The teacher can determine whether she has games that the student can play, the purpose of which is to help students learn the consonant sounds (there are several such games commercially available). If these games need more players she may ask the rest of the class if anyone else is interested in learning the consonant sounds as a means of getting started in reading.
The teacher can determine whether she has programmed materials that the students can use to learn the consonant sounds.
The teacher can determine whether there are other students in the class who know the consonant sounds under consideration who would be willing to teach them to the students wanting to learn them.
The teacher can determine whether she herself has the time to teach the sounds to the students.
The teacher in question related to me that usually by the second day of class all of the students have decided on at least one objective and have started working toward it. I would like to follow up on the students who committed themselves to learning six consonant sounds. Let us assume that they choose to play a Consonant Lotto Game and now believe they know the six consonant sounds. They might approach the teacher saying, “We think we know the sounds now.”
If the teacher has not developed procedures for students measuring their own performance, she might then check to see whether the students have learned the consonant sounds. If they demonstrate proficiency in the sounds, the teacher notes this in their folders. As soon as the students learn to print they are responsible for keeping their own folders up to date by keeping a record of every objective they reach. Twice each semester the students will be expected to arrange a conference between their parents, the teacher, and themselves. The students preside at this meeting using their folders to review for the parents and teacher what they learned to date.
All the students in this classroom follow the same procedure described. As students finish working on an objective, they or the teacher records it in their folders, another objective is arrived at mutually with the teacher, and the process is repeated. If the teacher sees that certain students are doing an inordinate amount of work in reading but avoiding math, she would express concern about this imbalance and encourage the students to pursue more math objectives. However, at no time does the teacher impose objectives on the students.
The parents have been pleased with the freedom and flexibility of this approach to teaching. They were also pleased with how much their children learned and enjoyed learning. In fact, the parents were so pleased that they petitioned the school board to allow their children to remain with the teacher for a second year in order to continue the program. I am happy to report that the school board so valued the results the teacher obtained that they have asked her to counsel other teachers who want to arrange their classrooms in this manner.
I fully realize that I am not presenting anything you have not heard many times before. And I can already hear your objections, depending on where your school is and what your resources are.
If I have somehow led you to believe that I think the shift from a Domination class or school to a Life-Enriching class or school is an easy one, let me assure you that is not the case. I have personally been involved in the struggle and have been disappointed by enough failed attempts to establish such schools to know how challenging it can be. Swimming against the current, going against the established, traditional system, is never easy.
What gives the idea of Life-Enriching Education that I propose a chance of working isn’t the technical aspects of it, the self-correcting materials and peer tutoring and travel agent teacher I have described. What is needed to make these techniques work, not in just a few isolated schools but in all schools, is what lies at the heart of Life-Enriching Schools and all Life-Enriching organizations: the goal to help one another, to make life more wonderful for one another, as evidenced in an interdependent learning community.
Using Nonviolent Communication skills, constantly asking of students, teachers, administrators, and ourselves, “What are you feeling and needing?” we actually can meet everyone’s needs. No longer will the goal be merely to reduce violence and vandalism, to keep kids in school as long as possible, to get higher scores on the proficiency tests than the kids in the next county do, to get more kids into college than we did last year, or to improve our students’ showing on the SAT exams.
No longer will students and teachers alike be given only two choices, to submit or rebel. When there is only one goal, to get everyone’s needs met, classrooms and schools can be transformed. Because what we discover is that everyone’s needs are the same.
CHAPTER 6
Transforming Schools
The Problems at Hand
We are obviously in need of radically different organizations than those that now control the quality of life on our planet. Millions of people are starving each year even though the planet provides enough food for everyone. We live in the midst of horrifying psychological, physical, and institutional violence.
I am in agreement with psychologist George Miller when he writes: “The most urgent problems of our world today are the problems we have made for ourselves. They have not been caused by some heedless or malicious inanimate Nature, nor have they been imposed on us as punishment by the will of God. They are human problems whose solutions will require us to change our behavior and our social institutions.”
Life-Enriching Education focuses on how teachers can provide learning opportunities that will empower students to be an active force in solving these human problems. They can learn how to enrich their own lives and help others enrich theirs.
Domination Organizations
How did we come to the human problems that create the unnecessary human suffering and violence plaguing us? In her books The Chalice and the Blade and her recently published The Power of Partnership, cultural historian and evolutionary philosopher Riane Eisler shows how what she identifies as the struggle between the partnership model and the dominator or domination model goes back thousands of years. Riane Eisler, who personally knew the horror of having to flee the Nazis as a child, has shown in her study of thirty thousand years of human evolution (The Chalice and the Blade, 1987) how our problems emerged from the conquest and suppression of an earlier partnership culture by the domination culture in prehistory.
Drawing from Eisler’s work, author and theologian Walter Wink also maintains that for about ten thousand years over much of our planet, human organizations have been functioning as “Domination organizations,” controlling our spirituality, social structures, education, and human development (The Powers That Be, 1999). Wink defines Domination organizations as characterized by unequal distribution of resources and privileges, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain order—systems in which a few people dominate many. We have these systems represented in the family, schools, religious organizations, work organizations, and the government. They all operate by the same rules.
Like Eisler, Wink further claims that such systems are based on a spirituality that portrays humans as essentially selfish and violent. Given that, we need to have Domination systems in which the least vile of us gets to control the others. Over the centuries, there has been more than a little bit of argument about who was going to be at the top of the list.
These people get to control others through the use of power-over tactics—punishment and reward, basically. They get to punish those who don’t obey. That’s the only way to educate people, to teach them a lesson, to teach them how bad they are, and who deserves what. This depiction of human beings justifies domination and control by those claiming superiority.
Wink is obviously not describing only totalitarian governments such as that of Nazi Germany when he writes of Domination systems. Even in the United States, we can see abundant examples of privileged groups of people sitting in positions of power, getting the best jobs, living in the best neighborhoods, and of course getting the best educations, with an air of entitlement that makes equal opportunit
y appear a lie.
Once we are aware of the power of Domination systems, it is easier to see that a transformation to Life-Enriching systems offers a better opportunity to meet the needs of all our citizens. I would like to educate this and future generations of children to create organizations whose goal is to meet human needs, to make life more wonderful for themselves and each other. From that awareness, we can use the education of our children as a place to start.
Conflict Resolution
Two key issues in any school are how order is to be maintained and how conflicts are to be resolved. One of the components necessary for creating a Life-Enriching School is the skill of resolving conflicts in mutually satisfying ways. In Domination Schools the teachers and administrators decide on the basis of their experience that they “know what’s best” for the student and make rules and regulations enforced by punishment and rewards. In this method of establishing rules and regulations, the teachers and administrators may or may not consult with students. However, the teachers and administrators ultimately make the decision unilaterally, basing their right to do so on their expertise and experience.
In Life-Enriching Education, whatever rules and regulations are needed to maintain order are decided on through dialogue by the staff and students working together, being respectful of everyone’s needs. This process does not involve anyone giving in, giving up, or compromising.
To maintain order and resolve conflicts in this way requires the staff and students to be competent in Nonviolent Communication skills. Staff and students need to be literate in connecting with one another’s feelings and needs. After this quality of connection is reached, both sides engage in problem solving to find actions that can be taken that will fulfill all parties’ needs.
It is important that before anyone agrees to carry out these actions that she checks inside to be sure she is motivated to act with the sole purpose of fulfilling needs, with no trace of doing anything to avoid punishment, guilt, or shame. Nor would she want to act out of a sense of duty or obligation, or in order to get a good grade or any other extrinsic reward.
Those who object to maintaining order and resolving conflicts in this way often sound like this: “Well, these kids have got to learn respect for authority! That’s what we’ve got to do, to get these kids to respect authority!” And I usually respond, “Do you want to teach kids to respect authority, or to fear what you can do to them when you’re in a position of authority?” Many of us, educated in a Domination System, are not aware of the distinction between the two.
I would define respect for authority in this way: in a classroom, if the teacher knows something that the students value, and she offers to teach it to them in a noncoercive way, they will learn to have respect for her authority. But she has earned that respect, not demanded it. The student is the final authority about whether or not the teacher has authority, a truth which students clearly demonstrate every day. Fear of authority masking as respect for authority is easy to get; just give the people with titles the legal power to mete out punishments and rewards.
Another way to describe this distinction is to explain the difference between self-discipline and obedience. If obedience is what you want, punishment and rewards work well. A dog is taught obedience that way. A cockroach can be put in a T-maze, given some food if it turns right, an electric shock if it turns left, and taught obedience. But if what you want is self-discipline, I suggest you don’t use any coercive tactics, because they get in the way of self-discipline. A self-disciplined student or staff member acts out of a certain consciousness of his own values, of how what he is doing will contribute to his own and others’ well-being, not out of a desire for reward or a fear of punishment.
Many teachers feel helpless when told not to motivate students using punishment, reward, guilt, or shame, or a sense of obligation to duty. What’s left, they ask? What is left are connections between people and a desire to contribute to one’s own self-fulfillment and the well-being of others. In my experience, these basic human needs can be met by learning to use the skills of Nonviolent Communication. We share what is valuable to us, why we would encourage others to consider it, and listen to their feelings and needs in return.
Notice that this requires that teachers be fluent in Nonviolent Communication even when the children they teach are often coming from Domination system backgrounds. So self-discipline as opposed to obedience (or disobedience) doesn’t happen overnight. Very often the first weeks in a school attempting to become a Life-Enriching School can be chaotic.
I was once asked to help establish a Life-Enriching School for students who had all either dropped out or been expelled from public school. We wanted to demonstrate that Life-Enriching Education could reach students that the public schools were unable to handle. My job was to prepare the teachers to work in this school.
For financial reasons I was limited to four days to prepare the teachers. As a result, I was not able to provide the depth of training I would have liked. These were not even professional teachers, by the way; because of budget constraints we had put in a call to universities for volunteers to teach in this school. So here were kids that the public school couldn’t reach, and a group of people that were good-hearted volunteers, and I was given four days to train them.
Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the teachers did not understand how to establish rules and regulations and resolve conflicts as I had suggested.
I was out of town the first few days that the school was open. When I got back, the first message I received was from the principal: “Get down here quick! They’re thinking of closing the school. It’s chaos!” I rushed down to the school. The poor teachers looked like they had aged twenty years in less than a week.
When I heard what was going on from the principal, I said, “Bring about ten of the kids into a room with me, the ones that are creating most of the trouble, so we can get some order in the school.”
Eight students, ages eleven to fourteen, were selected by the principal. I began by introducing myself to the students and the following discussion ensued.
MBR: I’m very upset about the teachers’ reports that things are getting out of hand in many of the classes. I want very much for this school to be successful. Can you tell me what’s going on, and help me fix it?
Will: The teachers in this school are a bunch of fools, man.
MBR: I’m not clear, Will, what they are doing that leads you to say that. Could you give me an example?
Will: No matter what the students do, they just stand around grinning like a bunch of fools.
MBR: Are you feeling disgusted because you want more order in the school?
Will: That’s right, man. No matter what anybody does the teachers just stand there smiling like fools. Like, he (pointing to one of the students in the group) came to school yesterday with a pint of whiskey in his back pocket. The teacher standing at the door saw it, and he just pretended like he didn’t, and he’s smiling, saying, “Good morning, good morning!”
At this point all of them jumped in to give me one example after another of how passive the teachers were.
MBR: Fine, thank you, enough, enough. You’ve answered my question, but now I want your help in creating order in the school.
Joe: The teachers ought to get a rattan (a stick carried by administrators in the public schools in that region to administer corporal punishment).
MBR: Joe, are you suggesting that you want the teachers to hit students when they bother others?
Joe: That’s the only way they’re (students) going to stop.
MBR: I’m discouraged if that’s the only way. I’m worried about that way of settling things and want to learn other ways.
Ed: Why?
MBR: Several reasons. Like if I get you to stop horsing around in school by hitting you with a stick. I’d like you to tell me what happens if three or four of you that I’ve hit with sticks in class are out by my car when I go home.
Ed: (Smiling) Then you better ha
ve a big stick, man.
MBR: That’s what bothers me about getting order that way. It turns us into enemies. Remember, when we invited you to attend this school, we said we wanted to create a school where everyone works together in a cooperative way. If we get order by hitting people, I’m afraid we’ll not have the connections between teachers and students that I’d like us to have in this school.
Ed: You could kick the troublemakers out of school.
MBR: I’m discouraged with that idea, too. I want to show that there are ways of solving differences in school without kicking people out.
Will: If a dude ain’t doin’ nothin’ except causing trouble, how come you can’t send him to a “Do Nothing Room?”
MBR: I’m not sure what you’re suggesting, Will. Could you explain?
Will: Sometimes you come to school and you don’t feel like doing anything except causing trouble. Maybe your father beat the hell out of you before you left for school. So you don’t feel like doin’ nothing except causing trouble. So have a room where someone can go until they feel like coming back and doing their schoolwork.
(I noticed that the other students were nonverbally showing understanding and approval of Will’s suggestion.)
MBR: Are you suggesting, Will, a room we could ask people to go to if their behavior is keeping other students from learning?
Will: That’s right. No use their being in class if they ain’t doing nothing but causing trouble.
MBR: I’ m excited about that idea as long as we can get across to the students who are keeping others from learning that we’re not trying to punish them by asking them to go to the room, but simply trying to protect the rights of those who want to learn.
After further discussion, we all agreed that the students with me in that meeting would go to all the classrooms and suggest that we try out the following: If someone was too upset to do any schoolwork and their behavior was interfering with the learning of others, the teacher would request that they go to a “Do Nothing Room” where they would stay until ready to come back to class without disrupting others.
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