It’s a very non-linear, chaotic complex process that we as historians get to study. And that’s why when we talk about the future, we should correct ourselves and say, ‘futures’ (plural) and here are the futures we have to choose from.

***It’s a short video, less than 4 minutes and it’s going to be short quips like this for me this semester. Remember to throw interesting content you find our way too. Sometimes the short thought provoking posts are the best.

And everyone wants to know what you wrote! To kick off what we hope will be a season of sharing here’s my first attempt at writing Thomas Kuhn as a Dr. Seuss styled story for kids. Let me know if you need help getting your work posted….

The Original: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Normal Science

“it [a paradigm] is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions.

To see how this can be so, we must recognize how very limited in both scope and precision a paradigm can be at the time of its first appearance. Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute. To be more successful is not, however, to be either completely successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number. The success of a paradigm—whether Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of planetary position, Lavoisier’s application of the balance or Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field—is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself…

The existence of the paradigm sets the problem to be solved; often the paradigm theory is implicated directly in the design of apparatus able to solve the problem. Without Pincipia, for example, measurements made with the Atwood machine would have meant nothing at all.

A third class of experiments and observations exhausts, I think, the fact-gathering activities of normal science. It consists of empirical work undertaken to articulate the paradigm theory, resolving some of its residual ambiguities and permitting the solution of problems to whit it had previously only drawn attention. This class proves to be the most important of all, and its description demands its subdivision. In the more mathematical sciences, some of the experiments aimed at articulation are directed to the determination of physical constraints. Newton’s work, for example, indicated that the force between two unit masses at unit distance would be the same for all types of matter at all positions in the universe. But his own problems could be solved without even estimating the size of this attraction, the universal gravitational constant; and no one else devised apparatus able to determine it for a century after the Principia appeared. Nor was Cavendish’s famous determination in the 1790’s the last. Because of its central position in physical theory, improved values of the gravitational constant have been the object of repeated efforts ever since by a number of outstanding experimentalists. Other examples of the same sort of continuing work would include determinations of the astronomical unit, Avogadro’s number, Joule’s coefficient, the electronic charge, and so on. Few of these elaborate efforts would have been conceived and none would have been carried out without a paradigm theory to define the problem and to guarantee the existence of a stable solution.”

Kuhn, Thomas S. “The Nature of Normal Science.” The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

I first attempted to infuse the text with the political through elaboration. I had no intention of using the mode of a genre shift but it all made sense after working on the elaboration. Then I had to find a third mode that could be completed in a relatively short amount of time because I nearly ran away with the People of Penelope!

Re-Write #2: Genre Shift

Once upon a time in a small faraway place there lived the People of Penelope. The men, women, and children of Penelope did all the normal things that men, women and children do like laugh and sing and work and play, but all of this was done in a very special way. These laughing and playing people of Penelope believed that walking on their hands was the only way, so they wore boots on their fingers and caps on their toes! This all came to be when Penelope first began and its people had tiny little feet. As silly as it may be, living with tiny little feet proved to be no small feat for it took 837 steps to get from the bedroom to the bathroom and walking to school could take all week.  Now the persistent people of Penelope continued to plod along but they couldn’t help but notice that they got very little else done.

Horses, cars and even St. Bernard’s couldn’t provide relief. The tiny feet didn’t fit the stirrups or reach the pedals, and the poor dog barely escaped. A few children at play one day discovered what perhaps could be a brilliant new way. They think they may have seen it on T.V. or maybe it came to them in a dream, but walking on their hands got them to school with time to play. People watched with interest and fantasized about possibly cutting the trip to the refrigerator from 795 steps on tiny little feet to 5 simple strides on great big hands. The excitement grew and people wondered what other great things they might now accomplish and if this could really work.

With this promise in mind, an engineer designed a car that one could steer with tiny little feet while working the pedals with great big hands and looking out to the road from under the dash. Traffic coordinators decided they could move traffic lights to the fire hydrants so they could be seen this way, and Penelope grew more and more productive! There were great new plans to make walking on your hands the very best way from here to there and everywhere. A few older folks, however, were most unimpressed. You see they had never walked on their hands or even stood on their heads. They didn’t think they would be able to keep up and they were certain they wouldn’t like living in the world upside-down. The local gym saw a need and started classes to instruct the people on the proper form and strategies for speed and stability while all the local posters and signs were re-designed. They even decided to hang trees where the traffic signals used to be! Slowly the world upside-down began to look like the world upside-right as though this is the way it was always meant to be.

So now in the land of Penelope people laugh while they “talk with their feet” and sing when they feel “light on their hands.” Every now and then someone will insist that a world upside-down is simply bizarre, but the people of Penelope are quick to extol how grand life became when they started doing things this way and slow to see any reason to be back on their feet.

As the American public celebrates independence through fireworks, BBQ and pool parties, the 80 teachers who studied constitutional citizenship at Madison’s Montpelier know we must keep the future as well as the past in our mind’s eye. There’s no reason to skip the fireworks but let’s consider what that particular moment in time reveals to us about our present and our future. If America is an idea rather than a place, it’s essential that we share our ideas about what America is or could be.

It’s that mission that led to our last assignment for our afternoon discussion. We focused on our work as teachers and the role of citizens and elected representatives as constitutional officers, and Jim LeCain shared a quote he thought defined our mission:

Teach the [Constitution's] principles, teach them to your children, speak of them when sitting in your home, speak of them when walking by the way, when lying down and when rising up, write them upon the doorplate of your home and upon your gates.

–John Quincy Adams on the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution

–Quoted by Chief Justice Warren Burger at the 200th anniversary celebration

The quote resonates with the power of the words in Deuteronomy beginning with 6:5:

Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. ⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ⁹ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

And Will couldn’t stop there. If you didn’t hear the cadence of the words in Deuteronomy when you read the quote, you might have remembered a folk anthem instead. Remember these lyrics from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Teach Your Children”…

You, who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by.
And so, become yourself
Because the past
Is just a goodbye.

Teach, your children well
Their father’s hell
Did slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s
The one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would die
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.

With such an important task at hand, what do you SEE when you say AMERICA?

In all the branches of knowledge and in every kind of craft the end in view is some good. In the most sovereign of these, the capacity for [leadership in] political matters, the end in view is the greatest good and the good which is most to be pursued. The good in the sphere of politics is justice; and justice consists in what tends to promote the common interest” (112).

The course of the National Academy then pursued a series of questions for the sake of political knowledge.

From Aristotle, How do you know?

From Cicero, How do you see?

From Hobbes, How do you make?

From Deuteronomy, how do you judge?

And here’s a big question for National Academy alumni… how are you using these questions or these texts to promote an inquiry of political knowledge in your classroom?

A Federal Teacher shared his Path to Description with us in February. He provoked his students  to better examine what they know by describing what something is as well as what it is not. It took a year after the Academy but Hobbes21 unpacked the National Academy’s boxes to share them with his students. The Constitution became a protagonist in the story of We the People as Hobbes21 wove together the We the People text and his National Academy notes. His three part series, My Serial of Boxes, chronicles his concerns as he plunged into the depths of political philosophy in his Montessori classroom and the brilliant achievements of his students as they worked together to make order of this brave new world. You’ll want to check out the fantastic photos in the final post too!

Politicolor is a place to share your success and talk through your concerns. The healthcare debate still struggles to emerge from a summer of what believe was politics at its worst. As teachers and National Academy alumni we have the ability to share the story of politics at its best… how people organize themselves to achieve the good life.

If you have topics you’d like to discuss here… drop a line in the comments. We can also get you set up to write a post of your own.

The past, present and future take leading roles in his remarks about the shared enterprise that requires the work of the people as well as the work of the government. Whatever you think about the policies addressed in his speech, consider the constitutional nature of how he approaches them. This is 37 minutes of must-see video for constitutional citizens:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Full text of Obama’s speech)

A few words from my fourth-graders (non-speakers) when asked today by the panel what they had learned from the experience: “I learned what private domain is.”  “Compromise.”  “Better research skills.”  “How a bill becomes a law.”  “How long it takes to pass a bill.”  “A lot about pollution and landfills.”

In our first few sessions, my 4th-6th grade students narrowed their choices for the project to these rough ideas: Save Bears, Clean-Up Michigan’s Rivers, Fix the Litter in Detroit.  The more we delved into the text, students discovered that those topics really weren’t clear proposals for public policy.  They also gained a ton of knowledge regarding sovereignty, as well as private sphere/civil society/ government.  The more they learned, the more focused their idea became, and their eventual choice–EXPAND MICHIGAN’S BOTTLE LAW–ended up as a wonderful combination of the early favorites.

The four areas of the portfolio–PROBLEM, ALTERNATIVE POLICIES, OUR SOLUTION, and ACTION PLAN–serve as a fantastic outline for anyone of any age attempting to bring about change.

The panel presentation in a committee room at the state capitol was the pinnacle of the experience.  Having misjudged time, our project came down to the wire (lesson learned: start early!); as a result, the kids didn’t first benefit and learn from a local session.  However, they could not have done any better than what I witnessed today.  Thorough preparation pays dividends, and I was so proud of my students for presenting without reading from a page.  (It does make a difference, I can tell you, as we were able to observe a high school group who did just that.)

We will be participating in Project Citizen next year, and in the years after!  Sincerely, the entire process has been one of the most valuable of my entire teaching career.

If you have any questions about Project Citizen, right down to the tooth ‘n’ nails, feel free to contact me at montessorinorth@comcast.net, or pose your questions here.

Most know me as a U2 fan and it’s Bono’s words that provoked this post. Brian Williams from NBC’s Nightly News interviewed Bono after rehearsals Saturday night. Bono was overheard to say it felt like the band had somehow trespassed on the American dream. His emotional understanding of the moment guided Bono’s responses to Brian’s questions.

I’m going to save his answer just long enough to set the stage…

Aerial views of the thousands of people crowding the mall brought back personal memories for some and a sense of living history for others. We’ve seen crowds on the mall like this before. Is it one of our most public spaces? U2 performed two songs. Where they started is where many worried our march for civil rights had ended. They sang “Pride (In the Name of Love),” their tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King.

The song begins…

One man come in the name of love
One man come and go
One come he to justify
One man to overthrow…

The conclusion makes the song  personal…

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

In the name of love
What more in the name of love…

If time hadn’t already found itself in a crazy loop with MLK’s pride and passion present again on those famous steps, Obama then took center stage. His speech spoke to this moment while heeding the voices of moments past. This moment, with the past and future present at once, is where Bono’s remarks found their fuel.We now we return to Brian Williams and Bono.

Brian asks Bono what it means to the band to be a part of the inaugural celebration. Bono expresses his hope that it internationalizes it somehow adding, with a friendly jab to the ribs, “You might own the country but you don’t own the idea.”

Bono imagines people around the globe watching the ceremony on Tuesday and adds:

When this man swears in on Lincoln’s Bible, he proves that America exists. It’s an astonishing thing because in a way people had ruled out Amerca. They counted you out. They think… oh yeah, America is just for America. It strangely changes everything.

And with that assertion, that this moment on Tuesday provides proof that America exists, I thought of the question of who we are or, as Matthew added, who we is.  The words we use this week and the moments we create resonate with answers to these questions. Do some words carry the weight of our past while others herald the promise of our future? Are those the same words or are they different? Are some words and moments more substantive than others? What makes the difference?

I think that’s what bothers me most about the concept.  There’s an easy patriotism that is strongly anti-federalist.  Longing for the “good old days” is such a cop-out that one might as well phone in his citizenship.  And what can one tell of any so-called patriot who wears a flag pin in her lapel or attends a parade?  These “sunshine patriots” might throw on the guise of love of country without any work; their “show” of loyalty might be nothing more than that!

What do you do with your students to take definitions beyond their face value?  Are there activities other than discussion being used out there?  Does your school require community service?  If so, what’s your take on that?

I do a lot of work with propaganda in my class.  I firmly believe that students need an understanding of manipulation in order to navigate some pretty trecherous waters.  Today’s kids own a lot of savvy that we admire (when it comes to tech for instance); however, some argue that they can be more helpless than previous generations, especially when it comes to communication.  Whether that’s true or not, literature, writing, and social studies serve a powerful role in helping kids to decode their social environment.

What sort of levers, pulleys, and inclined planes do you show your students?  What will be in their toolbox once they leave your class?  Of what process are you proud to instill in your kids?

These were questions raised at a recent workshop at James Madison’s Montpelier http://www.montpelier.org/  .  On display in the lobby of one of the buildings, there is a bust of “Jemmy” more than a bit out of proportion to his actual (slight) dimensions.  However, artists sometimes exaggerate in order to make a statement;  clearly, this sculptor saw JM as a hero.

Hero can be an elusive term, as evidenced by the many opinions the discussion produced.  Is George Washington a hero?  Malcolm X?

Joseph Campbell http://www.jcf.org/new/index.php , long considered one of the world’s leading experts on mythology, describes the hero as “the man of self-achieved submission”.  I offer deep text from his book The Hero with a Thouand Faces:

But submission to what?  That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved.  As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements.  Only birth can conquer death–the birth, not of an old thing, but of something new.  Within the soul, within the body social, there must be–if we are to experience long survival–a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.  For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue.  Peace is then a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare.  When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified–and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn (16-17).

What does this statement say about heroes?  How is it federalist or anti-federalist?  Who do you consider a hero, and does this passage align with your notions?  Do your considerations include Campbell’s “self-achieved submission”?  Are there differences between this view and the essence of a hero who is American?  Was the sculptor, attempting to convey heroism through physical properties, right about James Madison?  If so, what were some of his heroic acts?

Religious groups, community organizations, and even some families may earnestly assert a covenant they’ve made and hold above that of our covenant as one American people. Does this suggest we aren’t one American people?

Whether it’s studying Aristotle or Federalist No. 2, there’s always someone who isn’t buying it. Are we really one people? Were we ever one people? Do we have any shared ideas about the common good Perhaps this is all “theoretical fun.”

According to Federalist No. 2, we are one…

“…united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence.”

It’s a pleasant thought but it’s no more true now than it was then. Federalist No. 14 adds that we consecrate our union with, “the mingled blood” shed in defense of sacred rights.

It’s hard to imagine this pride in standing together, fighting together, and sometimes dying together doesn’t speak to some idea of a shared past and shared destiny. It’s still fair, however, to ask if that’s enough.

A passage from Sanford Levinson’s Constitutional Faith offers an alternative…

“Indeed, one reason for the emphasis on reverence for the Constitution, whether articulated by Lincoln or by present-day figures, is the realization that there may be no other basis for uniting a nation of so many disparate groups. The Constitutuion thus becomes the only principle of order, for there is no otherwise shared moral or social vision that might bind togehter a nation.”

It’s the Constitution then that carves out and defines the American polity. It’s a statement of our shared vision we recur to throughout time. While the American people grow more and more diverse, the Constitution represents a fixed star to shape our discussions and influence our decisions.

In some ways it’s timeless as it presents our past understanding to our current circumstances and demands we interpret those commitments for our future well-being. In other respects the Constitution is a testimony to the time we’ve invested through events like the Civil War or the trail of case law protecting the minority groups from the majority. It communicates who we once were, who we are, and who we’re committed to becoming in the future.

If we return to John Jay’s Federalist No. 2, it’s through the Constitution that we have a shared language and mutual understanding of the principles of government. We have the same civic heritage with established manners and customs. Indeed these commitments are often referred to as our civic religion.

Does this then render us as one American people?