The Turnover Dilemma A Question to Keep Employees.pdf

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Albert Schweitzer, from Rabbi Greenberg’s “The Art of Living”

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Soup for the Soul series and Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

series are but two well-known examples. they have each become small industries in their

own right; during a period in the late 90s a list of the top-selling 100 books of the year contained

several volumes from each series; more than half the books overall were either inspirational or

self-help. M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled has been on The New York Times bestseller list

for longer than any other paperback. Apparently people crave guidance.

Many people, perhaps most people, would like to become more successful at “the art of living.”

Although individuals may receive inspiration from quotations, inspirational speeches, religious

sermons, works of art, or nature, very few individuals are able to learn the art of living from any of

them. they must be provided with experiences in which an inspiring approach to life is constantly

supported and re-enforced. this is why many churches place emphasis on “fellowship.” It is very

dificult for us to create better lives for ourselves in isolation. We usually need peer communities to

support our practice of the good, of wellness, of excellence, however we perceive such goals.

Beyond the genetic component, human beings become who they become based on the daily,

moment-to-moment, manner in which they live. they learn, or fail to learn, the art of living from

those around them. Although there are universities that study education and human development,

schools that follow government rules, and churches and secular organizations that promote

spiritual ideals, there are no institutions that allow for the ongoing practical development and

implementation of better ways of living. Schools at present are mostly institutions in which

young people learn the worse ways of living. We need to allow for the growth of a new species of

institution in which better ways of living may be developed and transmitted to our young.

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T here is a large market for books and workshops on how to live a better life. the Chicken

Reformers have long recognized that “education” is the solution to our problems. What has not

been generally recognized is the equivocal nature of the term “education.” exhortative billboards

and worksheets on self-esteem do not change habits and appetites, norms and attitudes. Inspiring,

healthy adults who build real mentoring relationships with the young people they supervise, and

who work together as a team to impart the practices of a coherent culture can make a signiicant

difference. In the absence of government schools and government teacher training (i.e. training

through state-accredited schools of education mandated by state licensure laws), our society would

have evolved institutions devoted to the practical development, implementation, and continual

improvement of better ways of living. “teacher training” would have developed along a path quite

different from what it is today, much more closely aligned with the optimization of human potential.

“Schools” would be unimaginably different from what they are today, much more closely aligned

with the fulillment of those human needs that would allow for the optimization of human potential.

My original goal as an educator was to increase intellectual performance; I had cohorts of students

who gained twice and three times the national average annual gains on the SAt, and developed

a charter school at which, in only two years, we had the highest percentage of students taking AP

courses of any public high school in new Mexico. But even to create superb intellectual gains, I real-

ized that the ultimate answer lay in changing peer culture to be supportive of learning rather than

hostile to learning. this is especially critical if one wants to improve intellectual performance among

cultural groups that are not already performing well academically. In order for a school to make

a consistent, comprehensive push towards changing a peer culture, the school director needs the

freedom to focus directly on those variables that determine patterns of peer interactions.

When I directed a charter school my employer, the government, judged my work strictly by whether

or not I hired credentialed teachers, whether or not my students scored well on certain standardized

exams (exams which were not aligned with authentic learning), whether or not I followed the state

procurement code (they actually speciied the number of purchase orders allowed in each ile folder);

and other such trivia. the lawmakers who established these laws were not bad people. the state

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employees who enforce these laws are not bad people. the thousands of school administrators for

whom compliance with the law is the primary focus are not bad people. And yet the strictures with

which the law forces us to comply are at best very partial and misguided. A busy administrator soon

inds most, if not all, of his or her energy consumed by compliance with dictates that utterly fail to

relect human needs and reality. It is not possible to raise young people well by means of general

rules passed in the form of laws or bureaucratic decisions by far away legislatures and state boards

of education. It is not possible to make the many thousands of adjustments, for particular individu-

als, particular circumstances, and in a world of pervasive change, while adhering to many strata of

inconsistent laws and regulations.

By means of such well-intentioned compliance with well-intentioned enforcement of well-intentioned

laws, over many decades of “public” education, we have reached a horribly inhuman situation in

The tragedy of modern times is that the most

powerful system for developing and disseminating

products and services, the free market, has not

yet been applied to education.

which young human life is systematically distorted and starved for meaning and inspiration. these

distortions and starvations, in K-12 education, contribute to much of the dysfunction of our society.

Compulsory mass public education, in the last 100 years or so, replaced individual human discern-

ment of what the young human spirit needs with a bureaucratic system that has been utterly blind

to the needs of the human spirit. We have pre-empted and then betrayed our deepest instincts,

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