Education and Liberty

I find myself constantly amazed at the lack of ethics and logic, even just plain common sense, regarding our treatment of children in society. The startling lack of judgment on the part of the Lower Merion School District (The latest headlines read:

A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday. Full Article)

and the recent tasering of a ten year old boy in Martinsville, Indiana (Full Article) are all symptoms of the same problem: I will call it “Zero-Tolerance Thinking”

By “Zero-Tolerence Thinking” I mean the tendency of adults, members of large powerful institutions such as schools and police forces, to think of people, all people, in terms of groups. We all do some version of this. It acts as an economization of time and effort in using our judgment. And it can be a useful social tool: labels allow for us to categorize our social experience, and more quickly make decision. It becomes Zero-Tolerence Thinking when, instead of sound judgment, those in a position of power and force use it to exact punishment. It becomes dangerous when instead of seeing a ten-year old boy, throwing a tantrum, police officers see a violent offender whom they must violently subdue.

How about you? How often do you do this? How often do you choose put a situation into easily definable terms, instead of thinking critically about all that parts? As teachers, co-workers, friends, have you done this (albeit on a smaller scale)?

My larger question is about the outcome when we do this to children. When we see them as a group, instead of as individuals, how does that change their understanding of self? Zero-Tolerence policies at schools create situations in which the individual child is subsumed under the rule of gross group punishment. The implicit moral is “Do not think about your actions, your desires, the particulars of your situation. They do not count, will not be taken into account when considering the consequences. Follow the rules. All of them.” Who does this policy serve? Is there anyone who feels good about it? The administrators, who usually recognize the injustice? The parents who see their child in pain? The student, who is emotionally destroyed?

The most eloquent description I have found was unsurprisingly (or surprisingly, if you aren’t as familiar with her body of work) written by Maria Montessori :

The fact that the rights of the child have been forgotten and ignored, that the child has been mistreated, even destroyed, and that moreover hsi worth, power and nature have been misunderstood, should all give humanity serious food for thought.

Maria Montessori, 1938

Very serious food for thought. And a serious call to action.

P.S. I recently came across this fantastic account of a small town lawyer and his fight to make a school board use common sense. Enjoy!

Zero-Tolerance For Zero-Common-Sense

If you practice law in a small town–and especially if you practice criminal law in a small town–chances are pretty good you’ll eventually experience the joy & thrill of appearing before some school administrators at an expulsion hearing.

And you may be thinking to yourself, that doesn’t sound too bad. What harm could come from developing a niche practice in a small town, a practice in which you might be able to help confused students (and their parents) find their way back into school to pursue their future academic and extracurricular promise?

Well, Dear Reader, the problem is YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MIND.

Welcome to the Land of Zero-Tolerance, a place much like Alice’s Wonderland, where your client gets a mad tea party instead of a hearing with due process, conducted by a school administrator who could be easily confused with the Queen of Hearts. It doesn’t take long to find out that a “policy of zero-tolerance” can be the modern-equivalent of “Off with their heads!”

Now, some solace can be found in understanding this frustration is not new. One of my favorite sages, Mark Twain, once quipped:

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.”

So, you can’t say you weren’t warned. But that doesn’t mean it hurts any less when you bang your head against the schoolhouse wall.

I once represented a young man, who had never been in any real trouble at school, for an expulsion under a zero-tolerance statute for the offense of “possessing a firearm facsimile.” His transgression? He had made the mistake of asking to see the object another student had brought to class. It turned out it was laser-pointer in the shape of a gun. A very small gun. Like a tiny toy gun. Which he could hold in the palm of his hand and then close his fist around without anybody else knowing what it was. Which is why he stupidly asked to see it in the first place because he didn’t know what the other kid had in his hand.

The school principal said he was compelled to expel my client for a year under the law and it didn’t matter what my client’s intent was. I appealed to the school board and pointed out that the language of the statute clearly required that the “weapon facsimile” be capable of being confused with a real gun. The school board was unimpressed with my logic. After all, as one school board member commented, it could have been just like one of those tiny guns that James Bond uses.

OK, then.

Luckily, a district court magistrate–employing a shocking amount of common sense–didn’t buy the James Bond approach and overturned my client’s silly expulsion. The school board, wounded by this judicial rejection of their power, appealed.

The appellate gurus can probably predict what happened next. I made arrangements to have the little gun-shaped laser-pointer brought to the oral arguments, where I showed the Court of Appeals just how small it was and how it could be held inside a fist without any sign it was there. And the Court of Appeals judges shook their heads in approval and asked really good questions that showed just how absurd they thought the school board’s decision was.

And then they issued an opinion upholding the expulsion–because it was the school board’s decision to make–not some pushy, common-sense wielding judge.

And, not for the first time, I went insane.

So imagine the state of my mental health when coming across this item in the New York Times:

“Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.”

Please be sure to click on the link to the NY Times story to view the picture of this scary transgressor Zachary. Nefarious, ain’t he?

The NY Times correctly reports that zero-tolerance policies concerning weapons started with the tragedy at Columbine High School, here in Colorado. But the reference to Virginia Tech and the claim that the “growing debate” over whether these policies have gone too far being a recent development are not accurate. The shooting at Columbine was over ten years ago, and most of these laws were passed soon after in the typical knee-jerk fashion so loved by state legislators. The shooting at Virginia Tech is only one such awful and sickening demonstration of the ineffectiveness and futility of these laws.

But zero-tolerance policies are very effective at one thing: demonstrating the definition of “absurd.” Thus, I could barely wait for the answer when the NY Times posed the question “on the minds of residents” where Zachary lives: “Why do school officials not have more discretion in such cases?”

The mind-bending, psychosis-inducing answer? School board officials don’t have more discretion because, essentially, they’re too stupid. (Score one for Mr. Twain, thankyouverymuch.)

It appears “some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.” Protect the students from whom? From other students? Or from imbecile school administrators too dumb to distinguish a prank from a serious threat?

And the answer is??? Of course! It’s from imbecile school administrators:

Charles P. Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at the University at Buffalo Law School who has written about school safety issues, said he favored a strict zero-tolerance approach.

“There are still serious threats every day in schools,” Dr. Ewing said, adding that giving school officials discretion holds the potential for discrimination and requires the kind of threat assessments that only law enforcement is equipped to make.

There you have it. Zero-tolerance laws are designed to protect students from school officials who possess zero-common-sense and are unable to make unbiased decisions that an average cop, who presumably has less education, makes on a daily basis.

So, while school officials might be in charge of educating our children and inculcating values like fairness, equality, and respect for authority in this nation’s future generations, we can’t trust them to tell the difference between a Cub Scout utensil exuberantly and proudly displayed by a six-year-old and a deadly weapon intended to be used to hurt somebody.

No wonder some school officials have tried to ban Mark Twain.”

This article on Mises.org (HT: Blake Stephenson) gives an example of how the negative feedback loops inherent in large, centrally directed bureaucracies stifle the use of judgment, local knowledge and initiative.

The article illustrates why the modern state should not be in charge of public education. But I think it also suggests that there are problems that exist in all collective human endeavors that educators, social scientist and entrepreneurs need to try to overcome.

Why can’t we all “learn” from history? Why don’t organizations learn?

Experience teaches. While individuals can clearly be very resilient to recognizing the lessons of their experience, when the consequences of their actions fall squarely on them, it is difficult for them to be completely immune to the implications reality has for their thinking and behavior. Even when we are resistant to such lessons, we are bothered by conscience and failure. Reality provides a kind of ‘control’ for our errors. Yet peoples, governments and organizations seem to be remarkably oblivious to lessons which can be drawn from their past. They repeatedly take the same actions that are detrimental to their purposes. They fail to draw conclusions about the consequences of their collective behaviors and they are slow, if not entirely resistant, to making use of innovations suggested by the experience of their members.

One of the reasons for this is that there is a fundamental epistemological difference between the natural and social sciences. Strictly speaking, experiments cannot be made in the social arena because social structures and relationships are far too complex to isolate one-to-one causal connections between actions and results. In the social realm, every moment is always different from the one before it. History never repeats itself.

For these reasons, irreducible judgment and understanding (verstehen) are essential. We can learn by reading history, however. We can practice exercising our judgment about social dynamics by comparing the considered judgments other individuals have made about particular historical situations in the past. This is practice in developing and considering likely stories about social cause and effect. We can also learn from economics, which tries to uncover the abstract and timeless principles of human actions.

The difference between the learning that occurs in individuals about the immediate effects of their actions and the “learning” of group is that the composite results of the actions of individuals is not immediate and cannot be directly observed. There are unintended and unobserved results of our behaviors that are beyond our conscious recognition and control. Social science studies the results of human action but not of human design. According to Frederick Hayek the “economic problem”–which is to say the fundamental social problem–is the need for agents’ actions to be coordinated to make use of the knowledge (and learning) available to all of those agents separately. In order to make use of dispersed knowledge, we need experimentation, judgment and risk-taking on the part of diverse individuals and some form of feedback that translates individual learning into a form that will tend guide the actions of others.

In the nexus of voluntary exchange (the “market”), the price system and the institutions of private property help to coordinate the knowledge and decisions of all the agents involved. In The Use of Knowledge in Society, The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization and Competition as a Discovery Procedure, Hayek describes how certain institutions tend to make use of fortuitous discoveries and local knowledge for the mutual benefit of agents in that nexus of exchange.

Strictly speaking, groups of individuals do not learn; concomitantly, institutions cannot learn. But social structures can be so constituted that they allow individuals to make use of the knowledge and learning of the other individuals in that group.

Figuring out how to order all of our collective affairs in such a way that optimizes the use of the knowledge of the members of a group who do not possess that knowledge themselves is an exciting task for those who care about learning and progress.

“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage… Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of [classical] liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. ~F.A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p194

If children are allowed free development and given occupation to correspond with their unfolding minds their
natural goodness will shine forth. ~Maria Montessori

There are certain moments in my life where I feel like the world is telling me something. Times where so many of the conversations I have , ideas I am thinking about and articles I read converge, that I can’t help but listen. This is one of those moments.

We all know that how we educate children needs to change, that the public school system is not  “working”. (I go further, and believe that it is inherently incapable of providing a truly valuable education that respects the individuality of the child.)

Most of the discussion of education has been negative statements, statements of what we don’t want. So what is the vision? What do we want out of education? What would be the very best outcome for society?

Now I don’t presume to know the Answer, but I will propose an answer (and I am curious to hear what you think!): We want innovators. We want creative problem solvers, critical thinkers. That is where the continued progress and prosperity lies. We want people who see a problem, and are empowered to fix it, or at least give it an honest try. We want people who see a need, and want to fulfill it. We want entrepreneurs. This call is universal. It goes beyond industry and sector, it reaches the very source of prosperity for all people, in all countries. A country of inspired innovators is a country of prosperous, perhaps even happy, people. The wonderful Maria Montessori said in chapter one of her book, The Absorbent Mind, “If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.” The next question becomes what is the best way to develop the habits and insights of those “makers of men.” How do we inspire that wonderful quality of “tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”? Again, I do not presume to know the Answer. It is and always will be an evolving process but I have some ideas…

My current work is inspiring. I am honored to be in the company of a man working towards this: my boss, Jeff Sandefer, is an entrepreneur who, in addition to his many other contributions towards the cause of liberty, is making huge strides in how we approach higher education. The Pope Center for Higher Education put out an excellent article today regarding his prediction of the collapse of the US higher education system. As I work with him to develop a primary school curriculum we are making progress towards changing the very model of elementary education. Exciting times.

Here you will find an excellent speech that he gave on education.

It is important to note that the economic crisis we are in right now is not the result of technical or material conditions.  It is an economic problem, a problem regarding the coordination of individuals’ plans and the available resources.

Sustainability requires a balance of conservation with use. Governments everywhere subsidize consumption and tax saving and conservation.

Governments subsidies the production of roads, cars, the extraction of oil, deforestation, you name it. Most harmful is their use of artificial credit expansion from the federal reserve to subsidize widespread short-termism and present-focused consumption over savings and long term stewardship.

What has caused the crisis?  Too much consumption, too much borrowing, too much lending at high risk, not enough thought and care, too much unsustainable growth leading to a widespread miscoordination of plans with the facts of reality.  What is the proposed solution?  More of the same: to keep the economic engine going by encouraging more present consumption, over borrowing, protecting bankers from risky lending, and a continuation of directions of unsustainable growth with more easy credit.

We cannot continue this pattern indefinitely.

“No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child.” ~Maria Montessori

I recently returned from my first North American Montessori Teachers Association Meeting, held in Seattle, WA. What I learned there absolutely reaffirmed that education is the best way, certainly the best voluntary way, to support liberty. I am not talking about college courses and white papers churned out by think tanks (I love you think tanks, you know I do!). We have to start earlier, we have to cultivate a culture that educates about the ideas of freedom from the beginning, not one that merely tries to change minds later.

I had the opportunity to spend time with the lovely Marsha Enright of the Reason Individualism and Freedom Institute, while at the conference. A long time Montessorian who also is a true lover of liberty and the founder of the new College of the United States, whose vision is: “To create the global leaders of tomorrow who will fulfill the vision of our Founding Fathers by becoming successful men and women of principle and action, capable of spreading the benefits of reason, individualism and the bounty of liberty worldwide through their work and their example. “

We spoke about how the Montessori Method supports the development of the child in a way that generates a love of liberty, a respect for others individuality and a recognition of the value of their own. It is such an amazingly thorough pedagogy, and absolutely goes against the cookie-cutter mentality of compulsory education.

“We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instruction.” ~Maria Montessori

Each Montessori Guide is a gentle hand that helps to cultivate an environment (sort of like law is supposed to be) that allows each child to find their strengths, at their own pace, in a way that encourages a love of learning and therefore a love of thinking.

Isn’t that amazing? An education that in its very principles supports the thing I value the most: freedom, especially the freedom of children!

Below is a song by the elementary students of Countryside Montessori School in Northbrook, Illinois It is an excerpt of their opera, “On the Road to Freedom”

They are reciting the words on the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”