Achieving Goals

I have something planned for early tonight. I feel both anxiety and excitement whenever I think about it. I feel threatened in a way, feel a queasiness in my stomach, a tension in my shoulders and thighs. Why? Is the tension from the mere fact of setting a goal or planning an activity? What am I afraid of? And how do you set and meet goals without anxiety?

 

What happens when you create a goal, or create any planned activity? Goal setting is important to all of us no matter how difficult or tedious it might feel at times. It’s important to students, in getting work completed on time. It’s important to teachers who, during the school year, are so busy their lives seem to consist mostly of planning activities and goals or living the planned activity. It’s important to parents, managers, workers of all jobs and professions.

 

To learn how to create goals, you have to understand why you do it, why this particular goal, and why any goal. It’s not just about meeting expectations and getting work done. Goals structure life. We can’t live without them. They are intentions. They get us to do something. They concretize our emotions and values. They create opportunities to grow, learn, enjoy. So, to create goals you need to be aware of and understand your own experience now. You have to understand your own intentions, needs, drives, primarily the drive to live fully and meaningfully. What, if anything, is getting in the way of living fully now?

 

When I feel threatened, I usually want to fight, run away, or play dead. But there’s another possibility. I feel threatened partly because getting someplace on time, or succeeding at any task or assignment, means doing all the necessary steps to getting there. Even to be somewhere at 5:00 pm, I must figure out when I must leave, how far away is the place I am going, etc.. Once a time is set, I need to put psychic energy into remembering to get there. And how do I do that? If I’m going somewhere to have fun, I don’t want the moments I am getting ready to have fun be moments of anxiety and fear. To learn something that will make my life better should not mean making my life before that time worse.

 

But, you might say, sometimes you need to sacrifice in order to achieve. You need to be able to do what is difficult or do what you would rather not. You need to work a lousy job in order to pay for college so you can get a better job. Yes, that’s true, to a point. The point is how do you live that “lousy” job or anything difficult? Once you set an intention or goal, do you then resent and feel angry about all that you must do to get there? Do you resist your own intention? You mustn’t lose the feel of the original drive, which is to fully live the moments of your life.  As the novelist G. K. Chesterton said, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly understood.” A difficulty can become an opportunity. Once you uncover your intention, then mine each moment you live to the depths for what it can teach you, give you, and especially what you can give to it.

 

So, if you conceive of goal setting as something you do for the future, as if the future were separate from now, then you can never get there. You undermine your efforts. The goal in the future is an idea wrapped in hopes and memories. It’s an abstraction.  It’s easy to fear not meeting your expectations or not being the person you imagined you’d be, because these are ideas. You can never, no matter how hard you try nor how glorious or perfect your idea might be, transform yourself into an idea. An idea does not breathe; a living being breathes. But right now can be glorious.

 

So, to learn how to meet goals, you learn how to live each moment. If you think having a goal is planning for the future, you miss the heart of it and separate from it. If you treat each moment as your goal, then you’ve already achieved it.

 

 

To mindfully set and meet goals, try the following:

  1. Sit with your body straight but not rigid. Take a moment to close your eyes partially or fully and notice your breath. Notice what is happening in and around you. With your inbreath, notice any feelings, thoughts, sensations, or images. With your exhalation, let go of the images and return to awareness of the breath.
  2. Is there a goal, a need or drive that you have? What goal stirs your heart, awakens your soul, or puts food on the table? Just allow any thoughts or images to come to mind of any goal you want to achieve.
  3. What is it about this goal that motivates you? Do you want this for your own good? To help others? Just ask yourself, and listen for an answer. Feel the energy within it, the passion. Visualize achieving this goal. Hear, feel, or picture it. Notice yourself, where you are, what you’re doing, as you achieve the goal.
  4. Test it. Notice any thoughts, feelings, emotions which arise in response to the thought or image of this achieved goal. What might the consequences be of pursuing and achieving this goal? How does it affect the people you know? The world? Does the goal feel right? If so, continue. If not? Let go of the goal and turn your attention to noticing your breath, or listening to the sounds around you.
  5. Let come to mind the steps you need to take to achieve the goal. Just listen, feel the answers arise. What do you need to do now? Do it in your mind so you can do it in reality. Imagine acting fully, with determination, to achieve what you set out to achieve. What actions will you take when you leave this chair?
  6. As you breathe in, turn your attention to the room. As you breathe out, open your eyes and look around you. Then begin.

 

*The photo: the goal of a stone patio halfway achieved.

News Events and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

How and why do people hurt others? I am a mostly retired secondary school teacher. This question came up frequently in my classrooms in the past, and it has frequently been in my mind lately. Is it in our nature to hurt? Do many of us suffer from an empathy deficit disorder? Or do we hurt others when we are too distracted, lost in an emotion, or educated to ignore the pain of others except those who are close to us? Do we have to be “carefully taught” to turn a blind eye to those in need or those breathing close to us on the street?

 

This is a crucial question, for the living room as well as the classroom. It is the question of “what is human nature?” Or is there a human nature? It is a question about the psychology of violence and ethics. How do you stop violence? Or, what allows us to be violent towards other humans? It happens seemingly too often. How can we not see and feel another breathing, feeling, speaking being as essentially just like us? What goes on in the mind when this inner blindness or distortion or active antipathy occurs? There are so many ways to think about and try to answer the question, yet we have to struggle with it.

 

In Baltimore over 2 weeks ago, an African-American man named Freddie Gray died in the custody of police. Evidence revealed to date indicates he was not involved in any criminal act. Yet, he was arrested and is now dead. How can this happen? Why? There have been partial explanations revealed, charges filed, but still, there is no justifiable reason for this death.

 

When we perceive others, we do so in an environmental, social-historical as well as a personal context. We are always part of a context or situation. We make the situation meaningful by organizing all the sensory and other information we receive into a coherent structure, basically into a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. This story helps us remember details of our lives; it is built out of memories. It gives meaning not only to the situation but to ourselves. To create this structure, details must be selected. What supports the structure is perceived; what doesn’t is ignored. Once we have our story, we live an abstraction; we live at a distance. How much and what we feel, think and, thus, do is determined by the story. How we frame reality determines our sense of power, our sense of justice, and compassion.

 

So, what story were the police who arrested Freddie Gray and contributed to his death telling themselves? Did they see him as another person? And the news reporters talking about the demonstrations and violence: what story were they telling themselves, and telling us? Are the people who took to the streets demonstrators for justice? Are they moral citizens or criminals? Is the violence the consequence of people taking to the streets to speak out? Or the inevitable consequence of inequity and racism?  And the police—are they also seen as people? There are stories of great courage in Baltimore as well as ones of people losing control. Clearly, there are volumes of background stories, volumes of past history. Which stories get told? Where you begin your story and how you tell it has consequences. Are the news media considering the consequences of the stories they tell?

 

Dominique Hazzard, a teenager from Baltimore, wrote: “Imagine, for a second, that Maryland governor Larry Hogan called for a state of emergency when Freddie Gray’s spine was broken and his voice box was smashed [when he was] arrested for no reason.” A very different way to think of what happened; a very different story would have been told. Such perspectives need to enter classrooms and living rooms throughout the country.

 

There are many subjects students need to learn in school, how to read, write, be a responsible citizen and question. But one crucial subject is how their own minds work and how other people and social situations influence their viewpoints and values. It’s not just what happens that’s important; its what we tell ourselves about what’s happened. There’s always a difference between an event and the thoughts and memories of it, even when we try to tell the truth. The event is alive, fully now, rich in infinite detail. The memory, story, is, as I said, more selective, abstracted. We all need to learn how we construct the meaning and memory of what happens in our lives. Only if we notice something, whether it’s an injustice in our community or a mental pattern that causes suffering, can we act to stop it.

 

In order to understand how we construct meaning, we need to study the nature of emotion and how it arises in us. One purpose of emotion is to tag stimuli with value. It glues a story together. Daniel Siegel, in The Developing Mind, describes steps in the construction of emotion. The first step is arousing attention, what he calls the initial orienting response. Do we notice, pay attention or ignore a raw stimulus? The second adds memory and thoughts. It involves appraisal, which includes labeling stimuli as good, bad, or neutral, something to approach or avoid. The third step is experiencing the full emotion like sadness, happiness, fear. Without awareness of the initial signals to pay attention and then to approach a task, learning as well as timely action is nearly impossible. Without this awareness, we too easily convert living people into characters in a story.

 

Teachers need to select the stories they tell and the ones they assign not just with the eye of beauty but with the aim of improving social and self understanding, knowledge as well as awareness. They need to tell the story of how to create meaning and live meaningfully. They need to foster inner strength, understanding of how interconnected we all are, and a sense of responsibility for how we act.

Education, Technology and Relationships

Friends are great. Really. The quality of the life you live depends greatly on the quality of your relationships, the moments spent with friends, family, even pets and the environment. This blog was inspired by a friend who sends me articles she thinks might interest me.

 

Our brains prioritize human relationships. We make judgments about other people much faster than with other things. If you pay attention to what thoughts fly around in your mind, most of them involve other people, how you appear to others, and such. Relationships are crucial to our very sense of ourselves and what is real. Dr. Daniel Siegel conceptualizes mind, including conscious awareness and subjective experience, not just in terms of an embodied brain, but in terms of the relational processes, the exchanges of information we are involved in.  So any education, especially K-12, must prioritize relationships—the quality of relationship that a teacher has with students, how students are taught to relate to peers, other adults, even people on the street. And, of course, with themselves. Many people grow up thinking their own self is as foreign to them as a random person on the street, except with your self you get to listen in to intimate experiences, conversations and memories.

 

If you spend several hours a day relating to a virtual reality, does this undermine your ability to relate with a flesh and blood one? For years now, schools have been pushed to increase the use of computers and other digital technologies with little reflection on the affects of the technology use. Many school districts already have or are aiming at giving each student and teacher a laptop or other device. They imagine great learning will ensue from this “21st Century” approach to education. Many politicians, media experts, and corporate executives who attack American public schools as falling behind other nations often push digital devices–while leaving out the fact that those nations which outperform us on standardized tests, like Finland, spend less on computers, and other forms of technology in the classroom, than we do. Compared to the salaries of other professionals, they do spend more on teachers. In other words, it’s not the technology that is helping students from those nations supposedly outperform us on tests. Isn’t it about time to question that priority? How and how much should technology be used in education? Should we teach not just digital literacy, but digital mindfulness, mindfulness of the affect media has on our emotions, thinking and attention to the world around us?

 

Psychologist Susan Pinker wrote a great article for the NY Times opinion pages called “Can Students Have Too Much Tech?” The answer she gives is a definite “yes.” She says, for example, “Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores.” The impact on students from poorer families is far worse. I haven’t, yet, read her book The Village Effect, on the importance of face-to-face contact, but I plan to. I decided to independently check out her basic conclusion. I found out that, according to USEIT, a study funded by the US Department of Education which analyzed the relationship between student computer use and test performance, the “recreational use of computers to play games, explore the Internet for fun, or chat with friends at home had a negative effect on students’ MCAS [Massachusetts standardized test] reading scores.” However, when computers are used through the full writing process, from rough draft to editing and final draft, this positively affects test scores.

 

Since I don’t think standardized test scores are an accurate or educationally positive way to assess student learning, I looked at other indicators. For example, how does technology affect us emotionally? How anxious do you get when you can’t check in with your technology? One study showed that, for example, 51% of people born between 1990 and 1998 get anxious when they can’t check their text messages. 62% of those same people check their technologies every 15 minutes, or even more frequently. People feel deprived and wonder what they’re missing if they can’t check their phone. How often do you see people walking through a beautiful natural environment, or even sitting at dinner with a loved one or friends, and instead of talking with the person in front of them, they’re on their phones? For these people, the phone, the virtual reality, has become valued equal to or more than the flesh and blood one. If you can’t let go of the virtual world, how can you learn in, or feel fully present, feel meaningfully engaged in, the world outside that realm? Many teachers I know have noted the increase of anxiety in their students. Is technology a major culprit?

 

If administrators and others were serious about improving the lives and education of students, they would spend more time and resources on improving equity of resources between schools, and on social-emotional learning and mindfulness, so kids could learn to better self-regulate their emotions, their attention, their time spent in different activities. In order to develop the empathy needed for good relationships, emotional regulation is crucial. In order to think more critically and clearly, empathy and mindfulness are important for enabling the student to better reflect on and direct their thinking. Money spent on tech and tests is money not spent on social-emotional learning (or teachers), yet our children need to learn both about emotion and computer technology. Maybe one reason tech is pushed is the same reason some politicians and educational corporations attack and try to undermine public schools: greed. Attack teachers and public schools and you sell the idea of charters, standardized tests and programmed lessons produced by educational corporations—and sell technology. I probably do not need to say this, but I will: technology is big money.

 

Technology is not only addictive to young people. If you’re old enough, consider how much more you pay for your phone, television, etc. than you paid in the 1970s or early 1980s. For me, it’s about 10 times more, and I have a flip phone. Of course, I love my computers, I love the new television programming, DVDs, etc.. I only bought a television in 1980 to watch the television series Shogun. But since the 1980s, the amount of money most of us spend on technology has gone up, while the average income for 90% of us has remained stagnant. (According to the IRS, the average income in 2008, adjusted for inflation, is $400 less than 1988.) Does the technology function to make us forget that the quality of our media has gone up, but our freedom to earn a good wage, to influence political decisions, to attend college without indebting ourselves for decades, etc. has gone down. It’s important to teach students how to use and create technology. But we can’t improve understanding of life and death, of our place in the world of other people and other species, by diminishing how much we value actual face-to-face, eye-to-eye contact with those others. We see so many more people on Facebook. (I even share this blog on Facebook and other media.) Facebook is great for keeping contact and sharing information. But has the quality of our lives and relationships improved? Have we moved closer to substituting virtual contact for face-to-face presence? And is the price worth it?

Politics, Greed, and the Welfare of Our Children

Last week, teachers and administrators were given jail terms for fixing test scores. I think this crime pales before the gross lack of human caring, feeling, and worse carried out by politicians, with the support of corporate executives and hedge fund managers, who distort and overemphasize the meaning of standardized test scores while forcing their use in public schools throughout the U. S.. They force teachers, who know the exams cause needless suffering to students, to give them anyway. And to whom have these politicians been giving the power to judge how much students have learned, how well teachers have taught, and even who can become a teacher (and sometimes how a subject can be taught)? Corporations like Pearson Education, which is now being investigated by the FBI for various possible crimes including insider dealings with the Los Angeles Unified School District and Apple.

 

Diane Ravitch describes in her book Reign of Error how various corporate interests, working with individual politicians, have been leading an effort for years to undermine public schools. They have been working to undermine teachers, teacher unions, and the very concept that a public institution working for the general good, instead of a for-profit corporation, could manage and direct an educational system. The strategy calls for publicizing deceptive information to create a sense of a crisis in education so corporations can step in and save the day. For example, the A Nation At Risk report, produced by the Reagan administration in 1983, claimed public education was responsible for everything from a decline in academic achievement, college graduation rate, to the loss of manufacturing jobs. All later proved untrue. Academic achievement from 1975 to 1988 was actually improving, and not only for middle class white Americans. The divide in academic achievement between rich and poor was diminishing. In 2001, President Bush pushed the No Child Left Behind legislation. Since NCLB, the number of standardized tests given to our students was increased to the point where the US is now number one in the world in the number of tests we force on our children.

 

Should the politicians who have pushed this agenda be punished? There is no reliable evidence that standardized testing improves education. In fact, even years ago reliable evidence showed the opposite– students who graduate from schools that rely on such testing for assessment are less creative, less able to apply what they learn than students who go to schools who use more alternative assessments. These tests increase student suffering by teaching through fear. Students do not take these tests because of what they teach. They take them because they are threatened into doing so. The tests support inequity (see Fair Test) and narrow the range of what is taught. They serve no real diagnostic value, since they are in many cases “poorly designed” and the results are long delayed, often until after the school year has ended. By narrowing the range of what is taught they rob students of a well-rounded education. Yet, these tests are still pushed. Why?

 

What about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo? Cuomo has been pushing to increase how much scores on standardized tests will count in judging which teachers are given tenure. He wants test scores to count as one half of a teacher’s effectiveness score. To get this through the legislature, he proposed: “Pass that evaluation change, and school funding will go up 1.1 billion dollars…in the 2015-16 budget. Leave it out, and there will only be a $377 million increase…” Why do this? If Diane Ravitch is correct, he does it so he can turn schools over to entrepreneurs who can use them for financial gain. According to Hedge Clippers, Governor Cuomo’s campaign received “$4.8 million from hedge fund billionaires.”

 

The lack of empathy for how these policies affect students, teachers, parents and the communities that most of us live in, is appalling. Just imagine you’re a teacher. To teach well, where must your focus be? On your students, who they are, what they need educationally and as a total person. If you understand who the students are, you can shape educational methods to fit them. If you fear punishment, job or salary loss based on test scores, you will feel pressure to shift your concern to pleasing authorities and focusing on test scores. A student who does poorly on a test, or might do poorly on a test, becomes a threat. Only assessments that are authentic demonstrations of how much an individual’s skills and knowledge, in a particular course, grows in a school year unite the student, teacher and community’s interests together. High stakes tests must be de-emphasized in favor of assessments which come from the individual teacher and school, and must give immediate feedback so effective remediation, when needed, is possible.

 

Our public school children are being held hostage to the financial and political agendas of the few. Isn’t it about time to shift the focus back to the greater good of students and their communities?

Presence

My cats Milo and Tara often wander the world with me. If I sit at my computer, they sleep nearby. If I go outside, they follow me. They seem to like simply being in my presence. I sometimes feel a very silly sort of happiness seeing them sleeping by my feet. This happiness doesn’t just happen with cats, although the people I know luckily don’t follow me around or sleep at my feet. I love simply being with my wife, family and close friends. When I was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, I lived in a big house by myself in a relatively small village in the bush. When I first arrived, there were no other Peace Corps people or friends within miles. A few of the villagers liked to come and sit with me. If I talked with them, they would often leave. When asked why they came, the response was that they didn’t want me to feel lonely. Talk was unnecessary, even an obstacle. What is it about presence that is so satisfying?

 

What is presence? It is certainly not well defined. Is it about feeling safe? My cats feel safe with me, I hope. I certainly feel safe with them—and certainly with my friends and wife. I can relax and open up. There is little or no need for pretense. Presence is an absence of pretense, a type of mirroring back. One party opens, trusts and the other feels it and gives it back. One hears, sees, feels and is in turn heard, seen, felt.

 

Presence is not just being in the same space with someone, and not just with other beings. It can be on one’s own or with any place, object or situation. Recently, there was an opinion piece about presence in the NY Times called, “Being There: Heidegger on Why Our Presence Matters.” The author, Lawrence Berger, said many cognitive scientists argue that, “We are information processors rather than full-bodied human beings.” For these cognitive scientists, human beings don’t experience anything “outside” us, like another person or a tree, directly but only some sort of “internal” representation of it created by our senses and brain. We supposedly respond not directly to the tree or person but the representation. We are, in principle, locked away from the world. What is ultimately real are the physical and physiological processes, synapses, neurons, myelin sheaths, not presence. But on other “levels,” we can speak of electrons jumping around, or on another there are chemical interactions, etc.. So, isn’t each person a universe of multiple perspectives? Aren’t each of these perspectives equally about what’s “real”? And isn’t one of these perspectives, and an important one, the sense of a face lighting up in your presence?

 

One neuroscientist mentioned by Berger said that conscious awareness is “a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color.” These cognitive scientists remind me of different, older theories which “reduce” consciousness to something mechanical, physical and measurable. For example, the behaviorists of the early twentieth century argued that consciousness could not be studied and was irrelevant to explaining human behavior. It had no causal significance. Human behavior, they theorized, is conditioned, basically “programmable,” like machines. This position led to some important discoveries but also abuses.

 

The cognitive scientists focus on the mechanisms of what happens in the body when we attend. For Heidegger, a 20th Century phenomenologist philosopher, attention is not just selecting what in the world we take in, but what becomes present to us, or what takes on life, being. The “beingness,” or the mere sense of aliveness becomes primary. Attention is not just selecting what we pay attention to and with what strength or intensity, but the quality or the “feel of” that attention. So, if this is true, isn’t presence crucial for constructing meaning, understanding, and clear thinking?

 

Berger said, “When we feel that someone is really listening to us, we feel more alive, we feel our true selves coming to the surface — this is the sense in which worldly presence matters.” Presence is a recognition of our subjective experience as an event in the world, not separate from it. It is not just internal physical mechanisms or processes which have an effect. The quality of our awareness, our presence has an effect on the world.

 

And for scientists to say that conscious experience has no causal relationship to our behavior, or is merely a representation separate from a reality it simplifies and depicts, is untenable. To date, there is no clear or definitive understanding of consciousness from either science or philosophy. Anyone can theorize or have an opinion, of course, but must recognize the tentativeness of their position.

 

In my high school classes, I sometimes asked students: What are the implications of these different theories of consciousness on how you act or feel about yourself? If humans are totally programmable, would it be ethical or humane to hurtfully experiment on them and then just wipe away the memories of pain? What happens to how you treat other people when you conceive of them as machines, even computers? Which understanding of your own mind would best enable you to do school work—one which conceived mind as a cartoon, or one which thought of mind, consciousness as powerful?

 

And, you are never separate from the physical universe. If what you experience are representations you construct or cartoons you draw or theorize, this is an event inseparable from the universe that you construct. Thus, when “I” see “my” cat Tara, the perception is inseparable from me, Tara is inseparable from me. I and cat, (I-Thou) arise together. The theory by which I explain the universe is a metaphor I use to view and act in that universe. Thus, shouldn’t the effects on behavior of the theories you use be considered as part of the evidence by which a theory is evaluated?

 

If you’re a teacher, you must do the physical things, like prepare, bring in supplies, give clear directions and ask meaningful questions (and eat a good breakfast). But, as Berger said, you must also remember your “worldly presence matters.” For the student, the aliveness of the teacher, the caring, the “being heard,” the feeling that your is life mirrored, held and valued by the other—these matter. You model and teach presence and how to make theoretical questions “present’ or alive to your students. And when you do so, the mere act of listening with your whole being means you are heard, you matter. You give, you receive. This, I believe, is clear.

 

 

**The photo is of the Bosporus Strait in Istanbul, Turkey.

How Can You Discuss Controversial Subjects In Schools, Like Religion?

I recently published a blog on why religion needs to be discussed respectfully and openly in schools. Now, the question is how (hopefully) this can be done.

 

People often assume they know what religion is, but in actuality there are many different conceptions and definitions of it. So, to begin the discussion, ask: What is religion? What is it for you? For many, it is a system of beliefs and practices related to sacred things or beings (Emile Durkheim), or the worship of God or a deity. To others, it concerns whatever is the deepest value in your life. The roots go back to a word for obligation or reverence. An older root is religare, re means back, again, anew; ligare (as in ligament) bind or tie. So, religion is to “bind back”. Bind back to what? To God? The universe? Yourself? To purpose or meaning? To full awareness? To your community? How is being religious different from being spiritual, if at all? Is it necessary to have a belief system or a God to be a religion?

 

What you teach must be adapted to where you teach, who your students are, and who you are. If you are in a community where parents and the school administration would vehemently oppose such discussions, instead of discussing religion, discuss related philosophical and psychological questions that students think are important. My students often chose to discuss why be empathetic or how to live a meaningful life, what love is, and mind.  And, many ethical questions, like: Why is there violence and how should I respond to it? On what basis can I make ethical choices? How do I humanize even those who disagree with me?

 

Then you need to ask yourself what your intent is in discussing religion. Is it to push a specific belief system? Is it to increase understanding of the diversity of religious or spiritual viewpoints? Is it to help students better understand themselves and their world? Are you committed and open to learning about several religions and studying philosophical methods? What is your story of religion? The first person to question is you. What are your values? Beliefs? Questions? Would you feel comfortable sharing these with students?

 

If you think you can discuss religion, how do you do it? Since religion is so important in so many people’s lives, you must obviously be sensitive, respectful, open and empathetic. People tend to strike out when their core beliefs are threatened. So you must be strong, ready to protect students, and real. You must model empathy so students can learn to do the same, both to people of different religions or no religion and in the face of new ideas. You need to present ideas and questions, not dictate answers.

 

What is the history of religion? If you believe the earth and human history begins 6000 years ago with Adam and Eve, maybe the question ends there. But if you think the evidence for the age of the earth being billions of years old is reliable, and that humans evolved into what we are now, this is a very interesting question. You need to discuss what constitutes evidence and what is a theory and a fact versus an opinion. There is evidence that even Neanderthal had some kind of religion. Shamanic, animistic and then polytheistic religions all appeared before monotheistic religion (as we know it). There are myths from around the world–Greek, Norse, African, Japanese, etc. which are filled with religious content and purpose.

 

So, if cultures throughout history had a religion of some kind, why? Why is religion so ubiquitous? What purposes does it serve? I mentioned in an earlier blog that one answer people give is that religions provide answers, often comforting answers to difficult or uncomfortable questions. I argued that this is a partial answer, at best.

 

David Loy, a Buddhist philosopher, speaks of two major purposes religion fulfills. The first is that it provides a social canopy. The second is transformation.  We have already begun to describe the social canopy, which many people think is the entirety of religion. Picture a canopy. It shields us. In Loy’s analysis, it consists of the reassuring answers mentioned earlier, ones which tell us what is real or true, now and even beyond death. It tells us how to live, what’s important. Some of my students thought religion was the glue holding a culture together. It ties humans in a community of shared meanings and practices. When social and political institutions fall apart or fail to provide needed support services, religions often step in to fill that need. Of course, many think the religious also have undermined cultural cohesion at times; one recent example is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana and Arkansas. One question to ask and carefully study is: what happens if you are religious and think the canopy is falling or being taken away?

 

The second purpose is transformation. Transformation might help answer another question about religion: would religion have continued if its only purpose was to provide the social canopy?  All religions that I can think of talk about individuals transformed in some way, by God, grace, insight, a journey, experience or some practice such as a ritual or meditation. There is Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tse, Mirabai, etc. Whether these figures are also God, a prophet, an awakened individual or a saint, they are important or central to a religion. What exactly ‘transformation’ means needs to be analyzed and discussed. It might involve a change of ethical behavior, or how you are with others, your compassion. It might involve understanding or wisdom. It might involve a deepening of awareness or how you experience life. It might involve all three or more. The psychologist Abraham Maslow called it “self-actualization,” Carl Jung “individuation.” It can involve learning how to end suffering. A big question is: can the social canopy interfere with transformation?

 

I recommend studying the science of empathy and compassion. Discuss what thinking means and how to do it clearly and critically. How do you know what’s right to do and true? You might discuss the various meanings of logos and mythos. You might discuss framing metaphors, and the role of stories in thinking. What is the role of doubt and questioning, as well as revelation, belief and faith? What do these all mean? Carefully differentiate self-doubt, or doubt in your ability to think, from having faith in yourself to doubt, question, analyze, and empathize with other people’s answers as well as your own.

 

Here are a few of the books I have used. I have left out books that are fabulous but speak of only one religion. Always try to provide different viewpoints on each topic or question you discuss. I would suggest reading select chapters from the following.

Karen Armstrong’s books, particularly The Case for God. This is a profound book about God and religion, in the past as well as in today’s world. It has insightful analyses of faith and belief and how our understanding of these has changed over time.

Philosopher Philip Novak wrote The World’s Wisdom, a collection of short excerpts from the spiritual writings of many religions.

Huston Smith, The World’s Religions provides a comparison of religious doctrines, philosophy, history and practices. Although students find it a bit dry, it is a great resource and has been used for decades in comparative religion classes.

Ken Wilber’s exciting synthesis, No Boundary, explores both a philosophical and psychological analysis of religious experience.

 

To provide artistic and emotional insight and some fun, and to stimulate students to come up with their own syntheses, add books such as:

Roger Housden’s collection: Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation.

Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield’s collection: Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart: Parables of the Spiritual Path from Around the World.

 

**Photo: Goreme Open Air Museum, Turkey. Church carved into rock.

Discussing Religion

Discussing religion in public schools is obviously controversial. Religion (and opposition to religion) is very close to the core of many people’s understanding of reality and so must be treated with sensitivity and awareness. There are also constitutional and legal constraints.

 

Although the implications of the first (and fourteenth) amendment are still argued in some circles, the purpose is to protect a citizen’s right to freedom of speech and religion. It forbids congress from promoting one religion over another. It states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson and before him, Roger Williams, spoke of a “wall of separation” between church and state. The prohibition against religion in public institutions is a prohibition against combining church and state, or making church the state.

 

But does this mean that religion should not be discussed in schools at all except in very limited circumstances? Circumstances such as world history classes, where history textbooks give relevant dates, name important people, central practices, teachings and terminology? These references are usually very superficial, dry, and do little to help students understand or learn about religions other than their own (if they have one).

 

I think religion must be discussed in schools. For one thing, students have many questions. It is in the headlines, often in very negative terms. We hear about religion fighting religion, about religious extremists and terrorists. A report by Media Matters, in 2007, found the coverage of religion oversimplified, with a consistent bias in coverage in favor of conservatives. “Combining newspapers and television, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.” Some students have no experience with religious teachings at all. Others go to a church, synagogue, mosque, center or whatever but rarely do they get to ask questions or think about religion from a perspective of someone not a member of their community. Students need a deeper and more inclusive picture. A reality ignored or oversimplified is a reality distorted and abused and we have enough of both in our world.

 

The questions about religion that concern secondary students most and I think should be predominantly examined in schools are psychological and philosophical or ethical. What is religion? Why has it been part of human life, history and culture since the initial days of humanity? What is the place of reason and doubt in the face of belief and faith? Discussing religion easily leads to deep questions and concerns, about purpose, morality, mind, soul and death, about truth and how you know what’s true, about compassion and love. Throwing out religion as a topic of study often leads to throwing out what is crucial to the lives of each and every human being. Do we want to empty schools of the deepest and most meaningful questions and concerns? If so, we know why many think of school as a wasteland. In fact, is religion another way to speak about one’s central concerns in life? Is religion so tied to culture that the two can barely be separated? If you can’t discuss religion, at least discuss these philosophical questions and how to humanize and respect those with views other than your own.

 

The discussions need to be real and in-depth, the questions mostly open-ended, with no one right answer. There are not “two sides” to any deep religious or philosophical question (or maybe any important question) but multiple sides. There are also factual questions that need to be researched and reliable “experts” in the field interviewed (historians, psychologists, philosophers of religion, theologians, and spiritual leaders, in person, or through YouTube and books). For example, students told me that in many classes when religion was discussed, it was portrayed as a way to explain the unexplainable or to give people comfortable answers to uncomfortable questions. Although I think there is some truth to this, this explanation of the “why” of religion is woefully inadequate. It might even be a way to sneak in a dismissal of the religious as lazy or poor thinkers. Anyone who argues this has never read the writings of, or listened to, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, Jr., Karen Armstrong, the Dalai Lama or others. Also, it is untrue. Some religions do not give comfortable answers. One example is Buddhism, which speaks of the suffering common to most people’s lives. Overcoming suffering does not come easily and is not from belief but through an almost scientific examination of how the world is, of mind and awareness.

 

Of course, I am arguing this viewpoint with some trepidation. Open-ended discussions of religion can be difficult to lead, very personal and require great trust on the part of students in the teacher and the classroom community, a trust that has to be earned. And schools are already being attacked from many sides and often unfairly so teachers might feel themselves vulnerable to attack. Religious groups pushing their particular doctrines and corporate groups doing much the same assault them.

 

But schools are the closest we have to common places where, maybe, perhaps, wisdom might be found and encouraged, even taught, along with compassion and understanding. Or where there are people, namely teachers, who are deeply committed to developing such attributes in themselves and young people. It’s about time to let schools attempt such a mission instead of being bogged down with test prep and superficial knowledge. And discussing meaningful questions might actually increase engagement and learning in the classroom.

 

Next week: How do you foster and lead such discussions without distorting the discussion with bias? What do you think?

 

 

**The photo is of my wife, Linda, in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

 

Fearing Science #2 and The Value of Money in Distorting Understanding

In the last paragraph of my latest blog, I spoke about needing the “intention, the commitment, the care” as well as a clear mind in order to act constructively to limit or slow global warming—or to take any effective ethical action. We act according to what we value. Valuing the earth, and our intellectual understanding of human caused climate change, is purposely undermined by corporate and other parties creating false, frightening countervailing claims. Claims such as “addressing global warming is too expensive, cost massive job layoffs, increase energy dependency, and so on.” We’ve all heard these claims, all largely false. (See George Lakoff.) How is it that people who make and believe such claims don’t consider that an uninhabitable earth would really undermine the economy? Why don’t they consider (or admit they are already considering) the growing economic and personal costs we are paying now for extremes in climate change, costs of increasing droughts, floods, fires, loss of animal habitat, maintenance of infrastructure stressed by climate extremes, etc.?

 

As George Lakoff put it, “… when the wealthy control what appears in the public media, they can control public discourse and public thought mechanisms through the control of language and imagery.”

 

Mirriam Webster defines money as a medium of exchange and the storing of value. Viewed psychologically, it is a reification of value or value symbolized in matter. What is labeled as costing one million dollars is more valuable than what costs ten dollars; or someone being paid one million or more annually is more valued in our culture than someone paid ten thousand dollars annually. Money can be invoked to distort our understanding and caring.  I hope we, all of us, can learn how to better discern and control its influence. Lakoff says that, “Global warming is the greatest moral issue facing our generation” and increasing concentration of wealth in the few runs a close second. “Together, they present a clear and present danger, not just to the United States, but to the world.”

Why Deny Science? What Do You Do When You Don’t Know?

I was reading a great article in the latest issue of National Geographic, by Joel Achenbach, on the modern movement against science. Actually, I can’t stand calling it a movement. There should be a better word for it, maybe collective delusion. The cost of denying science is incalculable. Science shows the state of the environment, for example, is degrading rapidly. Yet, if the article is correct, only about “40% of Americans accept that human activity is the dominant cause of climate change” and thus realize we can and must do many things to improve the situation. I encourage everyone to read the article.

 

The article shows that strong sentiment against science is not new. The persecution of Galileo is one good example. There was a great outrage against Darwin, that partially continues even today. The novel Frankenstein is in many ways an expression of the fear against not only technology but science. You might think that by now, when we’re in the age of information technology, which depends on science for its very existence, there would be more trust in science. But as the deniers of  global warming prove, as people who argue against teaching evolution in schools prove, scientific thinking, and maybe critical thinking, is clearly misunderstood and probably feared.

 

Why is this true? It’s certainly a great question for teenagers to think about. My students in the past had theories. Maybe the dependence on science makes the fear of it more potent. It’s easy to fear what you depend on but don’t understand. Is there a general anti-intellectual bias in American culture? Is it, as has been argued in books like The Closing of the Western Mind, a phenomenon arising originally from uniting Christianity with imperial power, or religious belief with politics?

 

Many people I know hold religion responsible for this lack of understanding. Certainly, scientific and religious explanations often disagree. And there have been countless examples of delusion by religious people claiming to act out of faith or belief. But the same could be argued regarding adherents to political and economic theories or analyses. Without any fact checking, I think I can reasonably argue that for the last 150 years, adherents of Fascism, Communism, and Capitalism have caused as much delusion and suffering as has any religious belief system.

 

The article conjectures not knowing what evidence is, which I interpret as not knowing how to critically examine evidence and bias, contributes to science denial.  I agree. However, I think the problem is also due to not knowing how to deal well with not-knowing and uncertainty. Achenbach says “our brains crave pattern and meaning.” The craving for an answer can be overwhelming; the more basic and important the reality, the stronger the craving. You perceive something and in microseconds you assign meaning. You need to know that the earth under your feet won’t give way when you step on it or you won’t be able to walk. You learn early on that certain uncomfortable sensations in your midsection are hunger pains. The good taste of food was originally there to tell you that the food you’re tasting is not poison. Uncertainty is hunger for certainty; it’s uncomfortable. How do you understand discomfort? Is it “bad”? Does it mean you are in danger and must do whatever possible to end it, including believing in what restores comfort instead of what is best supported by evidence? Achenbach talks about a “confirmation bias,” the “tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe.” In that case, you will not do very well with adversity or stress or anything requiring complex thinking.

 

And science demands complex thinking. The National Geographic article points out that “scientific results are always provisional,” subject to change;  “Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.” How do you hear that? Do you want truth to be absolute, simple and forever? If so, I doubt that many “truths” are like that. For example, the good taste of food indicating something is safe to eat depends on where and when you’re talking about. 10,000 years ago it might have been true. Today, thanks to pollutants and pesticides, the taste of raw foods can’t be counted on to indicate safety. Even something like the boiling point of water is dependent on elevation, amount of salt and other contents in the water, etc.. The relativity and provisional quality of truth can be disturbing. Achenbach points out how difficult it is for us to look beyond our intuitions, to see the evidence for the curves of the earth despite the everyday assumption of flatness. Although scientific studies can be distorted by funding sources and bias, the very fact that science is recognized as provisional makes it possible and mandatory that critical minds engage with it.

 

To live with discomfort and uncertainty and be able to think and act with clarity, you need first to understand that discomfort is part of learning. It is there to wake up your attention so you can consider whether to say yes, no or maybe to something. You need to know about neuroplasticity, a word meaning that the brain changes, you change, with every experience. Who you are is not set in stone; if it was, learning would be impossible.

 

You need to know how attention and perception work. Back in 2003, I started using a book called Multimind, by Robert Ornstein, in my psychology class unit on perception. Ornstein theorizes Mental Operating Systems in the brain, which process and assign value to information according to specific criteria. Information that meets these criteria is given attention and other information is ignored. The MOS has an “extreme sensitivity to recent information,” to what’s new, what’s changed. It values relevance to you and everything becomes meaningful through comparison. Something that changes gradually is lost. Global warming is gradual, so gradual that most of us don’t perceive it until the tidal wave or tornado or six feet of snow or extreme hot or cold temperatures hit you. Actually, we don’t perceive it unless we carefully study it, unless we value such studying and thus know the relevance and power of the information.

 

But intellectual knowledge is not enough. You need the intention, the commitment, the care. You need an experiential method to calm your mind and clearly observe and learn from whatever is present to you, even discomfort and pain. Constructive action is likely only when you perceive the situation clearly. Somehow, we all have to get better at cradling information, cradling the world in our arms so we can feel depths of meaning without hiding from or reacting against it.

 

*See the addendum to this blog.

**The photo is of the Temple of Athena in Delphi, Greece.

Education is Fun

I repeated the title of this blog to myself, “Education is Fun,” and heard in my mind all these inner responses. “Yeah, on what world?” “When I was three, it was fun. Then I went to school.” “It should be fun, but only with the rare teacher.”

 

Play and exploration are the earliest forms of education. They are fun. They involve the mind and body’s natural curiosity and drive to grow, develop, survive. So many people have written about this. I remember reading John Holt in the late 1960s, who said learning, for young children, “is as natural as breathing.” There’s John Dewey, A. S. Neill, etc..

 

But in the U. S. having fun in school is too often considered “frivolous.” We have too many important issues to deal with, too many failing schools. There are no Common Core Standards for fun (thank God)! Concentration, focus, oh, and discipline are our priorities, and memorization. Yet, this is ridiculous.  A joyful or happy brain is one that learns efficiently. Joy involves the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system gets us ready for fight-freeze-flight, a quick response to danger. The parasympathetic system involves a ‘rest and digest’ response, cools the readiness to fight-freeze-flight. It also allows us to feel attraction, love, to digest food and ideas. It allows our eyes to focus for deeper overall vision. So it can make learning more efficient. A brain readied for fear and threat is ready to fight or run, not stay and learn. Joy and happiness are our brain and body’s signal that great learning is occurring.

 

And fun and joy improves the quality of our life. If education is about living a good life, why isn’t it more concerned with fun? We live not only to achieve and make the world a better place, but to love and be happy. In fact, making the world “better” means decreasing suffering, increasing happiness. Yet, what do we see in the headlines? More testing! More threats.

 

So, how do we bring fun into a classroom? There are four ways I can think of right away: Games, creativity, depth or meaning, and flow. These four are so interwoven that I can hardly stand to separate them.

 

Games: In English classes, writing can easily be made a game, even without going onto the internet. And it utilizes your own creativity as well as that of your students. For example, to teach story writing, I would write short stories of about 10-15 sentences. I remember one popular story was about being home alone at night. It began with a description of my hearing an unexpected sound and went on to describe what I discovered. After I wrote the story, I broke it down into individual sentences, made copies, cut them out. Each student or pair of students got the whole story in the form of unorganized sentences. Their job: to put the sentences together into a coherent story. A great lesson in logic, pacing and plot development. Another game: write the beginning of a story and have students finish it. I taught grammar sometimes by finding very short stories, taking out the punctuation, and having students fill it in. We could then discuss the story and how different ways of punctuating it would change the meaning. Or you’re preparing for a test or other assessment of learned material in science or history, so create a game of jeopardy. There are so many possibilities.

 

Creativity: Besides writing stories and creating games, for student assessments, include creative presentations. Have students in English classes play the characters they read about. Or in a science class, they can create their own fantasy interviews of scientists or design an experiment. In history, they can create fantasy journeys back in time. Depth, Meaning, Relevance, and Flow: There is joy in going deep into a topic or question, especially one that arises naturally in your life. Ask students where their interest and questions lie and then guide them in researching and answering the questions. Have students engage in meaningful, real life projects in their community. Flow is a natural joyful state. It involves getting involved in a project that is a great challenge, but one you can handle. It is self-motivating and means getting so engaged that you forget about time and the possibility of failure. It is very much like play, very meaningful play.

 

And your attitude toward fun, meaning, engagement, your kindness and valuing of your students, and prioritizing their well-being as people, not test scores, brings all these together.

 

So, instead of using standardized tests as assessments, use projects that induce flow. Then you’ll witness a generation of dedicated and successful learners.