I just got a really great concrete lesson in why compelling priorities does not work for proactive commitments (which are most of the commitments that we compel for).
Force is most useful, really, for negative priorities. It's needed when you want to keep someone from doing something. It's far too blunt and just doesn't work to compel proactive commitments because people always find ways to resist. Passive resistance is the form of resistance that most people take on, whether they be teachers, students, administrators, politicians, activists, or whomever in the education field and everyone else everywhere else. The only people who cooperate in life, for real, are the people who want to cooperate.
Force creates artificial cooperation for a limited period of time - when the threat of consequences are imminent - and then wears off as the consequences are not imminent. That's why force based regimes like the Nazis and Communists applied so much force. Because it was the only way that force could sustain any impact, long-term. Because it wears off, otherwise, even for negative priorities - trying to keep someone from doing something - without proactive commitment.
Proactive commitments needs people on board. It needs people convinced of your idea and working actively and collaboratively to achieve goals and solve problems along the way. Collaboration, by its nature, is genuine cooperation that is proactive rather than passive cooperation. And it can't take place when it is forced because, by its nature, it cannot be forced. It's not genuine cooperation, otherwise. No matter how much we might make excuses otherwise.
And today, I just had this really great lesson in why you, ultimately, can't compel long term development of whatever goals you want to achieve between people. Even to reduce and end violence and murder, two of the clearer cases for the use of force, will only stop, in the big picture - plenty of individual murderers can be shut down by jailing them or killing them - when people commit themselves to nonviolent and least possible and necessary aggression in resolution of problems, generally, and build a culture that better supports those commitments.
But when it comes to a goal like improving student achievement, pressure, force, and compulsion cannot create proactive commitment.
Today, we met around those goals and developing lesson plans to improve student achievement.
I teach math, which is the big area that the district is compelling efforts to improve achievement. They've developed benchmarks in the 8th grade that students have to pass before they move onto 9th grade. They've compelled teacher improvement. They've compelled the development of lesson plans according to very specific criteria. They've compelled a pacing guide for a district proscribed curriculum to achieve all those objectives. This is all on top of the millions of mandates from special education on my time and energy.
There is no lack of compulsion in American public education (and yet, it is never enough for its advocates, is my experience. The Nazis had the same problem).
Today, my teacher colleagues and I shared our lesson plans for comment and critique. I shared my plans on my team. And from every comment I got, it became clear that the thing people were most impressed with was how closely I followed the mandate for how the lessons were to be done.
Translation: noone else was doing it.
The reason, I'm pretty clear, is because I, ironically, have a much better attitude about these things than most people. Most people like to compel others and hate to be compelled themselves. And resist it like crazy when it is imposed upon them.
I hate it. And I spend time venting to friends, on my blog, and in life, generally, to have a release of all of the anger and frustration and hate I often feel having my hands tied to achieve results that I generally - and most people, really, if you ask them - will have better ideas for given a freer hand than I will if someone arbitrarily imposes a structure on me that may or may not be the best structure.
The thing that everyone forgets and that is the source of the hubris that the Greeks spoke about over 2000 years ago as the fundamental human error is that there is noone who has final knowledge or real, final authority - beyond their always artificial roles as authority figures - about how anything should be done, and even whether it should be done. No group of people, no matter how multilateral or built on consensus or otherwise legitimized has that power. Noone does. And it doesn't matter how much I or we assert it. It doesn't exist. Not in reality.
The best we do is we assert it and hope people go along. And induce, force, and otherwise manipulate them.
But the only way that any great effort ever gets achieved for real - meaning proactively with people on board - is if people believe in it. Period. There is no working your way around it. Because people always do, will, and should resist those things that their consciences and judgments are not convinced of. It's a good instinct that we have. And yet, it's not really an instinct at all. Fucking is an instinct. Eating is an instinct. Shitting is an instinct.
Critical thinking and skepticism are learned behavior.
And good for us for taking it more seriously than the current advocates of force to achieve their ends.
The irony in my life is that I more happily comply with laws and rules, generally, than do most people, because I understand that they are generally created from good intentions. Not all the time. I break rules and laws all of the time. As everyone does, no matter how careful they are not to. There's too many of them for us to keep up with all of them, is the truth.
And as Winston Churchill brilliantly observed:
"If you have Ten Thousand Regulations, you destroy all Respect for the Law "
And that is what we are and have been in the process of doing for the last 6 years, and for quite a long time, now, truth be told.
We've done it before, obviously. Hence, Prime Minister Churchill's observation.
And that, I think, is the engine for liberal reform when those with a regulatory instinct do not want to or will not let go.
And that is the process we are in the middle of, right now.
As I watch my teaching colleagues, the one thing that comes clear more than anything else is that they resent and resist the impositions and regulations and coercion.
And their resentment of it interferes with their ability to do what I do: to look deeper and understand intentions, even as you disagree with the means.
I don't even do this as well as I notice I need to as things move along.
And I'm a best case scenario. Most people just resent and resist.
And you can't create more genuine proactive commitment and collaboration with resentment and resistance. Genuine proactive commitment and collaboration come about because people are persuaded that the goals matter and when they genuinely work with one another through all of the pitfalls to solve problems that inevitably face all kinds of obstacles.
That's why a volunteer army is so much more effective than a conscripted one.
Because people who freely commit themselves will give exponentially more to the effort, and to any enterprise.
That's why Stephen Ambrose was right that Allies would inevitably win World War II and that the only question was how quickly and how many people would die in the process.
Because free people love their freedom more and will work harder and longer to keep it and expand it than compelled people will work to appease those who enslave them.
That's why the American military outstrips every other military in the world in its manpower, technology, and development. It is freer than other systems and has more people more collaboratively dedicated to achieving it's goals. And it is supported by a free economy that creates technology, resources, and services that is one of the freest and most proactive in the world.
You can't imitate or substitute that with force. It isn't possible. Our military certainly has a long way to go to have more of this kind of advantage that comes from a freer institution. But is far better than almost all militaries over the course of civilization, and most militaries today.
The same is true of education and journalism and business and even politics and the law and every field, when they stop to think about it.
Force achieves narrow and minimal objectives. It cannot produce genuine commitment and cooperation and collaboration. Because genuine commitment and cooperation and collaboration, by their natures, cannot be forced. That is the nature of them being genuine. And force, in the meantime, as Churchill wisely observed, undermines that kind of genuine commitment and collaboration.
I hate all the regulations and impositions that I have to deal with. But I do them more happily than most people and with a clearer effort to live more within the spirit of the law than the letter of the law. Because I take seriously the spirit of the law and the politics that created it and understand that it means something, even if it is flawed or wrong-headed or ill-conceived.
That is what the advocates of the contemporary political moment of force as a governing philosophy do not see, understand, or recognize as the mistake that is, currently, undermining all their efforts.
But eventually you have to face it. It took the Soviet Union 70 years to face it. It took the Nazis 26 years to face it until they were forcibly deposed, one of the classic and most important examples of how and when force, even considerable force, must be used because no other sufficient alternatives exist.
Leftists in Cuba and North Korea and their cheerleaders in the West have still not faced it. Right-wing ideologues in Pakistan, Syria, Iran and elsewhere, and their cheerleaders in the Arab world and the West, still have not faced it.
But eventually you have to face it. Not because you are forced to by others, necessarily (though elections are nifty ways of doing just that; and an excellent example, especially in less mature democracies, of where people can resist such imposition unless they are proactively committed to purposes of democracy and regular elections).
You have to face it because the failure becomes too obvious.
So many people were killed, imprisoned, and hurt in the old Soviet Union and Nazi regime until the failure and grotesqueness of their ideologies became completely clear for enough people to end their rules.
I do wonder how long it will take liberal societies to fully embrace their liberalization. Their freedom. And the far superior abilities that such freedom gives space to breathe and learn and grow.
All I know is that no matter how long more repressive ideologies march ahead (30 years for Naziism, 70 years for Communism, thousands of years for the more repressive history of humanity pre-democracy), they cannot sustain themselves. It is both a matter of morality and commitment by free peoples, where power distorts morality and loses touch with its higher purposes, and a matter of reality, where more repressive philosophies and governance and ideas and cultural commitments cannot sustain respect for the law and governance and even ideas that undergird them, and where, in reality, free people and cultures always dance circles around their repressed brethren on the things that matter most.
I am very proud to take a liberal education and a more genuinely liberal outlook on life much more seriously than most people, even in liberal societies. Because I'm completely clear that it is our liberal worldviews that afford us every most important quality of life that we have in a world that takes advantage of all that liberal education and all those liberal commitments and is forever taking them for granted.
And I would rather have a liberal democratic culture that is taken for granted, than a repressive culture to abandon or overthrow.
What we need, all of us, is a liberal democratic culture that we more genuinely appreciate, expand, and sustain, rather than perpetually undermining its opportunities and the freedom that creates them.
And the first thing we need to build that more liberal culture is more genuinely liberal schools, universities, educations, and engagement, in and out of schools, to sustainably support that kind of culture for the long haul of humanity.
Love,
Ben
