outliers

Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell, 2008) is subtitled The Story of Success, because Gladwell sets out to look at successful people, how they achieved that success, and what factors outside their control helped (or hindered) them on the way to success. He looks at professional hockey players and other athletes. He looks at Bill Gates. He looks at school children and lawyers. From my perspective his conclusion is that every successful person has a series of advantages and/or opportunities that don’t come to most of us; there is some unearned, usually structural advantage—often several of advantages—that successful people have that the rest of us don’t. Therefore, Outliers is a thoroughgoing critique of idea that meritocracy exits.

For example, in Canada, where many professional hockey players grow up, children’s hockey is organized by age group. If you will be 12 during the calendar year, whether in January or June or December, you will play in the 12 year-old league. If you turn 12 in December, compared to children born in the first few months of the year, you will be 10 or 12 months behind in development. So, when it comes time to select the best of the 12 year-old league, you’ll be at a significant disadvantage, because you’re likely to be less physically developed than most of your peers. The best of any particular age group tend to get more playing time, more coaching, and just play more hockey. Thus, when you get to the 13 year-old league, not only are you behind your peers physically, but also in terms of experiencing and training. This gap widens at every age group—is it any surprise that most of the Canadian national hockey team is born in the first three months of the year? According to Gladwell, the great majority are.

This is a great illustration of an arbitrary advantage, given to some and not to others, that leads to the difference between success and failure at something, in this case hockey. Gladwell describes similar structural and systemic advantages and disadvantages in all kinds of situations until, after telling a story about a “brilliant immigrant kid [who] overcomes poverty and the Depression, can’t get a job at the stuffy downtown law firms, makes it on his own through sheer hustle and ability,” he says: “I hope by now that you are skeptical of this kind of story . . . . [S]uccess doesn’t happen that way. Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.” Successful people are “a product of the world in which they grew up.

Gladwell goes further, explicitly critiquing the way our culture clings to “the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we chose to write as a society don’t matter at all,” thereby wasting huge a amount potential talent:

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes and who doesn’t.

Gladwell implicates us all. “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success . . . with a society that provides opportunities for all. ”

Societal responsibility for helping our children succeed and for helping all people realize their potential is an important message. If Gladwell had left I there—pushing us to accept our responsibility and calling out to change the arbitrary nature of success in the current structures—the book would have been a useful and even profound call to improve education and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, rather than change society to acknowledge the talent and skill of more of us, for Gladwell the solution seems to be to deny ones culture in the name of being successful by the standards of our current structures. Looking at Korean Air pilots and their historically disproportionately high crash rate, Gladwell literally argues that “to be a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity,” a deep respect for authority that he admits “runs throughout Korean culture.” Similarly, for Marita, a twelve year-old girl in a special school called KIPP (Knowledege is Power Program) in New York City. “[T]he cultural legacy she has been given does not match her circumstances . . . . Her community does not give her what she needs. So what does she have to do? Give up her evenings and weekend and friends—all the elements of her old world—and replace them with KIPP.” That is, Marita needs to give up her culture because her culture isn’t giving her “what she needs.”

This attitude is classic cultural deficit reasoning (see the work of Tara Yosso and my entry on a lecture she gave in San Francisco). The idea, often put forward by well-meaning liberals, is that the poor (usually non-white) unfortunates, who don’t have the advantages that middle-class white kids have, can be saved by assimilating, by learning and adopting white middle-class culture. That this ignores the strengths, abilities, intelligences, and experiences the rest of the world brings to every situation doesn’t seem to register. This perspective looks at what people don’t have (i.e., they don’t have middle-class white culture), rather than what they do have (i.e., cultures and practices and abilities all their own). It also ignores the racism, sexism, classism, and other oppression that people outside dominant groups endure and the way that identity is fundamentally shaped by those forces.

A much better approach would recognize that everyone comes with strengths and weaknesses and would celebrate the incredible diversity of our cultures and abilities. It would foster talents we currently don’t even call talents. Creating true opportunity for more people to be successful in our culture means acknowledging the wealth that all people bring to school and work and politics and life.

what’s the matter with kansas?: how conservatives won the heart of america

In 2004, it was easy to moan about how strong the neo-conservative movement in the United States was. The war against gay marriage, abortion, and other social/cultural issues was raging and the neo-cons seemed to be winning—witness the fact that George W. Bush was reelected that year on a platform that consisted of almost nothing except the failures of his first term and the idea that he was somehow of the common people.

This is exactly what journalist and writer Thomas Frank does in What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004), using his home state of Kansas as the poster child of confused, misguided voting in the U.S., voting by the poor and working class against their economic self-interest. His main questions: why, in Kansas (and, by extension, all over the country), would farmers, blue-collar workers, and poor people, in general—historically faithful Democratic voters—vote Republican, supporting the corporate takeover of their family farms, the Wal-Martizing of their local businesses, and the reduction of taxes for the wealthiest? Why would the people that need the most help getting by support reducing the amount of health care, education, and other public services?

The answer, unsurprising to those that have read George Lakoff, is values. Thomas makes the case that the neo-conservatives have used wedge issues social issues like abortion, gun control, and evolution/creationism—racial and xenophobic fear is notably absent from his list, but I would certainly add them—to polarize the traditionally Democratic base. The ironic thing about these reasons for voting Republican, as Thomas points out, is that little is ever actually accomplished on those issues. The neo-cons run on a platform of social outrage and moral uprightness, but spend their time in office busting unions, cutting taxes, deregulating industries, and gutting our public school system.

Thomas is a thorough researcher, but most of the book is an anecdotal rant, a head-shaking “can you believe this really happened?” What’s missing is the kind of organizing scheme that Lakoff provides, a lack that left me feeling little wiser after reading the book. Nevertheless, Thomas makes some important points. Primary among them: “Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Shawnee and Wichita with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.” The lack of clearly articulated progressive vision, combined with liberal politicians’ concessions to Wall Street and the rich, have impoverished the left and the country has paid the price with 8 years of neo-cons in the White House.

A year after Obama’s election, it feels like we’ve started to recover from those dark days. However, the economic policy debates are still largely framed like they have been since the 1980s. Progress on social issues, incremental as it is, is great, but does little, if anything, to change the economic conditions, distribute wealth and prosperity to all people, and improve health care and education. Only by reframing the issues so that most people see real change as beneficial to them and in line with their values can we move forward to create more justice and equity in our society.

the political mind

George Lakoff is a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working in a long tradition of scientists who use their knowledge and skills to understand the world we live in and to change the world for the better, as they understand “better”. His books, including The Political Mind (2008), are a part of that project. I admire him for trying and for the power of his work.

I used the phrase “as they understand ‘better’” advisedly. The history of scientists using science to improve the world has been good and bad. Science has been used to eliminate disease, make daily chores easier, and many other good ends; it has also been used—and still is—to further oppressions of all kinds, including racism, sexism, classism, and more.

This is not to say that I dispute Lakoff’s science or even his applications to the political world. In fact, I find the ideas compelling because they help me understand the world and the behavior of people around me. In addition, I like his goals and mostly align with his politics.

But agreeing with Lakoff’s picture of a better world—a picture he outlines in the book’s last chapter—is not important. The science underlying his method for changing the world is important and we should take notice. Lakoff calls that science the 21st century ideas of reason and cognition, which is somewhat self-serving considering that he helped develop the theory. Nevertheless, as I see it the big idea here is that the mind is fundamentally a metaphor instrument (and here we need to note that using the word “instrument” itself evokes a metaphor and one that I don’t think is entirely accurate—instrument implies a tool with a user, but the mind is part of the body and cannot be separated, so who or what would be the user of the “instrument”?). According to Lakoff (and others), we think in and reason with metaphors; every action, every perception, every idea is governed by one or more metaphors that are semi-hardwired in the physical space of our brains.

As I understand the story, our neurons physically form circuits or “frames” or metaphor themes. For example, take a basic action frame: Actor, Action, Acted On. This circuit in the brain is activated by pretty much every action. I could be the actor, writing the action, this blog entry the acted on. Or the actor could be you, reading the action, and still this blog entry the acted on. Every time the frame is activated these roles come into play; my mind is looking for who or what fits the roles. Then our brains take the idea of me—literally another circuit in my brain with an entire frame of associations and knowledge—and binds the actor role with me physically and temporarily.

The binding isn’t permanent, but the more an idea is bound to a role in a frame, the easier it is to do it again. If an idea or person is bound to a role often enough it becomes difficult to separate them because the physical connection between the two brain circuits is now hard to break. This explains, physically, why thinking of yourself as a being in control of your life promotes more of the same. Confidence leads to more confidence, because literally the circuitry that represents you in your brain gets bound in neurons to the circuitry that represents confidence. Of course, the opposite is also true.

This understanding of the brain’s function helps explain and supports lots of ideas about education. Metaphor binding means context is important, that attitude matters, that fun and enthusiasm matter, and that relationships between teachers and students make a difference. Teachers know all this, but now we have a more physical understanding of how it works.

The Political Mind is a deeper exploration and a more nuanced, less specifically political perspective on the ideas from Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant. The basics of the politics are that conservative worldviews are dominated by authority and obedience, while progressives’ central ideas are empathy and responsibility, with protection and empowerment the main roles of government. Lakoff also claims, I believe rightly, that empathy is the foundation of democracy and the philosophical underpinning of our Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. The specific issues he focuses on mostly are economics, the environment, health care, and wars; rarely does he address race, prisons, or schools.  Still, it is easy to use the frames he develops for any issue. Towards the end, Lakoff adds a nice chapter that synthesizes the development of cognitive linguistics with the history and traditions of science, math, philosophy, and other disciplines.

The science Lakoff discusses is useful and provocative. His attempt to use it to change the world is laudable and may work to some degree—though don’t think we’ll know for years to come. The kinds of frame changes about which he’s talking are literal changes in people’s minds; that take time, persistence, and even luck. In the meantime, he’s given me a powerful way to think about and understand the world.

race matters

Almost a year after Barrack Obama was elected president the debate about what his being the nation’s first biracial president means rages on. Simplifying and generalizing the arguments (always a precarious thing to do): some say it signifies a step beyond race to some place where we do not have to worry about it, where race has nothing to do with how we see and judge people; others admit the importance of Obama’s election, but also speak of the continued racism that people of color face and to statistics about the disproportionate number of people of color living in poverty, failing in our schools, suffering from toxins in their neighborhoods, sitting in prison, and generally dealing with the very real effects of institutional and systemic racism in our society.

In recent weeks the debate was inflamed by the arrest, in his own home, of noted scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who publicly asserted that he had been the victim of racial profiling. The arresting officer denied the idea and refused to apologize, saying he had no reason to do so. The president weighed in; the papers and talk shows are having a field day. Predictably and revealingly, in a poll, about 3/4 of African-Americans said they thought race was a factor in the arrest; 2/3 of whites said it wasn’t; it is the privilege of the over-class to ignore the world in which the under-class lives.

There is hardly a better moment to read Cornell West’s 1993 classic Race Matters. In essays entitled “Nihilism in Black America,” “Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity,” “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject,” and more, West incisively and profoundly analyzes racism in the U.S. His carefully constructed prose elucidates complex ideas and stimulates further thought. He speaks truth to power in a way that is both provocative and obvious, frequently making me wonder why I hadn’t seen his point before that moment.

Among many, the idea that stands out for me at the moment is that African-Americans are intrinsically part of our national culture. They’ve been on the continent almost as long as white people. Our society has evolved with the contributions of both black and white people. To the extent that there is a “white” culture and a “black” culture (categories that clearly include a great deal of variety and individuality within them), they have evolved together, contributing to one another in both many, many ways. African-Americans are as “American” as the rest of us.

It is obvious to me that, as the title to this book suggests, race still matters in the U.S. and around the world. The sooner that white people in the U.S. accept and publicly acknowledge this reality, the sooner we will be able to take true steps to equality.

lincoln’s virtues: an ethical biography

“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

So said Abraham Lincoln at New York’s Cooper Union on February 27, 1860. It was near the beginning of his successful campaign to become President and he was speaking both in general and, more specifically, about slavery’s role in each state and in the nation as a whole.

I started reading about Lincoln in the hope of learning something about politics and speeches; I wanted a politician I could respect and from whom I could feel good about learning. Perusing the titles and back covers at a local bookstore, I discovered Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (William Lee Miller, 2002). As a first book on Lincoln’s life, it’s probably not the best choice. It is a pretty dense analysis of Lincoln’s argument, his moral, ethical, and logical treatment of issues. It’s slow going and I finished three or four other books during the time I was working on it. However, I did learn some valuable lessons:

1. Prepare. In a series of now-famous debates, Lincoln—a self-taught lawyer from backwoods Illinois and at the time a one-term Congressman—took on one of the most powerful politicians of the era (Stephen Douglas) on the most controversial subject (slavery) in the nation. He didn’t win every point, but he did respectably most of the time and, more important, he clearly articulated his position. Lincoln spent months preparing for this work, a habit that he carried into almost everything that he did.
2. Work from something incontrovertible—or as close as you can get. Lincoln based his arguments against slavery on carefully worked out trains of logic that were founded on the Declaration of points Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the fundamental humanity of all human beings. While some people denied the full humanity of black slaves, Lincoln’s position was ultimately redeemed by the weight of majority opinion and the logic that if one group can be enslaved and dehumanized today, there’s no justification for not enslaving your group tomorrow.
3. Do the politics. Lincoln was a consummate politician. He counted votes. He curried favor, formed coalitions, and helped build a major political party. He argued, cajoled, encouraged, motivated, and twisted arms. He used most of the legal and respectable tools available to carry his points and win his goals—though he didn’t always win. He didn’t shy away from talking to those with whom he didn’t agree and he acknowledged the expertise and ability of others, sometimes even those who had disparaged him in the past. (His Secretary of War through most of the Civil War, Edwin Stanton, is a great example of someone who had strongly opposed Lincoln’s election, but who Lincoln appointed anyway because of his skills; the two became a powerful team.)
4. Do it because it’s right. Even under intense political pressure, Lincoln seemed never to lose sight of his larger goals and never to let personal gain be more important then communal good. At one point, trying to become the Senator from Illinois (something he wanted very much), he realized he couldn’t win and threw his support behind a candidate with less initial popularity (and who hadn’t supported him), but who was much preferred politically. He thereby helped his party and his ideological stance win, despite the personal loss. Consistently, he chose the right thing, as he defined it, over personal feelings (again, Stanton’s appointment is a good example).

Certainly, there are many perspectives on Lincoln and Miller’s is just one. However, Miller’s attempt to trace Lincoln’s moral and ethical development provides powerful access to and analysis of a crucial figure in our nation’s history. Whether you agree with Miller’s relatively rosy picture of Lincoln or not, looking at Lincoln through the lens of morality is welcome at a time when ethical behavior and moral principles seem, at least to this observer, less and less a part of our political rhetoric and life.

omnivore’s dilemma

When I moved to Boulder, Colorado in the late 80s, after being raised primarily in Minnesota, Boulder felt like vacation-land, an artificially “fun” place, filled with pretty people with nothing much to do except exercise, drink coffee, and pursue their inner selves; there’s plenty of money in Boulder and almost nothing old. Yet, after three or four years, though I was aware of the issues and could notice Boulder’s world-unto-itself quality, I began to feel pretty much at home.

When, in 2001, I moved to the Bay Area, I felt predictably out of place, once again; Oakland and San Francisco don’t have the same feeling of artificial newness as Boulder, but after eight years I’m still not quite comfortable identifying as a Californian. There are times when I forget and just live here unselfconsciously, but most of the time I’m very aware of the ways that California is a little bit different than other places—often for the good and sometimes not. Maybe I’m too old to fully adopt a new place. Whatever the case, I was reminded powerfully of my displacement while reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s epic of four meals and their origins, because I don’t think the book could have been written or conceived anywhere except California, and probably, more specifically, it could not have been written outside the Bay Area.

Pollan traces the four meals through their very different supply chains (industrial, industrial-organic, beyond organic, and hunter-gatherer) in a well-researched story of economics, biology, cuisine, and culture. He talks to farmers, manufacturers, industry experts, professors, cooks, food enthusiasts, and his own wife and son. He learns to fire a rifle for the first time in his life and spends time working on farms in Iowa and Virginia. He buys a steer and at least attempts to follow it from birth to death. He gets up early and stays up late, trying to learn something about his food and why he eats it. It is ultimately this focus on himself and his process that makes the book compelling; the self-focus is also part of what makes the book so uniquely a product of Berkeley, California, a center of self-involved, self-motivated culture (witness Berkeley’s neo-hippies and, need I say more, Dave Eggers).

Berkeley is arguably the birthplace of the modern organic food movement in the United States, is definitely the location of visionary Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse (which if you don’t know was one of the first, most locally-sourced restaurants in the U.S.), and is most definitely the home of the University of California, Berkeley, a prestigious, some would say pretentious, institution, at which Pollan happens to be employed. With this kind of background, one can understand why Pollan, in addition to telling a story of food and his relationship to it, is trying to teach us some things: he feels like an expert, with access to more experts, and he’s used to teaching.

One of the most important things he’s trying to teach is that we don’t understand all the ways that food nourishes us; more generally, we don’t understand all the ways that ecologies work synergistically for the benefit of all the organisms in them. For example, in the 19th century, western science discovered the importance of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) for growing plants, knowledge that is the foundational concept for modern fertilizer. As science has advanced, we have begun to see that organisms and microorganisms in the soil contribute to plant growth and health in a synergistic harmony that is way beyond NPK and that we are still struggling to comprehend fully. Similarly, our understanding of the requirements of human nutrition continues to evolve: from carbs, protein, and fats to vitamins to the importance of micro-nutrients and other factors of which we are not yet aware. Our food evolved with us and supports our health in ways we don’t understand, which is why fortifying food with vitamins is not at good as eating food with those nutrients occurring naturally in them.

Another lesson Pollan wants to teach is that it’s important to examine what we eat and why. Part of his personal answers to these questions includes an interrogation of meat eating. In a thoughtful chapter on the ethics of eating meat, he argues for transparency—for knowing more about how the animals we eat are raised, killed, and prepared for our consumption. Underlying that logic, and the book’s very title, is the idea that humans are evolved to be omnivorous and that eating other animals is a part of that legacy. That is, unless I mistaking his argument, it boils down to the idea that humans are part of nature and that eating meat—albeit responsibly, respectfully, and moderately—is natural and good. This idea is the basis for most of his answers to the question of what to eat and why: we should eat natural food because we and the food evolved together for our mutual benefit.

Whether or not you buy his reasoning—and his uniquely Californian perspective may be off-putting to some—Pollan’s addition to the national food dialog is welcome. I knew a lot of what he’s sharing, but not all, and he has an undeniable ability to make potentially boring subjects come alive. The book didn’t make me more comfortable in the Bay Area, but it did help me see I’m part of its culture more than I knew: Bay Area denizens generally like to think and talk about food quite a lot and I’m no exception.

don’t think of an elephant!

George Lakoff’s near classic primer on framing, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives (2004), is a great little book for learning how to talk and think in the political world. He outlines the worldviews of both conservatives and progressives in a simply, easy to digest way that helps you keep it in mind and communicate the differences more clearly. In fact, it’s a little too simple—notwithstanding Lakoff’s minimal attempt to nuance the ideas—and probably that’s appropriate in today’s short attention span world.

That doesn’t mean Lakoff is simple. On the contrary, he is a cognitive scientist and linguist and his approach reflects that training. He looks at how people think and make decisions and vote and then at the language people use to influence each other. He tries to find the underlying themes and logic that unite what might otherwise seem like contradictory positions and behaviors. The results are powerful for understanding our society’s politics.

Because he is primarily trying to identify the themes that unite each of two opposing sides, his analysis elides many of the differences that sometimes cut across his dualistic approach. I’m thinking especially of identity issues—race, class, gender, sexuality, and others. Lakoff very briefly discusses these issues as one of the six main strains of progressive ideology, but he is self-consciously trying to bridge those differences and his treatment is probably unsatisfying to many who identify with those strains. That is, I think many people might see the intelligence of his thinking and still feel he’s missing some important issues.

Nevertheless, the book is valuable as a handbook of technique and skills—essential background for the activist, thinker, and aspiring politico.

the art of critical pedagogy

Let us begin by rethinking the position that urban schools are failing. . . . When one set of schools [in high-income communities] is given the resources necessary to succeed and another group of schools [in low-income communities] is not, we have predetermined the winners and losers. . . . Urban [low-income community] schools are not broken; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.

This in the second paragraph of Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell’s brilliant book, The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. It’s brilliant because it is based in the experience of actually teaching our country’s youth, on working day in and day out with high school students in Los Angeles and Oakland. Most of the book is Duncan-Andrade and Morrell detailing several educational projects on which they’ve worked, describing their experiences as they try to put their belief in critical pedagogy into practice, and explaining what they learned.

As grounded in experience and practice as they are, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell know the theory, too. In chapter two, they give the best overall summary of the work and writing of the major names in critical pedagogy—Freire, Shor, Darder, McLaren, Giroux, hooks—I’ve seen. In addition, they discuss the efforts of a few “lived examples of critical pedagogy to emphasize that critical pedagogy is more than just a teaching strategy—it is a personal, financial, political, emotional, and spiritual commitment to prioritizing the needs and liberation of people who are suffering under various forms of oppression”: Carter G. Woodson, Lolita Lebrón, Franz Fanon,Reies López Tijerina, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Subcommandante Marcos. (If this list and the words used to describe these people intimidate you, you’re a normal human being. The authors make it less intimidating as they describe how they put those words into practice in the work they have done and continue to do.)

Before they do that, they lay out their understanding of the urban public school context in which students try to learn and in which teachers try to teach. They argue that “urban school failure is tolerated because deep down our nation subscribes to the belief that someone has to fail in school,” belief supported by racist and classist ideology. Currently, the line is that “educational failure is the result of cultural deficiencies on the part of the student, the family, and the community—de facto, educational attainment is attributed to cultural superiority or assimilation into culturally superior ways.” Regardless of the reasons, the result serves the dominant culture in our country, because “some people must fill the least desirable places in society, and it is important that they feel they deserve to be in those positions or, at the very least, that there is a formal mechanism to justify their place there.” The attack on students’ esteem and confidence is self-perpetuating and circular: if you’re made to feel stupid, you do worse on tests because of your lack of belief in yourself.

But, according to Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, the equation of performance in school and intelligence is false. For, if

school achievement were an accurate measure of intellect, achievement patterns would more closely mirror the random distribution of intellect that genetic scientists report in human populations. Instead, the results of schools are quite predictable. . . . With remarkable consistency, schools serving low-income, non-white children disproportionately produce the citizens who will spend most of their adult lives in the least desirable and least mobile socioeconomic positions (prison, low-ranking military positions, and service labor).

The few urban students who do well are “asked (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) to exchange the culture of their home and community for the higher culture of the school in exchange for access to college.” Therefore,

urban education reform movements must begin to develop partnerships with communities that provide young people the opportunity to be successful while maintaining their identities as urban youth. This additive model of education focuses on the design of urban school culture, curriculum, and pedagogy that identifies the cultures and communities of urban students as assets rather than as things to be replaced.

This “approach provides pedagogy and curricula that lend immediate relevance to school in the lives of urban youth. It also works to break the cycle of disinvestment of human capital in urban communities by crating graduates who recognize their potential agency to improve urban centers, rather than seeing them as places to escape.” Duncan-Andrade and Morrell see critical pedagogy as a win-win for students, teachers, and society as a whole, because “rather than presenting the community as a place to rise above, schools must equip themselves to draw from the knowledge that students bring with them to school—knowledge that is often not in their textbooks but is acquired from the streets, family cultural traditions, youth culture, and the media.”

They are critical of the results we’ve seen so far from multicultural education because it has “failed to deal with the conditions of modern urban life.” They argue persuasively “for pedagogical practices situated in critical analyses of the role of urban schools in social inequality.” We should “shift the rhetoric of failure from young people and caring teachers onto an inequitable system designed to concretize failure in poor communities.”

Finally, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell “believe that urban students should go to college at rates equal to their more affluent counterparts” and that a

schooling environment that foregrounds the relationship between education and the most pressing conditions in the community, an education with relevance, is most likely to produce notable increases in college eligibility. . . . [T]he desired outcome in critical pedagogies in urban education is multiple and . . . it must impact academic achievement, identity development, and civic engagement. . . . To often, we believe, critical pedagogies focus on the rhetoric of social critique to the exclusion of the development of sophisticated literacy and numeracy skills.

These academic skills frequently come “at great personal and social costs that include alienation from family, language, community, and progressive social values.” Therefore, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s work focuses maintaining a sense of community and culture for students, while still promoting rigorous academic skills, by setting those skills in the community and cultural context. Literally, they ask the students what problems or questions are important to them and then develop the curriculum around those issues.

All this made connections for me with the writing of bell hooks, especially in Where We Stand: Class Matters in which she talks about her experience of going to college and being alienated from her home culture by the college culture and the resulting disorientation of being caught between two the two. (For more, see my entry on hooks’ book.) The connection is expected, since Duncan-Andrade and Morrell begin their work with hooks and other related writers as the foundation upon which they build. Indeed, they are trying to do the work that such writers recommend.

As I mentioned above, after contextualizing their work, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell spend the bulk of the book describing their work with students in urban schools. In the final chapter, “Toward a Grounded Theory of Praxis,” they try to draw conclusions from their experiences, point to areas that need more research and exploration, and make suggestions about teacher education. Importantly, they also talk about love. In a section called “Pedagogy, Love, and Revolution” they write about “revolutionary love” and its potential to change both students’ lives and the larger world. From my perspective, real love—that includes celebrating successes and correcting errors and facilitating the development of the person each student wants to be—for your students is the foundation of good teaching. It doesn’t mean that you like every student the same or that every student likes you. It means that you love them and treat them with the respect and compassion you treat all your loved ones. It means that you treat your students the same way you treat your own children. This is a beautiful, dangerous, and somewhat radical stance—and that is right where I want to be.

the law of white spaces

The stories in Giorgio Pressburger’s The Law of White Spaces, are about ordinary humans encountering what we think of as extraordinary illnesses: brain tumors, brothers that all die of something related to their legs, cancer, aphasia, dementia. Written in Italian and translated to English, the prose is clean and clear in that way translated books about Europe often are. It reminds me of Bulgakhov or Borges. Reading about odd ailments and the way people deal with them has a voyeuristic quality that I think Pressburger encourages. His approach is both visual and psychological, but the focus is on what people do, not what they see or think. Despite being published in 1989, there is an old-world feeling, especially with regard to gender roles. The stories are by turns disturbing, touching, funny, and tragic.

I believe part of the point of the stories is that the suffering we go through in unusual circumstances is really part of the same life pattern that we all face, no matter how we live and die. Some people react to unusual circumstances with dramatic action, others by steadfastly adhering to their routines, and others with combinations of the two. But this is the same way we deal with more normal situations and, because we deal with them in essentially the same ways, the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary breaks down. Our pain and how we deal with it makes us human and we are both significant and insignificant, prosaic and poetic.

ethical amibition

When Derrick Bell, long-time civil rights lawyer, law professor at Harvard, NYU, and other schools, author, commentator and more writes a book, entitled Ethical Ambition, about morality and survival and getting ahead, you probably want to have a look. In the introduction, Bell writes:

I want this book to encourage those who, by reading it, may recognize more clearly their abilities, talents, and potential for positive contributions in this world. A committed life need not mean one without fun, without laughter, without romance. Energized with this insight, readers may better see that a full life should include humor and good times while challenging the barriers that life poses. This all-encompassing approach can nourish the spirit—whatever the risks, whatever the outcome.”

Bell explicitly calls for a multi-faceted life, asserting that serving the common good is life’s highest purpose and we cannot truly and fully do that without taking care of ourselves. Put another way, we cannot spread love and support and goodness unless love is inside us; the strength and compassion to care for others is founded on caring for ourselves and those we love. While acknowledging the challenges of his prescription—“trying to simultaneously balance my dreams and needs is tough, and requires an ongoing assessment of who I am, what I believe, value, and desire”—he affirms the importance of honoring his values and believes that his “needs will be taken care of.” Such commitment is “scary and exhilarating” for him, and ultimately exactly the right thing to do.

Bell identifies six keys to ethical living—passion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration, and humility—and dedicates a chapter in the book to each. His take on each is unique and peppered with personal narrative.

For Bell, we all have passion, but we do not always access it or use it in ways that are productive for us or for the world. It “is not an event, but an energy; and it’s an energy that exits in all of us all the time. The question is not whether we have it but whether we access it and how we channel it.” In addition, passion can be both constructive and destructive:

The difference between a passion that nourishes and one that denies you is that the first enhances the experience of being present, and the second facilitates the experience of escape. So contrary to popular belief, passion is not something you have or you don’t, or that has to be fed or it dies. It’s something that grows strong because you nourish it with the experiential equivalent of healthy food and sunlight, or wastes away because you deny it the attention and nourishment it needs to thrive.
Passion will respond to the buzz of a quick fix: sarcasm, too much junk food, impulse buying, gossip, rage . . . . But it thrives on substance: a job well done, giving credit to others, standing up for what you believe in, voluntarily returning lost valuables, choosing what feels right over what might feel good right now. In other words, nourishing passion is ethical passion—it’s finding power in doing the right thing.

If passion is the energy that feeds our ethical actions, courage is the determination to use that energy in the service of our true values, “putting at risk your immediate self-interest for what you believe is right,” since “courage has no meaning if there is no consequence to be feared.” And there are consequences to be feared because, according to Bell, “to be human is to be brought up against fears, large and small, whether we’re conscious of them or not.” We can repeatedly decide to take risks in the face of fear, and for the right reasons, “but however much we learn from our experiences, there is no graduation from fear training, no degree in courage. It is behavior that we must carry on for a lifetime.” By making that decision, over a lifetime, we can make a difference; and “by understanding that courage is not a reflex, but a consequence of knowing your own mind, determining right and wrong for yourself and acting on that understanding, you create the possibility of risk taking in the interest of the greater good. Your good and the greater good become almost synonymous.” Ultimately, then, for Bell to be afraid is to be human and “to risk ethically is a difficult blessing, but whatever the outcome, to risk ethically is also to live.”

Bell’s sections on the importance of spiritual faith, relationships, and inspiration are equally as powerful and speak both to what we can receive from them and to our responsibility to our faith, our relationships, and our inspirations. He speaks, in particular, to the need to be present and ethical in our relationships: “we will always make mistakes, and there is always the possibility of learning from them, but if we cannot behave ethically overall toward the person with whom we have chosen to share our lives, what real value can there be in the show of ethical behavior toward others?” A powerful question and one that he explores further, trying to find the balance between doing good work in the world and being in relationship. Part of his answer is to “argue that the belief that you are working for justice and against evil can take over your life as much as the drive for wealth can.”

Similarly, as he moves on to discuss humility, he writes that “self-righteousness is a gentle curse visited on those striving for social reform and personal uprightness. Humility, no cure, can serve as a continuing reminder of the difficulty of doing good.” He also counsels against placing too much belief in the power and the effects of any of your actions: “ethical actions must always fail if we understand them in terms of end goals. . . . no dramatic change . . . is likely to achieve even most of what it promises; if your criterion for success is perfection, then the failure of every ethical action is assured.” So, in the context of ethical living, humility is “the acceptance of inevitable failure and the willingness each day not to be daunted by it, the conscious connection of our knowledge and our experience.”

The book concludes with this message:

We cannot know whether our actions are a help or a harm. . . . Our lives gain purpose and worth when we recognize and confront the evils we encounter—small as well as large—and meet them with a determination to take action even when we are all but certain that our efforts will fail. . . . an ethical life is not a life a sacrifice. It is, in fact, a life of riches.

Bell’s tone is personal and real. His model and experience is inspiring and, I believe, many of us can learn from it—and, for me, there is more. In terms of motivation, another reason I do what I do is simply for people. Simple and profound, but sadly not as common as I would like, respect and appreciation of other people is a major part of my life and of every social interaction. It means that I am happy to see people, that I look them in the eyes, that I notice them and say “hello,” acknowledging their presence and their humanity. I do this because I sincerely like people, almost to a fault. I think this approach to life jives with Bell’s view of an ethical life; it helps make my life richer and better, more full of what feeds me–other people.

Beyond that there is an even stronger motivation for me: loyalty to my friends and allies. I don’t want to be the one who lets someone I care about down. I want to be dependable; I want those I love to rely on me and for them to know that when I mess up it is the exception, not the rule for my behavior and that I will take responsibility for my failings. I try to learn how better to care for my friends and family and how not to let them down.

The fundamental lesson to learn from Ethical Ambition is that we must live passionately and follow our hearts. To do anything less is to live less fully and less well; to do less is to be untrue to our family, friends, colleagues, and allies. Most importantly, what’s in our hearts is the acid test of whether we are true to ourselves.