How Educators Can Help Turn Back the Doomsday Clock

                So the doomsday clock has been moved closer to midnight, primarily in response to the election, inauguration, and first week of Donald Trump as president. Depending on one’s views on the situation, one may think it’s ticking faster than ever or one may think that’s an over-reaction prompted by a liberal media. I’m not going to take a position on that, and while I am going to become a bit more political than I like to in this blog, I’m trying to express this with the voice of an objective educator.

                Before I begin, however, I have to acknowledge doing so is becoming harder. Personally, sometimes I can lean so far left that I could tip over at any time. However, I try hard not to let that seep too much into my work other than how I treat people. I don’t see a school’s job as dictating what someone should think about a particular topic. But we should be teaching the right way to approach topics and how to engage individually and collectively in a search for understanding that improves us.

                That is why when I consider all the things which have so many people upset and anxious and angry and scared, I see a certain irony in the doomsday clock being moved forward when it comes to our children and their education. Yes, there are the oft-expressed concerns about what children may be learning and feeling. But I’m looking at this in more practical terms. It’s not just about the nomination of a person who seems amazingly unqualified to be Secretary of Education. It goes right to one primary purpose of education—preparing our children for the future and the world they will be entering.

                That is where the irony comes in…although irony may not really be the right word. Right now it seems as if President Trump and his people want to “Make America Great Again” by turning back to clock to an earlier time. And it’s a notion which I don’t believe can happen except to America’s detriment. Like it or not, with remarkable acceleration the world has become a highly-interconnected, highly-interdependent single system, except for some notable outliers who choose to practice isolationism and suffer for it. The issue is more than an economic one. Thriving in such a world requires an empathetic openness to other cultures and people, one that leads to a sense of “we” rather than “us and them.” Countless studies have shown how cultures benefit from the intermingling of diverse perspectives. The moves we’ve seen thus far smack of a hubris which seems to assume the trajectory of the world will change because the United States wants it to.

                But, despite whatever remains of our prominence, it won’t. History, short- and long-term, shows us that. Empires crumble; revolutions happen. Throughout the ages there have been doom criers. Yet the world continues to progress. Despite what we often think and feel, the reality is that it is less violent and moreaccepting place than ever. But recently we should be feeling true urgency. Perhaps now more so than ever, as educators we need to be thinking about how we help our students be a meaningful part of that forward march. Without engaging in extremism or proselytizing, we have to model the ideals and have the important conversations. Our students can be the ones who get that doomsday clock turned back. And that isn’t about liberalism or conservatism, Democrat or Republican, internationalism or jingoism. It’s about what should drive educators at any time: an optimistic belief in humanity.

Not Knowing and Leadership

       While I believe it's inherently wrong, perhaps even harmful, to reduce education to a single overarching objective, I'm going to do so here for the sake of my argument, albeit with a caveat. That is, the objective I'm going to assert can play out in endless ways. It's the notion that a meaningful, purposeful education prepares one to lead. To lead by being who one is in whatever roles one plays. And just as we rethink what it means to be a leader, we need to rethink what it means to be educated and ready for that role.
       Last month I sent out the following Tweet:

Love this from @tomfriedman Thanks for Being Late: leadership now about multiplying credit. #isedchat pic.twitter.com/EFnbJwSEIL

— Mark Crotty (@crottymark) December 22, 2016

When I saw it, I found myself recalling The idea of level 5 Leadership from Jim Collins' work in Good to Great, particularly the notions of modesty, looking out the window to apportion credit, and setting up successors for even greater success. Then a couple of days ago, I ran across a Fast Company blog post titled "Why Real Leaders Have Strong Egos and That's a Good Thing." The author, S. Chris Edmonds, writes, "In practice, 'having an ego' simply means understanding the worldview through which you act--in order to get your own needs met as well as the needs of others. And that, of course, is in every leader's job description." He contends this "takes discovering how you--uniquely--can support both yourself and other people to go through the same process, to 'self-actualize' in reaction to all the messiness of business and life."
       It's not the time-honored definition of a leader. I also suspect it's not one overtly taught in most schools, although we talk about developing leaders. I think that's because of what our culture--and, by extension, schools--defines as being educated. We use terms such as smart and knowledgeable, as if there is a clear and easily defined threshold, and one must present it with surety and gusto, even bravado. Many people draw a certain security from that, wanting to believe our leaders know just where we are going and how to get us there.
       But in such volatile times--the age of accelerations, as Friedman calls it--is that really what we need? Just as Edmonds points out many of misunderstand the concept of the ego and should reconsider its role in healthy human development, let's reconsider knowledge/education and its link to leadership. The second most important knowledge may be the continual realization of just what we don't know, individually or collectively. And the leaders we need may have the first most important--a sense of how to help us all figure things out together.