel how they could help build a stronger democracy, as well as more intelligent students.
The Abstract Stage: 15 and Beyond
Then, lastly, there’s what I call the abstract academic period. No doubt, adult brain development begins growing at puberty, around 12 or 13 in most kids. As a result, young folks become better at learning abstract facts of all kinds, like math, history, science, politics, economics, and also reasoning better too. For those going on to college, these years can be devoted to learning more book-facts and seeing life on a more abstract level than before. However, even for those not going to college right away, abstract ideas can also help mentally anchor many of the skills they’ve learned, like ideas in chemistry, biology, and physics, as well as ethics and politics. What car mechanics doesn’t need to know about electricity and how to diagnose repair problems, or a fair price to charge their customers? So, at this stage of development, future plumbers and electricians, as well as doctors and lawyers, can more easily learn more abstract ideas, especially useful ethical ones like honesty, trustworthiness, and helpfulness? Such abstract studies can help young folks become even better prepared to live in our complex capitalist society. Abstract political ideas too can be put into a healthy physical framework, with the help of voting and debating skills. Students can learn more about asking candidates how they list their loyalties, like to the public good, corporate good, an active or passive federal government, regulations, and what the role of government should be? Are they most loyal to conservative or liberal ideas, and if so, then what are they and why are they better? All too often our public schools all but ignore teaching such healthful democratic skills, and thus keep allowing elected people to keep working for things besides the public good.
Here’s one example of what I mean. My Democratic US Representative has recently announced his loyalty to the President’s plan to pass a very controversial trade treaty called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It could produce a host of obnoxious results for all taxpayers in many nations while allowing corporations to control even more public tax money. He’s chosen to keep his loyalty to the president and large corporate donors, and be less loyal to the public good! For us liberal Democrats, however, such loyalties are the basic reasons to vote for or against any candidate! Thus democratic health itself rides on such loyalties, and how candidates list their importance. In my own case, if he doesn’t change those loyalties and start working for the public good, I’ll probably vote for someone else next year who is more loyal to protecting and enlarging that good. In my view, we don’t need more concentrated feudal corporate power; we need more popular democratic power. Such abstract thinking about political health can continue deepening at this 3rd level of physical development, on all political levels -- city, country, state, and federal. Why shouldn’t students be called into political debates as least as often as they’re called into sports pep rallies!
Useful and Harmful Results
No one is born with such knowledge and skills, and yet they continue being ignored almost completely within our own conservative public schools. If they’re taught at all it’s on a book-centered academic level, rather than an active experimental level. Thus, far too many children feel as Plato did, that physical health should be ignored. In this day and age of so many kinds of harmful foods, and more dangerous corporate power, that idea is simply no longer acceptable. The harmful medical results of such ignorance increases costs for all us in one way or another. In fact, physical pleasure and enjoyment are a large part of physical health, so why not teach even young students how to intelligently enjoy learning such knowledge and skills? Since when does school have to be serious, sullen, and somberly quiet?
On the harmful side, ignoring such basic skills of physical health in effect divides and separates students from their own bodies, and isn’t that the ultimate educational sin? Isn’t that what conservatives have been doing to people for thousands of years with otherworldly religious ideas? Isn’t that habit really at the root of our ignorance about curing such physical diseases? For we liberals, that was conservative philosophy’s and religion’s great original sin against humanity; they ignored learning about our own physical bodies while teaching irrelevant rituals and ideas, thus keeping both women and men separated from themselves and from building more intelligent habits of physical health and pleasurable enjoyment. In fact, for centuries in Western civilization people were taught pleasure is the road to hell itself! In excess it can be, but as liberal Atomists like Epicurus said, in moderation it is the road to enjoying the few short years of life anyone has. As liberal educator and essayist Michael De Montaigne suggested in the 1500s, individualizing such useful knowledge encourages students to learn more about their own body-minds, and thus become more empowered to intelligently direct their own daily actions.
Learning more about physical health also helps students see we all have different strengths and weaknesses, as well as how they might help others help themselves become healthier. Even young students can teach themselves to choose the foods their own digestive systems can use best, regardless of what parents tell them to eat. Don’t even children have a right to practice and build healthy habits and skills? Are we to keep saying students must be 18 before they have the right to know what physical health feels like? No doubt, many dentists and doctors would answer that question with a yes.
Liberal schools where physical health is encouraged will also help students set aside some time each day for a little healthful exercise, even if it’s only a few minutes for stretching out and walking a little. As many senior citizens know full well, even small amounts of low stress exercise are better than none. Older students too could help and encourage younger ones. How many millions of dollars change hands each year in Health Spas and Clubs, trying to improve weak and unhealthful exercise habits? Wouldn't their physical health be improved if students started building such habits in school, when unhealthful habits haven’t become strong and propulsive? Young students often need just a little encouragement to start learning about such important habits, rather than deciding which local gang has the best drugs for sale and where to get the best junk food. The sooner students learn it’s best to help police make such dealers pay for their crimes and disrespect, the easier it’ll be to keep making themselves healthier and exercising more. Such spas and clubs can then take exercise to higher levels.
As we’ve seen earlier, active, healthful, and enjoyable dramatic arts like writing and role playing are yet other important ways to physical health. In fact, such habits are useful in just about all human actions. For Dewey, learning to talk about ideas was the greatest invention in all of earth history. With its growth we became more separated from the animal kingdom than ever before, and more dominant in it as well. How many students in exercise class would love to make fun of dull and boring athletes who aren’t interested in much else besides hitting knee-high curve balls or catching another touchdown pass? Small, short, dramatic scenes, written and performed by teams of students in any academic class, can be a great way for students 8-14 to learn more healthful reading and writing skills, as well as healthful cooperative and joyful verbal skills. How many young students would love to act like bacteria and viruses, or older students as greedy politicians always on the lookout for wealthy campaign donors, or greedy bankers always scheming for more money? Such habits lead naturally to the topic of psychological, economic, and political health as well. What greedy student in a psychology workshop wouldn’t benefit from having fingers hit and going to school-jail after stealing someone else’s property? With such healthy role playing activities it would also be much easier to feel what kinds of actions build character excellence, and also help students find the group they most naturally fit in with.
Such healthful and enjoyable learning activities would also help students get a feeling for respect in their own actions. No doubt, some people are more dangerous than others, but it’s because of their actions, not the way they look. After all, many actions are excessive; some students may become overly fearful and neurotic about germs and fear touching anyone else, or compulsively start washing their hands every 5 minutes. But if we don't start teaching such basic healthful skills to children, they'll continue living in an immature and more dangerous psychic world.
Some Useful Social Results
Perhaps the most important social result of such physical health studies all through schools would be lessening taxpayer healthcare costs! Even today, taxpayers are paying more than necessary for healthcare; as health and insurance costs increase, so do taxes! In fact, our conservative public schools where physical health is ignored only increases the chances for obnoxious results to keep growing. So, the more young folks know about how to keep their physical body-minds healthy and in ship-shape shape, no matter what they study, the better off our entire society becomes! Such useful skills should no longer remain ignored in our public schools, even though many such facts have only recently been discovered. True, only in the 1930s were viruses discovered; electron microscopes had to be invented first, but why shouldn’t high school students be free to build their own microscopes, keep learning about cold and flu viruses, how merely sharing bodily fluids can produce dangerous results, and how to intelligently protect their health. How much did ignoring such healthy ideas and skills in our public schools contribute to our current AIDS tragedy? Shouldn’t everyone learn more about such physical health skills while they’re in school? No one is completely immune from such dangers.
Our Liberal Soapbox!
We Deweyan liberals say it is time people begin making our own conservative public schools places where health becomes the center of attention once students step into school. In them students will begin learning more about themselves and what’s going on in their own bodies, writing and performing scenes about them, learning to work in healthy ways, and thus build feelings about physical health into their muscles and brains. Such skills can also help educate parents too. After all, what have we got to lose besides more sickness, tragic deaths, and higher healthcare costs and taxes? With more active and enjoyable experimental projects more excellent healthy habits can keep growing on both personal and social levels. In fact, all such studies and feelings can begin growing in the elementary grades, and continue growing all through high school as the work becomes more abstract. How many bright high school students would love the challenge of building an electron microscope for their school? Who knows? They might even be able to build a vaccine against tooth decay, and thus change dentistry forever! Why shouldn’t such students be free to build their own health workshops where students are asked to talk freely about their food and exercise habits, and, more importantly, how best to build better ones. Drug resistant bacteria are already becoming more of a threat to everyone, and so everyone can help lessen their growth a little. We’ll see more about such psychological health in the next section.
Physical Health on a Social Level
So-called super-bacteria are becoming a greater threat to everyone’s physical health. For example, each year drug companies make about 18 tons of antibiotics, of which about 15 tons are sold to cattle, sheep, hog, and chicken farmers. They’re used to kill dangerous bacteria living inside those animals, so they’re safer to eat. However, when not enough antibiotics are given to animals, it allows drug-resistant bacteria to evolve, and thus increase dangerous diseases and sicknesses. And what’s worse, some drug companies sometimes pay politicians and people at the Food and Drug Administration to look the other way when it comes to even giving them information about what they’re doing! Such disrespect for the public good is, in fact, dangerous to peoples’ lives! In fact, for many big profit-hungry corporations, the general operating rule seems to be this: keep people as ignorant as possible about what we’re doing; the less people know about what we’re doing, the easier it is to keep taking as much of their money as is possible! For more see David Kessler’s informative New York Times article entitled Antibiotics and the Meat We Eat, 3-27-13.
From this liberal soapbox we Deweyans say, the more such healthful knowledge is regulated and controlled by the government, the easy it becomes to avoid any unhealthful social results. What can it mean for our schools? Well, why shouldn’t concerned and caring high school students regularly test in their labs how healthy the animal foods and water are in their own neighborhoods? After all, what public good is there in merely knowing bacteria exists if it doesn’t help students to make life safer and more healthful? Why aren’t there Nobel prizes for great student work too, so better research and testing tools can become more widespread?
We liberals say people have the power to start building more liberal schools where loyalty to health and the public good is the highest priority, or at least equal for a student’s right to choose what to study. No doubt, some doctors might object, but wouldn’t such healthy student skills help free doctors to concentrate on those who really need specialized help? With the growth of DNA facts, knowing how to use such knowledge to help those with genetic diseases has become more important than ever before. Recently, a Democratic congress finally passed an important healthcare reform bill, the Affordable Care Act; it helps more low income people better afford healthcare. But wouldn’t it be more intelligent to build more liberal schools where physical, psychological, economic, and political health were also taught while students learn the job skills for work after high school? What is more important, learning almost useless and soon forgotten academic historical and mathematical facts, or teaching students what healthful habits to build, and how best to build them? At Plato’s school in ancient Greece its motto was Let No One Ignorant of Geometry Enter Here. We Deweyan liberals say it is time the motto of our public schools becomes: Let No One Ignorant of Health Leave Here! Such schools would be celebrated much more by parents and students than our conservative book-centered schools.
To put it bluntly, to us liberals ignoring such studies is educationally tragic, not only for students, but for our social health as well! How many college graduates still have weak and unhealthful feelings for excellent diet and exercise habits, or for working with as little useless tension as possible, or how not to keep abusing their bodies with excessive alcohol and drug use to just relax and fall asleep? In fact, with the growth of science has also come a whole new set of health challenges, and the less students learn about them and how to answer them intelligently, the more unhealthful their own lives become.
For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors roamed freely and actively, but that all began changing with the growth of cities only about 5 thousand years ago, and our schools have not been doing much to teach more intelligent and stress free habits for living in those cities and building excellent schools. Thus, to better answer our new physical health challenges, we need better schools where more intelligent habits besides reading books are taught. So, with more time devoted to building healthful habits, even young students can begin feeling not only their own health, but also how their teachers and schools are caring for them as people, rather than just desk sitters and test takers. The whole humane feeling of communal friendliness becomes almost non-existent in schools where testing and book-facts are the center of attention. They continue disconnecting students from their own neighborhoods. Like military sergeants, many teachers feel they too need to dominate and control their troops-students!
In fact, all nations are now challenged to build such liberal schools: China, Russia, Muslim, African, and Western. Even undeveloped countries are beginning to feel the need for schools where practical kinds of healthy skills are taught on a daily basis. They’re the best insurance against the on-going growth of greedy feudalistic institutions around the world. Teaching more healthful habits to students helps them see and feel all other people have the same challenges, and so should be helped when necessary, and imitated when admired. Wouldn’t such healthful feelings make peace that much easier to continue growing, rather than war after war after war?
Thanks to our growing and powerful women's movement, more women are finally becoming a greater part of our male-dominated, warring, and overly competitive institutions. Our nation is becoming more democratically healthful! Many women are now unafraid to ask new questions and bring a fresh healthier set of values to life, and so female students too should be asked to practice such skills. Should anyone tolerate greed or disrespect in any of its forms? No doubt, our huge male-dominated and profit-hungry defense industries and stockholders might object to teaching such skills, but then again, buggy whip makers objected when cars were first being built. Again, for us liberals, this world is ours for the making, and belongs to all of us, rather than merely to those few who continue wanting a feudalistic status quo to stay forever in place.
In fact, here in the US, supposedly the world's most advanced nation, there's a lot of evidence we're still health primitives! It seems we've skipped civilized habits of serenity, taste, elegance, grace, intelligence, and enjoyment, and gone from frontier brutality to greedy, decadent, and indulgent economic and political lifestyles, based on extremes of wealth and education. For example, researchers tell us no one needs more than 3 ounces of meat a day in a healthy diet, and yet many people are eating that much at one meal! Few people still don’t realize all the natural toxins they're putting into their bodies with such foods, toxins created when an animal’s killed but when its muscle cells keep living and producing waste material.
What’s more, unhealthful adult and even childhood obesity is skyrocketing; if it isn’t improved, then in a few decades most people may be driving their electric wheelchairs from work straight to kidney dialysis or the pharmacy! Then the wealthy can begin making more money by investing in expensive wheelchair builders rather than cars, then ship such factories overseas to make even more money? It wouldn’t be so bad, except many now ship profits to off-shore accounts and thus avoid taxes altogether. Is it any wonder we liberals want to teach the next generation what healthy political habits feel like?
True, we may be only at the beginning of building such schools, but even that fact can be motivating. Over-population too is rapidly becoming another health challenge, as both India and China are showing us. Only for a few centuries now has science been relatively free from intolerant religious control, and in some ways that alone makes teaching more healthy population habits a challenge around the world. Few students even today have begun discovering how easier life becomes when families are limited in size.
And in this new 21st century we might see yet another major biological revolution, as scientists learn how to use their new genetic knowledge to continue improving human physical weaknesses, disabilities, and defects. Until then, however, people need to know more about physically healthy habits, and for that there is no better place to start than our own public schools. One thing seems certain: If we don't start teaching children more about healthy habits and skills, and how they can best be built with active kinds of practice and rewards, then we simply keep making life more expensive, stressful, and frustrating for everyone. What have we got to lose, besides old and routine, unintelligent, feudalistic, unhealthful habits?
Such healthful studies will also help grow more intelligent healing and medical habit-arts. Why shouldn’t elderly folks with various medical problems be free to share their health situations with students, giving them a chance for some real creative thinking and testing about healthy actions here and now? What's the best way to help mildly depressed people start enjoying more of life? How important is moral encouragement for building an intelligent exercise habit? Shouldn’t students be free everyday they’re in school to intelligently experiment and learn more about health and the results of unhealthy habits? Why shouldn’t even young students learn to take a person’s blood pressure, heart rate, and lung health, and then see how they vary after exercising or eating certain foods? Shouldn’t there be a physical health workshop in every public school? What's the best way to keep teeth clean and healthy, so their dentist can figure out another way to pay off their huge med-school loans? Doesn't causing med-students to have, say, a $100,000 debt when they graduate merely cause health costs to stay just this side of an arm-and-a-leg, with maybe a kidney as interest? Who wants to stay in debt for years, and it helps many of our smartest people will begin thinking more and more about making money than about public health, and also using our money-based political system to help them.
37. REALITY SCHOOLS: PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH
People and young students often don’t realize there’s more to psychological health than merely knowing things they shouldn’t do. Don’t lie, is one example. For the first 5 years of life many students are told what they shouldn’t do. All such negative statements, however, leaves them ignorant about what they can do to practice psychological health, like acting intelligently, respectfully helping others, and obeying just laws. It’s yet another reason for our public schools to focus more on psychology’s more positive actions, like feeling joy, working in a relaxed way, how to respect others, earning honest money, making our society more democratic and fair for everyone, and so on.
With such habits psychological health touches all 3 of our other kinds of health as well as character health! For example, it’s one thing to tell students, respect others, but liberal public schools also use role-playing as a main learning tool for teaching students what such ideas feel like in practice. Often respect means simply not saying anything to someone, and allowing people to go about their business peacefully and lawfully. So, in a psychology lab, students get the chance to first make a list of the healthy skills they could learn, a list of the skills they want to learn, listen to other students saying what they’d like to learn, and then working with students to actively practice them joyfully and happily. There simply is no better way for young students to start learning what such important psychological habits feel like. No one is born with an inbuilt instinct to know what any kind of psychological skill feels like.
Why teach such skills to even young children? After all, not all students will need such practice, especially those lucky enough to have respectful, nurturing, and caring parents. That may be true, but far from everyone is so lucky; many children have disrespectful parents who often simply order them around and threaten punishment if they don't obey, or don’t know the best skills to teach. As a result, many children grow up feeling the way they were raised is normal, right, and healthy. As we’ve seen, for centuries many children were taught Africans should be enslaved and discriminated against.
In a democracy, however, mere obedience to status quo habits is far from psychological health. On the contrary, it often requires intelligent social actions like protests, staying in contact with elected representatives, asking to know where their loyalties are on different issues and actions, and holding them responsible for their actions. So, to keep ignoring such skills on a formal level in our conservative public schools simply weakens our entire democratic system. When is the last time you redd a student book about economic or political health, much less psychological health? Conservatives know full well, the less students are taught about such useful personal and democratic skills and habits, the easier it is to keep using their economic and political power to keep getting more powerful. And, since 1944, when the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created by the corporate community, that kind of feudalistic economic and political power has become more globally oriented, as the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man so vividly describe.
A Liberal Model
Once again, for thousands of years philosophers have defined human nature, or human psychology, with liberal, moderate, and conservative ideas. So, before getting to some specific educational ideas about a liberal model of psychological health, this very important section will start with a little historical review.
Since ancient times liberals like Democritus and Protagoras suggested the art of building habits useful in a democratic society always involved active and intelligent body-mind practice! Today we call that active process building one’s psychological health; more poetic types have called it building one’s survival kit. Only with habits like equality and sharing power equally could democratic systems grow at all. They knew only such habits would empower people to take a greater control of their lives, learning goals, and governments as well. The conservative alternative, like at Sparta for example, was to let a small class keep control of the government, and with their military habits keep endangering everyone’s life. In any case, however, even thousands of years ago liberal Greeks said such active learning lives at the heart of any kind of health, including democratic health and freedom. The more a person practices respect for all people, the stronger it becomes. They saw so clearly, only in democratic societies could everyone’s freedom and liberty keep expanding and growing all through life.
Such practical thoughts about learning any habit-art, then, were put at the heart of their liberal models of psychological health, where they remain to this day. Only practice can encourage students to intelligently control the growth of both personally and socially healthful habits, and so the actual knowledge of such skills lies within a person’s own actions, muscles, and intelligent choices – in their body-mind. Even for many ancient Greek liberals, then, we are all self-determining; we are all what we actively practice! For them, conservative ideas like fate, or the gods controlling human actions, are merely a myth, even though Socrates and Plato believed in them. Even moderate Aristotle agreed to a degree with such liberal ideas of practical health; Democritus’s writings helped convince him of it.
Thus, for such liberals, both Plato’s and Aristotle’s model of psychological health learned by reasoning alone was merely one step in the process of building a healthy democratic psyche -- one’s psychological health. No doubt, Protagoras saw reasoning as merely the 2nd step in that learning process. Our reason and practical common sense can merely suggest ways to improve any weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts. For example, young Greek men had almost no knowledge of how to intelligently debate and defend themselves in court, or vote intelligently in the Athenian Assembly. Such habits were weak and made them vulnerable to those who had better persuasive skills, or a politician who argued for unwise policies. Protagoras thus sensed the need for teaching such democratic skills, and so offered to teach them for a fee to those wanting to learn more democratic skills. In that kind of active educational process, little by little, more men learned about psychological health! The more they practiced such skills, the better they got at defending themselves in court, speaking intelligently in public, and questioning those with other ideas. In Athens any citizen could offer any idea to the Assembly for its approval to become law, much like our democratic initiative and referendum processes do today.
Liberal doctors like Hippocrates, too, taught the same kinds of psychological health though active study and learning. Medical students actively studied diseases, medicine effects, and the results of giving them to different people. So, their active method of learning helped build a liberal model of psychological health alive to this day. Hippocrates saw there was just no better way to learn more about disease and medicine in an ever-changing world than actively studying all its different cases. Thus, for such liberals, intelligent experimental learning skills were placed at the core of psychological health even before Aristotle was born.
Such liberal models of building one’s psychological health on a daily basis helped doctors keep feeling physical health always depends on individual patient reactions to different medicines here and now. That idea too challenged the conservative status quo of believing health for everyone could be reduced to just a few simplified ideas. It was one thing to say, like conservatives said, sickness and health were the result of just 4 moving bodily fluids, but it was another thing altogether to see the results of different medicines and eating actions in ill people. In fact, those simplified conservative ideas of sickness and health continued throughout the Middle Ages in the practice of bleeding ill people to restore fluid balances. Even George Washington was bled to cure a sickness. That's how strong some habits can be when a more liberal model of psychological health as intelligent experimentation isn’t taught in schools to the next generation! In general, then, it may be said conservatives often wanted life to be much simpler than it really is, and so kept ignoring experimentation to know more about nature.
As a result, thousands of years ago the liberal Greek educational challenge became teaching students what actions are most intelligent, healthful, and less stressful, especially in a democratic society. Democratic Dewey couldn’t have agreed more. He too felt experimental learning, equal rights, enjoyment, playfulness, pleasure, creativity, and fun were very important learning tools for energizing a healthy democratic psyche. And what’s more, all such skills and habit-arts are best learned one day at a time, and one step at a time. All such habits rest on feelings and they take time to grow and mature. Plato too recognized this fact: the more habits are practiced, the stronger they become.
Conservative and Moderate Models
What set him and moderates like Aristotle apart from liberals were the skills they recommended by learned. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato were much more respectful of religious ideas like fate, and divine power -- the gods – for helping build any kind of psychic health. The saying, we are all puppets of the gods, sums up their model of a healthy psyche; it’s one in which people practice respect, obedience, and submission to the gods, so they will grant some people special skills and knowledge. For them psychological excellence could be learned by only a few. Such ideas, however, become even more amazing when they couldn’t even prove such health-controlling objects existed, much less what kinds of respect they demanded. Even in their day there was a tremendous diversity of worship habits, and how can we know which one is right? It’s yet more evidence of how strong their own religious habits were.
In Christianity, then, the idea of divine power was defined as divine grace. Only by divine grace could Christians become saved and eligible for an eternity of heavenly bliss after death. So, naturally, their model of psychological health was based on feelings and habits of submission to, and acceptance of, those Christians with religious authority; the idea went back to Plato himself. For centuries, then, a religiously conservative model of psychological health remained in place even as plague after plague, and war after war kept sweeping across Europe.
Such a model of psychological health simply assumed only religious leaders really knew some deeper kinds of Truth, and so should be obeyed, like the ideas of sin and forgiveness. In such a model psychological health retreated merely to one’s inner feelings and motives, not one’s good works. We are saved by grace alone, said Christianity’s founder, Paul of Tarsus. No doubt, they encouraged helpful social actions like building hospitals for the sick and dying, but the most important part of their model of health remained confined to one’s inner feelings and motives. The entire feudalistic model of both health and redemption rested on such inner feelings and motives. One could live an horrendous life and if they would sincerely repent on their deathbed they could go to heaven.
Such a model of psychological health based on inner feelings and motives was also celebrated by the New Testament writers of John’s Gospel in the 1st and 2nd centuries. In fact, they too called attention to one’s inner feelings, or as it was then called, the health of one’s soul. In fact, for them such feelings became the Kingdom of Heaven itself! Those more relaxed, serene, and confident feelings of being saved allowed many to believe they were in fact already feeling what heaven was really like. They said the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. With that idea those writers brought such subconscious inner feelings to a conscious level and said they were the most important part of psychological health! Without them one could not be saved and redeemed. Feelings like being born again and feeling god’s grace became more important than learning more about nature. Thus, their original insight about the usefulness of some inner bodily feelings were used to build another mystery religion separating and dividing people into different religious tribes, and also feeling only their tribe knew eternal Truth. Such feelings continued blocking people from seeing all people as merely people. It’s often the result of conservative models of psychological health; even Plato felt all non-Greeks were inferior barbarians. Once those kinds of feelings are said to be absolutely True, forcing others to obey and submit becomes justified and all but inevitable! And, with such a narrow and passive model of psychological health it becomes easier to see why active kinds of experimental learning became almost non-existent in their schools.
Slowly, as those religious conservatives built more of their schools and churches, it became easy to teach such skills to the next generation. Not many questioned how even such skills rested on actively learning certain habits, like praying, worshipping, confessing one’s sins, and building more awe-inspiring churches. In such grand ornate and opulent cathedrals it became even easier to feel people really were in a heavenly holy place. Since the pyramids were built around 3,000 BCE, architecture had been a useful tool for religious conservatives; the Parthenon itself was a temple for Athena’s statue. They helped achieve their goal of social power over people, just like greedy capitalists today want monopolistic economic power over people.
Anyone not accepting the Church’s model of psychological health as absolute Truth was dangerous and thus could not be tolerated. For centuries even cold-blooded murder and torture was used to protect their monopolistic power, as it still is in many places of the world, like Afghanistan for example. And, as we’ve been seeing in these pages, today economic monopolists use laws and police to enforce their models of psychological health -- submission to and acceptance of their power and their ideas. And, for both religious and secular conservatives, democratic liberty, freedom, free thought, and individuality are dangerous, and so should be suppressed at much as possible, especially in our public schools.
For us liberals, however, the obnoxious and disrespectful personal and social results of a conservative model simply should not be tolerated in a democratic society. Results like great class divisions of wealth and poverty, limited medical and educational opportunities for the poor, and thus diminished lives, are simply unacceptable to us who see all people as people. Thus is a brief description of our current cultural wars. The more conservatives control a society, the more difficult it becomes to build schools where democratic models of psychological health are encouraged, like helpful and constructive habits of equality, as well as democratic forms of social power like labor unions, democratically run corporations, and more liberal governments aimed at promoting the public good. For us liberals, such divisive and warping social results simply should not be tolerated anymore; the entire kingdom of enjoyable and peaceful feelings living within our own muscles should be used to build a more humane and democratic society.
No doubt, both Aristotle and Plato knew about liberal models of psychological health, with their focus on learning nature’s small truths slowly and experimentally. But, they had simply been trained to want more than small facts of natural knowledge. They both felt nature had some eternal and unchanging objects making natural movements eternally the same. Also, they believed only a few people were talented enough to learn nature’s eternal Truths. As a result they built models of nature and psychological health so a few would have a way to learn about them. With such models they both battled liberal sophist models of psychological health. Since the 1600s, however, life itself has shown ancient liberals like Democritus and Protagoras were psychologically much wiser, more robust, more humble, and better adjusted to living in an always-changing nature. Experimental learning and its thousands of small truths have become our strongest and most reliable tools in the war to keep improving nature and better controlling its dangerous results. What’s more, in that model no one learns any habit-art without actively practicing it! The on-going existence of schools themselves tells us that idea rests at the heart of all psychological models!
Assessing Conservative Models
To us liberals, such conservative models of psychological health should be judged on their results and motives. No doubt, many churchmen really believed they were saving a person’s soul by burning them at the stake, but unless all their supernatural ideas can be proved to exist, they have really no social justification for any discriminating actions. It would be like accepting the belief in harmful Martians living on the moon’s dark side without any real and objective evidence!
In short, to us liberals, a conservative model of psychological health based merely on inner feelings generally ignored the usefulness of objective kinds of natural knowledge. It explains why our most powerful scientific revolution is only a few centuries old, whereas conservative governments have been in place for thousands of years! In fact, social forms of narrow and feudalistic power remain a threat to millions of people today denying them of equal rights, opportunities, and to live as they see fit. Both Middle East and Western conservatives may continue fighting to teach their models of psychological health, but on those grounds we liberals have a right to oppose them. For us liberals, the best kind of psychological health is produced when people work together intelligently and peacefully to share equally in any rewards of their work, thus promoting feelings of equality and freedom. In fact, as we’ll see in the next section on economic health, capitalism itself can be criticized on the actual social results it produces, as the new Catholic Pope Francis has recently said himself. Capitalism has a proven record of producing many useful goods, but a much less admirable record of distributing those goods to the people and sharing their profits equally.
What’s more, even conservative habits of psychological health, like obedience and acceptance, help create a rather ironic situation worthy of Socrates himself. For example, to teach their feudalistic values and habits of psychological health, both conservatives and moderates had to use an active liberal model of learning; the more children practiced such values, the faster they learned to feel them. Two especially useful habits during the Middle Ages centered around the ideas of heaven and hell. The first told people they could achieve the best results possible, an eternity of blissful living, if they merely obeyed their leaders. And the second made people fearful if they didn’t obey those leaders. Who wants to burn in hell for all time? People like Robin Hood who may have actively worked to decrease differences in wealth were simply hunted down and killed; even kings were trained to fear excommunication, even though there wasn’t any objective evidence for either heaven or hell. Even today, such ideas like trickle-down economics, and corporate personhood, continue working to make people accept the feudalistic status quo system and all its disrespectful results. As we’re seeing more and more today, in many places such ideas are growing weaker. More and more people have accepted the liberal model of health as based on objective evidence.
Dewey’s Model of Psychological-Political Health
About psychological health, scholarly Dewey wrote this in School and Society:
“Earlier (Aristotelian) psychology regarded mind as a purely individual affair in direct and naked contact with an external world. At present (however) the tendency is to conceive individual mind as a function of (localized) social life -- as not capable of operating or developing by itself, but as requiring continual stimulus from social agencies (like teachers, parents, and fellow students). (Traditionally) mind was supposed to get its filling by bringing the child (to) geography, arithmetic, grammar, etc. … it was forgotten the maximum appeal (of knowledge) could be secured only when the studies were presented from the standpoint of the relation they bear to the life of the society.
… the older psychology was … of knowledge, of intellect. Emotion and (enjoyment) occupied an incidental place. Much was said about sensation -- next to nothing about (feelings and) movements. There was discussion of ideas, but the possibility of their origin in and from (local social) action was ignored. Now we believe the intellect, the sphere of sensation and ideas, is but a ‘middle department which we sometimes take to be fixed … it can have but one essential function -- the formation of defining the (future) direction which our activity shall take.’ (98, emphasis and additions are my own)
In other words, for Dewey, psychological health is best focused on learning to enjoyably guide intelligent actions here and now, and with their results keep building more useful personal and social habits. What is the good, Dewey might ask, of believing any mere academic fact or idea really reflects eternal Truth, or then use those ideas to maintain one’s economic, political, or social power by attacking those who disagree? That is what much of the Middle Ages were about, as is much of our current economic power structure, the so-called richest 1%, about 3 million people in the US. If nothing else, such facts teach us to feel life’s dangerous possibilities when people gain too much power, whether economic or religious.
Naturally such ideas have some very important results for public school education too. For example, in a healthy democracy, psychological health means, among other things, not allowing power to become too concentrated in any form! Recently, economic forms of power have become so forceful and self-serving they continue disrupting and endangering millions of innocent people trying to live better lives. So, the educational lesson becomes clear: to teach even young students more liberal habits where power is shared and all students have a say in how their schools and studies should be run! In such schools, the principal will often tell students what options they have with their schools, and encourage debate about what options should be experimented with. Why shouldn’t even young students begin feeling how such liberal habits of psychological health are best learned with active kinds of experimental practice? The sooner such feelings and habits start growing, the easier it becomes to practice such democratic habits all through life. Intelligent liberals need much more than inane negative ads to get our votes at election time; we need real debate and discussion between candidates. For us, peoples’ taxes alone give them a right to say how they should be spent! Such health isn’t gained by merely reading more psychology books, but actually practicing such vibrant democratic habits in our public schools. Without such skills, our democratic republic has, in so many ways, regressed back to a feudalistic system of concentrated and dangerous power.
Building Early Psychological Health
We turn, then, to some more suggestions about teaching a more liberal model of health in our public schools. For young students in the first 3 years of school, such habits can best start growing with sense-based learning experiences. For example, they can be allowed to sense what flowers they like best, and then asked to vote on where they should be planted, what foods should be cooked and eaten, what aromas are pleasing, and perhaps what pet animals they should touch, feel, and even train to learn new skills. In such ways they begin building their own individual kinds of psychological health, and democracy’s health as well. The more students are allowed to talk about such options, and look at their results, the more forward-looking they become, as well as intelligent too. What’s more, the more they see students make different choices, the more respect and honor they learn to feel for democratic diversity and differences. Some may like tulips, others roses, and so 2 different teams form and begin planning how to grow such flowers and where to plant them. And, when they get better at reading in the 2nd stage of development, they can learn how to make even more intelligent choices. Also, drawing such activities is another sense-based skill encouraged at this level. Why shouldn’t some children enjoy the feel and sight of drawing such events? How else can we discover who has artistic talent unless we give children the encouragement and freedom to first learn about such options, and then express their choices?
Other useful sense-based skills to be encouraged are talking and communication skills. They’re a big part of physical health too, aren’t they? How many young folks leave high school and know very little about intelligent talking skills, like what humorous talking sounds like, what good questions can be asked, and how much can be said with just a few words. According to Plato, the Spartans were excellent at saying much with just a few words, so the more students hear good speakers, and talk to a group themselves, then the easier it’ll be for them to build more healthful speaking and thinking habits. As the ancient Athenians taught us, such speaking skills lie at democracy’s heart. When used intelligently, to keep making life safer and more enjoyable, the easier it becomes to notice disrespectful and dangerous actions both in and outside of school.
Young students often like to hear what other students are learning about, especially if it's humorous too. Talking excellently also helps build good question-asking skills, thus increasing curiosity as well. Such communication skills are useful throughout life, and not just in school, thus liberal schools will take great pride in helping young students learn such habits with daily practice.
In liberal schools, confident, relaxed, and caring speaking on everyone’s part becomes another important sign of psychological health. And the earlier it’s learned, the easier it becomes to practice it all through the school years. In liberal public schools a quiet classroom is often a sign of sleeping students. So, why shouldn’t students have, say, an hour a day to merely relax and hear what other students have been working on, and what obstacles they’re discovered? Even if students merely say they don’t have much to say, it’s still better than saying nothing at all. For us liberals, it’s simply another important part of psychological health. Such skills can also help build one's humorous habit, as students begin feeling how their words and ideas can make fun of the social status quo. The healthful skill of satire can thus begin growing, a skill useful throughout life. For example, a child might say how a parent worked so hard for a new car only to discover global warming is a growing threat. Isn't that what our humorists do on a daily basis -- help us feel the humorously healthy absurdity and folly of our own actions?
Young students can begin learning such liberal habits of psychological health, but only if they and their teachers have the freedom to teach such habits. Thus, they’ll begin to feel how useful freedom is when they’re not allowed to practice it, and are told to write a book assignment instead. Needless to say, the more that feeling of freedom grows, the stronger our democracy grows. In such ways children can also begin learning how enjoyable work is another big part of psychological health. In a psychological lab they can begin feeling health doesn’t just mean listening to others, or voting now and then, but also how to enjoy feeling the results those actions produced. What’s the sense in, say, growing beautiful tulips unless you take the time to see and feel them? If such habits weren’t useful all through life, then the phrase, ‘take the time to smell the flowers’ would be meaningless.
For us Deweyan liberals, these first 3 years of school are tremendously important; they set the tone and standard for the rest of their 9 years in public education. For example, their sense-based work will make it easier for students to begin learning another important skill of psychological health, namely, how to intelligently resolve personal differences. Working in teams will naturally produce some differences of option, and so intelligent and useful skills like conflict resolution and anger management can start growing with, of course, the teacher’s help. When a teacher takes the time to call everyone’s attention to a difference of opinion, and to how it can be resolved peacefully, then students will start learning how such skills work, as well as when and how to use them.
Luckily, all such healthful habits can begin growing in the first 3 grades, when students are naturally sense-dominated, and so already are learning with sense experience. Such learning helps weaken all habits of over-thinking and over-reasoning about life, and keeps students focused on feeling the results of their actions, and how to make them even better.
With simple sense-based learning it’s easy to make learning not only enjoyable, but intelligence as well. It’s easy to feel enjoyment with projects like using food rewards to teach pet animals new skills, drawing colorful pictures, and feeling what it’s like to build a little garden with other students. It not only keeps us connected to our biological roots, but also to important skills of practicing intelligent actions. Obviously, the skill of working to produce some future result, like making a pet animal exercise before getting a food reward, makes life easier in many cases. Feeling enjoyment and fun, while working on such constructive sense-based projects, is a healthful psychological skill useful throughout life. If life is a series of experiments, then why not learn to experiment intelligently?
Learning how it feels to intelligently and smoothly use rewards of, say, food, to teach a pet new skills also makes it easier to feel our kinship and similarity to the non-human world. Not only can such work can thus become the foundation for comparative anatomy studies later in high school, but they also help students see animals learn basically the same way people learn, with the help of enjoyable and pleasant rewards. No doubt, a line should be drawn somewhere, like forbidding students to train alligators to fetch the morning paper, but I think you see my point. Such sense-based projects make it easier to teach students how to reward themselves for learning a new habit! What kinds of rewards are best, and how often should they be given. Such work also makes it easier to educate their own children more intelligently if and when they have them. And, even such simple enjoyable projects also prepare students to study more abstract psychological ideas in high school. There, it’ll be easier to read more about other psychological models and their useful ideas, like talking about our feelings in a Freudian model, and role-playing in a Gestalt model. All such useful projects start helping students know more about themselves and also about others as well. What kid in any country wouldn’t like to have a cute little baby alligator until they learn they might lose a hand or a foot one day? Intelligent life is the art of drawing limits, isn’t it?
Another useful and important behavioral skills students can start feeling in these early years is learning to work in a relaxed way. The more students can stay relaxed, the easier it is to keep working and not grow their fearful ideas and feelings of failure and worthlessness. If we can't learn anything without the help of our muscles, then learning to work in a relaxed way only makes us healthier learners. Why stay tense when its results can become counterproductive? In short, why remain our own worst enemy and fail to become our own best friend? Feeling we love and respect our self makes learning that much easier.
Thus, relaxed working becomes another worthy goal to teach, and students should be told that, so they can add it to their list of skills they want to learn, like truth telling and good talking habits. Being relaxed and able to laugh easily at many of their mistakes makes it easier for students to stay loose, focused, and attentive to learning more about what they’re interested in. It makes schools and life itself more enjoyable, and really, what better habit-art can we give ourselves than that one? Such a skill, slowly brought to conscious awareness with a little daily practice in a psychology lab, keeps increasing student confidence about their own body-mind and its healthful possibilities. On a personal level, for years my own neck and shoulder muscles were overly tense; often I’d come home and do a shoulder stand for a few minutes, just to stretch out those muscles and feel more relaxed. Eventually it increased my feelings about such tensions and even helped me learn how to relax them. That was years ago, and the habit was so strong I still haven’t completely lost such tension, but it’s gotten easier to let go of it.
Even exercising can be done with a relaxed body-mind, but only if students are helped to see what that skill means and feels like. Otherwise, fatigue and stress build tiring work habits. With overly tense muscles even reading and writing can become more difficult and frustrating. I know more relaxed feelings have had a positive effect in my life, so why shouldn’t students have the freedom to experiment with such habits, especially those who are already overly tense and afraid? Learning to let go of useless bodily tension helps make all work and actions easier and more enjoyable. It might be described as learning to work and act with a heightened feeling of serenity and peace; judging by what I see in the world, it’s a skill many people could use in their daily lives.
Students can also begin learning about abnormal feelings as well, like obsessive-compulsive, passive-aggressive, and hypochondria. No doubt, young students often don’t have such habits, but why shouldn’t they start learning about them in grades 1-3? They could even be demonstrated by students themselves, especially those working to become counselors and therapists. Such sense-based knowledge will help students identify problems in others as well as themselves. Are their feelings and actions becoming unhealthful, and if so what can they do about it. Superstitious feelings and actions are still widespread around the world, so why shouldn’t young students begin hearing about them and learning how to improve them? Isn’t such knowledge yet another sign of psychological health? How dangerous are recurring scary dreams, and what can be done about them?
In such ways the entire subject of abnormal psychology can begin opening up to students, and used to help them keep their own actions healthful and enjoyable. Once students are free to start talking about their own feelings in a safe and nurturing school setting, then it becomes much easier to let go of such fears, as well as learn to overcome their challenges at home. In fact, the more students hear others talk about what may be their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful feelings and actions, the easier it becomes to start sharing their own feelings with others and start learning more intelligent ways of acting. With such knowledge their own parents will be seen more objectively and perhaps even be able to help them too.
Gestalt psychologists too encourage enjoyable role playing even for young students, to learn more useful skills and habits, like humor and creativity. Who wants to play the pet alligator role today and help teach students how dangerous some animals can be? How will someone feel when they're turned into a slave and made to obey someone else? Wouldn't such healthy role playing help reduce the still powerful habits of disrespectful dominance practiced in so many places? Such actions have no place in a respectful liberal democracy, and role-playing can begin teaching young students that idea. The more students feel the results of being treated like a slave, the more difficult it becomes to treat someone that way. And what applies to slavery and bullying can apply to any selfish and disrespectful habit, like stealing, lying, breaking just laws, and so on. Active sense-based role-playing adds a feeling element to learning that’s often lacking in conservative book-oriented schools. Thus, not only can such role-playing produce healthier and more deeply felt psychological habits, but more excellent character habits as well. A big part of liberal psychological health is actively showing people what a joyful person can act like, and also all the different ways of intelligently showing respect for others, like smiling and speaking joyfully when someone talks to us, rather than acting depressed and joyless. No doubt, everyone feels like that some time, but when it’s on-going it can become very dangerous and disruptive. Caring intelligently for others is another foundation of a healthy democracy.
Psychological Health in the Middle Years
Then, in the middle years of development, roughly from 8 to 14, psychological health can be practiced in more complex ways with more difficult and challenging construction projects. For example, learning to see creatively and imagine how their schools and neighborhoods can be improved, and then actually working with tools to test their ideas in wood and metal shops, helps students achieve another quantum level of psychological health. Again, such habits are essential to a healthy democracy. At this 2nd stage of child development, psychological health aims at enjoyably teaching more complex practical and intelligent kinds of building skills. Pet animals, for example, can be taught more complex habits by breaking down the process into small baby-steps of learning.
Also, in a psychological workshop, these students can keep learning about practical kinds of mathematics and reading by first build a list of improvements in both schools and neighborhoods, organizing them in order of importance, then estimate how much they might cost, how they might raise the needed money, how city officials and caring foundations might be able to help, organize the building project itself, and so on. Such activities will continue teaching students how interrelated and organic life really is, rather than being separate and distinct subjects. For example, voting on which projects should be worked on first is another democratic skill useful all through life. After all, not all forms of improvement are equally useful and valuable! Sound like a familiar idea? Thousands of years ago democratic Athenians like Protagoras and Pericles would have insisted on practicing that skill!
At this 2nd stage of growth individual differences and student diversity can also continue growing, as students continue learning more about what’s most important to them. But why shouldn’t even those students wanting to be a lawyer or doctor also have a role to play in such projects. After all, legal and medical events happen with any projects, so there’s a role to them as well. Some will also want to learn more about using computers to build things, like student businesses of, say, trading video games with others. And some will want to see if they can learn more about plumbing or pottery making with such projects, or perhaps creating works of fine art and selling them. In such schools where students are liberated from learning the same set of academic facts as everyone else, they will have a much better chance for exploring their own feelings as well as learning how to express them intelligently and constructively. And no doubt best of all, such projects will help make joining the honest money-making workforce after high school that much easier too.
So, quite naturally, we liberals say until such an active and liberating student-centered model of psychological health is practiced, many of our current personal and social weaknesses will continue on, the worst of which are passive and obedient habits to a feudalistic social, economic, and political status quo, and equally important are juvenile and adult crime, drug selling and abuse, and unemployment.
Also important at the 2nd stage of development are constructive reading and writing too. At this time students can continue learning more about creative writing, for example, and even reading humorous speeches to a student audience on a regular basis. As Dewey has said, the creation of talking skills about 100,000 years ago was the greatest invention in all of natural history. It began building the skill of thinking with ideas and words, and thus became the main reason our knowledge skills have become the greatest in all of earth history. Sad to say, never once did such events happen in my entire school career, as if both writing and reading such speeches was a cardinal sin and should never be allowed! We Deweyan liberals say the time for neglecting such useful skills is over in all liberal public schools. When students are the center of education, such skills are celebrated on a weekly basis, rather than being ignored.
As economic and manufacturing conditions continue changing, it calls for new and more healthful psychological habits of learning. Thus, the sooner students know how to intelligently build such skills, the better off they’ll be. Such new modern challenges like criminal behavior and greed help justify experimenting with building more liberal schools, where children are liberated to start building more useful skills. The sooner such intelligently constructive habits are learned, the more difficult it’ll be for feudalistic centers of power to keep making life more dangerous for everyone. The more students are allowed to protest social injustices, the better they’ll get at reducing such centers of power and making life better for everyone. In the past decade alone we’ve also seen the dangerous global results of our feudalistic military-industrial complex wreaking havoc across the Middle East and south Asia. The more students realize they can join together to help improve those excessive events, the healthier our own democracy will become.
Later Kinds of Psychological Health
Then, in the 3rd stage of growth, psychological health can express itself more abstractly, with students reading more about different psychological models. Thus, at this level more intellectual projects can be encouraged, like writing articles, stories, scripts, poems, and songs celebrating psychological health and their role in helping build a stronger democracy and safer world. In other words, the forms of liberal democratic psychological health can become more abstract and intellectual, as well as more physically active with protests and useful social work. At this stage of psychological development, schools will look more like the adult world than ever before, where people keep learning what they want. The more that happens, the easier it’ll be for students to enter into that world and be psychologically ready to make some positive contributions to life. Even young student lawyers and doctors can begin making some positive social contributions even before they graduate.
In a world where many people still practice violent and disrespectful habits, are there any better habits to teach other than intelligent reasoning and acting? They help grow a more respective and peaceful democracy where all young folks, both boys and girls, can actually start contributing to democratizing our still feudal economic and political systems. Learning more about how to intelligently see where such habits are still practiced, like in many of our corporations, helps student become better organized at demanding a more equal sharing of wealth-power. If not, then powerful corporations will continue growing a wealthy upper class by paying workers subsistence wages while getting hundreds of millions in tax-free income. We Deweyan liberals say, as the next generation approaches adulthood, they should be intellectually free to more clearly see what’s going on, and also actively organize against all forms of greed, whether economic or social. Such skills are the very heart and foundation of all healthy democracies. We see it happening today with corporations like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. Protestors are hitting the streets as executives in those companies keep taking advantage of a tax loophole and thus take tax-free millions from profits while workers have trouble making ends meet and paying for necessities. Such feudalistic activities are the natural enemies of all liberal democrats everywhere!
Also, with learning more about economic and political events here and how, it becomes easier for students to realize the world they’re about to enter is growing more feudalistic, not less. For about the past 40 years corporations have been working to break union strength, concentrate their decision-making power even more in their small boards of directors, and also build such tax loopholes into the tax code. As a result, executive pay and profits have skyrocketed, worker wages have gone flat, and unemployment is still too high for many people. Students in more liberal democratic schools and homes will have more freedom to focus on such results making their own lives less than satisfying.
Another subject worthy of intellectual study and action centers at our still feudalistic Supreme Court, especially since the current conservative court has allowed millions in corporate money to make its way into the political arena. It’s all been justified by merely 5 unelected conservatives saying corporations are people, and so have the same rights of free speech (Citizens United, 2010) Why shouldn’t more democratic high school students ask exactly what citizens are they talking about, conservative corporate executives or middle class citizens? And, why should anyone keep accepting the fact of 5 unelected Supreme Court Judges having so much power over 300 million people? It’s not democratic, it’s feudal! Such intelligent questions help build the intellectual powers in the next generation, and can give hope to democratic students as they learn most states already have some form of popular vote for their state Supreme Court members, so how can we go about changing our federal system? Such studies make it easier for students to get in touch with events in the real world.
All abstract knowledge becomes easier in this 3rd stage of development. As students become more able to learn, say, chemical facts, it’ll be easier to base their healthy habits on them, and thus unite ideas to the healthful feelings they already have. Chemical knowledge makes it easier to see why refined sugar and flour products are less healthy than other foods, and how little in the way of fats they’ll need to stay healthy. Excess food energy merely makes it easier for the body to keep growing cancers of all kinds. With such abstract knowledge they’ll be better able to follow the logic and understand why too much animal flesh is not healthy for them. They’ll connect the knowledge about the human food processing system with facts about animal toxins and waste products produced by animal cells even after the animal is killed, and how cooking can even make such toxins more toxic!
And of course exercise too can become more abstract with biological book-facts uniting their feeling about healthful exercise habits they’re been building for years! For example, muscle health is best promoted with mild warm up exercises, so as not to tear muscle tissue. And bodily responses can become more abstract by keeping information on blood pressure and heart functions both during and after exercising. In such ways exercise and eating will become even more scientific and more intelligent as well.
In more liberal public schools, then, feeling those new abstract levels of intellectual power and thinking also gives them the power to learn more abstract written information from electronic and book sources. They’ll become better able to research and find the ideas they’re looking for, rather than read through an entire book looking for what they need. As a result, they’ll feel new confidence as they keep making intelligent plans for their constructive work projects. At this stage of their lives students will not only have the physical skills to, say, build a school green house, or a useful chemistry lab for testing the air, water, and soil around them, but also the abstract skills to draw up more detailed plans, thus making their building projects more like an architectural science.
And of course at the higher adult levels of psychological health students may even learn the subtle art of helping people by simply asking them a few simple questions: how’re you feeling; how’s your mom or dad; what do you feel like protesting today? Some may even learn to enjoy frustrating those who are planning to hurt or harm others, or at least tell the authorities if they do. To such students, harmful and undemocratic actions deserve to be confronted as soon as possible; to ignore them merely increases their possibility. Even morbid feelings and habits can be felt, played with, and perhaps improved too.
Psychological health during these high school years leads naturally to social kinds of democratic expressions. For us, above all else, every person is part of our human race, and so deserves respect at least until they act illegally or disrespectfully. That democratic model of psychological health is not only respectful, but also actively holds people responsible for their actions. The more those skills grow, the easier it becomes to live in the adult world, where only a few people take responsibility for their actions, especially in the government. Even President Nixon claimed he really didn’t know what was going on with his closest advisers and their Watergate capers. And, of course at this abstract level of growth, abstract laws themselves can be judged by their results. Does, for example, welfare laws make people dependent on the government, or help them keep learning more useful skills so they can better support themselves? Thus, such debates about many different abstract ideas become much more powerful during this stage of development. What’s the best way to respect just laws, and should all workers share equally in the profits from their work? Does merely smiling help make us happier? How important is the skill of wisely helping others? What’s it like to be treated as a 2nd class citizen merely because of one’s sex, skin color, or religious habits? Is intelligence really an adverb? What is freedom?
Such intellectual debates can be much more of a learning experience at this stage of development. They can also help students see intelligence itself is not something one finally acquires, like a ring or a necklace, and after which it stops growing. At the more abstract levels of high school it’s easy to see intelligence is an adverb; it’s merely a skill to keep making our actions more intelligent than before. It keeps modifying an adjusting our actions in the best sense of that word. Freedom, too, is never finally achieved, so that one is completely free once and for all. No. It’s an organic habit-art growing all through life! An intelligent skill keeps asking us how we should act here and now to produce the best results. Thus, at this abstract level of learning, students will begin feeling many of mankind’s most important questions, the answers to which become the foundation for everyone’s psychological health.
Without more liberal democratic schools teaching such habits of psychological health, we’ll no doubt continue seeing political results like the Nazis in the 1930s, Russia in the 1950s and 80s, the US in the 1960s and 2,000s, conservative Republicans since the 1980s, and fundamental Islamists since 2,000. They all more or less ignored democratic kinds of health, and focusing on providing a few with fortunes while sending others to fight and die for it. Knowing even intellectually a little something about such actions will begin making it easier to feel what people like Eugene Debs said about war early in the last century: the wealthy and powerful have always started the wars, and the poor have always fought and died in them. The more liberal schools keep growing, the more students will be liberated from becoming those kinds of slaves to those in power, and the weaker all feudalistic habits will become.
Today, more and more people are realizing slavery in any of its forms, even in schools making students read and study the same abstract academic facts together, makes it more difficult to learn more intelligent democratic habits. Such schools are far from a liberal model of psychological health, and yet many today still say they’re the kinds of schools we need. As conservative educators like, for example, Michele Rhee have recently learned, more and more people are rejecting that idea. Her lack of democratic feelings about individual student needs and wants, and her conservative ideas of educational and psychological health based on abstract knowledge and testing, helped create results so obnoxious to people in Washington, D. C., they soon took her educational power away. To us liberals that was yet another sign of liberal psychological health expressed intelligently through the ballot box; conservative models of enforced and blind obedience to largely useless academic book-facts simply have no place in a democratic society. And for those interested in reading a great article about how useless standardized tests are in the real world, please see the Washington Post article Four Lessons on new PISA scores – Ravitch (12-3-2013) It puts such testing in a more liberal perspective.
What Caring People Owe to the Next Generation
Admittedly, in liberal schools these health-based skills are infinitely more important than memorizing largely useless book-facts. For us, they attack a number of weaknesses in conservative public schools. Might such habit-arts reduce the number of recent mass school killings we’ve been seeing around the nation, or very high unemployment numbers for high school grads, or crime rates and drug use? No one knows for sure until they’re actually experimented with. But, almost certainly, we’ll never know what the personal and social results will be if we keep enslaving students to more and more book-knowledge! In any case, however, many of our on-going destructive and wasteful social problems keep telling us we should try a more liberal learning model based on health even at the elementary level, before students learn anti-social habits.
With just these few ideas and suggestions mentioned above we can begin feeling how Behavioral psychology and a liberal model of health can be used as two liberating skills. Teaching such skills even at the elementary level will start empowering students to live more intelligent lives in their homes, churches, and schools. If not, then parents with excessive and unhealthful habits will eventually pass them on to their children, and to their children, and so on, thus perpetuating many of our serious social problems. Don’t’ we owe it to the next generation to teach such kinds of skills all through their formative years? After all, what students don’t want to become better at overcoming unhealthful obstacles in their lives, and learn more about what health can mean in a democratic society? What abused children wouldn’t like to have more intelligent ways of confronting abusive parents or peers?
If so, then don’t we all owe it to the next generation to start teaching such skills in our public schools, converting them one year at a time? Our own public schools are excellent places to start empowering students to intelligently fight against excessive kinds of punishment, as well as learn more constructive skills? We’ve got physics labs and chemistry labs, so why not take our public schools to the next educational level and start building physical, psychology, economic, and political health labs too? How many 9 year olds, for example, would love to keep experimenting with training their favorite pet animal, I mean besides those who have fish for pets; I’ve yet to see a trained gold fish? After all, many adults earn good honest money with such skills. And, wouldn’t it be much more comforting to know the neighbor taking its pet alligator for a little after-dinner walk has trained it not to bite off someone’s foot yet? Chalk that last idea up to yet another lame attempt at humor, but better a lame attempt than no attempt, right?
One more important result for the next generation can be mentioned. The more children learn about such healthful skills, the easier it’ll be to teach them to their own kids, spouses, business clients, and perhaps even their pet alligators, although odds are against that last idea. It bears repeating once again: over 90%, 90% mind you, of the young men and women in our prisons today have had their body-mind’s warped and disabled with excessive abuse and violent punishment. That’s the bad news. The good news is the remaining 10% are probably gays and lesbians who’re there by choice trying to help teach and liberate them from their own strong destructive feelings and habit-arts! With more liberal democratic schools where health is the main learning goal, such results would become weaker and less troublesome.
If more children were taught more healthful psychological skills, it would not only reduce individual frustrations and anxieties, but also reduce the cost of maintaining such prisons for the next generation. How can we fulfill our on-going desires to give the next generation a better world unless we start teaching them how to intelligently keep building it? So, again, where is the harm in helping liberate the next generation psychologically from its own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, and increase their chances for living in an oppressive-free, respectful, and helpful environment? How else will our supposedly ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ actually help make people free and brave unless those excellent psychological skills are practiced in our homes, public schools, and churches?
No doubt, the next generation may thank us for building such schools, and thus helping them reduce the cost of, say, spending around $50 Billion every year just for prisons in California. With a little elementary math that averages out to around $30,000 a year per prisoner, while public school spending for each student is around $11,000 per pupil. And, as a New York Times article of 10-23-2013 by Marc Santora reports, “The city paid $168,731 to feed, house, and guard each inmate last year.” Don’t such numbers for California help create around 20,000 reasons per student to see such skills are taught in our public schools? There seems to be no limit to those venture (vulture?) capitalists who want to keep taking more of the public’s money with for-profit prisons and charter schools. Imagine how much more enjoyable and productive our public schools could be for students if they had an extra $20,000 a year per pupil to spend on student community service projects. And such public schools would finally provide all those who complain about higher taxes, and yet have no educational plan for reducing them! Wouldn’t it be a win for students and taxpayers, but more importantly, a loss for all those greedy people who live and breathe to keep taking more of the public’s money? To such people any form of socialized system, except the military, is a target for attack.
Thousands of years ago many Chinese intellectuals realized more police is certainly not the best long term remedy for non-violent criminal behavior. By the time people get to adulthood such habits are already strong will-power, and thus more difficult than ever to reconstruct and improve. No doubt, even kind-hearted Confucius cracked down on criminals when he was given the power, but he also realized the more socially involved and respectful young folks learn to act, the less need there will be for prisons later on.
Since the early 1900s and Dewey’s work in Behavioral psychology, teachers and principals began seeing what important healthy psychological skills are useful in a democratic society. Even in the 1950s my 6th grade teacher was already skilled at reading student personality traits from the way they wrote; handwriting too is another behavioral way students express their feelings! So, when should the next generation start learning what actions are best for building a more democratic society, I mean besides yesterday? What's to be gained from keeping the next generation ignorant about all these healthy habits? Doesn’t it merely make it easy for those with economic power to keep taking more money from them?
No doubt, even conservatives will often say our public schools should teach children how to solve their own problems. On an abstract level, at least, they say independence is a worthy habit to teach. But with laws like NCLB, real active opportunities to learn such skills are reduced to almost zero. It’s yet another example of conservative hypocrisy – saying one thing and doing the opposite! In liberal schools building such intelligent habits becomes active and real. Such independent skills also make it easier to keep seeing what those with economic and political power are doing with their money. Why keep the next generation merely chained to their books around 80% of the time? It merely helps perpetuate a feudalistic status quo in a democratic society.
Today, more of us liberals are beginning to realize the best remedy for wasteful prisons and unemployment lines is not more drug laws, de-humanizing jails, more impersonal courts, overworked public defenders, or more ineffective probation officers. Those remedies, though sometimes helpful, use public monies that could be much better spent building more liberal health-oriented public schools for the next generation. Once such destructive feelings and actions become propulsive adult habits, then it’s much more difficult to teach more intelligent healthful skills quickly, like they could be taught to young students. If not, then many more people will continue spending decades in prison wasting valuable public taxes, when, with more intelligent skills, they could start contributing to national health in their teen years. Is that the kind of public school system we want to hand to the next generation?
If not, then it’s really up to each of us adults here and now to start organizing and building more liberal kinds of public schools in our own neighborhoods, one grade at a time, one year at a time. Such schools will start liberating the next generation to spend their tax dollars on more enjoyable and rewarding systems than the ones we have now, like our present circular self-perpetuating school-to-jail-to-release-to-back-to-jail system! Prison guards would be much more useful to society if they were hired to teach law enforcement skills to the next generation. In truth, each one of us have some responsibility for helping the next generation become liberated from such a system. No one knows how much our prison population would start shrinking if children simply were taught what the law is, and rewarded for respecting it too. If we want more psychologically healthful law-abiding citizens, then we need to start teaching young folks both what respectful laws are, and how to enjoy obeying them. Why shouldn’t public school success be judged, in part, by how many of their graduates get jobs after high school, and stay out of legal troubles for 10 years, rather than by just how many kids are graduating and what their standardized test scores are? The sooner students learn being in a disrespectful gang is not a sign of intelligence, the better off we all will become. The sooner disrespectful-acting students are taught more intelligent kinds of habits, the better off all of us will be.