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An Interview with Bill Ayers

The following interview is shared with you by both Bill Ayers and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click hereTo find out more about Bill Ayers and his work, click here.

Bill Ayers

billayersIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Bill Ayers: Well, I guess “community,” like most compelling and layered terms, has a contested meaning, both in the world and within myself. I think when we say “community” and when we feel ourselves to be within the positive embrace of  a community, we tend to think of community as loving and accepting, representing our perspectives and values, something inclusive and nourishing. But it’s important to recognize that every community is also a wall. And that means that only some are in the community, and many others are not—they dwell outside the community.  When we get carried away with the loveliness of community as we imagine it, we can miss the fact that communities by their nature are exclusive; this is true even when we talk about the universal community or the ecstatic community or the beloved community or  the human community—those constructions also cut out a good deal. So I think we should always be aware when we long for community, and most of us do, when we reach for others who are  needed if we are to thrive as human beings, we should be aware of what we’re cutting out and ask ourselves if it’s appropriate and if it’s exactlywhere we want to live.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

BA: I live life in multiple communities and always have, and I think if we examine our lives more carefully, most of us do.  Again it’s something we’re not always aware of.  In our natural narcissism we may think that where I go my community is with me, but the fact is that we live in overlapping, sometimes excluding, groupings. For me without my family I would find myself bereft and lost—so that’s a very close-in community.  I also have other communities.  I have communities of resistance, I have communities of struggle, I have political communities.  Starting in the middle 1960s I was drawn to and have lived off and on ever since in intentional communities—utopian communities. I was part of the commune movement in the 60’s, and I’m still a member of a community that has land in common in California where we raised our kids and now our grandkids. We share a lot, but we only share a lot for a few months a year. That's a kind of community, but it doesn’t overlap with my political community in Chicago particularly.  That community gives us a place to develop, a place to rest, a place to think, a place to work out ideas.  And I think in the world of political thinking and political struggle sometimes “just us black people” or “just us women” or “just us queers” have to go into a room where we can be a community of a very self-defined specific type. But as soon as we go into that room we begin to recognize that the particular identity that forms that particular community is a fraction of who we are and if we can see that and recognize that we still might tactically need to be with a specific intentional community—but aware that that intentional community is a limitation as well as a liberation.  It’s both.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

BA: Well none of us lives as an island, none of us is all by oneself. And the more we develop that kind of narcissistic sense that’s it’s me alone, entirely self-sufficient and completely self-reliant, the more we lose in terms of the value of community.  Because community is what brings us alive and what allows us to be both more enlightened and more free. I think of Fred Rogers who used to say on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, his children’s  television show, “Think about the people who loved you into being.”  Well, I think communities do that, I think they love us into being.  They can also be an illusion.  They can also delude us.  So one of the things that I guess I want to always be conscious of is the way in which a community not only has this dual aspect that I mentioned earlier, but also the ways in which any single community, any single identity is entangling.  And if you inflame your identity, you know, “I’m queer,” “I’m white,” “I’m a male,” “I’m old,” whatever identity you’re representing – as soon as you inflame that you do damage to yourself. I think that for me the various communities that I’m a part of in various overlapping ways help me to negotiate and earn myidentity.  It’s what allows me to strive to become more human.  So that without my granddaughters on a weekly ba-sis, taking care of them, I would be missing a certain part of what is very central to my life.  On the other hand I am now retired, I’m a grandfather, I do take care of my grandkids, but as soon as I say, “I’m a retired grandfather taking care of my grandkids,” automatically all of these socially-constructed assumptions descend upon me, those labels which are themselves so diminish-ing and limiting.  So what I want to argue for is gaining from each community a piece of your humanity and a part of your personhood, and giving to each community as much as you can because it’s in giving to community that we realize the fullness of ourselves. And then, to return to the central contradiction, let’s  not get stuck in kind of a totalizing community, an inflamed community or a dogmatic community.

IG:  What's missing in community?

BA: I could name some communities that I interacted with in the last few days and every one of them had and has its limitations. And every one also brought as-pects of what I live for.  For example, yesterday I met with a community that’s in the process of creating an intentional space in Chicago where we can be much more productive and get on with the business of movement building. So does that community of place have love and ecstasy and joy and culture?  Not exactly.  But that’s something very important at the same time. The night before my partner for forty years and I hosted a birthday party for a very close friend; we brought food and flowers and homemade cards, and we formed a circle where we talked about our lives together.  And there were maybe thirty or forty people there and we had a fire going.  But that community brought a lot, but it didn’t bring the kind of intellectual stimulation that might be more apparent in another place.  The day before that we had retreat of a political formation that I am a part of and we spent a lot of time on the question of access, not just for folks with disabilities but for folks with different languages and so on.  That community brought a kind of challenge to me.   So I could go on but you get the gist of what I’m saying. Living a life merges and creates intersections between communities and gives meaning to the fullness of your existence.

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

BA: The phrase undermines itself. When we talk about community there is no ideal. Rather there’s a quest, a journey, something that’s much more about process than point-of-arrival.  And as soon as we say something like my ideal community meets every Thursday at 4 o’clock  we’re already going off the deep end; we then begin to codify and create a dogmatic response to the desire for community.  It’s the most human thing in the world to long for community, and I think the ideal community is in that longing. But too often we settle for institutions. It’s the desire for community that keeps us putting one foot in front of the other and keeps us moving down the path more than the idea that you could actually define the shape of it once and for all.  I think that the draw of our workplaces and classrooms,  the draw of our churches and synagogues and mosques – the draw of all these things is that desire for community.  What we end up finding in those places is too often a fraction of what we were longing for and we end up getting a lot that’s not worthy of our deepest dreams for community.  

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

BA: A democratic education is an education based firmly in the culture of democ-racy, which is a radical proposition. A fragile but precious ideal powering every authentic democracy is the belief that every human being is of incalculable value.  That ideal too-often runs hard against the institution of schooling in which value is constantly being calculated, the value of this person and that person is constantly being parsed and sorted.  A democratic education begins with the premise that everyone is of incalculable value. We are equal in rights, and we are each an unruly spark of meanin-making energy. And it moves from there to a belief that the fullest development of each of us is the condition for the full development of all of us.  And the reverse is true as well: the fullest development of all of us is the condition for the full development of each of us.  And those things have huge implications for policy for establishing equality and justice in schools and society. If you assume the incalculable value of every human being then you have to think that curriculum is much more about initiative, courage, imagination, entrepreneurship, and much less about obedience and conformity.  It’s much more about opening windows and opening doors and learning from the world, not so much learning about the world—learning from nature not about nature, learning from democracy not about democracy.  Democracy and education are the same; freedom and education are the same. This is beacause education at its best stands on two legs: one leg is enlightenment, and one leg is liberation. They work together: we want to know more, we want to explore more and experiment more and under-stand more because we want to do more.  And it’s those interactions that make democratic education a reality. I resist the notion that education is strictly a K-12 or K-16 affair.  I reject the idea that education is for the young and that therefore a preparation for real life.  I think education is life itself, and education for democracy is the art of living and growing.

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

BA: I have devoted most of my life to education in a formal sense.  I’ve been a teacher or as I prefer to say I’ve been a person who’s been experimenting with and trying to become a teacher.  I always tell my students that “teacher” is a word they can put on their tombstones, but until then we are all simply working away at it. For me a teacher in a democratic society—even an aspirationally democratic worldis of necessity a learner, and the fundamental challenge of teaching is to become a student of your students. And I think of education as something more than formal schooling—it goes on 24/7 inside and outside, in the community and in our daily interactions.  So one of my most astute teachers these days is my three-year-old granddaughter and her six-year-old sister and they teach me all the time and some of it is silly and funny and memorable, and some of it is profound and life altering.  Yesterday my three-year-old granddaughter came into the room with a book behind her back and she said, “Guess what I have.” And I said, “Is it A Birthday for Frances?” and she pulled it out very triumphantly and said, “It’s your favorite.” And what cracked me up because I think of it as her favorite, but she thinks of it as my favorite. And somehow we negotiate this space where we are in cahoots but I think it’s marvelous that her perspective is that she’s doing something for me by bringing me a book that I love that I can read to her…  If you strive for a certain wide-awakeness, you’ll be awakened every day by something.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about education?

BA: I have spent a lot of my life in the last couple of decades fighting for the right of urban kids to have access and equity and increasingly to have recognition of their humanity in the schools, and it’s been a difficult battle characterized by the trumpeting of a narrow concept of education for the masses of the people while the wealthy and the powerful and the people promoting corporate school reform are demanding for their own kids all kinds of other experiences and opportunities.  So it’s a difficult time right now,  but we must remind ourselves that education and school reform and urban education are necessarily contested spaces and any time you feel like “Oh, we’ve lost and we must get in to the bunkers and barricade ourselves,” you’re making a huge mistake. We need to see this as a moment when the goals and values of education are very much contested, and we leave the field at our peril—we should stand up with great confidence and articulate a different frame on the question of education than the one being foisted on us by the powerful in politics and from influential foundations and the media.  I can give you one very simple example which is familiar to all of us in the recent presidential campaign.  Every time John McCain got to a microphone and said, “We need to get the lazy incompetent teachers out of the classroom,” I felt myself nodding dully as did millions of other people.  Who’s going to stand up and say, “No no I want the lazy incompetent teacher for my granddaughter.”  Nobody.  He wins the argument by framing it. If I got to the microphone first and said, “Every kid in a public school deserves an intellectually grounded, morally committed, compassionate, caring and energetic, well-rested and well-paid teacher” I would win the argument.  So part of our problem is how are we framing and re-framing the discussion about education today.  How are we thinking about it?  Then how are we not being bamboozled into accepting a frame that is unacceptable up to and including measuring our success by these silly and backwards test scores.  So my encouragement for myself and the reward to myself is to keep fighting and the reason to keep fighting with confidence is because it is contested space, because we are living in a dynamic history and the more noisy and shrill and over-powering the folks seem who are defining the agenda on education the more we should recognize the weakness of their case. I don’t think they represent the majority in any sense at all, and I think that we should fight for a robust public space in a more vibrant and participatory democracy.  I’m not optimistic because I can’t see the future, but neither am I pessimistic—again  because I can’t see the future.  Rather I want to promote a politics of hopefulness and confidence, and get people out there speaking up and speaking out so that we don’t barricade ourselves in either a defensive posture or a self-righteous posture.

IG: What is missing in education?

BA: I want from education based on the full recognition of the humanity of every-one who walks through the door.  And that means that the questions, the problems, and the contradictions kids bring into the classroom would become the stuff of education.  So every kid from the moment that they’re born is powered forth with questions and confusion and uncertainty.  And education is a place – education is the place – formally and informally where we can search for answers.  So if you think about the teacher.  I was a young teacher during the Freedom Schools that swept the South in the mid and late 60’s and those schools were powered by questions.  The curriculum of the Freedom Schools was a curriculum of questioning.  And the questions were profound.  “Why are you and I in the Freedom movement?”  “What do we hope to accomplish?” “What do we want to maintain that we have?” “What do we want to have that the majority culture has?” On and on and on, a curriculum of questioning. And those were serious, profound, life-changing questions because they allowed people who were beaten down and stepped on and pushed to the bottom to ask the big questions of their lives.  “How did I get here?” “Where am I going?”  “Where do I want to go?” Those are the questions that ought to power all education and I can parse that out in tiny as well as in giant ways, but that’s what’s largely missing.  Kids are denied, people are denied the right to think for ourselves about the circumstances of our lives and how they could be different.  That’s what an education for freedom is all about.

IG: What is an ideal education to you?

BA: Well again I’m going to have to trouble the question because “ideal” is both worth striving for but wildly indistinct—I don’t want to diagram a set of iron clad orthodoxies. I want to think about education as always responding to the reality before us, and always a process and a quest and a journey, always dynamic and growing.  But the contours of that dynamism have everything to do with being able to develop the capacity to ask questions of the universe and that means good teachers and good friends and good lovers are folks who help us formulate and develop and encourage the questions that will make our lives deeper, more meaningful, richer, and more open.

 

Bill Ayers delivered a talk, "Democratic Education for Social Justice," at the 2003 International Democratic Education Conference in Troy, NY, organized by AERO. Watch this talk below:

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An Interview with Pedro Noguera

The following interview is shared with you by both Pedro Noguera and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click hereTo find out more about Pedro Noguera and his work, click here.

Pedro Noguera

Pedro NogueraIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Pedro Noguera: It means many things. Community could be a physical community as in the neighborhood. It could be a virtual community as a collection of people with shared or similar interests. Or it could be kind of more a fictional community that is more symbolic with people who share some characteristic but don’t necessarily know each other like the gay community or the black community.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

PN: I think on all three of those levels.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

PN: Depends on which one. In terms of my actual neighborhood community I find it helpful to know my neighbors because we help each other with something as simple as shoveling each other’s snow to dealing with neighborhood problems together. From these more virtual communities that I’m a part of I find it helpful to get information to work on common issues together. That sort of thing.

IG:  What's missing in community?

PN: I think what I find I want most is the ability to act in concert more on issues of mutual interest to exert greater influence. I think that’s more difficult but maybe because of time – my own time – it takes a lot of time to do that kind of work.

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

PN: I guess it would have the combination of the virtual contact and then real actual physical contact – for there to be both.

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

PN: Well to me it means that you are – that it’s democratic in the sense that it is inclusive because it is acceptable to a wide variety of people.  It’s democratic because it recognizes that students are not passive beings but have to be engaged as critical thinkers. It’s democratic because parents need to be treated as also active participants in the educational process and not merely as consumers of it. And it’s democratic because it has a sense of public accountability and a commitment to addressing broader public and social goals.

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

PN: Well you know that’s my work so it plays out on many levels. Professionally it plays out in terms of the work I do and research and writing and then also direct support work with schools. I am also a parent so it plays out engaged through my kids with their schools. So it plays out on many different levels.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about education?

PN: I find most valuable visiting schools and working with educators who are making a difference, who are doing extraordinary things despite the obstacles they face still find ways to make a difference for children.

IG: What is missing in education?

PN: I want to see school play more of a role in promoting social change. I mean that in a broad sense. In communities that are – like I was asked to help in Detroit and New Orleans. These are cities with high rates of poverty and unemployment. They need to play a role in helping people to figure out how to address their economic needs and in communities that dealing with issues related to violence they to help people figure out how better to cope with violence and reduce the instance of violence. So I think, what I really look for is schools that can be function as assets to communities and really function more as institutions that can help to heal and alleviate the most pressing problems that communities face.

IG: What is an ideal education to you?

PN: An ideal education is simply put is one that prepares you for the world you live in, to be a critical participant in that world.  To be able to take care of yourself and survive – not to survive, but to thrive hopefully.  An education that contributes to your sense of happiness and fulfillment. 

IG: What do you think people should know about the relationship between community and education?

PN: Well I think the main thing to recognize is that learning just doesn’t occur in schools. That kids are often learning a lot outside of school at home and in the communities so the lines between schools and communities need to be permeable so that it is easy for educators to learn about and understand what is happening in the communities where their children live but also easy for the schools to draw support from those communities to address the needs of children. When that kind of more collaborative relationship exists I believe that schools and communities benefit from the partnership.

 

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An Interview with Sonia Nieto

The following interview is shared with you by both Sonia Nieto and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click hereTo find out more about Sonia Nieto and her work, click here.

Sonia Nieto

Sonia NietoIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Sonia Nieto: It depends on the context.  I live in a particular community so my community are my neighbors and my friends and other people who live in this town, for example.  I am a member of the education community and that is a professional group of associates.  I am Puerto Rican so I’m also a member of the Puerto Rican community in the United States which is pretty far flung at this point. I am a knitter so I am a member of a knitting community.  It depends on the context so it can be really small or really big.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

SN: I guess what I find most meaningful about my communities, the communities in which I interact, is the engagement with them, is learning from the communities. I think of every community as a learning community.  I belong to a neighborhood reading group; that’s another community. You know, I learn in every community so maybe I always see things as an educator. I see that their biggest impact on me is what I can learn from them and what I can understand that I haven’t understood before.

IG:  What's missing in community?

SN: You know, a long time ago I learned that community doesn’t mean consensus but on the contrary what it means is struggling through things to learn together, to argue about things, maybe not be in complete agreement but to have some basic respect for one another in spite of those differences.  So, what I am missing from my general U.S. community is now a sense of respect.  You know I don’t expect consensus because there are so many divergent views, but a civil discourse would be nice.  From my education community, I miss a sense of commitment, I guess, or of action on behalf of those who need help the most. Rather than Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind and all these so-called accountability, so called higher standards, what I would like is a real commitment to students who need us the most and equitable ways of getting there,  ways of getting there that nurture students and that honor the commitment of teachers while recognizing that some teachers will not step up. I don’t idealize teachers; I’m just saying that teachers are so disrespected nowadays that it’s very challenging to be a teacher.  I’m a teacher, my husband’s a teacher, our daughter’s a teacher, so I have a great respect for the community of teachers.  So that’s what I’m missing from my educational community.

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

SN: An ideal community would be a group of people or organizations (but especially people – let’s keep it at the people level) that engage in dialog and are respectful of one another.  That’s in general for every community. I guess in terms of my ideal community for education, I’ve already given some answers to that 

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

SN: Democratic education means practicing what we preach.  It means putting into effect all of those noble ideals of equality and fair play.  Democratic education in terms of what educators can do is to really look seriously at the policies and practices we have in place and ask how those further – or not – a democratic vision.  So do high stakes tests, for example, further the ideals of democracy?  The way that they are being implemented now, I don’t think so.  What about the curriculum?  Does the curriculum promote the ideals of a democracy?  I don’t think so because curriculum many times is so one sided and has left so much out.  What about pedagogy? I don’t think pedagogy is very democratic because it generally focuses on the way only some people learn and not on how other people learn. I think it’s important as educators to look at those policies and practices.  Now in terms of students, what I think it means is having more of a voice in what happens in classrooms and schools and being able to practice it and not just read about it. To be able to practice democracy.  And not only through student councils which a lot of times are just meaningless because they’re rubber stamps for the school administration, but taking action and being able to learn the tools of democracy  like writing a letter or doing a petition, or starting a boycott.  These are the tools of democracy that are sometimes seen as dangerous and that we shouldn’t teach these to kids, and yet how are they going to learn about democracy if not through these tools that we teach them in school?

IG:  How does education play out in your life? 

SN: Well you know, I’m retired (supposedly).  I am retired from the University of Massachusetts but not from life as I tell everybody. So when I called you I was just writing a forward for a book and I’ve been writing and traveling and so on. So education in my life personally plays out in the kinds of activities I’m engaged in, whether writing or giving talks or serving on committees, and commissions and on advisory boards, and so on, where I hope I can bring my experience to bear.  And it can be a part of the conversation in all of those venues. Also I think of everything as education so as I said before, I’m learning every day so education is always a big part of my life and I’d like to keep it like that..I expect to be fully engaged professionally for a long time, but even if I’m not at some point, I still expect to be a learner.  So that’s how it plays out in my life.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about education?

SN: I guess what I find most meaningful is that it’s always exciting, you know? Education is always exciting or can be always exciting. Now if you are talking about the institution of education, what I find most meaningful are the values that we purport to have about education  Doesn’t mean that we live them out, but I think those values of equality and fair play and of education being the way out of poverty and helplessness and hopelessness are important ones to have. I find that really meaningful and something to strive for, although we certainly haven’t achieved it.

IG:  What is missing in education?

SN: I think what’s missing is some clear-headedness. If we’re talking about public education, I think somehow we have lost sight of the students who we’re trying to serve.  So who’s profiting – I don’t mean to just harp on high stakes testing but I think that’s an example.  I mean, who’s profiting from the high stakes tests? Is it the kids?  The dropout rates of the most vulnerable kids are actually higher and these are the kids these tests were supposed to be helping, but who’s benefiting?  Big companies, testing companies are benefiting. And there’s a whole cottage industry – I won’t even say just cottage industry – there’s a whole huge industry that has developed because of these tests and they’re making billions but what are students getting out of them what are teachers getting out of them?  So I would like some more clear-headedness about going back to what the purpose of education is, and some respect for teachers and some real understanding of students and what they need: for example, having really high expectations of all students, but that doesn’t mean having standards that lead to standardization.  It doesn’t mean narrowing the curriculum. I was just reading something about the fact that science in the PISA test, U.S. students came out very low in science and they say that part of that is because so much focus has been on math and literacy, because of these high-stakes tests in some schools they don’t have science anymore.  I know that the science standards are being put into place and the tests are being given or starting to be given.  But will that take care of the problem?  I don’t think so. In other societies they don’t have these kinds of tests and the students have done quite well.  What can we learn from other societies? I think these are important questions to ask.

IG: What is an ideal education to you?

SN: An ideal education would be an education where we actually tried to reach the vision and the ideal that we have that we have talked about for a long time about education being the great equalizer (it isn’t, but it should be), about education being fair for everybody; about everybody having an equal chance; about each child getting what he or she needs rather than a one-size fits-all kind of approach.  It would mean exceptionally high standards, especially for those students who’ve been marginalized and for whom we haven’t had very high standards or high expectations. That’s what I would like to see in public education.

IG: What do you think people should know about the relationship between community and education?

SN:  I think it’s important for educators to understand that communities have a great deal to bring to the education table, and often that’s not what happens.  What happens is that educators has come in and imposed what they think everybody should learn and some of that is very valuable.  Of course we all need to have some common culture and I understand that, but every community also has a lot of richness and a lot of assets that they can bring to their education, so building on those I think is really important.  Whether that’s kids who come to school speaking a language other than English and rather than seeing them as having a deficit in English, to see them as having assets in another language and to think how we can use it to promote their education.  I would say the same about social class. Rather than seeing poverty as always a deficit (although of course it has tremendously negative consequences for people and I have to start out as saying that), but also people who live poverty also have strengths we can build on and not just seeing them as having bad habits and bad morals and so on and so forth.  But what do families living in poverty bring to education?  Everybody has something.  I think we need to start with that view rather than always “fixing” kids or “fixing” people who don’t happen to come from the mainstream.

 

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An Interview with Riane Eisler

The following interview is shared with you by both Riane Eisler and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click hereTo find out more about Riane Eisler and her work, visit www.partnershipway.org; www.caringeconomy.org; www.saiv.org; and rianeeisler.com.

Riane Eisler

Eisler, RianeIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Riane Eisler: I always think of it from the perspective of the difference between what would be a community that orients to the domination system or to the partnership system. Because you can have community that basically is very reliant on fear and force or the threat of force, very male dominated, oriented towards in-group versus out-group, so that there is a win-lose mentality, which is part of the domination system because there is so much repressed anger and fear that you have to displace it to the “other,” so to speak. 

We certainly see those communities and actually they function quite effectively in the sense that they are close knit. People are socialized to accept them, and they do get a sense of belonging out of them. So I can't just define community as a sense of belonging, which is a very common definition. Because this would be very different in a partnership context where basically the glue that holds the community together isn't so much fear, be it of a punitive deity, Allah, Yahweh, or a Hindu god who’s going to bring you back as a cockroach if you're not good or if you don't obey, or of the rulers.  In a partnership context community is defined in terms of mutual respect, mutual accountability, mutual benefit – and not only for the in-group but for others as well. 

It's a very different kind of community, and that to me is the challenge: how can we build partnership communities, especially in a world where the norms are still so dominator-oriented in the mainstream, less in some places, more in others? 

Like the young woman who took umbrage that in my speech at the conference I spoke of Swedes and Norwegians as more partnership-oriented because of this one crazy guy who shot all these young people. Actually, these nations, which are more partnership oriented, have been so hospitable to immigrants, more than other nations. So they view community in a more inclusive way, with empathy not only for your peers or your class.

These are very basic issues for me. I don't think that community can be really understood without making that distinction. My community, to be personal, really is not a local community. It's a community of people like you, like me, who are committed to moving to a partnership system, be it through education, be it through economic change, be it through changes in religious stories, changes in the media, changes in family or other relationships. 

I feel very blessed to have our community because what it reminds me of always is that even in times of massive regression, like we can see through the last decades, there are people working to create a different kind of community, a community that's dedicated to building a better world. 

IG: How does community play out in your life?

RE: It's on many levels. First is a community of my dear ones, my husband, my children, my grandchildren. That's a very important community to me. It's a love that we share, the challenges we share. We're bonded.

Then there is the community in which I live, and I'm very lucky to live in a beautiful place, Carmel, small. When I first moved to Carmel I was on the board of the YWCA. I worked for the women's shelter. I worked with the ACLU, but then I got disillusioned with the ACLU because much of their financing has been from Hustler, from Playboy — so they have never taken a sensible approach towards violent pornography for example, of a balancing of rights, which law is always about, of balancing protecting women and children and free speech. So I quit.

I still become involved in community affairs. When a close friend who was an artist died, we helped to organize an auction of art to support the family. I have also spoken at benefits, such as one recently for homeless women, and donated money.

These are all community activities. I'm certainly active in the larger community in trying to change the direction of our national policies. I’m also involved in changing international policies. I spoke at the United Nations General Assembly recently in a session on harmony with nature. I was the only one to talk about women and children and about poverty and hunger. It was on the rights of Mother Earth, but the rights of Mother Earth depend on what people do. It isn't some abstraction. So, for me, communities are on various levels. I think of myself as a member of the larger human and ecological community.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

RE: The love that we share, the respect, the mutual caring, the attempt to, in my community – I'm now talking about another community which is the Center for Partnership Studies, the people on our Board, our staff, our donors and the people that we serve — to create the conditions that will support partnership rather than domination. I love the webinars CPS offers, the Caring Economy Leadership & Learning programs, and so on. It's very meaningful to me that I'm able to teach in them. That is very rewarding.

When people tonight came up to me, so many of them, saying, “Your work has transformed my life.”Or one guy who brought me my dinner said, "Oh my gosh, your work just completely transformed my life." Sure there's some ego here, but there's also that great pleasure of knowing that you have given something to people. So, it's very nurturing to me and my work is nurturing to others.

IG:  What's missing in community?

RE: Well, what's missing is that I wish that we had been more successful in building a partnership community at all levels. I know, as I was saying in my talk, that as you look at modern history through the lens of the partnership/domination continuum, we can see an upward movement toward partnership, but it’s a spiral movement with dips. And the dips are getting more and more dangerous because of high technology. Their effect on nature, through nuclear weapons, biological weapons, the rise of terrorism, all these are signs that the mix of high technology and an ethos of domination and conquest is suicidal. 

So, that's why I also feel that there is something about community that we have to be careful about: that's about not feeling that we have to conform to gain acceptance and love. Even in the progressive community, that's a problem – it's tough to be an outsider rather than just go along with the crowd; for example, to still think of matters affecting the majority – women and children – as “just women’s and children’s rights.” I have leaned to accept the value of being an outsider, which I already was as a child, as a refuge, an immigrant. It's okay. There is something about being an outsider that is not to be discounted because one of the problems with communities can be the pressures to not follow your own perceptions, not even to know what your own ideas are – that is an obstacle to fundamental change.

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

RE: Well, an ideal community would be at all these levels, but it would be a way that people that can live together in a caring way. My work is so much about caring, about mutual respect and mutual accountability. In domination systems, accountability only flows from the bottom up, not from the top down. I don't think that a community can be a completely flat organization because we need parents, we need teachers, we need managers, we need leaders. That is why I emphasize that partnership communities do have hierarchies, but they are hierarchies of actualization rather than domination.

In what I call hierarchies of actualization rather than domination, accountability, respect, benefit don't just flow from the bottom up, but also from the top down. Here power is conceptualized as the power to empower. So, that would be the ideal community. How do we create that worldwide? Well, we have to deconstruct our dominator heritage. That's not easy. And it’s not enough. We also have to reconstruct.  That is why the template of the partnership system, of the core elements of its configuration shown by my research and described in my books is so vital.

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

RE: I think that democracy if we're talking about having a vote, is terribly overrated. Hitler was voted in.  Hamas was voted in.  People can vote in dominator regimes and maintain them.   People who were brought up in dominator families will do that; not everybody, but a substantial majority.  That's what keeps the system going.

Even this notion, it's so popular now in the development literature, that if you go into a village, you ask the people what they want, and that will be the best way to go.  But the power structure in that village will be the main determinant, and women, for example, are not going to speak up in a dominator system, which is unfortunately still in place in much of the developing world, which is still very dominator oriented especially in the rural communities where the domination traditions are still very, very entrenched.  They're not going to say we want a school.  We want a family planning center.  We want maternal health.  They're going to go along with the powerful voices who say we want a big road, a big machine of some kind, or some other project the ruling men think will add to their status. Democracy you see isn't necessarily going to get people what they really need.  You have to empower people first and you have to change the norms.

Democracy as just having a voice or a vote doesn't really guarantee things despite what you read in the newspaper.

IG:  How does education play out in your life? 

RE: In my life, I'm an educator.  I teach in the graduate program of Transformative Leadership and Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies.  I teach through our Center for Partnership Studies webinars.  I teach through my books.  I teach through my lectures. Because I provide this powerful lens of the partnership and domination configurations, I make it possible for people to go deeper and understanding things that seem random and disconnected in a coherent way that makes it possible to bring about transformative change.

But in my life education also works another way, which is that I'm always learning.  For instance, I've become very interested in neuroscience which you probably gleaned from my talk, in how the brain develops differently in partnership or domination settings. Because the brain adapts, especially in our formative early years, and it develops differently as it adapts to a partnership or dominator cultural environment — as mediated through families, education, religion, etc.  I'm constantly learning and teaching.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about education?

RE: My own exploration is very exciting. And so is being able to enrich people's lives through what I've learned, and to stimulate them and inspire them.  That's very exciting, very meaningful. There's so much to always learn.  I'm a voracious reader still.  I read a lot of history.  There is just so much about learning and about teaching that I love.

IG:  What is missing in education?

RE: Well, it depends on what education. If you're talking about what's missing here? What's missing in India? What's missing in China? What's still missing, to a very large extent everywhere is what I was talking about today: to show people that there are more than two alternatives. You don't just have to dominate or be dominated; served or be served. There is a partnership alternative.

I just wrote a chapter for a Cambridge University press book on crimes against future generations. Again, mine was the only article on protecting the majority of humanity: women and children. The extent of crimes against children and against women is horrendous. Yet, the world doesn't pay attention. These crimes largely take place in homes. They also take place in schools. Physical violence in schools in India, for example, largely account for their huge dropout rate according to Indian reports.

I know it's not politically correct in progressive circles to ever point to problems outside of the United States. Whereas for the regressives in this country, our country can do no wrong, for progressives, it can do no right. It's idiotic, frankly. To blame everything on the U.S. is ridiculous. The world is much more complex, and some of the most severe violations of human rights still take place in emerging and developing nations. We need to help people in these places shift from domination to partnership, which is part of my work. 

IG: What is an ideal education to you?

RE: At its core is helping children understand what being human means, what I was talking about, that we humans have capacities for caring and for empathy and for creativity and for consciousness, and to help them understand how they can create the conditions that support the development and expression of these capacities. Because these human capacities are maladaptive for domination systems, where you've got to compartmentalize them, even suppress them. 

They also need to understand that we have the capacities for insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness, and they need an education that does not support the expression of these negative human capacities.

So actually you have to throw away much of the traditional education because, as I said, from the classics, the Iliad, the epics that present the hero as a killer, we are educating for systems of domination … Where are the role models for partnership for both boys and girls? And yes, education must be gender balanced. It's what I write about in Tomorrow's Children, where I also have many examples for multicultural education.  Again and again, education should show the two possibilities for all relations – domination or partnership — how to promote one rather than the other. Education should also support that human quest for meaning, and help each child find her or his passion.

IG: What do you think people should know about the relationship between community and education?

RE: Of course, it is a very direct relationship because education, be it formal or informal, will largely mould whether it's a partnership or domination community. So, we're right back to that. First of all, we have to start with what kind of structures we create – domination or partnership — as well as what kind of stories we tell. As I said, it’s essential that education be gender balanced. Without the gender balance, we still have that model for equating difference with superiority or inferiority, for one part of humanity being important (and therefore emphasized in what we are taught as knowledge and truth), while the other, the female half, is marginal at best. If we do not change that, we don't have anything, and it is still so engrained.  Yet it is basic. That's why regressive regimes, whether the Nazi's or the Taliban, always promote the superiority of males over females – they have to have that. In addition, parenting education should be a huge part of partnership education, caring and connected parenting education. There is an excellent guide for that at www.partnershipway.org as well as on www.saiv.org, that I would like to see educators use in middle school and high school – and of course parenting education classes as well as gender equity classes should be mandatory. That is where we first learn whether to respect human rights or accept human rights violations as normal, even moral. So we must pay much more attention to the cultural construction of these primary human relations.

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Watch Riane Eisler's talk, "From Domination to Partnership: Transforming Education and Society" at the 8th annual AERO Conference here: