How can schools shape better leaders?
Teaching kids how to really read, listen, and respond will shape our future -- and teaching ourselves how to do the same could radically change our present.
Ghassan Gammoh told me that he believed the better discussions will “create more empathy, [and] create more diplomats.”
Diplomats?
When I teach, I’m not usually thinking about training a specific community. Especially at the secondary level, teachers are tasked with an opposite task: training students with radically divergent future paths to meet a standard of knowledge. Ideally, as I’ve discussed before on TWT, the skills and knowledge from class will be maximally transferable to situations beyond a given classroom and beyond a school. Assessments, too, should whenever possible mimic or transfer directly to authentic real-world or future-world settings. Teaching class discussion with an eye to a very specific population seemed, to me, like a curious choice.
After attending and teaching at Georgetown, too, I’ve become a little bit allergic to rhetoric surrounding “training future global leaders,” which is a central, and annoying, thread at that particular institution. My bias is also defined in part, or even maybe in whole, by my ignorance of what it means to actually train people like diplomats. Though Ghassan isn’t a diplomat himself, and therefore probably also has some limitations to his own knowledge of what it means to make and be a good diplomat, his cross-cultural childhood and adolescence and his years teaching History in cosmopolitan and international environments give him plenty more authority on the subject than I have. Even if he didn’t have that authority, I think that it makes sense to entertain his thought.
The most cynical idea of the purpose of school says that school mostly exists as a holding pen, a receptacle for otherwise-feral kids in a post-child-labor-law world. Though most people seem to think that school is more than just a place to put children, the Covid-19 pandemic affirmed that that’s a more central function of schools than most people want to realize. Once working adults realized how much they relied on care for their dependents, many recognized that they were willing to fight for schools to be open no matter the cost. People want to think that school exists for a higher purpose, but American society’s recognition that school is a key cog in the machine of society (and specifically the economy), regardless of how well schools function, is critical to building investment in its success. That recognition was, in fact, a major stimulus for me to begin this newsletter.
I would understand if a reader furrowed his brow at the idea that America has just come around to recognizing schools’ social function. After all, education is considered a right of all students, and issues like school choice are central to elections from the local to the federal level. At the same time, education, while often used as a predictor of economic outcomes or a variable in comparative studies, seems rarely to factor into discussions of national economy. Everyone knows that how much school you have and where you have that education has a strong influence on your earning potential (your personal financial capacity), especially if you aren’t white, male, and/or come from a wealthy background. But school rarely seems to matter, tangibly, in discussions of the bigger system -- until now. In a capitalist world, once you factor into economic outcomes, you’ve “made it.” People start to care.
Ghassan’s comment about training diplomats strikes me, in retrospect, because it touches on the fact that teachers know but the rest of society often forgets -- that everyone who does everything was trained for it, either through curriculum or through unspoken hidden curriculum -- in part at school. When people say that they learned nothing in school, or that everything they learned they learned in other settings, I have to think: you spent a lot of time in that place to have been completely unformed by it. What happens at school matters, and it plays out in the public sphere, not only in the knowledge or skills that the general workforce possesses, but also in the way that the general public thinks about and treats others. This is why Ghassan’s idea -- that better class discussions create better diplomats -- makes so much sense to me.
Even, perhaps especially, in ugly, terrible systems, great leaders can arise. Intelligence springs from all kinds of places. But does goodness? Can we make goodness flourish? If so, how? Though I always hesitate that schools should teach morals -- because so much of morality is variable -- the world in which we live, and the rising awareness that education isn’t just a preamble to but a central force in the world around me, makes me believe that goodness -- training and teaching it -- has to be part of my practice. A beloved -- not universally, but certainly by me -- teacher at my high school has a small sign on her door that reads, simple, “GOODNESS + KNOWLEDGE.” It’s part of the motto of the school. I’ve always seen it as ironic, because so many from that institution haven’t always stood for goodness or have proven wanting in their knowledge, but the spirit of it matters -- that the pursuit of both in equal measure is the noblest aim. A better discussion, a classroom more committed to discourse, can bring goodness into the world. Yes, it matters. Yes, it’s worth remembering.
Effective and equitable class discussions aren’t the only avenues by which educators can and do work to foster that alchemy. A school’s culture shapes students’ prioritizes, and what it punishes and doesn’t matters not only for the way that it reflects broader societal issues but also for the way that it shapes future leaders (Charlotte-Mecklenberg School District, the district that surrounded the college I attended, is a terrifying example of how proximate high school issues are to broader social patterns, and a clarion call for schools to educate students through the values they uphold). Classrooms and class skills also tangibly shape students’ access (or lack thereof) to listening skills and critical thinking that we as a society need. In a school system that fosters attention primarily to what a student needs to succeed, we would do well to foster first an ethic of what we as a society need.
Yesterday, I worked with my juniors as they reread and built understanding of an academic essay. It’s one of the first that they’ve read in their school years, part of the bridge to college coursework that comes later in high school. It was an essay about the musical Hamilton, which we watch during our unit on the Revolution. I asked them about the world of memes that center on primarily white guys who like to read a whole piece of writing and decide to respond to one point made in that piece, often in a way that ignores the rest of the argument. Another version of this is a response written based on a cursory skim of the argument, which is especially offputting when the writing at hand has been deeply considered and heavily edited. It’s always a laughable phenomenon when you see it, but it’s also, sometimes, scary; regardless of whether or not this moment is harmless or harmful, it’s endemic in society, especially on the internet. The students recognized these kinds of moments immediately and laughed, but nervously -- in the context of the classroom, they had to realize, I was shining a light back on student practice. Without training and accountability, most students do the bare minimum to hear and comprehend the material in front of them.
Maybe our minds reach for the simplest understanding of what we hear, but our hearts shouldn’t. What I propose, instead, as a more concerted effort to grasp complexity and present it, discuss it, in the clearest means possible. Such skills are required of truly effective diplomats, senators, school leaders, and, in my dream-world, citizens.
You can’t teach goodness, but what you can teach are skills and disciplines that might lead to it. I’d add to Ghassan’s idea that better discussions will lead to better diplomats by saying that emphasis on deeper reading, especially of complex texts (versus a volume-focused curriculum) will radically change the way that people work with one another. More complex writing assessments, which move away from standardization and easy-to-grade measures but ask students to apply and exhibit deep understanding, will ask students to view opinion not only as a right, but a responsibility, and one that carries with it a shared responsibility to know what you’re talking about first. You can’t learn this on the internet.
Ghassan was, at the time of the interview, “interested in starting an IB [International Baccalaureate] online program,” because he saw opportunities for “collaboration and global outreach, which can raise empathy considerably.” Even though, in his eyes, “nothing can replace the physical presence of being at school,” an innovative, future-focused approach to education -- including technology integration -- can help to backward-design us to better civic and foreign policy ends. I was not the only educator who, on January 6, 2020, watched the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol and asked: “who taught these people what this democracy is supposed to mean?” The answer is complicated, but schools have something to do with it.
That event filled me with a sense of civic responsibility that I’ve never felt before. It should also shine a mirror back on the public in the way that my discussion with my juniors shed a light back on their own behavior. The basest political behaviors, I’ve started to see, often arise from heavy concentrations of phenomena that are in the water and of which many, if not most, citizens are guilty. If an adult never learned the skills I’m talking about in school, it’s time to learn now. If a school or district hasn’t made space for teachers to prioritize these ends, they must now. Maybe this is the new civics.
After the insurrection, I wrote this op-ed about the ways in which learning means changing your mind. What Ghassan’s interview reminds me is that that concept connects to a broader set of skills, and those skills can change the world -- if we can challenge ourselves to teach them, and if we can humble ourselves enough to learn them.