What bureaucracies don’t teach
     A community's sense of right and wrong

High school students John Kirtley and Gage
Sobell tape their interview with Mayor
Marty Malesich about problems facing
their hometown of Dillon, Montana.

An email from a friend expressed doubt that community-centered teaching can “preserve community.” He observes the “casinos, lofts, and latte shops occupying the bricks and mortar of former factories” and the blurred sense of community that has remained.

It does seem unlikely that communities organized primarily around economic realities can be preserved--as communities. Communities form when people come together to pursue goods. If the goods they pursue are jobs, when the jobs move on so does the community. But there are other goods that are more durable, and the communities formed around them are also more durable. My prime historical example is that of the Jewish people, who kept a sense of community through centuries, despite persecutions and diasporas.

Their secret was that they ordered life around a written text which they considered sacred and which embodied their understanding of what goods they were pursuing. By teaching this same text to each new generation, they created a durable community, within which members even centuries apart in time could recognize in their writings people who were in essential ways their kin. The community understood itself primarily in moral terms rather than in economic terms.

Though Montana logging towns have been less durable, it’s true that the actual, geographical and historical places are pretty important.

Nonetheless, once you’re there, caring about community is a moral affair. For me, the center of community is the conversation about what is right and wrong. Much of the time the conversation is tacit, but it has to be there. Finding ways to have the conversation, keep it going, and bring others into it is the work. And the ways can’t be faked, very much. There has to be a purpose that touches each life. Fulfilling an institutional mission won’t do it.

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The Power of Community-Centered Education
     Presentation for Portland State University

I’ll be presenting a webinar for a Portland State University class this month, taught by Marta Turner. The main reading is Chapter 8 from The Power of Community-Centered Education: Teaching as a Craft of Place.

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Beyond the last best place (Part 2)
     The Literary West

Lincoln in Dalivision

I admit I liked it better when I thought “the last best place” was an intentional play on Lincoln’s words to Congress. Just before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in December, 1862, he observed, speaking of human freedom, that “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

They weren’t idle words. Lincoln could see that Western civilization was at a crisis. He knew that, as Michael Knox Beran describes in City Journal, “the fate of liberty hung in the balance in three great nations: Russia, where Alexander II sought to promote liberal reform; Germany, where Otto von Bismarck applied his dark genius to the destruction of the Rechtsstaat (rule-of-law state); and America itself.” His rhetoric sounded lofty, but it was neither hollow nor overly grandiose. Those were real words, forged in a fiery candor. Could any nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle that all men are created, long endure?

Knox suggests the way history might have gone if Lincoln’s vision had not won:

Had Lincoln not forced his revolution in 1861, American slavery might have survived into the twentieth century, deriving fresh strength from new weapons in the coercive arsenal—scientific racism, social Darwinism, jingoistic imperialism, the ostensibly benevolent doctrines of paternalism. The coercive party in America, unbroken in spirit, might have realized its dream of a Caribbean slave empire. Cuba and the Philippines, after their conquest by the United States, might have become permanent slave colonies. Such a nation would have had little reason to resist Bismarck;s Second Reich, Hitler’s third one, or Russia’s Bolshevik empire.

At times I get the sense that something huge is happening and I suspect that issues of similar import are being decided in the hearts and minds of people here today, so when I first heard “the last best place” I turned the phrase around in my mind, thinking of what might be at stake here. Alas, according to William Kittredge, the man who coined the slogan, thoughts of Lincoln didn’t enter his mind at the time:

Back in 1988, the writers Kittredge and Smith had nearly completed a massive anthology of Montana prose and poetry and were desperate for a title, Kittredge said.

That year, the anthology’s editorial committee went to Chico Hot Springs in the Paradise Valley for some heavy duty literary brainstorming, he said.

At Chico, Kittredge was pouring a drink and musing about a line from a Richard Hugo poem called “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.” The line includes the phrase, “the last good kiss.” He was also thinking about the name of a western Montana mine called the Last Best Hope.

It all came together as the “Last Best Place.”

“I’m the one who thought it up. I know exactly when I did it,” Kittredge said.

Robert Struckman, the Missoulian

I was in the University of Montana’s MFA program at the time, and sometimes wondered whether every story written in Montana had to involve an epiphany in a bar. Thoreau had said that the government of the world he lived in was not framed in after-dinner conversations over the wine, but I don’t think he was angling for a grant or an award.

In any case, learning the true provenance of “the last best place” felt like a diminishment, a let down similar to hearing a rock anthem associated with my youth’s pure longing for freedom “re-purposed” as a jingle to peddle some pharmaceutical potion or a new pickup truck.

Sometimes—walking a high plateau east of the Crazy Mountains one afternoon in a chill autumn wind or putting a raft into the Missouri downstream from Fort Benton one brilliant July morning—I’ve felt I belonged to the same tribe the New Westers belong to. It’s a wonder, living in a place poised at that pastoral stage of development, where we have access to the abundance of modernity but aren’t yet assailed by a hundred miles of strip mall, noisy with solicitations to lay waste our powers.

But other times, it seems we live so far this side of paradise that I think it’s been a long time since I’ve heard words sufficient to the evil of our day.

By invoking Lincoln, even unintentionally, the slogan invokes the timeless question of freedom or slavery. The present age, after all, is far from exempt from that question. “The world of today is torn asunder by a great dispute; and not only a dispute, but a ruthless battle for world domination,” said Czeslaw Milosz (winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature) in his masterpiece, The Captive Mind. The great dispute was between the totalitarian regimes of modernity and the political theology that, from Christianity, had developed such concepts as the essential equality and dignity of every person ("in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them"), the separation of church and state ("Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s"), and the consent of the governed as basis for the legitimacy of political authority ("On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram").

Since Milosz wrote that, the Soviet Union has collapsed and, under Putin, begun to take form again, but the USSR was only a local manifestation of a principle that’s never been absent from history. The details vary but always someone is trying to build an evil empire, and its foundation is always a lie: the divine right of kings; the supremacy of the white race; the triumph of the master race; the great leap forward. Lies are tricky and even the well-intentioned are deceived by them. The early guru of modernity, Ezra Pound, saw that it was through corruption of words that the bad guys got and held power and he said he was committed to purifying the language of the tribe. But he ended up shilling for Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Nonetheless, one would think that purifying the language of the tribe should be part of the calling of the literary crowd. Sometimes it is, of course, but more often literary types fit the description offered by Mark Lilla in his latest book, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (which he offers as “a modest companion” to Milosz’s work). He said they “consider themselves to be independent minds, when the truth is that they are a herd driven by their inner demons and thirsty for the approval of a fickle public.”

Kittredge himself occasionally sounds that way to me. He can write achingly evocative lines, and then suddenly lurch into politically correct incantations that pop up like applause lines in a political stump speech. In Owning it All, he does some memorable storytelling about his grandfather, who, he said, set large cage-traps for magpies each summer, so he could drive down to the traps with his 12-gauge in his Cadillac. Then, in a slow and inevitable ritual the old man would step out of the sedan, the pockets of his gray gabardine suit-coat bulging with shells. The old man would kill the magpies one by one, taking his time. When asked for a reason, he simply said, “Because they’re mine.”

Kittredge introduces that strange story with these observations:

The West is a pastoral story of agricultural ownership. The story begins with a vast innocent continent, natural and almost magically alive, capable of inspiring us to reverence and awe, and yet savage, a wilderness. A good rural people come from the East, and they take the land from its native inhabitants, and tame it for agricultural purposes, bringing civilization: a notion of how to live embodied in law. The story is as old as invading armies, and at heart it is a racist, sexist, imperialist mythology of conquest; a rationale for violence—against other people and against nature.

Racist, sexist, and imperialist. Of course. People like to hear their opinions confirmed, and that little passage gets quoted often. After his story, Kittredge drives home the big point:

And our mythology tells us we own the West, absolutely and morally—we own it because of our history. Our people brought law to this difficult place, they suffered and they shed blood and they survived, and they earned this land for us. Our efforts have surely earned us the right to absolute control over the thing we created. The myth tells us this place is ours, and will always be ours, to do with as we see fit.

That’s a most troubling and enduring message, because we want to believe it, and we do believe it, so many of us, despite its implicit ironies and wrongheadedness, despite the fact that we took the land from someone else. We try to ignore the genocidal history of violence against the Native Americans.

In the American West we are struggling to revise our dominant mythology, and to find a new story to inhabit. Laws control our lives, and they are designed to preserve a model of society based on values learned from mythology. Only after re-imagining our myths can we coherently remodel our laws, and hope to keep our society in a realistic relationship to what is actual.

Whoa! That’s a pretty big statement to hitch up to one little story about an unhappy old man.

I think of my own grandfather, who also farmed in the West but who I’m pretty sure wouldn’t have blamed private property for the way Kittredge’s grandfather acted. Maybe he was blessed by failure and hardship. He didn’t conquer the entire valley where he lived and he never killed anything for sport. He lost his farm in the Great Depression and moved to what he called the “dry farm.” He struggled with hauling enough water for stock, and he trusted rain for the crops. He didn’t think of ownership as some sort of absolute right, but as a precarious blessing (he imagined “blessings” rather than “privileges” since he didn’t think the state and its entitlements constituted the main force in life) and as an achievement that brought some measure of independence and prosperity.

After he retired from farming he bought a house in town but kept a couple hundred chickens in a well-made coop in his back yard, so he would have some chores caring for living creatures. He showed me how to candle eggs.

I’m pretty sure that if he had witnessed Kittredge’s grandfather blasting birds to bloody bits, he would have blamed it on bad character rather than on mythologies. I’m not sure exactly what he would have said, but “son of a bitch” comes to mind. He also knew other words: “arrogant,” “greedy,” “heartless” and “bastard.” His “mythology” didn’t lack resources for disapproving of such conduct.

His son—my father—once caught me, when I was about ten years old, throwing rocks at a stray cat. Though my father often disapproved of things I did, I rarely felt he was disapproving of me—my essential identity—but at that moment that is what I did feel, which is why I’ve remembered it. “It’s bad enough that he doesn’t have a home,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t need to throw rocks at him.” His voice was quiet but the disgust was plain.

I wonder how deeply Kittredge really believes the moral he fastened onto his story. My hunch is that at least part of the reason he said what he said is because such ideas are fashionable among the tribe where he made his career.  I’ve heard that tale often enough: Americans are racist, sexist and imperialist thieves who also have genocidal tendencies, along with a superstitious belief in private property. Talk about a mythology.

Kittredge is explicit about saying over and over that he wants us to inhabit a different literature, a different mythology than the one of our fathers and grandfathers. Those hankering to shape the future have always told us tales, which is why people who want to be free have always had to be literary critics, in a sense. In Kittredge’s telling, his family’s ranch was a destructive mistake. “It all went dead, over the years,” he said. “We had reinvented our valley according to the most persuasive ideal given us by our culture, and we ended with . . . a dreamland gone wrong.”

My first question is simply, is this true? Not is it true that his family made mistakes, but is it true that they had lived by “the most persuasive ideal given to us by our culture”? Our culture has been around for centuries, and we’ve had some mighty storytellers. If Kittredge’s family truly did live by the most persuasive ideals that were available, and things went so wrong, I would imagine that things are quite hopeless. I don’t see today’s crop of storytellers as having wisdom or craft superior to the standard set by storytellers of the past.

Fortunately, hardly anyone I know is likely to believe that Kittredge’s grandfather was living by the most persuasive ideal available in western culture. For me, Kittredge’s story is the cultural trope of a tribe I’ve visited from time to time but among whom I’ve never really felt at home. So when he talks about “we” and “our” I don’t often feel that he means me and mine.

Part 1

Beyond the last best place (Part 1)
     Welcome to the Pleasure State

You may have heard Montana referred to as “the last best place.” It seems a fitting slogan, in the New West I hear is coming (version 1.0 of the New West was described by Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1906 book, The Rise of the New West—in it, Turner noted that “every period of [American] life is a transitional period").

In our current transitional period, maybe Dan Kemmis will get his way, and we’ll be ruled by appointed commissions of stakeholders—i.e. those who matter—and we can forget all that trouble about consent of the governed.

Maybe Rick Bass will get his way, and the loggers will leave the Yaak to him and the wolverines so he can expound more fully on what he intends by making a home in the wild.

Maybe David James Duncan will get his, and all the world will attend his churchless sermons and all religion will be disorganized.

Less likely, maybe I will get mine and people will be careful what goods they jettison on their overloaded journey to the promised land.

If you Google “the last best place” one of the first articles that pops up is about a nursing home in Florida. Florida, the writer says, is “the place where [the elderly] hope to live out, with as much verve, comfort and security as they can find and afford, the extra decade of life that advances in health care have given them.” At a “life care facility” called Canterbury, you can contract with an institution “to care for you for the rest of life. It is like a small well-managed village, or a very adult camp, and that is as good as it gets.”

The article caught my attention because I’ve always thought Montana’s unofficial slogan sounded like the sort of thing a person might say about somewhere he was going to die. It has, as Jedediah Purdy pointed out, a “slightly alarmed” quality, as when progressives, having debunked everything in sight, come to the gut-wrenching realization that they really are going to die anyway, and turn their attention to really enjoying that latte.

For me, listening to New Westers activates those parts of my mind that get me thinking about jasmine-smelling boutiques with shoppers gliding around the pyramids and mirrors, sampling metaphysical potions and charms, unable to get to the dream at the core of existence. Not that I mind the smell of jasmine or the quirks of my mystical friends.

Still, they aren’t the sort of people you want to count on when things get real hard. They tend to be hedonists, and hedonists, even mild hedonists of the sort who long for steamed broccoli, have difficulty comprehending soul-deep love and the meaning of sacrifice. Pleasure is subjective, which is to say private, and when it comes right down to it, they figure, they’re alone.

So we are never in it together, though we may experience our private thrills side by side and mistake it, in the short run, for something more important.

In any case, I tend to take talk of a “New West” as a wispy byproduct of the season, wafting like morning mist through the canyon, or the clatter of conversation half heard in the distance, mingling with the rattle of pebbles dislodged from an ancient trail to a remembered place that I intend to see again. Death is an illusion we use to learn what to let go. There is no last place. There is no best place.

But there is Montana. In some ways, the slogan may be as indicative of the sentimental state of some Montanans today as “The Treasure State” was of the Montanans of 1895, when that slogan first appeared on the cover of a guidebook published by the state government. At that time, Montana led the nation in the production of copper, gold and silver, and turning earthly resources into marketable goods felt right. It seemed to people then a reasonable way of heading toward Eden. Though the mines themselves could be hellish, people could also see the beauty of promise, which they called progress, in freight trains billowing coal smoke over the landscape.

Today, decades along in an environmental crusade full of Epicurean sermons that endlessly rehearse the idea that “the system” is evil—organized on principles of exploitation, oppression, capitalism, consumerism and commercialism—it’s become second nature to feel alienated, truly at home only among those who have the same feelings.

We have an entire class of oddly detached people who have a lifelong habit of frowning and shaking their heads about the economic system that fills their pantry and finances their vacations. They keep their jobs and manage their retirement portfolios, all the while holding themselves aloof from it all. To soothe their desire for coherence, they adopt public policy positions in favor of rain forests and whales and against Wal-Mart and pharmaceutical companies. This lets them feel a sense of moral purpose without interfering too greatly with their cherished freedom of personal choice. They may have to use less styrofoam but they can still find nice clothes at Patagonia, and if they really want something from a big box discounter they need only make a little self-mocking joke by giving “Target” a French pronunciation. To satisfy their hunger for real commitment to transcendent affairs, they can save the polar bears by turning off the porch light when they’re not using it.

Deviously, though the system is unquestionably evil it creates tons of stuff nobody wants to do without. The wealth that it generates is real enough to liberate lots of people from all sorts of commitments and duties that once formed the framework of many American lives—religion, civic organizations and family. They soon find other things to occupy them, so the detachment heightens rather than interferes with the pursuit of pleasure. As with the ancient Epicureans, their detachment creates space for the pursuit of pleasure—though with considerable care. After spending the day looking for the perfect restaurant, it’s important to eat sparingly, thus avoiding such trouble as gaining too much weight or getting diabetes. People who are no longer harangued by Sunday morning sermons or the threat of hunger see fewer and fewer reasons not to experience the world as a playground where it feels good to believe it’s one’s birthright to choose among pleasures. What is life other than a spectacle to be enjoyed?

Screenshot from Ameya Preserve website. Ameya is a
proposed development near Livingston, Montana.

The exclusive housing developments springing up throughout the West would seem to fit perfectly into this world view. David Nolt notes that “the cultural features” at Ameya Preserve, a proposed housing development near Livingston for the super rich, will include, along with open vistas of the Rocky Mountains, “restaurant and cooking classes, courtesy of Alice Waters, the reknowned Berkeley-based chef.” Those with time can explore “the dinosaur digs with Jack Horner.” Life can be planned around “readings, lectures, and . . . the largest observatory telescope in the state.” Ameya is only one of many housing enclaves dedicated to enjoying the Montana spectacle: Spanish Peaks, Moonlight Basin, Saddlehorn, Iron Horse Ranch and Rock Creek Cattle Company.

Of course, lots of New Westers find it pretty hard to like these gated communities such as Ameya—not because there’s anything wrong with a life dedicated to self-fulfillment and aesthetic gratification in whatever last best place can be found—but for other reasons. It’s so darn inegalitarian. It locks up natural resources for private use. It develops previously undeveloped habitat. Wade Dokken, the financial industry CEO who’s trying to develop Ameya, really ticked them off by saying that the opposition to his plan was mostly due to “class envy.”

I would bet on the guy with money and a plan. He’s got some elements of that deep dream at the center of life in Montana figured out: wilderness is our garden. We plan it and cultivate it just so. It pleases us.

We are past the point where wilderness is possible, except as a style of gardening. The language of Genesis was the language of commandment but also of prophecy, and the part about dominion has largely been fulfilled: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” The earth is largely subdued and the extent of human dominion is, by historical standards, amazing. If grizzlies still wander McDonald Peak in the Mission Mountains, it is because bureaucratic committees have met and decided that it should be so.

Tranquility Ranch, Swan Valley

The good news is that grizzlies do still wander McDonald Peak, because the committees, reflecting the wishes of the people, echo the Creator somewhat in concluding that the earth, including the bears, is good. If the ideas of people such as Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold still seem a little odd, at least the lifestyle seems cool. We’ve been converted. No one wants a porch on main street. Everyone wants a Walden Pond or a weekend house on the Wisconsin River.

Rather than dreaming of seeing new factories built, we admire the beauty of all the showy houses the wealthy are building beside small lakes and along ridge tops everywhere in the West. Wouldn’t it be fine to build a house with a nice view of some special little piece of Montana and then to lock things down, so it too doesn’t get ruined? As much as possible we would keep the infrastructure decently hidden—the interstate trucks laden with Italian olives and and Mexican apples for our table would be kept too distant to hear. We may connect to the Internet every day, but the massive server farms running Google are low profile and down river along the Columbia, and we’ll insist that the power lines from the grid to our breaker box are tastefully buried. There will be no visible wires in this fantasy.

The last best place, I imagine, becomes a simulacrum of a wild world, tenuously holding the wild world at bay.

Welcome to Montana, the Pleasure State.

Part 2

Now what? School reform after NCLB
     Keeping faith with community-centered teaching

One of the more comical aspects of NCLB is
the Hickory Farms facade on the US Depart-
ment of Education building in Washington,
D.C. The homey little red school house
acknowledges what we all know: kids do best
in human-scale places. We are apparently not
supposed to really notice that vast bureau-
cratic structure looming behind, that repre-
sents the reality of school reform via federal
law.

Why are the politicians in charge of education?

Diane Ravitch asks Deborah Meier a critical question on the Bridging Differences blog:

. . .how did American education fall so effortlessly into the control of Know Nothings from the world of business, law, and politics?

How indeed?

Since schools are politically-governed institutions, why would you expect them not to be controlled by politicians? And as you increasingly centralize their governance, how would you not expect lawyers and businessmen to increase their control, as they have of most other centralized bureaucracies where there’s huge opportunity for gain?

It’s not quite true that these politicians, lawyers and businessmen truly know nothing. It’s just that in a democracy where vast numbers of voters are ignorant or inattentive or both, politics will often be dominated by opportunists who pander for gain. It would take a Know Nothing—or at least someone uninformed by much history— to expect otherwise.

Schools depend on the surrounding community for both their clientle and their staff. Public schools also depend on that community for their governance. Ever since I was a young, reform-minded principal, I’ve been quite sure that the community needs to be the unit of educational change, if we are talking about a public school. As long as decisions are made by elections, it’s nearly inconceivable that a school will operate for long at a higher intellectual or ethical level than the community in which it is embedded. To get the community to do something difficult, such as succeeding at teaching children difficult things, at least a majority of the community will need to see and understand the need for doing hard things.

Lost in a national “community”

That seemed hard enough in the town where I worked. When the size of the decision-making community has been expanded to include the entire nation, as it has been under No Child Left Behind, the difficulty is beyond daunting. No individual is likely to be heard above the roar of institutional voices, speaking through costly lawyers in forums created and controlled by big money. Of course we lose our voices.

At this juncture, those of us who would like schools to be thoughtful places where difficult and meaningful work is the daily task, our choices for getting there seem to be either to educate a majority of the national citizenry to share our vision, so we can get past gridlock or ugly compromises and can get on with the work, or to escape national decision-making (though we may want to keep national information gathering and dissemination) and let folks at the site make most of the decisions, through some system of decentralization.

The most hopeful may be vouchers which could allow a network of private schools where decisions about professional practice could be made by professional educators without undue interference from local politicians. Disgruntled parents would not need to campaign for politicians who promise some axe grinding. Instead, their freedom would be preserved through choice. If they disliked what was happening at school, instead of getting involved in politics they could just change schools.

One danger, of course, is that many private schools would just be local franchise outlets of large corporations offering the educational equivalent of happy meals: cheap, standardized, and gratifying but not very good for you. To be honest, I’m not at all sure this would be worse than what many kids are now getting, and I’m also sure that educational fast food would not be the only offerings on the market. McDonalds has not driven good restaurants out of business.

Be that as it may, we are nowhere near the first choice袀reaching a shared vision of what quality public schools would look likeԢindeed, we may be moving farther from it, judging by the partisan tone of our national political conversation. So the first choice seems, well, impossible.

And if the second choice—a robust national system of private schools—doesn’t quite seem impossible, it does seem unsatisfying, ineffective and unrealistic, at least in the short term.

One initial problem with it is that new schools would be staffed by people from the existing education industry and so would tend to re-create the system we would hope to reform. A lot of ideas about teaching that have been demonstrated not to work (whole language, learning styles, multiple intelligences, portfolio assessments and most thing deemed “authentic” or “student-centered") are, nevertheless, ubiquitous and seemingly as ineradicable as false ideas about medicine that seem so ingrained that even many doctors believe them: we only use 10 percent of our brains or we should drink at least eight glasses of water a day.

Speaking about the difficulty of making progress by increasing parental choice, Ravitch somewhat irreverently points out that

most schools will reflect the dominant ideas of the schools of education, where most teachers get their training, so most schools will adopt programs of whole language and fuzzy math. . . . Most students under a pure choice regime will know very little about history or literature or science.

City Journal

This is what I’ve thought for a long time. Parental choice may be better for reasons having to do with freedom, but I wouldn’t expect it to lead to mass improvement on standardized tests. In the short run, a new charter school or voucher school is unlikely to be fundamentally different than a typical public school. Where would it find people who think and act in ways fundamentally different than their colleagues up the street?

Where are our teaching orders?

So things at the moment look a little bleak. At such times, when there seems no clear way forward, I sometimes finding myself thinking about an odd comment Philip Rief once threw out: “Where are our teaching orders?”

An order is as different from an organization as a team is from a committee. In an order, each member has internalized the principles that the larger order is dedicated to so that, in a sense, each member contains the whole. People are bound together by their shared vision and shared commitment rather than by the formal rules, though formal rules will certainly exist as expressions of the vision and commitment and as a way to remember complex learnings.

A good teaching order would both train teachers and operate schools. The animating vision of the order would provide guidance not only for the curriculum, but also for system-wide discipline involving the conduct of teachers and administrators as well as students. Most schools today have adopted the vision of school as a due-process bureaucracy, which often creates organizations that exist in a high state of disorder because the wills of the individuals are not aligned. Students are taught they have rights but less often are they taught they have duties to any particular communal order. Orders must be entered by choice.

At present, leaders who would create different schools usually need to use teachers trained by the universities into the standard progressive ed vision. Though we do have hundreds or thousands of programs that do some teacher training, the training is usually inservice and narrowly focused, and after a summer institute the teachers return to their various schools, where they are likely to be quite lonely.

Focusing on the work at hand

Even so, I feel oddly optimistic. Maybe because at the moment I have lots of work to do and the school I’m at is at least in comparative terms a sane place. It would be a breach of faith to feel pessimistic when every twenty-four hours a brand new morning arrives, and I have energy.

I also know that the rules that govern our reality respond to us. Many of those laws are, as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman put it, “socially constructed,” and some realities we can change by changing such simple things as the way we walk, our posture and the expression on our face.

At times when we can’t do all we would like to do, it may be enough to be honest with ourselves, to listen carefully, to think clearly and to speak candidly. Sometimes we don’t need to solve problems so much as we need to lose our fear of them and turn away from them to the other things that matter to us more.

We only need to change our minds and all sorts of unsolvable problems vanish. Something is going to change. Keep busy and look forward to what’s going to happen next.

Life in the Enchanted West
     Cowboy manners: smile when you call me that

Though I owned a horse when I was a kid, I didn’t have a saddle and we didn’t have any cows. My dad was a logger. Nonetheless, he taught me the Code of the West, in his intermittent and distracted way. He loved cowboys and he hated jerks and bad manners.

Though Montana now has its share of folks who look to Europe for their sense of how people ought to live—the ones who call the President a cowboy and feel they are being very mean when they do—some of us just can’t feel that it’s much of an insult to call someone a cowboy.

I’m talking about mythic cowboys, of course. The ones who can’t be destroyed by the debunkers, who live two or three paradigms south. Mythic cowboys live in in the narrative space of stories that should be true. They emerged when their creators felt that the ideals they embodied were threatened by all the usual things: urbanization, industrialization, corruption and modernity. Some way was needed to jazz up the ideals of civilization when the forces of barbarity seemed ascendant.

In other words, mythic cowboys were created to meet actual problems. It worked well enough, barely. All those GIs in World War II thought they knew a thing or two about how they were supposed to act when faced with the likes of Hitler. The details—50 caliber heavy machine gun in the waist of a B-17 instead of Colt .45 from the back of a gelding—mattered little.

Cowboys inhabit a timeless narrative space, along with the troubles and villains they face. Who hasn’t from time to time found himself in Hadleyville, that hapless town located in High Noon where the ordinary, fearful folks feel things might just be good enough if Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) will just ride away. That Miller gang is pretty scary. Think how unpleasant a fight would be.

But of course, the good cowboy doesn’t ride away if that means injustice triumphs. That would be against type. So Kane stays and things get unpleasant but then, after a hard trial, the good order is restored. Historian Victor Davis Hanson believes that when Europeans call George Bush a cowboy, their typological thinking is mainly correct:

The truth is that we live in a global Hadleyville suffering from the delusion that international communications, cell-phones, and the Internet--like the railroad and telegraph before them--equate to civilization. In fact, they are only a thin and flashy veneer atop a wild and savage world where outlaw regimes like North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq, and Iran push until pushed back. The United Nations can keep the peace and dispense justice about as well as the territorial marshal who is a three-day ride away or the bought sheriff of a cattle baron’s town. And a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mullah Omar, or Saddam Hussein listens to international warnings about as much as Liberty Valance pays heed to the bumbling coward of a sheriff Link Appleyard.

That is why so many people privately appreciate an American Tom Doniphon, Shane, or Will Kane who from time to time appears out of nowhere to stand up to a Saddam, Taliban, or Kim Jong Il--or to the recent crop of bullies in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

How now, cowboy? The uses and abuses of a national icon.

A crucial part of the charm of the cowboy type is the requirement for being a reluctant warrior. The good warrior doesn’t want war. Cowboys are primarily gentlemen—practitioners of the code of chivalry. They have manners, which also bespeak the timeless.

Manners, they know, are the little ways we practice the big virtues:

* “Always tip your hat to a lady and they’re all ladies.”

* “Actin’ like you’re big is probably going to have the opposite effect.”

* “A man taking a stand on high moral ground just might be standing on a bluff.”

* “One sign of good manners is being able to put up with bad ones.”

* “Sooner or later we all wind up sitting next to someone at dinner who is about as strange as a duck in Death Valley. Good etiquette requires that you waddle across the desert with ‘em until dessert is over.”

* “If a woman spills her drink, hand her a napkin and let her do the patting.”

* “Don’t answer the doorbell in your undershorts.”

* “If the guests outnumber the chairs, it’s called a buffet.”

* “If you’ve got nothing much to say, don’t take an hour to prove it.”

* “Don’t interrupt unless somebody’s hair is on fire.”

* “Never go anywhere without your head in your hat.”

* “Aftershave is not a marinade.”

* “Never interfere with another man’s dog unless the dog is about to attach himself to your leg.”

* “When served escargot, pour a little salt on it and forget it. It will melt while you wait for the next course.”

from Texas Bix Bender’s Cowboy Etiquette, with art by Larry Bute

I’ve spent a bit of time over the weekend reading some far left websites. Not many cowboys there.

Writing conference via email
     Teaching in the connected world

Today my English 11 class was doing a timed writing, partly as practice for the state writing assessment they will take in March. About 15 minutes into the session, a little beep notified me I had an email. I looked, and it was from C_____, one of the students who was sitting with her back to me at her computer on the other side of the room. “How am i doing so far?” was the subject heading.

I opened the email and found a couple paragraphs from the essay she was writing.

I read it quickly, noting a few stylistic weaknesses in a couple sentences. I copied these into my reply with a brief comment and hit “send.”

A few minutes later another message arrived from her, asking for clarification. I went into a bit more detail and sent it back to her.

“Can I use these suggestions?” she asked. “Sure.” “k. . .thanks.”

It was quite fun and, I think, quite effective. Feedback at the moment of creation tends to be more useful and memorable than feedback a few hours or days later. Also, it was very efficient. Neither my comments nor hers took more than a few brief moments. It went on in complete silence, without distracting anyone else in the room.

Since the class is largely about reading and writing, I would like to do quite a lot more of the teaching in this way. If more students were like C_________, that would be quite easy.

How to improve the teaching of writing
     Five steps to a better high school writing program

Learning expedition at Whitefish High School

I’ve heard that the writing curriculum is going to get some attention from the administration this year. Nothing that schools attempt is more difficult than teaching writing. Writing may be the most intellectually challenging thing many students are asked to learn in school, and teaching writing requires individualized coaching, which is laborious and time-consuming.

We’ve gone through something of a revolution in teaching writing since the late 1970s, when “the writing process” began to be championed throughout the land. Most state teaching guides now talk about the writing process. Unfortunately, this hasn’t led to any measurable improvement in student writing:

Over the last 20 years, during which process has been integrated into instruction nationwide, all NAEP reports have shown a gradual decline in writing performance. The NAEP 1996 Trends in Writing report (U. S. Department of Education, 1996), the most current comparative report as of this writing, showed that holistic scores (on a 6-point scale) for fourth-grade writers changed from 2.82 in 1984 to 3.02 in 1996. This change is statistically insignificant. The percentage of run-on sentences actually increased during this period, as did the percentage of sentence fragments. The more recent 1998 NAEP Writing Report Card (U. S. Department of Education, 1999) does not look at longitudinal data but nevertheless allows us to compare student performance as reported in the 1996 Trends in Writing report. The 1998 report examined results for Grades 4, 8, and 12 and found that percentages of students performing at the basic (below average) level were 84, 84, and 78, respectively. The percentages of those performing at the proficient (average) level were 23, 27, and 22, respectively. Only 1% of students at each grade level performed at the advanced (above-average) level. If we compare the 1998 and the 1984 data, we find that the above-average figure is unchanged for 1998, that the average figure is lower for 1998, and that the below-average figure is higher for 1998.

James D. Williams, Preparing to Teach Writing: Research, Theory, and Practice. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 2003, p. 99.

Between 1998 and 2003 there were slight improvements in the NAEP scores for 4th and 8th graders but not for 12th graders. Since in Montana scores stayed flat during that time, that meant our students slipped downward in the national rankings (aside: there was a huge gender gap in Montana, and elsewhere: Montana eighth grade girls scored 168, which was 31 points higher than the 137 scored by boys).

Although the widespread adoption of process teaching has not led to notable improvement in writing, I don’t take this to mean that the approach is wrong. Indeed, as one who has spent countless hours trying to write better, I am quite sure it is right. Good writing really does require planning, drafting, revising and revising and revising.

Instead, I just take the lack of improvement as evidence of how difficult the challenge really is. If kids do not write a lot and do not get quick and useful feedback on how they are doing, they are not going to get much better, regardless of whether the teaching takes a pedagogical or a process approach. What this means in practice is that if most students are going to learn to write skillfully, the school day needs to include substantial blocks of time for writing, and the writing teachers’ work day needs to include substantial blocks of time for coaching student writers.

The National Commission on Writing has called for schools to “double the amount of time most students spend writing.” I suspect that for many students on many days, this would be quite easy, since two times zero is still not much.

If improving writing in the district were assigned to me, these are the steps I would advocate:

1. Clarify and articulate the vision of why writing matters. Be able to say clearly why it is important. Then say it often.

Kids do learn what they are taught and they do believe what they are repeatedly told, if what they are told isn’t so foolish that their own experience contradicts it, and if the tellers aren’t obvious hypocrites, only mouthing pieties they have no intention of living.

I believe writing matters because it’s impossible to do large, complex thinking tasks without it. I believe writing matters because without being articulate in language, we are at the mercy of the large bureaucracies that govern modern life. Theodore Dalrymple, in his work as a physician in the London slums, commented on the way the inarticulate are held hostage by the very bureaucracies that were invented to serve them:

In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantagea disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. I would find myself dealing on their behalf with those bureaucracies, which were often simultaneously bullying and incompetent; and what officialdom had claimed for months or even years to be impossible suddenly, on my intervention, became possible within a week. Of course, it was not my mastery of language alone that produced this result; rather, my mastery of language signaled my capacity to make serious trouble for the bureaucrats if they did not do as I asked. I do not think it is a coincidence that the offices of all those bureaucracies were increasingly installing security barriers against the physical attacks on the staff by enraged but inarticulate dependents.

I believe writing matters because I believe every human life matters, and to the extent possible each should create a history of its significant experiences and insights. I believe writing matters because organized societyעwith its miracles of medical science, of improved production and distribution that make life less painful and more enjoyable, of social linkages that help us find and stay connected to those who are important to us—depends on dense communication, including written communications, at every level. I believe writing matters because I agree with Francis Bacon that “Reading makes a full man . . . writing an exact man,” and all the higher occupations require the sort of analytical exactness that can only be learned through writing.

Oh, and then there’s this:

The bottom-line problem and opportunity remain the same: The correlation between career success and writing proficiency is extremely strong. Government and private sector employers alike have told us that those who can write well will advance in the workplace and those who cannot write well will struggle to be promoted or even retained.

Bob Kerrey, National Writing Commission Chair

2. Ensure that all teachers hired can write well. Don’t assume any teacher has much writing skill just because he or she has a teaching license. Especially don’t assume all English teachers can write or teach writing.

Require a writing sample created at the interview site at the time of the interview. Promote this school as the place where writing matters. Include the emphasis on writing in all vacancy announcements. Make this the place teachers who have a passion for teaching writing want to be.

3. Develop the writing skills of teachers already on staff.

This is challenging. “Drive-by” inservice workshops won’t do it. Further, much of the advice out there about the teaching of writing really has little to do with the foundations of powerful writing, which are still knowledge, grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The first rule of powerful speaking, Cicero taught, was to know your subject. He observed that unless a speaker “grasps and understands what he is talking about, his speech will be worthless.” So it is with writing.

But if you took seriously the ”6 traits”—the most popular framework for writing instruction in the public schools today—you might think that good writing was mostly a matter of “voice.” And if you look at some of the fliers that come out of the National Writing Project, you might think good writing was mostly a political affair, having to do with empowerment, authenticity, and, again, voice.

Well, maybe it is, but I sure wish more of today’s education authorities believed that “research"—including not just Googling but also interviewing, observing, and experiencing—was thought important enough to be a trait. Also, some mention of truth and accuracy would be bracing.

In any case, good writing is intimately connected to learning and to a writer’s purposes. It is important in ways quite far removed from writing 40-minute essays in response to prompt unrelated to any real world purposes (even though there is quite a lot of overlap at the level of fluency and basic skills).

For teachers who are expected to include writing among their teaching strategies, one thing that would make sense would be to have them write frequently about their practice: brief reviews of websites and other materials, introductory comments to units they want to use, reflections on student work, and so on. When I was a high school principal, we included reflective writing in-service training, and then we published teachers’ thoughts about using writing in their teaching. I was surprised at the generally high quality of the work we received.

Today, I would think long and hard about ways to use blogging to engage teachers in writing and collaborating about their practice. For one thing, I would design the school website so that each department was posting regularly for the public, for other staff, and for students about topics of interest in that discipline. Janet Clarey discusses a similar idea (though in a corporate rather than a school setting) a little more here. Teachers would need to be given some time to write, but if they are not given regular time to write and, more important, a reason to write, they are not likely to get much better at it or give it a tremendous amount of thought.

4. Ensure that student writing is visible.

Both accountability and standards are best addressed by making the work real and public. Athletic programs provide a model--both accountability and standards grow out of regular games and tournaments. A writing program should also feature regular performances. The best of these, I think, involve writing for real world purposes with a natural audience, such as local history.

Blogging is a new genre of writing that should also have a place in the writing curriculum. What I have in mind is not at all the diary-writing that young people put on their My Space pages, but the focused and regular writing on specialized topics that have emerged everywhere. While journalism continues to decline as a profession, all sorts of businesses are adding bloggers to their payroll, recognizing the advantage of putting a personal voice before the public, along with a constant flow of information and links related to the business, whether that is gardening or automobile racing or software development. For students, the practice of regularly reading online information on a topic that interests them, and then commenting on it and providing links, is an excellent way for them to advance their interests while doing large amounts of regular reading and writing.

Note: I would be leery of burying the writing in literature courses. Though many teachers apparently do a great job of integrating writing into the study of literature, it’s far easier not to do so. Teaching literature is fun and relatively easy. Most writing teachers would rather be teaching literature. Very few writing teachers went to school to teach writing. Most went to school to read great books, to spend time in the storyworlds of fiction; they didn’t go to school to learn to teach writing to the unwilling and uninterested. Teaching writing is labor-intensive and time-consuming—an easy thing for a literature lover to put off or slight when they also have curricular obligations to read all those novels.

It’s quite easy for a class mixing the study of literature with the teaching of writing to focus more on literary analysis than on writing. That is, after all, the focus of most classes taken for an English major. Many English majors are not taught how to write so much as how to appreciate literature. Appreciating literature is, of course, a fine and wonderful thing, though not something as culturally central as it once was. It’s not just that reading has been declining for some time among all age groups, it’s also that the age of great poetry has passed, in the English speaking world, and the age of great fiction is rapidly fading in the rear view. Few people today walk around with lines from the great tradition of English poetry resonating through their lives. This is unspeakably sad, and in some moods I feel it is likely that it will yet be catastrophic.

Nonetheless, the important cultural conversations in the present age are occurring elsewhere—for imaginative works, in television series and films, and for fundamental questions in the biological sciences, in cognitive science, and even in history, but not, unfortunately, in fiction and poetry. Worldwide, nonfiction outsells fiction by $55 billion to $25 billion. When a work of fiction does enter into the national consciousness, it is most often because it has either been transformed into a successful movie or it has been discussed by Oprah.

At the post-secondary level, writing across the curriculum programs have liberated composition classes from the English department. It was, after all, mostly a historical accident that led to the strong association of English with composition. Professors in all disciplines are expected to write, and anyone who imagines literature professors know more about writing than people in other disciplines probably hasn’t read much recent scholarship in the field.

5. Ensure that writing teachers have the time.

This is the main thing. Students don’t write more in large part because teachers don’t have time to deal with floods of student writing. I suspect that the real reason writing ability declined during twenty years of emphasis on the writing process was simply because all the workshops and exhortation was unaccompanied by any real increase in time to do the work. If a teacher assigns only fifty students an essay, that will translate into more than fifteen hours of reading and commenting. If those essays are taken through three drafts, you can triple that time. This is time that, for a typical teacher, will be spent after school and on weekends. A good writing conference with a single student can easily take a half hour, though such conferences are much, much more effective than scrawling comments in the margin.

But even those large investments in time aren’t enough. Except for teachers of honors classes, much of the writing will contain numerous basic problems, such as unclear pronoun references, which can’t be explained simply to students who are not eagerly seeking the skill. At the end of reading a batch of essays laden with problems of basic usage, problems of style, problems of coherence and organization, and problems of general mindlessness, the teacher needs to decide what to do about it all.

Writing comments on papers hasn’t been shown to be particularly effective. Even if it were feasible, reteaching everything that needs to be retaught tends to be similarly ineffective. Students who have failed to figure out active voice many times before are quite capable of ignoring yet another lesson. There isn’t time in class to reteach everything, though if you add up the errors made in many typical classes, they will include pretty much everything. There have been dozens of suggestions for how to handle what is basically an impossible situation: have the students edit each other’s work, have students get their papers read by two or three other people before turning them in to the teacher, teach “mini-lessons” on all those problems that show up in the work. All of these work to a limited degree with a limited number of students, but a good many students continue to write poorly all the way through high school graduation, and then on through college, and not infrequently on through graduate school.

What works best is coaching: reading carefully through a students’ paper while giving explanations and making helpful changes. To the extent that I have been able to do this, it has worked. I believe a good faith effort to teach every student to write competently would require a writing teacher’s load to be no more than three classes a day, with no more than fifteen students in each class. The other three hours a day would be spent reading student writing and holding conferences. Students enrolled in a writing class should be simultaneously enrolled in a computer-equipped study hall, both so they have time each day to write and so they are available for conferences.

Teaching writing to 45 students a day, who were actually writing for an hour each day, would be more than a full-time job. If this were done at least one semester each year for three years during high school, I would expect to see significant gains in the writing ability of a majority of students in such a program.

If this isn’t possible, for financial reasons, then I would advocate that such a program be available to those students who freely choose it. It is as impossible to teach a student to write well who hasn’t the least desire to learn it as it is to teach good basketball skills to a player who refuses to run at more than three-quarter speed or to pay attention to what is happening on the court. Though sometimes a talented teacher can motivate a student, this is a difficult and inexact art, and I’m not of the mind that opportunities should be withheld from some students because no one has found a way to persuade all students to strive for them.

Counting on lightning
     Surprised by insight

In medieval Europe, people believed that ringing the church bells during bad storms dispersed evil spirits seeking to destroy God’s house. In a thirty-year period in the 18th century more than a hundred French bellringers were killed by lightning running down bell ropes. Finally, the custom was outlawed. The ancient Romans believed that lightning moving from right to left was a good omen while energy moving from left to right was a sign that the gods didn’t like what was happening politically. A leftward movement required that all public assemblies be canceled.

Probably the Romans were no closer to the truth than the medieval Christians, though both positions still claim adherents. It’s easy to misread the meaning of things.

For me, lightning is one window into the way of things. There are illuminations that occur suddenly. Unseen patterns connect and the darkness explodes in brilliant skeletal patterns, and I see.

There are slower ways of learning, of course. Some things we learn gradually, a little here and a little there, something like the way a coral reef is built up from the remains of innumerable individual polyps. This learning is vast and solid, forming the experiential base of all our knowing. 

But I have come to count on lightning. Living in a dry climate where lightning is rare, I know that conditions need to be right. Lightning forms in thunderstorms, and thunderstorms are brewed out of heat and moisture. So I read and observe and make notes, bringing the needed ingredients to mind. I am drawn outside at night when the sky is alive with tumultuous changes.

Sometimes, it’s true, the darkness returns so swiftly that we are little more than confused by enlightenment too brief to stick. But sometimes, we really do see and in seeing we are changed.

Living or artificial?
     Are Christmas trees green?

A few of us head out in search of the
perfect tree. This year, all five of children
managed to make it to this annual tradition,
along with their spouses and seventeen
of the eighteen children. The eighteenth
grandchild is fifteen, so sometimes other
obligations seem more important to her
than yet another family gathering.

Sometimes I’m even more glad than others that years ago Valerie and decided to live in a small town near family rather than near career opportunities. This morning I came across an article in the
Washington Post pondering whether people should put up living Christmas trees or artificial ones. Well, “pondering” is actually too impressive a word. Fiddling with the concept would be more accurate.

I do worry though that such fiddling too often passes for thinking among many of us--judging by the detritus of modernity that fills my own inbox each day. There seem to be a lot of people quite busy with not much.

At a superficial level, the question might seem a touch one. On one hand, a living tree gets chopped down. But on the other, most artificial trees are made of nonbiodegradable plastics and metal in China. Cutting a tree. Oh my! Contributing to nonbiodegradable mountains. How awful!

From where I live, no such dilemma appears. Each year, my family gathers to cut our trees on a piece of property purchased by my wife’s father decades ago. The land is in the foothills of the Mission Mountains, more than a mile above the nearest county road. Some years, just getting in there is a challenge. This year there was snow, but it was a sunny day with temperatures above freezing. Stunning.

If any of us had more time or resources to devote to managing the forty acres, we would somewhat aggressively thin the trees, cutting thousands of competing fir and pine and spruce and leave healthy trees spaced every fourteen feet or so. We’d select the trees we left for general health and to preserve the mix of conifers that have grown there as long as anyone knows. I’ve done quite a lot of such thinning in the past, in much the same spirit as I thin carrots once they have sprouted, leaving only as many as can flourish. In any case, we don’t imagine our taking of a few trees is harming the planet.

Many years ago I cut some trees to sell at this same property. I was a first year teacher and Valerie and I were quite poor. It seemed we could either tighten our belts at Christmas or do something to get some more money. We drove a few hundred miles home, spent one day cutting and bunching 500 trees to load on our 1956 4x4 GMC (I loved that truck) and then we drove back to eastern Montana where I worked (and where trees were more scarce). We sold all the trees out of our front yard, charging $1.50/foot. Most trees were seven or eight feet tall.

The removal of 500 trees wasn’t noticeable, but the little difference it made was an improvement, helping the forest renew itself more quickly. Crowded trees can’t grow very fast.

None of which interests me much.

What interests me is the family tradition of going to that place to get our trees each year. We do it on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. We started when Valerie and I had three small children. We’ve done it every year since. This year, there were twenty-seven of us. For a few hours we spread out through the mountains, the toddlers staying near parents and the older kids going sledding on the ungroomed hill that bounds the property on the north. Our kids, who are young adults with families of their own can’t remember not doing it, and their kids experience it as a huge festival involving all their cousins who, for these kids, are nearly as well-known as their siblings.

As it gets dark, we leave the hills and gather back at the homestead for chili. Well, this year it was clam chowder. I usually make the chili, but my son-in-law, Dev, made chili for everyone the day before to serve at his oldest son’s birthday party, where we all gathered. So, chowder. The key to keeping traditions going is being flexible. In fact, several people didn’t even get trees this year. My youngest son cut some fire wood, which he needed at the moment more than a tree, and my oldest daughter, who had a two-month old baby riding in a pack, seemed content to just wander through the woods with us, enjoying the day.

Until a few years ago, most Christmas trees were harvested from wild forests. Today, nearly all commercial Christmas trees are grown on tree farms, where trees are continually planted and harvested. Buying all those trees keeps the land planted to trees, albeit small ones, and it keeps a lot of people working on the land, which I take as a very good thing.

It seems sad to me that about half the trees out there this year will be fake. Perhaps the time will come when my family, too, will switch to synthetic trees, which will for a while try to create echoes of the sort of memories I am rich with. If that time comes, I will indeed face a dilemma, but it won’t have much to do with worry about landfills.

Instead, I will be thinking about how to create new traditions that link family members across generations in reliable moments of togetherness. What else is Christmas for? (Hat tip: Garden Rant)