I am returning tonight from four days at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention in Pittsburgh. There is nothing quite like spending a weekend with 3,000 people who believe that poetry and stories can change the world. The many conversations I’ve had with teachers in the last few days have me thinking about the demands liberals and progressives typically make with regard to education: primarily better funding for our schools and higher pay for teachers. The economic issues are certainly important, but, coming out of this conference, I wonder if pursuing those goals is enough. Should a spiritually progressive movement address the content of education as well as its funding?

There are good reasons, I think, that liberals haven’t said much about the content of education. One of the fundamental principles of traditional liberal political philosophy is that each individual should be free to choose his or her own values, beliefs, and way of life, so long as those don’t harm anyone else. As a result, we’ve worked to keep schools and curriculum “value-neutral,” insisting that instilling values is the work of parents and not of our schools. Much about this argument is compelling.

Still, I don’t really believe that our schools are value-neutral. In fact, I think that in this age of assessment, the values we are most effectively rewarding in children are competitiveness and thinking that is objective, detached, divorced from feeling. (Witness the cutthroat competition in many high schools for class rankings, which has in some cases even led to lawsuits.) The belief in scarcity very much shapes the way in which we talk about education; it is a commodity that will enable our kids, our states, and our country to compete in the global economy. Much hay is made of the ranking of U.S. graduates as compared to graduates of schools in other countries. While excellence in math, science, the arts, and the humanities should certainly be encouraged, shouldn’t we also be actively helping students develop the ethical sense that will allow them to use their academic prowess in humane ways?

The following are some ideas, most of them adapted or borrowed from Rabbi Michael Lerner’s “politics of meaning,” that might give us a starting place for thinking about how education might be reformed to emphasize the kinds of values that will enable us to live in more loving communities:

·         Assess schools not only on the academic performance of their students, but also on the ability of their students to demonstrate empathy and make ethical choices.

·         Regularly and publicly reward students who demonstrate compassion and sensitivity to the needs of others.

·         Likewise, make empathy and ethical sensitivity criteria for college admissions and for hiring.

·         Provide students with direct instruction and practice in developing self-discipline and responsibility.

·         Expand service learning programs.

·         Implement critical literacy programs that help students take ownership of their own learning and adopt a critical stance toward messages created by people and organizations in positions of power, including the media.

            At dinner Friday night, I had the opportunity to discuss educational philosophies with Ed Farrell, former president of NCTE and professor emeritus of the University of Texas at Austin, and he said something that has stayed with me throughout the weekend: “First we have to imagine what kind of society we want to have twenty years from now. Then we need to imagine the curriculum that will equip students to create that society.” How might we begin to advocate for schools that foster empathy, curiosity, respect for all peoples of the world, stewardship of the natural world, a healthy skepticism toward media messages, and a deep commitment to nonviolence?

There are certain words and phrases that trigger in me a Pavlovian fury, and “family values” is one of those phrases. I suspect I’m not alone in reading this phrase as right-wing code for the hatred of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people; opposition to reproductive choice; discomfort with sexuality in general; preference for male-dominated households; stigmatization of single people; and even uneasiness with women in the workplace. What’s more, families are hardly the sacred refuges the right would make them out to be; far too often, the mores associated with the “sanctity” of the American nuclear family serve to conceal an array of physical, emotional, and sexual abuses, as well as myriad less egregious ways that family members damage each other.

            Still, the family is one institution in our culture in which the highest acknowledged goal is not the pursuit of money and power but the sharing of love, kindness, and nurturing. In other words, families are among the only entities currently trying to operate, even imperfectly, according to the new bottom line of loving and caring that we in the Network of Spiritual Progressives are advocating for the whole culture. For this reason, I’m wondering whether the concept can be saved. What would our communities look like if they truly supported the nurturing capacity of families? The following are some preliminary answers to that question.

            First and most obviously, no family would be discriminated against on the basis of the gender and sexual orientation of the parents. Legislating against stable, loving families because they are headed by adults of the same sex is simply counterproductive.

            Second, our culture would need to acknowledge that in order to thrive, families require the support of a larger community. Visiting my hometown in Ohio this weekend, I was reminded of how important people outside the bounds of my immediate family were to me as I was growing up. The time I spent with the family of my seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Berring, acted as a tension-release valve for our small family by giving me somewhere else to be during the worst of my middle-school chaos. I lived for the weekends I spent with my grandmother and her partner Margaret near the shores of Lake Erie. No family can sustain itself without support from people around it. This truth is openly acknowledged at Unitarian Universalist commitment ceremonies in which the officiating minister leads gathered friends and family in vowing to support the couple as they vow to support each other.

            A natural outgrowth of this community acknowledgment would be increased funding for family support services, including outreach, parenting education classes, family support groups, eldercare, and crisis nurseries. We must begin to acknowledge publicly that family life is challenging, that no parent is perfect, and that families need not be ashamed to seek help when they are having difficulty. Only by breaking down the walls of secrecy around family life—by making family stress an acceptable topic of conversation—can we begin to address the epidemic of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in American families.

            Teaching students family coping skills as part of public school curriculum would also help ease family stress. In schools and family support centers, family members could experiment with empathizing with each other’s point of view.

            The most significant change we could make to enhance family life, however, would probably be to change the bottom line in the rest of the culture. Much of the stress affecting families is created when family members bring home from work and school an unconscious attitude that other people are means to an end rather than sacred unto themselves. One effect of this attitude is that partners view themselves as consumers looking to get their needs met in relationships, and when one partner isn’t sufficiently meeting those needs, the logical decision (according to the old bottom line, the old way of deciding what is rational) seems to be to search for another partner who will. This view of a “marketplace of relationships” creates tremendous insecurity even in committed partnerships and in the families that those partnerships ostensibly support. The religious right might be correct in decrying the instability of marriage, but by scapegoating same-sex couples, feminists, and women who work outside the home, they avoid confronting the fact that the very economic systems their political representatives support are largely responsible for that instability.

            A new bottom line at work would naturally involve childcare and eldercare support, ample maternity and paternity leave, active cultivation of work-life balance, family days, and other programs designed to enhance workers’ family lives.  

            These ideas are just a starting place for thinking about what a progressive, family-friendly culture would look like. I welcome discussion and disagreement; you can email me. If you are interesting in discussing these sorts of ideas, please consider joining the Network of Spiritual Progressives. For more information, visit www.spiritualprogressives.com.

 

Much of the liberal political struggle of the last one hundred years has revolved around the acquisition and defense of a set of rights that we believe to be inherent to the dignity of every individual. Perhaps our greatest victories have emerged out of the women’s rights and African-American civil rights movements. The struggle for the civil rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered people as well as the defense of human rights for peoples around the world continue to demand our work and care, as does the protection of rights we have already won in the face of neoconservative attempts to erode them. I also find some of the arguments for extending rights to nonhuman animals compelling. The discourse of rights is essential to our understanding of freedom and self-determination, so what I’m about to say is in no way intended to imply that these struggles have not been significant or can now be abandoned.

            What I do intend to suggest is that the conventional discourse of rights is necessary but not sufficient to the progressive movement. In mainstream liberal thinking, each individual is free to live in any way he or she chooses as long as whatever he or she is doing does not infringe on another person’s right to exercise the same freedom. In theory, this approach may sound good, but in practice, it presents a number of thorny problems, the most familiar of which may be the issue of abortion. When viewed as a “rights” issue, the ethics of having an abortion comes down to an irresolvable dispute between the rights of a woman and the rights of her unborn child, a dilemma that forces those of us committed to reproductive freedom to argue that a fetus does not yet qualify as “life” and therefore does not have rights, an argument that that doesn’t seem to be very persuasive to a majority of Americans. The truth is that, because human beings are interdependent—maybe more so than ever, or maybe just more obviously than ever—there are few decisions any individual can make that don’t affect the rights of some other individual somewhere, or more likely, the rights of many individuals. Do I have a right to buy clothing made in a sweatshop? Well, in theory I do, but doing so will affect the rights of the people who work in that sweatshop and the rights of their family members. Do I have a right to look away as I walk by the homeless woman on the corner, as I am always tempted to do because to acknowledge her is so painful? Certainly I do, but my decision to do so absolutely has an effect on her experience (not to mention the effect that it has on me to deaden myself in that way). I think we need to move from thinking of ourselves as individual rights-bearers to viewing ourselves as relational beings always inextricably bound up in the web of life. The current globalization of extreme self-interest and greed may be the furthest logical extension an individualistic worldview.

            There is a real danger in what I am saying. Like many women, I’ve sometimes struggled to carve out my own life from the set of expectations that accompany my relationships; for many people in this country and around that world that effort is a life-or-death matter. We cannot afford to lose the freedom for self-determination for which we have struggled long and hard.

            Rather than thinking in terms of relationship or rights, I want to suggest that we think of our evolving liberal/progressive worldview in terms of a dialectic between these two, from which we now need to emerge into a synthesis of relationship and rights. One of the most compelling images for me of how such a synthesis might be imagined was elaborated by philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in his description of the ethical moment as the “face-to-face with the Other.” According to Levinas, each of us is, by the very nature of our being, by the fact that we are here taking up space, indebted to everyone else. We are from birth to death always already in relationship and bound by an ethical imperative to respond to other beings. However, the relationship is with what he calls “the face of the Other,” which in his conception is always mysterious, sacred, and in some way unknowable, and must be allowed to remain so. This mystery is the source of the Other’s right to self-determination. The Other is irreducible to any conception I might have of her or him.

This takes us into messy ethical territory and pretty much ensures that we can never know with self-righteous certainty that we are doing right by each other. For example, according to this model, the abortion issue becomes a complex meditation that demands equal consideration of the sacred, mysterious existence of both this individual woman and this unborn child. This is uncertain territory, which is, I think, exactly where the abortion debate belongs. Our insistence that the “right to abortion” is a simple, open-and-closed case is getting us exactly nowhere in contemporary America. We have to be willing to consider complexity, which means we have to be willing to engage in respectful dialogue with people who consider themselves pro-life. That may be the only way we’re going to prevent an all-out, categorical reversal of Roe v. Wade and the disastrous consequences that would entail.

As is almost always the case with these columns, this is just some preliminary thinking on my part, and I welcome feedback of any kind. How do you think we can both protect individual freedom and simultaneously take seriously our interdependence? Please email me your thoughts.

21,500 more troops, despite a mandate from the American people to end the bloodshed in Iraq.

For a sane strategy for dealing with this, see Rabbi Lerner's latest:
http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php?story=20070110184703996

That's me. You can see my 8 1/2 minutes of fame here.

I watch myself and I think not only "Wow, how alarming it is to see my head that big!" but also, wow, I really sound like what they'd call a "bleeding heart liberal."

But then I hear stories like the one I heard last night about a little boy I'll call James, and I think there ought to be a lot more hearts bleeding.

James is eight years old and has been in foster care since his birth here in Oakland to a mother addicted to crack cocaine. Shortly before Christmas, James was playing at recess with other kids in his special education class, and he leapt from the top of the sliding board, shattering his femur and his hip.

It's not easy for an eight-year-old to break a hip. Unless they have no calcium in their bones. Unless they haven't been fed at all for years except through the school lunch program.

After his fall, his teacher (and one of my personal heros, inner-city special ed teacher Katherine Fishman-Weaver) carried him into the office and spent more than two hours, as James lapsed in and out of consciousness, calling his foster family, trying to find someone who cared enough about him to okay medical treatment.

Eventually, the principal made the call to send James to the hospital without a guardian's okay. He was placed in a cast from his knees to above his waist, rendering him unable to sit up. It was then that his foster mother of eight years decided she didn't want him any more.

So James is recuperating in a group home, a ward of the state, with no one to bring him stuffed toys or comic books, no one to play games with him, no one even to help him turn over.

And we wonder why Oakland is the murder and crime capital of the country, when this is what happens to the kids who are trying to grow up there.

Yeah, there ought to be a lot more hearts bleeding. We ought to be drowning in blood and tears, as far as I'm concerned.

For three full days now I've been singing to myself, and the song that is staying with me is "Siyahamba," with English lyrics "We are marching, marching; we are marching in the light of God." This was the opening song in the interfaith service we planned to kick off the March on Washington on Saturday, and boy did that choir belt it out, until all 600 or so of us were on our feet singing, clapping, and dancing. That hour and a half early Saturday morning felt to me like a revival. And what we were reviving was our faith that the world can change, that we can build a world that operates on generosity and love.

Here's what I said in my welcome:

"We are here today to pray with our feet, to march in the light of God and in the Buddhafield of compassion, to stand for our fierce commitment to love in the face of violence, to mourn the dead and grieve with the wounded.

But I think we are also here to celebrate. We are here to celebrate the birth of a new consciousness in America, a consciousness that acknowledges that we are all one people, that what grieves you also grieves me, that abundance is more fun when it is shared than when it is hoarded, and that is is open-heartedness and not hatred, generosity and not domination, shared creativity and not shock and awe that will bring lasting peace to the United States and around the world."

I think it is so important to focus more energy on what we are FOR than on what we are AGAINST. So many of the signs I saw in the march, so many of the speeches I heard at the rally, were about how bad the Bush administration is and how much we need to end this war. I have no quarrel with those sentiments, but I also think we have to offer an alternative vision. To me, that vision is a foreign policy of generosity. We will make ourselves safer by expressing our concern for all the peoples of the world and by working with them to build a safer and more loving world for all.

Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote a more thorough report on how this message might permeate the peace movement. You can find it at http://files.tikkun.org/current/article.php?story=20070129014029798