ON EXCELLENT SHEEP: OUR NEW RULING CLASS

I taught for a long time in three very different high schools, one of them a highly prestigious public school in a highly prestigious community. I met very different kinds of students from all walks of life, economic conditions, and various ethnic groups. However, there was always one group of students that always intrigued me, but not necessarily for positive reasons. Most of these particular students came from, surprise, that highly prestigious and competitive high school from that highly prestigious and competitive community. I called them “excellent sheep”.

They took as many AP courses as they could accumulate without any love of the subjects. They did all the same extracurriculars. They were tutored to get the highest SAT scores possible. They either had coaches or had “ghost”writers help them write their college essays They had all figured out how to play the academic game of success without taking risks but many couldn’t do simple tasks like get on a commuter train to NYC. These students were the epitome of a saying one of my “regular kids” put on a  t-shirt we made up one year: “Be Different. Just Like Everyone Else.” They followed the script to get the highest grades, the highest SAT scores, and to get them into the most elite universities in the country. And get in they did.

Then, while working as a Fordham University mentor with 19 TFA corps members for four years I discovered the same thing. Although more diverse than most think, several of my corps members also fit this description. From Ivies or other Ivy like colleges, they had always been top students because they had played the game by the rules, gotten top scores, and thought of themselves as “ the best and brightest”. I always asked best and brightest what? They were often the ones who had the most trouble adapting to the far less than perfect conditions in the schools to which they were assigned, and were the most rigid in following the TFA line and had the hardest time in following the more practical wisdom I was providing them based on real experience.

In fact, in one of my earliest blogs I claimed that there were many corps members who, in the spirit of extracurricular activities accumulation, saw TFA membership as a similar escapade to many of the things they did while in HS (pay to be in a program that built a school in Costa Rica) to get them into the elite college of their choice. However this time it was to get them into the graduate program or job of choice. I said of them, “They would have gone to the Peace Corps in Africa, except their mothers didn’t let them.”

Last week, I read William Deresiewicz’s, Xcellent Sheep: The Miseducation of The American Elite. The title certainly sounded familiar. It was a phrase I had used years ago. Deresiewicz taught for years at Yale, one of the top Universities in the country. I taught for 18 years at Scarsdale High School, one of the top public high schools and Yale feeder schools in the country. He wrote about the same type of students I had taught and some of the TFA corps members I had worked with who did not stay in teaching, but have put themselves on the education public policy path to become the next Arne Duncan. I was captivated by the similarities in findings he had at the University level to what I had discovered on the high school level. I would recommend it to anyone looking to see why those in our leadership class are more followers than leaders.

Deresiewicz describes them as, “smart, talented, driven, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity, and a stunted sense of purpose; trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they are doing but with no idea why they are doing it.”

What follows is a summary of some the thoughts and observations we have both made over the years. They are a sad commentary on those we call our elite and our best and brightest as well as the institutions that have created them.

We have both concluded that students have not learned how to learn. Instead they have learned how to succeed at school. They believe doing homework and getting top grades is all education is. “They have learned to ‘be a student’, not to use their minds.” They are “content to color within the lines” of direction their schools have given them. Few are passionate about ideas or “intellectual discovery” of their own choosing. They are more interested in developing credentials, what Deresiewicz describes as “credentialism”. Others might call this “meritocracy.”

“Credentialism” has lead to a narrowing scope of practical utility in education setting its sights on future success in economics, business and finance. In fact since 1993 economics went from being the top major in 3 of the top 10 universities in the country to a whopping 65% of the top 40 universities and liberal arts colleges in 2014. As a result in 2010-11 (even after the Great Recession) “nearly half of Harvard graduates”, “more than half of those at Penn,” “and more than a third of those at Cornell, Stanford, and MIT” went into two fields: Finance and Consulting! “In 2011 36% of Princeton graduates went into finance alone.” The chief not-for-profit on that path to success? TFA!

Sheep! A former Yalie writes, “My friends and I didn’t run sprinting down a thousand career paths, bound for all corners of the globe. Instead we moved cautiously, in groups, plodding down a few well worn trails….” Deresiewicz adds, “That is the situation consulting firms, especially have learned to exploit.” The “work is pretty much like college: rigorous analysis, integration of disparate forms of information, clear and effective communication. They seek “intelligence, diligence, energy—aptitude. And of course they offer you a lot of money.” Success!

Here lies the rub. Our “best and brightest students” are told the world is their oyster. They are told, often from birth, that they can be anything, do anything, and be the best at it. However, most of them simply “follow the fold” and “choose to be one be of a few similar things.” Now that unfortunately includes education reform.

How sad is it that so few choose the “path less travelled”. How sad is it that our system produces high achieving clones. To get into the elite schools (from pre-K to university and beyond) students kill themselves overworking and underplaying, parents helicopter and kill themselves paying, all in the hope of what they call opportunity.

To me it seems that we have created too many opportunity costs. The narrow paths our best “students” follow have closed off to them the passions they never had a chance to enjoy. The narrow paths have closed off the chance to teach, to work with their hands, to be a musician, or to be a stand up comedian. The pressure of having to stay within the lines and conform to the expectations of teachers, counselors, professors, parents and peers for fear of embarrassment for doing something “beneath them” has actually closed a world of possibilities and probably their true callings.

That is a shame for both them and all of us.

Our elite leaders want others to be like them. In education, they want schools to be what they knew them as. They want all public schools to be like the Scarsdale NY, Weston CT, Riverdale OR, Chappaqua NY, and Briarcliff Manor NY schools that “24/7 Wall Street” named as the wealthiest schools in the country. They like charter schools because they see them as private schools for poor kids. Why not try to spread a little Dalton or Friends Academy love?

Remember, our first Black president did not go to school at Stevenson HS in the Bronx; he attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school. Arne Duncan did not go to Dyett HS in Chicago; he went to the University of Chicago Lab School. What do they know?

The problem that they continue to ignore? It’s the economy stupid! Or in this case it is the socioeconomic status that provided the opportunities our elite had. So lets examine (again with the help of author William Deresiewicz).

They are groomed. To get into the elite universities and colleges they must be more than intelligent, well tutored, test taking sheep. They are groomed to be leaders. They can’t have just belonged to student government; they had to have been president. They had to be first violin. They had to be captain of their teams. As Deresiewicz puts it, “ You have to come across, in other words, as an oligarch in training, just like the private school boys of a century ago.”

They cant just take required courses. They can’t take courses they may be passionate about. They can’t do experiential learning (unless convinced it helps their interview process). They must take as many AP courses as possible and score as many “5”s as inhumanely possible (again with tutoring). Some even take the SAT in 7th grade to be recruited in high school.

This process has been speeding down a slippery slope for decades. The competition has grown exponentially and parents have been using nitro-injected engines to get their “race to the toppers” across the finish line first. Race To the Top was created by Harvard grads who knew what many had to do to get in. Even the name of the law smacks of the process.

But what of the excellent black sheep? Many have become the best teachers in the best schools trying to help those in the herd see a different path. Others just work as hard as they can to accelerate the shepherding into the Ivy corrals. It is hard to stay the black sheep in the high-pressure environment of these competitive schools as a teacher, counselor, parent, and especially student. Crazy begets crazy as many will attest to. Deresiewicz tells us the following:

• Parents refuse “to allow their children to go on a field trip, because they couldn’t afford to lose a day of academics” – with “a lot of kids agreeing with them.”

• “It doesn’t matter if your parents aren’t crazy…because the environment is. Other people’s parents are crazy, so the whole school is crazy.”

• Most “teachers are trapped in the system.” As their schools “ give the parents what they want, no matter what’s good for the kids.”

Here is the upshot of all of this. These elite public and private schools have been, for generations, producing students who grow up to be corporate and political leaders “constructed with a single goal in mind.” Sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens describes it thusly, “Affluent families fashion an entire way of life of life organized around measurable virtues of children.” “They are not simply teaching to the test, they live it.”

What of their personality traits? William Wordsworth’s famous line, “The child is the father of the man,” says a lot about who we grow up to become. They become what they were made to be in their childhood (which now extends into extended adolescence). Alice Miller tells us in The Drama of the Gifted Child that many parents have made perfection the goal (see Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) with the following results. Their child gives them what they want…or tries. The demand is constant and ongoing. What the child does is never enough. “What, only an A-?”

What happens to this child as an adult? They swing back and forth between what Miller calls “Grandiosity and Depression” or as Deresiewicz calls it “Hotshit/piece of shit”. They create a false self to cover much of this up. In the policy world it comes across as “other directed”, maybe philanthropic or as misguided reformism. However in fact what this covers up is an anger, a cynicism, a “Hobbesian competiveness”, a careeristic attitude combined with a false sense of duty that they call leadership.

As a result, they see education through that prism. To many it has become as one student told Deresiewicz, “not far from game theory, an algorithm to be cracked in order to get to the next level.” People don’t go to schools to learn. They go to climb society’s ladder.

Is it a surprise therefore that when the children of this system grow up, that they create data based “measurable virtues” for our children and VATS or APPRs for our teachers? Is it a surprise that they measure students and teachers using algorithms as if it was game theory…with students, parents, and teachers in communities not as well off as theirs as the pawns to be sacrificed as they continue to climb their ladders of success?

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LAST IN A SERIES: FIXING ED POLICY: CLEANING UP AFTER EXCELLENT SHEEP

Our elite leaders in education have left a great deal of what sheep leave everywhere… for others to clean up. One of the big results of an elite education leading to an elite ruling class is just that. It has strengthened, and exacerbated a two-tier class system in this country. Simply put, regardless of what income percentile group you may be in you are either elite or common. You are either them or us. You are either a winner or loser. They compete in everything. They have since elementary school. To them the world is a zero sum game. We can see it in the language they choose to describe premises of their reform movement: COMMON CORE. RACE TO THE TOP.

A bit of history.

Commonizing attempts to make the U.S. more competitive actually started with the use of Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management in public (at the time called common) not private schools, during the industrializing economy of the early 20th century. That was when we were “ruled” by the Fords, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and other corporate leaders (Robber Barons) of their day. Their congressional and Presidential henchmen allowed them to rule the economic roost.

For years, most institutions and schools operated under the Frederick Winslow Taylor assumption of a century ago. This assumption presumed that the masses were drones that badly needed coercion, strict instruction, precise direction, and threats with punishment because they fundamentally disliked work and would avoid it if they could. “Work,” Taylor stated, “consists of simple, not particularly interesting tasks. The only way to get people to do them is to incentivize them properly and monitor them carefully”. That is what we often call classroom management. (Think of the straight rows and folded hands on desk total obedience model.) Think of what today’s education policy makers are saying about teachers and how they want them to work.

In education today, it seems as if our reformers still live by the standard of industrial America developed a full century ago by Taylor. Captains of industry (robber barons) supported scientific management, as it was called, in order to make their employees more productive. Their belief in the “mediocrity of the masses” (as supported by empirical testing) has fostered a systemic, algorithmic approach that has made “mediocrity the ceiling of what can be achieved.” Today’s policy makers want to turn teachers into industrial employees, churning students out like Ford workers churned out Model T’s.

Taylor, who as a member of the elite of his era, attended Exeter and was to go to Harvard until his eyesight deteriorated, and his followers turned efficiency into the justification for such changes. The industrial leaders of a century ago believed implementation of scientific management would benefit both workers and society at-large. Today’s policy makers have bought it hook, line, and sinker.

The best example of Frederick Taylor’s ideas at work in education today are high-stakes standardized tests–tests which have a significant effect on funding for schools and the careers of individual students and teachers. Although these exams can create enormous tension for students and administrators, it is teachers whose lives are most affected by them. Thanks to mounting pressure to get students to score high marks, teachers must concentrate on teaching the curricula chosen by test-designers, rather than local school boards or themselves.

The other major example of history repeating itself is in the meaning of “common”. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary the primary meaning of “common” is: “Of or relating to a community”. However two other definitions are: “Characterized by a lack of privilege or special status” and “lacking refinement”.

Common Core proponents claim to use the first definition, but given the fact that only public (common) schools are required to follow these “national” standards the latter 2 definitions may actually apply. The elite’s private schools do not have to follow anything common.

CORE can be defined as: – the usually inedible central part of some fruits…I leave the conclusions to you.

All of this produces greater inequity, retards social mobility, and increases the isolation of the elite in our society. As the new ruling class tightens its grip, its members become more and more isolated from “commoners” with the result being a smugness and arrogance they assume is their superiority as “the best an brightest”.

Beware you “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

William Deresiewicz provides us with some data about our 250 most “selective colleges”

YEAR	% of students from top quarter of income distribution	% of students from bottom half of income distribution
1985	46
2000	55	15
2006	67	3

“As of 2004, 40% of students from at [even] the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of $100,000 and up…. The decade since, it’s safe to say, has only made the situation worse.”

Once again we can easily track why this happens besides increased tuition. These elite sheep have been manufactured. As every product has it’s production costs, so do they. To pass inspection they must be able to be admitted to the top universities or colleges. What does it cost families to do this? Even without actual dollar amounts we can see how expensive an elite student is to produce.

First, a family must be able to afford either a top-notch private school or live in a community whose public schools are as good or better.

Second, regardless of the quality of the school, these families are convinced they must pay for tutors, test prep, music lessons, paid for community service programs, enrichment camps, sports equipment and travel teams, and any other means necessary to game the system.

Who can afford all of that? We know. So do they. More from Deresiewicz:

Less than half of high scoring SAT scores are by students from low income schools even enroll at 4-year schools. Or as Paul Krugman puts it, “ Smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.”

We are not talking about the Roaring Twenties here. “One study found that 100 (.3%) of all US high schools…account for 22% of students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Of those, ALL BUT 6 are private!!!!” (The caps and !!! are mine.)

The universities know too. They know who butters their bread. Even with some new generosity, they must have a certain percentage of “full payers” and need to cater to their donors and “legacies”. They need to service the upper and what they call upper middle-income classes to survive. As a result they produce one big happy family of students, future faculty, funders, administrators, corporate leaders, and policy makers who “know how to do things right” even if they don’t “do the right thing”.

Whew. As a result, doing things right means belonging to a meritocracy. Meritocracy needs data and algorithms. It means success on tests and high scores. It translates into how they decide who is good and who is bad. Anything unmeasurable, by those standards is bad. Funny how that word slipped in.

Why do they do it? They believe it. They have been raised to believe it. They have become it. To deny it would be to deny themselves. This is how they were measured as great. They think their sense of entitlement is due to them because their SAT, AP, GPA, GRE, scores were higher. We are “hot shit”, and that is how you need to become “hot shit” too. Too bad if you cant afford the manufacturing process. They have, too often lost touch with real people. They don’t often grow up with plumbers, electricians, cops, or union members. As a result, their version of service (TFA) and government intervention (Race To The Top and Common Core) is condescending.

They are “excellent sheep” who, for all intents and purposes, have been raised in a bubble pasture. They are what they have been fed. They will seek to raise their lambs in that same protective pasture and create a world based only on what they know. They have merit and everyone else does not. They do everything to justify their own position and ideology.

Ironically, we have seen this all before. E. Digby Baltzell, most noted for his creation of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) wrote in his Protestant Establishment, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privilege to leadership.” According to him, the WASPs reached their peak during another period of extreme excess, the roaring twenties. I will spare you the consequence. I trust you remember.

What do we do now, you ask? We know some level of inequity will always exist. The key as Deresiewicz says “is to prevent that inequality from being handed down.” “Above all it means eliminating inequality in K-12.” That would take equitable funding nationwide or providing low-income families with what they need to compete from the beginning as they do in Finland Canada, and Singapore.

I ask, how can we do that without a change in our excellent sheep who, according to Caitlin Flanagan, “preen ourselves on our progressive views on race, gender, and sexuality, but we blind ourselves to the social division that matters the most, that we guard most jealously, that forms the basis of our comfort, our self respect, and even of our virtue itself: class.”

The answer is Deresiewicz’s. “If we are to create a decent, a just society, a wise and prosperous society where children can learn for the love of learning and people can work for the love of work, then that is what we must believe. We don’t have to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we need to love our neighbor’s children as our own. We have tried meritocracy. Now it is time to try democracy.”

David Greene

Author: Doing The Right Thing: A Teacher Speaks

Save Our Schools Treasurer

Blog: https://dcgmentor.wordpress.com

TWITTER: @dcgmentor

PART 4 of a SERIES : “THE MOST SUCCESSFUL TYRANNY”

Says Allan Bloom, “ The most successful tyranny is the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.” Now I admit, I was never a fan of Allan Bloom, but in this regard he is certainly right about how our elite sheep education reformers have grasped hold of the media and have controlled “the awareness of other possibilities.” From Wendy Kopp to Arne Duncan to Michelle Rhee, all we have heard is how the American Education System is broken and must be replaced. They have convinced the public that teachers are incompetent, lazy, union slugs. Try to convince people otherwise these days. The tyranny is in place and we must overthrow it.

All of the professional training in the schools our excellent sheep-like leaders has made them single-minded.  Says William Deresiewicz, “Our rush to efficiency, our addiction to methodologies, and ‘metrics’—testing regimes, protocols…spreadsheets, the management mentality in all its incarnations—[the humanity of] humans has been torn from what they do.”

The professions many of our education reformers, leaders, and philanthropists enter too often ignore that. They are trained with specialized efficiency in mind. They plow ahead with that capacity to do what they believe their job is: to recreate education in this country to resemble how they see it: an efficient, metrics based, testing regime with school leadership based on the management mentality, not a “principal teacher” mentality.  It is all they know. It is how they succeeded. Thus, those are the schools and systems they support. Those are the not for profits they support. Those are the charters they support. As much as they believe they are the dissenters, they, in fact are the tyrants who refuse to collaborate with their workers. They refuse to question themselves. They all live in the same “Ghetto of the Mind.” They become the Emperor or Empress with no clothes.

How does all of that effect teaching? These elite leaders who come from the same “Ghetto of the Mind” say that all it takes is to put a great teacher in front of every class and all will be well. Three things are wrong with that. First, most great teachers do not park themselves in front of the room and second, most great teachers don’t fit their concept of greatness. Deresiewicz tells us, “Teaching is not an engineering [STEM] problem. It isn’t a question of transferring a certain quantity of information from one brain to another” and teaching test taking strategies so that test scores rise and all of a sudden a school and its teachers are “good”.  Finally, third, it takes time and experience for even the most talented teacher to become most talented and SKILLED.

We, in the profession, know what it is. It is mentoring, coaching, prodding, questioning, motivating, inspiring, and awakening. We (and even they) have felt it when it has happened. But because it isn’t quantifiable, our new tyrants can’t listen, even to their own hearts.

Suddenly Teach For America is the answer. Take our best and brightest elite 22 year olds, give them a 5 week training period and watch them perform miracles because they are us, and we are Mormon… oops…I mean we are miracle workers. Don’t our huge incomes show that? Don’t our prestigious positions achieved by the age of 28 show that? Doesn’t that data show that?

As Deresiewicz believes “for all the skill teaching involves, you ultimately only have a single tool: your entire life as you have lived it up until the moment you walk into class.” Like parents, teachers are what they lived as well as what they learned. The best not only bring their knowledge and skilled methods, they bring themselves as human beings. We all know great teaching as soon as we see it. You don’t measure it. You feel it. “It reaches deep inside of you.” It changes your life.

Our excellent sheep tyrants don’t understand, even if they acknowledge all of that when you ask them about their own teachers. They still want to cut the profession down to size and focus on the bad rather than the good. They refuse to pay attention to the vast amount of research that counters their one-track minds. Not only have they removed the “awareness of other possibilities” from others, they have removed it from themselves. How else do you stay a “successful tyranny”?
David Greene

Author: Doing The Right Thing: A Teacher Speaks

Save Our Schools Treasurer

WISE Services

TWITTER: @dcgmentor

Cartoon from: By Teachers’LettersToBillGates

PART 3: Excellent sheep as Au Courant Shepherds

Who are we but a mirror of what we have learned over our lifetime coupled with the DNA shake we have been served? We have believed for a long time that the role of high schools and especially colleges was to prepare thinkers. That has morphed into preparing students for the specific discipline they have chosen (or have chosen for them) in which they will immerse themselves for the rest of their lives.

Students arrive pre-molded by the tall tales, myths, legends, values et al. given to them by the institutions of family, community environment, religion, media, and now even more so – social media. As a result we have all seen their propensity to have an opinion on everything. I spent a great deal of time with my students getting them to see the difference between “opinion” and point of view substantiated by research and evidence, not just the evidence the find to support their intuitive opinion. Too often they start with an apriori opinion and simply find the “facts” to support it.

This should sound familiar in dealing with those elite we call education reformers. They “know” schools must reform (and so do we) but they already have their answers based on their lives and the groupthink they all share. The problem is that they have both the influence and money to be heard and supported by those in power until they, themselves, get to those positions of power.

Deresiewicz refers to this groupthink as Plato’s “doxa” and tells us what we already know. “The first purpose of a real education…is to liberate us from “doxa” by teaching us how to recognize it, to question it, and to think our way around it.” As novice teachers in the Bronx, our Platos (my immediate supervisors) taught us that was how to teach social studies. I have been doing that ever since, trying to develop skeptics, not cynics. Our elites, however, are too often cynics who refuse to believe the Platos of their education matter. Why? Because more often than not they distrust everything and everyone but each other because of fear.

More specifically, many, from the time they entered school, were motivated by fear of failure by those institutions that molded them. They think they are leaders, but in fact are only trained to follow with the fear of failing to please the real authority, wherever it lurks, otherwise they fail.

On elite high school and college campuses, remarks Mark Edmundson, author of Why Teach?,

A leader “is someone who in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people who are in charge…. When people say ‘leaders’ now, what they mean is gung ho ‘followers’ ”.

Deresiewicz pleads to colleges to train citizens, not leaders; to train those who ask whether something is worth doing in the first place, rather than just a way to get things done. This is especially true in education policy where the “leaders” have all jumped on the data driven reform train with the rest of the pack, instead of asking whether or not that train is even on the right track.

Are they willing to go against the grain and say, “Hold on a bit, many public schools provide terrific education to their students, maybe we need to use our brains and resources to spread those ideas rather than crush them?” Are they willing to say, “Maybe we should focus on the environmental issues that lead to problems in schools rather than blaming those who work in schools?” And what if they asked, “What if we recognized that teachers, as the real experts in the field (not us), deserve to be heard and have a leadership role in revitalizing American schools, not reforming or destroying them?”

Do they have the courage to go against the au currant grain? Can they change the world for the better by listening to others beside themselves? Can they learn from those who led the positive changes in education 50 or more years ago? Can they figure out that justice, not condescending charity, is a virtue? Can they question their fellow entrephilanthropists and policy makers? Can they admit TFA in its present form is a bad idea, even though one of them created it and it is filled with thousands of them? Can they figure out that doing good doesn’t mean doing well, or becoming a success and getting to the top by doing good?

Now that would be real leadership, wouldn’t it be?

PART 2 of a series: Why Sheep Grow Up To Be Shepherds…or… “ Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way?”

Our elite leaders want others to be like them. In education, they want schools to be what they knew them as. They want all public schools to be like the Scarsdale NY, Weston CT, Riverdale OR, Chappaqua NY, and Briarcliff Manor NY schools that “24/7 Wall Street” named as the wealthiest schools in the country. They like charter schools because they see them as private schools for poor kids. Why not try to spread a little Dalton or Friends Academy love?

Remember, our first Black president did not go to school at Stevenson HS in the Bronx; he attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school. Arne Duncan did not go to Dyett HS in Chicago; he went to the University of Chicago Lab School. What do they know?

The problem that they continue to ignore? It’s the economy stupid! Or in this case it is the socioeconomic status that provided the opportunities our elite had. So lets examine (again with the help of author William Deresiewicz).

They are groomed. To get into the elite universities and colleges they must be more than intelligent, well tutored, test taking sheep. They are groomed to be leaders. They can’t have just belonged to student government; they had to have been president. They had to be first violin. They had to be captain of their teams. As Deresiewicz puts it, “ You have to come across, in other words, as an oligarch in training, just like the private school boys of a century ago.”

They cant just take required courses. They can’t take courses they may be passionate about. They can’t do experiential learning (unless convinced it helps their interview process). They must take as many AP courses as possible and score as many “5”s as inhumanely possible (again with tutoring). Some even take the SAT in 7^th grade to be recruited in high school.

This process has been speeding down a slippery slope for decades. The competition has grown exponentially and parents have been using nitro-injected engines to get their “race to the toppers” across the finish line first. Race To the Top was created by Harvard grads who knew what many had to do to get in. Even the name of the law smacks of the process.

But what of the excellent black sheep? Many have become the best teachers in the best schools trying to help those in the herd see a different path. Others just work as hard as they can to accelerate the shepherding into the Ivy corrals. It is hard to stay the black sheep in the high-pressure environment of these competitive schools as a teacher, counselor, parent, and especially student. Crazy begets crazy as many will attest to. Deresiewicz tells us the following:

• Parents refuse “to allow their children to go on a field trip, because they couldn’t afford to lose a day of academics” – with “a lot of kids agreeing with them.”

• “It doesn’t matter if your parents aren’t crazy…because the environment is. Other people’s parents are crazy, so the whole school is crazy.”

• Most “teachers are trapped in the system.” As their schools “ give the parents what they want, no matter what’s good for the kids.”

Here is the upshot of all of this. These elite public and private schools have been, for generations, producing students who grow up to be corporate and political leaders “constructed with a single goal in mind.” Sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens describes it thusly, “Affluent families fashion an entire way of life of life organized around measurable virtues of children.” “They are not simply teaching to the test, they live it.”

What of their personality traits? William Wordsworth’s famous line, “The child is the father of the man,” says a lot about who we grow up to become. They become what they were made to be in their childhood (which now extends into extended adolescence). Alice Miller tells us in The Drama of the Gifted Child that many parents have made perfection the goal (see Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) with the following results. Their child gives them what they want…or tries. The demand is constant and ongoing. What the child does is never enough. “What, only an A-?”

What happens to this child as an adult? They swing back and forth between what Miller calls “Grandiosity and Depression” or as Deresiewicz calls it “Hotshit/piece of shit”. They create a false self to cover much of this up. In the policy world it comes across as “other directed”, maybe philanthropic or as misguided reformism. However in fact what this covers up is an anger, a cynicism, a “Hobbesian competiveness”, a careeristic attitude combined with a false sense of duty that they call leadership.

As a result, they see education through that prism. To many it has become as one student told Deresiewicz, “not far from game theory, an algorithm to be cracked in order to get to the next level.” People don’t go to schools to learn. They go to climb society’s ladder.

Is it a surprise therefore that when the children of this system grow up, that they create data based “measurable virtues” for our children and VATS or APPRs for our teachers? Is it a surprise that they measure students and teachers using algorithms as if it was game theory…with students, parents, and teachers in communities not as well off as theirs as the pawns to be sacrificed as they continue to climb their ladders of success?

Why many of our new “leaders” are really “Excellent Sheep”

I taught for a long time in three very different high schools, one of them a highly prestigious public school in a highly prestigious community. I met very different kinds of students from all walks of life, economic conditions, and various ethnic groups. However, there was always one group of students that always intrigued me, but not necessarily for positive reasons. Most of these particular students came from, surprise, that highly prestigious and competitive high school from that highly prestigious and competitive community. I called them “excellent sheep”.

They took as many AP courses as they could accumulate without any love of the subjects. They did all the same extracurriculars. They were tutored to get the highest SAT scores possible. They either had coaches or had “ghost”writers help them write their college essays They had all figured out how to play the academic game of success without taking risks but many couldn’t do simple tasks like get on a commuter train to NYC. These students were the epitome of a saying one of my “regular kids” put on a  t-shirt we made up one year: “Be Different. Just Like Everyone Else.” They followed the script to get the highest grades, the highest SAT scores, and to get them into the most elite universities in the country. And get in they did.

Then, while working as a Fordham University mentor with 19 TFA corps members for four years I discovered the same thing. Although more diverse than most think, several of my corps members also fit this description. From Ivies or other Ivy like colleges, they had always been top students because they had played the game by the rules, gotten top scores, and thought of themselves as “ the best and brightest”. I always asked best and brightest what? They were often the ones who had the most trouble adapting to the far less than perfect conditions in the schools to which they were assigned, and were the most rigid in following the TFA line and had the hardest time in following the more practical wisdom I was providing them based on real experience.

In fact, in one of my earliest blogs I claimed that there were many corps members who, in the spirit of extracurricular activities accumulation, saw TFA membership as a similar escapade to many of the things they did while in HS (pay to be in a program that built a school in Costa Rica) to get them into the elite college of their choice. However this time it was to get them into the graduate program or job of choice. I said of them, “They would have gone to the Peace Corps in Africa, except their mothers didn’t let them.”

Last week, I read William Deresiewicz’s, Xcellent Sheep: The Miseducation of The American Elite. The title certainly sounded familiar. It was a phrase I had used years ago. Deresiewicz taught for years at Yale, one of the top Universities in the country. I taught for 18 years at Scarsdale High School, one of the top public high schools and Yale feeder schools in the country. He wrote about the same type of students I had taught and some of the TFA corps members I had worked with who did not stay in teaching, but have put themselves on the education public policy path to become the next Arne Duncan. I was captivated by the similarities in findings he had at the University level to what I had discovered on the high school level. I would recommend it to anyone looking to see why those in our leadership class are more followers than leaders.

Deresiewicz describes them as, “smart, talented, driven, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity, and a stunted sense of purpose; trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they are doing but with no idea why they are doing it.”

What follows is a summary of some the thoughts and observations we have both made over the years. They are a sad commentary on those we call our elite and our best and brightest as well as the institutions that have created them.

We have both concluded that students have not learned how to learn. Instead they have learned how to succeed at school. They believe doing homework and getting top grades is all education is. “They have learned to ‘be a student’, not to use their minds.” They are “content to color within the lines” of direction their schools have given them. Few are passionate about ideas or “intellectual discovery” of their own choosing. They are more interested in developing credentials, what Deresiewicz describes as “credentialism”. Others might call this “meritocracy.”

“Credentialism” has lead to a narrowing scope of practical utility in education setting its sights on future success in economics, business and finance. In fact since 1993 economics went from being the top major in 3 of the top 10 universities in the country to a whopping 65% of the top 40 universities and liberal arts colleges in 2014. As a result in 2010-11 (even after the Great Recession) “nearly half of Harvard graduates”, “more than half of those at Penn,” “and more than a third of those at Cornell, Stanford, and MIT” went into two fields: Finance and Consulting! “In 2011 36% of Princeton graduates went into finance alone.” The chief not-for-profit on that path to success? TFA!

Sheep! A former Yalie writes, “My friends and I didn’t run sprinting down a thousand career paths, bound for all corners of the globe. Instead we moved cautiously, in groups, plodding down a few well worn trails….” Deresiewicz adds, “That is the situation consulting firms, especially have learned to exploit.” The “work is pretty much like college: rigorous analysis, integration of disparate forms of information, clear and effective communication. They seek “intelligence, diligence, energy—aptitude. And of course they offer you a lot of money.” Success!

Here lies the rub. Our “best and brightest students” are told the world is their oyster. They are told, often from birth, that they can be anything, do anything, and be the best at it. However, most of them simply “follow the fold” and “choose to be one be of a few similar things.” Now that unfortunately includes education reform.

How sad is it that so few choose the “path less travelled”. How sad is it that our system produces high achieving clones. To get into the elite schools (from pre-K to university and beyond) students kill themselves overworking and underplaying, parents helicopter and kill themselves paying, all in the hope of what they call opportunity.

To me it seems that we have created too many opportunity costs. The narrow paths our best “students” follow have closed off to them the passions they never had a chance to enjoy. The narrow paths have closed off the chance to teach, to work with their hands, to be a musician, or to be a stand up comedian. The pressure of having to stay within the lines and conform to the expectations of teachers, counselors, professors, parents and peers for fear of embarrassment for doing something “beneath them” has actually closed a world of possibilities and probably their true callings.

That is a shame for both them and all of us.

More on this subject will follow.

David Greene: The Importance of Respect–for Students and Teachers Alike

I thank Diane for posting this.

Diane Ravitch's blog

David Greene, a veteran educator, reflects on the meaning of respect and wonders why our society no longer respects teachers–and if it ever did. He certainly respected his teachers. They changed his life. Yet he recounts a dinner where one young upstart dropped a condescending comment about teachers having “common and ordinary intellects.”

Students need respect too. He writes:

For kids, respect is as important as motivation, often more so. I am not talking about their respect for teachers. They respect those who respect them. They want structure and authority. The teachers they are most successful with are those who enforce the code of the school yet, at the same time, show respect for them.

They know that the best teachers understand what Elijah Anderson calls their “code of the street” in his 1999 book of the same name. Whether that street is urban, suburban, or rural, respect from their…

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PUBLIC DISCOURSE, SELF RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND REGAINING CIVILITY

Why is it so difficult sometimes to have a discussion rather than a debate? Why don’t people listen to each other? I learned a long time ago that the real skill in communication was listening. I bet many reading this have learned that as well. So why do we have so much trouble practicing what we have learned?

Why do we get so frustrated communicating with various people about issues revolving around public education as well as any number of hot political issues in our increasingly partisan and uncivil society?

I thought I knew. Then I read Jonathan Haidt’s book: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics And Religion.

In a nutshell, actually nine nutshells, here is what I believe can be useful to us all in better understanding communication problems and how to work through them.

These are his words. I have taken his words and put them together in a way I believe makes sense to me and hopefully to others.

 THE RIGHTEOUS MIND:

WHY GOOD PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED BY POLITICS AND RELIGION.

1. GROUPISH BEHAVIOR: “Our politics is groupish, not selfish.”

Many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. Rather, people care about their groups, whether those are racial, regional, religious, or political.

In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not “What’s in it for me?’ but rather “What’s in it for my group?” Political opinions function as “badges of social membership.” They’re like the array of bumper stickers people put on their cars showing the political causes, universities, and sports teams they support

Individuals compete with individuals, and that competition rewards selfishness—which includes some forms of strategic cooperation. But at the same time, groups compete with groups, and that competition favors groups composed of true team players—those who are willing to cooperate and work for the good of the group. These two processes push human nature in different directions and gave us the strange mix of selfishness and selflessness that we know today.

2. HOW WE ARGUE: INTUITIONS COME FIRST, STRATEGIC REASONING SECOND:

 – People automatically fabricate justifications of their gut feelings. Rapid and compelling intuitions come first and reasoning is usually produced after a judgment is made to influence other people and for other socially strategic reasons.

– People are only virtuous because they fear the consequences of getting caught—especially the damage to their reputations. People care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality. In fact, the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences. Human beings are really good at holding others accountable for their actions, and we’re really skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own. When nobody is answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything falls apart.”

– People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it’s your belief, then it’s your possession and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it. Here is some evidence I can point to as supporting my theory, and therefore the theory is right. When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe it?” Then we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks.

– In contrast, when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it.

– If people can literally ONLY see what they want to see, is it any wonder that scientific studies often fail to persuade the general public? And now that we all have access to search engines on our cell phones, we can call up a team of supportive scientists for almost any conclusion twenty-four hours a day. Whatever you want to believe about the causes of global warming just Google your belief. You’ll find partisan websites summarizing and sometimes distorting relevant scientific studies.

– Most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you e reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people. Skilled arguers are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputations are in play.

– But if you put individuals together within a group so that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, yet all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).

– There are two very different kinds of careful reasoning.

• Exploratory thought is an “evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view.
• Confirmatory thought is “a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view.

Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply:

(1) Decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience

(2) The audience’s views are unknown

(3) They believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy.

But the rest of the time—which is almost all of the time—accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right than to be right. 

3. THREE “ETHICS” EXPLAIN A LOT OF DIFFERENCES:

• The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other’s projects. If you grow up in a WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

• The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous—a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends.

• The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted. People are children of God and should behave accordingly. If you are raised in a more traditional society, or within an evangelical Christian household in the United States, you become so well educated in the ethics of community and divinity that you can detect disrespect and degradation even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

If we look at many issues (The middle East, for instance) through those lenses we can begin to see how we so often cannot hear each other.

– Cultural (and subcultural) variation in morality can be explained in part by noting that cultures can link a behavior to a particular cultural ethic. Should parents and teachers be allowed to spank children for disobedience? On the left side of the political spectrum, spanking typically triggers judgments of cruelty and oppression. On the right, it is sometimes linked to judgments about proper enforcement of rules, particularly rules about respect for parents and teachers. 

4. FIVE MORAL MATRICES TO UNDERSTAND PARTISANSHIP: CARE, FAIRNESS, LOYALTY, AUTHORITY, AND SANCTITY.”

 a. CARE/HARM: The chief moral matrix of liberals in America and elsewhere rests more heavily on the caring for ALL than do the matrices of conservatives. Conservative caring is somewhat different—it is aimed at those who’ve sacrificed for the group. It is not Universalist; it is more local, and blended with loyalty.”

 b. FAIRNESS/CHEATING: On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part on Fairness—wealthy and powerful groups are accused of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden. On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hardworking Americans and give it to lazy people (including those who receive welfare or unemployment benefits) and to illegal immigrants (in the form of free health care and education).

 c. LOYALTY/BETRAYAL: The love of loyal teammates is matched by a corresponding hatred of traitors, who are usually considered to be far worse than enemies. Given such strong links to love and hate, is it any wonder that Loyalty plays an important role in politics?

 d. AUTHORITY/SUBVERSION: If authority is in part about protecting order and fending off chaos, then everyone has a stake in supporting the existing order and in holding people accountable for fulfilling the obligations of their station. As with Loyalty, it is much easier for the political right to build on this foundation than it is for the left, which often defines itself in part by its opposition to hierarchy, inequality, and power.

e. SANCTITY/DEGRADATION: Sanctity is crucial for understanding the American culture wars. Why do people so readily treat objects (flags, crosses), places (Mecca, a battlefield related to the birth of your nation), people (saints, heroes), and principles (liberty, fraternity, equality) as though they were of infinite value? Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.

– Liberals are usually more open to experience  new foods, new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.

– We see a vast difference between left and right over the use of concepts such as sanctity and purity. American conservatives are more likely to talk about “the sanctity of life” and “the sanctity of marriage.” Sanctity is also used on the spiritual left where many environmentalists revile industrialism, capitalism, and automobiles not just for the physical pollution they create but also for a more symbolic kind of pollution—a degradation of nature, and of humanity’s original nature, before it was corrupted by industrial capitalism.

5. REPUBLICANS (Conservatives) UNDERSTAND “MORAL PSYCHOLOGY” MORE THAN DEMOCRATS (Liberals).

– The moral vision offered by the Democrats since the1960s can be seen by many Republican voters (some of whom were once liberal) as too narrowly focused on helping victims and fighting for the rights of the oppressed.

– The political left tends to rest its cases most strongly on Care and Liberty/oppression moral matrices that support ideals of social justice emphasizing compassion for the poor and a struggle for political equality among the subgroups that comprise society. In the contemporary United States, liberals are most concerned about the rights of certain vulnerable groups (e.g., racial minorities, children, animals), and they look to government to defend the weak against oppression by the strong. It leads liberals (but not others) to “sacralize” equality more than liberty, which is then pursued by fighting for civil rights and human rights. Liberals sometimes go beyond equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system. This may be why the left usually favors higher taxes on the rich, high levels of services provided to the poor, and sometimes a guaranteed minimum income for everyone.

– Republican morality appealed to all five Moral Matrices. Like Democrats, they can talk about innocent victims (of harmful Democratic policies) and about fairness (particularly the unfairness of taking tax money from hardworking and prudent people to support cheaters, slackers, and irresponsible fools). But Republicans since Nixon have had a near-monopoly on appeals to loyalty (particularly patriotism and military virtues) and authority (including respect for parents, teachers, elders, and the police, as well as for traditions).

– Conservatives, in contrast, are more parochial—concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity. For them, the Liberty/oppression moral matrix and the hatred of tyranny support many of the tenets of economic conservatism: don’t tread on me (with your liberal nanny state and its high taxes), don’t tread on my business (with your oppressive regulations). American conservatives, therefore, “sacralize” the word liberty, not the word equality. This unites them politically with libertarians. Conservatives hold more traditional ideas of liberty as the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order to protect the groups that liberals care most about.”

6. LIBERALISM IS AT ODDS WITH BOTH LIBERTARIANS AND CONSERVATIVES: the grand narratives of liberalism and conservatism

The liberal progress narrative: Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditional “ism. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies. While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize the individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression. This struggle for the good society in which individuals are equal and free to pursue their self-defined happiness is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.

Problem: While Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion, their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital thus angering Libertarians and Conservatives. This is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently.

The modern conservative Reagan narrative: Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried to “understand” them. Instead of worrying about the victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals. Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fidelity, and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle, and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles. Instead of projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform, burned our flag, and chose negotiation and multilateralism. Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.

Problem: Libertarians and Republicans cannot get past their repulsion for their common enemy: the liberal welfare society that they believe is destroying America’s liberty (for libertarians) and moral fiber (for social conservatives).

7. CAN PARTISANS UNDERSTAND THE STORY TOLD BY THE OTHER SIDE?

– When liberals try to understand the Reagan narrative, they have a hard time. They actively reject Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. They say loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.

– Conservatives score lower on measures of empathy and may therefore be less moved by a story about suffering and oppression. Even though many conservatives opposed some of the great liberations of the twentieth century—of women, sweatshop workers, African Americans, and gay people—they have applauded others, such as the liberation of Eastern Europe from communist oppression. Conversely, Conservatives often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

8. UNCIVIL POLITICS: We have become Manichean: If you think about politics in a Manichaean way, then compromise is a sin. God and the devil don’t issue many bipartisan proclamations, and neither should you.

– In the last twelve years Americans have begun to move further apart. There’s been a decline in the number of people calling themselves centrists or moderates, a rise in the number of conservatives, and a rise in the number of liberals. Our counties and towns are becoming increasingly segregated into “lifestyle enclaves,” in which ways of voting, eating, working, and worshipping are increasingly aligned. If you find yourself in a Whole Foods store, there’s an 89 percent chance that the county surrounding you voted for Barack Obama. If you want to find Republicans, go to a county that contains a Cracker Barrel restaurant (62 percent of these counties went for McCain).

– We know that much of the increase in polarized politics was unavoidable. It was the natural result of the political realignment that took place after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The conservative southern states, which had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War (because Lincoln was a Republican) then began to leave the Democratic Party, and by the 1990s the South was solidly Republican. Before this realignment there had been liberals and conservatives in both parties, which made it easy to form bipartisan teams who could work together on legislative projects. But after the realignment, there was no longer any overlap, either in the Senate or in the House of Representatives.

– Things changed for the worse in the 1990s, beginning with new rules and new behaviors in Congress. Friendships and social contacts across party lines were discouraged. Once the human connections were weakened, it became easier to treat members of the other party as the permanent enemy rather than as fellow members of an elite club. Candidates began to spend more time and money on “oppo” (opposition research), in which staff members or paid consultants dig up dirt on opponents (sometimes illegally) and then shovel it to the media. As one elder congressman recently put it, “This is not a collegial body any more. It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred.”

– Nowadays the most liberal Republican is typically more conservative than the most conservative Democrat. And once the two parties became ideologically pure—a liberal party and a conservative party—there was bound to be a rise in Manichaeism. And because since 1995 the vast majority of DC legislators live at home and not in DC, cross-party friendships are disappearing; Manichaeism and scorched Earth politics are increasing.” Other reasons include: include the ways that primary elections are now run, the ways that electoral districts are now drawn, and the ways that candidates now raise money for their campaigns.”

9. FIXING INCIVILITY: If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response.

– Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide. The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. – – —- When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then we try to find the truth in the other person’s arguments.

– We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy.

– If you really want to open your mind, open your heart first. If you can have at least one friendly interaction with a member of the “other” group, you’ll find it far easier to listen to what they’re saying, and maybe even see a controversial issue in a new light. You may not agree, but you’ll probably shift from Manichaean disagreement to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement.

If you take home solutions, make them these:

1. Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places—particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation. Anyone who tells you that all societies, in all eras, should be using one particular moral matrix, resting on one particular configuration of moral foundations, is a fundamentalist of one sort or another.
2. We all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It’s not just a capacity; it’s the portal to many of life’s most cherished experiences.

3. The next time you find yourself seated beside someone from another matrix, don’t just jump right in. Establish a few points of commonality or in some other way a bit of trust. And when you do bring up issues of morality, try to start with some praise, or with a sincere expression of interest.

You may not agree with Haidt’s views and research, but try to understand his solutions as you weigh his points and their importance to create civility in our public discourse. 

Of course feel free to use them as you post civil comments about this blog post.