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April 24, 2025

Greetings!

What an exciting time to be a leader in government and public schools! Lots of titanic social changes present some great challenges and some great opportunities.

For over 100 years, our schools have been saddled by ‘Carangie Units’, established in 1906 to meet the needs of oligarchic industrialists more interested in exploiting human potential than encouraging the flourishing of the best parts of us.
Our modern world has created a huge bio-psycho-social crisis, dramatically exposed by Dane County’s two school shootings, as well as the more private despair, loneliness, phone addiction, and anxiety of our citizens. What in our modern culture is creating such pain and anguish, and what can our schools do in response?
Our world is going through rapid, profound changes which schools need to face. MMSD’s vision is that “every child will graduate from high school ready for college, career and community.” However, nobody knows what the world will look like in 20 years: what will the role of college be? What sort of careers will exist? And what will ‘community’ look like? I hope before MMSD spends any of our $500 million, it can answer these fundamental questions. Not doing so is like laying phone wires during the advent of cell phones.
Trump’s destruction of the Dept. of Education. As Abbé Faria said to Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo, “Abandonment becomes neglect, and neglect becomes our ally.” Our schools can finally choose to become human-centric places that meet the universal bio-psycho-social needs of our staff and students, catalysing human flourishing and an epidemic of eudaimonia!

Now is the chance to overhaul education to meet the bio-psycho-social-spiritual needs of the people: What will education look like, Human-reducing big box stores or human-nourishing Portuguese villages? What will be our foundational principles? An exciting time indeed!

Attached is a draft of a chart of universal human needs and some ideas of how our communities and schools can meet them.

And another that briefly outlines some concrete steps showing how schools and local governments can immediately address these trying times.

Thanks for reading. Do reach out if you’d like to talk further.

Richard Wagner
www.humane-dane.org

universal-need-meeting plan for county, city and schools

Handout for Monona to print

Hello,

In deciding how to respond to the recent school violence, we need to ask the right question: not “Why the shooting?”, but rather “Why the pain? Why the despair?” While the first question addresses the symptom, the second addresses the cause.

The short answer is that we have created a modern world that does not meet the universal, bio-psycho-social needs of humans; in fact, this modern world works to de-humanize us. Young people are canaries in the coal mine. We don’t blame the canary; instead, while we work to cure the canary, we also determine how the mine is deficient, and how we can re-form the mine so as not to harm more canaries. The question is, “Is our modern world meeting the needs of humans? And what can we do to change that?”

Gabor Mate says that evaluating a culture is easy: “to what degree does it meet the needs of human beings, and to what degree does it undermine the needs of human beings?” Let’s see what our culture is creating:

As is (and this is PRE covid; don’t blame the quarantine)

Conclusion

Our (Civilization? City? Way of life? Unsure of the word) is in crisis. The canaries are dying in the coal mine. Of course we need to heal the canaries, but we must also transform the coal mine. We have created a largely unnatural world that does not meet our needs and produces mental/emotional dis-ease. We need huge change, and huge change often requires courageous, profound, systemic change in both schools and in our county. We must create a civilization that meets the basic, universal, bio/psycho/social needs of the people.

Here are my recommendations for both school and county:

School recommendation

Creating in the district a culture of compassion and humanity by--

Training the existing staff from school board to (fill in with whomever you feel has the least power in schools) in Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model of the Brain and Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication.

Taking advantage of the incredible plasticity of the young human brain, and pour the lion’s share of our resources into PK-2nd(?) grade by--

Making the meeting the universal needs of staff and students, along with the skill of self-regulation, the prime directives of 4K to 2nd(?) grade by--

Revolutionizing early curriculum to emphasize community, curiosity, play, and wonder over academic rigor, and--

Teaching, explicitly and through modeling, the skills of emotional and social intelligence to everyone.

Recruiting/hiring/equipping an army of ‘mental health nurses’ to adopt classrooms or children in classrooms to be a positive, regulating presence in the child’s life. I imagine lots of retirees would love to be part of this.

Stopping the giving of unhealthy, food-like substances (and creating terrible eating habits and bad mental and physical health) to children. Serve them healthy, delicious, made-from-scratch, whole foods in order to build good eating habits and health.

And continuing this approach through the rest of their schooling, adding the opportunity to engage in real work, starting cottage industries, working with hands, negotiating a life plan. . . One example: bring aquaponics into the schools, gradually releasing responsibility to students: it’s real work, and it’s interdisciplinary (biology, chemistry, culinary, construction, business(?)).

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Sadly, producing healthy children only to send them into an unhealthy world is cruel. So we need to change the world we have created into a world that meets our universal human needs. We need to transform the coal mine.

We live unnatural lives in a profoundly unnatural civilization. In the following chart, the first column describes how humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years; the second describes how we now live:

from The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate

County recommendation

Make this the vision of Dane County: walkable neighborhoods filled with locally-funded, locally-owned businesses selling locally- produced goods and services, all connected by rail-based public transportation. (Like every great metro area in the world).

Use the gems of Dane County as a model of development: Willy Street, Monroe Street, State Street, Atwood Avenue, downtown Sun Prairie. . . all places that create community, create wealth, and are worth caring about.

Immediately stop approving auto-based developments. No huge, single-family houses on windy streets or huge apartment buildings that sentence each resident to an isolating, alienating, auto-based future and whose maintenance is massively expensive.

Immediately stop approving franchises and transnational businesses, the companies that extract wealth from a community instead of developing the wealth of a community.

Start developing walkable neighborhoods filled with locally-funded, locally-owned businesses selling locally-produced goods and services, all connected by rail-based public transportation.

Establish a local investment exchange, so all citizens of Dane County can invest in locally-owned businesses.

Establish a ‘make-up-the-difference fund’ so everyone can afford to buy locally-produced goods and services, especially food.

Establish a rail-based transportation system today.

Thank you for reading. I, and the citizens or Dane County look forward to your response,

Richard Wagner

Resources

School changes

Dr. Gabor Maté Speaks to Psychotherapists

Bruce D. Perry: Social & Emotional Development in Early Childhood [CC]

Jonathan Haidt: The Three Terrible Ideas Weakening Gen Z and Damaging Universities and Democracies

Emotional Intelligence Curriculum

Dance and Drama and mental health and emotional intelligence