In the last post, I was trying to make a case for the power of paradigms in shaping our world views, and how they might change and morph over time. When you are trying to design and execute transformation, and particularly when your goal is the cultivation of the ability to self-transform, then there are some paradigms that are more dynamic than others. What I want to explore in this post is what some of those effective paradigms might be, and which ones might not be as effective.
But first, remember what President Obama said in the last post, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He then went on to say, "I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone." Obama is really picking up on one portion of the idea of American exceptionalism (see last blog post for a fuller explanation) that goes back to, among other people, Abraham Lincoln.
Probably the most eloquent and powerful exegesis of this part of the American mission in world history was Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In it, Lincoln offered that America existed in world history for one major reason-- the nation had been "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln understood-- like few other people-- the continual paradoxical tension of a country devoted to both liberty and equality, but also thought that it was the American mission to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from this earth." In other words, can a country exist as an ever-increasing democratic republic consisting of a common civic culture amongst free and equal citizens? That is a vital part of the American experiment.
In this theory, America is held together not by ancestry or geography but by ideas and shared beliefs that form a common civic culture. Lincoln remains the only President to ever pass a federal law, on July 4th 1864, encouraging immigration. While Lincoln's motive was avowedly to bring a much needed labor force to a country embroiled in a Civil War, he had long believed that the the "electric cord" of the Declaration of Independence could link people from throughout the world. Therefore, in theory, anyone can become an American, or even a hyphenated American, if they subscribe to those ideals. In my own case, after Cromwell sent my ancestors packing out of Scotland in 1650, I have a choice to be American--or even Scottish-American, if I want. But my son who lives in Scotland could never become American-Scottish because the concept doesn't exist. So it is with all immigrants to America--except it isn't.
There is, I think, one other reason that America exists in world history and it too defines what the country's legacy will be. America's greatness, I think, will be something decided in the future--not in the past and not in the present. As we noted, the first reason for America's experiment in actually applying the political tenets put forth in the Declaration of Independence. But the other half of the American experiment is the ongoing fight to see if people from every nation, every race, every religion, every ethnicity, etc. can actually live together in a single commonwealth. Part of what I have loved about exploring the significance of New York City for the past two decades has been exactly that E.B. White wrote about in his iconic essay Here is New York in 1948, "The collision and intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry." And New York's un official poet laureate, Walt Whitman, saw New York symbolizing this same tension when he wrote in Specimen Days late in his life in 1882, “New York gives the directest proof yet of…the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate.” New York City has been to the United States what America has been to the rest of the world, the great experiment in multicultural re-creation. It is, I would venture, the most important work that Americans will ever do. But the paradigms we choose to be the foundation of this work will be vital to its full success.
For the past fifty years or so independent schools have been consciously becoming more heterogeneous. Most of those schools have been using a diversity model that tries to admit students that will be racially, ethnically, religiously, geographically, and economically different from one another. The commitment often takes the form of "celebrating diversity" through various affirmations of different people's cultures and differences.
But “celebrating diversity” is really only a step along the way to trying to inculcate a truly multi-cultural attitude. The difference between the two—a diversity model and a multi-cultural attitude—is significant. Diversity is a static concept that is actually just the description of a condition that exists to a greater or lesser extent. The schools I have worked at have had varying degrees of diversity and various commitments to increasing it. This commitment to diversity should not be an end in itself, however; it is only a foundation from which real learning can occur.
If diversity is like a noun, multiculturalism is like a verb. It is dynamic, not static. Multiculturalism depends on being willing to use higher order critical thinking skills—ferreting out premises and assumptions, imagining implications and monitoring inferences—in examining one’s own worldview as well as the worldview of people who are different than you are. In a multicultural world it is not enough to teach tolerance or respect (as valuable those attitudes are), you are called upon to use empathy as a critical thinking technique to try and enter someone else’s understanding.
But first, remember what President Obama said in the last post, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He then went on to say, "I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone." Obama is really picking up on one portion of the idea of American exceptionalism (see last blog post for a fuller explanation) that goes back to, among other people, Abraham Lincoln.
Probably the most eloquent and powerful exegesis of this part of the American mission in world history was Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In it, Lincoln offered that America existed in world history for one major reason-- the nation had been "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln understood-- like few other people-- the continual paradoxical tension of a country devoted to both liberty and equality, but also thought that it was the American mission to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from this earth." In other words, can a country exist as an ever-increasing democratic republic consisting of a common civic culture amongst free and equal citizens? That is a vital part of the American experiment.
In this theory, America is held together not by ancestry or geography but by ideas and shared beliefs that form a common civic culture. Lincoln remains the only President to ever pass a federal law, on July 4th 1864, encouraging immigration. While Lincoln's motive was avowedly to bring a much needed labor force to a country embroiled in a Civil War, he had long believed that the the "electric cord" of the Declaration of Independence could link people from throughout the world. Therefore, in theory, anyone can become an American, or even a hyphenated American, if they subscribe to those ideals. In my own case, after Cromwell sent my ancestors packing out of Scotland in 1650, I have a choice to be American--or even Scottish-American, if I want. But my son who lives in Scotland could never become American-Scottish because the concept doesn't exist. So it is with all immigrants to America--except it isn't.
There is, I think, one other reason that America exists in world history and it too defines what the country's legacy will be. America's greatness, I think, will be something decided in the future--not in the past and not in the present. As we noted, the first reason for America's experiment in actually applying the political tenets put forth in the Declaration of Independence. But the other half of the American experiment is the ongoing fight to see if people from every nation, every race, every religion, every ethnicity, etc. can actually live together in a single commonwealth. Part of what I have loved about exploring the significance of New York City for the past two decades has been exactly that E.B. White wrote about in his iconic essay Here is New York in 1948, "The collision and intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry." And New York's un official poet laureate, Walt Whitman, saw New York symbolizing this same tension when he wrote in Specimen Days late in his life in 1882, “New York gives the directest proof yet of…the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate.” New York City has been to the United States what America has been to the rest of the world, the great experiment in multicultural re-creation. It is, I would venture, the most important work that Americans will ever do. But the paradigms we choose to be the foundation of this work will be vital to its full success.
For the past fifty years or so independent schools have been consciously becoming more heterogeneous. Most of those schools have been using a diversity model that tries to admit students that will be racially, ethnically, religiously, geographically, and economically different from one another. The commitment often takes the form of "celebrating diversity" through various affirmations of different people's cultures and differences.
But “celebrating diversity” is really only a step along the way to trying to inculcate a truly multi-cultural attitude. The difference between the two—a diversity model and a multi-cultural attitude—is significant. Diversity is a static concept that is actually just the description of a condition that exists to a greater or lesser extent. The schools I have worked at have had varying degrees of diversity and various commitments to increasing it. This commitment to diversity should not be an end in itself, however; it is only a foundation from which real learning can occur.
If diversity is like a noun, multiculturalism is like a verb. It is dynamic, not static. Multiculturalism depends on being willing to use higher order critical thinking skills—ferreting out premises and assumptions, imagining implications and monitoring inferences—in examining one’s own worldview as well as the worldview of people who are different than you are. In a multicultural world it is not enough to teach tolerance or respect (as valuable those attitudes are), you are called upon to use empathy as a critical thinking technique to try and enter someone else’s understanding.
In a way, adopting this attitude is like going to a foreign country not as a tourist, but as a traveler who is willing to go native. But this is precisely what the historian does when she visits the past. To teach people to be historians is to give them the skills to empathically understand the psycho-emotional world of someone not like them. In that sense, visiting the past and visiting a foreign country are very much the same. To be a good historian is to be a good traveler.
I remember one class in particular where I learned an enormous amount about how to try to use diversity as the jumping off point rather than the end game. In this particular United States History class eight of the students were from foreign countries (Turkey, Serbia, Korea, Taiwan, China, Thailand) another five were first generation immigrants (a combination of the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Israel, Puerto Rico, Germany, Rwanda, Montserrat) leaving only three students whose families have been in America for more than a generation. It was the perfect crucible to be testing the inculcation of multiculturalism through the study of United States history.
One of our projects, for example, was to explore the conception of freedom as it has existed in different eras in American history. We used the techniques of the historian to explore “relics” from the 1770’s (the American Declaration of Independence and the pamphlet Common Sense) and the 1960’s (the “I Have a Dream” speech and the film Easy Rider) to see what we could discover about how Americans view freedom at different times in their history. But then we each picked two “relics” that inform our own personal conceptions of freedom. And while the three more "Americanized" students picked things that most of us would recognize, some of the other students were exploring their understandings of the writings of Ataturk, the Rwandan genocide and the "red shirt" protests in Bangkok.
What was learned was that each of us constructs our world differently and that we can use critical thinking skills to come to understand those constructions. We discovered what every historian already knows—that there are no such thing as facts, there are only inferences based on relics. And while creating a window into the American world of the 1770’s and the 1960’s, we also created a window into how other people from around the globe understand the concept of freedom. At that point, we turned that window into a mirror and used those same critical thinking skills to see our own premises through new lenses. We were using diversity as a base to really explore the multicultural views that existed in the room. This was not easy or comforting work necessarily. Celebrating diversity can mean holding hands in a circle singing “Kumbaya.” But practicing multiculturalism is more like attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with people who have decided to stop kidding themselves. We experienced some “expectation failure” where the mental models we had been using to explain our world to ourselves began to fail us. For the American students many of those models involved seeing that the American conception of freedom might not be so easily exported as many of our past statesmen have desired. For the majority of the class--the international students--it was a chance to see where the American conception of freedom had come from and how it had changed over time, and think about how (or whether) they wanted to engage with those ideas.
What was learned was that each of us constructs our world differently and that we can use critical thinking skills to come to understand those constructions. We discovered what every historian already knows—that there are no such thing as facts, there are only inferences based on relics. And while creating a window into the American world of the 1770’s and the 1960’s, we also created a window into how other people from around the globe understand the concept of freedom. At that point, we turned that window into a mirror and used those same critical thinking skills to see our own premises through new lenses. We were using diversity as a base to really explore the multicultural views that existed in the room. This was not easy or comforting work necessarily. Celebrating diversity can mean holding hands in a circle singing “Kumbaya.” But practicing multiculturalism is more like attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with people who have decided to stop kidding themselves. We experienced some “expectation failure” where the mental models we had been using to explain our world to ourselves began to fail us. For the American students many of those models involved seeing that the American conception of freedom might not be so easily exported as many of our past statesmen have desired. For the majority of the class--the international students--it was a chance to see where the American conception of freedom had come from and how it had changed over time, and think about how (or whether) they wanted to engage with those ideas.
In my career, independent schools have gone from creating positions for Diversity Coordinators to Deans of Multiculturalism to Directors of Equity and Inclusion. There are schools that are talking about adding the concept of "Justice" to that equation which would add yet another dimension. I know there is much talk all over the world about the failure of multiculturalism in America, and even more so in Europe. Angela Merkel declared it a failed concept as far back as 2010. But note that what she says is that the "multicultural concept" has failed. I wonder if what has happened is that we have made multiculturalism a noun, when it must always be a verb or lose its dynamism.
Different schools seem to be in different places in terms of trying to figure out which paradigm they want to have be most prominent at a given time. I can see virtues, obviously, in all of them but I guess my experience tells me that I want to make sure we keep the transformational power of multicultural engagement as a process--with all the critical thinking (especially the ability to question assumptions), the use of texts as "windows and mirrors," the destruction and alteration of mental models, the practice of empathy and self-implication, the mastery of dialogue instead of debate or discussion as means of discourse, and the individual, personal engagement--as something that isn't lost. The ability to affect one's own self-transformation seems to me to be one of the most valued objectives of learning, and a multicultural attitude--as a verb-- is a powerful paradigm for facilitating that growth.
Usually I never comment on blogs but your article is so convincing that I never stop myself to say something about it. You’re doing a great job Man,Keep it up.
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