School as Community
Posted on September 14, 2014 by debmeier
While waxing romantic about families in my last blog, and meaning every single word, I’m also reminded that there’s good reasons behind my concern with using family-like metaphors to describe good schools or good colleagues. The distinctions between them are too important to ignore. One of the most dangerous being that our students already have families whose ties of loyalty usually come before their loyalty to their school and us. That’s how it should be. And the same is probably true for the faculty, of course. We get in trouble when we forget this. But there’s an essential link between what we mean by community and family. It has something to do with trust.
Even within a good family, trust is not 100%. There are times…. and similarly, in the larger world, there are important reasons for families to educate their children in coping with situations that require distrust. For some this wariness covers a broad terrain—and again, wisely so. The wisdom of life experience needs to be passed along to the young, and trust is sometimes the victim.
The necessary tension between trust and distrust is also at the heart of democracy. How to put our own interests first while also not losing sight of our connection with “others_–including the entire species! We’re all dependent on each other in some ways for the health and welfare of the entire planet, our fellow citizens, our tribe, our particular blood- related family….and ourselves. How to wed narrow self-interest to the self-interest of the planet can’t be reduced to an algebraic equation.
Alas.
The balancing act that putting this all together under one roof involves is tricky, yields to no clear formulas or recipes and is in many ways a matter of trial and error.
That’s where democracy comes in. It allows for trial and error. It is a trial and error undertaken by ordinary human beings, who have different self-interests! An impossible dream? Perhaps, but working on it is worthwhile given the alternatives.
Some kind of mutual respect sustains it, enriches it and allows sufficient trust to grow over the centuries? How can one balance such trust with skepticism? What essential character traits makes this more than an idle dream and how do family and school School as Community | Deborah Meier on Education: