Introduction
These notes are not a blueprint for how to write a school statement, or a script for how teachers should tackle hot-button topics. In fact, they grew out of a struggle over the fraught business of taking stands on issues as a school. Even below the university level, those of us with the ability to make statements as schools have felt some pressure to do so—and to get them right. Emerging from my own struggles as a school leader, these notes reflect on that mood and that task. They are nonlinear, and they do not build an argument that will slay all other arguments. They are trying to be both courageous and wise about the relationship between a school and the larger world. The borders are porous, and porous borders require a patience and humility and tenacity and nimbleness that formal statements usually crowd out. Read on for that if you’re interested. Set these notes aside if provisionality seems, to you, exactly what this moment doesn’t need. This is pre-work anyway—honest, in-progress pre-work.
Complexity and Simplicity
When is the opposite of complexity simplicity? When is the opposite of complexity clarity? How do we know if the situation we’re in is forcing us to choose between something that seems simple but is actually complicated, as opposed to a situation that requires clarity and assertion? When to declare, in other words, and when to explore?
A guiding question we regularly ask our students: How is this situation or topic or text more complex than it might at first seem? A spur to deeper thinking. A call for further study. This is the mode of being we’re good at as a school.
Conversation-Stoppers
The philosopher Richard Rorty spoke of “conversation-stoppers,” claims whose effect is to shut down further questioning or exploration. A drawing of lines. An establishment of sides. When are the moments in education when what is called for is a closing off rather than an opening up, and does school do both modes equally well, or is school always a place where conversation goes on pursuing new dimensions, new insights? In other words, what exactly is school for?
School as Forum
Jerome Bruner on school as a forum: “The most general implication is that a culture is constantly in process of being recreated as it is interpreted and renegotiated by its members. In this view, a culture is as much a forum for negotiation and renegotiating meaning and for explicating action as it is a set of rules or specifications for action. Indeed, every culture maintains specialized institutions or occasions for intensifying this ‘forum-like’ feature. Storytelling, theater, science, even jurisprudence are all techniques for intensifying this function—ways of exploring possible worlds out of the context of immediate need. Education is (or should be) one of the principal forums for performing this function—though it is often timid in doing so.”
Timid at least because exploring possible worlds is harder than declaring the boundaries of one valid world or the one valid framework for arranging the world.
The Reaction Mode of Statements
Once you make a statement, the absence of a next statement is conspicuous. If the aim of statements is solidarity, you enact selective solidarity because you will not respond to everything worthy of attention. So how much of our role as a school should involve solidarity with causes, issues, events, people out there in the city and the country and the world? And to not be cavalier about not doing this. Because we care about the whole person, the whole experience of everyone in our community, our forum. But still to wonder if solidarity, which is part of our individual work as citizens, as people with extended sympathies in a thousand directions, has anything to do with the immediate work of school as school.
Study Everything
The grandmother’s charge in the early Isaac Babel story: You must know everything. It made Babel a writer. It’s good for school too: study everything, think about everything, interrogate, ponder, contemplate, analyze, wonder, then try to do things with what you think you now know—and see what else you then need to know (about everything).
Humility
“It seems to me crucial—even ethically crucial—to treat with caution any rhetoric that purports to have all ethical goodness on its side.” —Maggie Nelson, On Freedom
Yes, and yet still we’re not paralyzed from making moral commitments. We still call some things good and some things reprehensible. We just don’t imagine that we have access to moral clarity that other people, who don’t agree with us, clearly don’t have. Conviction that is not utter clarity is still conviction. Teaching the dynamic of this, understanding the historical and biological contexts of our judgments and our meaning-making (and not being shy, even so, about conviction) is the work of school, not issuing platforms of commitments.
The Long Game of School
“We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” —Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
Those temples for tomorrow take patience and head-down daily work with kids. What schools do well: putting in that work.
The growth is quiet and mostly invisible. Thoreau said of his time at Walden Pond, “I grew in those seasons like corn in the night.” In the night. Which is to say, he grew unnoticed, when everything but the owls were asleep—when even he was asleep.
On students not only not needing to be protected from all challenges or difficulties but actually, on the contrary, needing the experience of resistance, obstacle, opposition—needing headwinds, to get strong. Which, for school, means balancing the protection of students from real harm with allowing them to experience discomfort, offense even, opposition, frustration, resistance.
We are probably always out of balance. We are tilted now toward surrounding students with protections and intervening hastily when there is discomfort. The pandemic amped up our urge to affirm. Things were hard enough. That was decent and understandable. Figuring out the balance now does not involve a formula or algorithm. It involves practical wisdom, judgment calls by teachers on the ground. We put human beings in the classroom to teach, not bots, for that reason.
Pluralism
We’re both preparing students for the pluralism of the broader city and country, and practicing the pluralism of our immediate community.
We expect that people will hold different points of view on very many things. Our goal is not to make sure we even out all that thinking into a ripple-free cloth. Our goal is to practice being together with respect and maybe even love while we navigate our differences. Not defensive either, but expansive. The joy of it. The possibility of school. The zest of it.
Sorting and Churning
We’re sorting too fast. When we put things in labeled buckets, many of the important ones spill over the rim. Sorting is only one aspect of thinking. Describing and redescribing and redescribing again: a deeper aspect. Make important things strange and new—apprehensions, not definitions. We want students looking up and out for what’s possible, not staring at the lines we draw around their thinking. Education as a building of imagination. Educators as artists-in-residence.
Art as a way of “churning the world.” The phrase is the painter Amy Sillman’s. Maggie Nelson affirms the practice of churning the world rather than treating the world as “something in need of defending, alchemizing, or otherwise proven socially worthy.” That’s art, not school. But still the idea of churning—metabolizing, turning it over, with effort as well as patience. What these notes are trying to do. What we want students to do.
Is everything complex? Does everything need churning? Aren’t some things there to behold and admire—or denounce?
Obama’s Race Speech
Candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Obama was called on to denounce and declare. His response involved nuance and narrative. Made it a teaching moment that some found profound and others beside the point. I remember one outraged talking head: Did he just throw his grandmother under the bus?
School is not the campaign trail. We are not running for anything. Everything is a teaching moment. Nuance and narrative are the mother tongue of school. You must study everything.
Attention Spans
The matter of our besieged attention spans, and the way statements reinforce a certain kind of quick attention. The way these churning notes are attempts to slow my own thinking down.
Middle Schools Don’t Have Foreign Policies
The New York Times article in the fall of 2023, with its cheeky line that every celebrity and middle school now has a foreign policy. Oof. Also: touché.
The Pre-Work of Statements
Figuring out what kind of situation I’m in, what mode of engagement is called for. Should I explore and complicate to get a deeper understanding, or should I iterate quickly and act, or should I hold and consider or venture a point of view and adapt my way forward? Knowing when to do what is one of the higher forms of thinking (and feeling) we try to offer our students. There’s no script for this.
Students and Statements
That all we’re doing in school is a preface to other statements, statements the school doesn’t make but that its students make with their later choices and engagements. Ours are notes for a preface for their later statements. They have work to do to get ready to write them. We have some experience in helping them with that.
What school is for.
To Be Continued
Introduction
These notes are not a blueprint for how to write a school statement, or a script for how teachers should tackle hot-button topics. In fact, they grew out of a struggle over the fraught business of taking stands on issues as a school. Even below the university level, those of us with the ability to make statements as schools have felt some pressure to do so—and to get them right. Emerging from my own struggles as a school leader, these notes reflect on that mood and that task. They are nonlinear, and they do not build an argument that will slay all other arguments. They are trying to be both courageous and wise about the relationship between a school and the larger world. The borders are porous, and porous borders require a patience and humility and tenacity and nimbleness that formal statements usually crowd out. Read on for that if you’re interested. Set these notes aside if provisionality seems, to you, exactly what this moment doesn’t need. This is pre-work anyway—honest, in-progress pre-work.
Complexity and Simplicity
When is the opposite of complexity simplicity? When is the opposite of complexity clarity? How do we know if the situation we’re in is forcing us to choose between something that seems simple but is actually complicated, as opposed to a situation that requires clarity and assertion? When to declare, in other words, and when to explore?
A guiding question we regularly ask our students: How is this situation or topic or text more complex than it might at first seem? A spur to deeper thinking. A call for further study. This is the mode of being we’re good at as a school.
Conversation-Stoppers
The philosopher Richard Rorty spoke of “conversation-stoppers,” claims whose effect is to shut down further questioning or exploration. A drawing of lines. An establishment of sides. When are the moments in education when what is called for is a closing off rather than an opening up, and does school do both modes equally well, or is school always a place where conversation goes on pursuing new dimensions, new insights? In other words, what exactly is school for?
School as Forum
Jerome Bruner on school as a forum: “The most general implication is that a culture is constantly in process of being recreated as it is interpreted and renegotiated by its members. In this view, a culture is as much a forum for negotiation and renegotiating meaning and for explicating action as it is a set of rules or specifications for action. Indeed, every culture maintains specialized institutions or occasions for intensifying this ‘forum-like’ feature. Storytelling, theater, science, even jurisprudence are all techniques for intensifying this function—ways of exploring possible worlds out of the context of immediate need. Education is (or should be) one of the principal forums for performing this function—though it is often timid in doing so.”
Timid at least because exploring possible worlds is harder than declaring the boundaries of one valid world or the one valid framework for arranging the world.
The Reaction Mode of Statements
Once you make a statement, the absence of a next statement is conspicuous. If the aim of statements is solidarity, you enact selective solidarity because you will not respond to everything worthy of attention. So how much of our role as a school should involve solidarity with causes, issues, events, people out there in the city and the country and the world? And to not be cavalier about not doing this. Because we care about the whole person, the whole experience of everyone in our community, our forum. But still to wonder if solidarity, which is part of our individual work as citizens, as people with extended sympathies in a thousand directions, has anything to do with the immediate work of school as school.
Study Everything
The grandmother’s charge in the early Isaac Babel story: You must know everything. It made Babel a writer. It’s good for school too: study everything, think about everything, interrogate, ponder, contemplate, analyze, wonder, then try to do things with what you think you now know—and see what else you then need to know (about everything).
Humility
“It seems to me crucial—even ethically crucial—to treat with caution any rhetoric that purports to have all ethical goodness on its side.” —Maggie Nelson, On Freedom
Yes, and yet still we’re not paralyzed from making moral commitments. We still call some things good and some things reprehensible. We just don’t imagine that we have access to moral clarity that other people, who don’t agree with us, clearly don’t have. Conviction that is not utter clarity is still conviction. Teaching the dynamic of this, understanding the historical and biological contexts of our judgments and our meaning-making (and not being shy, even so, about conviction) is the work of school, not issuing platforms of commitments.
The Long Game of School
“We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” —Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
Those temples for tomorrow take patience and head-down daily work with kids. What schools do well: putting in that work.
The growth is quiet and mostly invisible. Thoreau said of his time at Walden Pond, “I grew in those seasons like corn in the night.” In the night. Which is to say, he grew unnoticed, when everything but the owls were asleep—when even he was asleep.
On students not only not needing to be protected from all challenges or difficulties but actually, on the contrary, needing the experience of resistance, obstacle, opposition—needing headwinds, to get strong. Which, for school, means balancing the protection of students from real harm with allowing them to experience discomfort, offense even, opposition, frustration, resistance.
We are probably always out of balance. We are tilted now toward surrounding students with protections and intervening hastily when there is discomfort. The pandemic amped up our urge to affirm. Things were hard enough. That was decent and understandable. Figuring out the balance now does not involve a formula or algorithm. It involves practical wisdom, judgment calls by teachers on the ground. We put human beings in the classroom to teach, not bots, for that reason.
Pluralism
We’re both preparing students for the pluralism of the broader city and country, and practicing the pluralism of our immediate community.
We expect that people will hold different points of view on very many things. Our goal is not to make sure we even out all that thinking into a ripple-free cloth. Our goal is to practice being together with respect and maybe even love while we navigate our differences. Not defensive either, but expansive. The joy of it. The possibility of school. The zest of it.
Sorting and Churning
We’re sorting too fast. When we put things in labeled buckets, many of the important ones spill over the rim. Sorting is only one aspect of thinking. Describing and redescribing and redescribing again: a deeper aspect. Make important things strange and new—apprehensions, not definitions. We want students looking up and out for what’s possible, not staring at the lines we draw around their thinking. Education as a building of imagination. Educators as artists-in-residence.
Art as a way of “churning the world.” The phrase is the painter Amy Sillman’s. Maggie Nelson affirms the practice of churning the world rather than treating the world as “something in need of defending, alchemizing, or otherwise proven socially worthy.” That’s art, not school. But still the idea of churning—metabolizing, turning it over, with effort as well as patience. What these notes are trying to do. What we want students to do.
Is everything complex? Does everything need churning? Aren’t some things there to behold and admire—or denounce?
Obama’s Race Speech
Candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Obama was called on to denounce and declare. His response involved nuance and narrative. Made it a teaching moment that some found profound and others beside the point. I remember one outraged talking head: Did he just throw his grandmother under the bus?
School is not the campaign trail. We are not running for anything. Everything is a teaching moment. Nuance and narrative are the mother tongue of school. You must study everything.
Attention Spans
The matter of our besieged attention spans, and the way statements reinforce a certain kind of quick attention. The way these churning notes are attempts to slow my own thinking down.
Middle Schools Don’t Have Foreign Policies
The New York Times article in the fall of 2023, with its cheeky line that every celebrity and middle school now has a foreign policy. Oof. Also: touché.
The Pre-Work of Statements
Figuring out what kind of situation I’m in, what mode of engagement is called for. Should I explore and complicate to get a deeper understanding, or should I iterate quickly and act, or should I hold and consider or venture a point of view and adapt my way forward? Knowing when to do what is one of the higher forms of thinking (and feeling) we try to offer our students. There’s no script for this.
Students and Statements
That all we’re doing in school is a preface to other statements, statements the school doesn’t make but that its students make with their later choices and engagements. Ours are notes for a preface for their later statements. They have work to do to get ready to write them. We have some experience in helping them with that.
What school is for.
To Be Continued
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.