Stuart Grauer was a speaker at the AERO conference in New York in 2013 and is a strong AERO supporter. He founded and directs an alternative, the Grauer School, an AERO member, in Encinitas, CA
(reprinted is from The Grauer School's Weekly Newsletter and Stuart's Blog)
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
–Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense”
So, I was in the country now, logging country, and on my way to the consultation with a small, independent school that needed some encouragement. It was a small town not far from the foot of Mount St. Helens.
I checked into the Red Lion Inn, was off to the first meeting, in a tiny coffee house, and I introduced myself to the faculty. There were six of them.
In Washington State, the coffee shop is the town hall. The teachers had no agenda but curiosity—a perfect start. The state of national education meant nothing to them—they loved their kids and their kids loved them. How wonderful to find a school where the teachers exuded openness like that.
The second meeting was in Starbucks, where I met a small parent group. They were thankful. Their school was independent, small, inclusive, personalized and they loved it. Such a beautiful school, and so simple: students and teachers in a ranch house at the edge of the damp, green, shadowy forest, talking about big values and really listening to one another. No big-stakes tests, no curriculum standards set from 3000 miles away. Most important of all: the school reflected who they were. Parents could join right in in the classroom and no one minded—it was open. Even the name of the school seemed from a bygone era, but an era that there was no reason to leave behind: Family House School.
But there was a problem. These days, it can be a real struggle getting the community to understand how legitimate an alternative school is, even if their kids are happier there. Communities feel enormous pressure to comply with the prevalent, comprehensive school model, even though a majority of people don’t like it. Communities seem unaware of how possible it really is to have relationships as the basis of schooling, how essential that is, and how rare that has become. Teaching is a relationship. So lost that once-obvious concept has become in our schools nationwide that many communities or school boards hardly remember or conceive of it as a possibility. So there was a problem.
Family House was neither a faith-based nor a hippy school. Classes are calm and focused with a balance of tolerance and obedience and an emphasis on responsibility and respect. It would appeal to any parents whether liberal or conservative, and there were plenty of both—but it was small and simple. Things schools have long forgotten, such as age-mixing and presuming kids to have various learning styles—no labels—are normal again here. Everyone is supported by everyone. Teachers routinely invited student reflection. Students typically referred to their school using phrases like: “A place where I belong” and “an indiscriminating environment where you learn to be tolerant of all kinds of kids.” And as such, Family House was reputed to be sub-par and amateurish. In America, when we peer into a school and find happy or free kids, our suspicions are quickly aroused.
The third meeting was at a medium-sized coffee house, with two public school teachers. I had no idea why they were interested in meeting me, or why they were even interested in Family House. Before long I began to learn, as talk grew deeper. “How can I channel my anger against the system?” one asked. I recognized these feelings from teachers in large, comprehensive schools not just around our country, but around the world, particularly among secondary school teachers. Systems getting bigger. Strong, dark emotions are welling up in this new world and none of this has been covered in teacher training. It’s new territory. After dinner, these teachers sobbed for an hour and a half. “I don’t know what to do with these emotions—I keep coming back to this sense of rage against our school administration or our government, and I know this isn’t going to get better—the system doesn’t support me. But I want to stay in this struggle.” And there it is.
The system doesn’t support me.
I know this is not exclusive to education. It happens wherever systems replace people: law, health care, corporate life, social services. There was no hope. But then, our meeting was not about hope. And who needs hope, anyway? We need only to do the right thing. For it’s own sake.
The right thing?
There is so much despair wherever we look; can we really pretend this will get better? I have almost never met a person from a current, large, comprehensive secondary school system who feels that either things are getting better or that enlightened people will arrive, or money, and somehow save them. We can try righteous anger but righteous anger does nothing. People either dislike the system or they take it on faith that this is the way things are supposed to be. The thought that “we can rise up against this, we can fix this” is the very falsehood that prevents facing what is. “But humans have always risen up in the past,” goes some thought, which is false. “We’ll create technology,” some people love to claim with their Magical Thinking. And this is false. Here is the way it is: This system is not getting better. It is not going to get better.
There is no hope for these systems.
We can cruise along blissfully and avoidant, or else we have to make some decisions. Do we leave a corrupt system or just close our classroom door and pretend to ignore it? As teachers, do we just insist that our work matters, and smile, and press on, knowing things are falling apart? The systems required to hold all this together are growing faster than the systems they are set up to serve. And what if there are no answers? Can we live in these questions?
Maybe. But what about, “No! This is not alright!” What about standing up? I keep telling teachers, “You have to be willing to risk your jobs—either that, or stop complaining.” Maybe that’s cruel of me.
“I just close the door,” answers one of the teachers in the coffee shop, world-weary from overcrowded classes, administrative reticence, and the ceaseless specter
of judgment. So we close the classroom door. We close out evil, fear, and hope, and in there we can have open space and some tiny pocket of freedom, which is our very own. It is the new millennium resignation: resign but stay in your job. These two teachers feel spurned and dissed, and all I can advise them is to make peace with the hopelessness of the situation. They CAN close the classroom door and live in this separateness from their communities. Inside, perhaps, there is even a pocket of wonderment, however hidden away from the system it is inside of. Perhaps as teachers we can be happy in the classroom, apart. “If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation,” said the poet Jack Gilbert. Let’s not do that. Happiness can be our weapon. Perhaps we can at least permit our own, sequestered joy.
“No hope.” Is this so terrible to say? No hope just means it’s really up to us teachers and parents. No hope is the real way of the world. Does any system put together by humans not fall apart? And why shouldn’t it fall apart? And what is it we are really hoping for, anyway? What would a resolution to our current schooling problems even look like? Not far from here, the University of Washington has created “The Center for Reinventing Public Education,” so at least some people appear awake. Does anyone in the whole world? Does anyone think the din of suffering or traffic or craving or distraction will just stop, like God putting noise-cancelling headphones on the world? (And aren’t a million teens already doing this?) Who are we kidding? Closing the door was the only way these two teachers, and millions like them, could abide in their real work, and find a little space for their craft.
“When an old culture is dying,” noted Rudolf Bahro, “a new culture is born from a few people willing to be embarrassed.” Talking about self-respect and freedom in education felt like sticking our necks for out for many of us for quite a few years. Many of us don’t care any more. Places like Family House have weathered all those storms. For their part, the people in Family House are good teachers, even though they might be utter failures in the system. Now they only want to know of their work: Is this okay? I tell them: yes! You are part of a rising culture.
Perhaps it is humiliation more than vision or entrepreneurship that drives teachers over the edge, to the point where they can no longer even close the door and do real work. When that time comes, they must leave. Maybe they leave the profession. If it’s not too late, typically meaning if they have taught less than four years or so, some go to places like Family House to teach. Maybe this is what reinventing really looks like.
I could drink no more coffee, and we parted. The next day I spent inside the classrooms of Family House, sunk into a zone where the local sense of place is a fundamental part of the school day and a national curriculum seems foreign. It is zone where art is inseparable from any other academic discipline, a zone where there is time for finishing what we start, a zone where age difference is not a divider of children but an opportunity for mentoring. And now my observations are complete. Somewhere it has been decided that I am to present my findings to the whole and I am given directions to another coffee house.
I arrive at the huge building, equal in size to any 10 Starbucks I have ever seen. A sign on the door reads, “ATTENTION: Out of respect for tonight’s speaker, we will stop serving Coffee at 6:30 PM.” Wow—this is a big deal. Almost reverent. No coffee served. Is the Dalai Lama coming? Wait—are they talking about me?
At any rate, no coffee after 6:30 was a good thing. It was already going to take me a week to get rid of the jitters I had from a week of coffee houses.
I entered and saw tables and chairs for well over 100 people, which were filling in quickly, plus standing room. They were all there to honor the brave, little independent school, both anachronistic and futuristic in ways anyone would want a school to be: caring and doing no harm, warm, intensely connected, not solving global problems, not making promises, simply acting well in their work. Doing the right thing.
In the corner was a large stage with rock band gear pushed to the back, and a spotlight was ready on a tall café table and chair, center stage. So, out in the country, an educational speaker was a headliner.
By now I had switched to chai (no caffeine), and I took a sip and began:
Just this month in American education:
• A handful of schools across the country are banning homework
• The American Academy of Pediatrics is sounding the alarm on epidemic levels of sleep deprivation among teens
• The movie “Race To Nowhere,” which launched 5 years ago at The Grauer School, is showing in 30 locations nationwide
• Hundreds of students poured out of at least five Jefferson County schools last Tuesday to protest what they say is the Jeffco School Board’s attempt to whitewash history
Some people clapped at the notion that local communities are “taking it back.” This phenomenon, taking it back, is not political or regional. It is happening in places where people fly the American flag off their pickup trucks, and I see it just as well in my home town of Encinitas, Southern California, where the cars are loaded up with surfboards. People want it back, whatever it is.
“On the Indian reservations they are re-building their native languages. Small towns all over the country are saying no to (or mourning) school consolidation, and yes to smaller, inclusive, safer schools with local controls,” I explained. More people clapped, and I shared stories about small schools and the successes I’d seen in this very town’s own small school all week: A school with the audacity to call itself Family House.
When you are out there, doing a separate thing, following your heart like Family House was, sometimes you wonder if it’s you who is crazy or everyone else, and at those times it’s reassuring to check in with some trusted authorities, almost like getting permission from the big guys upstairs.
“You are a part of a network that spans the globe,” I pointed out. Americans, I explained, are standing up against national and corporate authoritarian control over local schooling. Small, place-based schools are not less by virtue of size. They are safer, higher achieving, and more connected. They may feel alone, but they are a part of the Small Schools Coalition, Progressive Educators Network, Community Works Institute, Alternative Educators Resource Organization, and more, and growing. A school may feel isolated out there in the country, but in reality it is connected to an international network, bonded by the single-most important concept we will ever need to know about schooling:
The research says what we already knew, that people are not only happiest but most productive when they are with people they care about. A great teacher understands that engagement is not primarily about the subjects studied or the required curriculum and testing—it is about the relationships that are forming in the class. Connection … is the single most important thing in all of pedagogy. Find your people and make them your school. Find your people! Thank you very much!
So that was it. 150 people were on their feet, clapping that they did not need to be faceless members in a massive system, lost. They loved the sense of empowerment in their own schools, their own culture, their own vision, their own community.
They loved the notion that we do not need to stay in this mess. We can let go of the despair and collaborate with a handful students and parents, find the agenda together. Humans have the extraordinary capacity for delight with one another, and so what if we try to reclaim that, however small it is? What if our goals include a few moments of bliss now and then, no matter what else is going on?
That was my 15 minutes of fame. Amidst the clapping, it was easy to be taken in by my own ego, and I understand that this has been the downfall of change makers more impactful than me. But, for an egotistical minute, the allure was undeniable. Rock star teacher. It’s just fantastic that as soon as we let go of our despair and think we are home free, we can jump right into egocentrism. Maybe they are flip sides of the same thing.
I cut out of there, hungry and a long way from my flight in Seattle. Driving north, the radio said, “Mount St. Helens is showing signs of reawakening.” Wow. I pulled into a burger joint and got distracted photographing pheasants that were penned into the back of a farm truck. I was talking to the driver, an elderly farmer dressed in dungaree coveralls who was on his way to release these birds into the wild in time for hunting season, peering into cages, when a projectile filled my eye and I started backwards and grabbed my face, blinking madly. The farmer knew…
“Whaddee flip a turd?” he asked, wry and knowing.
“I keep learning the hard way,” I said back, trying to wipe the guacamole-like slime from my eye. The point is, if we want to let go of despair and egocentrism and jump into comedy, no one can stop us in that, either. In fact, for teachers, I recommend it. I know things are hard, but we can press on.
See original article here.
