Education, Leadership, Crisis, and Praxis

Edward Varner, Ed.D.

January 18, 2021

• “I had a dream my life would be

So different from this hell I'm living

So different now from what it seemed

Now life has killed the dream I dreamed” ~ Fantine, Les Miserables[1]

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• “We don't need no education 

We don’t need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teachers leave them kids alone” ~ Pink Floyd, “The Wall”

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• “You can’t just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution.” Tyree Scott

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The reality of the American dream has been the topic of an ongoing conversation I have with Christiana Varner, my wife and longtime education collaborator, which resonates with systemic challenges in education. Throughout that conversation, we find ourselves collectively discussing theoretical meritocracy in our country (Theoretically, if you work hard and do all the right things, you will get ahead – you will prosper and advance). Theoretically, we are all born equal. But in reality, we are not. We have been taught and we continue to teach our students that the system works – the educational system, the judicial system, the governmental system. We teach our children to trust the system. For the most part, we like to believe anyway, that that is probably good advice. It is, however, better advice for the affluent and not so good advice for marginalized populations. Unfortunately, there are far too many populations living with the ramifications of theoretical meritocracy. As a result, I continue to struggle with how our educational system supports or destroys the dreams of our students and the dreams of me as an educator and citizen.

Education in Crisis

We are experiencing an educational crisis in our world that has literally brought us all to the brink of a 2021 political and social catastrophe of historic proportion. Our crisis stems from, among other things, a lack of virtuous leadership, apathy, and plain old exhaustion within the ranks. I do not think that we did it any better a few decades or even a few centuries ago. The good old days of education are a myth. There are and have been moments and pockets of powerful education, but, mostly, we have just limped along. Something needs to change. The words of Walter Lippman are as true today as they were when he wrote them in 1925; his ideas that "the private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row… He does not know for certain what is going on, or who is doing it, or where he is being carried" (Iyengar, p. 15) certainly speak to the impotence that many Americans feel in today's society. Instead of perpetuating the same old boxed in concepts that keep people in their place and teach them to obediently follow, we need to be fostering a thought and action process that enables “people to make changes in their social reality” (Hinchey, p. 130). Instead of being followers ourselves, educators must take on leadership roles that “enhance the status if those human activities that they represent” (Strike, p. 113) and include both expertise in and a willingness to question and research subject disciplines in a way that can lead students to critically consume information and use rhetoric to participate in the change process (Hinchey, p. 139-141). A common definition of a leader is someone who can get people to follow and do the things that they want done; they have a sphere of influence over others. As such it becomes clear that educators are, whether we like it or not, leaders in our society. However, because the leadership-like influence we have as educators is not sublime - it is supported and thwarted by the culture of the world in which students are born into and live daily: socially, politically, economically, and technologically – we must also employ strategies to help our students become leaders as well – to whatever degree they desire. It is only through this type of multi-faceted, multi-cultural, and multi-generational grassroots type of informed uprising in education that any lasting changes will be made.

I think educating others is such a monumental task that it requires deep critical thinkers to awaken learning strategies, skills, options, and opportunities in others. However, after contemplating statements like Hinchey’s, "what we think we know is not always a reliable guide for our actions, because much of what we think we know eventually proves untrue" (p. 122), I have begun to spend more time analyzing what I think I know and the depths to which I explore the gems that my staff and students share with me. Analyzing what we think we know, analyzing what we do know, comparing our thoughts and experiences to reality and realigning our trajectory so that we can better apply these concepts lead us to, at least, stop and ask "why" more often. Why do I do what I do? Why don’t I fight harder and louder for what I know is right? This renewed willingness to question what I know affected the attention I paid to something shared with me recently; it made me rethink my elitist position (that only the highly educated should teach).

My wife, an ESL and Teacher Education educator once shared with me a story that one of her students had written in a journal writing exercise. The student wrote about his experiences in a refugee camp. He outlined how he had noticed the illiteracy of other people in the camp. He wrote about how disturbed he became with the recognition of the problem and so, he felt compelled to do something about it, to become a teacher. With his own limited set of literacy skills, he chose to help others escape a worse literacy situation. He felt obligated and responsible to educate those around him who needed help. According to this ESL student’s account, students flocked to him and his little, informal refugee school grew. He trained others to teach as well. And, after he learned of his relocation, he left others in charge to carry on the literacy movement in the camps. It was as if, without any formal training, he recognized that humans need to create and explore and express and that education helps to foster those outlets. He saw education and literacy as powerful tools for providing more options to individuals in bad situations – not as a means to control the populace but as a means to free them. This is certainly not to say that teachers should not be highly trained, they should. But, they should also be passionate and willing to see life through the eyes of their students. Sometimes, highly trained persons forget that the real reason for educating is not to raise test scores or instill perfect grammar or even, necessarily, to help students get into college; it is to open eyes and help people develop the tools to see and grasp options so they can choose their own paths. We are not to judge or predetermine the route for learners. No one should be ignored or overlooked (Dewey as summarized by Jackson, p. 417). As a whole, education and schools should seek to lift up individuals- each student that we encounter should be lifted by the system so that they can achieve more greatness than they anticipated. Unfortunately, right now in education (and probably for longer than most of us are willing to admit), this has not been the case. For many, education is drudgery and a reiteration that they are not worthy members of society – no matter how hard they work at it.

Perhaps one of the reasons education is in crisis is because we have not allowed the onus of education to belong to people who see other people's need to be educated. Perhaps letting corporations, politicians, and even the media determine the fate and trajectory of education is power misplaced. Doing the same old thing over and over again, including blindly obeying the texts and rules presented in faculty meetings or pretending to but sticking with the old “nobody's paying attention to what I'm doing in the classroom anyway standard” and then doing something else isn’t enough anymore. It appears to me that, at this point, the only people who really seem to benefit from our current educational system are politicians, big businesses, textbook companies, testing companies, loan sharks, and other commercialized and capitalistic entities who have figured out how to reinvent the same wheel again and again or even to sell us (the American people) a lower quality product for more money.

Culture: Our Interpretation of the World

Georg Hegel points out (as described by Cawthon) that “knowledge is always changing. It continuously moves from a state of unawareness to a state of consciousness” (p. 76) and that we acquire, massage, and filter knowledge from a variety of sources and experiences. In critical theorist fashion Geertz describes the study of human culture and knowledge acquisition in such minutia that black-and-white thoughts on every end of the spectrum merge together to form a constant cloud of gray. He describes culture as public anything and everything we do why we do it - it is meaning and the meaning we share with others. Culture is symbolic and based in symbols. It is the "unconscious motivation" with which we proceed. However, this culture is not finite. It is directed and redirected by imaginative and concrete things that we encounter. Geertz's conceptual framework suggests that our understanding of culture, our culture in general, can be refined and redefined by our exposure to new meaning. It can be shaped by our exposure to news and information - not just news and media that is social in nature but news that affects us personally in any way - personal news or news of field specific progress for example. Geertz states that "as our attention shifts to isolating just what something is, to disentangling ourselves" (p. 1) from concepts and ideas that we make sense of it and therefore increase its overall importance. For example, in the realms of anthropology and ethnography, which he discusses at length, he states that the mere news of given theories need only reach a field before they start affecting how persons within the field interpret what they see. That is, the news that "culture consists of socially established structures of meaning in terms of which people do such things" (p. 6) redefines the previous thought that these cultural activities were simply psychological phenomena. Essentially, faced with new information, scientists change the way they interpret data. That is, faced with new information, faced with what the life experiences, media, our teachers, our family and friends present to us, our interpretation of the world around us changes. It is neither subjectivism nor cabbalism in its description of how we make meaning and apply meaning to symbols in our world, it just is (p. 16).

Because the media (including social media) constructs reality in much the same way that Hegal and Geertz describe, members of the media are also leaders of our society. Our media consumption, intentional or unintentional, affects every part of how we see our world, how we live in our world, and how our individual realities are actually defined. The "problems that receive prominent attention on the national news become the problems the viewing public regards as the nation's most important" (Iyengar, p. 26). Careful scrutiny of more than 14 media related control group studies showed Iynegar and Kinder that even a single-story can have a significant effect on the shaping the political priorities of viewers, that the new (skewed) view persists longer than anticipated (p. 25), and supports the idea that even a modicum of change to the news with which participants were exposed created a dramatic shift in priorities. We, as a people, make our decisions and respond to things because of the experiences and the reality that is defined by what we experience which includes what we experience in the media. Hinchey reminds us that it is essential that we teach our students to be prudent consumers of media who are aware that “people with power use rhetoric as a tool to shape other’s perspectives and to channel others into particular attitudes and actions” (p. 139).

News stories are not the only thing that effect viewers' interpretations; their personal lives, station in life, and first-hand experiences also have an effect. There is a type of symbiotic relationship between one's personal experiences and what is presented on the news and "television news appears to be most powerful when it corroborates personal experience, conferring social reinforcement and political legitimacy on the problems and struggles of ordinary life" (p. 114). Iyengar and Kinder's results support the observations of Lippmann and reiterate the idea that news, in whatever form we engage it (paper, television news, blogs, podcasts, Facebook, and various other social and corporate media outlets), has an effect on the way we make sense, prioritize, and evaluate/judge our political and non-political world. Because the elements that are "prominent on the media agenda become prominent in the public mind" (MacCombs, p. 2) the media can determine what matters to us and what we do about it. As such, it is all the more important to teach our students how to consume and create information; it is necessary for our students to develop multidimensional literacy and the ability to interpret meaning and intent while also “cultivating a credible voice” (Hinchey, p. 139) to not just monitor the media but to participate in controlling the messages of the media towards justice and equality.

Aquines states that one of the essential characteristics of being a leader is to take on the responsibility to assure unity within an organization or constituency. Cawthon says that society causes injustices and it is up to the "good" leaders to help right the wrongs (p. 66). Leadership is in the details and in the big picture. It is in the desire to do something and in a willingness to stick your neck out to make it happen. Leadership is much more than directing others. Leadership is seeing what needs to be done and doing it quietly, loudly, through one-on-one grassroots types of references or explosive breaking news types of behavior. This is certainly true with many injustices in our world. Hinchey calls us to act, somehow, and her references to the power of the media encouraged me to consider that, perhaps, educational leaders should be taking a bigger role in controlling rather than being controlled by the media. Perhaps we can get the media to bring ideas of inequality and injustice in the educational system to the forefront of our minds so that we as a people can act on those injustices and perhaps correct them. However, the media will not cover these things unless we, as educational leaders, find a way to get the conversation out of faculty rooms and teacher conventions and into the media spotlight.

Resources

Arendt, H. (2007). The crisis in education. In R. Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of education (pp. 188-192). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Cawthon, D. (2002). Philosophical foundations of leadership. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Counts, G. (1932). Dare progressive education be progressive? Progressive Education, 9(4).

Crouch, C. (2007). Commercialization or citizenship: The case of education. In R. Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of education (pp. 200-207). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Dewey. J. (2007). The democratic conception in education. In R. Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of education (pp. 47-54). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Feinberg, W. (1995). The discourse of philosophy of education. In W. Kohli (Ed.), Critical conversations in philosophy of education (pp. 24-33). New York, New York: Routledge.

Gutmann, A. (2007). Interpreting equal educational opportunity. In R. Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of education (pp. 236-242). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Hinchey, P. (2010). Finding freedom in the classroom: A practical introduction to critical theory. Revised edition. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Jackson, P. (2007). Real teaching. In R. Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of education (pp. 336-346). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.           

Jackson, P. (1998). John Dewey's school and society revisited. The Elementary School Journal, 98(5), 415-426.

Jencks, C. (2007). Whom must we treat equally for educational opportunity to be Equal? In R. Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of education (pp. 243-253). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books, pp. 3-30. www.sociosite.net/topics/textts/Geertz_Thick_Description.php

Iyengar, S. (1991). Is anyone responsible?: How television frames political issues. University of Chicago Press.

Iyengar, S. and Donald Kinder. (1987). News that matters: Television and American opinion. University of Chicago Press.

King, M. L., Jr. (1963). Letter from Birmingham jail. In M. L. King, Jr., Why can’t we wait (pp. 61-77). New York: the New American Library.

Lippman, Walter. https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/Lippman/ch01.html

McCombs, Maxwell and Donald Shaw, The agenda-setting function of mass media, Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, 1972, 176-187.

McLaughlin, T. (2005). The educative importance of ethos. British Journal of Educational Studies, 53(3), 306-325.

Mechanic, D. (1962). Sources of power of lower participants in complex organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 7, 349-364.

Plato. (2007). Turning the Psyche. In R. Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of education (pp. 16-25). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Salancik, G. R., & Pfeffer, J. (1977, Winter). Who gets power and how they hold on to it. Organizational Dynamics, 3-21

Standish, P. (2003). The nature and purpose of education. In R. Curren (Ed.), A companion to the philosophy of education (pp. 221-231). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Strike, K. (1990). Is teaching a profession? How would we know? Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 4, 91-117.

About the Author

Dr. Edward Varner has been an educator, a musician, actor, and arts education specialist and advocate for more than 30 years. He earned the Doctor of Education Degree (Ed.D.) in School Leadership from Concordia University Chicago in 2017, holds a Master’s Degree in Educational Administration and Leadership from the University of British Columbia (2005), and holds the Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from California State University, Los Angeles (1989). He has presented language experience, music, arts, and literacy workshops for the National Association for Music Education, National Association of Elementary School Principals, the International Reading Association, the Virginia Reading Association, the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), the International Conference on Education (HI), the Pennsylvania Association of Independent Schools, the Arts Time Conference (WA), Montana State University, the California Arts Project, Great Basin College, Penn State Berks, and a variety of school districts.

As an educator, I have always been a firm believer in the philosophies of integration and differentiation of curriculum to better meet the needs of students. I must know my students in order to adequately and effectively meet them where they are and help them progress to the next level. This philosophy of knowing your students necessitates the added element of care. Educators must care for their students, themselves, and have the fortitude to continue caring when it appears that others have surrendered. - Edward Varner, Ed.D.

[1] English Lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, based on the original French libretto by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel from the original French production.