Month: April 2019

debunking

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“A body of men, holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by any body.” —Thomas Paine 1737-1809

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.” —Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s fictional detective, via @duncan_stuart

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connecting leadership

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What is leadership? In the past year I have written many posts on the subject from a variety of perspectives. Much of it is about ‘connected leadership’ — where people must be both teachers and learners. Neither training programs, nor even coaching, are enough.

Leadership by example through experience becomes the key. Connected leadership is more feminine, retrieving gender balance. It is not about individuals, but connected groups of people, especially engaged citizens. A networked society needs more universal mothers, not authoritative fathers.

We don’t need better leaders. We need organizations and structures that let all people cooperate and collaborate to get work done. Positional leadership is a master-servant, parent-child, teacher-student, employer-employee relationship. It puts too much power in the hands of individuals and blocks human networks from realizing their potential. Changing leaders will not change this type of  system from which they emerged. We need to change the system.

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the confinement of curriculum

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For the past several weeks I have spent an afternoon in a fifth grade classroom with 30 students, aged 11-12 years old. My wife is artist-in-residence for this class and I, along with a few other adults, am her helper. The students are making ‘trash art’, recycling everyday items into new creations. It has been a pleasure watching the students envision,  problem-solve, and create. The class time passes in the blink of an eye. But there is one aspect of public school that I find extremely frustrating — the one hour class.

The fact that the teacher, who is outstanding, can get 30 kids to focus after arriving from a completely different class, is incredible. However, at the end of the class almost every student wants to keep on working. They are immersed in their creations. But the system will not allow it. Popular science [fiction] states that we now have the attention span of a goldfish. Our schools have not helped with this at all.

Instead, they have taught generations the lesson of the bells.

“Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.” —John Taylor Gatto 1935-2018

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