K-12 education as a 3D hologram viewable from multiple angles

Chapter 5

A serializing of Growing Sustainable Children; and, Schools Worthy of Our Affection. This is my best guess how, in the next 100 years, whole-child K-12 schooling can evolve worldwide.

Please raise your hand if you know, or can imagine, a local Kindergarten, K-6, K-8 or 6–12 school, worthy of your affection.

Let me count the hands… Okay, good, I see many hands. This phrase, ‘Building K-12 schooling Worthy of Our Affection,’ is adapted from, “Building an Economy Worthy of Our Affection.” It comes from https://www.triplepundit.com/2016/06/building-economy-worthy-affection/

Iceberg and Pyramid models of K-12 schools

Let’s appreciate how successful schools are like an iceberg:

made by the author.

dg-schools-as-iceberg

Above the surface, visible in the “light of day” are curriculum and day to day procedures.

Below the water’s surface are the teaching methods and philosophy. These are only dimly visible from the outside, to the public who are not parents in the school.

Below what can be seen dimly thru the water, is the support fundamental, mostly unknown or completely invisible to external observers. These are the values; and, whatever consensus exists on truly human values held by local stakeholders.

These are Lakoff’s frames of moral value, images, metaphors and narratives. For Team Human K-12, we can make the above into a pyramid, top to bottom:

Pyramid model of schools

Viewing the above like a right angle, left-justified pyramid, we gain useful details. At the top of the pyramid:

Your child graduating.

Whole-child K-12 curriculum.

Best Practices and methods in adult interpersonal relations.

Best Practices and methods in large group processes.

Goethean Psychology applied to K-12 methods.

Goethean Holistic Psychology child-human development theory-models.

Goethean Holistic Science, The Three Sciences We Use Everyday

The school’s role models, inspirations and touchstones for truly human values.

dg-team-human-ed-pyramid

In both iceberg and pyramid, the most visible wagging tail of the dog, is above. The body of the dog, the inner part of the dog making the tail wag, is below, the water line, below the surface, below see-level.

If we see a wagging tail, we always want to ask, “What is making the tail wag?”

If what wags your school is a charismatic founder-leader — and nothing more — your dog can be sterile, unable to reproduce.

Only more solid inner foundations, and a team of people, united by consensus on values, enable school successes to replicate in new cities. As always, the more coherent and durable the inner organization, the more robust the outer manifestation can be.

The “vision thing”

What they teach in Journalism schools is not correct. Language is not neutral. We are always, forever, each and every time we speak our mind, speaking from inside frames of values, images, metaphors and narratives ~ George Lakoff (paraphrase from a podcast)

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” I was taught this was an ancient Greek proverb, carved in stone over some archway. You’ve probably heard it too. I’ve even seen this written in huge letters, on a banner, hung on an outside wall of a high school, facing a busy street, in Redondo Beach, CA. Mr. Google suggests the origin may be Proverbs 29:18 King James Version: 18 ”Where there is no vision, the people perish …”

Whatever the origin, it is a key for every effort, every attempt at creating a new social form.

Opposite of a “healthy vision” is “goalless-ness”

The opposite of a “healthy vision” is not a bad vision; such as, “democracy for only the rich.” Rather a “bad vision” is the converse or inverse. The opposite of a “healthy vision” is No Vision At All, goalless-ness. I learned this idea from Sam Keen in the 1970s.

In our inter-cultural moment, 2008–2025, expiring greed-based mainstream civilization; and, the last gasps of oligarchy and concentrating wealth are NOT our biggest problem.

Rather, our biggest problem remains Cultural Creatives wishing to create new social forms; yet, unable to, due to miring in Cororate Consumer Religion creating goalless-ness and widespread apathy. Without coming back to self-connection, uncovering your own pesonal deeply held values, cold atheism dominates.

For example, when social imagination atrophies, the new stories told on screens in theater or at home are re-treads and re-makes. Easier to re-make the dystopian movie, BladeRunner, than to come up with a workable positive alternative to dystopia. Current corporate storytellers have more confidence in a dystopian future than any other vision.

For those interested in a coherent theory and examples of how civilization form, die then re-emerge in new forms, see “Carroll Quigley” and ”engine of expansion.”

Role of Unconscious Patterns in all K-12 ed

Here I need to say something obvious, in a fresh way, so we can perceive the obvious we have always been involved with.

K-5 especially has always been and will always be, primarily about training the Habit Body to practice and align with the practices, traditions and local culture of the school’s stakeholders.

Tho we don’t talk about this much with parents, in a sense, teachers are always primarily teaching to the unconscious of children, to the child’s Habit Body, conveying, coordinating and arranging for healthy habits to be learned, on multiple levels, physically, imaginally, emotionally, mentally and mythologically (PACME).

After puberty, in grades 6–12, the focus shifts to training the mental body of the child. Hopefully Best Practice metods in managing your own emotional body are part of this instruction. Our physical habits are most easily perceived. Children’s mental and emotional habits remain primarily invisible. Tho teachers talk about this seldomly, we are in the business of teaching and teaching the sub- and unconscious habits in children.

What guides do teachers have as they shape the unconscious of children day by day?

“Every educational theory has behind it a certain image of the human being, even if this is not explicitly stated” ~ Astrid Schmitt-Stegmann in her thesis (1997) PDF available online

• Guess what? The most progressive schools teach to images of the human being aligned with the most truly positive human values.
• If in the coming 100 years Waldorf does not progress to talking about meaningful invisible habit patterns — in ways accessible to parents and lay persons; then, the second 100 years of Waldorf may be in trouble. Let’s hope concepts and rhetoric do progress in Waldorf schools.
• In 2119, I picture the healthy endgame as talking more openly about the etheric body. This is the home of our Habit Body, home of the Unconscious Patterns predominating in K-12 children. Starting after puberty, this is only gradually replaced somewhat, by conscious waking Self.
• Before we can talk openly about the etheric body, we need more people talking more about and more clear on truly human values. Classic Waldorf is so far best-positioned to do this. If they drop the ball, I hope the charter Waldorf schools can pick the ball up and run with it.

Q: Are you proposing a rubric for school reform?

• I do favor rubrics for classroom instruction in middle, high school and college, a written set of this teacher’s expectations of best outcomes for a specific student work-product.
• Rubrics work best where the same teacher teaches the same content similarly each year. They are therefore more natural in school, college and grad school.
• As a college student, I found rubrics liberating because I no longer had to guess what the teacher wanted or expected. Here it was, written down. Especially for kids who grow up second-guessing parents, this is liberating.
• Could rubrics work for whole-school behavior? As I recall school-wide rubrics were tried in Wm. Glasser’s Quality School experiments 1985–1995. What was learned? Each school appears to be so idosyncratic, rubrics for a school as a whole aren’t useful. If your goal is to graduate seniors who are beginning to think indepedently and critically about mainstream culture, rubrics for behavior are counter-intuitive.
• Better for K-12 schools is school self-assessment and self-study, questions for this; and, time to process. Self-evaluation and hand-on practice with Best Practices in interpersonal competency are crucial for any school aiming to be more than a baby sitting factory and high school diploma mill (these are not the worst schools, some urban schools fail even this standard).

SIDEBAR ~ Alternative-holistic education reform

Like most education activists of the Boomer generation, my education-activist roots are in Humanistic Psychology, 1955–1975, and how this impulse evolved. The 1970s was the peak era of K-12 Holistic-Alternative Ed. “Diversity” was “in,” “small is beautiful” was “in.” By the late 1990s,school districts began offering parents alternatives — good and bad, workable and unworkable — to factory-style ed. This was a lot better than no alternatives at all.

The 1970s Holistic-Alternative Education Meme at its peak was a range of alternative schooling options reacting to dismal factory-style schooling. Perhaps difficult to imagine in 2019, this included “Free schools” and “child-run” school experiments.

Unfortunately, those who do not know their K-12 school reform history are doomed to repeat it; along, with all the unsustainable errors of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Maria Montessori and 12–20 other sympathetic founders and authors. A major, vocal proponent for these unsustanable experiments was Ron Miller, founder of the journal, Holistic Education Review, later retitled, Education for Meaning and Social Justice, defunct 2005(?), content archived at http://www.great-ideas.org/enc.htm

Few traces exist today of hundreds of short-lived alternative-holistic education experiments. I’m sure the scores, perhaps hundreds, of failed new schooling experiments, were learning experiences for all involved.

Unfeasible or illegal until the mid-1990s, “school choice” is “in” now. This reduced pressure for alternatives to factory-style schools. Publication of quality homeschooling materials also burgeoned.

A big expansion of special needs, remedial education and GED programs also occurred. In 2018 Mr. Google has 3.6 million pages for “alternative education;” and, 480K pages for “holistic education.” In 2018 “Alternative education” connotes any K-college schooling, “off the beaten track” from mainstream public funded ed.

Q: What about Home-schooling?

A: Home-schooling can be sustainable for one family with one parent working half to three-quarter time on schooling. A small group of families can pool resources to make home-schooling possible. Beyond this, a K-6, K-8 or K-12 school requires the interest and support of a coherent community of like-minded persons BEFORE the school can be successful.

Since 2007 I’m no longer intimately involved in the K-12 field. As an outsider, it appears the great majority of Progressive work is the patient, quiet work of keeping good schools operating and making good schools into better schools.

Some readers will know the testing mania of the early 2000s, was the last gasp of piecemeal K-12 school reform. We won. Mr. Google tells me testing mania has abated very significantly. Diversity is in. “Small is beautiful” is in. State legislators and politicians squeezed all the votes they could out of the latest “magic pill fix” for failing schools. Hopefully more people like you and me are now on local school boards.

Q: What’s the latest book on Progressive school reform you recommend?

A: Eugene Schwartz’s, Millennial Child (1999), discussed in a later volume, has a great deal to recommend it to those serous about school reform.

Perhaps the next wave of school reform activism awaits a future generation, not yet reached its majority. Perhaps what’s written here will be useful for them.

Schooling now must again draw its inspiration from expanded visions of the whole person.