Spirit in Action

Social Justice Schools

Joel Westheimer asks the deep questions and provides the important facts in What Kind of Citizen?: Educating Our Children for the Common Good. How should education in a democracy differ from that in other systems? What are the wider effects of standardized education? What kind of citizen do we want our schools to promote?

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 10 May 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Get ready for some crucial country-changing thinking today for Spirit in Action. Our guest is Joel Westheimer, and his recent book is "What Kind of Citizen?" Educating our children for the common good. Joel asks the deep questions, and he shines light on the way forward. Joel Westheimer is at the University of Ottawa where he holds the University Research Chair in Democracy and Education and he joins us by phone today from Ottawa, Ontario. Joel, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. My pleasure, Mark. Nice to be here. I enjoyed reading "What Kind of Citizen?" It was very provocative. I had a number of wonderful thoughts that you brought up and that spurred in me. What inspired you to write the book? I love that it was provocative. That's kind of the best compliment I can get. I think that what inspired me to write this book is that I was very concerned about what's been going on with our education system in the last ten years or so, which is a kind of shift from a broad vision of what the goals of schooling are, a broad variety of subjects, the arts, all kinds of different areas of the curriculum to what your listeners will know has been a kind of obsession with standardized testing in only two subject areas, math and literacy. And as that curriculum has been narrowed to only little pieces of those two subject areas, what we've seen is schools moving away from their historic mission as educating citizens to function in a democratic society, and that's been deeply troubling to me, both as a former teacher and now as a teacher of teachers and also as a parent. And so I started to become interested in what the role of schools are in a broader sense and what type of citizens schools are imagining kids will become when they leave the school building. You start out, the first thing you mentioned in the book in the intro is about ancestry, coming from Germany. And I thought that probably at some kind of root level played an important part in who you are, realizing that the government that one finds oneself under can be pretty horrible. Yeah, you know, both my parents had very difficult experiences during World War II and the whole of, they were both born in Germany. My father left with his family to Portugal during the war, and most of his family was okay, but it was a big upheaval in his life, of course. And my mother was not so lucky. She left when she was 10 years old on a kinder transport to Switzerland to a children's home, and that was the last time that she saw her parents. They were sent to Auschwitz and were killed there. And neither of my parents ever made this kind of centerpiece of our growing up or anything. They didn't hide it, but it wasn't something we talked about all the time. But I do think it affected me in deep ways, and primarily in the sense that I became always concerned with issues of justice and how people treat one another. And here we, you know, if we look at Germany, it's one of the most educated societies in the world. And so the level of performance or competitiveness with other countries or all the things that we hear about when we hear politicians talk about schooling didn't amount to anything, right? All of that education was put in the service of building more efficient gas chambers or more efficient transportation networks to take train loads of people to their desk. So it did make me wonder, I think, in a broader sense what the purposes of education are. And in some ways the book, I called it "What Kind of Citizen?" It could be called "What are Schools For?" And to me, the answer to that question is what forms the basis of the book, which is that schools need to be about a lot more than just giving people the technical bureaucratic knowledge about things. And they have to also address issues of justice and freedom and other important matters to any society and in particular to democratic societies. This all starts again from Germany, from your ancestors. Wasn't Germany a democracy at the time that Hitler rose to power? And if they had had your thoughts on education, may they have been a better democracy so that they wouldn't let Hitler take over along with, I mean, part of the way he rose to power was by pointing at scapegoats and making them the bad guys and uniting people in opposition to them. Do you have thoughts that if they had been implanted in education in Germany, say in 1922, that maybe the whole thing could have gone very differently? I do think that. I really believe in the power of education and there was a lot of things that play there and there was, of course, scapegoating and a terrible economy and the results of the legacy of World War I and the shame that German felt in all of the rest. But what we did have was a population that had kind of compliance and easy goability about them, that they were able to become susceptible to the influences of an authoritarian regime. And you're absolutely right to point out that Hitler was democratically elected. And so we can't say that this is the, you know, we can't write it off as well. It was a military dictatorship that just took over the country and really it had nothing to do with any of the desires of people there because that wouldn't be true, which means, you know, where else then can we look on how to prevent something like that and other injustices in the world. And to me, one of the big answers, not the only answer, but one of the big answers that concerns me is education itself. And we're going to get into the details of that. You also start out the book with a story of your interaction as a young teacher, just getting started. How do you teach these important concepts with the student, Archim, and how you saw a transformation going on there? Could you relate that story in its broad outlines? I think people should go and read what kind of citizens so that they can catch more detail. But give them an idea of what that story is about and how that affected you. Yeah, Archim was one of my, you know, both favorite students and most difficult students. He was the thorn in the teacher's side. Every teacher has a set of Archim's in their class. And Archim and I had a contentious relationship. And there's something that all new teachers experience. And that is, you know, we go in with high ideals about what we're going to accomplish. And we have this expectation that we're going to go into a kind of empty space, and kids are going to be there. And we're going to set up a play that we imagine, you know, and the drama is going to unfold because we are in control of the script. And of course, every new teacher finds out that they go in thinking they're coming in at the beginning of a play. But in fact, the play is in Act 3. It's already started. The cast of characters is already chosen. There's the teacher's pet and the class clown and the difficult students and the smart students and the nerds and the jonks. And the teacher's coming in in the middle of this play that's already in progress and that we have way less control of that narrative than we think we do. And it's the mistake that almost all new teachers make. And I was among those. I came in thinking I would change the world for these students. And of course, they saw me as a newbie who needed to be tested. And that's what happened between me and Archim. Now, if you take that as a backdrop, an interesting thing happened. I was teaching social studies and my social studies class was before lunch. We had spent weeks now talking about the civil rights movement, slavery, and the legacy of black, white relations and so forth. And the kids, they all got it. I mean, they, you know, slavery was terrible, of course. And how could anyone think that black people were any less smart than white people? And that would never happen today. And they got everything about how awful it was in the same way that students would think how awful the Holocaust was. And yes, Hitler was a terrible man. But I noticed that when they would leave my classroom after those discussions for which they were quite articulate, they would immediately start going out to the schoolyard and they would call each other's faggot or spick or other derogatory terms without any connection to the stories of oppression and injustice that we had just been discussing in class. And so this started to make me think about the things that you and I are talking about, Mark, about what kind of citizen these kids are learning to become. And do we, how do we actually get kids to think critically about contemporary issues of concern and of justice? And so I had an idea, one of those rare ideas that pops into the head of a teacher and particularly a new teacher. No rare, come on, don't get too long there. Well, what had happened a few days before, this was going on, was there was a teacher in our school, and remember this was in the 1980s, so gay pride was not everywhere yet. But there was a gay pride week and the teacher, there was a teacher in our school building with the permission of the principal had put up a display about gay pride week in the school hallway in one of those glass cases, you know, it was behind the glass. And after a few days that this display was up, someone or a group of people had smashed the glass in with a chair or something. And the principal to his credit, along with the teacher, decided that what they would do is just leave the display that way for a few days and not do anything about it, but leave the gay pride information in there, but with the broken glass in front. And I had this idea, I talked to the janitor who I had become friendly with, and I said, "Listen, can you come in during my class tomorrow and bring in all your noisiest power tools, hammers, everything?" You're quite a flatter. Yeah, exactly. And I said, "So interrupt me, come in, set up a ladder and just start fixing one of the lights in the noisiest way possible." So he agreed to do this because he was a bit of a ham too. And we started our discussion on the civil rights movement, and he came in and started making all this noise. And I said, "You have to fix this now." He said, "Yup, yup, gotta be taken care of now." So I said, "Okay, look, everyone, grab your chairs. We're gonna just go out and continue our discussion in the hallway, 'cause this is too noisy to talk about here." So all the students grabbed their chairs and they went out into the hallway and set their chairs up around this display, this broken display cabinet. And we just continued our discussion. I pretended we were just going on as usual. Now, back to our team. Remember our team? In the middle of this discussion, our team leaned back in his chair and he raised his hand and I said, "Yes, our team." And he said, "Well, it's like this. It's like that." And he pointed to the display case. And I said, "Holding my breath like what?" I came. And he said, "Well, it's like that. It's hating people because when you don't know anything about them just for something about the way they are or who they are, but not really knowing anything about them." And I asked other kids, "Well, what do you think about what our team said?" And boy, the discussion just took off. And in fact, we then stayed through part of lunch. Other kids who are coming out of other classes joined our conversation. And it was quite this dramatic event where all the kids were now linking past injustice that we had already decided was wrong, like slavery or the Holocaust or violations of civil rights to current issues of controversy. And it wasn't some kind of, you know, Nirvana or progressive teachers dream. The kids said all kinds of things, some of which were homophobic and some of which were not. But the conversation had started. And I felt that this captured something about the way we need to teach kids to think critically about contemporary issues that other lessons weren't tapping into. Coincidentally, it also gave our team and I the opportunity to kind of change the narrative that we were playing under that play that I said was already in progress. Because our team from there on went from being the kid who was just there to cause trouble and to not participate. He sort of held himself a little higher. You know, other kids referred back to what our team had said and quoted him. And our team seemed to take a different orientation to school. And in fact, he decided that he wanted to become a community organizer and started talking to me about all the possibilities there. So it was a special moment in my career as a teacher. And it gave me some of the ideas about what I wrote about in this book. And in fact, readers can, I mean, your listeners can go, I think you can read part of that story even without buying the book online at Amazon or at the books website. What kind of citizen.org? So I do remember that website folks. What kind of citizen.org? That's where Joel Westheimer has information about his book. And you'll find a lot more about Joel. He's got other books out there too. Pledgeing allegiance, the politics of patriotism in America's schools or among school teachers. Community, autonomy, and ideology in teachers work. Clearly issues that you're very involved in. So our team becomes a transformed student. Kind of gradually. It's not an instantaneous transformation. That's right. I assume you could have grabbed a couple other stories of people. Hong, were you a teacher in New York area? I taught for about five years. And this was in the New York City public schools. This was a school actually on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But it was a magnet school that drew kids from all over the city. And there was a terrific variety of kids from Upper West Side, Middle Class or Upper Middle Class kids to, we had a few kids who were homeless. And so that was it. It was a wonderful experience in that way. You know, you made a point earlier, Joel. And I don't know that most of us are willing to inhabit the idea. But you said that, you know, talk about the past. You know, whether it's Germany during World War II or the rise of Hitler or go back to slavery. People say, I wouldn't do that. And my question is, what would prevent you from doing that? How would you know that you wouldn't accept that idea? I've read that before 1940, it was almost universally accepted, whites and blacks both, that African Americans, that their intelligence was less than that of whites. And even people who were benefactors of blacks still believed that, held that common myth. Probably in the same way that I think most of us believe now that white men can't jump as high as black men. I think there's some good data for that though. You mean that's not true? I don't know if it's true. I know that I'm never going to slam dunk and never have. Yeah, I think you're bringing up a really important point because, you know, I always like to ask people. I mean, are you sure? Like, can you say that with confidence? Because if you were going to stand up for what you're saying, you would stand up. It would have meant at that time that you would have been going against your family, your church or your synagogue. You would have been going against your teachers, the politicians, everyone in your community. And you would have been largely alone, right, or with a small group of people. And do you really feel confident that you would take that position? And I think it's hard for us to place ourselves in a different time. And that is exactly what I'm trying to get at, is that what we need to do with kids, to be able to think about issues of critical thinking and current controversy, is bring current controversies into the school. So that students have experiences dealing with things that we don't have full agreement on yet, not ones that are easy answers, you know, was the Holocaust bad. We want the more difficult questions. And I think that that's a critically important part of education in any society and in particular for schools in democratic societies. A big issue and one of the things that I think has fueled the efforts behind things like no child left behind, race to the top. By the way, I do like your name. Was it no child left thinking? Yes. You know, some teachers call it no child left untested. Or one of my favorites is I've heard teachers call it no child left. There is an issue in the United States. And I was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa in an impoverished country, Togo. I've traveled a fair amount in the world. And I do know that education works differently in different countries. Literacy and general knowledge in the U.S. are not impressive. There's, I think, multiple reasons for that. I don't actually know what the literacy rate in the U.S. is right now. But I don't think that people come out of our elementary schools automatically knowing how to read, which is a problem. What do you think about that? And could you explain what the objective or what the mechanism used in things like no child left behind, race to the top, common core, what those things are about, what they're actually addressing? Yeah. I mean, the goal behind no child left behind and race to the top, there are some noble goals behind it. And they're not without any redeeming features. So there is a goal for taking a snapshot of where schools are at particular places to know where we need improvement and how we can proceed. And also to detect areas where there's whole groups of children in a particular school or of a particular race or gender that are not getting the kind of education they need. The problem with no child left behind and the onslaught of standardized testing that is brought with it is that it becomes a situation of the tail wagging, the dog. What we know from research is that what gets tested gets taught. And so the entire curriculum has been narrowed to only these two subject areas, math and literacy. Now, it doesn't mean that those two areas aren't important. Of course they are. And I often, when I'm giving a lecture, I ask people in the audience to raise their hand if they're a member of the group, parents, teachers, and educators against kids knowing how to read or parents and educators against kids knowing how to add numbers. And of course there's chuckles and nobody raises their hand. And my point is there is no one who belongs to that group because of course those groups don't exist. There are no teachers who don't care that kids learn the basics. The problem is that an exclusive focus on the so-called basics is such an impoverished view of what the role of schools is and of education reform that what we're left with is such a narrow band of school goals that the curriculum becomes spectacularly uninteresting and unintelligible. It's just about facts and pieces of information. Where this problem originates from is that we have such faith in these tests to measure all the things that we think should be in the school curriculum. But the fact is we're very good at measuring things like whether kids can add two plus two and get four or whether they can decode the structure of a sentence. We're not so good at measuring whether they have developed critical thinking skills or creativity or passion or whether they have learned to be in loving human relationships or find meaning in their life or develop convictions about things and stand up for those convictions. So what happens is because we do love numbers, right? If I can, if I'm looking for a school for my kid and I have a ranking and this school got a 9.2 and this other school only got a 7.4, I say, "Oh, great. I'm going to choose the 9.2 school," right? As if this number is an accurate representation of what goes on in the school. Unfortunately, it's not. So what happens is because we can't measure the things that we care about, we start to care about the things that we can measure. And that's what's happened in the wake of no child left behind and raised to the top and similar reforms is that we've started to care about the things that we can measure. And unfortunately, the things that we can measure don't actually represent all the things that we care about. And it's left us in a bit of a pickle where we have some of the best teachers leaving the profession because they feel that their professional autonomy is not respected and they have a straight jacket on, their hands are tied when it comes to teaching in the ways that they think are most important and most valuable. Could you explain for me, Joel? And I have to admit a little bit of ignorance on my part. I'm ignorant, not stupid, and if people don't know the difference between that, it's a very key thing to learn. Yes. Ignorance can be remedied. Yes. And you're about to do that for me. What is the difference in what they were aiming at with no child left behind versus race to the top, and where does common core fit into this? Yes. It's great to talk about this. The truth is that there's not a huge difference between no child left behind and race to the top, although I have to say, even though no child left behind, I actually think is a bit of a better metaphor than race to the top because at least we can all get behind the concept of not leaving any children behind. I'm not sure what we're going for with race to the top because a race has winners, maybe one, two or three winners, and everyone else is a loser. I want to base national school reform on the idea that one, two or three schools are going to be winners, and everyone else is going to be a loser. But both of them suffer from the same problems that I talked about because they direct federal money and ultimately state resources to different schools and different groups of professionals based on how the kids in that school perform on these very narrow measures of academic success. So we've talked about that. Now common core is a little bit different. Common core is an improvement in that, first of all, it took into account the professional knowledge of teachers. There were a large number of teachers involved in developing the Common Core. The topics that are in the Common Core are much more sophisticated, much more nuanced than what was represented in no child left behind and race to the top. And so the Common Core is a huge improvement and is as a sort of background guideline or framework for education, it's really not bad, there's a lot to be said for it. The problem here is not with standards, which is what Common Core represents. And in fact, let me just interrupt myself by saying that everyone has standards, right? I've never met a teacher without standards. And I've never met a teacher who doesn't feel accountable. Teachers are accountable to their kids, to the kids' parents, to the community, to the school. The problem is not with standards, which is what Common Core represents. The problem is with standardization, which unfortunately Common Core and all the other reforms ultimately lead to. And standardization means the same. It's making every classroom or what every teacher is doing the same. And by very definition, standardization is the enemy of imagination and creativity. And that's where we run into trouble is when we try and make teachers assembly line workers who are interchangeable because the curriculum across the country is exactly the same. That's not how learning really takes place. Learning is about the relationship between the teacher and students and among the students. And Common Core, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, all of these try and short circuit or do an end run around that relationship and make the curriculum somehow teacher-proof. We know that there's no such thing. Education and teaching and learning is mediated through the teacher-student relationship and that's where the real work gets done. So if we're not doing so well right now, Joel, is there a time in the USA when we have some kind of golden age? In American education, a time when we were really teaching for this vital thing that we need to have, this public consciousness, I think that you would say for what kind of citizen you want, one that has an in-depth thinking relationship to go to social justice? Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that because I don't mean to imply that there was some golden age of reform where schools were doing all this work of social justice and education for citizenship, because that wouldn't be the case. But what has changed is our obsession with only math and literacy. We know from, there's a recent study that showed that more than 72% of school districts across the United States have scaled back instruction in every subject area and every extracurricular activity that didn't have to do with test preparation for these tests for just math and literacy. So what we have is whole groups of children, sometimes whole schools, sometimes whole districts, where kids are forbidden to attend science or recess or drama or music until they've raised their scores on their standardized tests in math or literacy. Then you can imagine what this does to a child who's already learned by second grade or third grade that they can't do school, that they're not good at the academic subject matters or even just math, let's say, or just literacy. And so while there's no golden age of school reform, there was a different kind of discussion around schools. Schools were always recognized as part of a kind of holistic set of goals that had to do with shaping the child and creating the best kind of society that we can create. It goes back to Thomas Jefferson and his quote that I will badly paraphrase, but something along the lines of if the citizenry is not well educated enough to govern their own affairs, the solution is not to take that power of governance away from them, but neither to educate them. And that really goes to what the purposes of public education were in the United States, which were to make democracy work, that you couldn't have a functioning democracy if you didn't have public schools to reach a broad number of students and educate them in the ways and the skills, attitude and knowledge that they needed to participate as democratic citizens were much more likely nowadays to talk about schools as job training institutions. Even as young as kindergarten, we're simply talking about how can we make sure that our schools make our economy competitive with China or Europe or wherever else. Sure, that's important. We want kids to have good jobs. We want them to lead productive lives, but it's not enough. We also want kids to understand that their learning is in a context of a society in which they live, and they need to think about what kind of person they want to be in that society. And that's what I think has changed. We're going to come right back to Joel Westheimer and some more discussion about education, but first I want to remind you that you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, for this Northern Spirit radio production on the web, northernspiritradio.org with about 10 years of our programs out there for your free listening and download. There's a place for you to post comments. We love two-way communications, so please post comment when you visit. There's a place to donate. Just click on support, and you can make sure that this goes forward. Especially, I want to encourage you to support your local community radio station. They provide a slice of news and music that you get nowhere else on American airwaves, and it's something that's badly needed for a wider education in this world. Please start by supporting your local community radio station. Again, our guest is Joel Westheimer. He is now the University Research Chair in Democracy and Education at the University of Ottawa up there in Canada now, even though you started teaching Joel in New York public schools. How long ago did you transition up to Ottawa? I've been here for about 12 years now, and before I taught here, I taught at Stanford in California, and then at New York University, NYU in New York. I'm from New York originally. I go back and forth a lot. I'm bi-national. Can I ask? I think having the position of a university research chair in democracy and education, do we have those in the United States as well, or is Canada the only one concerned about democracy and education? There are a large number of people doing excellent work on this in the United States as well, but all of us, whether in Canada or the United States, are certainly not at the center of policy reform. And part of my aim in writing this book, What Kind of Citizen, is to influence policy, and to influence parents, and teachers, and even students, and also just the general public, to understand what our schools are like. And I see that as part of the mandate of that chair, is to help think about what the role of school in a democratic society is. And I'll tell you, Mark, I mean, I've listened to your shows. I'm a fan. And in terms of, you know, we mentioned a lot of the different goals of schooling, but a lot would also put the idea of spirituality in there as well, in terms of having kids think about their place in our society and in the different relationships they have. And I think that that's an important goal of schools as well, that also is pushed to the margins when it comes to policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. You know, there's about 20 things that I want to ask you all at once. I know we're going to run out of time, Joel. One question I wanted to ask, and this, I know that education has to be changing. One of the reasons is we have the Internet, we have computers. I ask an employee of mine, and mind you, I used to have a business, a computer program, and consulting. So, you know, working with computers all the time, and he had written down product of 9 and 6. He had written down, I think, 48 or something, and I said, "Come on, that's not their number." And he said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, right, it's 63." No, and I said, "Come on." And he had to go run to his computer and quickly punch in 9 times 6, so he could come up with it. And I was so frustrated with them. It's 54, right? Yes. And yet, I understand that, you know, we've got computers, do we have to remember details, but I end up having fear about using the Internet as my memory source, because, as we know, countries can control which sites you can and can't see. And so, just as when the USSR could change the truth using Proveda, I believe our media right now changes the truth. And if we don't remember, five years ago, what actually happened, we are so susceptible. So, memorization, is that still important? Is it important to have those kind of facts, whether it's math or history or whatever, in our brains, as opposed to Wikipedia? Could you mention a little bit about that, what your perspectives are on that, Joel? Absolutely. Let me divide what you said into two things, because it was really interesting. One was about the one version of truth and the possibilities for governments or any society to control what the true story is, right? And the other was about facts in particular and memorization. So, on the memorization debate, you know, when people are against road memorization in school, of course, nobody who really thinks kids shouldn't memorize anything. And the time table that you bring up is really a terrific example, right? I mean, we have math reforms that are aimed at teaching kids how to think mathematically. And I think that that's very important in a very good development. In other words, it teaches them not the formulas as much as where the formulas come from and how to think through a problem so that they can apply it to different things. That doesn't mean that there are any math teachers out there who don't think there are things that kids should just know because it's a shortcut. And the multiplication table is a good example. You know, of course, all kids should know their multiplication table because we use it as shorthand for something. But they also should know how that multiplication table, where it comes from, right? I mean, shown how it works and help them develop mathematical thinking. Now, when we switch from math to, let's say, history, the same thing applies. There are facts that are helpful to know because it does what's called what educators called scaffolding. You know, when you know certain facts, when you hear other facts, they sort of stick to the scaffold that you have already. And so it's helpful to know basic structures of things so that you can file away new information properly. On the other hand, when those facts become one true story, that's where we run into problems. It's not that history books aren't filled with facts that are correct. It's that we don't ask kids to question who chose the facts and what story are those facts telling. And how might someone in a different country or a different society, or even just a different textbook, tell the same story differently? I tell this to parents, and this is in the book as well because I have a whole section on what parents can do to work with their kids to help them to become active and thoughtful citizens. And so this is in the book what kind of citizen as well. One of the things I tell parents is that one of the most radical things either parents or teachers can do with their kids is tell them that somebody wrote the textbook. Most people think the textbook came down on two stone tablets from some mountains somewhere and that it's just truth. But you say go ahead, look in the inside cover or look in the back. Who wrote it or what committee of people wrote it? And who are those people? Look them up. Where do they come from? What's their background? What interests might they have in telling a story a certain way? And then get another textbook and look for differences. Get a textbook about the same war but from the other side, right, from a different country and see how the story is told differently. That's what historians call historical thinking. It's how you do history. It's that history is not about the facts even though the facts certainly exist. It's about interpretation and how we interpret those facts and it's a never ending process. And coincidentally of course it's also what makes teaching and learning so interesting. Who wants to just memorize a bunch of facts? Of course you need some facts but what's really interesting is the debates, the controversies over these stories. And so whether it's math or history or science there are always competing definitions of what truth is. And it's very important for anyone in a democracy to know that there are competing definitions because in some sense what separates authoritarian societies from democratic ones is the citizen's knowledge that there are other perspectives, right, to question. I mean, you know, we put it neatly on a bumper stick or question authority. But in some sense that's what schools need to teach children. And that can be a pain sometimes. There's a saying among teachers that everyone likes to teach critical thinking but no one wants a classroom full of critical thinkers. Exactly, because they're asking, you know, all these questions, you know, Mr. Westheimer, how do you know that the Norman invasion was in 1066? But the truth is the critical thinking is essential and we all need to devote part of the school curriculum to developing those skills. I do want to address before we hang up there, Joel, is something about the loss of democracy in our country and the dangers for that. But there was one particularly interesting thing because I do happen to live in Wisconsin. You mentioned Bob Peterson, who was a Wisconsin elementary school teacher of the year. And he taught at La Escuela Fratney, which I happen to live about six blocks from there for four years. You'll give him a hug from me, won't you? Well, I'm not there anymore. Okay. And he talked about the response, and he's teaching elementary school. How do you respond to 9/11? What happened in the nation? And how do you actually have the kids learn from that experience? And I love what you described, what he did, which, from my point of view, well justifies teacher of the year, this kind of approach. Could you mention some of those things? Do you remember? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, Bob Peterson is a wonderful gifted teacher. And in this particular example, one of the things he did was so simple that you just have to love it and so few people fond of it. He put a, you know, a big question mark at the front of the room after 9/11, and he said, "What questions do we have? What questions do we have?" He didn't jump in with information about where Afghanistan is or Iran or Iraq or who the bombers were. He said, "What questions do we have?" And the kids started generating questions, and they then spent weeks and months following 9/11 trying to answer those questions. And of course, answering questions like those only begets, more questions. And so questions led to questions and different competing answers, and they looked at different perspectives, and they studied newspapers from around the world, and their responses to 9/11. And they had some of the richest discussions around these issues than many others that were going on in the U.S. And of course, there were other teachers doing similar things. But this is one example I write about in the book. Now, Bob is working in a school like Squella Fradney that is oriented in that direction anyway. The school itself is very supportive of that kind of development of critical thinking skills and allowing students to ask questions. And it's a wonderful approach to learning. Yeah. Let's talk about what kind of schools, what options they have. I mean, one of the concerns you've raised about standardization is, you know, the schools have to perform to these tests. Is that true for public and private schools? And I ask that in part because I happen to be Quaker. And many of the Quaker schools I've been acquainted with, which, by the way, Obama's kids attend a Quaker school. Yeah, I have a ethical culture school, yeah. Sure. And there's all these things taught. Are they limited in what they're teaching, as well as the public schools? It's a great question. And so I want to say two things. First of all, many of the politicians and policymakers who are pushing for stronger and stronger and more and more testing for annual testing of every kid in every grade, send their kids to schools that have no testing at all. They're not subject to those rules and they don't do standardized testing. Many of the politicians and policymakers who are pushing for larger class sizes, holding up very dubious research showing that class size doesn't matter, send their kids to schools, private schools, where the class size, the class student to teacher ratio is 12 to 1 instead of 35 or 40 to 1. So in some ways we can follow the money, right? It's what the great philosopher John Dewey said, the kind of education that is good enough for the wealthiest of our society must be the kind of education that we pursue for all our children. And that's simply not happening right now. So on the one hand, there are enormous differences between the wealthiest private schools in this country and the public schools, whether well-resourced or not. On the other hand, private schools are still living within the same culture as us, and we have a cultural problem where this obsession with standard and accountability is not just in education, but in many fields right now, including medicine. And the issue of relationships between whether it's teacher and student or doctor and patient is being subjected to all these metrics that simply don't have the sophistication to measure all the things that matter. And so private schools, you know, parents push for these same kind of metrics sometimes because we've lost the language to talk about education in other ways. So in some ways they are suffering from that as well. Now what I would like to see is both private and public schools shift in very important ways, and the biggest of those is respecting the passions and enthusiasm that teachers come into the profession with rather than trying to restrict what they do in the classroom. I'm not against all forms of standardized testing. I think it is helpful to take an occasional snapshot. You can do what's called sampling in the same way that we don't ask every single person in the country how they're going to vote for president. We ask a sample, a statistically relevant sample. You can do the same thing with testing to find out how we're doing across the board, and you don't have to test every child. I'm all for that. What I don't want to see happen is what's happened in too many places, which is the entire curriculum being reduced to test preparation. What I think we need to do is create the best possible working conditions for teachers to do their job and students to learn, and then get out of their way, and let them be the professionals that they are. I think we'll see a lot of passionate reforms and enthusiastic responses start to flourish around the country. I think I'm going to ramble on for a moment, Joel, if you'll permit me. Go ahead. I have some experience with education because I went to school. I happen to have a very interesting teacher in ninth grade for social studies, which actually was the name of the course, and the story you told us about our team. You were talking about the seventh grade social studies class, so this is a similar area. This class was U.S. History 1, and Mr. Gregerson, our teacher. Instead of just having us memorize the facts, I think he had one test where we had to know something from the text. He wanted us to learn what democracy and forming a government was about, so he had what was called the Island Project. He was the winds of Providence, and we're supposed to write up a list of what we're taking, and we're going to an island. Okay, this is happening today. What do you do? He didn't say, form a government, decide how you're going to make your decisions and all that, but he experientially was trying to teach us to do that. I think that's exactly the kind of thing that probably you would value. Yeah, it sounds like a wonderful experience. Yeah, and there was something similar he did with respect to the Civil War. I taught physics, chemistry, and math when I was in the Peace Corps, and I came back to the U.S., and I taught at the university here as well. And when I was teaching there, I would say that the best thing I did. I mean, when I'm teaching physics and chemistry, there's ways of doing it that's motivating, and there's ways which are boring, and they could memorize just fine. But when I took in and did experiments in front of them and encouraged them, I said, "You can take that flower over there, and if you boil it, you can use it as an acid base indicator." It blew their minds. And actually the best thing I did was my second year there, I established a science club, and I gave them their first field trip of their lives. And all of a sudden, their excitement for education just soared. So I'm very aware that how we do education makes a tremendous difference. And Togo was part of, they use the French school system, so you have these tests that you have to pass. If you don't pass the test, the single test, you do the year over. You don't advance until you pass that national test. I don't think necessarily we want to do that in the U.S., but I learned something from seeing that kind of a system. Now, you're located in Canada right now. You've been there for 12 years. What have you learned? Do they do things differently in Canada? Are there different nations who do things well? What have you learned about that? Absolutely, there's some very interesting differences we see internationally. So first of all, the second part of your question are there nations that do things particularly well. Interestingly, the United States and Canada both love to hold up Finland as a shining example of a stellar education system because it so happens that Finland performs well on international comparisons, right, on yet more standardized tests. What's interesting about Finland is that everything exactly entirely different than both Canada and the United States in their education system. They pay teachers extremely well. Teaching is a high status profession that's very competitive to get into. They have, wait for this, zero standardized testing at any grade level whatsoever. All the reforms in Finland are much closer to the kind of thing I'm talking about than what we actually see in the United States or in Canada. Now, the United States, I'm afraid, leads the way in this kind of myopic focus on standardized tests in particular in high-stakes testing. But the trend has not been restricted to the United States. It's moved all over the world, including into Canada. And Ontario, where I am, is one of the worst offenders in terms of narrowing the curriculum. But the tests are not as high-stakes as in the U.S. And so there's more wiggle room. And teachers take advantage of that wiggle room to do the work that they came to do. So there's some similarities, but there's enough differences that make it worse. And some might call Canada a gentler, kinder version of the standardized testing onslaught than we see in the United States. And that story you told Mark about the way you brought your own interest into the classroom. You knew this thing about flowers and creating litmus tests and so forth. You know, those are the things I'd like to see flourish a thousand times. But it doesn't mean we write into the curriculum that everyone should teach that flowers can be used to create litmus tests for acid or base solutions. It means that we need to harness all of teachers' backgrounds and passions and interests and let those flourish in classrooms around the country. And to be able to do that, we have to scale back this idea that every classroom needs to look the same and that everything has to be standardized. It's always important to me Joel to check what the outlook of my guess is. You know, where it comes from religiously, spiritually. I don't think of these things narrowly. And so it's not necessarily about a church, but I realize, of course, you have Jewish background and that your parents having come from Germany during World War II. A very affected by that. Does religion, the spiritual outlook, how would you describe your own? Does that affect how you think? Is there some part of that that plays some role in your work on citizenship? Yeah, it's wonderful that you asked that question. And I would describe myself. I have a very strong Jewish identity in the sense of Jewish culture and background. And it's been meaningful in my life in particular, a way that Judaism has been informed by quests for social justice, as well as Christianity has, too. I'm not a religious person, but I do believe that it's important for schools and for all of us to discuss the big questions that drive our lives. You know, why are we here? What's the meaning of life and what have I been put on this earth to do? And those are questions I think are critically important to bring up with children, if not in a specific religious framework, of course, in a spiritual one or a broader one. Because those are the questions that lead us and children to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be. And I think that's a very nice goal to have for kids, and it's one that I try and have for myself. You know, there's so much, as I said, Joel, that we want to cover. And again, we're talking with Joel Westheimer his book, What Kind of Citizen? Educating our children for the common good. There's so many crucial ideas in there, and again, I said it was very provocative for me just to think about all these different things. And one of the things that really struck me, at one point you talk about citizens, what kind of citizens are we trying to prepare? There's three different kinds that you mentioned, that you categorize, personally responsible citizen. We want people who don't let her or who have good character, and you talk about the character Counts Curricula that are out there. There's something called participatory citizens. In that case, we're talking about people who actually get involved and are aware of how you affect government in some ways. And then there's a social justice oriented citizen, which is a category that I think you both you and I, Joel, particularly love. And you talk about the Madison County Youth Service League and the Bayside Students for Justice. Could you talk a little bit about them and the kind of education they did so that we can capture a flavor of what I think you would like to advocate? Yeah, I mean, and that was a very nice summary of those. What we did was we saw when we looked at my colleague, Joe Kahn, and I looked at hundreds of programs across the U.S. and around the world. In the last many years we've been working on this, what we found is that different programs could be represented by these different visions of citizenship that you just described. And if we think about them broadly, you know, like if the participatory citizens were organizing a food drive because they've learned how to participate, the personally responsible citizens are donating a can of food because they're good people and they're willing to give to charity and so forth. But then we asked about that third vision of citizenship, the social justice oriented citizen. And I would say, if I continue with that metaphor I was using, that social justice oriented citizens are asking, "How come in one of the richest countries in the world there are people who are hungry? What's the root cause of these problems?" And so we took two programs, Bayside Students for Justice, was oriented towards developing those social justice or critical thinking skills. And Madison County Youth Service League, and that program was much more oriented towards the idea of participation that it's important to know how government works and to participate in the community. And we compared those programs as examples, and that's what I do in the book, is describe those two programs. And while both are fantastic programs, but while the Madison County Youth Service League is more likely to get their kids involved in things like organizing a recycling drive or showing up to community meetings and things like that, all very important goals, they're not as likely as the Bayside program to have kids understand politics and understand the root causes or look for the root causes of problems and find solutions. So they're going to be directed towards more band-aid solutions to things, right? Things like charity over things that really change deep structures in society. Now conversely, the Bayside Students, we found, there was a lot of change in those kids in terms of understanding the root causes of problems and looking to address those problems. On the other hand, they didn't get quite as good an education in how to actually get involved and make government work for them. And so both kinds of skills are important, but my goal in that part of the book and my goal for us all doing this kind of work is to understand that when we emphasize different aspects of the curriculum, we have different results, right? There are consequences to the choices that we make in curriculum, and too often they're all lumped together, and they usually come out looking like character education, which is teaching kids to be nice to each other and to be honest and to not to litter. But those kind of personal responsibility traits are ones that students in any country should have, right? I don't care if it's a military dictatorship or a theocracy or a monarchy. Every country wants their citizens to be well behaved and follow the law. The question for our students in our schools is, what else do we want from them? And I think it's asking the tough questions, asking how can we change things to make it better? There are such powerful lessons in what kind of citizen educating our children for the common good by Joel Westheimer. His website, where you want to find him right now, whatkindofcitizen.org, or on Twitter you can find him at Joel Westheimer. I'll have links for both of those on NortonSpiritRadio.org. This is transformative work to understand and to put that into effect with our children is to change the future. That's a truism, but so often we're ignoring vital elements of it and in what kind of a citizen, Joel, and by the teaching and research you're doing, you're making this world have the potential of a better life. Let's all work together to make it that way. Thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you so much for having me, Mark. It's been my pleasure. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of NorthernSpiritRadio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)