Finding the Other

Thank you, everyone, for your work on Unit 1. I was extremely impressed with the thoughtfulness and reflective honesty you brought to your writing. It was a joy to read these posts, a joy to read the back-and-forth in the response sections, and a joy to write up my own comments. Thank you!

Reading your posts and reflecting on what you wrote, I think I would have to admit: schools simply are not set up for anything but personally responsible citizenship. We all know that we can’t teach if kids don’t buy into the basic codes and norms of the classroom. Therefore, personal responsibility is essential—we need kids to follow the law, and we need it whether they had a hand that in shaping it or not. I do not like admitting this, but I do think that schools, as they are currently set up, leave teachers with few other choices.

We could think about participatory citizenship as a form of collective responsibility. The boundaries between self and neighbor start to break down, and I realize that my own good is only guaranteed to the degree that I become my brother and sister’s keeper. Of course, they are still responsible for their lives—I cannot take that freedom from them (except perhaps in exceptional situations)—but it is simply who we are as humans. I believe, like Dewey, that we are deeply cooperative beings that need a functioning and supportive social context to thrive.

Participatory citizenship as a form of collective responsibility for our families and communities does come naturally, I believe. This is what Payne was pointing out with her study of children collecting ladybugs on the playground. That said, some of us are better at it than others, and we are all capable of further growth. When we teach through a cooperative lens, when we teach “soft skills” like conflict management and peer mediation, when we integrate SEL into our classrooms, I believe we are teaching the skills of great citizen participation. Doing this in an individualistic school culture is not easy, but we have made great progress in these areas over the past ten years. There is good reason to hope.

Finally, we have justice-oriented citizenship. This, despite our cooperative nature, does not come so easily to us as humans, I believe. Because for me, I interpret this all as the move from self to neighbor to “other.” As Dewey implies, the democratic creed would ultimately make of the entire world our home and of all people our family. Democracy is the call to expand our community, again and again, to take into consideration those we had not previously considered.

When we realize how our energy consumption practices impact indigenous peoples in the Arctic, we are working within a justice framework. When we realize how our food consumption practices impacts migrant farm workers, animals, and the soil, we are working within a justice framework.

A justice framework asks us to expand our frame of reference and reconsider who is part of our community. In schools, that can mean welcoming the kid who just moved in. It can also mean asking new questions about how our use of plastic straws (to take one example I read about) impacts the Earth and the people on it—mostly in negative ways, but in some cases not.

We know that schools can and should promote personal responsibility. With a little work, we can build on children’s natural inclination to care for their neighbor and do it more skillfully. It is truly the work of a master teacher to go beyond this. It is possible, but requires careful thought. Listening to the other, to the stranger, to the widow and the orphan, to the cry of the poor—this is a very old injunction, indeed.

My hope is that we can continue to make progress in that direction as we live and grow.