Item 4: Reformers must highlight incompatible social tenets.
The purpose of a reform movement is to change something in a substantial way. This means that reformers will inevitably encounter resistance from people who are comfortable with the current situation or uncomfortable with the idea of change. This item is a strategy for dealing with that resistance. It has its roots in the philosophical pragmatists’ ideas about what forces us to revise our beliefs, and accept that something which we have considered to be true should not be considered as false. William James, for example, argued that we want to revise our beliefs as little as possible, and so we are only likely to do so if we recognizing that holding on to the particular belief in question will force us to discard a larger number of other beliefs. It is only when we become acutely aware of the contradiction between two beliefs that we are inclined to make the effort to revise one in order to keep the other.
I say acutely aware for a reason. It’s not enough to just point out an inconsistency the way you might correct an error in arithmetic or a faulty step in a geometry proof. Human beings are pretty good at glossing over such inconsistencies if they have a vested interest in doing so. The inconsistency has to be brought home in a visceral, emotional, personal way so that the contradiction is too powerful to ignore, and the path of least resistance changes from letting the status quo remain to removing the contradiction. This is what the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s accomplished. Americans who had turned a blind eye to Jim Crow could not do so when the pictures of brutality to protestors started filling newspapers, magazines and TV screens. I do not think that it is a coincidence that as the immediacy of those images fades from the public consciousness, it has become easier for opponents of the safeguards enacted in that period to weaken them today.
There are at least two dimensions on which a school can adopt this element of the reform model, and both are very challenging. The first is to highlight incompatible social tenets for students. This happens to a certain degree in normal circumstances. Anyone who has spent any time around young people knows that many of them are particularly skilled at identifying hypocrisy in authority figures. For it to be effective in the context of a reform movement school, that skill needs to developed consciously. Students need to reflect on and try to articulate the implicit ideals in our culture, our politics, and our social structures.
This can be done in a number of different disciplines. History or civics students can talk about the ideals of the Enlightenment and the American founders. English students can examine the virtues and aspirations presented in literature of the past and present. Science students can discuss the importance of the open exchange of information toward scientific progress. Foreign language students can compare how different languages articulate similar concepts and ideals. The staff and students of the school would have the responsibility to fully develop a plan and make sure it was part of the school’s identity.
Once these ideals and tenets are identified, students would also have to observe the world and find examples of behavior or social structures that seriously compromise those ideals. This is not the only thing that students should spend their time doing, of course. For one thing, confronting all of this cognitive dissonance is a pretty exhausting thing to do, and it needs to be balanced with consideration of the “success stories†of contemporary society. This way, identifying the contradictions can be framed as an exercise in making a good thing better, rather than one that points out how everything is lousy and there is no reason to try to improve or believe in anything. The school should be trying to inculcate a reforming spirit, not a cynical one.
Another reason why this needs to be carefully done is that the larger community may not be happy that the school appears to be introducing a destabilizing force by encouraging students to question authority, existing social norms, and the overall status quo. In a world where we are still arguing over the cultural legacy of Christopher Columbus, there will be people who believe that the reform movement school is radicalizing students against the very society that the education system is supposed to support. Especially if the school is part of a public school system, the school is going to have to have a strong base of support along with the ability to explain how the action of highlighting inconsistency is meant to strengthen society, not destabilize it.
This is particularly important because of the second dimension I alluded to. The students and staff at the reform movement school can not be insular if they want to be effective reformers. They must aim to share their work and their unfolding understanding with the community around them. (This is something that I am going to discuss in more detail in other parts of the model, so I will be brief here.) So the school will not just be trying to make the students and staff acutely aware of inconsistencies. They will be trying to do it for the public at large as well, and this is almost certain to encounter resistance.
We can see elements of this behavior in the students and educators who work through social media, community organizing, and other methods to speak out about the inconsistency of unequal school funding with the notion that education ensures that Americans have equality of opportunity, or in those who point out that emphasis on standardized test scores de-emphasizes the virtues of creativity and independent thought that are integral to America’s claimed entrepreneurial spirit. And we can see the resistance to this challenge presented by those who argue for more tests, more standards, and so on. If an entire school is going to make reform activity like this art of its essential identity, it needs to be prepared for the opposition it will encounter. If there is any aspect of the model that I think needs to followed carefully in a school environment, it is this one. But I am equally sure that it is an element that can not be ignored.