Seeking Common Ground, for Schools & Walmarts
Editor's note: Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, Deborah Meier's post for this week is being published one day early. Happy Thanksgiving all!
Dear Pedro,
Strategy has to follow from where adults and young people are—that's the big lesson I learned from being a classroom teacher, especially of 4- and 5-year-olds. Kindergarten, I'm reminded, would be like trying to keep 30 corks simultaneously under water at one time. (Mark Twain?) But since children are not corks, there's another answer: listening to them in action.
This means that we won't and can't have a thoroughly consistent set of "progressive" school demands—since different cities and communities and groupings are differently affected by the new "deforms." This requires us to be kind to each other as we sometimes take different paths to shared goals. It's what community organizing often fails at—uniting communities organized around different priorities!
The workers at Walmart are engaged in strike action. It won't end up with great concessions, I suspect. But
Dear Pedro,
Strategy has to follow from where adults and young people are—that's the big lesson I learned from being a classroom teacher, especially of 4- and 5-year-olds. Kindergarten, I'm reminded, would be like trying to keep 30 corks simultaneously under water at one time. (Mark Twain?) But since children are not corks, there's another answer: listening to them in action.
This means that we won't and can't have a thoroughly consistent set of "progressive" school demands—since different cities and communities and groupings are differently affected by the new "deforms." This requires us to be kind to each other as we sometimes take different paths to shared goals. It's what community organizing often fails at—uniting communities organized around different priorities!
The workers at Walmart are engaged in strike action. It won't end up with great concessions, I suspect. But
