A Roadside Field

The following piece was published recently in the Santa Ynez Valley News and is therefore copyrighted. As a consequence I must rescind my usual policy of open permission to use it. RLG
Have you chanced to drive to Los Alamos this spring? If you had, and if you had come in from the southern exit off the 101, you would have braked at the stop sign. And there as you paused you would have noticed a tree just across Bell Street and behind it a small field glorious beyond all joy with brilliant color. Late last fall, as the days grew shorter and darker , the tree was unremarkable and the field, a vacant lot really, was barren and colorless and scruffy with stubbly grasses. When night fell it was very dark there and on one of those dark nights a young man walking home near that tree and that field was struck by a carelessly driven car  and then left to die. I learned of the tragedy pausing at that stop sign during my mundane to-ing and fro-ing. My eye was drawn across the way to a gathering of  sad silent mourners beside the tree. Although I did not  personally know the young man who died there I saw that he was well loved and much missed. In the following days when I passed by, the nondescript tree was attended by various sized gatherings and sometimes songs and music sounded and sometimes eloquent silence prevailed and gradually the tree sprouted flowers and pictures and mementos at its base and as it slowly became surrounded by bright memories and illuminations of past joys of a life so suddenly vanished even the tree  seemed to slowly transform into a younger and greener and more promising memory of itself. But time wins out, and after many more days the visits became fewer and the flowers around the tree began to wither and the lone pumpkin shriveled and the mementos disappeared and the tree seemed to return once again to its unremarkable former self and the field to just a barren memory, no longer worthy of lingering glances or sad smiles from pausing motorists. To  the casual passersby like me the wintry cold of reality had set in and the beauty of those moments past had slipped from our grasp, as so often happens in life. But where humankind must finally let go and trod on, nature was waiting in infinite patience to celebrate the newest star in its firmament. Very early this spring, when the green hillsides first began to flaunt their ornaments of bright yellow and purple flowers, so too, suddenly, did that dusky featureless field flower abruptly, not in patches or in a half-hearted way but as an entire vast carpet of the most strikingly brilliant gold, interwoven delicately with taller deep purple spears, filling the entire field as if preparing an exquisite cloth for the coronation robe of a king. So spectacular were the colors and so extensively did it blanket the small corner lot behind the tree that once again motorists found it impossible to stop at the stop sign without pausing to pay homage to a ground now so obviously hallowed. And as the spring wore on and the  jeweled hillsides with their gold hued pendants faded as they must and when the glorious yellow and purple blanket beyond the tree seemed destined to diminish as well, suddenly more flowers burst forth in a whole new joyous celebration of reds and blues and all colors of the rainbow like the reprise of a grand aria. And that aria continues even  as I write. This is my first spring in Los alamos and you may try to convince me that this rare display is the result of  seeds  and thoughtful planting and that flowers grow in that field every year, but I will tell you that even had a human agent supplied the canvas and the oils used to paint such a picture those masterful brush strokes could  only have come  from nature, and her inspiration must have been the celebration of a newly arrived soul.

If you chance to drive to Los Alamos this spring, you can see for yourself.

The Crisis in Education Revisited

I read with interest Stephen R. Covey's recent piece in Huffington Post (Our Children and the Crisis in Education 4/20/10) and frankly, I could not agree more. The world is certainly moving toward profound change and, indeed, our children are not being prepared for that reality. Nor, in fact, are we. Unfortunately, as I have written in the past in this blog, the adult communities tend to begin to prepare themselves for change first, and our children last. It appears to be an old fashioned, even gallant, attempt to protect our children from harsher realities, but in effect it is an archaic approach to education which stultifies attempts to condition our children to facie the radically changing world in which they must live. Yes, traditional education is archaic.
As Covey writes, "Parents see the chaos, the economic uncertainty, the stress and complexity in the world, and know deep down that the traditional three "R's" …reading, writing, and arithmetic…are necessary, but not enough. Society's present and future needs and opportunities demand increased capacity for responsibility, creativity, and tolerance of differences." Covey further suggests that society needs people who are autonomous, trustworthy, socially competent, and will take initiative - in other words, leaders, and that our current educational system is not designed to produce these attributes. Again, I agree. I agree with Covey's proposed solutions as well. Education today does need to directly inculcate the attitudes and social competencies that Covey outlines and that are currently being taught in the leadership magnet school that he describes. The A.B. Combs school in Raleigh, N.C. has gone about it correctly with full immersion in the ideals, staff accepting themselves as role models, and a whole school positive mindset. The school uses an "inside out" methodology, as Covey describes it, teaching the teachers Covey's seven principles first so that they may live, model, and integrate the teaching into their classes every day. As Covey states, there is no new curriculum. While I agree wholeheartedly with this mission, I must disagree with the procedure. And here is why.
Those skills and capabilities that are necessary for the development of strong character, autonomy, and intra/inter personal competencies are not be taught by promotions, sayings, quotes, and role modeling alone (although such an approach is way better than no approach at all). Yes, the application of these principles in context in classrooms is valuable. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a teacher with the awareness to present such pictures within the framework of history, or science, or other disciplines is a huge asset. And certainly an entire community dedicated to the promotion of these principals is going to experience success. All of these reminders are needed. But the skills and competencies composing autonomy and trustworthiness and caring need to be nurtured and taught.
Character education is all about the brain. The integral traits need to be developed and the skills learned over time, the neural paths established and traveled repeatedly. And to do so requires a curriculum, a curriculum that is carefully crafted to reflect the needs and capabilities of children at each developmental stage. Leadership skills, social competencies, ethical decision making…all are centered in brain growth and processing (after all, what isn't?)…and how and what to teach at each level of growth must reflect an understanding of the brain's maturity and capabilities. All of this knowledge is available. A huge amount of neuroscience research has been done in the last decades, so much that there has not been time to disseminate it. While I believe that every primary and middle school teacher should be responsible for seeking out this research, to better understand what a child brain can be expected to assimilate at each developmental stage and to understand the importance of relevance and the power of peer influence, I understand that time is our constraint. But a prepared leadership curriculum, even a simple generic framework designed to be taught easily by any and all teachers, can insure consistency, accuracy, and sensitivity. In teaching such skills, the empowering of self is critical, and therefore the manner of teaching is as critical as the subject being taught. A designed curriculum can outline specific presentation techniques for creating such an environment.
While much more may (and probably should) be said to advocate the use of a designed curriculum for teaching those self leadership skills that Mr. Covey so correctly declares are critically needed in education today, I will resist in the interests of preserving the central point of the issue, which is that a sea change toward such thinking is necessary immediately, and that the strength of mind and character to preserve our world in the future can only come from the demand that our children be sufficiently prepared with these qualities.