Author: Michael Batinski
While flying home from a visit to The Meeting School, I thought about the people, there in New Hampshire and at home in Illinois who gather the resources for making a peaceful world. They do good work, quietly, so often unaware of coworkers hidden from each other by distance and condition. Lessons might be learned by attending to what each of us is doing.
Somewhere in midair between Boston and St. Louis, I returned to the question that flitted though my thoughts last year while Ginny and I lived in The Meeting School community as Friends in Residence. So what is it about Quaker education that makes it unique? While feeding the ducks and cows in the early morning, I felt prodded by some Friends who have written questioning whether there is such uniqueness. Sometimes, as I grasped for words to address the question, I too doubted. But through the year as I wondered and as Ginny and I shared our thoughts, I grew satisfied that there is a tradition, a rich one, and that this tradition is best understood not so much by listing principles but by witnessing its practice.
As I reflected, I realized that the answers flowed into another question: how might this tradition guide the world at large? Or can the practice of Quaker education guide and focus us as we work toward developing the resources for peace among Friends as well as among neighbors in the larger public? Last year, while Ginny and I sat in community meetings, cooked meals, taught and counseled students, did farm chores, and laughed and played with students, we wondered about this miraculous learning community and moved toward understanding by making comparisons with educational practices that prevail in the society at large. “Why,” Ginny would lament, “is it that other young people no matter their place in this society cannot learn in a community like this?”
Comparison with prevailing practices seems a good first step toward understanding. As retired members of a public university community, one a teacher and the other a counseling psychologist, we were most familiar with society’s norms. As we sat in community meetings with students and teachers together learning to work in common and as we watched students wrestle with the mysteries of pre-calculus and physics, we could not but attend to the public discussions over education in the print and broadcast media. Two points of comparison served as guideposts: first, the prevailing discussions over academic achievement (which is as old as the 1950s bestselling Why Johnny Can’t Read) and, second, the nagging worries about violence in the schoolyard (which are also at least as old as the film The Blackboard Jungle). What was striking was not just the prevailing concern about achievement scores as measures of academic achievement or the measures of violence as registered in incidents of bullying taken to tragic ends. Counting, while useful, carries worrisome implications. Equally troubling is a predisposition to conduct each discussion, of academics and of violence, on two adjoining and separated platforms. But need the discussions be separated? As we watched practices in this alternative learning environment, we inevitably asked ourselves what is the price for making such a division or what is gained by making integrations?
Academics, equality, community—what happens when schools treat these concerns as important but separated? Or what happens when a school weaves them together? Academic excellence is pursued for what end? To gain competitive edges? To “race to the top”? As an historian, I listen to today’s talk about education and hear the echoes of Social Darwinism. What kinds of community members are we raising by focusing narrowly on identifying students and teachers who do well at calculus? Or where and how do the schools open students to the habits of community and equality? For what end beyond technical skills are we preparing this rising generation?
Or what happens when students and teachers learn and live in community? In a community that nurtures egalitarian habits? The miraculous transformations I witnessed in weekly community meetings still enrich my imagination. Imagine students and faculty gathered in meeting with the clerk a student. But that by itself seems a superficial procedural matter when compared to the spirit that guides the conduct of the meeting. Students come here with expectations conditioned by their acquaintance with something called student government as conducted in public schools. Those of us who came from that tradition learned quickly the unsaid little truth that student democracy was contained by the authority of the assistant principle. We learned to understand, even identify with, Holden Caulfield. Across the meeting room I watched fascinated as students who came from that public tradition ready to test the school’s professed principles of community and equality. At first, they were testy in the manner of all-too-familiar adolescent rebels waiting to discover the truth underlying the rhetoric. Soon, however, they recognized that their voices did carry weight, and they began to conduct themselves accordingly and to take on responsibility for community life.
While writing, I can hear an inner voice from my public school experience that warns: what about discipline and order? Last year’s experience taught me to quiet such memories. Equality and community work well with respectful listening. Teachers need not abandon their responsibilities to mentor. Nor need they forsake the wisdom that comes with age. Teachers work, for example, to help nurture awareness of such concerns as housekeeping, sustainable practices, and smoking tobacco. But rather than simply dictating rules from above, they work together with students to write the school’s agreements that define such behaviors as smoking. While the community has embraced a minute against smoking on campus, the faculty has been guided by the awareness that the rule itself does not necessarily address the matter of healthy lifelong practices. After a long and thoughtful process, the school moved to address smoking off-campus at home among neighborhood friends. This was a long process that began while our son was a student five years ago. I confess that as I write I smile anticipating eyes rolling in skepticism. How naïve! Perhaps. But during morning opening last month, a student spoke from the silence volunteering that he smoked with friends during home visits. No one suspected. There seemed no reason to come forward other than inner direction. While living in this community, he had internalized not just rules but also an ethos of healthy living. He only asked for the community to help with this struggle.
The process is slow, frustratingly slow, by prevailing standards. But the community agreements emerge not as rules imposed from above to be dodged by those below. Discussion continues over the internet, its distractions and seductions. Students and teachers discuss the matter, come to agreements, and revise them in light of experience. At year’s end an issue arose that needed quick response, more quick than community process might allow. As expected, students came to community meeting indignant both about the decision and also the unilateral manner in which it was made. I watched comparing the present with similar situations when I attended public school. How different was the spirit guiding this discussion. Slowly the students came to recognize the reasoning that guided the head of school and finally agreed, but they also spoke clearly to their concern that the decision had not been made in the spirit of community process they had come to expect. The head of school and faculty learned that they had done their work well in nurturing healthy community.
This learning community illustrates the uniqueness of Quaker education because it places the Quaker clearness process at the center. If we consider school budgets, in particular faculty and student time, clearness committees may seem expensive. If we make integrity, respect for self and others, and clarity of communication essential aspects of student growth, the price seems as reasonable as hiring a geometry teacher. Students ask for meetings for clearness when considering which college to attend or while struggling with a roommate. Teachers request them with students who are not meeting their potential or with colleagues over the inevitable differences that arise in a small community. Civics can be taught from a textbook or it can be learned from experience. While watching, I returned to long-standing concern about prevailing patterns in public education that rest on authoritarian, albeit short-term economical, norms. How do we build schools that nurture the essential spirit of democracy? John Dewey still asks that question of us. Sadly, our schools practice as if he does not ask. Perhaps, the answer can come by attending to the traditions of Quaker education.
From these practices emerges the peace testimony. I think so. Is peace studies the subject of a course? Yes, in a way. But this small school in Rindge, New Hampshire, offers an instructive alternative to prevailing practice. Before retirement I taught a course on peace in American history as part of a peace studies curriculum. It was an elective, on the margins of the mainstream curriculum, and it was attended largely by those who were predisposed to listen. But more important, I think, my course was just one course, a fragment of the student’s education. Peace studies is an integral part of The Meeting School, but not simply because there is a course requirement but because the precepts of that course permeate the entire learning experience from community meetings to clearness committees, to classes, and even to doing farm chores.
There is a difference in Quaker education. I felt so as we listened to the radio’s reporting a local incident of schoolyard bullying that ended tragically. Slowly I have come to understand what was happening. There are alternative ways to grow through the trials of adolescence. Perhaps the challenges are universal. Questioning one’s identity and one’s life course may be common to modern youth. But I began to learn that these uncertainties and anxieties that commonly can turn to predatory behaviors need not—need not, if the environment changes. Youth need not be violent, uncaring. Students brought the same issues to The Meeting School but were learning with the support of strong, patient, and attentive listening that there were alternatives.
The students told me so by the lives they were learning to lead. I listened to students talk about becoming doctors in less privileges places, lawyers and advocates of human rights, urban farmers making a greener world, English teachers. During winter intersession they are exploring these ideals by living in a Catholic Worker group (Dorothy Day’s) in New York, by working with a volunteer health clinic. Last year one student worked in Africa with school children and another camped in a northern Vermont refuge for wolves. If there are significant indicators to measure a school’s success, they come by attending to the graduates. I have spent much time in the last year talking with these wonderful people, most of whom are working in caring professions. They are teachers, workers in social welfare agencies and international development agencies, and counselors. One teacher who returned for a second term, separated by more than twenty years, now is preparing to join the Peace Corps in Africa. What better indicators of healthy education can we find? And what better answer to questions regarding the uniqueness of Quaker education?
