How do educational leaders accomplish this difficult task of bringing students -- and even citizens -- out of their self-made caves of ignorance? How can they be brought to interact with different, even contrary ideas?
You tell me.
The opening course in my graduate program stressed listening in the first few sessions. We assessed the manners in which we listen using a form adapted from Madelyn Burley-Allen’s Listening: The Forgotten Skill, and Udai Pareek’s SPIRO Instrument measured the ways our personal interactions change with adults who are experiencing different emotions. Even the clever “Life with the Wright Family” story and group exercise illustrated how challenging it can be to listen as a group. All of these elements trained us to build effective visions according to a “Working with Visions” article which stresses collaboration and the seeking of common ground. Indeed, a vision cannot be crafted in a vacuum, nor can it be crafted for a vacuum. Every school exists in a community; listening to the members therein ignites the process of finding the right common ground that can evolve into a shared vision. In truth, the vision already exists. The shared values already course through the veins of every family in the neighborhood. A careful listener and astute observer will actually be able to spot those values rather easily. The vision-crafting process involves a lot more collaborative investigation than creation. Schools must merely articulate in a clear, common language the priorities that already simmer in the souls of their respective communities.
The final piece of the vision puzzle may prove more elusive, however. Once all the shared, communal values are unearthed, which ones can actually help a school educate the local youth? Leaders need to ask the right questions in order to find the answers that will contribute to the right vision. Bill Honig argued in the video we watched on September 8 that “right” values will connect content area knowledge to students’ experience and instruct them about their roles in American democracy. Honig makes a fascinating assumption here that is all the more ironic when considering his title in 1986 at the time of the video. California’s Superintendent of Instruction implies that the content standards his government delivers to teachers contain zero relevance to students’ lives or their civic duties. Why else would he advocate that schools actively connect the curricula to these concepts? And he’s right: the content standards alone do not provide the students with the context necessary to make learning meaningful. Schools must forge those connections, craft that context, through their vision of how learning should occur.
Herein lies the essential question for every school: how can this curricula, handed to us from on high, be made relevant to the lives students lead and the democracy in which they shall participate? Out of all the information, what do students need to know?
It is not for principals and other educational leaders to answer that question. Their job is to ask that question and listen to their community’s responses. It is an urgent duty precisely because information saturates the American landscape yet stunts the American dialogue. We need to draw our citizens out of their caves and back into conversation. A distinction no longer exists between information and ignorance; one can easily possess both in spades. In an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart just a week before his new program debuted on PBS, Jon Meachem spelled out his mission as editor-in-chief of Newsweek. He offers a different word as the antonym of ignorance:
“I do not believe that Newsweek is the only catcher in the rye between ignorance and democracy. But I think we’re one of them, and I don’t think there are that many on the edge of that cliff.”
What do students need to learn in order to avoid the cliff’s edge? How should they be drawn out of their caves and into democracy? The leaders and educators in every school need to know.
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