Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, finished her eloquent plea for education reform. She turned to the Dalai Lama and said, “How do we build the public will for addressing the needs of children in poverty?”
The Dalai Lama, Nobel Prize winner and exiled political and religious leader of Tibet, shrugged a painful shrug. “I don’t know.” He paused a moment and said again, “I really don’t know.” It was a poignant moment.
Educators from Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pittsburgh and other prestigious institutions were making it clear that new research in neuroscience and child development were proving what had long been suspected: children raised in poverty, surrounded by fear and violence, denied access to essential health care and adequate educational opportunity have little chance of succeeding in school. It’s a dangerous downward spiral.
The scientists and educators at the global education conference in Washington, D.C. were frustrated at the difficulty of turning solid new scientific understanding into policy.
McCartney asked that policy makers and educators embrace the new scientific understanding of child development and human nature. Children are not born evil to be redeemed only through discipline and obedience as James Dobson and others on the Right believe. Children learn to trust themselves and the world through caring and nurturance. That trust is essential to a child’s educational achievement.
Policy lags far behind science, in part because of recent right-wing efforts to twist science to serve ideology. This is true when it comes to the global climate crisis. The teaching of evolution is opposed because it doesn’t seem to fit particular religious doctrine. In our approach to poverty, we somehow believe that incarcerating those punished by poverty will solve poverty.
As a senior fellow at cognitive scientist George Lakoff’s Berkeley think tank, I once joked that a tour of the galaxy might show that a planetary civilization’s survival depended upon a planet’s people reaching a true understanding of the brain and human nature before they achieved the technological ability to destroy themselves. I’m no longer sure it’s a joke.
The funny thing is, the new understanding of human nature is not news to most folks. It confirms what they’ve known in their hearts all their lives. So why isn’t that knowledge reflected in our politics and policy? Did the question really stump the Dalai Lama? Well, no. He spends plenty of time explaining practices that promote freedom, help us recognize our interdependence and strengthen individual and collective will. But there are some specifics about American politics that might also help.
Our contemporary politic practices carry with them a deep bias in favor of the status quo. Successful issue and candidate campaigns need big money, and big money contributors earn their money off of yesterday’s policy and politics. I could go on and on, but just look at the debate over health care reform. Our neighbors are ill and dying because of an insanely inefficient and ineffective private insurance-based health care system, and we’re arguing over whether the system is more valuable somehow than our lives. Change is hard.
The alienation of Americans from their political system also must be addressed. There are those who actively seek to suppress political participation. There are citizens so overwhelmed by their effort to survive that political engagement is something they don’t have time for. Both of these problems are real. Why don’t we have a national election day holiday and same-day voter registration? Because people in power are afraid of what will happen to their power if everyone votes. People working three jobs while trying to raise a family look on politics as something their bosses do. We need to empower them.
American poet Charles Olson once wrote that what does not change is the will to change. I think that’s true of life. But it’s a truth not reflected well in today’s politics. The first step in summoning the will to attack our problems before it’s too late is to understand that solutions are at hand, that it is simply a matter of will. We can do it. We just have to believe that we can.
When someone says that poverty is a problem without a solution or that humans didn’t cause and can’t fix global warming, they aren’t really trying to win a logical argument. They are trying to demoralize us, trying to persuade us not to act. To win that argument, all we have to do is act.
