Culture  Change

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 our recommendations for transforming schooling:

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(?)).

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. Let’s use this opportunity to create a district that meets the eudaimonic needs of staff and students! Let’s make MMSD a destination district.

1. For over 100 years, our schools have been saddled by ‘Carnegie Units’, established in 1906 to meet the needs of oligarchic industrialists more interested in exploiting human potential than promoting human flourishing.  

2. Our modern world has created a huge bio-psycho-social crisis, dramatically exposed by Dane County’s recent 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?

3. Late-stage capitalism, A.I. and Trumpism are stimulating 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 on buildings, it must answer these fundamental questions. Not doing so is like laying landline phone wires while Steve Jobs brandishes the iPhone.

4. 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!

Will MMSD have the courage to make this vital transformation?

Now is the chance to completely re-imagine education to meet the bio-psycho-social-spiritual needs of the people. To paraphrase Russell, a truly educated person could, if necessary, “re-form an entire school district from scratch”.
So, starting from scratch: Why do we have school? What will education look like, human-reducing, big-box stores or human-nourishing, “Portuguese villages”? What will be our foundational principles? An exciting endeavor indeed!

Here is a chart of universal human needs and how different entities can address them: