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<hr noshade color="#9999FF" width="85%" size="4" align="left"> <h2 class="title"><a href="http://www.montanaheritageproject.org/index.php/MichaelUmphrey/belonging_to_what/">Belonging, yes--but to what?</a> Chronicling endless school reform</h2> by Michael L. Umphrey For more than a year now, the school where I work has been listening to periodic exhortations from an expensive consultant focusing on increasing a sense of belonging among our students. “Belonging” is one of <a href="http://www.qisa.org/" title="eight "conditions"">eight “conditions”</a> being championed as the key to. . .well, I’m not clear on what it’s a key to. A couple of times I’ve suggested that one way to think about giving kids a sense of belonging is to think about what sort of community we are building, or even if we are building a community at all. I was hoping to move the talk on to more interesting things than tabulating how many times we smile per period, making sure we’re in the hall to greet kids, or expressing concern after a student has been absent. Though such things are good and fine, they are the stuff of bureaucracies, where being pleasant is a daily requirement. Even the clerk at the drivers license bureau is likely to be pleasant. Being pleasant, like being punctual, is an important bureaucratic skill. It’s not that hard. But superficial pleasantness does not create a sense of belonging. In a couple of meetings I suggested that part of the problem is that the high school presents itself to students primarily as a due-process bureaucracy, with our emphasis on policies and procedures and rules. A modern high school, of course, is a due-process bureaucracy--a place where everyone will be treated fairly, which means everyone will be treated the same, according to policy. Which means everyone will be treated impersonally--which is to say, without much care. It’s true a good teacher can do quite a lot to humanize such institutions, mediating between the required legal structures and the necessary accommodations to individual differences and needs. And it’s true that a good principal can do a lot to make it easier for good teachers to really work on that humanizing. Still, it’s hard to feel one belongs unless there is a community--even if it’s just a gang. We belong to posses, tribes, teams, bands, families and even nations, but we only pass through bureaucracies, getting what we need and then getting out. Well. Some of us do. A little over fifty percent, according to the surveys of our school the consultants administered. The trouble schools have with building any strong sense of real community is that to form strong communities we need to champion clear values and virtues. Even the Hell’s Angels are clear about what they are about. So are the marines, the Mormons, and nearly any other group you can think of that has members who really feel they belong. But if virtues are compelling enough to move people, they are sure--in our modern age of competing stories about who we are, our modern age of debunkers--to be controversial. So we try to make a virtue out of being uncommitted to any particular set of virtues. The posters in the halls celebrate diversity and teach tolerance. “Respect” comes readily to our lips. Generally, making such our core virtues mean that you are free to value anything you want as long you keep it to yourself and no one objects. In other words, it sort of means nobody cares what you think. It sort of means you’re on your own. We’re a collection of free individuals, but there really is no “we.” We find ourselves aiming no higher than a low common denominator. Everyone needs money, so everyone is somewhat motivated to get some. So schools have come to discuss their mission mostly in careerist terms. Schools exist to prepare young people for careers. It’s hard at school to discern any deep and committed sense of older and loftier reasons for education. Usually, kids are urged to do things or avoid things because of the impact those things will have on their career prospects. In other words, our appeals are usually to students’ self interest. We encourage them to be little careerists, keeping their self-interest paramount in their planning and doing. Naturally, we get a lot of kids who care about grades and who are looking out for themselves, and just as naturally, since most young people sense vividly that they are meant for grander things than to surrender all of existence to a job, we get a lot of kids who don’t really listen anymore. Teachers once talked about the path of nobility. Not us. When our children come to seem a little too selfish, we add “service” requirements as another hoop that successful careerists need to jump through, and the honor students jump and the others sort of shuffle. Since it’s hard for me to feel any sense of belonging to such an institution, it doesn’t surprise me that lots of kids disengage. They would like to join some grand enterprise that would give their lives meaning, but that’s not what we mostly offer. To what or to whom would they belong? No one really trusts a careerist. If I were involved, say, in a real contest with the forces of darkness, I wouldn’t look to a careerist to back me up, unless the prospects of winning were quite good and the rewards for winning appropriately scaled to his or her aspirations. Hirelings only go so far. Most likely in the big issues of life I’m on my own, as far as the institution goes. Career success among adults is somewhat like good grades for students--one of the lower things that tend to take care of themselves when one has purposes and aspirations that have a higher aim. I sometimes tell students that grades are a sucker’s game, by which I don’t mean they don’t matter or that there are no costs associated with bad grades. I only mean that a person arduously seeking understanding and knowledge doesn’t need to worry overmuch about grades, which is a wonderful condition, just as a person working hard at solving real problems often doesn’t need to spend a lot of time calculating for money. I do try to help kids see real communities around them that one can join and that are worth joining, though. There’s the community of fellow seekers of the truth, for example. It seldom has pep assemblies and the members aren’t always smiling and making pleasant small talk in the halls, but it has other attractions. For example, it affords a good view as here and there, bit by bit, the forces of darkness recede, the controllers losing control, descending into a maddening rush of new initiatives that never quite work, leading one member of that old community to wonder that so many people were in “desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.” Most teenagers are getting their sense of belonging from families, churches and nonschool organizations, and they are content to have schools teach the skills needed for career success. I think they are more interested in online alternatives to all-day attendance, or early graduation, or dual enrollment courses, than they are to recreating the total institutions of the 1950s. And what they want, eventually we will provide. The kids who don’t feel they belong anywhere are having trouble, and many of them turn to drugs, video games, sex and gangs. The schools that work best with them take a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweating-Small-Stuff-Inner-City-Paternalism/dp/0615214088" title="strong approach">strong approach</a>, teaching clear virtues. This approach requires strong leadership growing out of a coherent vision. That sort of leadership is rare in the schools we’ve built. Copyright 2008 Michael L. Umphrey