"True" Character Education

Posted on Nov 27th, 2009 by

Los

www.nytimes.com

THE OTHER EDUCATION Op-Ed piece, Nov. 26, 2009 by David Brooks

Brooks notes in this great Op-Ed piece about the "second" education, that which involves emotional resonance. This might be news to some readers, yet the very fact that emotional matters have been amputated from education should be right up there along with "high test scores".

But aren't parents and the religious institutions in charge of this aspect of children's maturation? When they were synchronized into a total 4 quadrant understanding, a matrix that at least meshed level for level, stage for stage, yes.

But now that matrix is off-kilter. What on earth am I referring to? Those who know of the Wilber-Combs lattice will understand this immediately. For those who are wondering what all of this means, it is really quite simple. Think of the interior and exterior, and stages of conscious development within either the collective and singular, of human understanding as being plotted on an X-Y axis. If, for example, we have Vito Corleone living in a community that respects power in the hands of the strongest and most dangerous, then Vito is living a congruent life.

If a person from an intentional spiritual community based on a high level of spirituality would move into this community, that individual would not be in congruence, and would experience a terrible angst or psychic pain. He would most probably develop physical manifestations as well.

Brooks observes astutely that objective information "walks in the front of the room", meaning transferred didactically. The emotional universe is transferred in another "universe", which we know is a different kind of knowing. He does remark that society does not pay nearly enough attention to this type of knowing, through the Left hand path.

Along with the arts, which Brooks highlights, we might mention the advent of positive psychology as it pertains to teens, who are in dire need of honest, accurate, and personally resonant knowledge of their own strengths. I am not speaking about the ersatz "everyone is the same" that kids know intuitively is dishonest, and demeaning, and which fails to add to self-esteem.

I was deeply involved with the area known as "character education", and was nominated by NJ's Governor to sit on the official commission. This served to be an instructive application of Integral education. "Character ed" consists of value-laden content that points more to the negative, to the pathological, and presumes that the "right" moral ethic can be taught didactically, an example of theory in use vs. espoused theory.

In many of these courses, the lessons involve questions such as, "If you find $ 50 on the street, do you keep it or hand it over to a policeman?" of course I exaggerate a bit, but not by much. The teens know which answer is the "right one"; yet when I taught my seniors Kohlberg's moral inventory, most admitted to Level 2, which is at a pre-conventional.

So what on earth is the good, positive news here?

What is positive here is that every child possesses at least 3 types of intelligences among the MI, and each child hungers for positive, true self-esteem. The esteem does not come just from being handed a little statuette. It comes from challenging himself and finding himself capable of meeting that challenge.

I was always saddened when I had my students do their multiple intelligences test, their enneagram, and MBTI. It was so distinct from their SATs or GPAs, that they could not believe that they had competencies. This is the true emotional health of our children, and it comes from the emotional side, the "second" education, which we need to integrate with the objective side.

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Hyper-Competition in Teen Culture

Posted on Nov 26th, 2009 by

Los

It was my sociology class again. I was trying to compare/contrast American values of competition with the Progressive/Green Steiner version of high schools. My fav person in the school is the librarian, whose children attend our local Steiner school, and i asked her to come into my 5 classes to explain how they structure the alternative to competition.

She brought in dolls, toys, the school yearbook, and explained how they keep the students together in elementary grades with the same teacher. She showed them the extraordinary art work that the students do. I was quite impressed, and one girl who had attended the school k-8 glowed as she explained her early schooling.

My students were not only not impressed; they were outright hostile to my colleague and expressed their anger about the entire concept of a school formed around cooperation rather than Darwinian competition leading to a sole winner.

One criticism was that Steiner schooling would not ready them for the brutal competition of our culture.

They of course could not comment on the developmental implications of segueing from Kegan's second order of consciousness to the third order.

Those who understand these developmental stages will understand why the teens, even at 17-18, expressed outright hostility toward a cooperative world view. It involves how many perspectives the children are capable of taking. But at 17 these students should be able to put themselves into another's point of view as opposed to their own. So what is going on?

It seemed to me that my teens lagged behind what their potential stage of development might be.

Some were locked into Kohlberg's stage 2 hedonistic orientation when I explored his 6 stages with them. The school and their peer group function as the enculturating environment, their ecology, if you will, in shaping their meaning-making. I had naively supposed that teaching them in 3rd person might jar them out of their stages, but I know now that is not possible.

I was shocked that they had such hostility upon hearing of a system that provided education without failure! Where will these young, mid, and older teens receive their sense of self-esteem? It certainly does not come from giving every person the same little "MVP" statuette. If we want to help them make sense of their world, to open up to receive honest approval, to know that their legitimate needs are mirrored and will be honored if possible, then we need to provide schooling that offers them this very environment.

How do we prepare our teens to be capable of reciprocity, to be capable of honoring others' needs, to build relationships that can grow in depth as they mature?

My students lauded the hyper-agentic training they received with their sports activities. Everything in the school was woven into competition. I cannot recall anything that was done for the pure joy of learning and creating; the art, writing, chess, and music students had to compete and WIN.....

The culture did nothing to teach them about the value of or means to achieve healthy interrelationships. When learning about the Steiner culture, they charged that it would lead those students to be soft and not be a winner, that is what they learned.

We then wring our hands when character education does not take hold after the $5,000 motivational speaker has left town.

I felt sad. The beauty of what the librarian shared did not have to be adopted immediately by all my students. I expected at least that they would see it as an alternative, and perhaps see that it contained some lovely and loving innovations.

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Tagged with: education, teens, Kegan, competition, Steiner

Infantilizing Teens & Its Consequences

Posted on Nov 25th, 2009 by

Los

In sociology I taught my students about the concept of diffuse status, where a person occupies many, often conflicting, statuses.

My teens asked me why there are so many conflicting laws and norms covering them: movies admission; joining the armed forces; leaving school for good; buying cigarettes; drinking; driving;criminal punishment; leasing a car; voting; age of sexual and marriage consent; signing a contract, and the like. "Adulthood" has no clear bright-line any longer, and the teens are resentful and confused. Who ARE they--- to us? To themselves?

Different groups use different criteria for their own self-interests, as when the age of leasing a car was determined by statistical analyses for lowering of accident rates; although the newest information about brain maturation has not yet been utilized to justify their differential treatment. When the economy was damaged during the depression, and again with the recession of the 1970s, mandatory school attendance through 18 became a means of keeping 17-18 year olds out of the work force.

The evidence of brain development lagging until they turn 25 might well exacerbate the confusing spectrum, and continue to delay the more accurate acknowledgement of their strengths. It might increase the demand for across-the-board infantalization. And what of earlier and earlier sexual activity? whether it is the hormones in the milk, the age of puberty onset among African-American girls is around 10, and for Caucasians is around 11.

With the advent of serious anti-abortion movements in the American LL and moving into the LR, we see a huge jump in teen pregnancies resulting in the girls raising their children without fathers. Many seek refuge at home to have help financially, practically, and emotionally in raising their children. We also know that this early motherhood most often side-tracks them out of formal education and into poverty.

The mythic and early rational societies solved this by marrying the children off early. Some cultures specifically in India and indigenous cultures, had girls live with their intended groom's family as young as 10. It was up to the girl, then, to initiate sex with her young husband. The early Mormons, as we know, married off their young girls to older men, but then drove off their young men who might be rivals for the young girls.

Education has demanded that those who wish to succeed in Western culture stay in educational training for many years, thus keeping them away from high paying jobs until their late 20s or 30s. Many of my students had to return to live home to enable them to complete post-graduate education.

So here we have an either/or solution that must be broken down and a both/and situation created. How do we find an Integral way?

1-- Sex, abortion, and "family planning" have to come into some type of coherency. The current political landscape is burdened by the Evangelical Christian/Catholic belief that sperm + egg = human being with soul. In the Jewish tradition, there are 4 levels of soul that a human inhabits on its way to birth. There is room within that bifurcated understanding to perform abortions or engage in aggressive understanding and use of birth control without having guilt-inducing thoughts interfere with the female making use of them.

Biologically, the rubber-band is stretching to the breaking point when it comes to sexual behavior......earlier puberty means that younger children are engaging in the act, and creating the next generation of impoverished and under-parented children.

2--Drug laws and criminal treatment deal another harsh blow to this demographic. Teens self-medicate and experiment during this time; unless they begin serious dealing, the harsh pot laws send them into the revolving door of the penal system.

Using stages of development would be the fairest way to re-direct them, as well as creating a superordinate goal for them, which might be as innocent as the Midnight Basketball games. An Opportunist teen needs to be handled differently than a Diplomat.

Changes within the educational system can address this as well, as long as we can create meaning for them in actually staying within the system in some manner, be it home/charter/on-line schooling.

3-- I have played around with creating different rites of passage to coincide with the different stages of life. One major passage will just not do in today's complex understanding of human growth and development. i'd hate to think of Merit Badges as a substitute, but perhaps someone cleverer than i could come up with a way of highlighting the leaps that are accomplished in a healthy manner among this group.

So much attention is rightfully paid to the very young, but the teen cohort is the Bermuda triangle of life, and it deserves the cleverest, wisest, minds and souls to help them mediate this important transition.

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Tagged with: Integral, teens, drugs, sex

One Book Fits All: ONE SCHOOL ONE BOOK

Posted on Nov 23rd, 2009 by

Los

From the Star-Ledger 11/23/09:

HAVING ALL STUDENTS READ SAME BOOK IS CATCHING ON

Oh dear.... Allentown High is having all 1,100 students and 100 staff read the same book as part of a grass roots movement across North America to reverse the findings that among high school age kids, reading is in decline.

Butler's principal reports, "kids don't read for fun as much as they used to. To a certain extent it is a lost art." And forcing one book to fit all interests is going to solve the individual's assessment of what is Beautiful in literature.

Integral education would assess this as yet another piecemeal approach out of one specific aspect of the student's total approach to learning, being educated, and being schooled...We would want to know the level of the student's reading ability, the stage of his development, the strongest and weakest lines of intelligence, and the culture of the community, school, and peer group to assess what would be "fun" for that child.

Too individual for public schools?? Not if we could do a curriculum based on the levels and lines.

Imagine a district-wide curriculum that could be handed out to teachers; imagine a computer-based assessment program that could identify the few major variables such as reading level, stage and line identification (and there are just not that many being seen at the teen level). Now imagine leaving it up to the teacher or the child (even!) to pick out a book from that list and read it within a group of like-minded peers.

FUN! LEARNING! INCREASED TEST SCORES!

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Tagged with: integral, integral education, education, schools

"The War on Kids"

Posted on Nov 19th, 2009 by

Los

If anyone doubts that teens are dying spiritually, emotionally and sometimes physically as a result of their schooling, read the review in the NY Times of the new film "The War on Kids". I could incorporate the entire review, indeed it sounds as though I could attach the entire film, as a source for my book. I am not engaging in hyperbole as I detail the interactions I've had over 25 years in the classroom that show the despair and the soul-murder that so many of our "best and brightest" are exposed to, even in the top public schools.

"A shocking chronicle of institutional dysfunction" at Columbine HS is detailed. Columbine is very much like the HS where I spent 25 years. I've detailed the excesses of zero-tolerance policies, and how excessive and exclusive reliance on Amber-level thinking have distorted the educational mission. "When an 8 year old can be suspended for pointing a chicken finger and saying "Pow", we know that common sense has officially left the building". I've got 10 even more outrageous excesses in my book, but these are just highlights, or lowlights, of what happens when an institution abrogates discernment for absolutism. This stage absolutism is what Ken has referred to; it is touted as coherency, but in truth it is a lazy and hypocritical method of dealing with much larger problems. Perhaps they think that enforcement of "quality of life" violations, like they did in NYC with squeegie men. But they did not execute these minor violations!

What is called for is an understanding of the developmental levels and the appropriate means by which to alter their behavior. Until someone has mastered that issue, of matching sanctions to behavior, we have to cringe when we think of our children in our public schools of any flavor.

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The "Problem" with Teens--an Integral Perspective

Posted on Nov 16th, 2009 by

Los

I honestly wish I had time to divert from my book to write an article for the Integral Theory Conference on dealing with teens, the Afghanistan of life stages (just in jest, don't fret). I have been reading the supreme Court briefs on incarcerating young children for life without parole as our misguided and draconian way of dealing with our "tough on crime" strutting and posturing, or "mine is bigger than yours" method of morphing personal and collective weakness and fear into appearing hyper-agentic and principled. It infects a goodly portion of our entire society right now, and to make matters worse, defiant and troublesome teens are the terrorists in our very households, on our streets, mocking our law-abiding selves, and showing us our shadows.

But unlike those who raise children in sweet little romantic bubbles, in a modern-day equivalent of living in caves away from any cultural influence save the parents', where absolutely NO hurtful or disorienting dilemma is permitted to cross over into the awareness of the little prince or princess, most of us have had to, or will expect to, tangle with teens in our own homes. (whew...long sentence..)

So there are two, obviously dualistic ways of dealing with this inevitable stage: treat it like Red moving into Blue and handle them with strict Blue code until they break: or love them completely and think of them as adults who are being discriminated by virtue of ageism.... One has been our penal approach and the approach of a majority of schools; the other is to romanticize them and consider them as innocents who deserve to have a full seat at the table of democracy in every social holon.

And then there is the Integral perspective: both/and

From the UR we find that there are indeed major brain maturation differences that cannot and dare not be ignored by the romantics among us. their brains do NOT function as ours do, and indeed will not mature completely until they are 25. that is why drunk driving and accident rates plunge at just that age!! The insurance companies got this a long time ago. There is a physical component that is now available to us, and we ignore it for political correctness sake at society's and teens' peril.

From the UL however, we learn that many teens are at the same stage of consciousness as adults; Diplomats and beyond, and should not be penalized for their age when their stages are approximately the same as those with full rights.

So how do we transcend and include this information, and create a BOTH/AND solution??

APPRENTICESHIPS! Restore the idea that from about 15 up to 25 we have quasi-adults who need to know their social roles, rather than the diffuse hodge-podge that we have now---held to adult standards in some areas and infantilized in others.

The incorporation of teens into the LL by adults as quasi-adults with certain rights that are mentored by adults will create a far more seemless emergence into adulthood than the patchwork mess we currently have.

The LR can formalize this as well; there are already contract laws that talk about voidable contracts entered into by teens, and it is up to prosecutors in most states to determine whether to waive up a teen offender to adult court. with more precise assessments of cognitive, consciousness, moral, and self-senses, it should become fairer to determine which youth need far more mentoring and which can be held to more stringent legal standards.

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Tagged with: teens, youth, Integral, Integral law

10 Points To Consider About Your Child's Education

Posted on Nov 14th, 2009 by

Los

1. What educational system is your child currently enrolled in, EVEN IF YOU ARE HOMESCHOOLING, and how closely is it aligned to the AQAL model? Would you be able to analyze and compare the two?

2. What is your child's teacher's (EVEN IF IT IS YOU) Kosmic address, and does it really matter?

3. How amenable is your child's education to incorporating aspects of Integral parenting, and have you found a "community of the adequate" with which to discuss integral parenting?

4. Even if you are homeschooling right now, is it possible for you to create an Integral high school, or can you augment the current post-primary experience with an Integral approach?

5. Children need assessment; how are you handling their assessment right now, and if your children are being schooled outside of the home, what would you wish for as Integral assessment?

6. How should we train future Integral educators? Do you have any experience with an Integral educator who is in a position to train other integral educators?

7. Do we need Integral textbooks? How might we select materials for various levels of Integral education?

8. What would the advantages of an Integral education be for my child or children?

9. Are there any Integral educational products available anywhere that you might be able to use at home or consider for adoption by your school?

10. How can I integrate my spiritual understandings into my child's education?

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Tagged with: Integral, Integral education, education

Toxic Effects of Degraded Education

Posted on Sep 10th, 2009 by

Los

I'm re-reading Carol Hoare's fact-filled IR article from Dec. 2008 coordinating LR data and UR educational achievement in the US. Being a rapt observer of the US's LL and LR all my life, i sadly agree that "our decline as a country is apparent."

Reading through her depressing statistics gives one considerable pause....From an integral perspective, it is inconceivable that any beneficial change can come without a 4-quadrant approach. To single out one form of education, one aspect of schooling, one remediation tool, is propping up a skyscraper with a toothpick.

Given our less-than-wholehearted ability to do any type of systemic change, what would be the best way to begin to remediate this failing system and support the students who travel in this leaky boat?

My own experience has shown that by admitting the failure to the students instead of parceling out blame on their performance on a biology test, or disruption during a food fight in the cafeteria is to open them to participating in realistically appraising the situation. Similar to telling a dying person the truth, there is at least the ability to adapt to the truth that has been intuited or experienced in the past, but ignored or deied. It is far less crazy-making for them. They are more able to participate with the teacher in attempted remediation.

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Tagged with: Carol Hoare, Integral education

New Direction

Posted on Sep 9th, 2009 by

Los

About a year ago I promised to become more dedicated to this blog. The decision sent me into a new direction which werved to take me away from this blog, and into writing a book. But as I take sections of the book out and add new ones until I get a coherent version, I thought that i would share the redacted portions here in order to elicit comment and dialogue.

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Tagged with: integral

Beyond Discourse

Posted on Oct 22nd, 2008 by

Los

I've decided to become more dedicated about this blog as I begin thinking through my book, the ropic of which has been repeatedly validated by random books I pick up, and articles I read. Yay... i also know that I am a compulsive reader, about a book a day, which I hope to reference in the book, and that I would like to share with others who don't have time to read. In addition, the 4 of us from NYC are being supervised by Diane Hamilton in coming to 2nd tier leadership models and figuring out how to introduce leadership without triggering any Green reactivity to a new structure and order.

Beyond Discourse is by Alexander M. Sidorkin, 1999, takes an ontological understanding of dialogue as do Gadamer and Heidegger, as the quintessential embodiment of being human, and urges schools to introduce children to the life of dialogue. Today i receieved Daniel Siegel's tapes on "The Neurobiology of We", which I wanted after reading Candace Pert's books. sidorkin references Buber and Bakhtin as well, citing I and Thou and Dostoevsky's Poetics. He appears to be a post-modernist, but I am intrigued by what he intends to prove.

In line w/ 3-2-1 and 1-2-3 understandings of Integral, I-Thou is the miracle of We, whereas I-It becomes a subject-object exdperience.He was interested in discovering a new and integral aspect of being human.

Bakhtin: "Dialogue here is not the threshhold to action, it is the action itself.....To be means to communicate dialogically."

Sidorkin: Thou art, therefore I am.

uh-oh, my puppy is reacting to the darkness and feels it is time to go to bed. Enough for tonight. More tomorrow.

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"True" Character Education

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