New View EDU Episode 4: Schools for Growing Citizens
Read the full transcript of Episode 4 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, in which hosts Tim Fish and Lisa Kay Solomon explore the idea of changing our mindset about the word “citizen,” from engaging with it as a noun to treating it as a verb—a set of guiding principles that can be translated into actions each person can take to contribute to society. The guest is Baratunde Thurston, award-winning writer, activist, comedian, and host of the podcast How to Citizen With Baratunde, who shares his four pillars of citizenship, as well as stories about how his experiences as an independent school student shaped his worldview and citizen behaviors.Lisa Kay Solomon: What does it mean to be a citizen of this world, of our community, of our future? And in this moment of deep disruption and division on nearly every level, how can we repair, rebuild, reimagine our collective community? Where does that work happen? How does that work happen? When does it happen? On today's episode of New View EDU, Tim and I will speak with Baratunde Thurston, writer, activist, and comedian.
He's the executive producer and host of the podcast, How to Citizen With Baratunde. I've had the pleasure of working with and learning from Baratunde on a number of projects, and could not be more excited to bring his passion, expertise and posture of learning to school leaders and educators, and to explore how to re-imagine what it means to citizen.
And to citizen as active, teachable, learnable practices, and why modeling those practices are everyone's job. Baratunde, welcome to New View EDU. We are so excited to talk with you today.
Baratunde Thurston: I'm excited to be here with the new view, tired of that old view. Let's see some new stuff. Thank you, Lisa Kay Solomon. L K S, does anybody call you LKS?
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh my gosh. That just made us best friends. That just warmed my heart so much, yes.
Baratunde Thurston: RBG of education, I don't know, I'm just riffing here.
Tim Fish: Baratunde. Thank you so much for, for joining us today and for joining the conversation. I know that our, our, our listeners and our school leaders and others are going to be super excited to spend some time with you as well. You know, as we think about this topic, how to citizen, and we think about school, you know, one of the things that's always fascinated me as a lifelong educator is that whenever you talk to people about like, why do we even have school? You often hear, people will say, well, school is there to create citizens. And it even goes back into, I think the founding of public education, citizenship was a key element. And I remember always wondering, like, what exactly did that mean? Are we in fact doing that? Have we ever really done it effectively? And for whom or what, who did we think of as a citizen and what opportunities were available?
And I love your concept of citizen as a verb. What does it mean to citizen today?
Baratunde Thurston: Absolutely happy to take a crack at that. Yeah. We made this show. We being my wife, Elizabeth, and I made this show. Citizen as a verb. It's a show I've tried to make in different media for awhile. Podcasting was the place it landed best.
We came up with these four elements of what does it mean to citizen?
Not just to be born in a certain place and inherit rights and privileges, but to live in this practice of self-government. We're trying to live together. We're trying to live together with a lot of difference and we're trying to rule ourselves. Not be ruled by others. So that's, that takes work. That's, that's an active posture as a member of society. We are driving the vehicle with other people, which could get a little messy. So we have these four pillars that we came up with in listening to our guests and making things up ourselves, and tapping into our hearts. And the first is: you show up. To citizen is to show up and participate. That's an active thing.
Number two. We invest in relationships with ourselves and with others. You can't citizen alone, it's a team sport. It requires multiple people and we're stronger together. I'm not trying to quote Hillary Clinton, it just came out that way, but we are stronger together. We can do more with others than we can do by ourselves. Like, I don't know, make vaccines and stuff.
Number three, we understand our power. And we understand the multiple layers and types of power we have access to. In a democracy we're often told, one, there's people with power and there's people without power. And we set up this false dichotomy that there are powerful people and powerless people. In a democracy, everybody's got power, whether we use it, leverage it, understand it. That's a separate question. We have the capacity. And the other thing that we are taught in our version of democracy is: your power is your vote. We're taught your power is your vote. And your vote is your voice. And it's partially true, but it's not the whole story. And there are many members of society who do not have the power of the vote. But still have power. Those might be people with felony convictions on their record in too many states in our union. Those might be people who we call children, who have a significant interest in how this society operates, but don't necessarily have access to ballot power.
So Eric Liu, Citizen University, helped educate us on power and enhance our understanding. You got power in your money. You got power in who you hang out with, in your associations. You've got power in what you consume, not just calories, but informationally. We've got power on what you give your attention to, which regardless of financial level, we all have that kind of power.
And lastly, number four, we do all this to benefit the many, and not the few. And this is the, this is where I get this image of like an elegant gymnastics dismount from like the pommel horse, because these things all connect. It's part of a routine. And to stick the landing, go back to that investing in relationships with others.
So part of that anchor, that pillar comes from Valerie Kaur, author of a book, See No Stranger, who says, "A stranger is just a part of me I do not yet know." It's a very generous way of looking at a stranger, but if we can see some part of ourselves in others, then we have a connection. And her whole thing is revolutionary love. We need to love ourselves and we need to love others. We even need to love our opponents. But if you take that kernel that someone else is a part of me, I'm investing in that relationship. Then when we work on behalf of the many, we're not just giving away stuff to random other people. I think so much of citizening, when it benefits the collective, we have this way in the U.S. in particular of framing that as socialism communism, collectivism, like that's a dirty, bad, negative word. That there's a zero sum mentality. To quote Heather McGee, author of "The Sum of Us," that if someone else gets something that means I gotta be losing. That's not how this works, because we have to live together. So. If you're working to benefit the many, and you believe in and have been investing in relationships with others because you see no stranger, they're just a part of you, then helping the many is also helping yourself.
And there's a negative way to look at this, right? Which is, well, if I can make the world more secure, if I can invest in broad public safety for other people's kids, they're less likely to jack up my kids. Right? You can be like, we should encourage high graduation rates so those kids don't end up in prison based on something they do to my kids. That is an incentive, it's a negative incentive, but it sorta works. I'm much more attracted to the positive incentive, which is: Oh, the things we can do, when we combine our forces. You know, it's just the education a little bit, because we like to teach our history in a relatively positive light.
Right. America's been great. We did all this cool stuff. We invented, like, Furbies and Wet Naps. And we went to the moon that one time and we won't shut up about it. And we defeated the Nazis, you know, it was there like real cool stuff back in the day. Yes. And. That whole time we have not been a full democracy.
We've been defending the thing that we don't fully practice ourselves. We've been this partial democracy, but for most of our history, look it up, it's in the books, most people couldn't participate in the democracy formal. So what does that make us? Not terrible, not ruined, but unfinished, incomplete. And so we look back at all these great things we've done, and I ask how much more dope stuff could we have done, with more participation? We went to the moon, big whoop. We could have gone to Mars if we let women have bank accounts. More wealth for the collective, more fuel for the rocket. So that's a long explanation of how to citizen, but I—that's my attempt at a gymnastic dismount.
Tim Fish: I think you stuck it.
Lisa Kay Solomon: You know, Baratunde. I love how you frame it so much. And so in keeping with what our promise is: New View EDU. And I hear so much in that beautiful, forward-looking, inclusive description, which starts with: every person should have agency in participating and knowing how to participate, and having on-ramps and practice in participating. And when I think about your four pillars that are so compelling, so inviting, really an offer. Right? An openness and invitation to get to that place where we have more diversity, more possibility, more abundance beyond zero sum. And I think about the asks and the offers that you make to participate, to show up, to invest in relationships, to understand power through a multiplicity of currencies and to value the collective.
I feel like those could be values of every single school across our country. Like the thing that gets me excited is to think about our youngest learners and leaders, having an invitation to start their practices in these ways of citizening from the beginning. So the thought and the inspiration, I think Tim and I have, of saying, how can we empower all school leaders to think about their schools as vehicles for practicing the behaviors that our future and our communities need most, is so exciting.
And so I want to maybe talk about your journey to the, to really understanding these practices and, even, you know, when, when they started for you and when you had this sort of insight that said, wait a minute, it doesn't have to be this way. We actually can have a different stance.
Baratunde Thurston: I was a little trouble-making child. My mother was a troublemaking adult and, like sometimes begets like, so I had an, a very local inspiration in the household. And my mother was always wanting to make me aware of a broader history than might be taught in terms of the role of black folk and the U.S. The assaults, you know, by the U S government against its own people in various forms throughout the years.
Again, it's stuff we don't really celebrate, but that definitely happened. So I showed up a little more skeptical, a little more like head on a swivel and like, cool, cool, cool. This is great. But what about, what about that? And when I started going to an independent school myself in seventh grade, in Washington, DC—went to the Sidwell Friends School —I also was enrolled in this Pan-African, Pro-Black rites of passage program, in DC as well, called (unintelligible). And it was just to like boost a sense of history and self-esteem and morale. But I was getting two different educations at the same time. I was getting sort of relatively classic American education during the week, and then this like hyper pro-Black education on the weekend. And I had to learn to hold them both. And figure out for me, what do I believe? Who am I? And part of how we make, I think, citizens, is exposing people to situations where we can choose. We can interpret, we can see things from multiple views and start to understand what we believe. You know, and who we are and what we feel, and not just repeat what we hear, which is really tempting and is a good facsimile for knowledge. Just repetition, but parrots don't truly speak, you know, in so many ways. So that's one of the things I remember, just that, that dichotomy of exposure was really useful.
And I also remember, you know, I was very active in Black student activities at Sidwell, that's where a lot of my own politics—I got to practice politics and citizening and organizing, complaining. I mean, if you're in school, and you're not complaining about the conditions of the school, you ain't learning. You know, it's never perfect. There's the vending machine is stocked poorly or overpriced. The food selection is meager. The teachers aren't attentive enough. The curriculum isn't representative enough. The athletic program isn't robust enough or it's imbalanced, or there's a whack coach who shouldn't be there anymore. Like something's wrong. Find out what that wrong thing is and just pick at it, you know, and just don't, don't relent.
So a lot of that came up for me with, you know, representation, of, and for Black students, not having enough Black faculty. And so we did, we'd have little meetings, we'd have little children meetings and with our little junior Black Student Union in like seventh or eighth grade or the Students of Color meetings, and the parents had a version of it too, and we conspired, you know, and we'd share notes. "Oh, so that happened to you, too. Oh, that teacher said that. I thought it was just me." And so, again, not alone. Right. If it was just me, then maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe I should just suck it up. But three other kids had the same experience with that teacher. We might have a situation. And then we'd go to the Dean's office or the principal's office or the head of school or whatever they're called, the authority.
Right? "Dear Authority, we've got a problem." And authority says, "I don't know if we have a problem, but thank you so much for your time. You should focus on your education." I guess the last point is really the fun part. I was like learning to use the language of education and, and, growing people and the language of the school itself in service of what we thought of as our education.
"Oh, you say you stand for these things. Then do it, cause we don't think by this behavior, you're living up to that charter that's on the wall, that notice that's on your website. The thing that convinced my parents to spend all this money." And with independent schools, there's an extra hook because folks are paying. So you're like a consumer, you're like a customer. So you've got the customer's always right thing going for you. "Well, I'm not paying for this." So that's, that's a fun way of practicing. And I think when I look at myself as an adult and try to hold the United States to its own standard, I, I got to practice that at school and like, how do we hold Sidwell to its own standard? It says it stands for all these things and Quaker values, and watching my fellow students find ways to use that—that was fun. As I look back fondly, I know we were a pain in the butt. You know, these teachers like "We're here to create independent thinkers, but this is so much independent thinking."
Tim Fish: One of the things I love about that is that, you know, we often think about the structures that we need to put in place. You know, we need to create a course, or we need to create a major thing. And like, these were just small things. School just let you have the space to gather and talk and share and write a petition and do all the other things you did.
And I was visiting a couple of years ago, visiting with just one of my favorite schools, University Child Development School in Seattle, pre-K through fifth grade school, and I was walking through the school, just hanging out with some teachers and just kind of taking it all in. And we came out to the playground area and we saw the second graders were sitting on the ground.
And they were having a conversation because they were actually having a bit of a debate. And that the issue was that there was this one tree that was in the playground area and on the tree there's beautiful leaves. And a bunch of kids had taken to, as part of their game, they would pull leaves off the tree and they would make like a salad or they would make some thing in their pretend world.
And there were some other students who said we can't be pulling leaves off the tree. And what I love about it is, they probably went up to the teachers and said, you know, you need to tell them to stop pulling the leaves off the tree. And the teacher said, we're going to have a conversation about this. And they huddled everybody up and they had the kids make the case and they gave them the agency, the power to make that decision about what are we going to do about this situation with the tree, right. And what questions we need to be asking, how do we represent ourselves? And what I love about it is it was so in the moment, it was so real and authentic. And you could see when I was sitting there watching, I could see students who were questioning in their own mind. Like, you know, should, what side of this do I stand on? What's my point of view on leaf pulling in the tree, in the yard—
Baratunde Thurston: It's the Lincoln-Douglas debates for leaf pulling, I love that.
Tim Fish: Right? It's so, like, I just love that notion that you can, that those moments are, that moments of leadership are there. And I'm curious if like, through your experience in your work, if you have any advice for school leaders or those who are teachers, or those who are working with young people in schools around how to help students and the community learn to citizen in real ways, and anything that comes to mind for you that you might give to folks who are in a position where they could make more of that happen in a school.
Baratunde Thurston: You know, when we asked Eric Liu, like, what advice do you have? What do you want people, how can people practice this? He said, start a club, start or join some kind of association where you can practice power and negotiation and disagreement and quorums and consensus and all these kind of almost parliamentary group dynamic things.
But that's not the point. The point is bowling. Or bocce, or basketball, or something with the letter B apparently. Cause that's where my mind is right now. So, I mean, schools are natural places for that. They all have clubs and associations and sports as a formal thing, but there's the yearbook clubs. And the various language clubs and all kinds of ultimate Frisbee and things like that. So making sure that that is encouraged is probably the easiest thing because it's so natural. Kids want to play and do stuff. Gather around the tree and debate leaf pulling or not.
I think exposure to the larger community is a really important focus. And one thing I give a lot of credit to my high school for, it was just baked in. You know, I, I grew up in a house where we did regular community service through soup kitchens and food vans, you know, in DC. And that was just my mom's ethos. So literally every week from at least age six, I was out in the street, interacting with people who didn't have homes or didn't have enough food or both. And it was normal. And so I was less judgmental and I could see folks as people, even though we didn't live like that, I was like, oh, but they still live. They, there's a dignity. And a, uh, implicit respect. My mother never lectured me. She never said, "I need you to value every other human as an equal human. And I need you to recite this every day. You know, I will value people whether they have a home." No, I just, it was by example and exposure and interaction. And so schools that especially might run the risk of being cloistered and apart, some have campuses more beautiful than the environments that those campuses are situated in.
Maybe the demographics are different from the zip codes they're in or the counties they're in, or kids are coming in from so many different places. There's not a neighborhood component to it. So you got to recreate that. And I think, you know, training students to citizen means the school itself has to be citizening too, and showing up and participating and relating to the community, not standing above it or totally apart from it. That's helpful.
Then I think you, and your second grade example reminds me of something really powerful that we pulled off when I was in high school. We, we used arts to communicate and explore really divisive topics around race in school. And we, primarily Black students, wrote a play to explore like Black identity at Sidwell.
That was a savvy move. I might say. I'll give ourselves some pats on the back. Parents helped us, you know, we had a, professor of rhetoric at Howard University. She tapped this playwright at American University who sat with us and co-wrote this thing. But the courage was also on the part of the school to give us space to put this play on, and not just be threatened about what might happen. "What, you're just going to go on stage and start complaining about racism at this--" I know that there was some discomfort. There were probably faculty meetings that I was nowhere near where folks were like, is this too risky?
But we did the play and then we had these discussion groups after the play. Again, the school gave time, let us design it. You know, we had to get some sign off. It wasn't just like, okay, bring whoever to say whatever for two hours. But we put on this show. And then we divided the whole upper school into small groups in the classrooms at the school. We repurposed those classrooms for a different type of learning. And we had all gone through facilitator training, and dispute resolution workshop stuff. And we did that. So we got like a half day to explore and it wasn't simply like Black kids lecturing white kids. It wasn't that simple. It was creating a space, just like those second graders around that tree, to talk and share. And that practice is, is really important. So those are some of the things, humility as a trait is important. Being honest. I think so much of what I remember as a child growing up is this, like, what is wrong with these adults? Have they forgotten what it is to grow, to be young, and what are they afraid of? And I think I would have really appreciated some adult having the courage to acknowledge that fear. And in, maybe it's a quiet moment. Maybe you don't put it in the newsletter, but be human.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I think it also, Baratunde, models that leadership and frankly, the new kind of leadership we need, where we start with humility.
We start with discovery. We start with honoring who we are serving in a much more holistic way. I love that story that you shared about your experience at high school. I also, I'm an alumni of a Quaker school outside of Philadelphia. And as you're talking, it reminded me how grateful I am to have experienced, early in my life, a system that rewarded community discovery, community evolution, community growth that would, might have come from an unexpected source, meaning the students. Right? Like I can imagine as you share that story, the school leader did not start off the year thinking, you know what I really hope happens? Here's what we're going to prescribe. Right. And yet, as there was energy and movement from you, from your peers to do this, they rallied around you. They opened up space. An intention to create an opportunity for growth and learning to, what, what we sometimes say in organizational theory, to find congruency between your espoused values—what we say we care about—and our lived values, how we are going to allow that to happen.
And so I just love that story as an example, for where you got to practice what you are now sharing with the world, through your podcast and through your conversations.
Baratunde Thurston: I think, you know, there it's, it's such a basic concept, but educational institutions are not just there to educate the students. Everyone should be learning. And I think if you're the leader of a school, that does not exempt you from learning, and that's true in every domain where there's this kind of structural power. Like, companies and their leadership, politicians, to have all the answers, you're taking the wrong test. So there's, there should—that humility has some benefits too, and I think it may be easy to forget when folks show up, like you're here to educate my kids. Yeah. And also, like, I'm learning too because the world around us is changing and we have to adapt. All of us.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I just have to say something really quick on that. I had this light bulb that a way for us to advance, you know, to grow learning is a resilient posture, right? It is a resilient posture for a leader to say, we know we're not going to have all the answers this year. How lucky are we that we get to bring our voices and our contributions forward in order to be able to do that.
And I think also, Baratunde, of how you even initially described that you were a troublemaker. Like imagine if you're like, oh my gosh, we have an idea amplifier on our hands here, people! You know. Wow. How exciting that we have students that are bringing to our attention opportunities for us to improve. This is amazing. You know, you win the improvement award of the year because you identified all of the places that we can learn in conversation. Versus, oh my gosh. Again? We're having another issue?
So our language and, the way in which we look at these moments as a way for us to learn individually and collectively is a fundamental reframe.
Tim Fish: Yeah. You know, it makes me think Lisa, about this concept that I've always, I sort of have been formulating in my mind for years, I call it structured agency. Right. So we, we all believe in the power of agency and the imperative for agency. And yet at the same time, we need in schools and in our lives, a certain amount of structure around that that sends it off in the right direction.
And I think about the school, Baratunde. And when they, when you guys wanted to come up with that play, they were like, yeah, let's do it. They gave you the agency and they gave you a little bit of structure. Like, Hey, we kind of need to know what you're talking about. We need a little bit, you know, we need a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
And the masters in the classroom for me have been those who have been, "I'll figure out how to give maximum agency and just the right amount of structure that it unlocks the potential of the students." Right. I think about when I first started independent schools, way back, I was a tech director and I, and I showed up at a, I showed up at the school where I worked and, and, there were these, one of the first things I heard from some of the folks who had, who have been doing some work with tech, because there was this little group of students and these group of students were like, hacking the network and every time the school—
Baratunde Thurston: That was me!
Tim Fish: That was you. I bet it was, I was wondering if that was you, right? They were hacking the network and every time the school would put some new block in place, they would figure out how to get around it. And so we had gotten to a place where, when I first went in and sat down, all the computers students had access to had no icons on the desktop, you couldn't right click on anything. You hit the start button, there was like one or two things there that you could have access to. You couldn't do anything inside of a browser. And I was like, this isn't gonna work. Like this is not teaching kids anything, like, what are we doing? And so we ended up sitting down and having a conversation about it. We ended up creating something called the hack lab. And the hack lab was, we took some old computers, a bunch of like old servers and we found a space on the campus. And we just said to those kids, we pulled them all in. We said, we're going to give you this space. You can do whatever you want in here. You can set up the most secure environments and we need you to partner with us. To help us A) unlock these computers to let students have a real experience, but also ensure that the school is, you know, being a good steward of our resources and all of our, of our materials. And it unlocked everything. Those students became these incredible advocates and partners with our team. And that unlocked a whole bunch of other stuff, right? But it was that notion, I'll never forget the folks who were like, what are you doing? They're like, you can't give them that stuff. You can't give them admin rights to a server that's going to be sitting on our network. There were other tech directors who had thought I had completely lost my mind. Right?
But yet there was an agreement. There was an element of that structure that was there. And then there was a ton of agency. And I was just talking with a school the other day, the One Stone School in Boise, Idaho, which is largely a tuition free nonprofit independent school that is largely run by students. The majority of the board members are students.
Baratunde Thurston: What?
Tim Fish: Yeah, you could, you should check it out. This place is—
Baratunde Thurston: I gotta visit that school.
Tim Fish: This place is unbelievable. But the part that got—the part that gets me is one of the things, when we were having a conversation with them recently, they said that their tendency, the one tendency they have to give up is like, whenever they come across something hard, they're all, they're kind of getting this frame of mind where, and I'm paraphrasing, I'm not going to quote them perfectly.
But basic premise was we get in these spots and we think, oh, this one, the adults, we got, we got to solve this challenge. Right. Cause this one's really, like, whatever. And whenever they get there and whenever they go down that road, they always end up going, nope. The kids would've done—the students, if they had been in and really helping us, they would have done a better job.
And so for me, it's that core question of, right, what does that look like when we actually get out of the way more? Right? When we can step back and get out of the way more, and how can that unlock and create the space for the conversations we need to have and allow students to practice, to citizen. That for me is like, you got to give the space. The only way to learn to citizen, is to citizen.
Baratunde Thurston: Is to do it. It's a learn by doing thing. You also reminded me in our current season, we've just focused on economics and money, and what role that can play in helping us citizen better or, or not. And we learned a lot about cooperatives and cooperative economics. And the, what you described from the Boise, Idaho school, it sounds like an educational co-op, you know, because the customers, you know, are also governing members in that sense, there's a bit more ownership stake. There's a power of a vote. Is just—the same way that having a sort of—employee owned businesses have a kind of a different dynamic, but what one of our guests that, who focused on this, actually out of Philadelphia, Lisa Kay. From the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance, Jamila, last name escapes me right now, but she says, you know, co-ops are places to practice democracy, and sort of democracy embedded in the business. And so how much democracy is embedded in our educational institutions?
Tim Fish: Love it.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Baratunde, I want to come back to something that—one of the core pillars, which is that of power, you know, and I, and, and, and how misunderstood it is, how little we actually talk about it directly, even though it affects everything. And the opportunity we have, to get back to what Tim was saying and what you've been saying about agency, if we actually spend time talking about the different levers of power, how we use power, how we build power, how we reframe power, because that is such an empowering way. And it feels like a negative word, and so maybe we sort of skirt away from it. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, what you've learned with Eric Liu, whose work on power I found to be so enlightening, you know, even just talking about the different buckets of power, and how to think of power as a tool and, you know, maybe what you might hope, you know, for school leaders.
Baratunde Thurston: When I was in high school, this keeps coming back to that because it's NAIS. So my mind just flips back in time. I also recently reconnected with two friends from high school after a really long time, we talked for like three hours. It was great. On podcasts, in fact, cause everything has to be a podcast. It can't just be a conversation. So I, I remember when we had this spate of expulsions. And we were trying to figure out what, what do we do about this? We're not, as students, in charge of who gets to stay or go, but we know the school says these values. We have messages that we could try to communicate. And so we did a couple of things. We, like, used the student newspaper to try to get the word out that way.
Um, and opinion editorials and news articles and data, you know, and trying to make, raising awareness. I remember, you know, with one particular expulsion, there was a lawsuit and I had gotten the court transcript from the depositions, which revealed a lot of nefarious nonsense in my opinion. And I delivered that in a targeted fashion to the lockers of the students whose parents were on the board. And I was like, oh, this is for your parents. You know? Cause maybe they don't even know. And so that's, that's a particular, strategic targeting of like, okay, how does the school really work? Yes, there's the administrators, but they work for somebody, you know, they answer to somebody. Who do they answer to? This board. Who's on the board, parents. Do I know these parents? I know these kids. So, that.
Uh, we did protests, you know, and signs around campus. We used, in the Quaker tradition it's meeting for worship vibe, but you know, every school has some version of assembly and gathering. And so we used that to kind of ask questions out loud and lean into that, to that universe. We were playing with power. We had, we had felt subject to it in a negative way, like losing friends to, to the relatively violent act of expulsion. That's kind of a psychologically devastating thing where, especially if you've been at a school your whole life, as a lot of my classmates had. And then all of a sudden your lifelong friend is no longer showing up to school anymore.
And so we, we didn't spend any money. There was no ballot, right? This was, but we were just discerning power. Where does it sit? Oh, the board. That's an interesting angle. The newspaper! We could—and then we were practicing. We were writing, we were, we were huddling. We were experimenting and feeling a sense of agency.
Now we didn't get any of those students reinstated. Those decisions were final, but one, we felt better, right. We felt like we were doing something and not just being victims of something. The friends who had been expelled felt seen and loved. And not discarded, which the act of expulsion really can feel like, because it is. And so they're like, oh, they didn't just forget about me. They're like, advocating for me. That's kinda cool. In some cases, retroactively, the school did offer diplomas, right? So from a long-term credit perspective, that was another kind of potential loss. You don't get this name on your educational CV, in some cases that ended up happening. And I dunno if that would've, without these different forms of pressure. So that's an early lesson set in the time of like independent education.
You know, the last thing I'll—to skip us to the present on my journey and with the podcast, like... power is everywhere. It's almost, I feel like I'm a Star Wars person talking about the force, but it is, this is energy and we can, we can tap into it. Eric says we can generate it. You know, we can build it. We can build power. One of my friends runs an organization out here in Los Angeles, literally called Build Power, Kendrick Sampson, an actor, and activist, you know, he's acting in multiple ways. And you know, you look at Black Lives Matter and the journey from Ferguson, no, actually really the journey from, from Florida, from stand your ground and Trayvon Martin up to where we are now, a year ish into pandemic and Derek Chauvin verdict and all that. There was a building of power and an exercising of power. It was beyond the ballot and it didn't depend on two billionaires to fund it. It was people exercising, literally physically exercising out in the street, exercising power. So it's inspiring and surprising to see both how people use it, find it, wield it, and also where it sits sometimes. You know, if you could have x-ray vision or heat map to reveal the flows of power and the concentrations of it in society, in the economy, gender wise, racially, like zip code. There's so many places. So to, to, to teach someone, to observe and notice power and the use of it, and then learn to practice it. That's true Jedi stuff. That's like the whole game.
Tim Fish: Baratunde. Thank you so much for, for being with us today. You know, we started the conversation on what does it look like to citizen, and your four pieces. And the thread that's pulled through for me is that when you ask anyone at Sidwell, or at any independent school, you say what's at the heart of an independent school? What's the thing that, that your school has that you treasure and would never want to lose, never want to lose sight of? And one of the things I always hear is relationships, and I hear community, and I hear providing students with the opportunity to participate, and I hear elements of love and this idea of the collective. And for me, what it says to me is that fundamentally, our schools are founded around helping the community learn to citizen.
And we just hadn't put it in those words before. We hadn't said, this is what we do. This is what's at the heart. This is what's the center of our work. And so for me, I am just inspired and grateful for your words, for your insights, for your time, for your energy.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I agree, Tim, and I just want to say, Baratunde, I mean you really embodied everything we had hoped in New View EDU. And I just want to end with something that you put in your opening of your podcast where you say, "Much of the message we've been getting is how alone we are, how powerless we are. But there's another side to the story that talks about us as part of something greater, something that we can do together that sees the current moment as an opportunity, with pandemic, revolution and all, to reimagine and reclaim this word citizen."
And I think that's the gift you've given us today, to think about that in the context of citizening at school. And what's possible when we start, as young as people can understand how to engage in a classroom, how to engage with their teacher, how to build relationships with others. So thank you for that gift. Thank you for your work. Thank you for being here today. What an absolute inspiration.
Baratunde Thurston: Thank you. This was a joy and a pleasure. And I'm like, I said that? That sounds pretty cool.