Dad’s Walnut Tree
In the early 1970’s, The Wall Street Journal reported on a machine developed in Japan that peeled sheets of veneer so thin that a good walnut tree trunk was worth $10,000 in early 1970’ dollars. Dad read that article and decided to grow a walnut tree that would be optimized for that use.
He planted a black walnut in our yard. As it grew, he trimmed off the side branches so there wouldn’t be any knots in the veneer and no forks in the trunk. Several years later, a twelve-foot tree stood straight and tall, crowned with a small cluster of leaves. The trunk, however, was only about two inches in diameter. It was the most mis-proportioned tree you’ll ever see. One quiet day, it simply collapsed. It didn’t snap. It just bent like a straw and that was the end of my Dad’s optimized $10,000 walnut tree. All that was left was a perfect metaphor for what happens when you maximize a relationship for just one output.
An increasing amount of our culture is being “managed” by private equity that has become increasingly known for maximizing for one output: short-term profit. All around us, our “trees” are collapsing. Private equity bought up many of the foreclosed homes following the housing crash, raised rents and now people can’t afford housing and are homeless. Pension funds are raided. Companies have their wealth extracted and then filed for bankruptcy. When private equity takes control of hospitals, patient recovery rates decline. Hundreds of millions of dollars pour into campaigns to elect politicians that will vote for tax cuts for the wealthy. Trillions of dollars leveraged into fossil fuels leads private equity to desperately downplay climate change, revealing their willingness to sacrifice the health of the next generation of people, plants and animals (and perhaps our rare, exquisite planet) for the sake of more money than they will ever actually need.
Serviceberries
A year ago, I highly recommended Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmer. I just finished her latest essay/book, Serviceberries. It’s a quick read contrasting our current economy with a gift economy. Contrasting an economy that assumes scarcity in our relationships with one that assumes abundance. Contrasting one that operates through transactions with one that operates through reciprocity. The contrasts between my dad’s walnut tree with Robin’s serviceberries.
The External Revenue Service
Trump announced the creation of an External Revenue Service. Why would he do that? I initially chalked it up as an ego that likes to name things like the Gulf of America until I saw how it could be used to camouflage tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the rest. I’m not an economist but I am a systems thinker so let’s follow a possible flow.
A foreign company is going to sell 100 billion dollars worth of products to the United States. But a 20% tariff is now put on those products. So the company has to pay 20 billion dollars to the United States. This 20 billion goes to the External Revenue Service. To retain their profit, the company has to pass this cost on to the American distributor who trades 120 billion dollars in exchange for the merchandise.
To retain their profit, the distributor must raise the price they charge the customer (that’s us). Let’s assume the distributor raises it by 20 billion. So we, as individuals, pay an extra 20 billion dollars. We have less money than we did before.
But Rejoice!!! Trump declares that thanks to his tariffs, the External Revenue Service has collected 20 billion dollars from foreigners. Thanks to that, we can now reduce the amount of taxes that darn Internal Revenue Service forces us all to pay. Thanks to the tariffs, we get a 20 billion dollar tax cut!!! With great praise and jubilation, Congress passes the tax cut. But most of it goes to the already-wealthy.
So what actually happened? Most Americans paid almost 20 billion dollars more . They get a small amount of that back through a highly-publicized tax cut. The net result is an outflow of billions away from most Americans. Most of the tax cut goes to the already-wealthy Americans. The net result is an inflow of billions of dollars for them. Put the two flows together and the rich are siphoning the resources of the non-rich. But this relationship is made invisible by creating the External Revenue Service to make it feel like foreign money is flowing to us when actually our money is flowing to the wealthy.
By understanding and acknowledging this relationship, we help make it less likely to happen or succeed. There will be less cheering and buy-in if he attempts it.
Scaling Up
I had a wonderful time helping an eighth grader explore the rules of exponents. What is x0? What is 82/3? How can we figure these out on our own? How can we derive these rules from direct investigation rather than knowing them only because someone told us?
Working with that teenager reminded me of a day-long conversation I had with several Silicon Valleyers last year. In the afternoon, we got talking about Chrysalis (the charter school Alysia and I helped found) and public education. One of them asked about the possibility of “scaling up” Chrysalis so that our model could have more impact.
“Scaling up” has become a common phrase in educational reform. Many grant sources require that a proposal be scalable. They think, “We need to find the right model and then scale it up. Otherwise we are just funding local projects that can’t make the significant difference we want to make.”
I replied that the phrase “scaling up” makes me apprehensive. I heard several knowing chuckles within the group. I’ve reflected on that conversation over the ensuing months. “Scaling up” is often presented as an important part of solutions to a variety of issues.
In my experience, the push to “scale up” public education often takes the form of on-line presentations and lectures and sequenced software. Multiple-choice quizzes can be graded in a split-second, giving the student immediate feedback. To somebody who knows the material, these presentations appear very complete and helpful. All this beckons with the efficiency of replacing teacher time with much less expensive computers. Therefore, this approach can be efficiently “scaled up”.
Alysia and I tutor several home-schooled students whose main education is via presentations such as this. The presentations can’t detect all the ways a student might misunderstand concepts within these presentations. These presentations can’t detect when a window suddenly opens in a child’s mind (like exponents) and a responsive teacher can lead that child towards a newly-seen horizon. Every topic resides within a vast host of interlinked relationships, creating opportunities in unexpected ways to root the concepts in diverse fertile grounds. The students’ relationship with this learning is isolated. There is no group excitement, no social give and take, no relationships built on creating something together. Just individual drill procedures until they are memorized; no understanding required. My mentor, Michael Butler, used to say that we want our students to do what mathematicians do, not just learn some of the things that they have learned.
One of the main structural goals of Chrysalis is to give us teachers as much autonomy as possible so that we can respond in the moment to what is happening in our classrooms with our specific students. This responsiveness nourishes relationships. These relationships create opportunities for honest, direct interactions between teacher and student that allow the interactions to go deep. That is one (though not only) of the outputs I would like to “scale up.”
For me, “scaling up” is too often a euphemism for finding ways to reduce human relationships in education because they consume time and money. If we can replace that with a great program, we can both help our culture and make a profit.
More broadly, “scaling up” means creating a scripted format that is applied top-down upon the teachers and, through them, the students. The novelty helps some of these work the first few times until enough repetitions reveal it as a script rather than an actual relationship with learning to understand.
So after reflecting on my reply about “scaling up” making me apprehensive, I’ve come to think that “scaling up” can be one way of degrading the Commons. A way of replacing human relationships with programs. “Your call is important to us so please stay on the line for the next available representative.” What is lost when more and more people within a culture have been raised on scripts – and been trained to accept a script in place of understanding?
Scripting Chronology
After writing this post, I went hiking in the very windy rain. Three memories emerged during that wild walk that began to order themselves from child to adult as an answer to thequestion: What is lost when more and more people within a culture have been raised on scripts – and been trained to accept a script in place of understanding?
(A Young Child) With groups, I often stick a pencil into the ground to mark where the top of the shadow of a tree or streetlight or power pole. When we refer back later, the shadow has moved. In Issue 29: Moving Shadows in my website’s Best of Cairns section, I described what happened with a first grade class.
“The last time I participated in this activity, the first-grade teacher wanted me to offer a clear answer to conclude the lesson. Instead, I remarked, “Something is moving, and it took people thousands of years to understand what that is. It’s a tough question, but as you get older, you may solve it.” For me, learning should involve such open-ended experiences. However, the other teacher felt uneasy with a lesson that ended without a definitive answer (like, “Why do shadows move? Because the Earth is turning.”). She preferred a conclusion that stated this fact, even knowing the kids might not fully grasp it. This answer would mark the lesson as complete, similar to saying “Amen” after a prayer.
“At the end, as the teacher instructed the kids to line up and return to school, one boy stood apart, moving his hands and watching his shadow. Eventually, he joined his friend, who said, ‘That is a hard question.’ The boy responded, ‘I want to grow up to be a scientist so I can find out the answer.’”
(A College Student) I once was invited to do some environmental education activities with a college class. One I did was marking a shadow. They, of course, “knew” that the shadow moved because the Earth is turning. “If so,” I replied, “which direction is it turning?” The ensuing discussion occupied at least 45 minutes. They really struggled at how they could prove it to those who thought it moved in a different direction. It went far longer than I anticipated. Several students commented on this in the reflection that the professor had them write at the end of every class. I especially remember what one woman wrote: “I have never had a teacher not give me the answer to something before, unless it was a test, which this wasn’t!”
(A Parent) Sometime around Obama’s first election to the presidency, a politically conservative parent came into Chrysalis’s admin office and said to our politically conservative Office Manager, “Have you ever noticed how hard it is to find out anything about what Obama was doing in his thirties? They keep it hidden.”
“That’s strange,” I thought. “Why would that be?” So I looked Obama up on Wikipedia. Thirty seconds later, I called out to the parent, “Obama was teaching constitutional law at Harvard Law School in his thirties.” That wasn’t hard to find out.
But not until now did I realize where the heart of the story really was. The parent had never searched for what Obama was doing in his thirties because he had been told that it’s hard to find out what Obama was doing in his thirties. He accepted that explanation. He preferred passing on the script rather than checking it out for himself.
Snippets
Update about Shifting
In an earlier post, I mentioned that my book, Shifting: Nature’s Way of Change (also published by Chelsea Green as Seeing Nature), had been reprinted as a hardback. It’s now also available as a paperback. https://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Natures-change-Paul-Krafel/dp/9198917218/
If you are already a fan of my book, you can go to that page and write a 5 star review that will help guide others to the book.
Poem
Ken Homer shared this poem that feels so appropriate to this now.
A Sleep of Prisoners
by Christopher Fry
The human heart can go to the lengths of God*.
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move,
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size
The enterprise
Is exploration unto God.
What are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity sake?
*“God is the collective potential of the human imagination.”
~ Rabbi Menachem Creditor
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