I once read an article titled, “Headship: The Job that Uses Every Bit of Me.” It struck me as spot-on. From plumbing problems to preschoolers who bite, from legal challenges to flu epidemics, from bonds to books, it’s all in a year’s work.
Governance demands an equally broad mindset. Along with school heads, trustees are at their best when reaching beyond their daily work experience and keeping abreast of thinking in areas apparently distant from tuition setting and advancement goals. Here are four disparate books to stimulate discussion at the board meeting and beyond.
Daniel Shapiro’s title, Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts, should instantly resonate with school leaders. This is, after all, what we do on many occasions, with students, faculty, parents, donors, or campus neighbors, among others. Shapiro, cofounder of the Harvard International Negotiation Program and a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, brings his experience to bear on situations where immovable objects seem strewn in the path of our best intentions.
Shapiro describes the nonnegotiable as whatever threatens our identity, violates our personal or “tribal” taboos, recalls a past experience of harm, or attacks our notion of the sacred. We, or the other party, enter a state he calls vertigo, in which we cannot see the other person clearly and fear that the past trauma is recurring. We notice only the data that confirms our fears and find ourselves “trapped within a dizzying state of adversarial relations.” But all is not hopeless.
Shapiro suggests, among other ideas, that we try to disentangle our “core identity” from our “relational identity.” Are we or they seeing an existential crisis where there is simply a need to readjust our relationship? Can we prevent past experience from intruding into the present? Finally, can we “strive for harmony, not victory,” finding crosscutting connections, commonalities, and a “shared we”? This brief description can’t do justice to the richness of Shapiro’s analysis or his skillful narrative. The book’s opening scene, which could be headlined “Alien Invasion at World Economic Forum,” grabbed my attention and never let it go.
Governance is not all about negotiation, but it always requires communication — that all-encompassing term for everything from PR to advertising, therapy to political manipulation. Sherry Turkle, who has tracked the effects of technology on culture for more than 30 years, proposes a more precise and humane word for “communication” in Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Her thesis is that “[w]e have been silenced by our technologies — in a way ‘cured of talking.’” Those familiar with Turkle’s work, and who expect her case to be built on masses of both statistical and anecdotal data, will not be disappointed.
Turkle’s thesis will ring true for anyone who has spent time with children, their own or those at their school: “Face-to-face conversation is the most human — and humanizing — thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood. And conversation advances self-reflection, the conversations with ourselves that are the cornerstone of early development and continue throughout life.”
This essential human activity is threatened everywhere: between parents and children at the dinner table, in the social development needs of adolescence, and among adults in both their business and personal lives. Turkle recounts case after case in which young people, seduced into constant virtual connection, actually fear entering into an open-ended conversation with others: “Real people, with their unpredictable ways, can seem difficult to contend with” when one is accustomed to online life, where a facade can deceive ourselves as well as others.
Each reader will find moments that evoke either the shock of recognition or the gasp of dismay. The U.S. senator who loses focus and starts playing virtual poker in the middle of a national security discussion. The lover who opens Tinder when her partner takes a bathroom break. The college junior who says, “In my family we have our disagreements in Gchat conversations. It makes things go smoother. What would be the value proposition of disagreeing with each other face-to-face?”
As someone who now spends much time on conference calls, I see these effects: discussion is halting, awkward, and confusing; people are hard to distinguish by voice; and colleagues, children, dogs, or traffic in the background must surely be as disturbing to the speaker as they are to the listeners. Spending several years on a board with people I’ve never met, or talked with, beyond an hour or two’s business a month, is for me the epitome of alienation. Turkle parses the issue into three parts: “One Chair” (solitude and self-reflection), “Two Chairs” (family and relationships), and “Three Chairs” (education and work). For each she provides both evidence of harm and sensible solutions to the second great addiction problem in our society.
Meaningful conversation, of course, can only happen between human beings with real selves. Matthew Crawford, think-tank fellow at the University of Virginia and custom motorcycle designer, offers an even stronger warning than Turkle in The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. For Crawford, the bombardment of stimuli in our environment, much of it designed to capture our attention for someone else’s purposes, threatens our freedom to focus, reflect, and therefore become a self-aware individual. Arguing that evolution required us to attend to whatever was novel in our environment — and therefore a threat or an opportunity — he explains why we cannot seem to resist our phones, televisions, or ubiquitous advertising messages. But we can only develop our ability to understand our experience by withdrawing attention from the immediate environment to reflect on past events, see patterns, and plan for the future.
Crawford argues that we need “attentional space,” which first of all involves silence (both aural and visual), because “just as clean air makes respiration possible, silence, in this broader sense, is what makes it possible to think.” He continues, “The availability of silence surely contributes to creativity and innovation,” and “we consume a great deal of silence in the course of becoming educated.”
This is a challenging book, ranging from neuroscience to Western philosophy, both ancient and modern, and advocating, as Crawford did in his earlier Shopcraft as Soulwork, for the ability of “skilled practices” — from shaping a hockey stick to designing a pipe organ — to build our attentional muscles as we engage with the external world by our choice, not that of the marketplace. The World Beyond Your Head should be read by everyone interested in designing a curriculum to help students become individuals who can mold their world rather than be molded by it.
Benjamin Barber’s If Mayors Ruled the World may seem the odd book out here, but the more I read it, the more applications I saw to the work of school leaders. Barber, the author of Jihad vs. McWorld, and currently at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at City University of New York, has spent several decades studying how citizens can make a difference in their societies. His case here is that cities, being less constrained than nation-states by matters of sovereignty, and more focused on the immediate and the interpersonal, can do more to combat some of the worst conditions of the world than their home countries. As he puts it, “Presidents pontificate principle; mayors pick up the garbage.” Board members, and especially school heads, will also hear the familiar in his statement that “multitasking is typical of mayors around the world.” At every turn, I saw “independent schools” in place of Barber’s cities and “public education” in place of his states.
Barber provides, for example, a list of city characteristics that often parallel the best aspects of independent schools. They are both chosen places with voluntary identities, possessing their own forms of liberty; more attentive to the arts, often more cosmopolitan, and in an age of resegregation of public schools, capable of being more multicultural. Most constituents of a school exist in proximity in a way not possible for whole school systems, and they are, at least in theory, places of possibility, growth, equality, and innovation.
One of Barber’s key distinctions also applies widely to independent schools. States have borders and economies to defend from near and not-so-near rivals. They function, at least in part, as zero-sum players. But with some exceptions, such as financial centers and Olympic venues, one city’s gain is not another’s consequent loss. This means that for both cities and schools, there are fewer barriers to cooperation and sharing.
But cities around the world have made far more progress than have independent schools in tapping this potential. Barber introduces a large and, for most of us, little-known world of intercity cooperation. One list of organizations to which a single German city belongs, includes “the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe, the Council of European Municipalities and Regions, Cities for Mobility, Cities for Children, and — the kicker — United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), the most important global association of cities, representing over three billion people.”
What would happen if our schools collaborated in this way to change, if not rule, the world? After 40 years as teacher, administrator, and school head,
