Theories of Motion

The Greek “dunamis,” from which we get words like “dynamic,” can be read or translated several different ways, and each interpretation brings with it a world-view. At one end, we can translate it as the physical property of “potentiality.” This ignores, however, much of what Aristotle or another Greek would have meant by the word. They would have tied our material interpretation to other, metaphysical and immaterial meanings, ultimately, perhaps, including a concept of “divine power” and the force of a “daimon,” a deity inferior to the highest deity or deities.

If we ask today why a ball that we throw through the air continues to move after it has left our hand, we discuss mass, force, acceleration, momentum, and gravity, each of which can be measured, if not (yet) thoroughly understood.

But the dunamis, because it is immaterial, cannot be measured. Hence, we have learned over the past centuries to redefine it, to shape it into a concept (potential energy) that can be measured, and to ignore other meanings that it may have.

Further, ignoring these other meanings, relegating them to the qualitative sphere that we have gradually come to see as derivative of a more quantitative engagement with the world, we have come to disbelieve in their existence, to see their existence as superstition.

But this disbelief consists of a series of assumptions that put us in an illogical, if apparently reasonable, position. We may say that we have no need of an immaterial concept of the dunamis, that we find it extraneous to what we want to know and do, but we simply cannot pass judgment on its existence or non-existence. Without quite acknowledging it, we have allowed theory to become fact.

We throw a ball and it travels through the air. The ball weighs, say, 5.25 ounces and has a circumference of 9.25 inches. It’s covered in white horsehide and stitched with thick red threads. It spins and generates air pressure differentials that cause its trajectory to curve. The “force of gravity” (which we can measure but cannot yet comprehend or explain) draws it and the earth together. It drops past the batter’s knees, a called strike three. And there may—or may not—be a lower deity, a daimon, one of the dunamoi, guiding it along its way. We just don’t know.

Am I actually suggesting that I believe in immaterial beings of motion? I don’t believe but I also don’t disbelieve in them. But I acknowledge that my belief in physics does not contradict a belief in a qualitative understanding of motion and even of beings of motion, the dunamoi.

Learning to Think in High School

We learn with more than just our heads. Lots of us, not just those in Waldorf schools, agree with this.

In 1956 (and after), to take a prime example, Benjamin Bloom described a taxonomy or hierarchical organization of learning within a threefold context of cognition (thinking), affect (feeling), and psychomotor behavior (will). Based on continuing research, his taxonomy has since been modified and now includes these six levels, from the highest to the most basic: creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering.

Based on the work of John Gardner at the Garden City Waldorf School in the 1950s and 1960s and Douglas Gerwin since then, Waldorf schools approach each grade of high school differently in terms of assignments, expectations, and the development of thinking.

Looking over their work recently in preparation for a faculty meeting, it occurred to me that John Gardner almost certainly took Bloom’s work and compressed it—six levels sandwiched into four years of high school. And it makes sense to do this. Bloom’s work was based on higher education, on students who had largely passed the developmental stage of adolescence. For those teaching adolescents, a gradual introduction to more sophisticated thinking makes sense.

Interestingly, Gardner had the insight to move the synthesis required of creativity to the head of the list before a reassessment of Bloom’s research in the 1980s that did the same thing—earlier, “evaluating” was higher than “creativity.”

Our high school Core Teachers study education at each of our faculty meetings, and use the concepts outlined below in creating assignments in literature, history, science, and other subjects based on this understanding of thinking, learning, and mastery.

Ninth graders focus on accurate observation and description.
• Key words appropriate for 9th grade assignments include these: Observe, describe, note, summarize, re-tell, sequence, depict, illustrate, name, report, specify, and state.
• Questions for 9th graders might begin: What…?

Tenth graders focus on objective comparison.
• Key words for 10th grade assignments include these: Compare, contrast, difference, similarity, equation, equivalence, inequality, analogy, affinity, relationship, balance, weigh, connect, correlate, match, and proportion.
• Questions for 10th graders might begin: How…?

Eleventh graders focus on metamorphosis or transformation (building up) and analysis of a whole into parts (taking apart).
• Key words for 11th grade assignments include these: Analyze, abstract, theory, growth, transformation, metamorphosis, change, interpret (parts), make-up, essay, dissect, test, influence, involve, estimate, scrutinize, divide, and cause (and effect).
• Questions for 11th graders might begin: Why…?

Twelfth grade aims at individual synthesis; that is, forming an argument using the methods of grades 9-11 to present a coherent point of view that represents a student’s own view.
• Key words for 12th grade assignments include these: Synthesis, meaning, interpretation (whole), judgment, contemplation, reflection, integrate, assemble, combine, unite, unify.
• Questions for 12th graders might begin: Who…? (in the sense of a student’s relationship to the material; and, ultimately, who am I?)

Interpreting a Hard World

When I was a child of nine or ten, the world suddenly seemed hard. I mean this literally. Not that life was hard in some metaphorical way, but that everything from the porcelain sky through the shiny leaves and silver bark of maples in summer to the granular asphalt under my feet had an impenetrable quality. I was outside this world, and I found this alarming, discomfiting, depressing. This feeling overwhelmed me at times, especially on bright days when the sun mercilessly picked out the infinite detail of the world.

That the world was this way didn’t seem like my active perception of it so much as an intrusion from “out there,” and I struggled against it, mentally trying to soften things up, to penetrate their surfaces, or, although I wasn’t aware of this at the time, to become one with them again.

But there was nothing I could do, there was, then, nothing to do about it. This feeling of otherness, of separation, was simply a fact of my existence, but one that I clearly had not noticed before.

For several years—until I was 15 or 16—I could summon this feeling at will, immerse myself in it, experience it, examine it anew. But this ability faded, and now I have only a memory of it.

I forgot about all of this for decades.

And then, a few weeks ago, something about the brightness of the sunlight (the leaves are off the trees), perhaps, triggered a memory, and it all came flooding back.

As an older person, I can begin to interpret this sense I had then. Small children are connected to the world and their parents, at first literally and then, for years and years, metaphorically and, without effort to reconnect, increasingly tenuously. I believe I experienced something of my separation—from my parents and family, but also from creation at large—something of my growing individuality, in seeing the appearance of the world as so impenetrable.

That the world so all-of-a-sudden took on this hard quality implies that it wasn’t that way before this, when I was one, two, three, or eight. That is, that my perception of it was different, that what I found now, by comparison, must have been different. I can only say that the metaphorical inside of the world was still united with its outside. (For Barfield, consciousness is “the inside of the whole world.”) And then these split.

Notes on Starting a Waldorf High School

What follow are answers to questions posed by Douglas Gerwin in research on starting a Waldorf high school (so far unpublished, I believe). I thank the half-dozen or so of my colleagues who helped me come up with these answers a couple of years ago.

What helped the most and least in preparation and founding?
Most:
• A years-long anthroposophical adolescence and high school study group of teachers and parents.
• Students who wanted to continue in a Waldorf school and asked their parents to help make it happen—not many, at first, but a couple with real initiative.
• Steadfast and enthusiastic parents, teachers, and trustees.
• The attitude that we’re going to do this even if we have to meet in someone’s living room to save money; that my child will be there in September even if she’s the only one.
• An experienced lead teacher to inspire students and parents (who had taught the lead class in 7th and 8th grade).

Least:
• A “wait and see” or “prove this is worthy” attitude from some trustees, teachers, and parents.
• Antagonism from elementary school parents concerned that their money would support others’ children’s high school education.
• Selfishness and resentment about “lending” elementary school teachers to the high school.
• That the elementary school had been established for more than 30 years—no pioneer spirit left.
• That the elementary school had “lost” a high school in the 1980s—had started one and then had to close it fewer than four years later.
• Presence of Hawthorne Valley School—including a Waldorf high school—c. 25 min. away. (Although we believed—and still believe—that two healthy elementary schools can support two healthy high schools; that there’s room for healthy cultural variation among Waldorf schools—more choice is better; and that, like gas stations clustered near the center of a town, people will go where the education is.)
• Culture among elementary school parents; expectation that 8th grade “graduates” will go on to prep school.

What were the big surprises, miscalculations?
• The whole thing has been a surprise... That we’re still here and have grown through the nation’s recession, that we’ve had a balanced budget for the last three years, that our students and parents are happy and that the students are accepted to excellent colleges means we haven’t miscalculated too badly...
• That we had a fantastically successful 9th grade year (first year of high school) and then were told that others had misgivings about moving ahead with grade 10. (To be precise, some of us remember agreeing to see how 9th grade went before deciding if there would be a 10th grade—like many prep schools, we could imagine being a K-9 school for a few years before moving to a full high school; others remembered an agreement that we were not adding a 10th grade, no matter what. The lack of clarity here—no minutes or written Board decision—hurt us.)
• How difficult it was to have part of a high school (9th grade, 9th and 10th, and 9th, 10th, and 11th) without a senior class. Seniors are real leaders, and the school didn’t really start to feel complete and entirely happy until spring 2006, just before our first graduation.
• Skepticism of supposedly committed elementary school teachers.
• Economic hardship—more than one teacher worked for a year for nothing. Nothing.
• Community involvement has been spectacular.
• Exceptional visiting teachers.

What were the biggest obstacles, hurdles?
• The sheer difficulty of the operation, top to bottom. The infinite detail.
• Initial lack of money and students. The high school “paying for” a crisis in the elementary school at the time of founding with reduced enrollment. Little money for PR; low visibility...
• Perception that we were “just” a continuation of the elementary school; that we would use elementary school understandings of students and teaching methods. (Which is like assuming that elementary school teachers will use early childhood understandings and techniques…)
• Perception that, because another Waldorf school is 25 min. away, our work was unnecessary or redundant.
• Faculty turn-over. Several teachers miscalculated their commitment or the difficulty of starting a school and left for greener or at least more predictable pastures.
• No tuition remission for our teachers. We couldn’t afford it. Now we don’t support it because not giving remission is a signal to our community that we’re all in this together. Teachers can enter the tuition assistance pool just like everyone else.

What do you wish you had done that you did not do? What would you do differently if you had it to do over again?
• Emphasize value of small school from the start (we spent a couple of years apologizing for our small size before our parents correctly pointed out to us the many benefits of our size): flexibility, motivation of students, caliber of work, focus, structure.
• “Sell” to students in grades 5-8. (We started with the belief that parents should make the decision about their children’s high school, even if we knew that students were making it. And we found each year that including 7th grade families wasn’t enough, nor 6th... “marketing” needs to include the whole elementary school, and targeting events—open houses, plays, etc.—needs to begin with 5th grade families.)
• Emphasize the need for confidentiality among colleagues as we go through the “birth pangs” of starting a school—specifically, for example, when we missed a pay period, it was harmful to the school (and didn’t help anyone get paid any faster) when teachers complained to parents or others.
• Establish a more structured relationship with our Elementary School to allow for greater clarity in planning for the future. We had an ad hoc joint committee of teachers and trustees, but this functioned reactively; we would have benefitted from a more durable, proactive group.
• Devote more energy to educating our elementary school teachers (especially in grades 5-8) about who we were and what we were doing. Like many parents, they assume that a Waldorf high school is “just” a continuation of the elementary school, not a transformation of it...

What are you grateful that you did do?
• That we started (instead of waiting).
• Engaged resources in the community—artists, studios, internships, Simon’s Rock college athletic center, lab, library, and, especially, the “language” trips that we instituted to Germany and Peru every other year.
• Stuck to our strong substance abuse policy. We lost a couple of valuable families by sticking to our guns, but, in the long run, we’re stronger and healthier and our enrollment has grown.

What was most helpful in generating enrollment, philanthropy?
• No annual appeal, just informative letters and requests every other month or so. Relationships with major donors.
• Success of pioneer classes—college acceptance, graduation speeches, general student presentation convinced many parents and students that we were worthwhile.
• Positive student attitudes and supportive students (and these developed more strongly from our 4th year on...)

What best persuaded 8th graders to join high school?
• Visiting days. Skeptical students were usually “wowed” by spending a day with us. Even those who went elsewhere recognized the quality of the school.
• Our annual play, too.
• And the possibility of travel and exchange.
• Also our flexibility—willingness to add courses or, for example, a darkroom and photography to curriculum based on student requests.
• The high quality of our teaching—a Core Faculty experienced in Waldorf schools; 2 PhDs; four of six Core Faculty members attended Ivy League schools and the others are also exceptionally well-educated.

What is essential in starting? What can you do without?
• At least one “real” Waldorf high school teacher, whatever that is, and enough committed families to create a pioneer class—our smallest number in the school has been 12 (our smallest class has been 3, if you don't count the year we had senior class of 4 and a junior class of zero).
• Passion, unity of purpose, and a mission shared among colleagues.
• Everything else, we’ve demonstrated so far, is extraneous, or at least can be jerry-rigged year-to-year.

How did you handle elementary school anxieties?
• Primarily by incorporating separately, not because we wanted to, but because it was the only way we could continue.
• Openness—willingness to meet, to answer questions, to allow visitors to classes, board meetings, etc., etc.
• As more and more nearby Waldorf schools founded high schools, however, the argument that, although it is risky to start a high school, it may be riskier not to, gained some traction among thoughtful parents and trustees.

How did you seek and secure “buy in” from community?
• By quietly representing ourselves openly and honestly. We had open board meetings from the start (and were followed a year later by our elementary school!).
• We try, with limited resources, to make sure that all our families, high school and elementary school, get the student newsletter, our fundraising letters (which we try to make as “meaty” as possible), etc.

Threefold Social Organization and Waldorf School Governance

According to Rudolf Steiner, social organizations should have three cooperative but independent administrations—one to administer economic functions, one to administer rights and responsibilities of members of the organization, and one to administer what he calls the spiritual or cultural functions—he uses these words interchangeably in discussions of social questions—of the organization. These three administrations scale to cover the smallest institutions and the largest social groups. One administration may consider itself more central than the others to the mission of a particular organization, but all must balance if the organization is to maintain itself in health. A school, for instance, could mirror a theocracy if educational concerns are used to trump or bully the genuine concerns of the rights of its consumers.

This example points to the intuitive correctness of Steiner’s view. Take the opposite view; do we believe that justice should be bought and sold, or that the state should govern religion? For those seeking a more conventional (but no less difficult to comprehend) statement of a view of the theefold structure of society, Jurgen Habermas’s concept of a “lifeworld,” discussed in detail in the second volume of his Theory of Communicative Action, outlines a view that is essentially the same as Steiner’s. For Habermas, every communicative act—asking a question, making a statement—expresses all three of the human subsystems of thinking, feeling, and will. (That is, the most rigorous thought is still communicated with some emotional investment and some intention of will; the most emotional outburst still gives evidence of a thought and an intention, and so on.) Further, every communicative act, in that it is directed from one person to another or to a group of others, extends the human capacities of thinking, feeling, and will into a social interaction. Thinking extended into social interaction we may call culture; feeling extended becomes politics; and will extended concerns economic relations.

For Steiner, an economic administration should function according to a principle of solidarity (Steiner says “brotherhood,” but we should update this) through an “association of producers, distributors, and consumers.” For a school, a child’s education is a product in the economic sphere. It is more than this, but it is also this. Hence, a school should have an administrative body that is comprised of producers—representatives of teachers and staff—and consumers—representatives of the parent body as proxies for their children. Such an administration, to ensure that its work is legal and effective, will also require legal and financial expertise. (Introducing expertise of any kind, we should acknowledge, introduces something from the spiritual-cultural sphere.)

The work of this administration is to balance the needs, desires, and resources of producers and consumers to produce a budget and to plan for the future. Clearly, this administrative body may be identified with a school’s board of trustees.

An administration of the spiritual-cultural area of a school functions according to a principle of freedom, and so—despite tradition and received wisdom—it is difficult if not impossible to say how this administration will or should be governed. It might operate as a so-called College of Teachers that uses a consensus decision-making model, but, in freedom, there is no requirement that it do so.

Steiner did not specify a decision-making process for cultural organizations (and, if he did, we would still have to decide for ourselves whether or not we agree with his statements), and, in fact, in the meetings to reorganize the Anthroposophical Society in 1923-1924, stated that the process mattered little and should be left up to individual groups. One group might choose to function aristocratically, another more democratically. His position was that the structure mattered less than the persons involved, and that those chosen to carry out a task be given the freedom to do it. I believe his views here on constituting the administration of branches of the Society are directly applicable to constituting the administration of a Waldorf school. And, in the first Waldorf School, Steiner was the Director, appointed by acclamation (not by vote).

A spiritual-cultural administration consists of the teachers in the school, regardless of how they structure their governance or decision-making. As Steiner said, “no one who is not a teacher is to have anything to say [about how education is conducted].” Powerful words, if true. Of course, visiting teachers—consultants, mentors—and doctors and therapists who work with the students in a school may be included. But that’s about it. In a Waldorf school we may call this group the College of Teachers, the Core Faculty, the Council, or something else. We may worry that it is too small and too exclusive (and then work to make it larger and more inclusive—there are many ways to do this), but this is the body in most Waldorf schools that corresponds to the free administration of the spiritual-cultural life of a school.

And the work of this administration is the education of students.

A third administration, an administration of rights and responsibilities, which functions democratically according to a principle of equality, should clearly include representatives of every constituency of the school community, anyone who has any rights within the organization, anyone who has any responsibilities to the organization. Here we include students, parents, teachers, staff, alumni, retired faculty and staff, and even donors. All have some number of rights and responsibilities to the organism of the school. These include legally recognized rights, and so this administration requires legal representation, if not at every meeting, at least as a resource on-call.

(I use “rights and responsibilities” because I believe that to be a more revealing phrase in this context than “politics,” a word that is tainted in contemporary colloquial use, and more revealing than “legal,” which doesn’t go far enough to describe what I’m talking about. And I include “responsibilities” because these are clearly conceptually necessary, with rights, to describe what I’m talking about. Steiner includes them, although this is often overlooked or forgotten. To call it a “rights” administration alone indulges a kind of knee-jerk American selfishness—I’ll insist on my rights—and ignores the obligations that we owe each other in social interactions.)

Rights are myriad. Perhaps they begin with clear legally recognized rights, but they also include the policies and procedures of the school. Among other things, for instance, applicants have a right to a clear response to their application in a reasonable time. Responsibilities, too, are myriad. Parents must pay their bills. Teachers must engage in appropriate professional development. Breach of rights or responsibilities is reason for discipline or termination.

Policies, procedures, working conditions, contracts, all belong to this administration. Its work is to set and negotiate the boundaries within which the human beings in the organization conduct their work.

Often, it seems, this work is fragmented in Waldorf schools, is not given to one administration. The Board sets its own policies and procedures, as does the College of Teachers or Council. The support staff (administrative staff) may do the same. A Human Resources committee may assume responsibility for some aspects of this work.

This fragmentation may lead to confusion and miscommunication among parents, teachers, and board members. Dysfunction in this area seems to plague Waldorf schools, and I would say that this is, in part, because schools are clear about the function of a Board and a College but remarkably unclear about the function of this third administration—in fact, there is usually no single name we can use to designate it in a Waldorf school, and there is no single administrative body that consists of representatives of all the constituencies of the school.

(In many schools, the Board may see this administration as part of its legal function, but may then micromanage, fail to distinguish properly between economic concerns and those of rights and responsibilities, or fail to constitute and empower a committee that can take full responsibility for this work. Similarly, Colleges of Teachers may fail to distinguish their appropriate educational function from that of a separate rights and responsibilities administration.)

Schools would undoubtedly be stronger if there was a single administrative team, constituted according to correct principles, that oversaw this work. As it is, too often, policies are weak or incomplete, forgotten or ignored, or simply absent, sending persons of otherwise good will up a wall and out of a school.

As a test case, we might ask first about a clear process for terminating a teacher who is not fulfilling her responsibilities to her students or the school. Schools accomplish this, but often with far greater ill will and rancor than sister institutions (that don’t claim to have such an idealistic view of the world but that function with better management and clarity). And as a second test case, we might ask about a clear process and procedure for terminating this person if she is the Faculty Chair or other person who might otherwise be central to the termination of another colleague. Is there a safety valve or a back door?

Democracy here does not imply voting, or not voting alone. Dewey’s broad definition of democracy as “conjoint community” may point us in the right direction. Decision-making may be democratic and consensus-driven (within legal boundaries), or it may be representational and use some other decision-making process. The point is that all voices are heard and considered.

(I am indebted to my students at Sunbridge Institute for helping me clarify several aspects of this article; it attempts to summarize a week of work in an intensive course on school governance.)

Bad Teachers Teaching Badly

About a year ago, for reasons now lost, my students and I started a running list of things bad teachers do, or bad teaching techniques.

We have derived a lot of amusement from creating this list, although seeing it typed out gives me pause—I see my own imperfections and those of my colleagues. Although my students and I may have been chuckling as we added another item to the list, I also see how pernicious and destructive bad teaching can be.

(I remember Mrs. C, a 6th grade teacher in a public school I attended. She accused me of something I hadn't done and required me to stay after school to write 100 times that I wouldn't do it again--I don't remember what it was. When I tried to protest, she brow-beat a false confession out of me. I still can't believe how easily I capitulated. After school, while I was writing, she accused me of giggling when I sighed, and added another 100 repetitions. Almost 40 years later, I can't believe how worked up I can still get about all this.)

A list of things bad teachers do throws into relief what a decent, not to say, good, teacher might avoid and suggests what a decent, not to say, good, teacher might do.

Feel free to add to this list in Comments.

• Insult your students.
• Threaten your students.
• Use physical and psychological aggression to punish and humiliate your students.
• Show off in front of your students.
• Indulge any digression you feel like in front of your students; allow yourself to be continually distracted.
• Ignore student questions.
• Get angry when students ask questions.
• Repeat answers to questions even when it’s clear that they don’t understand the answer you are giving.
• Encourage students to bully and tease each other.
• Arrive late to class, or don’t come at all.
• Play favorites in a class and treat students unfairly.
• Compare one student with another, favorably and unfavorably, especially with regard to older siblings you have taught in the past.
• Punish a whole class when one student deserves discipline.
• Indulge horseplay.
• Teach wrong or outdated facts. Make up answers when you don’t know them.
• Spend the class talking about yourself and your conspiracy theories.
• Teach the same thing every day, day after day.
• Yell.
• Comment on your students in a way that will embarrass them.
• Give them nicknames that they don’t want and don’t appreciate.
• Show movies.
• Fall asleep in the back of the class during student presentations.
• Call students by the wrong names.
• Lose students' work after they hand it in, then claim you never received it and accuse them of lying if they insist that they handed it in.
• Don't return students' work.

Model Teachers

Our most highly paid, most highly regarded teachers have no training in education. None. They don’t have education degrees, teaching certificates, or even, at least at first, any teaching experience. They’re professionals in their fields, but amateurs in the field of education, even the best ones, and, for good reasons, no one seems to think this matters.

I’m talking, of course, about university professors.

What do they have going for them? They have great educations themselves—the hiring process ensures that those offered jobs and then tenure generally have the best credentials, have gone to the best schools—and they are experts in their fields.

But back up one year, from freshman year of college (where your teacher is likely to be a lowly Teaching Assistant, not a professor) to senior year of high school, and requirements and expectations alter radically. Your best high school teacher was likely a union member with a master’s degree in education and a teaching certificate, an amateur in the subject she taught but a professional teacher.

Should our goal in improving teaching then be to require more credentials and certifications, to professionalize something that we don’t really recognize as a profession? Or would we be better off if we figured out how to take what works in universities and make it work for younger students?

The Opposite of an Ancient Egyptian

Like many, I often go to bed too late, reading by the bedside lamp, then awake, groggy, to an alarm clock, drink too much coffee, eat too much sugar, and, during the day, pay too much attention to those athletes, movie stars, and musicians whom we pay tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to distract us, for an hour or two, from our actual lives. And, like you, I live in a world that for the past hundred years or so has erected curtain-walled towers that reach toward the sky and that consist mostly of air, a world that has learned to fly and then raced to the moon.

Our feelings of heaviness, of tiredness, which we combat with levity, with stimulants, with distraction, and with structures and endeavors that soar (yes, the dream of flight is ages old, but not in the context in which we experience it now), present a configuration unique to our age. Undoubtedly those hundreds of historical generations that lived before the electric light, the professional musician, the can of caffeinated sugary soda, did not suffer as we do (not that they didn’t have suffering of their own).

Take the Egyptian pyramids, almost five thousand years old, built in a creative burst of no more than a couple of hundred years. They are virtually solid mountains of stone. Imagine standing in an inner chamber, any shaft to it sealed off, in the blackness. Above, below, and all around you are hundreds of feet of solid stone. Feel the weight, the claustrophobic pressure. This is not a modern structure.

Or look at an Egyptian sculpture or relief or painting of a pharaoh. Notice the too-large, flat feet, almost pyramid-shaped, loving attention given to each toe.

The Egyptians, too, created much of their artwork for the afterlife, to be sealed in tombs, not to be seen by human eyes again; they did not open museums and galleries and invite the public. They mummified bodies and sealed them away. (We, apparently, plasticize them for display and ship them around the world.)

Perhaps the Egyptians, like young children, felt, relative to grown-ups of today, too light, too disincarnated, too disconnected from the world around them. Not too heavy and tired, but buoyant. So, rather, than seeking levity and stimulants, they sought gravity and weight. Rather than a focus on the here-and-now, a focus on the hereafter.

The Egyptian experience, I propose, was the opposite of our levity, our tiredness, our materialism and our concern for this life, now.

Perhaps it’s no accident that, a short while later, Greek drama was born as tragedy.

Waldorf Schools and Political Bent

A friend of mine in liberal Massachusetts recently asked his fiscally conservative Republican father (who lives in a different state) to support his grandchild's Waldorf school. My friend described the school and the exchange as follows (I’m quoting him but I’ve changed things a bit to make them more generic):

“There is a strict dress code—no logos or camouflage. Not too much skin. There are haircut rules. Good manners and respectful behavior are taught and expected. Mornings begin with handshakes and eye contact. The day ends the same way. Cell phones are prohibited. Personal music devices are prohibited. Don’t even ask about computer games. Preschoolers cook or bake their own natural snacks daily, and say a blessing before lunch. All children bring lunch. There is no cafeteria. There are no vending machines. There is no soda or junk food. Students spend eight years with the same teacher. The curriculum includes Bible stories (Old and New Testament) in grades 2 and 3. Security measures at the school consist of the front desk. The front desk is also the infirmary. There is no teachers' union. Teachers work there because they love to. There is no state testing. There is no standardized testing. The curriculum is not determined by the government. (Neither is the lunch menu.) Full tuition is about $14,000 per year. About 70% of students receive tuition assistance. The average expenditure per student is about $9,000 per year (vs. $15,000 at public school). Parents pay for the school for the same reason teachers teach there. Parents also pay for public school through income and property taxes.

When I was through, my father said: ‘Sounds like a truly great school. What kind of school is it?’

A Waldorf school.

Clearly the values and practices of the school support responsible parenting, teaching, and learning, regardless of lifestyle or politics.”

It may be tempting, based on stereotypes, to categorize all those associated with Waldorf schools as politically, socially, and fiscally liberal, but this would be a mistake.

And, at least in the United States, what we mean by these things has changed significantly over the past decades, both within Waldorf schools and out in the wider world. For those old enough to remember, don't you now find John F. Kennedy, the Cold Warrior, a Democrat, more conservative than your may have believed at the time? And doesn't that old conservative Republican Richard Nixon appear more liberal than he used to? Socially? Economically? Opening China?

In the 1940s and 50s, many of those in American Waldorf schools supported the American consensus--anti-communist (although not rabid McCarthyists), pro-capitalist, and even pro-Vietnam. They also lobbied--quietly and ineffectively--for the separation of school and state. After all, the longest running socialist program in the U.S. is our system of public education.

Small School, Big World

A smaller world threatens to be a more provincial world. For all that the Internet and the century of technology behind it have shrunk the world, if my “experience” of those around the globe comes through a glowing screen—images and sounds, but no real contact—and I never leave the comfort of my study, I may never really be touched or reached by those far away.

Lowell Monke (author of Breaking Down the Digital Walls: Learning to Teach in a Post-Modem World), then teaching in an urban high school in Iowa, describes his AP students leaving a computer lab—this was the 1990s, before laptops and wireless Internet—after “conversing” with students around the world. The door across the hall opened, and international students poured out of an English as a second language class. Monke watched in disbelief as his engaged, intelligent, sensitive, worldly students ignored every one of the living, breathing foreign students who were now walking down the hall with them, side by side. Monke, a believer in the educational power of technology, became older and wiser in that instant.

If the real world is a butcher, the Internet gives us plastic-wrapped, bloodless, odorless fillets with all the fat trimmed off.

The students at the high school at which I teach have spent three weeks every other year in Peru or Germany—our small size allows us to fundraise effectively so that the whole school can do this.

Travelers to Peru visited Machu Picchu; a women’s shelter in Cuzco, where they made adobe bricks for new construction; and the Waldorf school in Lima. Students got lost and were confronted by armed guards; they got sick and rode in taxis through foreign cities to seek treatment; they helped those who live happy lives that are far different from our lives in the wealthiest nation the world has seen; they formed friendships with those they hope to see again on exchange next year or the year after. Travelers to Germany saw the Bavarian alps, Munich, Salzburg, and Berlin, three centers of world culture that make the oldest buildings in North America look new. They played in the English Garden, saw remnants of the Berlin Wall, and lived and traveled with Germans whom they hope to see again, here or there, in the next few years.

Our students returned full of stories and enthusiasm—all have stories to last a long time. You can imagine it took a couple of days for everyone to settle down to the routine of school. For some, this travel and a view of the world and people outside the United States will change the course of their lives. They will choose different majors in college than they might have done, they will volunteer to help those less privileged, they will travel with confidence, or they will simply conduct themselves with greater empathy and humility. The Internet is a great tool and resource, but there’s no substitute for actual experience.

I Compute

We talk--sometimes with hope, sometimes with fear--about computers learning to think. Regardless of our emotions around the topic, it seems less and less likely that "strong" artificial intelligence is a real possibility.

What we don't talk about, however, is the danger that in our rush to embrace technological fixes for the problems of education, of the environment, of voting, we will forget how to think.

Computers are unlikely to become too much like us.

We are more likely to become too much like computers.

The Evolution of a Disregard for History

Do we assume that we are smarter than those who lived before us? Do we assume that if only they could have thought of the automobile or the ballpoint pen or derivatives they would have invented them?
It seems to me that elements of this argument contain truth—our knowledge of mathematics increases; things that were long unproved get proved. Our technology is greater than that of any earlier peoples, so far as we know. But perhaps this is all to say that we’re cleverer, not necessarily smarter. Or smarter in a way that’s important to us but simply may not have been to earlier people.

Certainly Archimedes had a genius for invention, but declined to share much of it with the world, disdaining application and deciding that it was unethical to perpetuate some of his creations. Was he a crackpot, or did his view represent the views of others in the ancient world?

We could as easily turn the argument around, at least in thought, and take the part of some ancients. In the last four or five hundred years, they might ask, have you written epics and plays as sturdy as the Odyssey or Oedipus? Do your buildings rival the pyramids, or the cathedrals of medieval Europe? Are you closer to Nirvana than we were?

The difference, it seems, is not a difference of intelligence, it’s something else—priority, focus, mentality, or consciousness.

When Allan Bloom asks, obnoxiously, where is the Zulu’s Plato, he’s narrowing the question too much, unbalancing the scale (and assuming that he in 20th century Chicago is somehow closer to Plato than a Zulu, simply because he participates in an academic tradition that honors Plato…).

The question, perhaps not one we have the historical knowledge or understanding to answer, is, what was as important to the ancient Zulus (or their ancestors) as philosophy was to Plato, and how did they manifest this? To assume that because we don’t know about it, it didn’t exist is just an error of logic.

And to assume that our priorities or mentality are superior to those of the ancients according to arbitrary rules that favor us before the competition is announced is just unfair. Worse, it leads to a disregard for the possibility of seeing the world in a different way, to a devaluing of history, and to a narrowing of each of us who thinks this way.

Anxiety Dreams

Many teachers suffer anxiety dreams in August, and I'm no exception. I used to think they would abate as I became a more experienced teacher, but, entering my twenty-sixth year of teaching, they really haven't. I take this as a good sign, although I don't welcome the dreams. I hope it means that I'm still interested in doing my job well, that I'm not burning out or drying up.

Anxiety dreams aren't nightmares, exactly, they're just unpleasant.

The most memorable comes from August 1988, before the start of my fourth year of teaching, probably around the time I started to think of myself as a teacher and not as someone passing time, trying to figure out what to do with my life.

We had had a rough 11th grade the year before, and it was hard to imagine these trouble-makers as seniors, student leaders. Two stood out, in particular, jokers and clowns.

In my dream, I had class with them in the school library, for some reason. I was dressed in a blazer, shirt, and tie, but had nothing on from the waist down (maybe shoes and socks; that wasn't my focus). They didn't notice my nudity, but I was acutely aware of it, and just wanted to find some way to leave in order to put on some pants. The students wouldn't settle down, though, and the two I was most concerned about were front and center. I walked over and slapped each across the face, hard.

That's the dream. But it doesn't end there. They returned to school as seniors a couple of weeks later and were one of the better behaved, more dynamic classes I have taught. And the two subjects of my concern remain among the staunchest supporters of the school, decades later.

This summer I've had a series of anxiety dreams, none particularly noteworthy. I believe I'm getting used to them.

I also get a knot in the pit of my stomach before the first day of school, as I did as a student, and I get nervous before the first day of any new course, even one that starts midyear.

Once we get going, however, that all melts away. I can't wait.

"The" Scientific Method? Not So.

"The" scientific method? What do theoretical physics, biochemistry, geology, and sociology share? Is this it?

1.Define the question
2.Gather information and resources (observe)
3.Form hypothesis
4.Perform experiment and collect data
5.Analyze data
6.Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
7.Publish results
8.Retest (frequently done by other scientists) (from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method.)

Comparing methods as diverse as extrapolations from observations in geology, mathematical modelling in theoretical physics, genetic testing, instrument-guided observation, personal experience, and statistical analysis of, say, questionnaire data, it's fair to say that there is no such thing as "the" scientific method. There are, really, roughly as many methods as there are sciences.

More important, perhaps, is the observation that scientific methods are not a beginning to a creative process but a conclusion that, if wrongly conceived or taught, overlooks the actual creative work of a scientist.

Creativity in science can enter the process at any one of the eight seemingly algorithmic steps quoted above. At any moment, novelty in data, creative insight, unanticipated results, a new concept, a new formulation, a chance conversation or event, can provide an inroad to new science.

The danger in teaching science, especially to middle and high school students, especially by those who are not themselves scientists, is that we will teach dogma--"the" scientific method--that closes our students to the possibility of a creative encounter with science.

Student Ingenuity, Student Gullibility

Part of what I love about teaching is the endless amusement that students provide, deliberately or inadvertently.

School rules required a shirt with a collar. Robert showed up in a blue sweater with a clean white dress shirt visible at the neck. He went from class to class, polite and calm--which wasn't normal. At the end of school, as he shook my hand good-bye, he pulled on the collar and, surprise!, it came out from around his neck in one long piece. He had torn the collar off a shirt and worn it--just the collar--tucked carefully into the neck of his sweater. "What do you say about that, Mr. Sagarin?" he asked. I say, Robert, thanks for entertaining me.

Back when subway cars in New York had conductors who made actual stop announcements--not the audible but impersonal pre-recorded voices of today--at least one conductor, on arriving at Times Square, would announce, "Times Square. 42nd Street. Center of the Universe," giving that location its due in the imagination of the world. I was telling this slightly amusing story to a seventh grade class, when I saw Emma's eyes grow wider and wider. "Mr. Sagarin. Is Times Square REALLY the center of the universe?" she asked. Thanks, Emma. Now I'll never forget it.

Rigidity and Dogma in Waldorf Schools--Some Theories

Let’s face it. Here is a question central to the practice of Waldorf education: Why are some Waldorf schools and Waldorf school teachers so rigid and dogmatic?

I have five operating theories and would be glad to hear more, so long as they’re sincere and expressed politely. Here they are in the order in which they occur to me:

1. Do we express the zeal of adult converts, treating a method of education as a religion, confusing method with world-view?

2. Do we suffer from insecurity because none of us can measure up to our image of Steiner’s expectations and, perhaps, we believe our colleagues will criticize us if we appear to think too strongly for ourselves?

3. Do we allow “lowest common denominator” extremism in so-called consensus decision-making (those who feel most strongly about an issue forward their views or block others and receive little opposition from those who don’t feel so strongly)?

4. Is a rigid, dogmatic, literalist attitude toward the world a default position of our modern mentality, one that doesn’t cause us trouble when we’re washing the car or watching a movie, one that is disguised by the ease with which we can get through each day but which confronts us when we try to participate in the life of an idealistic institution like a Waldorf school?

5. In the absence of a clear culture of our own—distancing ourselves, for better and worse, from our own American culture—do we unknowingly perpetuate and assimilate to a culture that, prior to the loosening and opening of the last half century (civil rights, women’s rights, the environmental movement, the democratizing influence of television and the Internet), simply was more rigid and dogmatic—I mean, particularly, German culture in the 1920s, when Waldorf education got its start?

Where do your Congressperson's children go to school?

It doesn’t seem right that lawmakers take lots of money from teachers’ unions, write laws (America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind…) that mandate dehumanizing standardized tests that don’t really help children learn or tell us much of anything about their schooling, pass and then don’t fund mandates, politicize schools and budgets, and then neatly sidestep the mess they’ve created by sending their own children to private schools where such tests, unfunded mandates, and politicization are non-issues.

Nationwide, about 11% of families send their children to private schools. We can guess that this number would be higher if more of us had greater means.

In Hawaii, about half of state representatives send their children to private schools. (Hawaiian Lawmakers' Children) In Florida, the number is about 40%, and “the rate climbs to 60 percent for lawmakers on education committees that make key decisions about K-12 policy and funding.” (Florida Lawmakers' Children) I don’t know how representative these numbers are, but to say that state lawmakers send their children to private schools about 3-4 times as often as you and I do sounds about right.

The numbers are the same for Federal lawmakers, between 40 and 50% (Congressional School Choice).

We may assume that almost all of these families, too, live in the best public school districts.

I’m not writing against private schools—I’ve taught in them virtually my entire career (there was that semester I taught at the City University of New York, 140 students in one class with no teaching assistant…). I chose to send both my children through private schools.

I’m not writing against public schools. I went to a few for ten years, had some excellent teachers, married a public school teacher, and I know and have known many, many remarkable persons associated with public education.

I’m not writing against politicians’ choices as parents. They have, like anyone else of means, the right to choose the best schools for their children.

I am writing against the mix of money, influence, and politics that allows teachers unions to have such unfair and detrimental influence on education in the U.S. And I am writing against the hypocrisy of politicians who—ignoring or rationalizing their own educational choices for their own children and ignoring what we actually know about good schools and good teaching—bow to this influence and make schooling worse rather than better.

Fruit and the Fall: Metaphor and Fundamentalism

Owen Barfield tells us, “The besetting sin today is the sin of literalness or idolatry…” (Saving the Appearances, 161-162)

By “sin,” Barfield means not a shame-inducing act but a mental habit of which we are guilty and for which we suffer.

By “literalness or idolatry,” Barfield means, at least in part, what academics have come to call “reification,” our ingrained tendency to mistake abstract or metaphorical words, ideas, or concepts for reality.

A prime example from the last century is the suffering inflicted on the world by our belief—perhaps now overcome, or in the process of being overcome—that “intelligence,” because we had a word and, we believed, a meaning for it, was an actual, unitary “thing” that could, because it existed, be measured, say, by an IQ test.

Another current example of literal-mindedness, it seems clear, is what in other contexts is called fundamentalism, taking a religious text as literally true. But, as Douglas Sloan has pointed out, a fundamentalist attitude does not belong to the religious alone. Atheists, scientists, economists, anthroposophists, anthroposophical critics, anyone who takes a dogmatic attitude with regard to a set of assumptions or beliefs may be called a literalist or fundamentalist.

Anyone who asserts truth without remaining open to contradiction or the possibility of being proved wrong may be called a literalist or fundamentalist. This does not mean that the claims of fundamentalists—religious, scientific, economic, anthroposophical—are wrong. They may be—and probably often are—true in any number of ways. But the assertion of truth, the close-minded, hierarchical, smug sense that one knows better than another (even if presented in the guise of open-minded, democratic, and humble discourse) AND the simultaneous assumption or assertion that the truth exists beyond any method for discovering or proving it, adds to conflict, strife, and suffering in the world. What else can fundamentalist assertions do but compete blindly and, in the end, meaninglessly?

Literalness goes even deeper than reification or fundamentalism, and the consequences are profound. Perhaps the most egregious of these is this: When we lose what we might call our “sense of metaphor,” our sense that reality stands behind our symbols (that symbols—words, concepts, works of art or technology—in and of themselves have no particular value), when we mistake symbols for reality, we cut ourselves off from creation. We suffer, again, a fall.

We eat the fruits of the tree while denying the existence of the tree that produced them. But trees need tending, and a tree that we ignore may grow in strange ways, produce strange fruit, or die.

Finally, Barfield goes beyond identifying the sin of idolatry to its consequences: “It will, I believe, be found that there is a valid connection, at some level, however deep, between what I have called literalness and a certain hardness of heart.” (He also addresses a remedy to idolatry, but that’s for another time.) The years between the time Barfield wrote this and the present—a period that saw the rise of fundamentalism in the world—demonstrate exactly this.

No Smoking

August 1984, Florence. Around 10 p.m., on the Ponte Vecchio, I walk up to a dark, slender, bearded man who is leaning against a wall, smoking. He is dressed from head to toe in loose red clothing. I have seen persons dressed like this all over Europe, and I want to find out what's up.

“Pardon me,” I ask him, “Um, I’ve seen people dressed like you all over the place. May I ask, um, why?”

“Sure.” He says. “We’re followers of Sri Rajneesh. He’s a great man. He’s our guru.”

“So, uh, what’s involved in, um, following him?”

“Well, we seek enlightenment. We meditate… And we live a simple life. Like, we’re forbidden from drinking alcohol, or having intercourse, or smoking.”

My eyes focus on the tip of his cigarette, and my brain hiccups. “But,” I say, naïve American that I am, “you’re smoking now.”

He looks me right in the eyes, infinitely cool, completely sincere. “No. I’m not.” And takes a drag.

I don’t remember how we part.

I do remember the aerial photograph, a few years later, of Sri Rajneesh’s 72 Rolls Royces, gifts of his non-smoking followers, parked in a muddy field in Oregon.

Who Needs School?

“Mom, I don’t feel like going to school today.”

“Okay. Do your chores and we’ll go to the beach (or the museum, or the zoo).”

Chores were huge in my house growing up, three boys and a single mom. Muck and feed the chickens, all-male killer geese, and duck (only one, I forget how). Stack firewood. Mow the lawn—three hilly acres with a 20 inch push mower. Turn the soil in the organic garden. Weed. Weed. Weed. But we agreed, Mom called the school, we did the chores.

And then we packed a picnic and piled into our green Pinto wagon or our gold VW 412 wagon or our blue Chevy Cavalier wagon—we had a succession of some of the worst cars ever made—and drove to the beach. During our years in upstate New York, the “beach” was Lake Taconic; later, on Long Island, it was Field 10 at Jones’ Beach. We ate, read, swam, and built sand castles, school a distant memory. (Far earlier, living with my grandparents in the New York City suburbs, we skipped school to go to the Bronx Zoo, or the Botanical Gardens (boring), or the Museum of Natural History.)

Mom knew, intuitively, that what are now called “mental health days” were as much a part of childhood as days behind a desk in a string of mediocre public schools. And, knowing that we didn’t “have” to go to school made it less onerous actually to go. (Going to school, for years, involved bus rides each way of an hour and a quarter over rutted back roads, obtaining from an early age an informal and unreliable education regarding sex, foul language, alcohol abuse, drug experimentation, things with engines (mostly snowmobiles and motorcycles), dysfunctional family dynamics, fighting, stink bombs, and practical jokes, an education that remains more vivid than many classes in school. The Internet? Who needed it. We had the older kids at the back of the bus.)

These memories return when I think of a former student—I’ll call her Zephyr—who simply didn’t go to school (except for an experimental semester here or there in Scotland, or Russia) between 5th grade and 12th grade. Zephyr came from an eccentric family—single mom, again—that simply up and left, traveling the world and, well, living. Around the age of 17, Zephyr decided that she’d like to graduate from an actual high school, so she called us, from Nepal, to see about applying.

How do you apply to a school when you have no transcript? You write a letter describing your life since you left school. You include a list of the books you’ve read—an impressive, extensive list. You list the languages you’ve learned during your travels. And the school takes a chance on you.

Zephyr showed up in September, cheerful, intelligent, and game. She moved, with great equanimity, at her own pace. She agreed that she was ignorant in science and math, and set out to correct this deficiency. She had read most of the books in our curriculum, so she would sit in a corner while the other students were reading, say, Moby Dick, and study geometry. She found geometry easy, and decided to catch up in algebra and other topics in order to join her class in calculus. It took her about a month.

Looking back on her year with us, I’m impressed by how quickly someone of normal to high intelligence who decides to learn something can learn it.

I used to say, somewhat tongue in cheek, that no one should start school until the age of 16 or 18. I guessed that you could learn what you need to know—reading, writing, math—more quickly as a more mature person than you would if you were forced to inhale it, like dust, slowly, year by year by year from the age of 6 or so on. Zephyr was schooled through 5th grade. And she came from an attentive, literate family. And she had travel experience at a young age that few of us will obtain in a lifetime. Regardless, I believe she’s part of a proof of concept that schooling is overrated.

As John Taylor Gatto says, good basic literacy requires only a couple of hundred hours to acquire. Why do we sequester students for twelve years of schooling? The answers may be too unsettling to confront—we’ve created a world in which children are extraneous, even an irritant. We need to “dumb them down” in order for the “establishment” to perpetuate itself. And so on.

My focus here, however, is not on conspiracy theories or the unintended consequences of bureaucracy in education. It’s on the amazing power of the human being to learn. And, from at least one point of view, school just seems sort of beside the point.

Educating the Minimally Whole Child

For a school to advertise that it teaches the “whole child” is virtually meaningless. What school would aim to teach only a part of a child?

The issue is what we mean by wholeness. And it’s clear that there may be radically differing conceptions of wholeness. To a materialist, teaching the whole child may involve little more than sophisticated programming and manipulation; what else are we to do with matter? On the other hand, a radical spiritualist, who sees the physical world as an illusion, or even as evil, may ignore a child’s body and may ignore engagement with obviously material aspects of the world.

Scott Forbes argues, in “What Holistic Education Claims About Itself,” “that holistic education has as a goal that students develop to the highest extent thought possible for a human (Ultimacy), and that to achieve this a kind of knowledge associated with wisdom (Sagacious Competence) needs to be learned.” (Forbes: What Holistic Education Claims About Itself)

So when I read in Education Week that the “Needs of ‘Whole Child’ May Factor in ESEA Renewal: Wide Range of Supports, Services, and Enrichment Seen as Vital but Costly” (EdWeek: ESEA Renewal), I’m interested to see what this means. And what it means is this: schools should find ways to “…include dental and mental health, as well as programs aimed at providing prekindergarten and library services, summer and after-school enrichment, mentoring, college counseling, and increased parent and community involvement. The whole-child concept can also refer to making sure schools attend to students’ nonacademic interests, through programs such as the arts and physical education.”

Wow. Although each of these things is probably good for education, they hardly rise, collectively, to the level of Forbes’ argument or to what almost anyone actually means by or thinks about the “whole child” or holistic education.

It may look like I’ve jumped from “wholeness” to “holistic education,” but, according to EdWeek, “witnesses at last week’s ESEA hearing argued that programs aimed at a ‘holistic approach’ to education have to be part of the mix if schools are truly going to boost student achievement.” In the context of the article, it’s clear that “holism” has here been reduced to children’s health and social needs.

ESEA, by the way, refers to the Congressional Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the most recent version of which is known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The Act is up for renewal. Inclusion of larger concerns than standardized test scores and academic achievement is clearly in the best interests of students, teachers, schools, and society. But to blur the line between healthy things like libraries, physical education, and dental care and deep educational questions about what it means to be a complete human being does service to neither the whole child nor holistic education.

Good Brain Science, Bad Brain Philosophy

Heard on NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125304448): “A person's moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Disrupting or altering a brain process apparently causes adult moral reasoning—which takes both intention and effect into account in forming moral judgments—to become effectively juvenile, taking into account only effect.

One interpretation of this result? "Moral judgment is just a brain process," says Joshua Greene, psychologist at Harvard University. "That's precisely why it's possible for these researchers to influence it using electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain."

Another interpretation might be that this research points to a view that moral judgment involves perception, is linked to our senses; when perception is disrupted, the conclusion—as in an optical illusion, perhaps—is faulty.

On the other hand, "the fact that scientists can adjust morality with a magnet may be disconcerting to people who view morality as a lofty and immutable human trait," Greene says. "If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul."

It's probably correct and healthy not to view morality as lofty and immutable--that sounds like the beginning of fundamentalism. But that hardly leads to the conclusion that it's purely mechanical, which is simply the assertion of speculation as truth. And isn't that... fundamentalism?

How often do we have to repeat “correlation is not causation” before even Harvard psychologists will begin to separate science from opinion and belief?

Great Teaching

Amanda Ripley’s article in The Atlantic (Jan./Feb. 2010) examines data on thousands of teachers from “Teach for America” to shed light on what makes a teacher great (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/). The findings?
1. “First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students.”

2. [Great teachers] “were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when [Steven] Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: ‘They’d say, “You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.” When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.’ Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.”

3. Great teachers “avidly recruited students and their families into the process;”

4. Great teachers “maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning.” “For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.”

5. Great teachers “planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome;”

6. Great teachers “worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”

Some of the findings may appear counterintuitive: “Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.” Presented with Farr and Ripley’s list, however, a lot makes sense. Who could really argue?

I don’t want to argue with the value of such a list, but I do want to point to its limits. Isn’t there—shouldn’t there be—a significant difference between helping “a new teacher achieve success” and achieving “greatness” as a teacher? Ripley—and, I assume, the “Teach for America” data—simply don’t make this distinction clear. Are we examining master teachers, or are we finding statistical correlations among practices regarding really good new teachers and other, not-so-good new teachers?

More important is the distinction between a great teacher as found in statistics and an actual teacher facing an actual student. What this research defines as a “great teacher” is one who assists a class in achieving better scores on standardized, grade-level assessments than other, less great teachers do. This is beyond reproach. Although standardized tests are execrable political tools and standards themselves are often very low (in order to allow a significant percentage of students to pass them), who wants a teacher who can’t do a good job of this? But is this measure enough to define greatness?

I had a few great teachers. One was my high school German teacher, Dr. Macht. He was a low-key raconteur, easily distracted. He was a World War II veteran, and chose to study German on the G.I. Bill in order to read Nazi documents in order to understand the atrocities he had witnessed. He had endless interesting stories about the war and his life. “Boys, let me tell you a story,” he’d begin, looking out the window. And that was that. No more German grammar or vocabulary for that day. But, in the end, I learned a tremendous amount from him, and received my highest achievement test (now called an SAT II) score in German. My point here is twofold. First, a lot of students didn’t think he was a very good teacher, often for the very reasons I liked and appreciated him. And, second, on the list of six qualities from “Teach for America,” he probably scores well below 50%. He was great for me, not so great for others, and, statistically, maybe not that great.

Another teacher, Mr. Tomlinson, a science and math teacher, was frequently acknowledged to be a great teacher, but I just never found that I learned that much from him. He was likeable and clear, but also slow-paced and methodical. For me, any sense of the value of the study as a whole, how the parts fit together, was largely missing. And yet astronomer and professor William Kaufmann III so loved Mr. Tomlinson that he dedicated his book, Discovering the Universe, a well-known astronomy textbook, to him. Another student, a highly successful lawyer, now retired, credits Mr. Tomlinson with literally saving his life as a teen, giving his life sufficient meaning at a time when he was seriously contemplating suicide. Mr. Tomlinson certainly scores more highly on the “Teach for America” criteria than Dr. Macht would; I’d give him, minimally, a strong 4 out of 6. But, for me, he wasn’t that great.

I have written elsewhere on this blog about a third great teacher, Howard Gruber (see "Howard Gruber, Practical Idealist”). But the man whom I met as a great teacher, toward the very end of his career, endlessly frustrated other students with his repetition and with his (beautifully) open-minded refusal to define things too clearly that he believed should not be defined too clearly. Great for me—top two or three—not so great for some others.

My main point is that, as a student, it simply doesn’t matter whether or not anyone else—or some set of statistical criteria, however accurate and admirable—define a particular teacher as “great.” Malcolm Gladwell, in “Most Likely to Succeed,” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell), based on research from the University of Virginia, describes the importance of an emphasis on teaching instead of an emphasis on schools. (“Your child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”) Amanda Ripley writes about great teachers according to valuable statistical correlations. But we can go further, at least in our imaginations and in our ideals, and picture not some abstract “great teacher,” but the teacher who will be great for us, or great for our children, who will help them set their lives on course, or, sometimes, save them.

Electrochemical Superstition

No parent would want a teacher to teach a science course using a textbook from, say, 1910.

And, in 2110, no parent will want a teacher to teach science using today’s textbook.

In teaching science, then, to avoid a version of the presentist fallacy, it’s important to retain a sense for what is fact—and how we know it’s a fact—what is supposition or hypothesis, and what is plain unquestioned assumption (which, pejoratively, we may call superstition). And textbooks are generally not good at this; they too often present science not as a creative process, but as a finished product, as dogma.

Here's one example. If I had to vote for the greatest illusion or superstition of our age, I would say it’s the illusion that the brain thinks. (Not that you don't need a brain in order to think, but that you think; the brain is an instrument. And a metaphor.)

Assume everything we know of the brain and neurons and neural activity is true—it isn’t, it can’t be, and there’s a lot we just don’t even pretend we know. Picture a vast network of electrochemical activity among neurons, impulses racing this way and that. Picture it down to the smallest activity of an ion across a membrane. Picture it in its trillion-connection complexity. And realize that, if you want to find, say, a thought or an emotion, there’s no there there.

Eventually, for instance, if only in a thought experiment, we could draw all the connections and interactions in a brain, down to the molecular, atomic, or subatomic level; give us a whiteboard large enough, sufficient time, and any tools we need. (Yes, indeterminacy and entanglement might make our comprehension impossible, but these just substitute scientific magic for the old fashioned kind.)

Let us chart the “action potentials” of neural impulses, and the movement and effects of neurotransmitter fluids. (Did you know that the impulse along an auditory nerve is the same—exactly the same—as the impulse along an optic nerve? Watching the impulse pass, you simply cannot tell if this chemical activity relates to vision or to hearing; the impulse is void of quality. Why do we suppose that following it down the rabbit hole of complexity into which it vanishes will yield insight?) What we won’t find is a single thought, emotion, or memory, although—and even this is supposition—we may find the correlates or material or organizational traces of these. We may well be able to look at a configuration of neurons or molecules or particles—now represented in marker on our whiteboard—and correlate some brain configuration with some emotional state or thought, but it should be clear that the configuration is not and can never be an emotion or a thought or anything else that is fundamental to human experience or value.

(We can successfully perform this same thought experiment, however, with a computer. In the computer, if we know how to read the code, we can discover exactly what’s stored there, what’s calculated there, and so on. That’s because the computer isn’t conscious, isn’t thinking, isn’t feeling, isn’t anything but an apparatus, despite our science fiction fantasies. What’s in the computer is what we put there. The computer’s “activity” may yield startling and counter-intuitive results; it may “solve” problems of complexity beyond that of smart human beings in many lifetimes. But the thinking behind this work doesn’t reside in the machinery. It is available through the ingenuity and creativity of the programmers.

When we say that the brain is a computer—unless we are speaking metaphorically—we are not only making a category error, we have things exactly backward. One aspect or set of aspects of the brain is computer-like, but let’s not forget that minds and brains existed for a long, long time before the computer, and that the computer existed in the work and minds of those, like Charles Pierce and Charles Babbidge, who imagined the computer before the technology existed that could bring it to reality.)

I’m not disputing the association and correlation of brain activity with thinking, perceiving, emoting, breathing, heart-beating, or running. You need a brain to do brain-associated things. A pianist needs a piano, and preferably a well-functioning one. But when we say, for example, that “the brain thinks,” we indulge a supposition that not only has not been demonstrated, we irrationally indulge a view that loads what is essentially an electrochemical flowchart with impossible hopes, dreams, and assumptions.

The consequences of this thinking—or should I say, this lack of thinking, this assuming—are dire. Where, in fact, are consequence, morality or ethics, creativity, or humanity in this picture? The answer is, nowhere.

None of this is to argue against brain research. Far from it. Someone near to me is recovering from a closed head injury, and I am in awe of and grateful to the doctors and researchers who have helped with his recovery and helped us to understand what has occurred and what is occuring. I wish them all speed and good fortune in learning more and more about how the brain works and, when necessary, how to help it heal. But medicine is not (or not necessarily) meaning.

To bring this back to the education of students in a school, we have to acknowledge that we do not serve them well if we freight them with our superstitions, no matter how fervently we believe them.

Contradictions, contradictions

I sip my coffee watching Morning Joe on MSNBC. A couple of mornings ago, within the space of two breaths, Joe Scarborough lauded a plan to nationalize math and reading teaching--"national textbooks" in these subjects--and blasted a politician who opposed the creation of more charter schools in New York.

Huh?

Doesn't he see that charter schools succeed--when they do succeed; it's not a given that they will--by not following the path that leads to a national curriculum?

Or that a national curriculum in a nation as diverse as the U.S. is senseless?

But, I fear, his views represent too many of us.

More on Administration...

The following entry is in response to this comment:

Dear Steve, I came across your blog for the first time today and was impressed by [the] exchange on school governance. A writer myself, I am very interested in education and foundation lessons, which really get to the heart of the matter. I really responded to your words and was curious to know your specific thoughts on Administration, and what advice you would give to others on best practice.

In this piece, you also talk about structure, and I wondered what was lightest possible administrative structure you've encountered or could envisage?
Yours most warmly,
Nicola

First (I’m assuming you have some familiarity with Waldorf schools; if not, I’d be happy to answer questions), Rudolf Steiner never said that Waldorf schools should be “faculty run;” the phrase he used was “self-administered,” by which I believe he meant “not administered by the state.” Which is to say, much more the case for U.S. schools than for most European schools—we have always enjoyed greater local control and freedom in how we educate our youth than have nations with more powerful ministries of education. (I’ve read that the Federal government provides roughly 10% of educational funding in the U.S. and 90% of the—mostly unfunded—directives and mandates.)

Given this, it’s really tough to say that a good administrator in a Waldorf school should be somehow different (beyond her commitment to the mission of the school) from an administrator at another school. In my experience, the toughest part of the administrator’s job is gaining the trust of the teachers. For this reason alone, it may be good for Waldorf schools to select an experienced teacher to hold this position. The problem is that it’s a rare teacher who can be a good administrator. And if the administrator is seen by parents as being partial to teachers’ points of view, trust erodes quickly.

On the other hand, the peculiar structure of Waldorf schools requires any administrator to adapt to the school. By this, I refer primarily to the tension that often exists among parents, boards, and teachers’ councils or colleges, especially when times are tough. Most Waldorf schools, by bylaw or practice, for example, simply don’t give the power to hire and fire to one person. So an administrator, then, becomes a diplomat—lots of responsibility, little authority—carrying messages from one camp to the other, attempting to negotiate a peaceful settlement.

When you ask about minimal structure, I think of the school at which I currently work. I’m a full-time teacher and the only (part-time) administrator. We have an office manager/assistant here three mornings a week. We have an off-site, hourly bookkeeper, and a volunteer treasurer. Teachers pitch in to help with admissions events, open houses, and so on. Trustees (volunteers) handle fundraising. Our Core Faculty (about 7 teachers) meets weekly. Our Board meets monthly. We have as close to no administrative structure as it’s possible to have, I believe.

By contrast, I know a school that was advised by a highly paid professional to hire a full-time fundraiser. The school did this and, three years in, has yet to raise close to the cost of the fundraiser’s salary and benefits. And I don’t believe this is a comment on the fundraiser’s ability—more on the school’s inability to see that their situation, despite the recommendation of a consultant, simply doesn’t warrant one full-time person devoted to development.

In creating structure, it’s too easy, I believe, to copy what everyone else does—admissions officer, development, business manager, administrator, etc.—even when the numbers don’t justify it.
This brings up another point, which is that of scale. Small schools can break even; large schools can break even. Smallish schools that act like large schools, however, will lose money. And no private school can afford to do that for long. And there is a “deadly middle ground.” For many private schools, it occurs between roughly 60 students and 150-200 students. This middle ground is precisely where many Waldorf high schools find themselves, unfortunately.

In growing from a small school to a larger school, schools add administration as they grow, and are happy for the increase in students. When, a few years later, perhaps, enrollment declines, rather than facing the actuality of the situation (there was a time when they would have been overjoyed to have as many students as they are now groaning about), they often freeze salaries, cut salaries, add to workloads or otherwise diminish the morale of the school.

Which brings up another point: When schools act like their real business is providing support for a community of like-minded adults, rather than doing all they can to educate the children in their care as well as possible (and, in the process, spend the parents’ tuition dollars as wisely and efficiently as possible), they quickly lose their way, creating a vicious spiral that leads to further loss of enrollment…

I don’t know if this addresses your basic questions; sorry if it contains too much opinion or too many digressions…

The Word "Waldorf"

I don't know where the phrase comes from, but let's "stop the insanity." For a couple of years, I've been collecting uses of what I call the free-floating "Waldorf." That is, the word Waldorf attached to some other word or concept in order to give it some (Waldorf) meaning, whether it deserves it or not, whether it actually means anything or not. (For those who don't know, the word Waldorf in Waldorf school comes from the Independent Waldorf School, founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919. It was so-called because it was, initially, a school for the education of the children of the employees of the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory, although it quickly outgrew this clientelle. And, yes, the owners were the same family as the owners of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in NYC. So, in the end, Waldorf salad and Waldorf school are, indeed, loosely connected.)

Here's the list. Feel free to add other examples in Comments, and I'll update periodically.

Waldorf Administrator

Waldorf Advocate

Waldorf Alliance

Waldorf Alumni

Waldorf Answer

Waldorf Approach

Waldorf Art(work)

Waldorf Child(ren)

Waldorf Crayon

Waldorf Critic(ism)

Waldorf Curriculum

Waldorf Development

Waldorf Doll

Waldorf Education

Waldorf Emphasis

Waldorf Family

Waldorf Festival

Waldorf Fundraising

Waldorf Furniture

Waldorf Grace

Waldorf Graduate

Waldorf History

Waldorf Home

Waldorf Homeschooling

Waldorf Initiative

Waldorf Inspired

Waldorf Kindergarten

Waldorf Library

Waldorf Life (skills)

Waldorf Math

Waldorf Method

Waldorf Movement

Waldorf Music

Waldorf Mythology

Waldorf Oriented

Waldorf Painting

Waldorf Parent

Waldorf Pedagogy

Waldorf Philosophy

Waldorf Prayer

Waldorf Pupil

Waldorf Resource

Waldorf Ritual

Waldorf Room

Waldorf School

Waldorf Science

Waldorf Student

Waldorf Treasure

Waldorf Trustee

Waldorf View (point of)

Waldorf World

What’s Another Trillion?

All this talk of a trillion dollars.

There are 309 million people in the U.S.

A trillion divided by 309 million yields roughly $3250 per person, or $13,000 for a family of four. This is a lot of money. It’s a bit more than a quarter of what the average U.S. household earns in a year. It’s a down payment on a house, it’s the price of a decent used car. It’s the kind of debt families take on all the time, but not every year. And it’s amortized, like a mortgage, over many more years than an auto loan. Which means we’ll pay more but have longer to do it.

It’s about half what we already owe on houses, credit cards, and autos.

It’s about one fourteenth of the U.S. government debt, which is growing but which is still only a fraction of what it was after WWII (as compared to GDP). And as a fraction it’s not much: we safely borrow 2.5 times our income to buy a house, admittedly a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime debt.

Interestingly, it’s also about one fourteenth of the U.S. GDP.

The point, to me, is not really the size of a trillion dollars, which is substantial but not outrageously so, but how it relates to our health and life as a nation. To borrow this much money means little to a young, healthy family with two working parents. It means a lot more to someone about to retire on a fixed income, or to someone who has just lost a job.

The question may be put as an analogy: How old are we as a nation? Are we young and strong, facing a growing income and years to pay off our debts? Or are we old and weak, facing years of declining income with little time left to pay off our debts?

It seems to me that the safe assumption is neither of these. We shouldn’t assume growth that we can’t verify, but, within the bounds of conservative estimates, we shouldn’t assume that our days in the sun are numbered or over. We should assume that our income and expenses last year are a good predictor of what they will be next year and for the foreseeable future.

From this point of view, it seems clear that a trillion dollars is not an amount we can borrow every year, but, compared with our GDP and existing debt, it’s just not that much. Assuming we’re borrowing it for the right reasons.

After all, we spend less than 7/10 of a trillion dollars a year on educating every single child in the United States.

Teaching for Freedom

Just before our last performance of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," I gathered the cast in a circle, the way I had seen other directors do it. I gave a few notes, and then I gave the best advice I could think of: "Once you're on stage, you can do whatever you like. You can say whatever you like. No one can stop you." The kids knew their lines, the blocking, the set changes. We'd rehearsed and rehearsed, and this was the last performance. I'm not exactly sure what I was after, but I wanted the students to play the play, or at least to know that they could. For weeks, we had adhered to lots and lots of rules and drills and agreements, and now it was time to let all that go, if possible. In earlier performances, I had played with the play in order to make the students do it. Now I wanted it to be their turn.

In the first scene, Ernest has to look for his shoes. I didn't want him just to "act" like he was looking for his shoes, so I had the prop master put his shoes in a different location for each performance; he actually had to look for them. Under the sofa? Under the side table? Where?

Before Aunt Augusta arrives, Algernon has to eat all the cucumber sandwiches. For one performance, I had the students secretly prepare twice the normal number of sandwiches. We all got to watch Algie squirm to get them down--he ended up sneaking a few between the couch cushions for later.

The play started, line after line, just as rehearsed.

The butler appeared, unscripted. Without a word, in the background, he picked up Ernest's discarded bathrobe, put it on, poured himself a sherry from a bottle on a side table, and left the stage. No one in the audience knew that we had never planned nor rehearsed this whimsy. They were amused, we were beside ourselves. (For the record, the boy who broke the ice was--and is--about as taciturn as any high school boy can be, reserved and observant, but also a determined, solid character. It was no accident that he was the first to test this ice of improvisation, and it was no accident that his improvisation was silent.)

From that moment on, this last performance gathered steam. Not every actor dared to break the boundaries of the play as rehearsed--these were high school students. But many did, in character, and the play went on, richer than it had been, richer than we had imagined it.

Afterward, one of the dads--a real actor-director, not an amateur stepping in to fill a need, as I was--said, "...they were free." And he meant it. After hours and hours of rehearsal, lock-step performances in which they tried to "get it right," some of them dared--within the confines of the play--to improvise.

The risk, the giddiness, the creativity, the responsibility, all spoke to them more plainly and more boldly than any classroom lecture or discussion could about the real preparation for freedom, the responsibility of freedom, the possibility of freedom, and the reward of freedom.

Sometimes, the best things we teach, we teach unconsciously, inadvertently, and we only recognize them in hindsight.

Waldorf School Governance

The following questions and answers come from an email exchange regarding school governance and administration. I have removed all references to specific schools, places, times, and individuals.

1. How do “Waldorf schools” tend to be governed? What does it mean to have a style of governance that is consistent with and reflects Waldorf principles?

My view is that most Waldorf schools are not governed well. The 3 “spheres” to which Waldorf schools frequently refer—cultural, economic, political—exist in all schools, Waldorf and not. And these are not reflected, in my opinion, in bodies of the school--teachers, parents, trustees--that others claim correspond with Steiner’s ideas of a “threefold” social or institutional organization. What Steiner envisaged was three cooperative administrations—one for cultural (i.e., educational) questions (the faculty or college of teachers or council); one for economic questions (an association of producers and consumers); and one for legal or political questions and questions of rights (including expertise in this area and representing the rights of all—children, parents, teachers, admin., and trustees in a school…). I know of no Waldorf school that well represents this picture. To equate a group—say, trustees—with a “sphere”—say, legal/financial—is to confuse this picture (legal questions are separate from financial considerations, to a degree) and, in practice, to exclude other community members or stakeholders who have an interest in these areas. Steiner is clear in his writing on this question that each of us is an integral part of each administration, although we may have a greater personal stake in one or another. You have a chance to do it better!

2. How do other schools draw boundaries—or do they?—between decisions that are the purview of the faculty and those that are the purview of the Board? (And if overlap is recognized, how are decisions reached?) The decisions that have recently caused distress within our school have been ones where it seemed that there is inevitably an overlap between pedagogical concerns and concerns relating to such practical matters as enrollment, marketing, and tuition schedules.

Just as a brain that consists of working neurons needs an adequate blood supply, and muscles and bones need nervous apparatus to operate, there really are no decisions that belong to one group alone—ideally, a faculty group could have board representation (which would promote a better understanding between the 2 groups) just as boards often have teachers on them. (Emil Molt, who acted in the role closest to that of a trustee in the first Waldorf school attended faculty meetings.) The Board generally delegates day-to-day operation to the Faculty, but has a right—and need—to be informed of processes and decisions.
Decision-making is a stumbling block. Steiner didn’t care how decisions were made—aristocratic, democratic, or republican. He was concerned that those who were given responsibilities were given freedom to fulfill them. Most faculties in American Waldorf schools use some form of consensus decision-making process, but could do better to understand and refine this process. It seems to break down in the face of hard decisions, when, in fact, here it should be most closely followed. Boards often use Robert’s Rules or something similar. I believe this is fine; I do not favor consensus decision-making for Boards, which rely on the legal and financial expertise of their members.
I believe the most important principles include: 1.) joint decision-making between Board and Faculty, most especially when there is a need to make a tough decision; 2.) Clarity regarding process and personnel—who gets to make a decision and how the decision will be reached—prior to engaging the issue; 3.) Transparency to the community about the process and personnel (and timeline). Community members don’t need to have confidential conversations rehashed for them, but they have a right to know that a clear process was followed and to know who was involved in reaching the decision.

3. I am interested in the role of parents, or parent bodies, in Waldorf school governance—I hear reference to three groups (faculty, board, and a parent body) and I don’t know what they are each responsible for.

Parents are the economic engine of the school. Their tuition and fees provide the economic foundation for the work of the school. I don’t believe Waldorf schools acknowledge this simple point frequently enough. (Yes, individually we all understand this, but schools are not organized in a way that fully acknowledges this.) It is appropriate to have parent representation on the Board.

4. One of the things that has come to seem significant to me is that we have very different “cultures” in our faculty and board—faculty members see each other regularly, meet once a week, and share philosophies and professional common ground, and they operate on a consensus basis. Our Board overall has a certain common interest but much more diverse professional backgrounds than the faculty (we don’t even know what everyone does, for example), much greater diversity in our understanding and embodiment of Waldorf philosophies, we are very limited in our time together, and we operate in a rough sort of Roberts Rules format with majority rule. How does this “fit” the model offered by other schools? Is this desirable? Sustainable? Consistent with other Waldorf precedent?

I believe it fits with what other schools do. I believe it’s sustainable. It’s not undesirable, and you could change it over time to suit the needs of your community if you wanted to. Most Waldorf school boards micromanage (often in the absence of good clear management from the teachers/administration) instead of focusing on strategy, planning, budget, fundraising, etc. Board and faculty should meet socially at least twice a year (I’m basing this on experience; there’s no rule); they should meet to make joint decisions when necessary; and they should meet at least once a year to discuss vision, mission, etc. (more if they haven’t been engaged together in the past or, like your school, if you face major changes).

5. What might we expect over time? That is, are there special needs or challenges that are specific to our early stage (i.e., things that need special consideration now but that will pass), and what might be the things that are “permanent” or more specific to the future more mature stage?

Structure is necessary, but shouldn’t be confused with organization, which is living and changes as the needs of the school community change. Too often we believe that changing a governance structure will change an institution; if the same persons are involved in the work of the school, however, structural changes are unlikely to produce real change. Not to say that some structures aren’t better or more suitable or more efficient; there’s always room for improvement.

Managing cultural change is the necessary challenge, and requires greater ethics, communication, attention to process, willingness to compromise, transparency, etc. I believe one or a very small group can gradually change the culture of an institution, although it’s not easy. For one thing, it’s easier to change when times are good, although the incentive to change more often arises when times are tough. Getting agreement on a clear process (for example, by what process are new teachers hired?) is easiest in the abstract, not when a rift exists over the hiring of a particular candidate.

I believe the job of the administrator is to be a watch-dog and “connector” between others on these issues (ethics, communication, attention to process, willingness to compromise, transparency, timeliness, etc.)—she or he should, ideally, sit on the Board and College (and HR committee or other “rights” group of the school), as either voting member or ex-officio. She doesn’t belong only to one group, but serves them all. When I was a school administrator, I believed I was doing my job if the teachers believed I was listening too much to the parents and the parents believed I was listening too much to the teachers. (I worked with a particularly supportive board, but the same trust applies here, too.) Community trust in my ethics, compassion, communication, etc., was my only basic currency. If I was seen as partisan, I was ineffective.