On Simplicity, Transparency, and Educational Trust in Topeka

[A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Wichita Eagle here.]

There are several different ways to talk about the "Parent's Bill of Rights and Academic Transparency Act" being debated in the Kansas legislature. One obvious way is to look at the role of ALEC and conservative and Republican-leaning groups and activists in flooding state legislatures across the country with bills challenging what their advocates see as the unpatriotic curriculum often taught in public schools (usually associated with the "Critical Race Theory" bogeyman), employing the same claims which helped elect Greg Youngkin to the governorship in Virginia. But that perspective, though obviously correct, focuses only on the ideological and partisan actors at work in the promotion of this legislation. However polarized American voters have become, I also suspect that bills like this can ultimately only enjoy whatever popular success they do because they also appeal in part to a frustration and confusion, and certain kind of a longing for simplicity and trust, which is all but universal--because it seems to so often compromised-- in our modern lives. So as politically naive as it may be, I want to set aside the dark money accusations for the moment, and focus on that appeal.

That the ordinary lives lived by you and I and anyone else who may read this in the United States today--as in almost every other industrialized and post-industrialized economy--are regularly shaped by all sorts of complicated corporate, governmental, and bureaucratic systems is hardly a new insight (paging Rousseau, Weber, Berry, or my own pretentious writings about "simplicity" from the early days of this blog, more than a decade and a half ago). Almost no one like this, and almost everyone complains about it, but relatively few people--maybe entirely home-schooling parents, maybe off-the-grid Amish farmers, etc.--are both willing or able to reject the many goods (in terms of time, convenience, and specialized services, many of which are life-saving, but may others of which are, I'd like to believe most people would admit, merely distracting fun) which these complex, usually out-sourced systems provide. In the midst of this complexity and tension, how to hold onto the ideal of ordinary citizens being able to access the information to truly governing themselves? For some, like this bill's authors--or, probably more accurately, the audience for whom the ideologically disposed authors of this bill intended it--the answer is “transparency.”

That “transparency” is a key component of modern democracy is undeniable. If the decision-making of those whom we elect stays invisible, it invites corruption and poisons our civic health. But like “democracy” itself, the concept of “transparency” can sometimes become a totem, a term used to advance a cause rather than a standard to assess what is actually taking place. And that is, unfortunately, what I think has happened with this proposed educational reform. When a couple of Kansas legislators recently defended the bill, they only passingly mentioned the “unhealthy ideas” and “harmful ideologies” which they believed could find their way into the public schools. Instead, they focused upon how parents “have a right to know what their children are being taught,” claiming that the bill simply aims to guarantee “easy access to curricular materials that already should be available today,” and concluded by writing that “there are no enemies in transparency.” And on a certain level, they’re completely correct. 

Who, after all, likes to be kept in the dark, however unintentionally, by the specialized bureaucracies were are obliged to negotiate? When these two Republican legislators--both of whom, for whatever it's worth, are mothers and former educators themselves--point out that for “busy parents” the process of finding out just what exactly is happening in their children’s classrooms may be “unclear, unfamiliar, and tedious,” I would imagine that anyone who has ever had to negotiate the complex systems around us (think about trying to find a human being to talk to when calling to file an insurance claim or fix a problem your wireless plan) can relate.

But all the same, I wonder about their perspective on their former careers. The great majority of public school teachers I have known regularly bend over backwards to involve parents in their curriculum, and to help them through the process of understanding that curriculum, with frequent parent-teacher conferences, open houses, book fairs, and so much more. The history of our four daughters moving through Kansas's public schools haven't been conflict-free by any means (I can remember one rather tense meeting when we and several other parents confronted the principal of Wilbur Middle School over a division action a teacher had taken), but overwhelmingly, when have sacrificed sufficient time so to become fully familiar with and thus committed to the specialized work being done by the neighborhood schools our daughters have attended, the results have been pretty wonderful, and as close to collective, slowly built, long-term educational experience with pursuing the public good as I've ever known.

Weigh that reality--which I am sure I am not alone in having experienced--against what is actually in the proposed bill. It woulds require school districts to set up “transparency portals” to give parents online access to “each test, questionnaire, survey, or examination,” as well as explanations of the rationale behind each assignment and accounts of how any of the data collected from any of those assignments will be used in the evaluating the student, plus links to all the library materials used in any of the aforementioned assignments, and much more. In light of all that, it’s not unreasonable that many here in Kansas see bills like this as using the cry of “transparency” to express, instead, a simple distrust in educators themselves.

The bill won’t pass right now, thanks to strong Democratic opposition and dissents from some Republicans concerned about the intrusive governmental mandates it involves. But whether it dies, or sneaks through as part of an appropriations bill, or comes back again next year, the problem inherent to employing a valuable concept like transparency to justify creating more work and reporting for teachers whom parents should be talking to regularly anyway will remain. 

Outside of a complete embrace of home schooling, the classic small-r republican ideal of parents and teachers working together in local schools for the “the common good of the child”—as these legislators put it—will probably always face at least a little difficulty, since their roles and responsibilities of parents and teachers are different. Public schooling in America has always involved a balance between providing a private service to parents--providing their children with the skills and knowledge that will presumably benefit them in their adult lives--and a public good to society at large--introducing to minors civic concepts and a degree of cultural literacy which is judged to be appropriate to the responsibilities of adult democratic citizenship. That balancing act, in practice, will likely disappoint and frustrate as often as it succeeds; that’s what life in a complex, specialized society unavoidably brings us. Technological transparency may smooth over some of these frustrations, but considering its costs, maybe resisting the temptation to demand that the internet to be used to survey everything happening in one's children's classrooms at all times, and instead making the time to respectfully talk and listen, thereby showing trust in each others’ areas of concern and expertise, would surely be the better path.

Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

For ten years now, I've been teaching one version or another of a class on personal simplicity and economic and environmental sustainability here at Friends University, a formerly Quaker, non-denominational Christian, small liberal arts college in Wichita, KS. Though I teach at a religious university, I don't teach religion myself--and for that reason, I at first doubted that Jennifer Ayres's Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education would much that would be pedagogically relevant to me, despite my strong sympathy with her subject matter. In this, I was partly wrong. While Ayres's book includes many intriguing (and a few borderline outrageous) educational suggestions, its greatest value to me as a teacher is the way it inspires me to take stock of what I've tried to do with with my sustainability class, and to perhaps rethink what my primary goals in that course should be.

My original aim in the design of this class--about which I've probably shared my thoughts about too many times already--was always primarily getting students out of the classroom and into the growing, producing, fecund Kansas ecosystems all around us, showing them that there are patterns of life that can keep people fed and housed and happy without committing oneself to the rat race. It shouldn't have been a shock to me, after I'd lived in Kansas for a few years, to realize how many of my students really had no connection with farming or food systems--but it was, nonetheless. Sometimes broad popular stereotypes about "living in the heartland" would be confirmed as I talked with the students taking the class, and some of them would end up taking the lead in teaching me about cattle ranching or winter wheat or regenerative agriculture. But more often than not, my own agricultural background, limited as it is, nonetheless greatly eclipsed theirs. And so I figured that, whatever else I might be able to communicate to my students about Wendell Berry or John Woolman, I should at the very least get them out of the city and take them to some farms--as well as urban farmers markets and community gardens and other kinds of local sustainable business operations, perhaps going so far as to work on one of our own.

In doing all of that, I'd like to think I've been fairly successful, at least insofar as the "getting them out of Wichita" part is concerned. Even in the midst of the worst of the pandemic last summer and fall, different butchers and ranchers and food producers were willing to sacrifice some of their busy days to let students--majors in Conservation Science, Health Science, History & Politics, and more--come and tour their land, their independent meatpacking processing operations, their homemade tomato and lettuce greenhouses, their cheese-making and milk processing facilities, and so much more. These kinds of experiences don't, I'll be the first to admit, necessarily provide the students with the sort of detailed know-how necessary for them to develop more sustainable practices in their own lives. But as Ayres herself insists, knowledge about one's ecological surroundings are only the tip of the iceberg; as she writes, "Cultivating [the] capacity for inhabitance"--which she defines as "seeking to know and love and particular place in some detail and honoring its [ecological] rhythms, limits, and possibilities"--"requires personal and social transformation at a level far deeper than that of figuring out ‘greener solutions'" (pp. 3, 17). Thus the aim of those who aspire to "educate for inhabitance"--which I realized, in reading this book, clearly describes me--has to involve figuring out ways to engage the affections of others, their bodies and appetites and emotions and creative imaginations. If that seems intuitively true, it may be simply because philosophers from Aristotle to Polanyi have consistently argued that nothing can so engage people as real tactile experience, and real practical work. So far as that goes...as I said, I think I've done fairly well on the first, though not so much on the second.

To be clear: any success I've had with the first has to be attributed, first and foremost, to having an exemplar to draw upon, and becoming friends with Leroy Hershberger--a mechanic, handy-man, cook, juggler, bicyclist, and born story-teller, all with a degree from Yale--a decade ago has made all the difference in my life and the life of so many of my students. Some of them from years before have told me that dinners at the Hershbergers were one of the highlights of their entire college education. They remember well Leroy's glorious beard (that he shaved it off during the pandemic came as profound shock of several of them!), the kind words of his mother Mary, the inquisitive questions of his father William (who passed away at the age of 80 during the pandemic; Leroy's tribute to his father was touching, kind, and wise), and most of all the joy the whole Hershberg family take in being able to introduce young people a life more focused on the land, on real material productivity, and in that way a whole ecosystem--both ecological and economic, to say nothing of also spiritual--that exists and enlivens the worldview of many outside the hustle and bustle of our urban college campus.

I've sometimes been challenged--or, indeed, given the vicissitudes of trying to do my part to not just educate students but also keep my tuition-driven college campus alive and functioning, sometimes I have challenged myself--as to the real "outcomes" of this class and these excursions. Am I trying to turn my students into farmers, into rural proprietors and local producers? If so, why, and am I at all successful at it anyway? Every educator in today's late capitalist world confronts those questions of metrics and assessments at one point or another, and it's hard for me to conceive of anyone serious about the teaching profession who doesn't recognize the harmful framing they introduce into the very idea of paideia--that is, of the formation of the human person which a proper education should involve.

That may not mean that such questions can--much less should--be simply dismissed as irrelevant; our students live in this late capitalist world too, and are looking to find ways to discover livelihoods, relationships, and most of all places of productive inhabitance within it. If we as teachers provide no bridge from the formation we hope to introduce to their affections to the challenges facing them upon the conclusion of their education, then we haven't served them well at all. Ayres reminds me of all this, with wise comments on matters of both paideia (which she presents as an acknowledgement of the communities within which we are formed, and the responsibility of constructive critique which community membership must entail--p. 62) and place (which she defines as any location which, through human inhabitation, "is imbued with meaning, with histories, and [most crucially] with contestations"--p. 88). Creating, through my classes, opportunities for my students to come face-to-face, and hand-to-hand, with people like the Hershbergers and dozens of others who have exemplified simpler and more sustainable forms of life hopefully also gives them 1) a model of the love of place, and 2) the incentive to recognize, come to know, and thereby carefully--but unsparingly--critique their own places. 

Do I imagine that such incentives and models will automatically transform my students into ecologically, environmentally, agriculturally informed inhabitants of wherever they live? Obviously not, especially since my own inhabitation still falls short in so many ways. But life is long, and beginning students along a path scattered with seeds for reflection, fits in, again, with the kind of trust in the slow pace of creation which Ayers speaks of eloquently:

[S]low knowledge is the kind of knowledge necessary for an ecologically conscious person or community. It is cultivated together and shared, is deeply related to the context in which it is nurtured, and acknowledges--indeed, embraces--human limitations....[M]ost importantly, it demands human patience and attentiveness. It will not be rushed. In the not rushing, in the attentiveness, wisdom is cultivated and inoculates human consciousness against the seductions of technological progress and the quick fix....

In formal education settings, the push toward more content coverage and measurable success makes the proposal of slowing down, reading less, and reflecting more somewhat of a pedagogical and institutional risk. In religious communities, "slow learning" meets other institutional pressures: in a season of anxiety about declining religious affiliations and lackluster participation in education programs, religious and educational leaders might be seduced by slick curriculum packets that promise effortless preparation and meaning engagement with learners. The principle of slow knowledge, however would suggest that efficiency and meaning are sometimes at cross-purposes. Meaning takes time (pp. 72-73).

The relevance of ecological language to the slow formation of ideas, in the lives of students or parishioners or anyone else, contrary to what Ayres calls--learning heavily on Berry, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Wes Jackon, David Orr, and many others--the "uncritical embrace of the efficiencies and networking capacities of technology" (p. 4) should be obvious. Equally obvious is how committing to the enacting of that slow formation--such as by growing a garden--can only strengthen that relevance. But that, of course, is where things get exponentially harder. It is one thing, in the midst of whirlwind of experiences that make up a college education, to get students to pause for an hour, or a day, or maybe even longer, and enable them to put their hands on the soil and the food and the people who can provide them with real models of belonging and critique. It is an entirely different thing to commit students to fill up that pause with the daily, weekly, monthly work of growing things in a garden, and to be able to see and, eventually, taste the results of their own re-orientation.

For close to a decade, many of us here at Friends have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to commit our students--and ourselves!--to projects requiring some genuine husbandry in a garden space on our campus. Sometimes there have been real successes, and sometimes the space has lain almost entirely forgotten for an academic year (or more). The space in general has much improved since the early conversations about it, and the first rush of enthusiasm to transform what was a vacant lot beside a student housing complex. But an entirely sustainable component of Wichita's local food system--much less even just Friend University's!--the garden is absolutely not. It remains, month in and month out, dependent upon the vision and determination of a few of us, and the occasional student or two or five who find ways to make the time spent working in the garden satisfy either their own personal commitments or their academic responsibilities or both. But even in those happy situations, we'll likely only have a season or two from the students in question: they are, after all, young people, seeking to gain the learning (and the certification of having received such) that will enable them to find their own place, and make their own commitments, on their own schedule, not necessarily Mother Nature's. So we make the most of the seasons we have, and continue to try our best to get the carrots and arugula and potatoes to grow, in the same way I try my best to make my classes spark agrarian and ecological ideas that might never have occurred to the students before. Sometimes, it all works. And when it doesn't, we trust in God's grace and the fecundity of both the Kansas soil and the college student's mind, and try again.

That kind of attitude is always going to be dispiriting to some. They might look at Ayres's book and note that she hardly ever addresses the complex structural forces which likely make it difficult for an education in inhabitance to translate into the creation care she considers imperative. The same criticism could made of the three-credit hour college class I teach once a year at a not-especially-notable Christian college in the middle of Kansas, of course: how is that really addressing the obstacles to inhabitance. But as utopian as "religious education" and "local food tours" it may seem, that doesn't mean we still can't approach them with a hope for real formation work in mind. Or at least I do--and I thank Ayres for reminding me of that ideal. She is a teacher speaking to other teachers, like me. She is urging, through her book, those of us who have grasped the imperative of seeking to cultivate a greater concern for ecological and economic and spiritual sustainability to “envision...a way of inhabitance that may not yet be entirely possible,” holding on to the faith that the communities we might be building through our teaching “can imagine and do and become that which one person cannot on their own” (p. 129). Perhaps "envisioning for inhabitation" isn't a bad goal for my class, as I take it into its next decade.

A Semester of Teaching Sustainability

[Cross-Posted to Front Porch Republic]

The semester has come to an end here at Friends University, and students are leaving campus for their holiday break. Right now I'm grading, and while I have many tests to grade, none interest me quite as much as the exams turned in for "Simplicity and Sustainability" course which I taught for the second time this semester. I gave my students questions on the readings we've discussed--the writings of E.F. Schumacher, Herman Daly and John Cobb, and many others--but more importantly, I asked them to go beyond the questions, and use the essay portions of the exam to reflect upon alternative forms of social and economic organization. That was the focus on the course, after all--to consider, criticize, and comment upon the range of possibilities available to those who truly wish to make their livelihoods, their lifestyles, and their neighborhoods both simpler (meaning, most essentially, more readily available to and responsive to their own collective efforts, rather being dependent upon inaccessible systems beyond their reach) and more sustainable (that is, less exploitative of the resources, both human and natural, upon which all communities are built). That such possibilities are available is the primary reason why I teach this course, as well as try to bring similar insights into as many different classes I teach as possible. While I love taking students out to visit local farmers and producers (as the above sign, kindly provided by Phil and Lucy Nisly, one of the great localists I've gotten to know here in south-central Kansas, plainly shows)--some alternatives are much closer (both in distance, and in terms of social and economic change) than that.

Early in the semester, I stopped by the Wichita Downtown Development Corporation, and spent a while familiarizing myself with some of the work which this decade-old organization--a non-profit corporation which works with local businesses, developers, and government agencies, using money raised through a mutual improvement district which all the downtown business pay into--thinks about making a mid-sized city like Wichita more sustainable. There's actually been a fair amount of activity on this front; Wichita, KS, was chosen as one of the cities which the Urban Sustainability Accelerator, a program at Portland State University, would focus on turning 2013-2014, with plans to bring together various actors to get ideas (and funds) generated to push forward more green and more localized development in some key parts of our city. This led, in turn, to city planners and transportation experts from various local organizations and government agencies to visit the class, and lay out what concerns them most. Some major worries: include that cities like Wichita--like too many other mid-sized cities--suffer from an inferiority complex of sorts, such that home developers can almost always count on city officials to throw in "special assessments" to lure home developers to expand their footprint and keep housing costs relatively low; that the expansive footprint of the city contributes to an overemphasis on continually develop and expand our primarily roadways, assuming that such suburbanization is the only viable model for holding on to our labor pool, thus making it ever harder to push the city itself in the direction of bicycling, walkability, or mass transit; and that, for all these reasons (not to mention several that are probably somewhat particular to the political culture of this part of Kansas), the very word "sustainability" moves even non-Tea Party types to immediately think in hysterical terms of socialist government planning, rampaging secularism, and the United Nations taking over the country. So some other term is necessary to clear the air (I'm told that folks down in Waco, TX, dealing with similar paranoid resistance to citizens organizing themselves to promote local goods through planning, have come to speak solely of "stewardship" or "creation care." Whatever works, I guess.)

When looking at moving such a large entity--and of course, the largeness of even a city like Wichita depends upon one's frame of reference--as Wichita in a "simplifying" direction, you need to begin from below, as well as above. And so we also continued the on-again, off-again conversation which we've had here at Friends for a while about a community garden. Rebecca McMahon--whose expertise as a county extension agent is hardly elitist, but rather very much part of the effort to get all of us more engaged in our own food supply--made two visits to Friends University, to talk with us about various strategies. With the input of the nearby Northfield School, and the example of some other local gardeners, with any luck a few of us, students and staff and faculty, are moving towards adding a small but sustainable contributor to Friends University's local ecosystem--and giving our local community greater opportunity to get back to the earth at the same time.

If there was any single overriding theme to our class this semester, it was the question of scale--whether working from the bottom or the top, we have to be able to think clearly about what is about the social and economic organizations that we focused upon which we wanted to simplify, or make more sustainable. When is tending to the local the proper route to take, and when is taking broad and radical stands? And can you do both at once? Bill McKibben, the famed environmentalist, author, and challenger of our all-growth-all-the-time economy, argues in his latest book that you can. As for myself, I'm not sure--though it may be that, in out globalized world, you can't effectively choose not to. Certainly that was the point McKibben made when he visited Watermark Books here in Wichita this semester--the local (in his case, learning to keep bees) has been utterly changed by national and international forces rampaging across the planet, and so nothing less than equally broad and radical actions--which McKibben, a retiring and bookish person at heart, has found himself spearheading through his 350.Org campaign--are called for. I and several of my students went to hear him speak, and I can't deny: he's a persuasive man, who wants people to understand that we need to simplify and scale back the entire global oil economy, if we want to keep our communities sustainable in the long run.

McKibben probably isn't wrong--but neither is his radicalism particularly hopeful, or joyful. And what is the point of living a life that is more local and more truly one's own, if such simplification doesn't bring any more joy and contentment into your life? Which is why I was grateful, once again, to be able to make use of the wisdom and generosity of multiple farmers and producers near Wichita, most especially the Hershberger family, Leroy and his parents, who have opened up their home multiple times to these "Local Food Tours" that I organize. The comfort, pride, and love that they have for their particular place--the farmland of Reno County, and the Amish, Mennonite, and other Christian folk that have grown up in (or have left and then later returned) to that place to work the land and trade with and teach one another--is reflected in their language, their families, the attachments, and not least their food. (Who knew that butternut squash pie could taste so fine? I certainly didn't.) Repeatedly through our tour that day, we were taught, by word and by example, that the quest for greater personal and collective responsibility over those things which are most properly one's own--food, shelter, family, livelihood, community, and so forth--is one which requires constant "tendance," to use a term which the political theorist Sheldon Wolin developed long ago: one must become deeply familiar with, and committed to, ones limits, and think about what needs to be done in accordance with them. How to make use of this land? How best to raise these chickens? How can I adapt to specializing in a different crop? How can I pass this down to my children, and their children after them? How can I prevent myself, as I make decisions about schooling and budgeting and my faith life, from being "encumbered" by this world? This requires time, memory, and affection. Wendell Berry calls it "local knowledge," and the people who we visited, particularly the Hershbergers, clearly had it in spades. It is unlikely that anyone who takes seriously a more or less agrarian way of life can truly be without such. And yet, for all the legitimate reasons we might have to be suspicious of ever-expanding and ever-complicating logic of urban life, it would be wrong to say that city planners and gardening experts and transportation designers that visited my class were without such knowledge as well. True, they may not have been deeply focused on building an alternative form of social and economic organization, but they surely did have an often quite intimate grasp of the urban and environmental issue which face Wichita's residents, one that can only come from tending to a place--and as such, they may well be capable of asking the sorts of questions about sustainability and scale that, I think at least (and hopefully at least some of my class thinks as well), need to be asked.

The great problem which always faces any attempt to talk about--much less teach a class about!--how recognizing psychological, economic, and environmental limits may enable us to think less technologically, and more holistically, about slowing down and simplifying and making ours a more sustainable way of life, is the tendency to want more than "tendance" as a support for our efforts. More than "merely" tending to one's garden, we wish to deal with the larger threats to said garden. And we need to! But of course, any departure from our place to addressing larger issues is inevitably reductive of the place we've left--and reductivity is exactly the wrong kind of simplicity that we should seek. Real local, sustainable knowledge is diverse and changing, like the natural world: its simplicity comes in our structuring our lives and vocations to be near it, not in methodological homogenizing of it from afar. There is no simple answer here--real simplicity, the kind that can make for a more secure and joyful life, remains a pretty complicated affair. I'm grateful, though, that some continue to seek it--and by so doing, help me and my student learn more about the choices that we face, in an ever-more pressing fashion, each and every day.