How do these world-views work in the government’s favor?

#1 is about Sacrifice, and there are lots of emotionally-framed corollaries that go with it. You’ve seen the movies and read the books, and you don’t want to be even peripherally responsible for the deaths of thousands of your fellow citizens, and so you will go along with some significant level of discomfort before you actually take a stand and stop sacrificing. “All I have to do is give up X, and surely X is worth saving some lives, and surely it’s not near the sacrifice that our men and women in Iraq are making.” Besides, everybody’s doing it. If you don’t go along with the plan, you’re a selfish and unfeeling person who doesn’t deserve the rights and privileges afforded you under our system of government. All we have to do is hear the phrase “for national security reasons” and this line of thinking kicks in.

#2 is about Artificial Complexity. We think that surely no one citizen can appreciate or know all of the complex conceptual and practical bits of information that go into making the USA run and keeping her safe. “Surely it is not possible for me to make a decision about what’s right for our country based on what I know, because there are so many more people who know more, and they are very important and they’ve had lots of experience and they’re paid very well and they wear special uniforms and…” We defer fundamental decisions about what’s right and wrong to others because we think we do not have enough information or enough ability to make those decisions on our own. An important supporting behavior is that we assume any completely egregious abuses of this deference will be so obviously wrong that the system will fix itself. Surely corruption of any significance will not go unnoticed, and surely the media and lawmakers and watchdogs will make enough of a fuss to get everything straightened out. But until then, we err on the side of trust, and we trust that when someone says an action is “for national security reasons,” they know best.

Both premises require a level of faith in federal governmental structures that I’m not sure is present or common at any other level. If Mayor Hutton told us that she was going to be reviewing records of phone calls within the city of Richmond in the name of keeping us safe, she would be thrown out of office on her ear. If Sheriff Strittmatter told us that keeping Wayne County safe required the Sheriff’s department having the ability to indefinitely detain anyone for any reason (or no reason) without a warrant and possibly use coercive physical force to extract information from them, we would (I sincerely hope) not stand for it for one day.

So why do we accept such actions at a level that is even less accountable to us, that is run by people with a much worse track record of honesty and selflessness, that is consistently and predictably broken in its ability to serve our needs as a local community?

#1 Sacrifice: in the recent past, it has been a noble and patriotic thing to unquestioningly give of yourself in the name of service to your country, and most every part of our culture tells us that it still is, that there’s no sacrifice that will be demanded of you (in the name of national security) that isn’t valid and honorable. When you refuse to go against what your country tells you is right and good, you move incredibly far outside the comfort zone of the average citizen. And then you remember that life was better on the inside of that zone, and you go back.

#2 Artificial Complexity: It’s overwhelming to think about standing up to the federal government, and they like it that way. We wonder what number to call to tell Verizon, the local phone company, that you don’t want them to give your call records over to the NSA, and then just as we’re about to threaten to withdraw our funds from them as a customer, we remember that the usurpation of critical local services into the corporate global economy has taken away our purchasing power, and that we don’t have that choice any more. And then we think about all of the layers and dimensions of the ways in which we have yielded our power to others, and we fall asleep on the couch in front of the television.

The bottom line: most of the time, when we go along with the demands made of us in the name of national security, we don’t do so because we want to. I think we do so because we feel we have no other reasonable choice that allows us to continue living the life we want. But at what cost?

When you hear that something is being done in your name by your government in the name of perpetuating and preserving that same government, do you ask yourself whether that is really in your best interest? Do you wonder what you can do about it if it isn’t?

But the bottom line for me is that that our system of education in the US is almost entirely broken, ill-conceived in the first place, and that calls to make incremental improvements to a broken system feel largely like a waste of time.

Old minds think “how do we stop these bad things from happening?” New minds think “how do we make things the way we want them to be?” If education in the city of Richmond, the state of Indiana, and the U.S. is to be improved or fixed, it will be with new minds, not new programs put in place by old minds.

A hundred and fifty years ago, when the United States was still a largely agrarian society, there was no reason to keep young people off the job market past the age of eight or ten, and it was not uncommon for children to leave school at that age. Only a small minority went on to college to study for the professions. With increasing urbanization and industrialization, however, this began to change. By the end of the nineteenth century, eight years of schooling were becoming the rule rather than the exception. As urbanization and industrialization continued to accelerate through the 1920s and 1930s, twelve years of schooling became the rule. After World War Two, dropping out of school before the end of twelve years began to be strongly discouraged, and it was put about that an additional four years of college should no longer be considered something only for the elite.

It seems like urbanization and industrialization would have the opposite effect – that the system would be trying to put kids ON the job market. But imagine what would happen today if educators suddenly decided that a high-school education was no longer needed. There would suddenly be tens of millions of kids out there competing for jobs that don’t exist. The unemployment rate would go through the roof.

It would be catastrophic. It’s not only essential to keep fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds off the job market, it’s also essential to keep them at home as non-wage-earning consumers. This age group pulls an enormous amount of money – hundreds of billions of dollars per year — out of their parents` pockets to be spent on books, clothes, games, novelties, music, and similar things that are designed specifically for them and no one else. Many enormous industries depend on teenage consumers. If these teenagers were suddenly expected to be wage earners and no longer at liberty to pull billions of dollars from their parents` pockets, these youth-oriented industries would vanish overnight, pitching more millions out onto the job market.

We all know that most of the modern education system forces students to spend many years of their lives learning things they instantly forget once they’ve passed the tests. People don’t remember things they have no use for. So why do we force our kids to go through this exercise? Because we have to give them something to do during the years they’re being kept off the job market. And it has to look good, like it really matters.

What do people think about the failure of schools? They think the schools are incompetent and underfunded, and that kids are lazy. What stories do we tell ourselves about what the schools would do if they had more money? They could get better teachers and pay teachers more, and more money would inspire teachers to do a better job. The lazy kids? More money would be spent buying new gadgets and better books and prettier wallpaper, and the kids wouldn’t be as lazy as before. And so these new and improved schools would turn out new and improved graduates.

But what happens when these new and improved graduates arrive in the workforce and start competing for jobs that the rest of us are trying to hold onto? The answer shows us why schools do such a poor job of preparing graduates for the workplace (or graduating students at all): they’re doing what we actually want them to do.

People imagine that we want to see our children enter the workplace with really useful business skills, but if they actually did so, they’d immediately begin competing for jobs with their older siblings and their parents, which would be catastrophic. And if graduates came out of school with advanced skills, who would bag the groceries? Who would do the sweeping up? Who would do the filing?

Instead, we produce workers who have no choice but to enter our economic system, presorted into various grades. High-school graduates are generally destined for blue-collar jobs. They may be intelligent and talented as college graduates, but they haven’t demonstrated this by surviving a further four years of studies (that are generally no more useful in life than the previous twelve years). Nonetheless, a college degree wins admittance to white-collar jobs that are generally off-limits to high school graduates.

What blue-collar and white-collar workers actually retain of their schooling doesn’t much matter, in either their working lives or their private lives. Very, very few of them will every be called upon to divide one fractional number by another, parse a sentence, dissect a frog, critique a poem, prove a theorem, discuss the economic policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, define the difference between Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets, describe how a bill passes Congress, or explain why the oceans bulge on opposite sides of the world under the influence of tidal forces. Thus, if they graduate without being to do these things, it really doesn’t matter in the slightest. Postgraduate work is obviously different. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, scholars and so on actually have to use in real life what they learn in graduate school, so for this small percentage of the population schooling actually does something besides keep them off the job market.

The deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people, not the needs of our children. They exist to serve the needs of our economy. The schools turn out graduates who can’t live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits our economic needs perfect. What we’re seeing at work in our schools isn’t a system defect, it’s a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundred percent efficiency.

In grades K through three, most children master the skills that citizens need in order to get along in our culture – reading writing and arithmetic. These are skills that, even at age seven and eight, children actually use and enjoy using. Millions of years of natural selection have produced human creatures who are born with a ravenous desire to learn anything and everything their parents know and who are capable of feats of learning whose boundaries are literally beyond imagination. Toddlers growing up in a household in which four languages are spoken will learn those four languages flawlessly and effortless in a matter of months. Kids will learn anything they want to learn, anything they have a use for. To make them learn things they don’t have a use for, you have to send them to school. That’s why we need schools – to force kids to learn things they have no use for, which in fact they do not learn.

Our schools have been failing for many decades. What do you call a system that’s built on the presumption that people in this system will be better than people have ever been? Everyone in this new and improved system is going to be kind and generous and considerate and selfless and obedient and compassionate and peaceable, and THEN we’ll beat those low graduation rates? What kind of system is that? Utopian.

Old minds think “how do we stop these bad things from happening?” New minds think “how do we make things the way we want them to be?” If education in the city of Richmond, the state of Indiana, and the U.S. is to be fixed, it will be with new minds who want to create a mode of education that truly serves the kids we are educating, not us and our economic systems.

(Many of the concepts and phrases in the above rant are quotes or paraphrases from Daniel Quinn’s book My Ishmael, and I have merely transcribed them here in a format relevant to the local news. Still, I take responsibility for any interpretations or mutations made.)

Countries I’ve visited (4% of the total):

And that’s not quite fair, since I’ve been to one small part of many of those places.

U.S. States I can remember going to (60% of the total):

How about you? (And please, if you are an acquaintance and want to correct me on any of these, please do – my memory isn’t so good for the U.S. States in particular.)

1. There must be a really good reason: “force may be used only to correct a grave public evil…a massive violation of the basic rights of whole populations”
2. The injustice suffered by one party must significantly outweigh that suffered by the other
3. Only the proper authorities may wage war
4. Force must only be used in a truly just cause and solely for that purpose – correcting a suffered wrong is okay, but doing it for money or material possessions is not.
5. You have to have a good chance of succeeding – you can’t go to war if it’s futile
6. The force used must be proportional to the good trying to be achieved. (I remember my pastors metaphor here made it into my own speech: you shouldn’t kill a fly with a sledgehammer!)
7. War must only be waged as a last resort

Who wouldn’t be convinced by these? If all of those criteria are met, how can war not be justified, inevitable if abhorrent?

Perhaps as we leave the eighth grade and move on to more nuanced views of the world, we know that it may not be that simple. I have certainly come to learn that just war theory is presented within a particular moral framework that isn’t really my moral framework. But I certainly appreciated at the time that it was consistent within the framework it lived in, true to itself, and it was something you could hold onto when the horrors of what it means to be at war did have such a fogging effect on any thinking about the matter. I appreciated that if you’re going to go kill someone, or ask someone else to kill someone, you damn better well have thought it through at that level and gotten yourself crystal clear on what your reasoning and values say about why you would be a part of that act.

This is partly why it is so scary to me that U.S. troops in the Middle East are now receiving values training three years into this particular war. When requests like “don’t desecrate the dead” and “don’t cause unnecessary suffering” need to be put up in a Powerpoint presentation and read aloud to make sure everyone’s “got it,” I feel ill.

Of course, on one hand, it makes perfect sense, given that the war in Iraq, and perhaps any war waged, requires contemplation of what are probably unresolvable conflicts in moral and emotional principles. Of course there will be stories of troops killing innocent civilians. Of course there will be torture in prisons. Of course there will be horrible acts brought on by asking men and women to figure those questions out in the heat of the moment. How can we ask someone to reconcile the inherent mission of our troops – apply the use of deadly force to coerce people into behaving a certain way – with the conflicting values that are ostensibly behind that mission – respect for life, pursuit of freedom and democracy, instilling peace and justice, creating a better world for all?

I don’t think the U.S. military wants its soldiers pondering those questions in the field. I don’t think it can afford to have each person contemplating those moral judgments along the way. I don’t think it can afford to have real values training, because this is where war – from my perspective, anyway – ceases to have any integrity or consistency within its own moral framework. The justifications for war at a high level may work just fine, but when you drill down to what’s happening out in the field – human beings hurting and killing each other because they’re told to – there is no integrity, there is no moral code that one can follow to justify it. As Albert Einstein said, “A country cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”

For what it’s worth, I don’t make a judgment on those who are compelled to exhibit that lack of integrity in a war setting. I believe they are responsible to themselves for their own actions, and maybe they can be acting with integrity and morality within their understanding of their own worldview, even if they aren’t in mine. But if they’ve gotten that far down the path of war, they’re already working within a moral and cultural framework that doesn’t offer them any good options, at least in the context of creating peace, justice and a sustainable human existence.

Or, as I wish I could go back and say to my eighth grade class, there are plenty of ways to justify modern warfare, and a lot of them sound pretty good, but I don’t think any of them work for humanity.

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” –Ernest Hemingway

Note: This is a topic that I’m fairly certain the few folks who do read this blog may have some opinions about, and I’d really like to hear them. Please post your thoughts, even if anonymously; I’m done with the eighth grade, but I’m sure I still have more to learn and other points of view to consider.

I suppose it’s worth noting as well that, in my experience, the kind of interest-based resolution approach that Dave mentioned can work for people with extremely opposing worldviews or mismatched frames, it just takes a lot more time and energy than most participants are willing to spend. In other words, in many situations, the desire to end the conflict “one way or another” will outweigh the desire to end it with a mutually satisfactory outcome.