THE MINDFUL SCHOOL LEADER

ssoosay’s Simple iphone Lock Screen Mindfulness Reminders (on Flickr)

(A version of this post is currently running at Education Week, and is written by Kirsten Olson and Valerie Brown.)

The work of skillful, mindful leadership in education has never been more challenging.  Only this morning, a lively, Twitter-connected and forward-thinking superintendent wrote to one of us describing her sense that the pockets of innovation and exemplary teaching in her district,  “aren’t even scalable to our 726 square miles,”  although she has been leading this work for many years.  She is considered highly successful, yet she often feels overwhelmed and burned out.

A recent informal survey of school administrators conducted by Jerry Murphy, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (and our colleague in the exploration of self-compassion), showed that among his sample of school leaders attending a professional program on the inner work of leadership,  89% reported feeling overwhelmed, 84% neglected to take care of themselves in the midst of stress, and 80% scolded themselves when they performed less than perfectly–conditions under which few of us are primed to be our best or perform optimally.

Finally, at the most recent Educon meeting, we talked with a group of educators about the political and personal work needed to transform the educational community.  Many described the need to find external community–a group of like-minded colleagues to find courage and support (many educators are finding these communities online)–but also of the need for an internal set of  resources, to provide ballast and calm in the high seas of their chaotic professional environments–to create “permissioning,” as our friend Chad Sansing describes it.

How do we develop both? The capacity to maintain community and conviction for the work one is engaged in–particularly challenging for educators at this moment–and also the internal poise and sense of calm purpose to guide us across the rocky shoals of teaching and leading in our sector?

As mindfulness practitioners with long histories in chaotic, demanding industries, we believe developing simple, daily practices around calming, meta-reflection, pausing, and renewing are central to the work we are trying to accomplish, and vital to tapping the creativity and sense of possibility required to transform our education sector.  As leadership coaches believe our clients are already creative, resourceful, and whole, yet we know in practice, access to creativity and innate wholeness is often illusive for many of our clients.  As Westerners too, we often try to “think” our way into a sense of calm, and underestimate the power of developing daily activities, rituals, and skills that help us focus, get grounded, and center.  We have become convinced that the development of  mindfulness practice is a central piece of courageous, sustainable leadership in education–and greatly undervalued.   And we know that developing mindfulness is not easy.

FINDING MINDFULNESS

One of us (Valerie) first tried a mindfulness meditation class 18 years ago as a way to get relief from a relentless schedule as a lawyer-lobbyist.   In the meditation class the instruction was simple:  Let go of thoughts as they arise. See them like clouds floating in the sky.  “I wrestled with myself.  I tormented myself.  I tied myself up in mental knots.  This seemed so simple and yet, my mind was racing from thought to thought:  I’m sleepy. My back hurts. When is this going to be over?  On and on it went like that for two hours until the final bell rung and the meditation came to an end.  I thought to myself, What a disaster! Oh, well.  I’ll come back next week, and this time, I’ll get it right.  I have been coming back to Monday night meditation, now for almost two decades.  Over time, I have learned skillful means of extending mindfulness into my daily life.”

MINDFULNESS– -SKILLFUL MEANS FOR SCHOOL LEADERS

Mindfulness meditation, the practice of nonjudgmental awareness of what is happening inside and around us in the present moment, is innate to every person.  Mindfulness is a central element of Buddhism and is more than 2500 years old.  It was developed to enhance awareness and wisdom to help people live each day with greater ease.  Today, decades of clinical research supports the use of mindfulness practices, which have been widely adapted across disciplines.

Mindfulness goes deeper than simply generating feelings of relaxation and calm, or developing a toolbox of techniques. It is an embodied practice that creates an inner balance that allows for greater emotional stability, with clarity to act and respond with greater understanding.    Unlike apathy or indifference, mindfulness trains us to accept the moment, without judging it, without the constant running commentary, conceptual elaboration and emotional reactivity about our current condition or our current state of mind.   Awareness and acceptance are the important steps toward transformation.   Mindfulness is not about removing all thoughts (which is not possible anyway), or striving for a particular feeling of bliss.  It isn’t about mastery of the mind over body, or ‘being in a zone’, or getting rid of aspects of ourselves that we don’t like.  Instead, we train ourselves in observing and accepting without judgment sensations and emotions, even painful ones, which with practice, builds tolerance and resilience under stress.

Try this practice:  Every day, every few hours, stop and take three deep breaths through the nose, feeling the belly rise and fall.  Notice how you feel.  This builds awareness of the body and breath, and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, calming the body and mind, reducing stress.

Try this practice:  Next time you walk around the school building notice how you are walking.  Feel your shoes on the floor.  Feel your spine tall and strong, and your shoulders wide and relaxed. Allow yourself to become keenly aware of your surroundings.  This strengthens focus on the present, sharpening awareness and mental clarity.

Try this practice:  Next time you eat lunch, try just eating not reading, texting, or attending to anything else.  Notice the food.  Savor flavors. This enhances self-care and self-nurturance, and elements of self-compassion.

Try this practice:  Next conversation, practice listening.  Set aside the desire to fix, solve, correct or judge the other person.  Listen not just with your ears (to hear), but with your eyes (to see), your mind (to think), heart (to feel), and your attention (to focus).  What do you notice about yourself?  How does it feel to listen deeply?  Listening practice builds empathy and compassion, essential tools of emotionally intelligent school leaders, and promotes connectedness with others, a fundamental element of community.

As leadership coaches, we work with individuals on listening to their inner stories, learning to breathe through disequilibrium, to caretake and pause in the intense volatility and complexity of administrator’s and teacher’s jobs.  We find that by learning how to be more present, through pausing and centering, and by explicitly developing greater self-compassion, individuals are better able to deal with work that is uncertain, ambiguous and challenging.  With these practices our clients find that life offers refuge and even inspiration, and that refuge is always there for them, right inside of them.

Our mentor Parker Palmer, speaks poignantly about the need for coherence between our inner and outer worlds, between the “person we are inside,” and the external world of our work, of the desire for alignment between “soul and role.”  Mindfulness practices in education is a rapidly emerging area, with possibilities for depth of awareness, focus, clarity, concentration and understanding that can profoundly enhance teaching, learning, and leading.  School leaders who practice mindfulness serve as inspirational role models for emotional and social intelligence, uniting schools, teachers, boards, students, and parents.  Leaders with these skills bring a richness and depth to their roles.  Mindful school leaders mean more coherent and effective schools, teachers who are more focused and better supported, and students who have the skills and appetite to interact with the complex world outside the school door.  Mindfulness is for everyone.  We’re taking a deep breath right now.

Kirsten Olson, Ed.D. is Chief Listening Officer at Old Sow Coaching and Consulting, which specializes in transformational leadership services for educational organizations. She is the author of Wounded By School and founding board member of IDEA, the Institute for Democratic Education In America. Valerie Brown, J.D. is a former attorney and lobbyist, and is now president of Mindful Solutions, promoting transformation leadership services through awareness and renewal.  They are in private practice together offering leadership coaching and professional development solutions.

Listen Like A Cow

Sending listening quotes to a client this morning, I found this one from my files.  I remember how much I love it, and how it expresses that important sense of listening with all of you, with patience and love and the wisdom of the world.  Listening like a cow.

LISTEN LIKE A COW

Listen.

“Pay attention…Just be there.  Don’t be thinking about a solution, or how you should fix it.  Just listen hard and try to be present.  It’s very bad business to invite heartfelt speech and then not listen…What I’m trying to construct here is a theory of attention that depends little on therapeutic skills and formal training: listening like a cow.  Those of you who grew up in the country know that cows are good listeners…We don’t need fixing, most of us, as much as we need a warm space and a good cow.  Cows cock their big brown eyes at you and twitch their ears when you talk.  This is a great antidote to the critical listening that goes on in academia, where we listen for the mistake, the flaw in the argument.  Cows, by contrast, manage at least the appearance of deep, openhearted attention.”

-Mary Rose O’Reilley, Radical Presence: Teaching As Contemplative Practice (1998)

 

Radical Acceptance

For the past several months my life has been consumed by the Georgetown Leadership Coaching Program, in Washington, DC.  The program, which leads to certification as a leadership coach through the International Coaching Federation (ICF) is rigorous and intensive, requiring a real in-person commitment to showing up every month to whom you are as a leader, coach, and person in the world.  It also asks you to to think about how you can become more purposeful, skillful and centered in your own life. “Success” in the program means asking what you have to learn personally from the process of coaching.  In essence, the program is one long coaching session with oneself, as folks in my cohort and I have done lots of intensive introspection on the nature of our personal stories, the intensity of our personal realities, and the paradox of their self-creation–you can’t change what you don’t notice is an essential precept here–all as we are practicing live coaching.  I wonder about this as a parallel for the transformation of our teaching sector: what are the stories we tell ourselves about our work, and how can we change those stories?

As coaches, we offer our cohort a set of resources, explicitly joining our offerings to the many other coaches who have graduated from the program.  These resources join a huge pool of other leadership and human development sources.

The two resources I call out here point to critical pieces of my own coaching practice, involving helping folks work with self-acceptance and self-compassion, and also my belief in the power of communities of caring.   I offer them here as a beginning, a pool of resources to changing our stories in education.

Tara Brach, author and meditation teacher

Name of Resource:  Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, by Tara Brach (2003)

Type: Book and accompanying Audio CDs

This book, and the accompanying CDs on meditations for emotional healing, are useful for individuals who struggle the “trance of deficiency,” lack of self-acceptance, judgment and shame.  Brach, founder and senior teacher of the Insight Meditation Community in Washington, DC, wrote this book (then her first) from the standpoint of a single mother working through her own difficult journey of self-compassion and self-acceptance.  The book is down to earth, offering an initial bridge to awareness of a negative internal dialog, for individuals who have had little practice noticing their self-talk.  In each chapter Brach offers several guided meditation practices on softening to pain, learning to unclench and open to experience, pausing, and awakening the heart to compassion.

This book, and Brach’s accompanying CDs, are especially useful in understanding how to work with trauma, finding forgiveness, experiencing greater compassion, and in cultivating self-acceptance.  The practices it offers are simple and straightforward; Brach’s voice is also healing and reassuring if readers are inclined to listen to the accompanying CDs.

I personally have also experienced Brach as a meditation teacher, and she is one of the most ego-less, straightforward presences I have ever encountered.  It was instructive simply to be in her presence; her lack of it “being about me” has a powerful lesson in itself.

Each chapter in the book describes several meditation practices step by step; the CDs take the listener on meditative journeys of about 20 minutes each. This book speaks directly to the difficulty we often have dealing with strong emotions, and straightforwardly offers a pathway to working with them. Available at Amazon: Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, by Tara Brach (2003) 

Kripalu Center, Lenox, Massachusetts

Here’s another resource for renewal I can’t recommend highly enough.  I’m going to Kripalu this weekend.

Name of Resource:  Kripalu R&R Retreats at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Lenox, Massachusetts

At one of the foremost retreat centers on the East Coast, R&R Retreat-goers can plan a day-long, weekend, or four-or-five day retreat of relaxation, gentle yoga, hiking, and all-natural and delicious, healthful meals.

R&R packages are extremely flexible and relatively inexpensive: you go and pay the R&R rate and can partake in a great array of body, mind and spiritual one or two-hour programs throughout the day, or do nothing at all except enjoy the beauty of the retreat center and experience an environment where everyone is committed to self-care, relaxation and renewal.

Kripalu is non-denominational and spiritual in the broadest sense; welcoming and accepting, low-key, non-spa-like, humble and easy going.  No one dresses up, and many folks just wear yoga clothes all day long.  Physically, the retreat is a former Catholic monastery set in the Berkshire mountains, with extraordinarily beautiful mountain views, a lovely lake for swimming, and walking trails on the property.   Accommodations are modest, although a newer wing has been added that has a more hotel-like atmosphere (more expensive, obviously).

The town of Lenox, Massachusetts is also where the Tanglewood Music Festival is held every summer, and Lenox and Stockbridge are tourist-attraction towns for people who need a reason to visit this part of the world.

Kripalu R&R packages are useful for individuals who are experiencing difficulty pausing and stopping in their lives.  The flexibility and low-barrier-to-entry packages allow for great choice of how time off is spent, and simply being at Kripalu allows individuals to experience what it feels like to spend a whole day, or a whole weekend, taking care of oneself, eating well, exercising mindfully, and enjoying natural beauty in the community of others similarly inclined.  If this is not sufficiently stimulating, the Center also offers dozens of programs a month for more specific types of spiritual, physical, or mindfulness experiences.

Thousands of people visit Kripalu from all over the world every year, and yet it still maintains a sense of uncrowded responsiveness and reflection.  I, and many of my clients, have found Kripalu an important spiritual stopping place and an opportunity to reflect on important values and to reset life goals.

Online resources that explain the R&R packages are extensive.  Making arrangements via the website are exceptionally easy, and you can also talk to them on the phone at 866.200.5203.

At Kripalu, I appreciate the range of retreat options available in one place, without a sense of hurry, pressure, or commercial scale-up.  Kripalu faculty are engaged in the work of mindfulness, reflection, and more healthy living as a matter of principle, and the spirit of the place reflects this.  This is not true of all retreat centers.  This is NOT a spa.

You do not have to be a yoga master to feel comfortable here.

What are you doing to take care of yourself, educational transformer?  If you are not involved in self-care, how is this affecting your work?

Wondering…

The Future of the Dissertation: Hack the Diss

A couple of days ago a fine Harvard Graduate School of Education colleague, Zac Chase, and co-conspirators Tom Neville and Paul Tritter, put on a Hack the Diss (HtD) event in Cambridge, MA.  “Tonight is intended to provoke discussion of scholarly work’s future forms and purposes.”  

The evening juxtaposed John Dewey and Woody Guthrie in a knowledge-creation event around the first chapter of Kelly Spurgeon’s dissertation. Guitars, interpretive diss dancing, beer drinking, and the nature of the educative experience were highlights. (What is a meaningful life?” is at the heart of it, one participant concluded.) The evening proposed: a dissertation should be useful, a dissertation should reach beyond the academy–and asked the question: what is the performative nature of knowledge?

The night concluded with a panel on the future of the diss.  (Among the panelists were John Bohannon, Ph.D., David Damrosch, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Schnapp, Ph.D., who are invited to post their remarks here.  I was a panelist.)

My reflections on writing a diss, and the diss’ future, from the panel:

“The dissertation represents two extreme forms of human behavior: a hazing/belongness ritual for becoming an academic–a position I believe is increasingly thankless and ossified; and an Iron Man in the world of knowing: KNOWING as a way of being and seeking meaning in the world which–while powerful and occasionally pleasurable–has extreme limitations.

In my own personal practice at age 52, I am here to testify that knowing, in a classical Western sense, will get you only so far.

 And yet I enjoyed writing my diss, which became the basis for much of my work as an activist and a lot of the broader, more popular writing I’m engaged with, and formed the underpinnings of many of my larger projects.  My work with my diss took me out in the world in ways I never expected, and as something you’ve got to do for a fair number of years, I was passionately interested in the questions I was investigating.  I thought they were, and are, critically important.

I had fun, and I was playing, while I was doing the work, which is a high goal for me.

After completing diss, and kinda sorta beginning a somewhat conventional academic career–I found myself chafing and sweating as an academic, like a horse that pulls badly in harness.  I was a pony that could not be broken to saddle.  It became clear to me that did not want to give my life force to the support of the institution, an institution I regard as fundamentally colonizing, and at best morally neutral.  I left.

The future of the diss depends on the future of the institution of higher education.  Institutions of higher education are increasingly imperiled as knowledge certifiers and credentializers, as knowledge becomes more freely available and notions of validity are increasingly democratized and situationally-determined, as an evening like this one vividly demonstrates.  

 So my first question is: Do you really want to be an academic?

Over at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, moving in exactly the wrong direction, instead of embracing its marginality and low status in the academic pecking order, which would allow it to be inventive, playful, and counter-poised, its doctoral research products have become ever more conservative, stylized in a conventional social science direction, and unfortunately, less challenged by doctoral students desperate for jobs. 

The role of doctoral student is infantilizing and diminishing.  One leaves the pantheon of larger life–whatever that was–to enter the feudal guild of the department, where learning the conventions of the pecking order and adhering to thought-regimes of the professors upon whom one depends becomes essential, urgent, necessary. But it is a hair cut of almost supernatural force. 

Consequently, few students challenge the “real science” form of doctoral research at all.   The kinds of doctoral research projects approved now, even in the time since I have graduated from the school, have suffered from a terrible methodological narrowing:  What kind of inference can you draw from this particular research design, formulaic to the degree that it hardly matters whether you are doing qualitative or quantitative research.   

Low-status disciplines like education suffer from this narrowing and professional status insecurity most acutely. This is all ironic, of course, because where the real action is in the opening out of the form, the breaking up of the convention, the jumping over the walls of the institution and speaking out into a larger world of discontinuity, challenge, and paradigm shift.

The future of the diss, what kind of diss matters, and whether the diss itself matters, depends on your answers to some deeply personal questions. 

Does your dissertation concern questions that deeply matter to you?  That drive you, and involve the future of the work?

Or are you doing the diss to enter the academic guild, to get a job, to become a junior faculty member, to eventually get tenure so that then…in some imagined time…you will begin to express yourself?  If so, can you afford to wait?

If you love the production of ideas, and you are not tied to a lab, why do you need to be tied to the university? What kinds of social networks and platforms do you need to stimulate your ideas? With whom can you form alliances so that you might be able to do the kind of research teaching, and writing you wish to do?

 Most important, with whom do you want to communicate? And how?

Play is what most strikes me about the projects in John Bohannon’s DANCE YOUR DISSERTATION, or what I’ve seen here tonight.  Play is how we are going to shift the form. And the enormous power of play is in its triviality.

Is your future too serious?” 

What are you hacking, right now? 
 

Why Old School School?

 

“This is real school, this is actual learning.”

 

Every school has the potential for doing this.  Why old school school?

“I Am Not A Good Boy”

In this marvelous video, Paulo Freire speaks to Seymour Papert about the meaning of education, and Freire’s understanding of education–what education means for him.  “Look at how many envelopes of teaching you have deposited into me today…” the girl described by Papert might have said, notes Freire.  “I am the opposite of that, and I insist, I am the opposite of that.  I am not a good boy.  I try to be a good person, god knows, but I am not a good boy.”

The beautiful legacy of Freire, in another radical educator’s words:

“Teaching in a democracy, teaching among free people who respect and honor the autonomy of all people (including children) is about confronting knowledge in all its forms, including where the power lies in our society, why the privileged are living in privilege, why people increasingly suffer the weight of poverty, and why a free people continue to allow their leaders to say one thing while doing another.”

Paul Thomas 2011

The Shaman’s Body

photo by ronniedankelman flickr

“I believe that the individual of the future, like the individual today, faces the lonely task of transforming himself with or without the agreement and understanding of those around him.

He needs only to know transforming himself means coming up against internalized cultural edges (beliefs that are not his in origin). If this is to occur, he will have to disturb the status quo of the world around him as well.”

Arnold Mindell, The Shaman’s Body

Bowl of Wishes for American Education

Does wishing have power? Is there danger in wishing? Are some wishes more worthy than others? And what about the ancient link between suffering and desire?

Recently we had an education party at my house.  The room was filled with high school students, activists, graduate students, policy makers, academics, deans of education, teachers, writers, and administrators.  At the end of the party we asked folks to make a wish for American education.

Here are some of their wishes, from the bowl of wishes they created…

“I wish that schools will embrace the arts, creativity, and alternative models.”

“My wish is that we leave the punitive/threatening language of a Nation at Risk, NCLB behind and become a Nation Inspired by activist organizations in education.”

“I wish government will organize large-scale conferences to pull together the multiple NPOs to share objectives.”

“Compassion.”

“That students experience joy in school.”

“My wish is for better school systems all over.  There needs to be a change not just in MCAS but in all aspects.”

“I wish for a day where students can feel that their voices are heard and they have an influence. Also that all students have a mentor to support them and encourage them.”

“My wish is that every child in our country experiences the opportunity to think, problem- solve and innovate.”

“I wish that we mend the broken relationships in our communities, in our schools, and in our homes.  That we work to build relationships of care and respect between young people, their parents, and educators.”

“I wish all students would feel valued and connected in school.”

What does it unleash to wish? What does wishing clarify?

What’s your wish?

Men Can Stop Rape

My son protesting in Northampton, Massachusetts against the blaming of victims of sexual assault “because they asked for it.”  Slutwalks are a do-it-yourself way of saying, we can do what we want, wear what we want, and we aren’t asking for it.

My son inspires me.

Stomp and Holler March, October 23. Smith College

Real Education Is Human

#BLOG4IDEC, HUMAN, IDEC2012, POWERFUL, RELEVANT, TRANSFORMATIVE

This post supports Blog for IDEC 2012 week and is cross-posted at Cooperative Catalyst.

Photo by taylorgreene flickr

At an extraordinary and unusual school I visited recently, I observed a seven-year-old girl come before the school’s judicial council. The day before she had violated a cardinal rule of the school.  She had failed to look after her own safety.  She and four of her friends had ventured to a pond dock on the school grounds, where they saw a water snake.  Intrigued, they wanted to catch it.  Using a Tupperware container, string, and some duct tape, they made a trap and dipped it into the water.  The little girl, her heavy backpack still on her back, leaned too far out over the dock and fell into the water.  Some of the older, high school boys saw her fall in, rushed to the pond, and pulled her out.  The water was only waist-deep and slow moving, but in the life of the school, where children are allowed full freedom to roam the school grounds as long as they look out for their safety, no kid had ever fallen into the pond before.  The adults at the school, understandably, were beside themselves.

As I watched the judicial process unfold–the judicial counsel is run entirely by students with a carefully developed set of understandings and procedures evolved over many years–I wondered, how could holding a seven-year-old responsible for her own behavior in this way be “human,” the topic of this post?  Developmentally, aren’t seven-year-olds just a bit too young to be expected to think about these kinds of things for themselves, especially in moments of intense curiosity?  What were the implications of sanctioning this little girl more severely than her four friends, perhaps simply because her backpack made her unbalanced in ways she was unaccustomed to?

Human education is about exactly these sorts of questions. Real and important questions about individual liberty, collective responsibility and accountability–and how ironically, safety can sometimes be achieved only in a confrontation with danger.

The love and care with which the students on the judicial body, ages 8 to 17, gently questioned the little girl, was touching, beautiful and very serious.  When she entered the room (each little girl was questioned separately), she was asked to explain what happened.  She said, “I’m afraid,” and an adult she had chosen to accompany her to the meeting held her in her arms.  A fourteen-year-old girl gently queried,  “How far were you away from the edge? Can you show me on this table?” “Did you hear the older boys calling to you to be careful?” The little girl answered in calm, clear tones. “This far.  No.”  The council asked her: you know that you are going to be charged?  Yes, she said.  Do you know why?  Yes, she said.  A member of this community for a couple of years already, this child understood what was afoot, and perhaps also, why it was a very big deal.  As I watched this little girl, in a pink t-shirt with a peace sign on her tiny flat chest, I saw her grow under the gaze of this serious attention.  Charged and unforgettable, it was a moment of human beings in real consideration of the right way to hold each other and love each other, and offer each other freedom and boundaries at the same time.  And how little people can grow into themselves in such a circumstance.

Later in the day, when the whole school deliberated the recommended punishment–lack of access to the pond and a suspension–the adults in the community passionately disagreed with each other.  They debated the philosophical principles the incident represented. If a fence goes around the pond, then what?  When we tell parents that we expect their kids to be responsible in this way, and we live it, then it creates a “charge,” real and important, for us, the parent, the child. Powerful human education continued on for everyone, in all its unvarnished complexity and lack of clear answers.  Small, squirmy nine-year-old boys sat through the entire two-hour meeting voluntarily; older girls knit while the talk went on.  The whole-school meeting was ably run by a senior girl.

Without writing at length about the circumstances of this fascinating incident–and its complex and multi-hued punishment–what I saw at this extraordinary school was almost the direct opposite of what I observe in many American schools, where children are schooled down to size almost from the moment they enter.  They are–even now with our slightly-better-informed understandings of human capacity–still tracked into ability groups, labeled and sorted around learning abilities and disabilities, and denied creation of a truly accountable community, because adults are almost entirely in charge. (It is inconceivable for them not to be.)  In the conventional educational system, the places where children are allowed to show initiative and to be in charge, are all around individual attainment (get good grades, do well on the state tests), competition, and engagement in adult-sanctioned activities.  Legally and morally, students are inmates in a system that denies them access to the complexity of the question of what to do if a seven-year-old falls into the pond.  When one of our members has violated a rule, what does this mean for all of us, when we are all truly bound together?

A tiny girl becomes big, through contemplation of the seriousness of her own actions.  A community becomes more complex and interknit through passionate disagreement, not bland adherence to a set of rules.  Children are allowed genuine and near-complete adult authority, and they handle it ably and maturely.  Human education means that we will break some of the old rules because they no longer serve us.

International Democratic Education Conference, March 24-31, 2012, Caguas, Puerto Rico

How big are you willing to let kids be?  How big are you willing to let yourself be?  How many rules are you willing to break in service of a new kind of education?