Thinking Points Discussion of Chapter 7: Strategic Initiatives

I had posted this on the site before, but in case anyone wants some more information on this crucial idea I am reposted here:

The same people behind the Apollo Alliance also are behind this site
http://www.thebreakthrough.org/ a group that is implementing framing, values and strategic initiatives. Check out the "future" and "strategy" sections on their site.

"Strategic initiatives differ from the dominant mode of progressive advocacy which focuses on narrowly-defined problems (e.g., global warming) and then identifies specific solutions (e.g., carbon tax or a sky trust). In contrast strategic initiatives begin with big, positive, visionary solution that solves many problems simultaneously while changing social values."

Instead of identifying a problem that needs to be fixed and figuring out a policy to correct it, think of the value you want to promote, and figure out your allies.

The chart on the bottom of this page http://www.thebreakthrough.org/strategy.php shows conservative and progressive examples of strategic initiatives.

Strategic Initiatives should:

    * have Multiple impacts.
    * Elevate new progressive "frames."
    * create new Alliances and political realities.
    * Divide opponents.

Be sure to look at the PDF, "Strategic Values:" http://www.thebreakthrough.org/files/Strategic_Values_Overview.pdf

Excerpt from the pdf :

    "Activate and link the bridge values of American dream, financial security, ethical consumerism, and faith in science.

       1. Define the progressive base.
       2. Identify constituents of opportunity.
       3. Identify bridge values that progressives share with constituents of opportunity.
       4. Craft and implement strategic initiatives that activate and strengthen progressive values to build a progressive majority over time."

I encourage you to read through the site and the pdf. And check out http://www.apolloalliance.org/ to see how unlikely groups can form an alliance to bring about huge change.

And in case you haven't read the earlier Rockridge Institute's article on Strategic Initiatives: http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/rockridge/stratinit/

This one is my number one strategic priority. It is a multifacted strategy to:

- Gain energy independence, thereby enhancing our national and economic security

- Reduce and ultimately eliminate carbon fuel consumption, thereby reducing green house gas emissions and slowing or reversing global warming

- Create new jobs in the trans and post carbon energy economies

The two greatest challenges to our security, energy independence and global warming, would be directly impacted by this strategic initiative. It would provide our economy with a thechnological advantage going forward into the 21st Century and wuold create ultimately millions of new jobs.

This is both a suggestion and a question. If we were to work on increasing public school fundin nationwide--teacher pay, shrinking class size, and better funding over all it seems like it could have multiple effects--but does it count as a strategic initiative since more of the effects are conceptual?

Consequences are....
Elevate Public Role in life
Pro-active crime prevention
More/better jobs
Long term security- better teaching of science and math- stronger economy
Strengthen public sector in the voter's minds
Close Wealth Gap

Hi Joe,

I have for many years been promoting the idea of Mass Transit 2020, that by the year 2020, the U.S. should have the most complete, most efficient, state of the art mass transit system in the world. This is both a multifaceted and a domino initiative:

MULTIFACETED - Creating the most complete, most efficient, state of the art mass transit system addresses many progressive interests, such as energy independence and conservation, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, creating jobs for those who will build and maintain the system, including highly-educated and -skilled jobs. It will make more of America more accessible to more people. If properly designed, it will also make us better able to deal with natural disasters, both by making it easier to evacuate people before, and by providing a better infrastructure to support rescue, recovery, and rebuilding after.

DOMINO - But there are also many subtle but profound implications of this project. First, it would provide a replacement for the "military Keynesianism" that currently dominates our economy; rather than building tanks, aircraft, and bombs, we would be building high-speed and local rail networks. The shift toward energy independence would also offer less "cover" for imperialist minds who want to dominate the world's oil fields, thus making it more reasonable to reduce America's "military footprint" both at home and abroad.

Second ... and most profoundly ... it would renew our sense of community and our awareness of each other, by taking us out of the isolated, competitive "I'm in my car and you're in your car" mindset that pervades our society. If you've never lived in a city with a great mass transit system - here or in Europe - it's hard to explain HOW DIFFERENT people see each other when MOST people ride the bus, tram, or train to and from work, school, markets, and the like. That sense of community, of connectedness, doesn't end when you get off the bus, tram, or train. You're likely to ride with many of the same people every day, so you make friends of people who would otherwise have been competitors (on the highway). Moreover, you stop seeing the passage from Point A to Point B - and by metaphor life itself - as a dog-eat-dog, he-who-gets-there-firstest-eats-the-mostest competition. After all, "we're all on the same tram...."

For these reasons, I would really love to see the progressive community, and our leaders, make Mass Transit 2020 our #1 priority. It is "the change that makes the other changes possible," in so many ways.

Crissie

When you talk about shifting education away from competitiveness toward more community-based ideas, how far would you take this?

I ask only because my experience at several universities has led me to realize that the "community" aspect can have inherent problems of its own. Japan, for example, sends its best students to our universities because our individualistic, competitive approach in education helps encourage creativity, which is lacking in a society that believes "if the nail sticks up, it must be hammered down."

Having watched the Japanese "shop" our universities like idea malls, I do have some concerns about removing competitiveness from the system. The best solution would be a balance between the two. I visited the site link you gave, but while it asserts teamwork in exploration, it doesn't give a very in-depth view.

I'd like to hear ideas on how to manage this.

Hi Joe,

I've long felt that one of the chief failings of our educational model is its focus on individual effort and and grading, to the near exclusion of both cooperation and competition. Whatever the civics-related content of the curriculum, the structure of the educational experience itself is purely individualist. In the prevailing educational structure, cooperation is "cheating," as each student is expected to do his/her own work. Competition is almost non-existent - especially at the primary and early secondary levels - as teachers who grade competitively (such as using a grading curve) are seen as "unfair."

The resulting cognitive model is this: "I must work alone (or else I'm cheating), and if I perform well (individually) I should succeed, regardless of the performance of others."

Needless to say, that model bears almost no resemblance to adult experience. Most of us work in groups (companies, teams, etc.), and our success or failure is based on our group's performance relative to other groups in our field. That is, we must both cooperate (within our group) and compete (with other groups in our field). It doesn't really matter how well I've done unless my efforts have improved the work of my group as a whole, relative to other groups in my field.

When I've discussed this with educators, the most common response I've received is that cooperation and competition skills are "what the kids learn in sports."

Well yes, team sports can help us to develop cooperative and competitive skills ... if we get to play on a team, and if the coach has the attitude and aptitude to teach those skills in a generalizable format (not limited to the sport itself). But most students don't get to play on a team - participation is limited to star athletes - and most college P.E. curricula don't teach would-be coaches how to teach sport-as-metaphor. So the practice of children learning cooperation and competition skills in sports is sketchy at best.

Instead, what we too often are left with is UNSKILLED cooperation and competition, with both too often expressed in and practiced as forms of aggression: authority and obedience, dominance and defeat. Coupled with the individualist model of classroom instruction, we get a society whose members feel they should succeed based on their own performance, that cooperation is a luxury and competition a vicious struggle to the death.

That plays out in our politics, and in our policy. Having not learned two of the most essential skill sets in human experience, cooperation and competition, we've created a social model of "let the big dogs eat and the rest starve" - a perverse and destructive model which, had our species practiced it from our earliest roots, would have doomed us to extinction hundreds of thousands of years ago.

It's as if we've educated ourselves just enough to be stupid.

Crissie

Joe, wordshop & Crissie,

I have just ordered “Dewey on Education” which was published posthumously, so I presume it is a collection of various essays and/or excerpts. However, I have read both "Democracy and Education" (1916) and "Experience and Education" (1938). My own interpretation of the gist of "Experience and Education" (which seems to have been the last work he published specifically on education in his life) is that after basically kicking off the global progressive school movement with "Democracy and Education" and over twenty years of very well supported experimentation and research into creating alternatives to the industrial classroom he was throwing in the towel because, while he was very clear about what did not work, he still could not yet describe what does work. He attributes his failure to articulate the nature of an effective alternative to the lack of a theory of experience. If I understood his point correctly then he was saying that until a theory of experience is articulated then all the “alternatives” are shooting in the dark and if they hit the target then it was an accident.

I believe, Crissie, you are hinting at something important in your observation that elementary school classroom teaching is generally clueless to the development of skillful cooperation and competition. In my own process of developing the ideas that became my first book, "Attitude First: A Leadership Strategy for Educational Success", I was struck by what I see as the primary metaphor that frames how most people think about education as the delivery of units of knowledge, skills and information. This metaphor is very useful for driving the debate about accountability, the importance of test scores, and bringing economic ideas into the realm of school system policies. The industrial metaphors that make schools into factories for workers and turns teachers and students into units of production, human resources, and units of product are also pernicious. Another bad metaphor in education is the assumption that ignorance is the enemy, an unqualified evil to be fought against and vanquished at all costs. Thus, education is primarily framed as an industrial war machine that produces workers and eliminates ignorance. In order to win this war we have to be efficiently expending our resources which everyone knows is best handled by unfettered free market competition. Those resources need to be accounted for through a unified system of measurements of the units of knowledge, skill, and information that have been delivered, thus national testing and rigorous quantified standards are the obvious choice.

What I propose as an alternative framing, based on my informal study of Lakoff’s work and a variety of other people like Howard Gardner, is that the core element of progressive education is the mapping of experiences. The educational process is cognitive cartography, the creation and maintenance of maps of where a student is, where they want to be, and what is likely to be encountered in the process of the journey from one to the other. Ignorance is a starting point, and everyone is ignorant about some things. Therefore, it is not an enemy to be defeated, it is an important reference point without which we cannot know how much we have progressed. The units of knowledge, skills and information are still important, they are data that is included in the map, but what makes a map useful is not merely having lots of data, but portraying the relationships between the data. If I want to draw a map from Seattle to Berkeley then it is not enough to simply draw two dots and label them. Unless I accurately depict relevant information about direction and the nature of roads or other forms of transport that connect the two points then my “map” is going to be useless. This way of thinking about education puts relationships, nurturing relationships, at the core of education and all the other stuff needs to be subservient to the nurturance engendered in the intimate connection between a student, their teacher, and the world they are exploring together.

To answer wordshop’s question about how far to take this, I suggest we take it as far as we possibly can. I believe that the greatest leverage for making a difference is in the realm of k-8 education. These are the years when children are developing their sense of what is socially normal. It is bizarre to teach them that a social situation in which one person is autocratically empowered to exert total control over 15-30 other people who are all exactly the same developmental age is somehow a normal social situation. When the vast majority of the people in our country have been exposed to this as if it is normal, then why are we surprised by how they react to a political machine that takes advantage of that bizarre sense of how normal it is for one person to be in unquestioned control?

The question is not really whether a classroom is competitive or cooperative. The real question is whether a classroom is participatory, do the children participate in real and meaningful decisions about what to do each day, what the rules are, and have access to a legitimate process for changing them. Fortunately, there are many examples of schools that took this kind of shot in the dark about 40 years ago and, fortunately, hit the mark. One such school is called Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, MA. In the last ten years a number of schools have opened up around the world using Sudbury a model.

We don’t need to try to change the whole school system into the extreme democratic free school model of Sudbury, but kids do need to be given ample opportunities and encouragement to participate in the real decisions that affect their lives. This can be done very easily, even within the current context of standardized tests and all the bureaucratic stuff that has invaded the classroom. It can be as simple as the teacher observing what the rest of the world outside the classroom expects them to accomplish and asking the kids for help in making the decisions about how they can work together to meet them.

The necessary theory of experience that Dewey lacked is, I believe, potentially available through the developments of cognitive science and psychological research over the last 40-50 years (since Dewey’s death.) The principle measure of success that I propose to replace the units of knowledge, skill and information at the center of the educational system is optimal states of mind. Based on the fact that researchers have been able to study and quantify certain states of mind such as cognitive order, cognitive complexity, optimism, and others, then it is at least theoretically possible to use these as a measure of how well an educational setting utilizes the attention of the students. The ways that a student directs their attention is one way of describing their attitude. The point of my book is exploring some basic ways that this idea can help everyone in the field of education to do a better job by putting, you guessed it, Attitude First.

Besides the emphasis on attitude, there must also be, as Joe pointed out an emphasis on community. I suggest that it is not just an emphasis on occasional forays from isolated classrooms of developmentally homogenous groups of children into the community, but the development of real communities that make education a priority for everyone of all ages. And the transformation of educational communities from bizarre examples of elitist dictatorships into a variety of democratically governed groups who share with students the real power to co-create the rules and expectations that we choose to live by.

(This is my hot button, in case it is not obvious. If anyone is interested in further thoughts and discussion on education I am always eager.)

--
Enjoy,

Don

Site: http://www.Attitutor.com
Blog: http://donberg.blogspot.com

Hi Don,

Thank you for your detailed and insightful comments. I'd like to continue this line of inquiry, if you're willing.

Progressives have often tried to make education their top strategic priority, I suppose in part because it seems so progressive and democratic to ensure that "no child is left behind." The problem, of course, is that our basic educational model is conservative and industrial - not so much in its content, but in the classroom experience itself.

Children are seated row upon row, given a list of rules to be obeyed - among which are no talking and you must work alone - a list of tasks to be performed, and those performances are individually and independently graded by an authority figure whose position is beyond challenge. We expect this experience to produce self-motivated, self-teaching adults capable of cooperating and competing in positive ways, and of making reasoned civic choices as citizens of a democracy. That is, we expect them to internalize the content but not the classroom experience itself. To quote Mr. Holland's Opus: "We're here to teach democracy, not to practice it."

Contrast that with the athlete's experience of the entire team running wind sprints because a single player goofed off in practice. That practice horrified my mom when I played high school basketball. (It also horrified the my players' moms when I was a coach.) It seems "unfair" to punish the entire team for the mistakes of a single player. But in fact, it's a way of teaching the players to think of themselves not as individuals but as members of a team, responsible to and for each other, soaring or sinking as one. It mates lesson content with lesson experience.

What's more, players quickly stop seeing that as "unfair," because that particular frame of "fairness" - individual accountability for individual actions - makes no sense in the context of that team activity. Each season, new players would complain that it was "unfair," and returning players would say something like: "If I turn the ball over at the end of a game ... will I lose ... or will we lose?"

I agree that our educational model needs to be shifted. No matter how "progressive" our lesson content, our current individualist, industrial, authoritarian classroom experience teaches conservative frames.

And there are some theorists who suggest that is no accident.

Crissie

This is an informative conversation. I would hate to see it end here.

Regards!

Been researching more. My ideas are framed from experience a couple of decades ago, and some research papers of the time. Since even research succumbs to frames, it's good to review some of it from a different perspective.

I'll see if I can get my hands on the book you recommend.

Hi Chrissie,

I'm a fan of transit oriented design also and agree it is a strategic initiative for the reasons you've outlined.

I wonder if this initiative could be better framed as "child-friendly urban design" "family-friendly urban design" "community-friendly urban design"? Thoughts?

I like you're ambition that "by 2020 the U.S. should have the most complete, most efficient, state of the art transit system in the world." My sincere hope is that Australia will beat you to it! Though, all things considered, it probably is more strategic if the U.S. achieves it first because of its economic, military and cultural status in the world and the impact on the norms of urban planning such a shift would have.

Kind regards,

Daniel

  

Such kinds words, Daniel. I'd pretty much figured the neocons had destroyed any status we had.

I think the U.S. needs to achieve this goal because of the horrendous amount of carbon we emit per capita. It's the least we can do for the planet.

Regards!

Hi wordshop,

I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that should the U.S. undertake these strategic initiatives then it would have a profound effect globally, because of the dimensions of the country's global influence. In a sense it is doubly strategic for the U.S. to achieve these goals.

As for strategic initiatives, I've always thought that extended product liability would do a lot of good. That is, the manufacturer of a product continues to be liable for its impacts during and after its use. It would force product design to have optimum efficiency, capable of reuse, remodelling, recycling and be toxic free.

Perhaps this could be framed as "lifelong product care."

Kind regards,

Daniel

As someone who recycles religiously, I want to stand up and applaud this idea. Even such a simple thing as putting a deposit on cans or bottles would help. And then there's the big bugaboos: things that can't be recycled at all, or that can't be recycled in your particular area of the globe. This particularly drives me nuts.

And yes, I see what you mean about the US taking the step. We need to show the commitment and begin the strategic change. Given our resources, if we apply them properly, we can engender willingness to do the same, and perhaps create means of doing so more effectively and more cheaply.

The sin is that we do nothing at all.

Regards!

The phrase "lifelong product care" immediately made me think of Ray Anderson and the Interface flooring company.

Several years ago Anderson experienced a shift of his values that he described as a "spear to [his] chest". He realized his carpet company was incredibly polluting, and he vowed to change it. One of Interface's strategic initiatives was to think in terms of providing a service to cover floors (lifelong care, followed by recycling) rather than just to sell more carpet.

Ray Anderson was inspired partly by Paul Hawken's book, The Ecology of Commerce. If I remember correctly, that reframing of commerce is an example of Hawken's ideas about strategic initiatives.

Anderson tells his story briefly at this web page: http://www.interfaceinc.com/getting_there/Ray.html

He's also written a book of his own, Mid-course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise.

I hope folks find some of that useful. Cheers

The first reason public transportation loses public support is that it is slow, abusive, and inconvenient. As long as that is the image it has, it will always have resistance.

As long as there are discrete locations with long stretches between them a large train works. In a standard American amoeba city the old concept has major flaws. It almost never goes where you want, it doesn't have a stop near you but too many stops in between. Transportation to get to the stop is problematic and worse when you get to the destination, which basically amounts to long walks. Healthy for some but impossible for many.

If one takes a "man from mars" approach both the common bus/train approach, and the Car approach seem horrid for a number of reasons. Given the situation most people do not have either the same start or end to their trips and any bus system that tries to accomplish this becomes hopelessly meandering or so divers that most buses travel empty (or nearly so) most of the time. Timing is also a problem, the less the wait the greater the expense in "empties".

On the other hand having a behemoth standing buy able to take families across country but mostly in the service of a single person on relatively short trips, then finding a place to sit the rest of the time is as crazy.

But a Computer driven, small, light, inexpensive, electric, overhead, rail car that would travel directly to the destination, and then go to be transportation for someone else. They would be there at the time needed and would rarely travel empty except to the nearest need.

Built into the concept is the ability to have short range transport on board, this could be Segway, Hoveround, Razor, bike, or indeed feet, so that the last objection is answered, and in a way superior to the previous.

This system is way more scalable than giant trains or buses, and way easier to build effective demonstration systems that can build enthusiastic support from folks to actually get out of their cars and use it.

Davidp, Don, Joe & Crissie,

Davidp and I are from Ohio, where our current school funding process has been found to be unconstitutional and the Republican controlled state house has ignored fixing it.

In my own community a school income tax levy just failed in May and if it doesn't pass in November the local school budget will be slashed by 20%, pretty draconian.

All of your insights on education have been stimulating.

What do we (as a progressive community) need to do next to hammer out the strategic initiative and start running with it?

Hi cwatts,

As I hinted above in my essay Experience vs. Content, I think the "education as #1 priority" mode of progressive strategy is a trap we too often buy into. The changes needed in our educational model are so extensive, and the results so long-term, that we're asking present-day voters to focus on an initiative whose implementation and effects count not possibly be realized within their lifetimes. I don't think it's reasonable to expect voters to be that forward-looking.

By contrast, the Mass Transit 2020 initiative would encourage long-term changes in education, as well as encouraging adults to change their community and civic frames, while producing tangible, positive changes in society - while that system is being built. The shift in focus from defense to infrastructure spending, and the new jobs that would result, would happen almost immediately.

Moreover, there's somethng very primal about "building," watching an idea go from an architect's sketch to ground breaking to completion, and then having access to that newly-built thing. From the time of the pyramids and Stonehenge - and probably even before that - building calls out an atavistic sense of dream realization. Because core-level progressive objectives are so abstract - while conservative objectives seem so immediate - I think it's very important that progressive initiatives use concrete means and offer concrete benefits.

I'll offer two sample arguments to illustrate:

* "Progressives want to revamp the education system, but the bottom line is, dead kids can't go to any school. We conservatives will make defense our top priority, to keep you and your family safe."

Conversely,

"Conservatives want you to worry about whether some enemy might* hurt you. We progressives will state-of-the-art transit our top priority, so you and your family can still get to work and the supermarket after the oil runs out."

The former makes progressives sound "head in the clouds" while conservatives claim to be "down to earth." The latter reverses that, and frames progressive values in very concrete, tangible terms.

Crissie

Arrgh! I really wish I could edit my content here....

- The changes needed in our educational model are so extensive, and the results so long-term, that we're asking present-day voters to focus on an initiative whose implementation and effects COULD (not count) not possibly be realized within their lifetimes.

- "Conservatives want you to worry about whether some enemy might hurt you. We progressives will MAKE (word omitted) state-of-the-art transit our top priority, so you and your family can still get to work and the supermarket after the oil runs out."

My apologies,

Crissie

Based on about 20 years of thinking about how fundamental the issue of education is to our society and to achieving the fullest expression of nurturant values, I agree with Crissie that it is a very long term issue and does not provide the kind of concrete tangibility that can be substantially realized in the next five to ten years. Having said that I think that education can, nonetheless, serve as a central issue around which many if not all other strategic issues can be organized, a meta-strategy, if you will. The key is tying the progressive values together into a vision of what an Education Society would look like.

The strategic initiatives that Rockridge put forth can be tied together by looking at how they all serve as major tools to facilitate optimal states of mind in all the citizens of the world. This means that every one of them is an educational initiative. They are efforts to do massive nation-wide cognitive cartography (with global impacts); to accurately get a fix on our current position, identify where we want to go and then to effectively anticipate the obstacles that stand between us and that goal. Each strategic initiative is a tool or vehicle designed to remove man-made obstacles, to get around natural obstacles, and to inspire people to blaze new trails and take better advantage of existing ones to get to optimal states of mind.

Education is the process of engaging with the world to map out access to optimal states of mind. This is a process that never ends therefore it is imperative that every aspect of society is being continuously remade to facilitate this process. The biggest challenge is figuring out what people need in order to have this outcome. No elite class of people can ever create a system that can anticipate every individual need, but we can create a society that continuously acts as if the achievement of optimal states of mind and ensuring that everyone is appropriately challenged in finding their way to those states are the most important results of everything we do. That is to say, people are going to be a lot better at optimizing their own states of mind when they are given appropriate and ample opportunities to try than any arbitrary group of experts. Expertise is needed to ensure that the systems to support this outcome are accomplishing the job, but they are to act as equal contributors, not elite controllers.

As John Dewey wrote in 1938, “We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.”

My revision of Dewey’s statement: “We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by achieving a good attitude in the present moment are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. Discovering how to achieve a good attitude is the only preparation that amounts to anything in the long run.”

The possibility I am living into is enthusiastic people living passionate lives in a joyful society. This is the result of my work and the vision that guides me. The beauty of it is that it is possible right now with nothing more than the right attitude. Of course, most people do not experience the world this way from moment-to-moment and from day-to-day, but that is because we have a society that is out of alignment with the needs of most of the living systems on the planet, from individuals to whole ecosystems. While we can each shift our individual attitude, how do we shift the attitude of our organizations and, ultimately, our whole society? The question is how do we re-align ourselves and our society with needs at every level within the planetary ecosphere?

An education society invests it’s resources in facilitating the attainment of optimal states of mind in individuals, organizations, the society as a whole and it’s ecosystems. An education society recognizes that non-optimal states of mind are inherently part of the experience of life and the ultimate non-optimal state is death. Death and suffering are accepted as important points of reference along the journey of life, they may be necessary, but it is our moral duty to support people through these inevitable processes with dignity and care.

I have recently been reflecting on the idea that participation is the opposite of violence.

Here’s a link to a comment I wrote in response to the question of Fixing Schools:
http://www.rockridgenation.org/questions/fixing-our-schools/

And here’s a link to a blog post I wrote about participation being the opposite of violence:
http://donberg.blogspot.com/2007/04/opposite-of-violence-is-participation.html

Everyone has the inherent right to be included in the process of making the decisions that affect their lives. While we cannot participate in every decision, participation is the opposite of violence, therefore it is a form of violence to knowingly exclude anyone unless they are absolutely incapable of participating. This subtle form of violence is an act of exclusion, not merely a lack of participation. The moral path of leadership in this view is about facilitating participation by holding open the option, delivering a genuine invitation, and accepting the individual’s decision either to participate or not.

Here’s a bold notion: The vision of a world that works for all is based on extending meaningful participation to everyone, as much as possible. The opposing vision is about accepting as natural and/or inevitable the existence of an elite few who participate meaningfully and manage the masses for their own good (leaving ‘their’ ambiguous to leave open the question of who really benefits.) Based on the idea that participation is the opposite of violence, then the strict visionaries are, in essence, advocating systemic violence as natural and/or necessary. My vision for society and education is about maximizing the opportunities for everyone to meaningfully participate in making the decisions that affect their lives. It is irrelevant whether systemic violence is natural or necessary, violence is not acceptable as either means nor ends therefore we are morally obligated to continuously act to minimize it and not enshrine it. (It will still occur, but we cannot in good conscience resign ourselves to accepting it as human nature, even if it is a predictable feature of our world.)
Consider the more immediate strategic issues that have been presented, the ultimate outcome in every case is helping people to achieve optimal states of mind by removing barriers, getting around obstacles and creating new pathways.

An inequitable transit system causes the poor to expend resources on getting to work that should be spent on feeding their children. The waste of time and attention on the relatively minor matter of transportation is an incredible waste of vast amounts of human potential that could better serve our society in other ways. I know how valuable good a transit system is from my experience of having only owned one car in my life (which only lasted a couple years) and using transit regularly for the majority of my adult life.

The corporate welfare system and the current obsession with coddling the richest elite shareholders in the world causes companies to act irresponsibly and persist against all common sense to create immense amounts of waste and to degrade the living conditions of both the human communities and ecosystems that they are dependent upon to do business in the first place. Obviously the poor have it bad, but the rich are only going to be increasingly fearful of the envy of the poor masses and also the avarice of those few who share in the wealth. Ethical business should be about shifting the dialogue in business from the myopic focus on returning abstract monetized shareholder value to a much grander moral vision of creating and maintaining companies as the nexus of a network of important stakeholder relationships that have great interpersonal, social, political and monetary value. (Stakeholders include local communities, ecologies, workers, suppliers, customers, and management.)

Healthy food is fundamental to healthy states of mind (leaving out divisions between body and mind.) The goal of the food system should be to facilitate the development of positive quality-of-life enhancing relationships between all the different living things that participate in both the noble sacrifice of life for life and the miraculous transformation of ingredients into celebrations that honor the sacred hoop that gives us our existence.

Clean elections are a fundamental element of regaining the trust of the American people. The distrust is evident in the apparent majority of non-voters. I withdrew in disgust for many years and am still skeptical of the whole system. This is the most basic symbol of participation in our national system, so if we can’t build a voting system that is fair and universally accepted as a meaningful contribution to our governance, then we might as well chuck the rest. Clean elections are a key strategic initiative for both practical and symbolic reasons. The corruption of elections could perhaps be a symbolic poster child for how systemic violence is subtly perpetrated against the masses both wittingly and unwittingly by the major organizations that are responsible.

If this meta-strategy of emphasizing participation and striving to facilitate optimal states of mind for everyone can become a set of deep frames over the next decade or two, then the proper groundwork will be laid for making the case for a very different kind of educational system. An educational system that cares about the quality of a child’s relationships with their family, friends, and the world they live in and helps them to become a good person, not just another consumer or a human resource product to be consumed. An educational system that is life affirming and can truly nurture young people to be fully empowered citizens in a global democratic society.

This meta-strategy also paves the way to achieving an Educational Society that does not take the myopic view that schooling is only for children but takes full responsibility for the never-ending lifelong process of cognitive cartography. A society that is always willing to stop periodically to take it’s bearings, get a fix on where it is, where it wants to go and makes plans to get everyone from here to there together. A society that ensures that every facet of human interaction with each other and our planetary home is one that honors life and all the magnificent miraculous systems that make it possible.

Hi Joe,

Just getting to this chapter-thread now, so I have some reading to do before I can comment on earlier sub-threads here. Just a couple of initial comments that don't seem to be addressed so far:


 (1) The neo-con movement has been heavily influenced by Leo Strauss, and his view that there need to be "public myths" to influence the masses, even (and especially) if they are not in fact true. It's an intrinsically paternalistic view of politics, fits in perfectly with the strong-father frame. So for example, the disconnect between the progressive excuses for the Iraq invasion and the non-progressive underlying goals is a strategy that has been developed under a very conscious theoretical strategy.

Seems to me that the more we can expose this duplicity in the conservative agenda, the more angry (some) people will be that they are being lied to. We may not get the heavily strong-father framers to switch frames (they'll explain it away as usual), but those bi-conceptuals who value honesty and are angered by corruption should be more receptive.

The tricky part is that progressive politicians may try to "triangulate" their rhetoric to some degree as well, and thus the specific tactics of an individual politician may provide grist for this mill as well.


 (2) Media/Information initiative: My primary focus in terms of policy issues is media and information/communication technology ("ICT"). This is becoming increasingly important as the fundamental platforms we use to reflect society back to itself are increasingly compromised or under threat of being compromised. This is particularly important in context of the market discussion, because an unregulated media/ICT market will certainly not protect the Fourth Estate or the Internet in the public interest. These businesses are distinct gatekeepers that behave in the role of public utilities, and thus they present very special cases for market theory both in terms of technical analysis and in terms of societal impact. (There is a classic conservative comment with regard to TV some years ago that it is "just a toaster with pictures" - no way!)

Issues such as media consolidation, public broadcasting, net neutrality, DRM/TPM ("digital rights management" and "technological protection measures" - i.e., technological locks against the fluid flow of information) and so on are converging on a single issue of power over who gets to have a voice in our society. This power will supersede all other issues, because it will determine whether "truth" can emerge from below or will only be imposed from the top down.

Progressive agendas here are to resist mass media consolidation, support public broadcasting, protect net neutrality (also known as "common carriage" on the Internet, given its status as a public utility), resist onerous lock-down of content under intellectual property paradigms (balance has always been a struggle in this policy domain), protect freedom of speech for the broadest domain of speakers and listeners, support more channels for citizen voice in public governance processes, etc.

While all the substantive issues discussed so far are unquestionably important, I feel that the media/ICT domain is fundamental to them all, because if we lose on that fight, we lose all the tools (such as this blog, for example) to communicate effectively with each other in a bottom-up fashion, which is also critical for progressive movements to sustain themselves.

My belief is that conservative goals are well served by top-down control over communication and information (and that top-down dynamics of mass media had been systematically eroding the progressive motivations of Democrat politicians over the years - Ralph Nader and Jerry Brown's complaint), while progressive goals are better served by a diverse bottom-up participatory mode of communication which has increasingly flowered in the last ten years as the Internet has begun to evolve tools for grass-roots organization and mobilization.

So, while I don't know if this initiative deserves to be "marketed" as #1, I think it needs to be solidly on the list.

I know Al Gore thinks so (see his new book)... ;-)

Also, the Free Press organization, founded by Bob McChesney has been a leader in this area since 2003. They have great resources in this area.

As you see my writings elsewhere here and at my Website http://freedemocrat.blogspot.com/ (FreeDemocrat's Freedom blog) by framing the hijacking of the Public Commons as an assault by a Gang Of Pirates who have taken it by nefarious means to their exclusive benefit, and the grievous harm of everyone else.

They were only supposed to be the stewards of the bandwidth they have license for. Turning their license over to be a propaganda tool of the Gang Of Pirates means that they have not been good stewards of their trust. Failure to be good stewards means they have violated their license and should lose it.

On a separate note the entire process is wrong headed. Those who have license have laid claim to ownership. The rules should be re-enforce the stewardship aspect by having a one to a customer lottery with annual only licenses, renewable on good behavior for twenty years only and then thrown open to lottery again.

There is indeed a great investment in equipment and structures, but there is no need that these be owned by the license holder, nor indeed that all parts be owned by a single source. How to regulate that is a tougher issue.