Reflections on False Urgency, Binary Thinking, & How Change Actually Happens
I've been thinking about the thin line between urgency and action. It's a line I can walk in most areas of my life, but I lose all sense of it when it comes to how desperately I want schools to be transformed into the joyful, life-giving places I know they can be. Places, or concepts (schools without walls? "Schools" embedded in community?), whose main focus is to help young people discover their life purpose, their medicine to the world, that only that individual can bring forth. Places that would put career coaches out of business and help launch humanity into something more beautiful and closer to our potential as planetary custodians.
I can even sleep most nights, even with my ‘spirited’ (a.k.a. hilarious/creative/ADHD) younger son begging me to move to Finland at least once a week so he can go to school there. Yes, he is very familiar with the detention room at his school.
But then I went to a parent meeting at the school this week and some kind of beast inside of me became unleashed. I couldn't sleep. Urgency and revolution dominated my thoughts.
Woah Mama. Slow. Your. Roll. Turtle Island Indigenous elders have taught me that change only happens at the speed of relationships. Just take that into your body for a moment. Relationships. The mood at this particular meeting was tense, with clear divisions present.
One camp of parents seemed resistant to hearing any of the ways in which the school could do better to meet the needs of all children; I believe their motivation was to shield the principal and school staff from any potential criticism, which they termed as “having agendas.” This is curious to me. Why can't we say that the people who work at the school are working their asses off to do the best damn job they know how and also say that the school - a reflection of the culture - can do better to meet the needs of all kids, including preparing them for the world they are inheriting? It is this binary either/or thinking that gets humans into so much trouble.
Schools are on the front lines of social change, especially trans/gender issues, racial (in)justice, technological change, and mental (un)health. School leaders and teachers have one hell of a job right now. On top of all of the rapid societal change, they're trying to educate kids inside of an outdated system that was designed for a completely different age. That gap is only going to widen.
Teachers are feeling all of the above in their bodies, with high rates of both teacher burnout and dropout. Dubious? Read here and here.
And how are the children? Studies demonstrate high rates of deteriorating mental health and inequitable suspension and expulsion rates based on race.
Schools need to change because our culture needs to change. Our current ways of being and thinking are destroying our only home and school is the breeding ground. We are not preparing young people for the world we want or for the one they are inheriting. School leaders and teachers are doing the best job they know how; it is not an easy job. Both those things can be true.
I can feel a sense of urgency and despair when I read the news, listen to my son describe a crappy day at school, and attend a parent meeting like the one last week in which I can smell the fervour of just how badly some parents want schools to change. I have spent decades obsessed with school transformation and in these moments I think, 'Finally, the revolution has arrived!" It is in these moments when we need slowness, presence, and connection more than ever. Change happens at the speed of relationships.
As I described above re: the parent meeting, one camp was worried about the "agendas" of other parents; school leaders were bracing themselves at the tension in the room. What gains can be made here? How about we reframe "agenda" as justice? Justice that we walk toward together. We need to heal the divisions within ourselves before we can make any real change. As long as parents are eyeing educators with suspicions that they are secretly out to get their kid/not on the ball/fill in your complaint, collaboration becomes unlikely to impossible. All perspectives are needed in this massive effort ahead of us.
“We must be actively engaged in the setting free of every other person to be who she or he is intended: someone different from who we are, someone who will see the world from another perspective, someone who will not agree with us.”
-Caroline Westerhoff from Circle Forward, Building A Restorative School Community, by Carolyn Boyes-Watson & Kay Pranis.
