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Center for Enlightened Leadership
 
THE LENS – A QUARTERLY E-NEWSLETTER/JOURNAL

Who Has the Right to Stand Up and Be Heard?
By DOMENICO PIAZZA

  Domenico Piazza
  Domenico Piazza
Senior Associate

What’s right is usually a matter of perception. Standing up for “rightness” starts with that perception and then requires the courage and commitment to act on it. In a democracy, we assume that liberty and the right to openly challenge actions we deem to be unjust is not granted to us but rather inherent in our being. It is, as George Washington put it in a 1790 letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, possessed by each of us, “not as a grudging concession or even as a generous gift from the American government but as a right.” He added, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was an indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent rights.”

I think our natural inheritance of liberty is linked, inextricably, with science. Our forefathers thought of America as a great experiment. That word, “experiment,” appears frequently in their descriptions of the fledgling nation. An experiment is, by definition, a work in progress. It begins with an idea or hypothesis and sets into motion actions that either support it or falsify it. This has been the nature of both our country’s evolution and the process of scientific discovery. Like the “giants’ shoulders” upon whom our founders stood, so science has been a continual journey of building on past discoveries, correcting their imperfections, and creating more effective ones. It is apparent that the most enduring and progressive countries in the world are ones in which science has been allowed to question tradition and assumed truths. Those that have imprisoned free thought have slipped behind.

Tradition and a battery of assumed truths have persisted in education for years. Our schools today often resemble schools at the turn of the 19th century. Notwithstanding the technology available and present, school buildings, instruction, and management seem to have somehow evaded the great changes sweeping the rest of the world. Our experiment seems to lack the vitality to eliminate what has not worked for decades and to reinvent itself in a world of new and complex challenges.

Almost anyone you ask will agree that children learn differently and that they progress at a pace relative to their inherent abilities. Yet there is little evidence that this understanding has led to substantive changes in instruction. We have all allowed the notion of standardization to dominate educational discussions despite our experience with real students. As an experiment, it has been falsified—and yet it prevails. If the idea that liberty and science are linked were valid, it would seem that educators have surrendered their liberty to speak out against a system that is dysfunctional.

Gerald Holton, a science historian, has defined a modern individual in terms of four criteria: “Being an informed participant citizen, having a marked sense of personal efficacy (being able to control one’s own destiny and events around the world), being highly independent and autonomous, and being open to new ideas and experiences.”  How many opportunities do we educators have, and offer our students, to attain these vital criteria?

In place of these, we have stressed obedience, standardized instruction to receive standardized assessments, the absence of experimentation, the discouragement of meaningful challenges to the assumed truths delivered by state departments, teachers, and administrators, and the imposition of rewards and punishments to achieve desired behaviors. Good science could not flourish under these conditions; nor can good learning. Science is inherently antiauthoritarian; it is self-correcting; to flourish, it must draw on all available resources; it is powerful, since knowing things is empowering; and it is a social activity, that is, it requires the combined talents of many participants. I would suggest these also apply to education.

It is, therefore, no surprise that speaking up to inequities is rare among students and educators. When it does occur, we see it as a special event to be treated as an anomaly. Yet the history of our nation has taught us, if nothing else, that it has been the voices of doubt, questioning, and free expression that have brought into being the great social changes we now enjoy. We all have the right and the responsibility to speak out when our experiment fails and to seek alternative solutions. Like Democracy, education is a messy process. It cannot proceed with the notion that we know what the right answers are but rather that we are willing to experiment with the best information we have from as many divergent sources as we can gather and then be willing to revise the findings as needed. We all have the right to challenge a system that is not working. If we do not, our experiment will fail.


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