01-02-2014 - Traces, n. 2

CLOSE-UP
From an “I” to a “We”


A Humanity that Heals
An “all-invasive culture” threatens our educational system–and the very fabric of our society. Two American educators share their positions in a dialogue focused on the necessity of recovering the primacy of “relationship,” which allows adults and youth alike to discover who they really are.

by Suzanne Tanzi

“It’s as if the youth of today were victims of a kind of Chernobyl nuclear explosion....There has been a sort of physiological subjugation operated by the dominant mentality. It is as if the only real evidence in reality is what is in fashion, and fashion is a concept and instrument of power. Our surroundings, the dominant mentality, the all-invasive culture... cause us to feel estranged from ourselves.” Using these words of Fr. Luigi Giussani (in 1987) as a launching point, Fr. José Medina, teacher and U.S. coordinator for Communion and Liberation, and Dr. Pedro Noguera, Professor of Education at New York University, discussed the need for a different kind of education to address the crisis of youth alienation–witnessed most disturbingly in the past year in the attacks in Newtown and Boston. The following interview was extrapolated from the January 18th New York Encounter discussion entitled, “Lost.”

The violence visited upon our society by disturbed youth in recent years has led to a stepped up security system in our schools. Is this an effective response?
Noguera: No, as I said after the Newtown shootings, the real problem is that the social contract is fraying; the bond that should prevent individuals from harming one another has deteriorated. If all we do to seek solution to the thread of violence is increase security measures, we continue to ignore the real source of our security: civic solidarity–in a word, trust. I believe that relying on security measures instead of solidarity and connection will make our society less safe. Ultimately, the only thing that keeps us safe is this moral connection. We need to search for ways to rejuvenate such bonds.

Medina: The focus on education is almost exclusively geared toward the learning of certain skills, the attaining of certain knowledge. We rarely talk about this sense of trust, this sense of connection. Rightly so, we talk about creating and about measuring our success, but I don’t know how much effort is targeting what we really should be doing first: building trust and educating toward this civic solidarity.

How do we know that this kind of connection is even possible?
Noguera: Well, a degree of trust is already there. Frequently, students have helped to avert other such disasters by confiding in a teacher they trust. And in an incident I recall in New Mexico, a very young student who was shooting his classmates just handed the gun over to a teacher upon request. So it’s there but what is missing is a clear sense of how to allow feelings of reciprocity and trust to grow.

Medina: Here again, with pedagogy, we focus on what we should be teaching, and measuring it, leaving out the central concern of how to trust and how to teach the students to do so–in essence, how to build a relationship with a student. Talking to teachers about this aspect, there is the impression that they do not consider this part of their job. But in times of crisis, this reticence disappears; the human desire to be with others in times of drama surfaces.

So there should be more insistence on the social component of education...
Noguera: Schools are places charged not merely with educating and providing skills, but with socializing and preparing the next generation to become adults. I think we have always understood, but we have often forgotten, that central to that work is imparting values, is teaching young people how to become members of this community as adults. An education without an ethical foundation is an education that produces monsters, who will perpetrate acts of injustice against other people. I am reminded of French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s focus on the importance of moral authority. Moral authority, not just in school, but in society, is not based on your title, but based on a relationship. I would bet that that teacher in New Mexico, who was able to get the student to put down the gun, had moral authority in the eyes of that student. We can’t rely on fear and intimidation; we have to rely on a higher source, and this is why the idea of moral authority and the ethical foundation for our relationships is so important.

Medina: If we do not highlight this aspect of relationships, we fail at teaching.

This then begs the question: How, in our self-centered modern culture, with all its emphasis on achievement, can we educate to the higher value of relationships?
Noguera: That I think is a critical question for this country in particular, because we have a tendency to idolize the rugged individual, the individual who is able to amass great wealth and become the titan of industry–like Bill Gates. We look up to these people because they have power. What we overlook is that what ultimately makes our society just is not the powerful individual, but the ordinary people who do all the work–and their work and efforts at raising children and producing the things that keep our society going have to be rooted in an ethical foundation. In light of these competing values, we have to remind people that it is our tension to the collective, to the public good, to our common interest, that ultimately will make society sustainable.

What is the common good and what are our common values? It seems we would have to make a very strong case for those in order to debunk individualism.
Noguera: I have been working on the “Project for Common Humanity” at NYU, which draws from a twofold source:  first, the recognition that we are in a state of crisis of connections, that our society is frail because our bonds with each other, our sense of obligation, is diminished. More and more Americans live alone, in dangerous isolation. Secondly, we have good research now showing that there is a human quality that is almost genetic toward altruism, toward the pursuit of togetherness. This is part of the human condition. We need to think collectively about how to respond to the challenges facing our society and tapping into those innate feelings of reciprocity is so critical to our survival.

Medina: I would push this sense of wanting to help, which as you say is even genetic, to the point of saying that, without “the other,” and obviously I see a religious connection here, so I would go on to say that without the ultimate Other, I cannot be fulfilled. Even with all the best altruistic intentions of building a society, a community cannot be built without an ultimate, and individual, reference to an Other.

How do we change society’s awareness of these innate truths, starting with our schools first, so the priority becomes how to connect and live truly, as opposed to the limited focus on how students are achieving academically?
Medina: As a teacher, monitoring achievement is my default position, but I know, also from the experience I lived in Boston during the bombings, that inside of us is this very strong need and desire to be with others, to pray with others, to accompany others. We are more human when we act out this desire–it is a very healing level of humanity that comes with meeting something that is not me. So the question goes back to the sustainability of this ideal of life...

Noguera: We have to keep in mind that relationships are essential to learning, even to the acquisition of skills. The master teacher knows how to build real relationships. Then what? Back to work, back to work because such a teacher knows that if these children are intellectually engaged, there will be no disturbance. This is what we need to demonstrate to teachers. It is not about trading off intellectual work for relationships, no: they go together. But what’s hard to do is to teach teachers how to build those kind of social skills, so that they can be effective with our children.

Medina: You are highlighting the fact that our crisis ultimately is a crisis of society. If our kids are lost, they are lost because the adults are lost. It is not because by nature the young person is lost. Actually, the natural position of a young person is to be “in search of,” and they need to find an adult to accompany them. There is a very deep need within us of relating to things that are not me.

How can we create or change adults and what impact does it have?
Noguera: I would say that, as with the child, the adult has to be part of a community, and that the faculty has to function as a community of mutual support. You enter into the classroom with new confidence, and a student thinks: “I know that I can trust you, I am safe with you,” and safety is critical because in order to ask questions, in order to learn, “I have to know that you are not going to humiliate me, that you are going to show patience and compassion in teaching me.” These are qualities that I think we lose sight of.

Medina: We have to change the way we think of education. The only way you are going to learn to have that kind of relationship with students is if you yourself are in a relationship. And I go back to the same thing that I was saying: if relationship is not this sense of openness to the other, is not one of the things that is driving us in life, we will always apply our drive for success, our capacity, our self-building.

How do we make our common humanity the starting point of the education conversation?
Noguera: In my experience, it starts with reminding people what is the most important aspect of this work. We want a society that is ethical, in which people are grounded in values of compassion. What we have to do is build that, and remind people that that is what matters most. Once, I was being given a tour of a school by the vice principal. After, a young boy was waiting for him in his office. He turned to me and he said, “You see that little boy? There is a prison cell at San Quentin waiting for him right now.” “How do you know?” “His father is in prison, his brother is in prison, and I can tell that he will one day end up there too.” So I asked, “Given what you know, what is this school doing to keep him out of prison?” And he looked surprised, because he didn’t think that was his job. When our faculty members wash their hands of the students, we need to remind them: your job is to keep that child out of prison. It is our job to care for that child, to get to the roots of the behavioral problems–it is not mainly to punish but to address the character of the child. That is central to education. Hope and inspiration are essential to a successful education system.

A true educator then not only needs relationships, but those grounded in hope...
Noguera: It is interesting, here in New York City, Mayor De Blasio just appointed the new Chancellor, Carmen Farina. One of the first things she said was, “My mission is to restore a sense of hope in schools.” I was very struck by that, because I would say the paradigm for the past 12 years has been one of fear. I myself remain very hopeful, resting my hope in a faith in God and in a belief and experience that human beings have a God-given capacity to solve problems and to draw on their strengths to try different courses.

Medina: If you go anywhere in public and say that the solution of the problem of violence in our schools is hope, people might even laugh in your face. The value of appealing to our humanity, to who we truly are, is not understood. I think it is critical to bring this consideration back to the public square because otherwise we will continue to create tools that we think will work, but they do not work.
Do you think then that the teachers are called to be parents?
Noguera: The law calls for it. It’s called in locus parenti. But when we train teachers, we pay little attention to this. We focus on content knowledge, on pedagogy... We spend almost no time on how to build relationships with children, and this a huge mistake. In medicine, we’ve come to realize that if a doctor is highly skilled but can’t communicate with the patients, has no bedside manner, he is more likely to be ineffective in serving patients. And, by the way, noncognitive skills, like persistence, social intelligence, the ability to form relationships, and the capacity to problem solve with others are ultimately more predictive of success than test scores.

Have you seen examples of the in locus parenti approach working?
Noguera: My daughter lost her mother just before entering high school. For high school, she enrolled at the School of the Future in Manhattan. She had a teacher, her advisor, who established a very strong relationship with her. At a time when my daughter could have flagged, because of grief or her reading handicap, or whatever, this teacher stayed with her. When it came time for each student to present an exhibition project that they worked on over the course of an entire year, as a ninth grader she had a 25-page research paper (with multiple sources) on the Roman and the Incan empires. She had to explain how these empires rose and why they eventually collapsed. She had to explain the politics, religion, history, culture. Throughout the year, she was meeting with her teacher on this project, getting continuous feedback aimed at improving and refining the project. When she presented her work to other students and parents and teachers, not only was I proud to see my daughter, who had struggled as a reader, produce a 25-page research paper, but I thought about grit. You learn grit through that effort of revision and resubmitting, which she was able to do with her advisor. And I also saw special aid students and learning disabled students presenting their work. I saw a young man, whose parents were deaf, who had language skill troubles because of living in a home of deaf parents, stand up and deliver his presentation with such eloquence, and even though he stumbled, the audience cheered him on. Talk about inspiration and hope. So, I think that there are means which we can embed in our educational practice to build relationships, build skills, and teach grit–all so essential in learning and in life.