Frog Warming

Thank goodness we clever human beings, on this gradually warming Earth of ours, aren’t stupid like those frogs!

Well, as a matter of fact, we have noticed it – some of us, at least. We even have the data projecting the continuing ocean-rise swamping most of our major cities, and the pending disruption and collapse of our agriculture. Far more is going on than perhaps would suffice to alert a frog, even a very stupid frog.

Actually, at any given point we could fairly readily stabilize or reverse the temptrend, by any of a great many different means, but chances are that we won’t, so settled are we within the walls of our stew pan.

Emergency measures (taken against the backdrop of a failed and shrinking economic base due to loss of our cities, our agriculture and most of our industry) are not good, and not only because we need to forestall such losses rather than merely react to them. We can change global and/or regional temps by any number of ways of changing the amount of sunlight being reflected instead of absorbed. Even though that can affect overall temperature averages, we just don’t know enough yet about how such albedo changes would affect weather patterns as such. The “cure” could be as bad as the “disease,” at least for our agriculture and living conditions.

Long-term? That appears to revolve around how much of our biomass turns into carbon dioxide (forest fires and our use of fossil fuels) and how much of our solar-heat absorbing carbon dioxide gets turned back into biomass (by growing plants), plus some not-so-funny feedback cycles involving carbon dioxide release and absorption rates in a warming ocean.

Here we need a lot of accumulated effects of little choices by a lot of people, rather than the heroic actions of one or a few individuals – and for the long haul….

That can’t be accomplished through persuasion. However persuasive a given case is or can be made to be, over time people’s attention wanders and other issues turn up.

That can’t be accomplished by fiat either. Policing to enforce is expensive, and costly in terms of other things we value, and over time other crises come up which pre-empt away the resources allotted for policing the task.

Nor can we leave this to the goodwill and conviction of a heroic few. Their continuing sacrifice puts them at a cumulative disadvantage relative to those who don’t give a damn about the matter. After a while, we find ourselves without those heroic few, whose heroism we might find ourselves badly needing on other issues and situations.

A nice thing about incentives is that, unlike command and policing, they get the job done without abridging any individual’s freedom. Just by making it somewhat more expensive to burn a lot of the wrong fuel or to slash-and-burn forests, or by providing a little bonus for those things which make for energy efficiency, a lot more people, choosing for their own unabridged free variety of reasons, will choose those actions which result in better conditions for us all. The free marketplace does this now, but for some things it does it a lot better than for others. So on some things, including global warming, the marketplace needs a little help – such as the appropriate tax incentives.

Look to what extremes people go now to find and use tax loopholes! Simply rearrange those loopholes so that all that effort to avoid taxes will benefit the public rather than hurting it.

Another nice thing about incentives is that they don’t require heroic sacrifice. We get to keep our heroes for other matters. Everyone gets to play out their own best interests in a way which also works in the best interests of us all.

Another nice thing about incentives is that they’ll last for the long haul. They’ll go on working for as long as the incentives are in place. We don’t have to “jawbone” people, over and over, from campaign to emergency campaign as we used to try with inflation, exhorting them to do “the right thing” until our heroes appear and get used up. We can, and probably should, have some sort of sunset closure on our deliberately set incentives – but let’s tie such closures to conditions and not just to the calendar.

Some of our electric utilities charge less for power use when it is during off-peak times. Under different conditions, different general behaviors are appropriate, and achievable, given the right incentives for the purpose. Incentives are an easy way to correct what we, en masse, are doing vis-a-vis global warming (and vis-a-vis many other matters as well!). When the conditions are finally corrected and we reach the point where we appear headed into overshoot with global cooling, then we can simply re-set the relevant incentives.

There is much more to say about incentives, both in specifics and in terms of their general theory. You’ll find much of it, in fact, said in one little book, Incentives As A Preferred Instrument of Corporate and Public Policy. Until you’ve looked more closely at the above situation and at this book, though, ba-deep. Ba-DEEP!!!

Email comments to Win Wenger

©2000 Project Renaissance

The following essay was written for a business audience in 1997 as an introduction for a symposium on business and competition. 

Understanding the Nature of Conflict

Gary I. Wilson, Colonel, USMCR

Business, like war, is the art of out-doing the competition. Businesses like armies need to understand the nature of competitive conflict and the benefit of strategic thinking. CEOs devise business plans to win in the market place; generals use strategic thinking to win wars.

Strategic thinking is both an art and a science. The essence of strategic thinking is found in the philosophy of maneuver warfare. This philosophy of maneuver warfare won the Gulf War. It is codified in the U.S. Marine Corps publication Warfighting.

During the Boyd symposium we seek to offer an overall philosophy of winning for business based upon the military concept of maneuver warfare. However, readers from many backgrounds and disciplines will find something of value here.

A common mechanism for winning applicable to both business and military conflict runs throughout. Just as executives relate the Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu’s, Art of War to the market place, our ìBusiness is War” philosophy introduces maneuver warfare to business and public administration.

The Nature of Conflict

The essence of conflict is timeless and ever changing. While the basic nature of conflict is constant, the means and methods we use to cope with conflict unfold continuously. Changes in a conflict may be gradual in some cases and radical in others.

Any change eventually results in the upset of the status quo or equilibrium; for example, dominance in technology has led to Japan’s becoming a global economic power. Japan’s advances in technology have destabilized world technology markets.

Advances in technology create opportunity for change. Technology often improves our chances to quickly capitalize on our own resources. By changing faster we can out pace our competitors.

It is vital to stay ahead in this process of change. We drive change rather than being driven by it. Those who are first to take advantage of change gain a significant if not decisive advantage. On the other hand, if we ignore the change component of conflict, we will find ourselves unequal to its challenges.

Friction

Conflict often appears deceptively simple. In practice any enterprise, be it a business, a military campaign, a boxing match, or a stockholder’s meeting, becomes extremely difficult because of friction. Friction is a force that adversely influences a course of action or plan.

Clausewitz, a revered 19th century military theorist, described friction as, “the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.” Friction is the force that resists all action–it makes the simple difficult and the difficult seemingly impossible.

The very essence of conflict is a clash between opposing wills and this creates friction. It is critical to keep in mind that our competitors are not inanimate objects but are independent and animate forces. The competition seeks to resist our will and impose their own will on us. The give and take between their will and ours makes business difficult and complex. In this environment, friction abounds.

1. What is friction?

Friction may be mental, as in indecision over a course of action or marketing effort. Friction may be physical, as when competitors capture buy need real-estate to expand. Friction may be external, imposed by a competitor’s actions, the state of the economy, or mere chance. Friction may be self-induced, caused by such factors as lack of a clearly defined market objects or poor service to customer.

Whatever form it takes, because business like war is a human enterprise, friction will always have a mental as well as a physical impact.

2. Overcoming friction

We should minimize our friction while increasing that or our rivals. Thus while striving to adapt to friction ourselves, we must attempt at the same time to raise our rival’s friction to a level that destroys their ability to cope. Our greatest need then is to learn to compete while coping with friction. The means we use to handle friction is the will. We prevail over friction through persistent strength of mind and spirit.

We can readily identify countless examples of friction. In business, for example, friction arises through production delays, rapid changes in technology, drops in sales, defective parts, and external competition. But until we have experienced friction ourselves, we cannot hope to appreciate it fully.

Only through experience can we come to appreciate the force of will needed to overcome friction and to develop a realistic appreciation for what is possible in business and what is not. While training should attempt to approximate the conditions of conflict, we must realize it can never fully duplicate the level of friction of the real business world.

Uncertainty

Another characteristic of conflict is uncertainty. We might argue that uncertainty is just one of many sources of friction, but because it is such an important aspect of business or war we will treat it separately.

1. What is uncertainty?

Uncertainty is always found in a conflict. This is similar to what in the military has been called the “fog of war.” Uncertainty may be found in the unknowns about our competition, about the economic environment, and even about our own corporate situation. While we try to reduce these unknowns by gathering information, we must realize we cannot eliminate them. The very nature of conflict makes absolute certainty impossible. Thus, all actions in a conflict will be based on incomplete, inaccurate, or even contradictory information.

At best, we can only hope to determine probabilities and intentions. This implies a certain standard of judgment and insight: what is probable and what is not? With this insight we make an estimate of our rival’s designs and act accordingly. But we also realize that it is precisely those actions which fall outside the realm of probability that often have the greatest impact on the outcome of a conflict.

2. Overcoming uncertainty

We must learn to compete in an environment of uncertainty, which we can do by:

Developing simple, adaptable business and marketing strategies. Planning for the unexpected. Nurturing initiative. Accepting and taking risks.

3. What is the nature of risk?

Risk is inherent in everything we do. Risk is also related to gain–greater risk, greater gain. Risk is common to both action and inaction.

We should concentrate our fighting power in business like war at critical junctures or points. But this means we must be willing to accept prudent risk. There is a difference between calculated risk and a foolhardy gamble.

Risk and Chance

With risk comes the wild card of chance. Chance is a universal and ungovernable characteristic of conflict and is a continuous source of friction. Chance consists of turns of events that cannot be reasonably foreseen and over which we and our competitors have no control. As chance influences unfolding situations, it can unravel us as well as our competitors.

The uncontrollable potential for chance alone creates mental friction. We should remember that chance favors neither us or the competition exclusively. Consequently, we must view chance not only as a threat but also as on opportunity, which we must be ever ready to exploit.

Fluidity

Like friction and uncertainty, fluidity or the need for agility is always part of conflict. The father of maneuver warfare, Col. John Boyd, defines agility as “the ability to shift from one unfolding pattern of ideas and actions to another by being able to transition from one orientation to another.”

The implications for business are clear: to the extent that old corporate ways of doing business lock in certain orientations which hinder the ability to discard the old ways and form new ones. As a result of this rigidity you become less competitive. For example, a manufacturer might use expensive packaging materials such as cardboard or wood instead of styrofoam.

Spontaneous Flow

Events in a conflict are fluid spontaneously flow in and out of each other. This dictates that we creatively seek original solutions. But no event should be seen in isolation. Rather, each merges with those that come before and follow it–shaped by the former and shaping the conditions of the latter–creating a continuous, fluctuating fabric of activity replete with fleeting opportunities and unforeseen events. Success depends in large part on our ability to adapt to a constantly changing situation.

It is physically impossible to sustain a high tempo of activity indefinitely, although clearly there will be times when it is advantageous to push our resources to the limit. In other words, “in high tempo environments, the shorter the timeframe in which strategic decisions are made, the better the firm.” Thus, the tempo of conflict will fluctuate–from periods of intense activity to periods in which activity is limited to information gathering, replenishment, or reorganization. For example, economic conditions–international, national, and local–can influence the tempo of business but need not halt it.

Rivals will try developing an independent competitive rhythm. Each competitor will try to influence and exploit tempo and the continuous flow of events to suit their purposes. Each will try to improve their situation; in business with better profits or greater market shares, and in war by gaining a tactical advantage or developing local superiority.

Disorder

When friction, uncertainty, and fluidity converge, conflict is certain to gravitate toward disorder. Like other characteristics of conflict disorder can never be eliminated.

1. What is disorder?

In the heat of battle between rivals, plans go awry, instructions and information will be unclear and misinterpreted, communications will fail, and mistakes followed by unforeseen events will be commonplace. It is precisely this natural disorder which creates the conditions ripe for exploitation by an opportunistic will. Each encounter in conflict will usually tend to grow increasingly disordered over time. As the situation changes continuously, we are forced to improvise again and again until finally our actions have little, if any, resemblance to our original schemes. For example, could Alexander Graham Bell have envisioned the modern FAX machine?

In any competitive situation, events will not unfold like clockwork. Thus we cannot hope to impose precise, positive control over those events. The best we can hope for is to impose a general framework of order, to prescribe the general flow of action rather than to try to control each event.

If we are to win, we must be able to operate in a disorderly environment. In fact, we must not only be able to compete effectively in the face of disorder, we should seek to generate disorder for our opponent and use it as a weapon against him. For example, because Saddam Hussein tried to defend the entire Kuwaiti border during the Gulf War, he ended up losing all of it. We generated disorder by giving the impress we would attack in force at one place but in reality we attack at another thus disorientating the enemy as to the true focus of the campaign.

The Human Dimension

Because conflict is a clash between opposing human wills, the human dimension is central. The human dimension gives conflict its intangible moral factors.

1. What is the human dimension?

Conflict is shaped by human nature. Conflict is subject to the complexities, inconsistencies, and peculiarities which characterize human behavior. Conflict will invariably be inflamed and shaped by human emotions. Conflict is a trial of moral strength and stamina.

Any view of the nature of conflict would hardly be accurate or complete without consideration of the effects of risk and fear of the unknown on those who make up the corporate or military force. However, these effects vary greatly from case to case. People react differently to the stress of conflict; an act that may break the will of one competitor may only serve to stiffen the resolve of another.

No degree of technological development or scientific calculation will overcome the human dimension in conflict. Any business plan which attempts to reduce business to ratios of sales projections neglects the impact of the human will on the conduct of business and is therefore inherently flawed.

Brinkmanship: Overcoming Fear and Risk

Since business and war are competitive enterprises, brinkmanship is a fundamental characteristic of both. And since competition is a human phenomenon, fear–the human reaction to risk–has a significant impact on the conduct of both enterprises.

All people feel fear. Leadership must foster the courage to overcome fear, both individually and within the corporation. Courage is not the absence of fear; rather, it is the strength to overcome fear.

Leaders and managers must study risk and fear, understand them, and be prepared to cope with them. Like fear, courage takes many forms, from a stoic courage born of reasoned calculation to a fierce courage born of heightened emotion.

Experience generally increases courage. Realistic training can be used to lessen the mystique of the unexpected. Strong leadership which earns the respect and trust of the corporate workforce can limit the effects of fear, risk, and uncertainty. Leaders should develop corporate cohesion, esprit and morale.

In this environment, a person’s unwillingness to violate the respect and trust of their cohorts will overcome personal fear.

Moral and Physical Forces

The interaction of mental, moral, and physical characterize conflict forces.

1. What are physical forces?

The physical characteristics of competition are generally easily seen, understood, and measured. In business these some of these might be costs of raw materials, hardware, technology; sales profits and losses; markets lost or gained; or a rise in the number of your competitors.

2. What are moral forces?

Moral characteristics are less tangible. The term moral as used here is not restricted to ethics–although ethics are certainly included–but pertains to those forces of mental rather than tangible nature, to include the mental aspects of business. Moral forces deal with aspects of people’s mental well-being, such as ample health insurance provisions, workman’s compensation, and maternity leave.

Moral forces are difficult to grasp and impossible to quantify. An idea is meaningless until it is conceptualized and actualized. We cannot easily show people a pound of job security, a cup of mental wellness, or a milliliter of good attitude. Moral forces exert a greater influence on the nature and outcome of conflict than do physical.

The impact of physical forces in conflict can have a significant impact on the moral. Because the moral forces of business are difficult to come to grips with, it is tempting to exclude them from our study of competition. However, any business plan, doctrine, or theory that neglects these factors ignores the greater part of the nature of conflict. For example, our English word “sabotage” comes from the Dutch word for wooden shoe, “sabot.” Centuries ago, disgruntled Dutch workers would throw their sabots into the wheel running the windmills, thus disrupting the work and profits of an unpopular employer.

The Art and Science of Conflict

From the discussion to this point, we can conclude that conflict demonstrates characteristics of both art and science. Various aspects of conflict, particularly its technical aspects, fall principally in the realm of science, which we will describe as the methodological application of the empirical laws of nature. Conflict then becomes “an over and over again continuing whirl of reorientation, mismatches, analysis, and synthesis which enables us to comprehend, cope, and shape, as well as be shaped, by the novelty that flows around us and over us.”

What is the science of business?

The science of business includes those activities directly subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and like disciplines. However, these do not describe the whole phenomenon. What is the art of business? Owing to the vagaries of human behavior and the countless other intangible factors which contribute to it, there is far more to the conduct of business than can be explained by science. The science of business stops short of the need for judgment, the impact of moral forces, the influence of chance, and other similar factors. We thus conclude that the conduct of business is ultimately an art, an activity of human creativity and intuition powered by the strength of the human will. The art of business requires the intuitive ability to grasp the essence of a unique situation, the creative ability to devise a practical solution, and the strength of purpose to execute the act.

Illumination

At first glance, conflict seems a rather simple clash of interests. But at closer examination, it takes shape as one of the most demanding and trying of man’s endeavors. Fog, friction, and chaos are its natural habitat. Each episode is the unique product of the dynamic interaction of myriad moral and physical forces. While founded on the laws of science, business demands, ultimately, the intuition and creativity of art.

The following online book is available for free from the Earth Policy Institute.

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus challenged the view that the Sun revolved around the earth, arguing instead that the earth revolved around the Sun. His paper led to a revolution in thinking-to a new worldview. Eco-Economy discusses the need today for a similar shift in our worldview.

The issue now is whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Brown argues the latter, pointing out that treating the environment as part of the economy has produced an economy that is destroying its natural support systems.

Brown notes that if China were to have a car in every garage, American style, it would need 80 million barrels of oil a day-more than the world currently produces. If paper consumption per person in China were to reach the U.S. level, China would need more paper than the world produces. There go the world’s forests. If the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economic model will not work for China, it won’t work for the other 3 billion people in the developing world-and it will not work for the rest of the world.

But Brown is optimistic as he describes how to restructure the global economy to make it compatible with the earth’s ecosystem so that economic progress can continue.

In the new economy, wind farms replace coal mines, hydrogen-powered fuel cells replace internal combustion engines, and cities are designed for people, not cars. Glimpses of the new economy can be seen in the wind farms of Denmark, the solar rooftops of Japan, and the bicycle network of the Netherlands.

Eco-Economy is a roadmap of how to get from here to there. The following is excerpted from the Foreword.

Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth

 by Lester R. Brown 

The idea for this book came to me just over a year ago, shortly after I moved from President to Chairman of the Board of the Worldwatch Institute, an organization I founded in 1974. In this new role and with more time to think, three things became more apparent to me. One, we are losing the war to save the planet. Two, we need a vision of what an environmentally sustainable economy–an eco-economy–would look like. And three, we need a new kind of research organization–one that offers not only a vision of an eco-economy, but also frequent assessments of progress in realizing that vision.

When Worldwatch started 27 years ago, we were worried about shrinking forests, expanding deserts, eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, and disappearing species. We were just beginning to worry about collapsing fisheries. Now the list of concerns is far longer, including rising carbon dioxide levels, falling water tables, rising temperatures, rivers running dry, stratospheric ozone depletion, more destructive storms, melting glaciers, rising sea level, and dying coral reefs.

Over this last quarter-century or so, many battles have been won, but the gap between what we need to do to arrest the environmental deterioration of the planet and what we are doing con-tinues to widen. Somehow we have to turn the tide.

At present there is no shared vision even within the environ-mental community, much less in society at large. Unless we have such a vision of where we want to go, we are not likely to get there. The purpose of this book is to outline the vision of an eco-economy.

The good news is that when we started Worldwatch, we knew that an environmentally sustainable economy was possible, but we only had an abstract sense of what it would look like. Today we can actually describe with some confidence not only what it will look like but how it will work. Twenty-seven years ago, the modern wind power industry had not yet been born. Now, world-wide, we have behind us a phenomenal decade of 24 percent annual growth.

Thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy´s National Wind Re-sources Inventory, we now know that North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas have enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national elec-tricity needs. In the United States, wind electric generation is projected to grow by more than 60 percent in 2001. With the low-cost electricity that comes from wind turbines, we have the option of electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen, the fuel of choice for the fuel cell engines that every major automobile manufacturer is now working on.

Wind turbines are replacing coal mines in Europe. Denmark, which has banned the construction of coal-fired power plants, now gets 15 percent of its electricity from wind. In some communities in northern Germany, 75 percent of the electricity needs are satisfied by wind power.

A generation ago we knew that silicon cells could convert sun-light into electricity, but the solar roofing material developed in Japan that enables rooftops to become the power plants of build-ings was still in the future. Today more than 1 million homes world-wide get their electricity from solar cells.

Today major corporations are committed to comprehensive recycling, to closing the loop in the materials economy. STMicroelectronics in Italy and Interface in the United States, a leading manufacturer of industrial carpet, are both striving for zero carbon emissions. Shell Hydrogen and DaimlerChrysler are working with Iceland to make it the world’s first hydrogen-powered economy.

What became apparent to me in my reflections a year ago was that to achieve these goals, we need a new kind of research institute. Thus in May of this year, with fellow incorporators Reah Janise Kauffman and Janet Larsen, I launched the Earth Policy Institute. Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth is our first book. We have also begun issuing Earth Policy Alerts, four-page pieces dealing with topics such as worldwide wind power development and the dust bowl that is forming in northwest China. These pieces highlight trends that affect our movement toward an eco-economy.

No one I know is qualified to write a book of this scope. Certainly I am not, but someone has to give it a try. Every chapter could have been a book in its own right. Indeed, individual sections of chapters have been the subject of books. Beyond the range of issues covered, an analysis that integrates across fields of knowledge is not easy, particularly when it embraces ecology and economics– two disciplines that start with contrasting premises.

People appear hungry for a vision, for a sense of how we can reverse the environmental deterioration of the earth. More and more people want to get involved. When I give talks on the state of the world in various countries, the question I am asked most frequently is, What can I do? People recognize the need for action and they want to do something. My response is always that we need to make personal changes, involving everything from using bicycles more and cars less to recycling our daily newspapers. But that in itself will not be enough. We have to change the system. And to do that, we need to restructure the tax system, reducing income taxes and increasing taxes on environmentally destructive activities so that prices reflect the ecological truth. Anyone who wants to reverse the deterioration of the earth will have to work to restructure taxes.

This book is not the final word. It is a work in progress. We will continue to unfold the issues, update the data, and refine the analysis. … We welcome your input in analyzing these issues. If you have any thoughts or recent papers or articles that you would like to share with us, we would be delighted to receive them.

Download Eco-Economy for free. (Requires Adobe Acrobat). Read the press release.

Education Can Lead the Way to a Sustainable Society

Wendy Priesnitz

We are experiencing the results of a global economic restructuring based on the premise that the world is no longer made up of cities or even countries, but a single world order dominated by transnational corporations and mass consumerism. Governments seem incapable of responding. Worse than that, their agendas appear to be set by corporations and financial institutions. Our political parties – including the so-called progressive and populist ones – are no longer attached to community life; they have become the creations of pollsters and media advisors or are paralyzed by lack of vision or preoccupation with money. We have evolved a type of “democracy” in which the elite have centralized power for their own benefit.

The Roots of the Problem

This situation has crept up on us, and it is only recently that most people have begun to notice. In order to understand the roots of this complicated problem, I have begun to examine our institutions and how they work. One of the main problems with institutions is their use (and abuse) of power. We learn early in our lives that power usually flows from the top down, often as a consequence of physical domination: big kids over little kids, teachers and principals over students, strong men over physically weaker women, big countries over smaller ones. Those of us who dislike the consequences of this distribution of power usually work outside formal channels of society and arrangements of power to protest, resist and sometimes overturn decisions made by the ìpowers that be”. We learn that democracy involves citizens influencing public policy, rather than authoring it. We learn that the object of political debate is one of persuasion, in the same way that children learn to wheedle and pout and throw a tantrum in order to get their way. Because we are never able to take the initiative, we resort to criticizing and complaining. Our negative experiences with power lead us, in our organizations, to fear and condemn power. We confuse misuse of power with the positive power to lead and to propose alternatives. Many of us have never even experienced the kind of collective power that can be used to build alternative institutions. We have been told one too many times to sit in our seats and listen, and to put up our hands when we have to go to the bathroom.

Goring the Sacred Cow

If we are going to improve the lives of our communities, we must recreate our institutions and rethink how we relate to them. And if we look critically at how we educate ourselves, we´ll find an institution that long ago ceased to serve our needs. Unfortunately, the public education system is sacrosanct among most progressive people. In the past, a strong publicly funded school system contributed to a democratic, egalitarian, socially just society. However, schools, as they are currently constructed, do just the opposite. They create institutionalized values, perpetuate social hierarchies, disempower us, and encourage a destructive level of consumerism and consumption. To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. Of course, the process of changing such an emotionally charged institution is a highly politicized one, as author Ivan Illich realized almost three decades ago when he wrote his book Deschooling Society. The process challenges not just our beliefs about education and learning, but a lot of vested interests – like how corporations make profits and who manages the affairs of our communities. And that is precisely why we must make major changes. Those who care about social equality and democracy must examine how the institution of schooling creates and reinforces our current unequal, non-democratic, consumer-based society.

Let´s face it: The majority of the problems facing society today – pollution, unethical politicians; poverty, unsafe cars…the list goes on – have been created or overseen by the best traditional college graduates. Whether these problems were created by design or accident, we cannot fix them by continuing the status quo. We need to create a society that chooses action over consumption, that favors relating to others over developing new weapons, that encourages conservation over production. And this just won´t happen unless we de-institutionalize learning. Here´s why. Beginning in Kindergarten, young people are treated as unneeded and legally minor. They are obliged to attend an often unfriendly – sometimes threatening – place, which robs them of their basic human rights. They are taught about human rights and government in social studies class, but they´re not allowed to experience – let alone practice – these vital components of good citizenship.

School is a substitute for everyday life, and childhood a rehearsal for personhood. It replaces real experiences with pseudo experiences. It dismisses the value of children´s own experiences, thoughts and opinions, substituting the opinions of a textbook author who often has a different worldview than the student. At the end of the school assembly line, students with little authentic knowledge are bumped out into the adult world like so many sausages – and expected to suddenly make mature decisions. Fortunately for their sanity but unfortunately for the state of the earth, the parameters of their decision making have been defined by their school experience and mostly involve choosing whether to buy Coke or Pepsi.

And that´s not surprising. The chief function of state-run public education is not to empower citizens to make responsible decisions about the future of the earth or the harmonious cohabitation of the people on it. It was created to groom workers for the factories of the Industrial Revolution. And if those factories are to make a profit, somebody has to buy the stuff they make. The educational system is the perfect mechanism for ensuring a culture of consumers. For this reason, we should not expect politicians and their corporate masters to look eagerly toward changing the educational status quo. On the contrary, schools and corporations are quickly merging. A good example is the principal of a school in the American south who recently suspended a young boy because he dared to wear a Pepsi T-shirt during an event sponsored by Coke. This corporate agenda is being pursued to all corners of the developing world. The majority of people who don´t go to school – but want to – are motivated by a desire to emulate the North American way of life. In virtually every country, the amount of material consumption by college graduates sets the standards for everyone else. The trouble is, of course, the planet won´t survive if the developing world ends up replicating North America´s levels of consumption.

The Cult of Experts

Our society worships a cult of experts, which promotes the belief that education is the result of treatment by an institution called a school, just like the cult of medicine teaches that wellness is the result of treatment by another broken institution – the hospital. In fact, learning does not need manipulation by others. Real learning is a result of experimentation, making mistakes, correcting mistakes, creating hypotheses and proving them.

Delivering ìReceived Ideas”

As author and schooling critic John Taylor Gatto explains, after we fall into the habit of having other people do things for us, we lose the power to think for ourselves. Maybe that´s why so few of us challenge the premises of nursing homes, television, day-care centers, schools and the global economy. These things are received ideas, not the result of individuals thinking about what would make their own lives – and those of their families and communities – better on a day-to-day basis. School measures a student´s mastery of a prefabricated curriculum on a standardized scale. When we submit to others´ standards to measure our own growth, we put ourselves and others into assigned slots. When everything fits so nicely together, there´s no need to look for an underlying agenda.

Aside from these covert agendas, schools don´t accomplish their stated goals very well. Experiments conducted 30 years ago in Puerto Rico showed that students were more effective at introducing their peers to the world of science than their teachers. After having received 12,000 hours or more of teaching, many people can´t read well enough to function in their daily lives. Many high school graduates have no skills to make a living or even any skills with which to talk to each other. Of course, education is more than just skill development. Unfortunately, schools also aren´t very effective in delivering what may be called a liberal education. In fact, most of the desirable things we learn in life – an understanding of our heritage, how to love and to play, to think, to work independently, to listen to music, to appreciate poetry or Shakespeare, to facilitate a meeting – are seldom learned in school. We learn these things by living our lives and, in most cases, in spite of attending school. The ability to interact well with others – to be well socialized – is one of the recognized goals of our school system. Ironically, most homeschoolers will tell you that the main reason they want to avoid school is the competition, aggression, bullying and violence that occur there.

So What is the Solution?

The solution to this crisis of learning is to de-professionalize the educational environment and put learning back into the hands of the learner. This will not be easy. Deschooling ourselves is as difficult as renouncing limitless consumption. But here are some ways to begin.

• We can rid ourselves of the idea that learning can be produced in us – and that we can produce it in others. We can abolish all curriculum that´s not created by the learner. We can get rid of text books, lesson plans, testing, grading, report cards, course requirements, homework assignments, schedules and attendance regulations.

• This will allow us to treat young people in ways that demonstrate our trust in their desire and ability to learn. We will then be able to create a learning environment – which includes role modeling, safety and respect, access to requested resources, consolation when things go wrong and celebration when things go right. Then we can get out of the way and not meddle in the process unless we´re invited.

• There is no reason to judge people´s employability (or anything except their ability to write tests and essays) by their degrees. So if you´re hiring someone, learn about their abilities, personality and character, rather than their university degrees. Of course, to really embrace this idea, we´ll all have to stop flaunting our own university degrees!

• Another step is to de-expertize teaching. Many people, in a variety of different roles and occupations, have much to offer children – as role models and as learning facilitators. So why should teachers and schools have a monopoly on helping people learn things? Sharing skills can be done informally, or there is an increasing number of more formal mechanisms, like skills exchanges and Natural Life´s Mentor Apprentice Exchange.

• We also need to place more value on the knowledge and experience accumulated by our senior citizens. We need to find ways to help people of different generations teach and learn from each other.

• On the same theme, we can work together in our communities to create a learning society. We need to tell our politicians to fund museums, theatres – and yes, even school buildings – so they can afford to provide spaces for people of all ages to explore, interact and learn on their own initiative. Institutions should exist to be used, rather than to produce something. If they´re effective, people will use them willingly.

• One of the most challenging changes we need to make is in our attitudes towards childhood. In addition to trusting children to learn, we need to respect and advocate for young people´s right to make their own decisions (within parameters that address their physical and emotional safety, of course) and their ability to live democratically and co-operatively if given the opportunity.

• Lastly, we need to like children and to want them around all day. This means trusting them with access to the tools of our trades and allowing them to participate in – and learn from – the life of their communities.

No, these are not simple solutions. But we have a choice. We can continue to pour increasing amounts of money into a system that is delivering proportionately declining returns – and creating a generation of angry, frustrated people who aren´t much interested in democracy. Or we can put money into creating appropriate opportunities and infrastructures to help people learn in ways that do not require huge amounts of real estate and bureaucracy, ways that do not make people abdicate the responsibility for their own growth, ways that allow children and young people to participate fully in the lives of their communities…and get a good education at the same time.

Wendy Priesnitz is the editor of Natural Life Magazine, a 24-year-old Canadian newsmagazine. She has written nine books, including School Free – The Home Schooling Guide (The Alternate Press, 1987) and Challenging Assumptions in Education – From Institutionalized Education to a Learning Society (The Alternate Press, 2000). She is also the founder of The Canadian Alliance of Home Schoolers (1979) and a former leader of The Green Party of Canada.

Which Way: Top-Down or Bottom-Up? The Story of the Albany Free School

Mary M. Leue

Our school, The Free School, in downtown Albany, New York, like a lot of others that call themselves “free” or “alternative,” is based on the rights of children – and is still going strong as it enters its thirtieth year! Every year more families are allowing their children to choose us. Every year we are approached by more people who want to learn more about us – or even to teach with us! We have more and more (self-chosen) learning options for kids to choose from, like apprenticeships in all sorts of fascinating occupations and work/travel opportunities. The best thing about us, I believe, is our mix of kids from a wide variety of backgrounds. Most alternative schools, and many if not most public schools, are made up of fairly homogeneous groups – some because of financial limitations, others because of the socio-economic separation of the neighborhoods from which schools draw their students.

We bus in most of our middle class kids. I find it heartening to see, consistently over the nearly three decades of the school’s life, how many families there are and have been in our geographical area whose choice of a school has not eliminated ours because of fear of “the ghetto,” with all of its attendant statistical “undesirability” criteria! Kids are kids, and learning, kids’ style, is its own reward for everyone concerned, and flies in the face of fears and prejudices!

Sometime during the early seventies we turned from a plain old “free” or “alternative” school into a school-community. And since we’ve got one which has been and still is highly successful – both locally and globally – I am happy to tell the story of how it happened, why, and how other people might take heart in setting up learning centers of their own! Timing is important, and ours was astoundingly tailored to the opportunities and failures of the time in which it began (the seventies). The times of the new millennium are very different, equally challenging and presenting their own opportunities for people able and willing to violate or transcend the mores of “what everyone knows,” as we did. So this is not a formula for success: it is rather an inspirational account of what we did and an invitation to explore and venture on your own!

Before describing what we have learned ourselves in the Free School community, I need to offer you a model of human learning – whether that be learning by a child or by an adult – which differs radically from the educational practices (although not from the principles so eloquently advocated by educational philosophers like John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Waldorf founder Rudolf Steiner, Francisco Ferrer, anarchist founder of The Modern School movement, A. S. Neill of Summerhill and others). What I believe all these people have in common is a grasp of — and a devotion to– the person, whether large or small, about whom one speaks when one looks at learning, for it is the actual individual human being her/himself who is paramount here, not some hypothetical or research-generated idea of who s/he is – and age is not a primary criterion here. Grasping that fact as rock-bottom reality can be darned elusive to a person twelve or more years of whose childhood were spent in attendance at an involuntary institution based on another model!

Most of what we “know” about education, alas, is based on tainted assumptions. The notions that learning should be self-directed and that kids’ learning should be segregated from that of adults have both been effectively negated by the success of the alternative and homeschooling movements. The belief that minority students have to be coerced into learning or even that most of them are relatively ineducable has been shown to be false in several inner city schools like our Albany (New York) and New Orleans Free Schools and in schools dedicated to effective remediation based on humanistic principles like the Community School in Camden, Maine. Thus, there is a great deal of successful educational experience on which to build an easily accessible, informally-organized community-based learning network to supplement the more traditional age-graded public schools. This suggestion for community learning centers is just taking the successes of the few already existing alternative educational organizations into the next logical step!

In fact, it appears that this trend is already taking place, with the success of resource centers for homeschoolers, an example being Pathfinder Teen Center in Amherst, Massachusetts under the guidance of Josh Hornick and Ken Danford. Additionally, there is the very interesting development of some of the older alternative schools into communities which offer a variety of learning options for families, both local and online, such as Pat Montgomery’s Clonlara School, with its homeschooling network and online Compuhigh. Increasing autonomy for both kids and families seems to be on the increase. Unfortunately, this encouraging trend is occurring mainly in the least needful areas of our country. Both Jonathan Kozol and John Taylor Gatto have stressed this inequality of opportunity for minority children. It may be that it is in this neglected aspect of alternative learning experiences that The Free School, in Albany, now in its thirtieth year, may be of use.

It has long been a shibboleth in American society that “a good education” is the keystone of a successful adult life, morally, culturally, intellectually, economically – even maritally. Common acceptance of the moral and intellectual inferiority of “the masses” in our ghettos is widely held. By contrast, John Taylor Gatto views children both as supremely themselves and as the adults of the future they will become, and sees the task of the school and the teacher as offering inspiration to them through the teacher’s own passion and know-how, supporting their individual genius or daemon, providing as much space as possible for experimentation and practice with their future adult roles, and as supporting and protecting them from the adults who have been assigned the job of indoctrinating them with the mores of the culture. For Gatto it is the personhood of the adults who shape children’s primary environment that makes the crucial difference in the adults these fledglings will become – and this idea is far less simplistic than most “educators” and parents seem to think! “We teach who we are,” as the saying goes – and that is who our children look to as their inspiration – whether positively or negatively!

Taking off from John’s model of human life, it follows that the learning experience is not something that can be fruitfully separated off from ordinary life, nor can it be limited to any one age group, to a building set apart for the purpose, to a specific curriculum or even to a designated leader so chosen because s/he has taken university courses labeled as teacher preparation and received a certificate verifying her/his qualifications for being the person given the task of “educating our children.” Yes, of course we go to someone who has specific skills in some area we want to learn about – and yes, someone who can, for example, teach kids to read and write and figure is to be prized above rubies. But that person’s “credentials” to teach children need to be personal, not simply symbolic or bureaucratic – based on a passionate attitude toward the subject matter being taught, toward the process of teaching itself and toward the kids being taught, as John says.

The difference here is that learning is a process that only works well when it is basically self-chosen, which is why I posed the question of “Which way: top down or bottom up?” as the title of this chapter. It is my profound conviction that we of the Albany Free School have survived and thrived largely because we did very little in the way of prior planning for structure, but instead, made it up as we went along. So you would have to say that we have lived by the law of “bottom up.” I doubt that we would have survived this long if we had pre-planned how things ought to go – because if we had, the second generation of people now coming into the community would have seen it as already established, which would have left them no room for innovation or change.

This criterion of spontaneity goes for adults as well as for children. Engaging in the learning process on the basis of a voluntary choice for nearly thirty years has left me with no doubt whatsoever that this is the right way to go! And having worked with a socio-economically integrated group of children in the ghetto in an “unschool” (as you might call it) in which the designated teachers were also self-chosen for their roles – we have never hired a single teacher nor fired one for lack of credentialization, for “incompetence” or for any other reason – I can testify to the fact that it WORKS! Our kids come to us by their own (not their parents’) choice, and leave us on the same basis when they want something else. So do our teachers. There are not two rules, one which applies only to children, another to the adults, as there are in most learning centers. And we have always been open for visitation, because (unlike some free schools) our children love visitors! In fact, they surround them, take them by the hand and lead them to wherever they want them to go! And bid them a fond goodby when they leave.

I feel as though it is incumbent on me to describe how our school actually works. That’s really hard, perhaps impossible. I can tell you how we fund the school (with tuition which slides all the way to zero) plus the revenue from our eleven buildings, most of them four-story row houses with multiple apartments in them which we offer to tenant families on a voluntary basis in lieu of rent). I can tell you what hours of the day we keep, how many children and adults occupy the building on school days, how the kids behave (they live their daily lives full-out from the moment they enter in the morning until the moment they leave for the night!). I can tell you what activities are available to kids and what kinds of things you would see if you paid us a visit. You might see groups hovering over a table in a room engaged in some joint enterprise, or individuals bent over a block of wood in the wood shop or a lump of clay in the crafts room – activities which might vary as widely as slogging away in math workbooks to drawing images for the school calendar, excitedly creating costumes and dialogue for a play to be put on for the whole school, writing copy for the school newspaper on the computer or listening to someone reading out loud from a favorite storybook like At the Back of the North Wind or The Hobbit, excitedly planning a trip to a local apple orchard, creating a tiny village diorama with multi-colored modeling clays, or any one of a number of other activities perhaps chosen jointly by students and a teacher, perhaps by a single student.

After lunch, you might see a couple of three-year-olds vying for the privilege of each taking a handle of the huge aluminum cooking pot half filled with the scrapings from lunch to lug down the stairs and out through the back yard to where the chickens cluck and strut, waiting for their daily treat. You might see others scurrying up the sidewalk to the neighborhood park to play baseball or swing on the swings or to the museum in the state Mall, or scrambling into the school van for some trip they had all planned together. We are a busy, intense crowd, and time at school just flies. But how these things really work is impossible to stipulate, because every day is different from the previous one. Truly, we “make it up as we go along.” And with luck, it will always be that day, because none of us ever wants it to be any different. And when our kids finally leave us, they swing almost effortlessly into the routine of the new school they are to be attending, because they have developed the habit of looking on school as sheer pleasure and stimulation. And the new routines and nightly preparations they now have to get used to seem to bother them not a whit, because school has not jaded their appetites for learning. They come back frequently to tell us how much they are learning in their new schools!

As I said above, having started as a school, thirty years ago, we became a community learning center somewhere along the way. This happened because families who sent us their children came to realize that what we had – and were – was not just for children, but was for everyone! So, many families found houses to buy and fix up cooperatively in the same block as the school, and gradually, we found ourselves living and working more and more with each other and with (and in) the school. We have never made sharp distinctions between any of the activities engaged in by adults and children, or between the school and the rest of the community, and there have always been personal incentives for adults to move closer to the immediate environs of the school to be in a position to take part in various school and community activities.

Because none of us ever had much money, we quite quickly saw the value of creating hedges against undue drains on the little we did have. And so we set up a whole series of support structures for affordable home ownership, health, financial security, access to group support for problem-solving, further education, recreation, pregnancy support, skills learning, and, chiefest among them all, an on-going basis for developing a steadily increasing sense of personal and professional worth and expertise based on direct experience over time. This sort of result can happen only when and where there is a lifetime investment in community learning! The price is a deep commitment on the part of everyone in the community to making it happen. It’s been a great way to live, for young and old alike.