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Corporate Homeschooling

Lawrence Williams, Ed.D.

This year marks the thirty-eighth year I’ve been involved with homeschooling. When I look back on the last four decades, it’s been an amazing experience—not only for me personally, but for all of us involved in this profound educational movement.

What has made the homeschooling movement most remarkable is that it was not guided by one charismatic leader or driven by a small group with common political or religious beliefs. Since the modern homeschooling movement began in the 1960s, it has always been composed of a wide variety of thinkers and doers: back-to-the-land homesteaders, new age hippies, right-wing fundamental Christians, academic idealists, public school educators, and many others. This diverse group, united only by love for children and a desire for educational freedom, has dramatically changed the educational landscape throughout the U.S. and created new opportunities for learning throughout the world.

Beginning as a small movement of about 10,000 students, amidst laws that banned it in almost every state, homeschooling gradually became a recognized, legal option for parents throughout the U.S. and a significant player in the educational field. There are now over two million students [nheri.org], dozens of homeschooling magazines and websites, hundreds of homeschooling curriculum providers and K-12 distance learning schools, and thousands of local homeschooling groups.

THE EARLY DAYS

I became involved in homeschooling in an unusual way—by starting a small school in California. It was 1975, and I had just completed teacher training at the Waldorf Institute in Garden City, New York. I was unable to find work as a Waldorf teacher, so I took a job as the business manager for Happy Valley School in Ojai, California and moved there with my wife, Bonnie, and our three children.

After a few months we found that the local school wasn’t a good fit for our children, and we started thinking about teaching them ourselves at home. Being young and naive, I called the state Department of Education and asked how we could do it. It turned out to be a life-changing conversation.

“Do you have a state teaching credential?” asked the man on the phone at the DOE.

“No,” I replied, “but I have a Master’s degree in education.”

“Nope, that’s not good enough,” he responded. “You need a state teaching credential.”

I couldn’t believe that was the end of it. Looking for some unofficial advice, I asked, “Isn’t there another way we could do it?”

“Well, you could start a school,” he replied. Start a school? Unbelieveable.

“And could my children be part of that school?”

“Sure. You could teach them and as many kids as you want.”

Dumbfounded, all I could say was, “Thanks for your help!” I hung up the phone. Standing there, looking out the window, my mind exploded. Start a school! Why not? I had a degree in business, experience as a school business manager, and I was a trained Waldorf teacher. Bonnie was a skilled administrator and loved working with children. So we started Oak Meadow School and began teaching our children and about 40 others.

Thirty-eight years later, Oak Meadow is still going strong. Since then, we’ve become an international provider of independent, creative homeschooling curriculum materials and an accredited distance learning school for homeschooled children in grades K-12 around the world.

HOMESCHOOLING AS BIG BUSINESS

Although the recent growth in the homeschooling movement has benefited homeschoolers by providing more support, it has also introduced new players in the homeschooling field—large corporations, political lobbyists, investors, and power brokers. As the recognized Next Big Market, with billion-dollar annual purchases and rapid growth, homeschooling has entered a new phase in its evolution. Now, homeschooling is not just about a shared love of children and a desire to help them learn, it is also about money. Big Money.

Of course, many for-profit companies, including Oak Meadow, have provided a variety of curriculum materials and educational programs for homeschooling families for decades, so the entry of more for-profit corporations into the homeschooling marketplace didn’t suddenly change the nature of homeschooling. What has changed is the sheer size and the business practices of the companies themselves.

Two examples of these new corporate players are Connections Academy (owned by Connections Education) and K12 Inc. Both of these are for-profit corporations, and both gain most of their income from agreements with public schools that allow them to receive public funds for online public school enrollment and thus, like all public schools, provide enrollment free to students. With 40,000 students enrolled in 21 states and annual revenues of $190 million, Connections Education was recently acquired for $400 million by Pearson, an international media company with businesses in education, strategic business information, international television production, and consumer publishing.

As large as Connections Education may be, it is a far second to K12 Inc., a for-profit education company founded in 1999. Like Connections Education, K12 sells online schooling programs to local and state governments for use in public or charter schools, and these schools then provide the K12 programs to homeschoolers as alternatives to traditional public education. Through its network of 54 schools in 33 states (including such “homeschooling schools” as Laurel Springs and Keystone), K12 enrolls about 110,000 students in its programs and has grown in the last six years from $141 million in annual revenue to $848 million [2013 K12 Annual Report]. As with Connections Education, the most interesting part of K12’s growth is that the vast majority of its revenue comes from taxpayers.

According to sourcewatch.org, $730.8 million out of the $848.2 million K12 earned from its operations in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2013 came from U.S. taxpayers. How is this possible? Through extensive lobbying. K12 has used lobbyists and political contributions to change state laws to enable the company to receive money directly from state and local governments for their online programs. According to PRWatch.org, K12 Inc. hired 153 lobbyists in 28 states from 2003 through 2012.

The money that K12 and Connections Education are paid is the same amount that public schools receive for each student, even though their online programs have no brick-and-mortar classrooms and therefore many fewer expenses. As U.S. taxpayers, we are all providing the money for the growth of these companies, whether we’re using their services or not. Homeschooled students flock to these companies because enrollment is free. However, as sourcewatch.org points out, “the services are far from free as they divert taxpayer dollars from the public school system to a private for-profit firm.”

Clearly, K12 and Connections Education are no mom-and-pop businesses created to provide educational resources to homeschoolers. This is Big Business, designed from the beginning to make a few people very, very wealthy. With the advent of these and other large, aggressive corporations, homeschooling is no longer growing by parents talking to their friends and neighbors. The growth of homeschooling is now being driven by large corporations intent upon maximizing profits for their shareholders and doing whatever is necessary to make that happen.

FOR THE LOVE OF THE CHILDREN

I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my life, and I have nothing against money and corporations. We’ve all benefited from the vision and genius of entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Arianna Huffington. There’s nothing innately wrong with investors looking for opportunities in a new market; their profits enable them to grow and more effectively meet the needs of their customers.

The corporate invasion of homeschooling, however, is different. Homeschooling is education, the end users are children, and children are our future. Letting Big Business into that realm jeopardizes our children and our future so that a few can become wealthy. We’ve monitored the educational results of large for-profit corporations and have seen the damage caused to parents and children who have enrolled in these “free” corporate programs through public schools (for more, see Stephanie Saul’s “Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools,” New York Times, December 12, 2011; and Wesley Blixt’s “Say ‘no’ to K12,” The Recorder, June 17, 2013).

In the early days of homeschooling, those of us who were involved weren't interested in changing the educational establishment. We believed that the existing educational system was so broken that it couldn’t be fixed, so we weren’t even going to try. We simply believed that homeschooling would help make the world a better place—that the most powerful way to change the world was by providing opportunities for children to express their innate intelligence, sensitivity, and creativity. Homeschooling has grown as quickly as it has for one reason: it’s motivated by love for our children and the beauty and potential we see within them.

These same ideals remain at the heart of Oak Meadow today. As we’ve grown over the years, we’ve tried our best to stay close to that vision. As we were developing Oak Meadow, we organized it as a for-profit corporation because that enabled us to be more nimble, flexible, and responsive to the changing demands of the homeschooling marketplace. At that time, we believed that schools and other educational companies could be organized as for-profit businesses without sacrificing the quality of education. To some extent, I even believed then that non-profit schools were a relic of the past and that more innovative educational approaches could be found in for-profit corporations than in non-profit organizations.

BECOMING A NON-PROFIT

There are certainly some innovative ideas coming out of for-profit organizations, and there are clear examples of non-profit schools that have become old, stodgy, and unresponsive to the needs of their students. In the past few years, however, as I’ve watched the tactics of for-profit educational corporations in the homeschooling arena and witnessed their efforts to constantly maximize profits at the expense of educational quality (even when those profits are already substantial), I now understand why educational institutions have traditionally applied for and been granted protection as non-profit organizations.

I’ve finally realized that education and for-profit organizations don’t mix. Perhaps the thrill of enormous profits inherent in the for-profit world is simply incompatible with the educational arena in which compassion, integrity, and self-sacrifice are valued so highly. If we want to teach our children to become strong, intelligent, compassionate adults—and thoughtful members of the global community—that can be best accomplished through a business structure that sets an example of disciplined, responsible, ethical behavior.

Over the years, we’ve had many offers to sell Oak Meadow, but on each occasion it was clear that the motivation of the buyers was for profit, not for children. Many other homeschool organizations have started, grown, and been sold to large for-profit corporations since we began, and the number of heavily-capitalized for-profit educational corporations seems to be increasing daily.

In this environment, we feel that allowing Oak Meadow to continue as a for-profit corporation jeopardizes our mission and our commitment to thousands of homeschooling parents and children around the world. For this reason, and to do our best to ensure that Oak Meadow’s compassionate, holistic, experiential form of education will survive for decades to come, we feel it’s time for us to swim upstream against the current, the way all reputable schools have over the ages. We have decided that Oak Meadow will cease being a for-profit corporation and will become a non-profit educational organization, irrevocably dedicated to providing quality education for the benefit of children worldwide.

In doing this, we realize that we’re giving up the potential to reap huge salaries, profits, and bonuses, but what we gain is much more important: the long-term stability and mission-focused dedication that enables Oak Meadow to continue offering the same progressive, high-quality curriculum and services that we have offered for almost 40 years. In the end, the children and future generations will be the big winners. For all of us at Oak Meadow—and for millions of present and future homeschoolers—that’s what is most important.

Lawrence Williams
Lawrence Williams
Lawrence Williams EdD is a pioneer and innovator in the homeschooling movement whose early work in the field helped homeschooling gain widespread acceptance and legal status. He has over 40 years of educational experience and is the author of numerous articles, books, and curriculum materials published by Oak Meadow.

 

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An Interview with Rick Posner

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

Rick Posner

Rick PosnerIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Rick Posner: Oh, wow. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. As a matter a fact, the talk I gave in Florida, at this conference—this symposium, was really about self-directed communities and what a difference it made in my life. And I think you certainly talk about the Yiddish term: mishpoka, which means family and it means more than family—it means tribe, it means sense of belonging to something greater than yourself. Gosh, community is such a missing link in this culture of ours, in this country. There are so few people who have had any real experience with community. I have to talk about it personally because, I think, for me it’s been a search for family and belonging that I’ve been engaged in my whole life. And so when I came to the open school, it gave me all kinds of new views of community. But I think, to me personally, it means belonging to a family—it means what Studs Terkel said about schools as communities. And he said: school communities—why can’t schools be places where people help each other become their fullest selves? And I thought—when I heard that, it was right before Terkel died, it was a radio interview on PBS or NPR, and it was just so meaningful for me to hear that… powerful, really. This idea that communities—real communities, not artificial communities like, I hate to say it, but most conventional schools create these artificial communities with school spirit and what they really do is divide their communities into sub-communities, and not in a healthy way—but real communities: putting people together in a democratic way to help each other become our best and fullest selves, I really believe that. And I didn’t have much experience with that coming from teaching in conventional school settings for so many years. So when I came to the Open school, it was really sort of a shock to me at first. Like most people who didn’t have much experience with real community, I was a little skeptical and a little cynical about it at first. It took me some time to realize that I was being accepted as a valued member of a community—and it was a wonderful feeling when I finally came to the realization that I belonged to something. It was a great feeling for me. It was very liberating kind of thing. So, I think that’s what community means to me.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

RP: I sort of addressed that second question already, but I think community plays out in my life as a way of synthesizing things—making sense of my world and my own identity. By that I mean that, community crosses lines for me, or has come to do that in my life. I think there was a time when I compartmentalized my life into: professional relationships, personal relationships, family, friends, you know what I mean? …separated stuff in my life. I think the way community has played out in my life is by helping me synthesize, bring together these different compartments into a whole. It’s been synergistic for me. And I think that’s what community should do. Not that there should not be some lines between your personal and professional lives, but there should be some transition points too. …so that you could make sense of your world. And I think that’s what a good community does, and that’s what it has done for me.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

RP: You know I think it’s the feeling of having a group of people that believe in you, and believes in your value to the greater whole. That you are valued, needed, and you have something to believe in and you have some people who believe in you. I think that’s the real value of a sustainable feeling of community. And that’s the other point, is that this isn’t something that just goes away when you graduate school or when you get bar mitzvah-ed or you get married or you leave the family—this is a feeling that you have throughout your life of belonging to something. And that, that’s the real value of it. You have this sustainable mishpoka, family or tribe that you belong to and feel valued by.

IG: What's missing in community?

RP: Yeah, you know I think in this country you can isolate yourself and not even know you’re doing it, very quickly. Some of it is just logistics. I grew up in Milwaukie: the city of neighborhoods. In other words, you could walk down the street and see people and meet people and talk to people. People walk to your house. A park is a block away, you go to the park, you play baseball with families and friends. That was an usual experience, and it was a great place to grow up because of that. But once I left and came out to the wild west, like you did, and you’re in the wide, open spaces and you’re in these pockets of people, you can’t walk out on the street anymore you have to get in your car. I miss that sense of accessibility to community and community life. And as much as I am attached like to the open school community, and what it’s done for me, I still feel a literal distance sometimes. And you have to be more creative and more intentional about bringing the community together when you can’t just walk down the street. Yeah, and now that I’m retired from the school, you know, I really miss that everyday engagement and connection that I had as a teacher in a vibrant community. It’s been hard for me. I’ve struggled with that a little bit.

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

RP: Ideal community would be to find a balance between the different parts of your life, but have the foundation of that tribal community-feeling underneath everything. It’s hard to explain. I think it’s a sort of a cycle-emotional feeling that I have about community that I want that foundation of belonging without the pressures of having to be there all the time, and be engaged all the time—especially when you get older and you become sort of an elder of the community. That’s one thing I’ve been really dealing with is: how do I transition into this role as an elder? What does an elder do? And I think in an ideal community, an elder doesn’t just sit back and dispense wisdom from the rocking chair but sort of gets to pick and choose how they want to be involved in the community. But I think that the ideal community, for me, is something that you never really reach. There’s no—you can’t reach this top of the pyramid, like Maslow’s self actualized kind of thing, but it’s something that you strive for. I think the ideal is to have that foundation—to know it’s always there, to know you can always go back home somewhere, to re-engage, to rejuvenate, and to re-attach if you need it. It’s like having a healthy family—that’s the ideal: a healthy, supportive family that you can go back to. 

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

RPWell, you know, I think it really means—you know I keep going back to Freire and some of his work and breaking down those hierarchies that we are so addicted to, especially in education. This idea of control and being controlled and having to control somebody and looking at the opposite of—or the feeling of loss of control as some kind of Lord of the Flies situation where students run wild and it’s all chaos and anarchy. So, finding a balance with sharing control and being able to talk openly about giving up and letting go of some of that control with the stipulation that you’re going to have some adult guidance in your community. Now, you know, the open school in the old days made all of their decisions by consensus and you can imagine how crazy that was—but how wonderful it was too. How wonderful and engaging and—well somebody said real democracy is like pulling nose hairs, you know? And I think of that a lot because in the early days in the open school, god it was excruciating but it was also exhilarating. That was my ideal democratic educational setting, was when you would just argue the hell out of something and work it to the point where you would have to have buy in from everybody. That was my idea of real democratic education. Now, over time we all know that especially public schools, public institutions get pounded down, they become a little more conservative, they become a little more conforming over the years, and part of it—we had a big open school become larger, it was harder to do that in larger groups with governance meetings. It went more to a representative democracy in some ways and we’re back and forth. So for me, the purest model would be the consensus model. The compromised model would be one person-one vote. That’s really the way it came down in my days at the open school. These days I think it’s become more of a representative thing and I’m not so sure I like it but in the old days, I’m telling you it was pure democracy. That’s what I would like to see—smaller groups that would have consensual decisions. 

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

RPYou know if I had to diagram my life, and I think I have been doing that a little for the last 5 years, I’ve been in traditional psychoanalysis and nobody does that anymore. You know on the couch, Freudian psychoanalysis where the guys behind you and you’re on your own, very self-directed kind of process. And you know what it is—it’s a personal journey, it’s a journey, it’s a self discovery journey and what I keep coming back to is you do sort of diagram your life and you try to put the pieces of your life together and make meaning of it. And for me, education is always right at the center of it. Everything sort of revolves around the idea of being self-directed but being self-directed in a community of learners. Whether it be family, friends, or work—it all revolves around teaching and learning. I think it’s been a very important centerpiece in my life. So it hasn’t just played out, it has been the fulcrum of my life. But it’s taken me awhile to understand that and to realize that it’s sort of the driving force in all the different parts of my life and I have to credit a lot of people for that—you know, my parents. My dad was a real self-directed, curious, vibrant learner. My parents took a lot of chances with their lives, and did a lot of traveling. And then, I caught that bug. I had the guts to make some good decisions when I was young about what I wanted to do with my life and it all gravitated towards education. You know what else I have to give a great deal of credit to is the influence of African American culture on my life. I’ve been doing a lot of writing and thinking about that lately. It’s been a great influence on me as far as education goes, and it’s played out—it’s been a very important part of my life. The spirit, the soul, the joy, the sorrow, too, of African American culture and history has been very important for me. That’s sort of been in the center of this education part of my life because, you know, I was the one who took kids down to the Delta and did the Blues trips and took kids to New Orleans for the Jazz Heritage Festival and did all the civil rights stuff. You know, taking white, middle class kids down to the Delta was like taking them to a different country. My mom would always say: “What the hell are you doing in Mississippi? You hanging out with the rednecks in Mississippi now?” I said: “No there’s more to it Mom, there’s to it than that.” But, education—it’s all wrapped up in the middle of my life. Thank god for it.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about education?

RP: Again, I find most meaningful the idea of synthesizing things in your life. I find that education is a vehicle and a center point for making sense of your life. And forming your identity as a learner who has courage, and foresight, and the guts to make decisions on your own, and the joy of learning new things—it brings everything together in your life. That’s what education does. And that’s what it should do. It should be a way of making sense of your life. …and I think that sense of personal power that you get from belonging to a community of learners and being a life long learner yourself—it’s a sense of power, not in an egotistic way but in a human way. I think it makes you more human.

IG: What's missing in education?

RP: Well, you know I think you know and I know what’s missing and really it’s—I hate to be abstract about it but it’s heart and soul. That’s what’s missing. The idea of a well-rounded education—which I find traditional, if you go back to the Greeks and you know if you talk about the word traditionally and go back historically—that’s the traditional education, educare, right? The Latin root of the word does not mean to fill up; it means to draw out from. That’s what educare means—that’s the traditional sense of the word. We have lost that sense of what it means to be educated. Now, we’re finding out what we’re missing because our students don’t have 21st century skills. They keep talking about 21st century skills now… none of those skills are on the test—critical thinking, creativity, collaboration—none of these skills are on the test and what we’re doing is we’re teaching the test now. I think we’re playing into the hands, I don’t want to get too political here, we’re playing into the hands of the private sector. I really believe they’re licking their chops at this giant market out there for vouchers and privatizing education. They still haven’t changed the law, No Child Left Behind, with all schools being 100% efficient by 2014. I’m sure they want to—I mean we all want to, I’m not sure the private sector wants us to change that. I think it’s a way to discredit public education, but I don’t want to get too conspiratorial about it. The truth is we’ve taken the wrong turn. We need to head back to what the traditional really was—you know, I don’t call the schools outside of the Open School traditional schools; I call them conventional schools. I think the Open School, and places like that, and Justo’s school in Puerto Rico, are more traditional. The old one room schoolhouse where you pay attention to kids, there’s cross-age learning—that’s traditional. I would say we’re the ones who are traditional. They’re the ones who are conventional. I think that the shit’s hitting the fan right now. It really is and as I said, the time is right for looking at some of these things. But we’ve definitely gone the wrong way.

IG:What is an ideal education to you?

RP: An ideal education for me would be an education of the heart, soul, mind, and spirit. I don’t know if you do yoga or not or if you’re a yoga-ite, I am. I go twice a week to yoga. I practice yoga and I’ve done it for about ten years now. And what yoga has taught me is what education really is. It’s an education of mind, spirit, body, and heart. And an ideal education is just that. It’s a focus on social, personal, and intellectual issues in your life. It’s being able to understand how to form meaningful relationships and maintain relationships in your life. An ideal education, again, is a synthesis of the different parts of your life into themes that make sense to you as a person who lives in a democratic—supposedly democratic society. That’s what it is for me. It’s a sense-making engine. 

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

RP: I think they need to know that it’s essential that—and you know I tried to stress this point at the self-directed learning symposium. Self-directed learning is not independent learning; it’s interdependent learning. One of the greatest self-directed skills, ironically, is knowing when to ask for help when you need it. I mean, a lot of people say: “Oh that’s giving in, that’s not very self-directed.” No, the idea is that community and learning need each other to thrive. You need a supportive community and you need a community where you can at least make some positive personal connections. Remember in the book I have that V-shaped model, you know it starts with the advisor and the advisee and then it goes out and up to the greater community and the greater world. That doesn’t work without a supportive community. They’re essential for each other. Even if your community is a relationship with one other person, it’s better than nothing. I will be very honest with you—a lot of kids have nothing these days. They have nothing. Did you see that thing in the paper a couple years ago? It said: “25% of Americans feel they have no one to confide in.” That means 1 out of 4 people you see on the street have no one they can talk to about anything. That is frightening. So, what I’m saying is that: the community part of this whole thing is essential. Even if it’s a small one-to-one community that it starts with—sometimes it ends there. It’s better than nothing and it’s chipping off some of that lower level of Maslow’s pyramid—whereas so many kids these days are just stuck at that lowest level of the pyramid. They don’t even have basic securities then, they have no one they can talk to. So, yeah, I mean they’re essential for each other, they’re reciprocal really.

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An Interview with Deborah Meier

The following interview is shared with you by both Deborah Meier and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click hereTo find out more about Deborah Meier, click here and follow her on Twitter.

Deborah Meier

Deborah MeierIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Deborah Meier: That’s a spectacular question because I have recently realized I use it in different ways. Sometimes I use it to mean an involuntary, place you live, which you are a member of whether you like it or not. I think communities that you are a part of, and are not self-selected, are also important. It makes you think about how one can get along with people who we didn’t choose to live next to, but who we do live next to. So sometimes I use it in that simple, geographic sense and other times I use it to mean a more selective sense, where you choose to attach yourself as a member, more like a club. It’s not a family, I reserve the word family for people who have to put up with you, who love you so much.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

DM: It’s very little of the geographic kind of community that I describe anymore–that was very much part of my life when I was raising children. Since then, it’s been much less of a focus and I miss it. And if I didn’t have outside pulls on me, I might try to create a community where I live. There are ways, and I’m sometimes pulled in that direction, and then I realize I couldn’t still spend enough time thinking about this community to make it a central thought for me. So it’s mostly in that second, selective sense. I’m involved in that sort of political education community, which also includes friends. And then there’s the family and friends community, which I said I don’t know whether I qualify that as community or not.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

DM: This answer has changed at different times of my life, based on what community was the center of my life. When my children were growing up, I think it was their immediate geographic community, which is where they went to school, where their friends lived, and where they could play safely outdoors. For me, that was where I could have a cup of coffee with a friend, where I could run for political office . . . that was the center of my life for about twenty years. In some ways, that community overlapped with the second kind. Most of the political and social ties I had were, in a sense, within that community. Those overlapped with others, but I think those communities are part of my interest in schools. A very large number of kids grow up today without any of these communities. They don’t even know exactly what I mean by having some kind of loyalty and attachment to the community—the school, our school, was a community. We didn’t all love each other, we had relatively little social life with each other outside of school but we understood that we shared the honor of the school, if you will. Kids caught that—it was contagious. And what I hear from them now, through social media, I hear from kids that I haven’t seen in 20 years and the extent to which they still feel like a member of that community is stunning.

IG:  What's missing in community?

DMWhat's doesn't exist is that sort of that attachment to community. Kids generally, after they reach 12, their only community outside of their family is other people who are 12, 13, 14, or 15. That’s a limiting community, it may be a community of sorts, but it’s fairly small. And, you know, I think their attachments to social media sites is a search for a somewhat larger community, what schools don’t offer at all. Kids find little subcommunities within the school. If they don’t find a community in which they, over time, feel some attachment to, they will need something more.

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

DM: There wouldn’t be just one. I think that’s not only ok, but I think it's important that we belong to more than one, so it depends on the community. It would likely be a community which I feel attachments and loyalties to others, even if we disagree, even if they annoy me, and it would be a community that holds us together.

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

DMIt’s one in which the community operates democratically, which takes each other as equals, but one that acknowledges young people are novices at it and therefore they're gradually initiated into more and more responsibilities in the community until they’re a full member of it. As a full member, they’re responsible and accountable to each other for whatever the community does, and that's how they play their role.

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

DMWell, of course it all depends on how you define education because I’m always learning. You’re touching on some of the areas where I’m still struggling, and have been for a good time. Definition, understanding… So, I don’t know how to answer that except to say I'm always learning.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about education?

DMYou know, in the broader sense, we haven’t got a choice… we’re always learning. The question is "are we learning in a way that helps us grow?" or "learning in a way that narrows our vision?" So, I don’t think we have any choice but to keep learning and it's most meaningful when it's in a way that helps us grow.

IG: What's missing in education?

DM: Everything postive about education that we’ve been talking about. It’s virtually a form of boring incarceration, in which, I think, on the whole, neither teachers nor students have the kind of bonds with each other that makes them good learners. They’re just living parallel to each other and, you know, teaching hasn’t changed a great deal—it superficially has—we have our agenda, they have theirs and they rarely touch.

IG:What is an ideal education to you?

DM: Ideal is too much for me, but that question would be part of a conversation that’s interesting and which I’m always learning from. Like good books. I mean, a common agency of people and people via their books, movies…

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

DMNow those words, "community education" … that’s interesting because, in fact, we have this idea that K-12 schools are education and we do forget that everything outside of schools is also education. Education takes place after you leave schools, whether it’s high school, college, whatever—this idea creates a culture that makes it easy to put that informal education outside of schools more central by thinking education is more than just K-12 schooling. We need to ask whether we are creating environments in communities outside of schools that are stirring minds or helping people escape their minds?" 

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An Interview with Parker Palmer

The following interview is shared with you by both Parker Palmer and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click hereTo find out more about Parker Palmer and his work, visit the Center for Courage & Renewal where he serves as Senior Partner, visit his Facebook page, and read his new book Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit.

 

Parker Palmer

Parker PalmerIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Parker Palmer: Well, you know, I think the word community has a sort of prism, prismatic quality to it, in that every time you turn it, it refracts the light a little differently. I think it has a lot of meanings to a lot of people. The one that came to me just when you asked the question, is that community means taking each other seriously. Which is something that I think we need to do at every level of life. I mean we know that a marriage or a relationship with a significant other, or parenting, doesn’t work very well if we don’t take each other seriously. But the same is also true of living in a neighborhood, living in a civil community, living in a democracy, and certainly it’s true in the classroom—or in schools. So, in a very generic way, I think community means paying attention to each other, being aware of each other’s needs, being—feeling accountable to each other, interacting around important goals and not always trying to go it alone as we Americans so love to do. So that would be at least a starting point for me. I lived for 11 years in an intentional community—a Quaker community called Pendle Hill near Philadelphia where 80 people lived a daily round of life that involved silent meeting for worship, Quaker style, physical work, decision making, eating meals together, maintaining the property, and studying—I was Dean of studies there and we had classes on both the inner and the outer life for adult students. So, you know, I’ve lived in a sort of classic form of community which is bounded by space, I mean we had 22 acres and 18 buildings and we had a kitchen and a garden and all that stuff. So, that was for 11 years, a very intense experience of community. We also did some pretty radical economic sharing in that everyone who lived there got the same based salary.  I had a PhD from Berkley and I was Dean of Students but I got the same based salary as an 18 year old coming to cook in the kitchen or to work in the shop or the garden because he or she didn’t know what to do next with their life. And that was, for me, that was a great equalizer—a great leveling—it had a great leveling effect, this being on the same scale without any regard to statist of rank, or education, or privilege. And it—as I’ve often said—it helped me do something very important which was to loose my sense of entitlement as a white middle class male who grew up in the suburbs at the benefit of a good education and I think, in my early 30’s, a pretty strong sense of entitlement. 11 years of Pendle Hill was a sort of exercise in de-programming for me. So, you can look to community in that very intense form of intentional residential community of radical sharing, both sharing economically, sharing space, sharing spiritually, psychologically, emotionally. Pendle Hill was all of that and more. It was also a community that took stands and took actions in the larger world. But the point, of course, is that very few people in our society are ever going to have that kind of intentional community in their lives. So, if we are going to give people experiences of community it’s going to have to be in smaller doses. And so I go back to taking each other seriously as an operating definition of community, which is in fact one that I’ve never used before—I’ve never said those words before as far as I know as a definition of community. But they kind of interest me because they give rise to a question, which is: In a classroom, in a neighborhood, in a family, in a voluntary association, in a religious institution, how might we learn to take each other seriously? So, that’s—to me questions like that are very generative because they can kind of give us our marching orders when we hope to foster an experience for people that we think they need. You know, when I throw your world democracy into the mix, God knows we need more and more people who have a capacity to take other people seriously. Especially people they disagree with—and not just write them off or blow them off. I should just add parenthetically that I just finished a new book that will be out in August called “Healing the Heart of Democracy”—subtitled is “The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit”. So, these issues of democracy and community are very much on my mind. In fact, I have a chapter in that book about the contributions that can be made in classrooms and school settings to this larger topic. So anyway, that’s a bit of a ramble. But the core definition is there for whatever use it may be to you.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

PP: Well, when I left Pendle Hill which was in 1985, I sort of felt like I was going back out into the cold, hard world of individualism, you know? Because I knew that the circumstances under which I had lived for 11 years were pretty rare. I think I went through a period of time of really feeling like in the long run Pendle Hill would have been my immersion in community and there wouldn’t be much more along those lines. But life has a way of surprising us. In the early 90’s, not long after I left Pendle Hill, to make a very long story short, I started a project that has now become the Center for Courage and Renewal. I don’t know if you’re aware of that outfit—you can check out our website. We do a lot of work with public school teachers—these public school teachers and their needs were one of the main motivations behind our founding. We now have 200 facilitators who in effect create community all over the country, in a varying 30 states and 50 cities and they work with people in many different roles: K-12 teachers, school leaders, clergy of various backgrounds, non profit leaders, physicians and other health care professionals, and now with citizens in that sort of generic role that we all share. Work with these groups through a series of retreats, that are aimed at helping people bring their identity and integrity more fully into their personal, professional and public lives. And so that work, which is scattered around the country but which started with me, which then moved onto the staff people who helped me found the Center for Courage and Renewal, now to 200 facilitators and to the 40,000 people we have worked with. That network has become my community in many ways. And I am 72 years old now and since I turned 65 I have essentially been volunteering my time for this organization because like every non-profit we are trying to make it work on a shoe-string budget without a lot of loose change lying around for anybody. Wanting to continue to serve people like teachers who can’t afford much by way of extended series of retreats but who need exactly that—so I’ll just mention for example the typical program that we run for teachers would involve a group of 25 teachers who journey together over a 2 year period through 8 retreats of about 3 days each on a quarterly basis—so it’s not just a one weekend mountain top experience, it’s really a deepening experience for individuals and it’s a community formation experience for the group and the community of 25 teachers or 25 clergy or 25 philanthropists or health care folk or whatever. This community becomes very important to people, because one of the sad realities of our society is that a lot of teacher and other professionals work in silos where they’re separated from one another and don’t have the kind of support that community has to offer. So, we try to keep the cost down so that it becomes possible for more and more people. So this network of folks is my community and I live in Madison, Wisconsin and there people here in town whom I see regularly and I’m married and my wife and I are kind of the wards of my 20 year old granddaughter. So I have a lot more traditional forms of close, at home community but you know as is true of many people these days there’s a very powerful dimension of my community life that is scattered across the country that keeps in touch with each other virtually and electronically that shares a common goal. Because I am able to travel and volunteer to help the center with serious events that are related to this work, I see a fair amount of these people too. My community is, I think the largest form that it takes is this community of shared concern, of people who are pursuing a common purpose in this world. And certainly to go back to your first question, community can and sometimes does mean sharing a common purpose. Now, I didn’t want to limit my definition of community to that, because we need to have civic community in a democracy, where it’s not clear that everyone shares a common purpose, but we still need to be able to talk to each other. So, I don’t want to limit my generic definition of community that way, but in terms of what I understand as my community—like the most close end community to me, that combines personal and professional and public life, it is this group of people with very much a shared purpose.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

PP: I think probably it is that it is caught up in that word purpose. You know, human beings don’t thrive if they don’t have sense of purpose in life and while it’s important to develop an individual sense of purpose I’m unable to imagine an individual sense of purpose that doesn’t require, or even demand, community in order to pursue it. So, I feel very blessed by the fact that I have a community that sort of undergirds my personal sense of purpose—supports and animates it and helps me achieve it, in the same way that I help others achieve theirs. So there’s a lot of mutuality in my understanding of this. So, that’s certainly one of the things that I find most valuable. I also find it valuable to have people in my life who will speak honestly to me not only sharing my joys, you know my successes, but also telling me where they think I’ve got it wrong. That’s really, really important. I have found—you know I’ve been writing and giving talks, and playing various kinds of leadership roles for 40 years and one of the things that I started seeing maybe 10 or 15 years ago was the older and better established I got and (to use a word that I really don’t like very much and if you have to understand that I use it with hesitation and with a real sense of limits), but as I became more “famous” in my own field, the fewer and fewer people were able to raise this hand after a talk and say: “Well I think you’re full of horse hockey”. When I was younger, that was no problem. And I learned, I’ve always been aware that I learn more from my critics than from my fans. Because your fans, they’re wonderful, they pump you up, they make you feel good about yourself and I’m grateful for that. But you know your critics cause you to chew on stuff and make you rethink stuff and often time learn things that you need to know. So, I think that right alongside this mutuality of purpose and meaning, what I find most valuable from my community is this honest dialogue or discourse that just covers the whole range. Like, if I bring a joy to them they don’t think I’m bragging they celebrate it with me. If I bring a sorrow to them, they help me heal. And if they think I’ve got it wrong they tell me. I trust them to give me honest feedback. I suppose what I’ve just done is put a little more language around my opening definition that community is about taking each other seriously. So those are some of the ways, that I just named, that I think we need to take each other seriously.

IG: What's missing in community? 

PP: Well I think that in this ago of virtual community and high social mobility and people able to work together but at great distance, I miss being face to face with a number of people in my network that I value. I mean, I’ve got at least 200 people out there that I really do value, with whom I have a strong sense of shared purpose, only a few of them are in town. So, yeah I miss that. The face to face opportunities where communication can be more nuanced and conversation, I think, can go deeper. I mean I’m lucky that the work we do involves actually gathering people in retreat settings and formats because that means that there is a certain amount of face to faceness with this work. But compared to my 11 years at Pendle Hill, it’s pretty thin in that regard. I do wonder, every now and again, what price we are going to pay as a society or as individuals, for generation after generation of people who think that online encounters are the ultimate form of human encounter. I don’t believe that’s the case. I think there’s something about being face to face with each other that is irreplaceable and that adds very important dimensions to the experience that we’re calling community. So, I think that’s probably the thing that doesn’t exist for me—it’s not that it’s all together absent, but I would be glad for more of it.

IG:What is an ideal community to you?

PP: Well, you know, I saw that question on your list just under your part one and I have to say that I’m sure you’ll understand what I mean by this because these are things you’re studying and these are things you live. For me the words ideal and community just don’t go together. I think community is tough. I think taking each other seriously is hard work. And I think that some of the most important learnings in community come from screwing up. There’s a remarkable man, that I admire very greatly, named Jean Vanier, French Canadian who founded a series of communities around the world called L’Arche, which are places where a very remarkable form of intentional community, where people who do not have developmental disabilities, or at least as we commonly understand those developmental disabilities, who do not have such disabilities live side by side, in full partnership with people who have a variety mental and or physical, developmental disabilities. It’s a very very powerful experience to be in a large community because for all kinds of reasons, but Jean Vanier has a book on community in which he offers one of the best definitions of community that I’ve ever heard—he says: “Community is a continual act of forgiveness”. And I just think there’s a lot of truth in that, I mean when we come together in community we stumble over each other and we hurt each other and we consciously of unconsciously betray each other, etc. we let each other down etc. etc. And what I’ve always thought was so critically important was to understand those experiences not as the end of community but as the doorway into true community. I think there are sort of false forms of community, “make believe” community, where people aren’t around each other enough to get past just being nice and they mistake that for community. I think a lot churches for example, or places where people show up on Sunday and for a couple hours they’re on their best behavior and they make nice on each other as the saying goes. And they think they’ve experienced community—but that ain’t community. That’s just—it’s a charade of some sort. So I think—what’s interesting is an ideal community for me would be a community which fully embraces the fact that we can never live in an ideal way. A community that accepts our flaws, our brokenness, our need for forgiveness and our need to forgive one another. So, you know it’s tempting—if the question has to do with something like ‘where would an ideal community be along this continuum from Pendle Hill (which is where people are face to face 24-7), to this more virtual kind of community that we were talking about earlier. I have no idea what the answer is. To me it’s whatever you’re able to do under the limits of your own life in your current situation, given the realities of who’s involved and what’s involved. Whatever you’re able to do to structure relationships in which people take each other seriously, I think that that would be the ideal community to me.

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

PP: Well I think one thing to say is, of course you and I both see intimate connections between part one and part two of your interview, and so I’ll begin by saying everything we’ve just been talking about is part of what a democratic education means to me. You know, if we could create community in the classroom or in the school along the lines that I’ve just discussed, we would give kids a lived experience of what it means to take each other seriously and to negotiate our differences and to work past the hard places, you know to treat the crises and the collisions as opportunities to go deeper into community rather than as excuses to run away from each other screaming. And you know, it’s so clear that our democracy today is really I think perhaps even in an accelerating state of atrophy because so many people, they either want to go it alone—without reference to the needs of anybody else—or they have very destructive ways of dismissing or marginalizing other people. It seems to be the toxin in our society these days, you know, that if you’re pro-abortion and I’m anti-abortion, then I’m the devil to you and you’re the devil to me. And that kind of thing is really the death knell of democracy. It creates a situation where because we don’t take each other seriously there’s no conceivable way for us to be part of “we the people”—which is the clarion call of American democracy, the foundation of American democracy. And there’s no conceivable way for us to determine what’s in the common good because we can’t even talk to each other. So, it seems to me that a democratic education would give kids a lived experience of everything we’ve been talking about. In the new book I’ve written I reach that to Alexis de Tocqueville, this French visitor who came to America in the 1830’s and wrote this amazing book called “Democracy in America” which was so prophetic and prescient. But even in that book he says that the fate of American democracy will depend in part on what he calls the habits of the heart that its citizens develop. He names schools as one of the key places where those habits of the heart develop. And by habits of the heart he does not mean simply the emotions but he meant a central place in the human self where all of our capacities converge. So a habit of the heart involves the intellect as well as the emotions. It involves intuition, it involves will, and so forth. And he saw schools as critical places where those habits of the heart get formed. Well, what happens I think, in a lot of public education especially, is that democratic education gets boiled down to some wrote learning of American history, the structure of American government, the ways laws get passed—you know kind of the skeleton of the thing. And while that kind of information or knowledge is worth having, having it doesn’t make you a citizen of a democracy. You become a citizen of a democracy when you learn how to both speak and listen in the midst of diversity of opinion and sometimes considerable conflict. So, in the book I do a lot with this habits of the heart concept. At one point I say: If somebody were to press me to give 2 words that would pin point the habits of the heart that I think we most need, those two words would be chutzpah and humility. So the capacity to speak my voice, and the to think that it can make a difference, and also the humility to know that I need to listen to other to enlarge my understanding of what’s true. So, these are things that we should be working with in school. And yet these are hard times, as you well know, because so much of this kind of stuff—everything that’s not directly related to the high stakes standardized tests is being driven out of public education. And the kind of education and community that we’ve just been talking about I’m afraid is part of that, along with art, and music, and a lot of other good things. So, democratic education to me means replicating both the demands and the opportunities of life in a democratic society, in the school itself and in the classroom. And I think that you could take that in dozens of different directions all the way from student involvement in decision making to more communal forms of teaching and learning, etc. etc. 

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

PP: I’m grateful for the education I got. Although, like most of us I had to un-learn a bunch of stuff in order to learn the deeper lessons of life after school. There’s so much that school doesn’t prepare you for and can’t prepare you for. But I’m very valuable—I think I’m especially valuable for and especially grateful for the liberal arts education I got for the sort of broad based education in philosophy and literature, history, the arts, social science. You know I find that having that broad base has served me well in a thousand different ways. I think what I am saying is that I am grateful for the fact that what plays out in my life most powerfully from my own educational background is not any particular specialization but it’s the education of the generalist that has best equipped me for the life I’ve lived. Education also plays out in that I understand myself to be a student to this day. You know as people say: life long learning. At age 72 that doesn’t stop—I don’t think it stops until you’re dead myself. If you’re still alive before you die, it won’t stop. The book I just finished on democracy is probably the most challenging book I’ve ever written. It’s my 9th book and when I took it on at age 65 or 66 when I started it, I thought “man, I don’t know if I have enough energy to do this—to do something that’s going to require so much learning on my part”. But I’m awfully glad that I took it on because I learned an enormous amount, and I’m glad I know what I now know. And then the other way it plays out in my life, in addition to being a critical part of my background and an ongoing part of my journey, I mean I don’t know—I wouldn’t know how to live if I didn’t know how to learn from my living. It’s absolutely—it’s a survival thing I think, the capacity to learn from what you’re living. Without which experience is opaque and often very harsh and can be destructive. But if you can extract something from it, you can make meaning out of your experience and I think that’s what we’re in the business of doing. So one more way education plays out in my life is that I never stopped being an educator. I’m doing it to this day in the work that I do for the Center for Courage and Renewal and I’m really, really grateful for that. I spent 5 years of my life, right after graduate school at Berkeley I spent 5 years as a community organizer. For a while I thought “Gosh—the cities are burning and I really feel called to work on race relations in the Washington D.C. area”, which is where I went to be a community organizer. But I really missed what I thought my vocation was—which was to be a teacher. One morning early on, I woke up and realized that even as a community organizer I was still a teacher. And if your vocation is to teach, then you will teach no matter what you’re doing. So, I feel that teaching is part of my deepest identity. There’s no way for me not to teach—when I’m writing a book, I’m teaching. When I’m talking with my 20-year-old granddaughter, I’m teaching. It’s just education is a red thread that runs through everything for me.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about education?

PP: Well I think it is in fact, I’ll loop back with the language of your questions itself, I think that it is—if you have an education and you continue to get an education, then you are also likely to have the capacity to continue to make meaning in your life. To make meaning of your experience. And so I think the most meaningful part of education from where I sit, and I think from in the lives of most people I know, it is the power it gives you to make meaning which is such a fundamental human need without which people die. They either die metaphorically, spiritually, or they die literally. 

IG: What's missing in education?

PP: I’m going to loop back here, I mean there’s a lot I think that we could talk about. For one thing if we’re talking about K-12 education, what’s missing is any real concern for the kids—you know we’re more concerned with the tests than we are with kids. Not because teacher’s want to be, but because they’re under enormous pressure to “live up to the tests” rather than serve the best interests, or deepest needs of this student or that student. But I could name all kinds of things that are being driven out by high stakes testing, whether it’s No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, you know it all comes out in the same place. There’s more about adults trying to look good than there is about trying to serve the true needs of kids. So I think that—I want to go back to that word spirituality that we used early on. What spirituality means to me, is not anything to do with creed or dogma or theology or formal religious belief. I think the word points to what I would call the dimension of depth in human life—this dimension of meaning and purpose that we’re been talking about all along. My generic definition of spirituality is that spirituality is the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than “my own ego”. Because if all you are connected with is your own ego, life is pretty lonely. People give different kinds of answers to that yearning, or they find that they fulfill that yearning in different ways. Some of them are filled with light and some of them are filled with darkness. And so it’s a neutral definition that can take you in any direction, which is what a definition ought to be. What I find missing in education is this willingness to dive beneath the surface into these depths of meaning and purpose and what is this largeness that I’m connected to—whether that’s human history or the environment or the needs of the world—whatever that may be, I don’t think there’s much going on in education that helps students explore those questions of depth where most of us end up—well the people that I admire at any rate—end up wanting and needing to go. They would mostly say, “I did not get much help doing that from my formal education”. Well I think young people are ready for that dimension of depth. I think they have a natural curiosity. I think they have very active inner lives and I think any discipline in the curriculum can take us there in some pretty interesting ways when it’s taught by a teacher with some imagination who really wants to connect with kids. I think that’s what I want from education that currently doesn’t exist, it has something to do (doesn’t it?) with the formation of the heart in the sense that Alexis de Tocqueville used the word in his phrase habits of the heart. What habits of the heart are we helping kids develop in school? How deep do those habits go? How life giving are they? How resilient are they going to be in the face of the true challenges of life? I think these are the kinds of questions that education needs to attend to.

IG: What is an ideal education to you?

PP: I think, again, I would say an ideal education is one that allows kids to make mistakes and learn from them, and to understand that failure is not the end of the road but might be the beginning of the most important thing in your life. So, I think that an ideal education would make room for human limitation and human frailty along with expanding human potential. If I had to put it in the most general possible terms, I would say that an ideal education would be structured in such a way that allows us to just keep the focus on the kids. To remember that we’re not subjects so much as we’re teaching children. I think there are tens of thousands of teachers who want to do that, that’s why they went into the business in the first place, but I think the conditions under which they work make it really difficult to do that. If they don’t teach to the test, they loose their jobs, their schools suffer, their colleagues suffer, and their kids suffer. But because the whole thing is being driven by something other than true educational imperatives, everyone suffers at an even deeper level from the fact that we’re just not doing what we need to do and what most teachers want to do. So, it’s partly a structural question that would take us in many directions, including public policy issues around public education, but for a quick answer that’s the one I’d give.

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

PP: Well for me, and this is I suppose the core of what I’ve been writing about for a number of years, for me if you ask people, “At it’s core, what is education about?” I think a fair answer would be “education is about knowing, teaching and learning”. And what interests me is the fact that knowing, teaching and learning—if we can agree that those are three key words in the mission statement of any educational institution—is that all three of those human activities, knowing, teaching, and learning, are communal activities. Knowing is not—is never a function of individual genius. No one ever gets declared a genius until what he or she has discovered gets tested in community. So knowing is a communal process of people sorting and sifting evidence and offering alternative interpretations and doing it across space and over time. So at it’s very heart you can’t know anything if you can’t function in community, or if you’re unwilling to function in community. I could go on about teaching and learning in the same way. Teaching is about creating a community of connections between the teacher, the student, and the students and the subject. And what good teachers are basically in the business of doing is weaving a community of connections in the classrooms, in the lab, in the field, wherever it may be, that evokes the learning capacities. And so learning, also, is best done in community. It’s relational, it’s interactive. So I think what I’m trying to say here, to put it negatively, community is not some sort of add on or decorative element in education. It’s right at the heart of these three things that are key to the mission of every educational institution. If we don’t have community in a school, if we don’t have community in a classroom, if community is not a key dimension or element in our pedagogy, then the mission of knowing and teaching and learning simply can’t be fulfilled. You know we can deliver information into the heads of kids and get them to parrot it back on tests, but we all know that that’s not learning. That may be individualized instruction that allows each student, one by one by one, to pass the exam but that’s not getting educated. And so, I think that’s where I would finally come down on that.