Occupy Wall Street is the Jacob Marley at Wall Street's Christmas

OK class, before we get to the Christmas Holiday it is time to read a literary classic. We're going to pick one absolutely relevant to the world's situation today, Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, one of the world's most famous ghost stories.

Imagine if the rich had to see pain and poverty? Mike Bloomberg's friends,
like Ebeneezer Scrooge, can't handle that.

Today, I am watching as Mayor Bloomberg and his police commissioner Ray "Missile Boy" Kelly launch those they command in attacks on the pro-democracy demonstrators in lower Manhattan. This comes after a week of co-ordinated assaults by American governments on demonstrators seeking a fairer, more equitable, and more democratic societies across the country. Like the Assad government in Syria, the Obama Administration has little tolerance of this kind of upset, and these raids and assaults clearly have the support of the US Department of "Homeland Security."

Why the attacks? Well, CNN's mid-day anchor made it very clear Thursday. "People don't want to be inconvenienced," he said of the financial industry personnel who work around Wall Street. Right, "health?" "safety?" "cost?" No, those are excuses, the reason is, as Dickens made clear so long ago, that the rich simply do not want to look.

Dickens saw it all in 1843. He saw it right where #OccupyLondon sits threatened today, on the narrow streets of "The City" surrounding St. Paul's Cathedral. That's where Scrooge and Marley's offices sat. That's where early capitalists destroyed the fabric of British society in pursuit of personal wealth. And that's where the first Scrooges called on city authorities and the police to ensure that they did not see the problems they were causing.

the conflict between capitalism and caring has lived around St. Paul's forever

In New York City this has also long been a familiar pattern. In the late 19th Century NYPD boss Thomas F. Byrnes was famous for his "dead line" along Fulton Street. The poor were prohibited from crossing that line because they might be thieves, or might otherwise trouble those of wealth and power. If you are interested in that, Jack Finney's fabulous book Time and Againwill offer you a remarkable view of that time. So, Ray Kelly, who I knew when he first became a captain in the NYPD,1 is just following in a role long established.

That role, which - I need to say in defense of rank-and-file NYPD officers - is not a favorite of any good cops, is to serve as a private army in defense of the comfort of the wealthy and powerful. Because I worked in Brooklyn and The Bronx, I had little connection to that role, but it has always been around. And this, of course,is hardly limited to New York and London. We've seen police in cities across America used - very clearly - for these purposes this week.

Dickens fully understood these power relationships, and this issue is embedded throughout this short and remarkable book. And, it is a story your students, of any age, can access. They can read it (in many accessible forms), of course, or they can watch it in many forms. My favorites being George C. Scott's version, Mr. Magoo's version (yes! "Razzleberry Dressing"), and Alistair Sim's version.

Magoo's version isn't just great music, it is a fine telling

Now, I am not suggesting that you feed your students my socialist line of thought, but I think it is fully reasonable, "at this festive time of the year," to ask students if they see relevance in this story to the news of the world today?

And it is reasonable to ask why the society we embrace in our stories, is not the society we embrace in our economics or politics? And it is reasonable to ask how Charles Dickens might report on Occupy Wall Street or Occupy London?

I think it is long past time for our schools to stop being socially reproductive, to start preparing students who might decide to, and have the capability to, change the world for the better. In order to do that, we have to stop being afraid to ask our students the tough questions. And Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London, all the Occupy Movements, are asking tough questions, just as Dickens was in that Christmas of 1843.

So, let us bring Marley's Ghost to our Christmas season 2011. I truly think he'd have a great deal to say.

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?...Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!"

And, for your principal, just tell him, "my class is reading Dickens." Chances are, he or she will leave you alone.

- Ira Socol

1. When I first met Ray Kelly he was my C.O., brilliant, incredibly egotistical, a tad paranoid, but limited enough by his position to work with others. I am disappointed to see power corrupt.

Inexperience and Reproduction

Most of you know that at one point, in what I call a former life, I was a police officer in New York City. Luckily, I believe, I began my job there in the days before Rudy Giuliani twisted the concept of New York policing into what I tend to describe as a neo-fascist control system.

I started thinking about this as I read a New York Times article about policing in one part of Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. And I began thinking about education too. 

"Sure we have order, but at what price!'' - Milhouse in the Simpson's famous "Bart the Hall Monitor" episode

Three basic ideas come through in this NYT piece: One is the value of trained and experienced people when "society" (the dominant societal group definition) intersects with social groups which are somehow "different." The second is the nature of "difference" itself. The third - what actions can change?

For the first idea, the question is, can we bring differing peoples in without being colonialists? For the second the question is, can we have identity while still being part of a whole? For the third, what should we be investing in?

"The school is a police state. Students are afraid to sneeze. And I have you to thank."- Principal Skinner to Hall Monitor Bart Simpson, Separate Vocations 

  

  The Simpsons: Bart the Hall Monitor
- Watch more Funny Videos at Vodpod.

In both policing and education there is a constant tension between the desire of the powerful for "social reproduction" (Rudy Giuliani wanted New York to be "One City" where everyone behaved like an Upper East Side white conservative, KIPP wants to make sure all minority students know how to "act white") and the need to craft a new and better society. When this line is walked well it is usually by mixing a few common needs (laws against murder and robbery, a common core of knowledge) with a wide range of both group and individual adaptation. When I joined the NYPD it's 75 precincts (OK, OK, back then it was just 73) all operated very differently, based on community needs, and within even that "justice" and "policing" was a very individual things, built up by an apprenticeship system in which new cops learned the precinct and its people from experienced officers, and thus knew how to approach and deal with different individuals. "It ain't one city," a lieutenant once told me, "it's 8 million cities, plus all the commuters and tourists." Just like - standardized tests and educational statistics be damned - your school isn't one school, your class isn't one class: you have a community of individual learners.

If you are building a better city, or building a better generation, you do that by engaging and empowering individuals. If you are attempting social reproduction, you are concerned with enforcing common codes efficiently. If you are building a better city or a better generation you are adapting rules so that they work to support individual needs. If you are attempting social reproduction you are creating rules for the benefit of the power structure.
(White Plains Road in the 47 at right >>)

Now, the Giuliani idea, still embraced today (though routinely simultaneously denied) by the Bloomberg administration, was that social reproduction was the goal because society divides into superior and inferior sections, and the only way to improve society is to force the norms of the superior group onto the inferior group. Thus Rudy was deeply annoyed that officers in a neighborhood like the 47th Precinct would accept that kids would hang out on the street at night or might smoke pot outside. These behaviours just weren't acceptable on East 75th Street in Manhattan (at right >>).

We cops argued that we knew better. We knew the norms of our communities. We had learned them the hard way, by day-after-day and night-after-night of interacting with our neighbors. We knew that life was really hard for most of our community, and that most of our community wanted things safe and relatively peaceful, and we had no interest in antagonizing any of those people for picking on them by harassing them for - in a literal take from the Times article - crap like "spitting on the sidewalk." "Why would you want to bust their chops?" a veteran cop told me early on, "We want them on our side." "Never give a ticket to a guy if kids are in the car," another veteran told me, "The dad drives away cursing you and you just made two generations of enemies. Say "be careful" and leave them alone and you've made two generations of friends."

Of course we didn't think we were superior to the residents of our precincts, we realized that we were much like them, just luckier to be a few generations removed from the ghettoes ourselves.

In the same way good teachers know that there can be, for example, very different forms of story telling, reading, and writing. In the same way good teachers vary their lesson plans based on student needs and response. In the same way one evaluation method (say, a test, or homework completion) might be very telling about one student and completely irrelevant when applied to another.

Of course this requires training and knowledge. If you believe in social reproduction instead, enforcement or teaching is best carried out by automatons who will simply do as they are told - or, in reality - by these rookie cops in New York or the untrained Teach for America resume builders in schools.

"The United States Supreme Court established the legal basis for stops and frisks — reasonable suspicion of a crime — in the 1968 case of Terry v. Ohio. But the officer in that case had a far different level of experience than many of the officers walking the streets of Brownsville. He had patrolled the same streets of downtown Cleveland for 30 years looking for pickpockets and shoplifters.

"By comparison, the nearly 200 officers who operate in the neighborhood as part of Mr. Kelly’s “Impact Zone” program — flooding problematic crime pockets with a battery of police — are largely on their first assignment out of the academy.

"The data show the initiative is conducted aggressively, sometimes in what can seem like a frenzy. During one month — January 2007 — the police executed an average of 61 stops a day." - The New York Times

These rookie cops in Brownsville lack the veterans to surround them and say, "don't do that kid." Just as the Teach for America "corps" lack the experience in ed schools which might lead to systemic doubt. And both abuse with their consistency, especially abusing the most vulnerable.

But it works if you've been born into the winning class and want to make sure you stay there. Because it pretty much guarantees that those "on the bottom" cannot possibly catch up - they are starting behind, and by forcing them onto the same path trod by their better born competitors, you are keeping them behind.

Breaking the mold of society, breaking the traps minorities fall into requires new paths, and new power structures. In policing it requires police-community cooperation on goals and tactics, and it requires investment in things other than policing (if you read the Times story you might wonder why so many cops and so few locksmiths, intercom repair people, and housing corridor cleaners, for example). In schools it requires learner-teacher collaboration which finds the best way for kids to get where they need to go.

But both require individual vision, and both require massive training and hard experience, and "shortcuts" are just an excuse for not doing the right thing.

- Ira Socol

Crossing America: An Education

Michigan is firmly in the US Midwest, but, despite the feelings of both Midwesterners and Northeasterners, the Midwest is firmly in the "East." No, not the "Euro East" of the New York Megalopolis, but a land Europeans would recognize, did recognize, and did settle in their own self-images: Green and scaled to towns separated by a day's walk, a place in which the works of God and the works of humans are clearly differentiated in form and color.

"Fishtown" - Leland, Michigan

When you leave Michigan and head west, first entering "The Prairie" in Illinois, the world begins to change, and thus, so do the ways in which people see, hear, think, and learn.

For a long, long time I have been aware of Europe's great divide (a split which has come to define the 1840s-designed US education system), that is the split between Protestant and Catholic cultures. And I have known and understood Europe's other "thought divides" - Colonized States v. Imperial States, Places once within the Holy Roman Empire and those without. Places once within the Soviet Empire and those without - but despite much previous North American travel this month's journey began to help me understand why mass education fails so often in the US in ways I had not deeply considered before.

Near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The third oldest European city in the United States, and longest continuous "capital" city in the nation (1610).

Educational "reformers" and administrators rarely consider environment as a prime issue in learning, consigning the idea to "primitive thought," "pre-rational thought," and "pre-scientific thought." After all, Mike Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee will tell you, there's only one right way to add 2+2 or spell "tomorrow."

And the inherent "truth" of that creates one of the great fallacies of our current educational debate. Yes, there is only one right way to add 2+2 or spell "tomorrow," but there are hundreds or thousands of ways to perceive both "2+2" and "tomorrow," and as many different ways to learn about both.

The world looks different if you grow up observing a place with the subtle colors of a desert or a place where all houses are the same color, or where houses may not have square corners. Where you can step out of your back door and observe the curvature of the earth on dry land, where the "neighbor" is five miles away.

The world looks different and so your learning is inherently different. If you grow up with ocean outside your door you know one set of facts. If you grow up on the desert, you know another. If you grow up in a valley it is easier to perceive the world as flat - if you grow up on a seacoast the roundness of the planet is obvious. If you grow up attending Mass at your choice of times, punctuality means something different than if the whole community gathers for worship at the exact same stroke of the clock each Sunday morning, and thus, time means something different.

If you grow up watching things grow from the earth and watching animals being born and dying you will approach learning differently than if you grow up in a sanitized suburban neighborhood where Trader Joe's is your impression of "natural foods." It is not just that your knowledge base will differ in these two childhood locales, but your filtering systems will as well, as well as your interaction with media. The suburban child can not have the same sensory experiences. The rural child will likely not have the representational dependence.

These children will be fundamentally different in their learning styles long before they get to school, even without the endless individual differences which define humanity. The notion that we can educate them by some mass production script is ridiculous. And this is not just true if we compare the Northeastern and Southwestern United States, but within states - say, Boron and Palo Alto, California, or within cities, say Mott Haven and the Upper East Side [pdf download] in Mike Bloomberg's New York City.

This matters in school. It matters in all communication. A wonderful professor from my undergraduate experience once told me that Americans were completely dangerous in Central Europe because they could not understand the importance of the old eastern boundary of the Holy Roman Empire. Americans were blindsided by the collapse of both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia because they didn't even know what to look for. Robert Putnam, a brilliant Harvard professor, could write Making Democracy Work and completely miss the cultural learning differences born of this ancient boundary through the center of the Italian peninsula. This lack of appreciation of cultural and physical environment on the process of education makes our teachers and our political leaders look like fools. And it results in diplomatic and schoolroom disaster.

We know that our tastes in food and even our food allergies are being determined from a a point a couple of months prior to our birth. We know that children are born able to hear all the sounds of all the world's global languages but lose most of this before they are two-years-old. Yet somehow we think that where a child "comes from" should have no impact at all on how our classrooms function. And that seems counter-factual to me.

So next time you recommend a "global" solution in education, in your nation or in your classroom, consider if your "globe" is the same one your students know. And if it is the same globe for this student, or that student, or that student...

- Ira Socol