Obituary

Donovan R. Walling, born January 9, 1948, in Kansas City, Missouri, died May 5, 2017. He was the son of Donovan Ernest and Dorothy (nee Goyette) Walling. A lifelong educator, Walling taught school in Wisconsin and Germany, was a curriculum administrator in Wisconsin and Indiana, and served as director of publications for the education association Phi Delta Kappa, retiring in 2006. He continued to work as a writer and editorial consultant in retirement, and was a senior consultant for the Center for Civic Education. Walling was the author or editor of numerous books in education and also wrote fiction and poetry. He was preceded in death by his wife Diana (nee Eveland) in 1991. He is survived by his husband Sam Troxal; his children, Katherine, Donovan David, and Alexander; and several grandchildren.

In light of Donovan’s lifelong commitment to education, his family requests memorial contributions be made to the Walling-Troxal Endowed Scholarship Fund at First United Church. A celebration of his life will be held Saturday, June 16 at 7pm at First United Church, 2420 E Third Street in Bloomington, Indiana.

Democracy and Education in an Election Year

This is an election year, a crucial one for public education. Republican control of Congress and in many state legislatures has advanced a longstanding assault on democracy, only partially enacted—though devastatingly for our nation’s young people—through a comprehensive war on the public schools. The war began in the Reagan era of the 1980s and despite intervening Democratic administrations has continued largely without significant interruption to the present. The objectives of this war are privatization and corporatization of education, objectives that have nothing to do with the common good.

In their weakened state, in classrooms underfunded and overburdened, in an era when testing is valued more than teaching, the public schools will be hard pressed to teach children, and perhaps through them, their parents, about the electoral processes that are fundamental to life in a free society. Perhaps it is the pessimist in me, but I fear that teaching about American democracy may become history instead of current events unless public school educators take up this challenge. And the rest of us must support them, especially at the ballot box.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a revolutionary period in American history that saw major cultural strides in civil rights and public education. Those strides did not come easily, and the backlash was deadly. We remember the martyrs: John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and many more. President Lyndon Johnson persevered, however, and oversaw two vital pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Both have been attacked over the decades, most vigorously in recent years. 

The Bush era No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law was a reauthorization of ESEA that perverted many of the positive intentions of the original act and promulgated the current era of test mania that is damaging learning for all children and undermining American democracy. The latest reauthorization, Obama's Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), offers little improvement over NCLB, because it is a watered-down piece of legislation passed by a largely do-nothing Republican Congress.

It is clear that the United States desperately needs a new revolution to move forward a progressive agenda on education and civil rights to counter decades of regression on these issues. Free and fair public education, the only sure guarantor of American democracy, is not a topic that springs to the lips of most candidates, whether at the presidential level or lesser offices, and that is unfortunate. But it is an issue embedded in the very ground of all of today’s candidates’ positions. The choice is clear: a hoped for return to social and cultural progress, a movement we envisioned sixty years ago and only partially realized, or a continuation of the current path toward final destruction of the American experiment in democracy.

It is possible that a populist revolution is brewing in this election year. As a child of the Sixties I can only hope that is the case. It will take nothing less to reclaim America for us, its people, and to save American democracy from the destructive corporatist forces led by the monied elites, who form a burgeoning and unwelcome aristocracy in this land of, admittedly fraught, equality.

Postscript: This is my final post on this blog. Many others write on similar topics with eloquence, and I have decided that I must devote my efforts to other matters at this point in my life. Readers may be interested in two other blogs that I will continue to write: Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com/) and Living With...A Cancer Journal (http://livingwithcancerjournal.blogspot.com/). During the writing of this blog I have appreciated the support and comments from readers both in the United States and abroad. For this I am truly grateful.

Citizen New Year's Resolutions

It’s a new year and so it seems to be a good time to make some resolutions with regard to education and a citizen’s responsibilities. In a free society parents with children in school are not the only stakeholders in education. Every citizen is a participant—and must be an active participant—in ensuring that our future citizens receive an education that empowers them to maintain our democratic way of life. Thomas Jefferson said as much in several ways, notably, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

To this end I would propose five citizen resolutions for education in 2016. As citizens we should resolve:

To uphold and advance our national commitment to effective, freely and fairly available public education. The public schools remain the best safeguard of democracy, and efforts to undermine public education, such as underfunding public schools and shunting public money into private education and corporate endeavors, must be viewed fundamentally as attacks on American democracy.

To ensure that all children, adolescents, and young adults are provided with educative experiences that enlarge their knowledge and understanding in ways that resonate both with the needs of our free society and with their individual interests, talents, and abilities. Narrowly defined, overly prescribed curricula inhibit personal development and should be anathema to free public education that is not solely in service to the state but, rather, is conceived to accommodate diversity in all dimensions as befits a fully developed nation.

To advocate for and work toward true safety for the nation’s young people, which means addressing safety issues across many dimensions, such as working for effective gun control to reverse the gun violence that has plagued the United States in recent years and working to establish and maintain learning spaces in which students are safe from prejudicial mistreatment and bullying related to racism, homophobia, or other detrimental conditions.

To strive through active engagement in democratic processes to ensure that elected officials at every level of government understand the importance of effective public education and work to craft laws and policies that commit resources, both real and philosophical, to the advancement of the public schools. Concomitant in this work must be real commitment by our elected officials to listen to the public they represent and to strive to act in a manner consistent with the public’s desires.

Finally, to work toward more appropriate use of standardized and other forms of testing, uses that truly contribute to the improvement of education. Mindless, mandated, mass testing, which has become rampant, is a misuse of instructional time and diminishes the educative experience. Moreover, the misuse of test results unfairly characterizes students, educators, families, neighborhoods, and communities and is a state-sponsored means to sort and select that often disadvantages the already disadvantaged, such as racial minorities and the poor.

None of these resolutions will be easy to keep or easy to accomplish. But the effort to enact these resolutions is worth making.

Not All Politicians Are Elected

It may seem as though I am painting all politicians with a broad stroke, and indeed I am, with some justification. Public education is under attack, as it has been arguably since the 1980s. Rightwing politics is the politics of privatization and corporatization; and that ethos has dominated across elected governing bodies, from local school boards to state legislatures to the halls of Congress, for forty years. So-called local control has not ensured that public schools operate for the common good because local governance, even when a community’s elected officials are centrist or liberal in orientation, often is overwhelmed by regulations laid down at higher levels and mired in the multilayered bureaucracy by which they are enacted.

Local school bureaucracies are as much to blame for the woes of public education as is the distant machinery of state and federal entities. Superintendents and lower-rank administrators often rise in the profession because they are politically savvy, rather than because they are knowledgeable about education or committed to public schools that truly serve their local community. The common law phrase “in loco parentis” has been applied to teachers, in particular, and other persons or organizations who function “in the place of a parent.” I suppose the phrase “in locum a legislatore” might equally apply to a superintendent or other bureaucratic functionary who serves “in the place of a legislator.” I have written previously that school leaders need to stop viewing themselves as vassals of the state and instead reclaim their intended role as servants of their local community.

Parents and teachers are justifiably frustrated when they see firsthand the demise of learning and the destruction of potential among their children and students because local leaders, instead of listening to and acting on community concerns, are marching to the faceless corporate cadence of distant masters. For example, testing instead of teaching is a counterproductive strategy if real learning is the goal. But that’s a big “if.” Learning for too many politicians is not the goal at all; control is. And money pays for control. Public education is expensive, and more and more public money is being funneled into private enterprises where a significant portion is used to line politicians’ pockets to keep them voting “right,” which is invariably counter to the common good.

The simple solution—though one that is hard to attain—is to vote out those politicians at every level who act contrary to public will and the common good. But that’s not really enough. Local communities also need to root out bureaucrats who work “in locum a legislatore” and by so doing fail to serve the public that employs them.

World at War

As I write this on November 13, 2015, the city of Paris is under siege. Several coordinated terrorist attacks—at a stadium, at a restaurant, at a concert hall, and elsewhere—have taken place, and the death toll is mounting. This unfolding tragedy is further evidence, following the recent downing of a Russian airliner, suicide attacks across the Middle East, and other incidents small and large stretching back across years and locales, that we are a world at war. For most Americans, and much of the rest of the world, this new and very different war began with the attacks of 9/11 in the United States.

President George W. Bush on September 20, 2001, used for the first time the phrase, “war on terror.” He could just as well have declared war on abstraction. Terror is a conceptual strategy. It is, as every affected country has found, which includes a large and growing number of countries, notoriously difficult render concrete or specific. Who are the terrorists? Where are they? What end do they seek? It is impossible to attack an abstraction in the manner that wars have traditionally been fought.

The Bush administration and its allies did not fully understand this new concept of war and so pursued a substitute war, a war that could be fought on more or less traditional terms against a substitute enemy, one that turned out to be largely unconnected to the events that sparked America’s bloodlust. Many scholars believe that this action increased the likelihood of future terrorist attacks.

Moreover, on the domestic front these dual wars against abstract and concrete (if mistaken) enemies provided the impetus—excuse?—for limiting and in some cases overriding civil liberties. This is not an unusual consequence of war. However, it is a troubling one, especially as there is no end to the war on terror in sight. The national security versus civil liberties debate has paralleled the war on terror; neither has yet been resolved. Nor is resolution of this debate in sight.

This moment in history seems to be opportune to affirm, once again, the need to educate our citizenry about the nature of democracy, particularly when democracy itself is under fire. In the years since 9/11 the United States has experienced far more threats from domestic terrorists than from foreign terrorists, which conservatives, in particular though not exclusively, have consistently failed to acknowledge or to deal with in any manner other than to institutionalize restrictions on certain civil liberties, while ignoring pro-terrorism factors such as lax gun control. It is not within the scope of public education to school the general populace, but it is a specific responsibility to educate our future adults who will—or will not—defend and extend our democratic way of life.

Deborah Meier, writing some years ago in “Democracy at Risk,”* suggested that such education ought not to consist merely of more civic education classes. Rather, education in democracy should be a pervasive theme in our schools, one that is actively pursued across the educative experience. This will require, Meier avers, designing “all our courses to focus on the habits of mind that we think are most central to an informed and intelligent democratic citizenry, whether it’s math, history, literature, science, or the rules that govern us in our hallways.”

The Paris battles of this ongoing “war on terrorism” should move us to ponder anew the future of our democracy. As President Obama, responding to the situation in Paris, reminded the nation, “This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.

Meier, in her article, wrote of the need for more pervasive civic education: “Democracy is embedded in the work of living in a socially shared space, and it becomes a habit as we go back and forth between living it and studying it, over and over, and then passing on our accumulated wisdom to the young.” The assault on Paris is a piquant reminder that we need to work harder to make democracy a habit.

*Meier, D. (2009). “Democracy at Risk.” Educational Leadership 66(8): 45-49.