The Big Shift

The Painter and the Sculptor

“Teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge.”

--John Taylor Gatto

When I first came across the quote above, I was struck by the powerful metaphor of the sculptor, and not just in its application to education. For the past 100 years, we were busy painting. Our industrial economy required us to synthetically produce an obedient and docile workforce. Teachers were painters, parents were painters, managers were painters. Leadership involved defining the world for and giving instructions to followers, be they children, students, or employees, with little respect for individual differences, passions and aspirations.

The emerging connection economy no longer requires us to produce a conforming and homogenous population. It thrives on authenticity, creativity and differentiation. Individual differences have become the key rather than the obstacle to success. The new economy requires the sculptor--the parent, the teacher, the manager—who helps reveal the unique image locked into each slab. In today's world, leadership involves empowering each individual to find her purpose and live up to her potential.

Being a sculptor is scarier than being a painter because we don’t know what we'll uncover as we chip away at the stone. We secretly worry that the image won't meet our hopes and dreams for that person or will reflect poorly on us. The sculptor is the parent who helps a child pursue a passion in theater, despite the parent's misgivings; the teacher who sees a flicker of genius in a teenager everyone considers a troublemaker and works to bring it out; the manager who allows a young employee to take on an innovative but risky project rather than direct his every move. Being a sculptor requires putting aside fears and relinquishing a measure of control.

Sculpting is, unfortunately, less common than we might care to admit. Most people and institutions are still telling people what they ought to be rather than helping them become what they were meant to be. Giving people their marching orders used to work for us, and it seems safer to rely on what used to work than to try something new. So we work harder and harder at doing what's not working. At the very moment we need to cultivate individuality, we double-down on uniformity. At the very moment we need to encourage creativity and love of learning, we issue "common core standards," insisting on what  “every” child ought to be able to do and when, as if every child was meant to do the same things and be the same person.

We are a learning society—a slow learning society, but faster than most others—so eventually we will overcome our insecurities and shed our outmoded beliefs. Eventually we will learn a new way of teaching, leading and inspiring. The question is: how much more painting must we do before we realize that the image we are looking for is just beneath the surface?

How schools create bullying

Andrew is a 14 year old ninth grader who taught himself how to program in Visual Basic so that he can produce his own novice video games. He plans on designing video games when he grows up. Andrew has trouble paying attention in class. While he can tune in to some teachers some of the time, more often than not he simply checks out.

“Andrew!” his biology teacher, Mr. James, bellows. “What are you doing?” Andrew turned red, as his classmates snickered. “You’re not even looking at the right book!”

Being publicly humiliated in class is a way of life for kids like Andrew with alternative learning profiles and for those who otherwise deviate from the norm. Mr. James has little regard for Andrew’s learning differences or feelings. Several of Andrew’s classmates, imitating the teacher, tease him after class. He’s been severely bullied on numerous occasions. When Andrew's parents mentioned to school officials that Andrew complained about being mistreated by Mr. James, they defended the teacher, who is popular among most kids. Given the values and, indeed, the very structure of school, it’s no wonder that bullying is so pervasive.

We speak of bullying as if it’s some irksome alien force, independent of the social structure of school when, in fact, it’s deeply ingrained in the very fabric of school life. The main problem isn’t that certain kids are mean, though that’s definitely the case, it’s that school values some kids and devalues others. Anti-bullying programs focus on teaching kids to be kind, which, of course, is a good thing to do. But telling kids that they should be nice and accepting of others when the school celebrates one type of student to the exclusion of others, is ultimately going to fall on deaf ears. In upholding a single standard of performance--only one definition of intelligence, one method of learning, one way of acting--the school, itself, is not being nice to kids who don’t fit the mold. We should not expect students to be any more respectful of diversity and any nicer to people who deviate from the norm than is the school they attend for seven hours a day.

In all likelihood, Mr. James cannot fathom that Andrew is actually quite talented. The teacher's impatience with Andrew reflects the school's limited model of the mind, which sets up kids like Andrew, whose mind works differently, to be ostracized. While I put some of the blame on Mr. James for lacking insight and compassion, I place most of it squarely on the education system and its relentless drive for homogeneity. Even if boorish teachers like Mr. James were out of the picture, we'd still have a gentler version of the same system, favoring one kind of kid and demeaning another. 

While learning outliers are frequently victims of bullying, they can be bullies too. In such a scenario, the outlier bullies a physically weaker “good student.” The outlier is angry at the way he has been treated by the system, and takes it out on the other student. Both types of the bullying are predictable outcomes of the classroom monoculture.

Some argue that combatting bullying requires cultural change in schools. Bullying, however, is first and formost a structural problem. Unless the structure of school changes, the culture will continue to support bullying. The only way we’ll ever see more compassion and less bullying is to restructure school, allowing for and even encouraging varied kinds of learning, interests and passions.

Such an environment would reduce if not eliminate bullying because it would acculturate kids to a diverse array of learning styles, behaviors and interests. Of course, this new structure cannot eliminate bullying altogether and perfect the human condition--none can--but it can create new norms and vastly improve upon it. Because the school itself would exemplify these values, it would be in a much better position to teach kindness, respect for diversity and opposition to bullying. It would also be a far superior learning environment, empowering kids to pursue their passions and preparing them to flourish later in life.

Until we transform the current cookie cutter education system, anti-bullying measures will be nothing more than a band-aid approach to a systemic problem. 

“Lean out” parenting (Yes, you should be your child’s friend)

I’m for “lean out” parenting (I’m also for lean out schooling and management, but that’s for another time). Lean out is a twist on Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg’s book title and burgeoning social movement “Lean in,” calling on women to ratchet up their professional aspirations and engagement.

When I say parents should “lean out,” I mean that we should do less punishing, less rewarding, less scolding, less praising, less hovering, less preaching, less controlling, less (over) protecting. Less is more. Of course this is a general philosophy and not an Individual Parenting Plan (IPP). There are 1001 legitimate exceptions, I have no doubt.

Some will view lean out parenting as a call for disengagement and chaos. Lean out does not mean bow out. And, of course, it does not mean that we should relinquish all control. We do have to get our kids to the bus stop in the morning. Rather, lean out means staying clear of what we can’t or shouldn’t control and doing more of what we can and should.

Most parents think they have a major say in their kids’ long-term behavior. This is a monumental illusion. The discipline we mete out has very little if any lasting impact on their behavior. Studies show that punishment works only in temporarily exerting control over a child and has no lasting effect. In one study, eighty percent of children repeated the behavior they were disciplined for that very same day.

Judith Harris first pointed out the futility of disciplining children in her seminal book “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do,” citing extensive research from studies of twins separated at birth. Researchers believe that roughly fifty percent of a child's personality profile—traits such as friendliness, openness, introversion, nervousness, etc.—are attributable to genes, which means that the other half is attributable to the environment. Studies show that peers and siblings have a much bigger influence than parents on a child’s behavior. Indeed, one of the most important decisions parents make is choosing a neighborhood or a school.

Anyone who doubts this more limited view of parental impact should speak to parents with both biological and adopted children. Almost invariably they will tell you how drastically different their adopted children are from their biological kids.

Notwithstanding the evidence, some parents, typically those with well-behaved children, credit themselves for their kids' stellar conduct. It’s a classic case of “confirmation bias"--we favor information that confirms our beliefs. Mercifully, some of these parents eventually beget a less compliant child, and wonder why all that skillful parenting no longer seems to work.  Given what we’ve learned about the power of genetics, it should surprise no one that well-behaved parents tend to produce well-behaved offspring.

Not only does standard-fare discipline not work, it can make things worse:

• We unnecessarily inflame our family life by constantly battling with less compliant children.

• We hold back our children from learning from the real world by imposing unnecessary restrictions. 

• We impede the development of an internal moral compass by fostering reliance on extrinsic controls.

• We make it more difficult to maintain an open and honest relationship by generating more resentment than necessary.

Parents can likely play a greater role in shaping the values and identities of our children than we can in conditioning their behavior. That probably has more to do with how we model own own values than with any long-winded speech we give or time-out we dish out. Even then, those values must ultimately be reinforced by the larger society if they are to have any staying power. None of us parents in a vacuum.

In short, by being disciplinarians, we trade some of our potential long-term influence on values for short-term control over behavior.

Dropping the pretense of punishment and rewards does not put us parents out of business. It creates the space for meaningful engagement with our children. It keeps the lines of communication open as they grow and makes it more likely that they will consult with us on challenges they face during their critical teenage years. It allows us to be their mentors and, yes, their friends, not in the same way we are with our adult friends, but friends nonetheless. And, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there’s nothing wrong with that. 

By leaning out, we can lean in in ways our children need most.

HBO series Girls on why having your sh*t together is no longer enough

Ok, I'll come clean, I’ve recently started watching the HBO series Girls, the popular comedy/drama about a group of twenty-somethings struggling with life in the Big Apple. Several twenty-somethings in my office have been chatting animatedly about the show at the water cooler, and…Why shouldn’t I watch it?  I mean, it’s important to understand how the millennial generation thinks, right?

The show is, admittedly, highly entertaining, but I digress. The Big Shift is always on the lookout for big shift thinking in pop culture, evidence that the people in Hollywood who wield such staggering influence on our cultural sensibilities recognize how and why the world is changing. If Hollywood gets it, eventually the broader society will too. The writers of Girls get it.

In one of my favorite scenes, Marnie, an art gallery assistant who recently lost her job, finds out that her ex-boyfriend, Charlie, developed and sold an app for lots of money. Marnie is dumb-founded and jealous of Charlie's instantaneous success, and launches into a rant: 

Charlie is living the dream….I thought he was going to be broken for like at least six years…I like mentally budgeted like six years of brokenness…he’s not broken at all…and it just proves to me, like, it doesn’t matter how right you do things…because you know who ends up living their dreams are like sad messes like Charlie, and the people who end up like flailing behind are people like me....who have their shit together.

 

The scene gives voice to a generation’s rude awakening: That you can do everything that your parents told you would get you ahead—study, get good grades, look for a job after you graduate—and end up floundering, while the aimless boob who had heretofore muddled through life makes it big.

The writers of Girls understand that today’s marketplace values less and less people who merely have their shit together, and more and more sad messes who are willing and able to proffer an original thought or do something bold.   

 

Confusing Parenting and Culture: Why it's impossible (and undesirable) to raise Bébé in the US

Dr. Marilyn Wedge argues in Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD in Psychology Today that US therapists (and their co-conspirators in school) tend to over-diagnose ADHD, and points out that French therapists rarely make such a diagnosis or prescribe medication. She goes on to say the following about the reasons for the lower incidence of ADHD in France:

French parents have a different philosophy of discipline. Consistently enforced limits, in the French view, make children feel safe and secure. Clear limits, they believe, actually make a child feel happier and safer—something that is congruent with my own experience as both a therapist and a parent. Finally, French parents believe that hearing the word "no" rescues children from the "tyranny of their own desires." And spanking, when used judiciously, is not considered child abuse in France..

I agree with Wedge that the US tends to "pathologize much of what is normal childhood behavior." I disagree that we should mimic French parenting styles in order to gain control over ADHD. Rather than treating ADHD as medically pathological, as American clinicians are wont to do, Wedge treats it as socially pathological. It should be viewed as neither.

As Judith Harris pointed out more than a decade ago in The Nurture Assumption, parenting styles have very little impact on children's behavior. Culture, on the other hand, has a huge impact. In parenting the way that they do, French parents are simply reflecting and reinforcing French cultural  standards of behavior. Placed in an American cultural context, such parenting would have little impact. American culture, and not just parenting styles, would have to drastically change for French-style parenting to work for American parents.

Indeed, American culture is less constrained and hierarchical than French society. Wedge points out that French "children grow up in families in which the rules are well-understood, and a clear family hierarchy is firmly in place."  This also partially explains why France is far less innovative than America. Strict behavioral norms impede creativity.

I'll take our wild children any day.

 

Thank you Mike Jeffries, CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Mike Jeffries, the humiliated chief executive of Abercrombie & Fitch. He has made a significant albeit unintentional contribution to the positive evolution of our society.

Here's what he said:

"In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids...candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong, and they can't belong."

In a single interview, Jeffries laid bare and likely sullied the pristine brand he worked so hard to build and protect. But he has also damaged the brand of the socially-superior, conformist popular kid, a repugnant cultural archetype that stifles individuality and perpetuates a rigid and often mean-spirited social hierarchy, first in school and later in adult life. In so doing, Jeffries has handed us an occasion to celebrate the kid who doesn’t seek to fit in, the weird, the outlier, the geek, the original.

Thank you, Mike Jeffries, for being a useful idiot.

"Pity the cute kid who gets anointed as the popular one or the class clown who discovers that a rude joke works or the facile actor who succeeds early and often in school plays. The feedback that comes from popularity in a popularity-obsessed system becomes an addiction. Soon the cuteness fades or the jokes get old or other, harder-working actors and musicians take the stage. Now what? How does the popular one stay popular?"

--Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception

 

Why good students are bad thinkers

I recently spent some time discussing with my 16 year old son his 15-page reading assignment about the evolution of American pluralism. He read it through paragraph by paragraph, and we discussed some of the major ideas. It took him nearly two hours. He was exhausted, but came away understanding the content of the essay in a deep way.

Given the demands school places on their time, many good students take shortcuts, looking at the questions before reading the essay and cruising the text for answers. Who can blame them? There’s simply no way they can do justice to such an essay in a single night with all of their other school work and after school activities. I could have spent that two hours with my son working on developing those “study skills” instead of helping him analyze the material, but he wouldn’t have truly understood the big ideas or expanded his critical thinking capacity. That requires going deep.  

The inexorable march through the curriculum can leave even the best students lacking in critical thinking skills. Indeed, the skills required to do well in school often work against critical thinking, and create poor habits of mind that can last a lifetime. These students are not in an active dialogue with the text, asking themselves what they think about a specific idea and how it fits into their larger understanding of the world. They don’t synthesize. Many of these students will later in life read current events articles in the same haphazard way they read a classroom essay. They will not have become critical thinkers.

After I finished college, I spent several months in Israel studying Talmud—the Jewish oral law tradition—at a Jewish seminary. Studying Talmud spawned generations of rigorous thinkers in the Jewish world, some of whom later used those same critical thinking skills to reject the very precepts of the Jewish tradition. We sat around a table with our teacher going over a single tract of Talmud—a short paragraph of text—for an hour a day for about three weeks. The tract laid out the moral reasoning of who is responsible if one man’s ox gores another man’s calf. The purpose of this pedagogy was not to impart the facts around the ox and the calf, but rather to learn a crucial thought process that would allow us to study other texts down the line. The students argued—often spiritedly, slamming their fists on the table—while the teacher refereed, tossing out challenging questions and new twists. The teacher didn't care how long it took; he wanted to make sure that we mastered the thought process. 

While I didn't retain the particulars about which party was deemed responsible for killing the calf, I did acquire a method of thinking applicable to other complex moral situations. If this tractate of Talmud were taught in a typical American high school, there would have been none of the heated debate, which, studies show, is a powerful method of learning. The teacher would have spent 15 minutes on it and administered a multiple choice test on who was responsible for killing the calf.

True learning, especially in an age when you can look up everything on a smart phone in a matter of seconds, does not primarily involve absorbing the subject matter, it involves developing a thought process that allows you to analyze all this readily available information. Schools are largely stuck on the subject matter.   

Without a doubt, some teachers, in some schools, at certain times, facilitate genuine critical thinking. But it’s rare. According to Ron Ritchhart, a researcher for Harvard's Project Zero and Director of the Cultures of Thinking project, “Critical thinking has been floating around the world of education for years. However, it has often been treated as an add-on to the curriculum rather a core aspect of learning.”

Until this changes or unless you make up for it at home, don't expect your diligent student to be a strong critical thinker.

UPDATED: Could a student's civil disobedience spark a learning revolution?

One thing's for sure: if more kids engaged in acts of civil disobedience in school (and others filmed it) like the one in the video, it would prompt a serious national conversation on education.

Follow him on twitter @Real_Jeff_Bliss

The story here isn't the lackluster teacher; it's the student's actions and words, and the potential that other students might follow suit. The story is the possibility of widespread civil disobedience against the tired methods of factory schools.

 

Not everyone, even among those who favor drastic education change, will appreciate the student's jolting act of protest. But it fits perfectly into the American tradition. We may think of social change as a neat and linear process when, more often than not, it's messy and circuitous. We may wish it to be civil, when usually it is anything but. As a political moderate (except on education), I certainly fall into this trap. While the student's (Jeff's) critique is impassioned but raw, such outbursts, captured on Youtube, have a much better chance of opening eyes than even the most compelling policy paper, opinion piece or speech.

No one describes the social change process better than the great social organizer Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals. It's a must read.

Is such a student-led mass movement possible? Is it desirable? Where would it likely lead? In the end, it may not matter what method of change any of us prefer. Such movements tend to take on a life of their own.

  

One thing's for sure: if more kids engaged in acts of civil disobedience in school (and others filmed it) like the one in the video, it would prompt a serious national conversation on education.

Follow him on twitter @Real_Jeff_Bliss

The story here isn't the lackluster teacher; it's the student's actions and words, and the potential that other students might follow suit. The story is the possibility of widespread civil disobedience against the tired methods of factory schools.

 

Not everyone, even among those who favor drastic education change, will appreciate the student's jolting act of protest. But it fits perfectly into the American tradition. We may think of social change as a neat and linear process when, more often than not, it's messy and circuitous. We may wish it to be civil, when usually it is anything but. As a political moderate (except on education), I certainly fall into this trap. While the student's (Jeff's) critique is impassioned but raw, such outbursts, captured on Youtube, have a much better chance of opening eyes than even the most compelling policy paper, opinion piece or speech.

No one describes the social change process better than the great social organizer Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals. It's a must read.

Is such a student-led mass movement possible? Is it desirable? Where would it likely lead? In the end, it may not matter what method of change any of us prefer. Such movements tend to take on a life of their own.

  

Could a student's civil disobedience spark a learning revolution?

UPDATED: One thing's for sure: if more kids engaged in acts of civil disobedience in school (and others filmed it) like the one in the video, it would prompt a serious national conversation on education.

Follow him on twitter @JeffLongHair8

The story here is not, in my view, about the lackluster teacher; it's about the student and the potential of other students to follow suit. It's about the possibility of widespread civil disobedience against the tired methods of factory schools.

Sometimes we like to think of social change as neat and linear when in fact it's often messy and circuitous. As a political moderate (except on education), I certainly fall into this trap. We want change to be  relatively civil when many of the precipitating events tend to be anything but. No one describes the social change process and the instigating tactics better than the great social organizer Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals.It's a great read.

While the student's (Jeff) critique is impassioned but raw, outbursts like this captured and spread virally on Youtube have a much better chance of opening eyes than even the most compelling policy paper or opinion piece.

Is such a mass movement possible? Is it desirable? Where would it likely lead?

 

Do you give exceptional advice?

We have a new intern in my office, a senior in high school who was recently admitted into college. He’s a sharp guy with a lot going on upstairs. He came to my office, and we talked about his future.

Me: What are you thinking of majoring in?

Intern: Political science. I'd like to do advocacy or maybe foreign policy for a government agency.

Me: That’s great. Think of things that will make you stand out. Many people get good grades and do cool internships. If you want to set yourself apart, write opinion pieces for a newspaper, conduct a social media campaign, start a new campus group. Come up with something entirely new. These types of activities will get everyone’s attention and give you the experience and skill you really need to excel.

Intern: Nobody has ever said that to me before.

Me reflecting: Yikes. And I thought I was giving him run-of-the-mill advice. Here’s a young man who has every opportunity in the world in front of him—he's educated, smart, well-spoken, even potentially passionate—but the only advice anyone has given him is to get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job. Follow the protocol and you will be selected. Nobody ever told him he could be exceptional by doing something exceptional.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman elegantly describes the new economic path we have embarked upon and what it will take to adapt our society. "Parenting, teaching or leadership that “inspires” individuals to act on their own will be the most valued of all," he asserts. 

I wonder if some adults fear that inspiring a young person to attempt something exceptional might cause him or her to veer off the beaten path. If so, they are doing more harm than good. The beaten path is really, well, beaten.