Author Archives: Stephen Seyfer

Ethical or Transactional. Which Will Our Children Be?

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“When you have the chance to do what is right, try to do it.” We listened to late-night radio back in the 70s and 80s and this was the sign-off statement of one of the after-hours talk shows. We all hear innocuous phrases that float on the airwaves but this one stuck with me. It stuck because the number of life occurrences when events present choices of expediency, self-interest, conformity, and ethics never ends. In those moments, the congruence of choice, what is right, and the action to do it belong to everyone, and the choice made matters more than we know.

What do we know about right?

When I was growing up in the 1950s Disney presented a TV series on the American folk hero Davy Crockett. I can still hear Fess Parker, as Crockett, give his personal advice – “Be sure you are right, then go ahead.” For a long time, Crockett’s words told me to pause in front of every decision to take a breath and consider the rightness of my options. It may have been easier in the last century; things may have been less fuzzy. Why are principle-based decisions so hard to make today?

When I was a child everyone I knew went to a church on Sunday. Kids went to Sunday School and then sat with their parents for a church service. I cannot say that everyone knew their Bible. Most churches, mine included, made two obligatory recitations of Old and New Testament verses as part of the weekly service but gave no interpretation or application. Sunday School followed our denomination’s published curriculum that included child-adapted Bible stories, but nothing about Bible-based living. The 23rd Psalm, Lord’s Prayer, the story of the Good Samaritan, and Sermon on the Mount were the heart of our religious education. I was raised in a Christian household with little knowledge of what it meant to lead a Christian life.

The Golden Rule from the Sermon on the Mount was as close to Crockett as I got.

Folklore provided children with stories of people doing the right thing. We heard Parson Weems’ fabricated story of George Washington chopping down one of his father’s cherry trees. When challenged, young George said, “Father I cannot tell a lie. I did it.” The lesson of not to lie was a lie in the telling.

Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac served as guidelines for how children should behave. “Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.” “Don’t throw stones at your neighbors, if your own windows are glass.” “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” Most Franklin verses were easier to quote than to practice.

The concept of true direction was not easy to discern. Early in our history, the North Star became a symbol for directing people. Frederick Douglas published an abolitionist newspaper in 1847 under the banner, North Star. Douglas used Polaris, the celestial marker of north on a compass, as a directional target for enslaved people on the Underground Railroad. To follow the North Star became synonymous with moving from slavery to freedom. Harriet Tubman was our hero leading runaways to freedom using the Big Dipper and North Star.

The North Star returned to our vernacular in this century. In 2007 Bill George, a former CEO, wrote True North. He argued that every individual and organization needs an internal moral compass based on a set of core values, ethics, and purpose. Without a moral compass, leaders and people in general are swayed by short-term pressures, greed, and self-interest. George gave us the reference point for figuring out Crockett’s “Be sure you are right” – follow the ethics of your true north.

But principled decision making still eludes us.

Being right and being transactional.

Being right today has become a matter of transactions. When faced with a question of a right or wrong thing to do, a person reduces the decision of what is universally right to a decision of what is self-benefiting. The transaction is – “If I do this, what do I get in exchange? And the more I get in exchange, the better the decision.” Transacting deals make a successful outcome the justification of a self-proclaimed right decision. For the transactional person, justification for a decision is idiosyncratic not principle based. This person uses the royal “we” as in “we won” or “we gained” to generalize and popularize the personal benefit that their decision brought them, but that is only a matter ego bloat. “Me” is the most important person in transactionalism.

How is this different from ethical decision making? An ethical framework treats people as an end in themselves with every person having inherent value. The first lines of our Declaration of Independence are based on such ethics. An ethical person aligns daily decisions with their values, the promises they have made, and to act without deception. An ethical person respects the rights of others and treats them fairly and honorably. And an ethical person accepts responsibility for mistakes and honestly tries to correct their errors.

Transactionalism reduces every person to the means of an end. People only have value if they can be used for useful leverage to achieve a personal goal or profit. Friends, colleagues, and others are only tokens to be used, they are not valued. Moral duties become conditional – keeping a promise is only worth doing if the return on investing in the promise is personally beneficial. If not personally beneficial, transactionals break promises with impunity. They treat their good deeds as bank accounts in which one good deed can be paid against a bad deed. Social trust is a quid pro quo proposition.

What to do.

We do not teach children what to think, we teach them how to think.

The first part of the above sentence is politically contentious. Today, more than ever before, every topic can be approached from multiple perspectives, especially political perspectives. Also, now more than times past, free-thinking people must honor different perspectives. This honor is in our national DNA. We defend every person’s right to speak, write, join with others, and publicize their ideas. In public education, we honor these by teaching about topics and their perspectives not teaching to inculcate a particular perspective on any topic.

To teach about a topic is to teach how to think about it. Children in school learn to think as historians and to understand human stories that tell us how perspectives about a topic developed. Children learn to think mathematically and to consider a topic quantitatively, statistically, and proportionately. They learn to think scientifically and to analyze the classifications and properties of things and how they work in a natural world. And children learn to think literally and figuratively. They learn to consider an idea for what it really is and means as well as how the idea can be interpreted and applied in different contexts.

Public education is not parochial. We do not teach a limited or dogmatic point of view. Public education also is not partisan, at least it is not supposed to be. Totalitarian states dictate what their people think, control what they write, and restrict their public meetings. Public education opposes mandated thinking, that is why those who mandate oppose public education.

With the caveats of our Constitutional rights and public education policies, we can teach about ethical and transactional thinking. Through literature and history, we can use human stories to illuminate examples of each. And we can extend their thinking with problem-based scenarios. The more they think about thinking, the better they will understand their thinking.

We can teach children the value of developing personal value systems within the mores of our society and with their informed perspectives how to evaluate life decisions.

The Big Duh!

Not to be too simplistic, we can teach children to be Crockett-like in considering the implications of and responsibilities for the decisions they make. This curriculum will not display on their transcript but will be noted in the proverbial book of life. We can teach them that a “True North” is either an ethical process for decision making or it is the endgame goal to be achieved regardless of process. It is their decision to make.

In 2026 educating about ethical and transactional decision making extends not only to children but also to the crafters of artificial intelligence. AI makes decisions that impact humans and our children will be the next crafters of AI.

Build Self-Reliance Not Conformity

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was the consummate influencer of his time. “Say, who?” Emerson is not a name that many children know today. To paraphrase people of my age, Emerson is a white, intellectual dead man, and was among the writers and poets whose works dominated academic study from the 1840s to the 1970s. Yes, but – what he wrote and talked about is more important today than it was in antebellum America. If students do not know Emerson, they should and we must teach them.

In the face of today’s 24/7 social media and insidious mind-bending noise of self-announced prophets who want to tell children what to think, how to think, and who to believe, Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance” is an eye-opener for a person who will take the time to think and reject being talked “at.”

What do we know?

Ask a child this foundational question. “Who do you trust to tell you what you should know?”  The answers surprise because research in the question tells us that children’s trust is very contextual – trust depends upon the topic. As a group, children trust

  • Their parents for questions of personal well-being and safety,
  • Teachers and academic text for formal facts, knowledge, and scientific information,
  • Research organizations like Pew and Common Sense for large, global issues,
  • Google and Wikipedia for quick, non-depth answers,
  • Peers and friends for social and cultural ideas like music, clothing, entertainment, and peer dynamics. They do not trust friends for facts, yet commonly misconstrue opinions for facts, and like many adults, “go along to get along” with their peers.
  • Do not trust mass media organizations – television, radio, and print – for the factual and unbiased news.

As children move into middle and high school, peer pressure, social dynamics, and school environments begin to change and refine how they perceive their parent and family views.

The answers also surprise because very seldom does a child say, “I trust my own judgements and intuitions. I trust me.” Where are children on their self-reliance? Is self-reliance relevant today?

What should we know?

This is where Emerson and his essay, “Self Reliance,” become highly relevant today. First, understand that “Self Reliance” was an essay written in 1841. Whereas Emerson used “Self Reliance” to extol his generation to separate itself from copying European perspectives and Eurocentric thinking, his essay is a primer for every generation of young Americans beginning their own era of adulthood.

These are the key points Emerson made about the self-reliant man.

  • Be an original not an imitator. A person who only repeats what he is told prevents his own intellectual growth. Instead, listen and watch, consider and think, compare and contrast, and then give your thoughts your own informed interpretation and personalization. A self-reliant person does not repeat slogans to make himself resemble another person and what that person says. Blind imitation of what others think is intellectual suicide and too many kill their personal thinking by imitating

America in the 1840s was rapidly moving west, receiving millions of immigrants every year, prospering with new inventions and pre-industrial energy. “New” was happening all the time and the increased opportunity for being new begged for originality, invention, and reinvention.

  • Resist social conformity. Society wants to narrow the range and diversity of thinking and behavior to make communities of people more manageable. And to make them more compliant. Political and social leaders use subconscious encouragement that shape speech and attitudes around policies and rules that restrict non-conformity. Emerson believed in non-violent protests, and he talked of personal and community resistance to public policies, laws, and rules that constrained individualism. Though educated as a New England minister with the region’s conservative traditions, her resisted dogmatic thinking and a prescribed life.
  • Growth requires change and adjustment not blind consistency. Emerson’s generation was on the move, and the multi-sides of dynamic change needed new economic, political, and social models. New territories, new businesses and industries, new populations, and unfamiliar problems needed innovative solutions. Old answers did not solve new problems. Emerson urged America to shed traditionalism in favor of contextual adjustment and change. In all questions, he did not hold with “blind” repetition of familiar and safe responses but urged innovative experimentation and thinking.
  • Trust your internal intuitions and convictions. As a transcendentalist, Emerson spoke of the laws of nature that humans cannot break or bend. He watched migratory birds and animals that knew when and where to make an annual migration necessary for their survival. As extension, each person has an immutable intuitive power, an inner voice that tells him what to do and how to do it. Emerson told his generation to believe in their intuitions and their convictions based upon an inner voice.

Consider the writing and thinking of Thoreau, a friend and student of Emerson’s, who moved to Walden Pond into nature, to contemplate the social, economic, political conditions of his time. His writings and personal lifestyle were shaped by his intuitive power and self-determinism.

With strong beliefs in originality, non-conformity, change, and self-determinism, Emerson was not a revolutionary. He did not espouse recklessness or selfish behavior or a rejection of community and social mores. The core of Emerson’s image of a healthy society is based on self-directed, critical thinking, innovative individuals who rely on their natural intuitions and convictions rather than unconscious repetitive habits.

Finally, Emerson and his peers, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, authors and poets, became the gold standards of American literature. Their names and their writings were known, and read, and quoted. Emerson and this group were the influencers of their times.

What does Emerson tell young adults today?

The Bible’s Solomon tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Young adults in the 1840s and young adults in the 2020s face many of the same fundamental problems of how to confront sociocultural, politico-economic, and moral questions. A different prophet, Bob Dylan, tells us that “The times, they always a-changing,” and each generation must find its fresh solutions for Solomon’s recurring problems.

How interesting it would be if those annoying pop-ups on our smartphone, tablet, and laptop screens told young people today –

  • Be original not a copycat of the self-serving slogans of today’s leaders.
  • Do not conform for conformity’s sake; do not be a human clone of other’s ideas and lifestyles.
  • Be contextually innovative and create original changes; inconsistency can break bonds to tradition.
  • Be intuitive and follow your internal convictions that comport with the laws of nature.

Compare and contrast these four Emersonian ideas with the messages of our political, economic, technological, and cultural leaders today. As Emerson urged a new day in America in the 1840s, his ideas urge a new day for young adults today.

The Big Duh!

Parents are correctly alarmed at the power of social media to influence, distort, and misdirect the thinking and behaviors of their children. While most influencers are driven by the monetary rewards and status of their follower count, we could substitute Emersonian ideals that would build the inner selves of children and prevent their blind conformity with others’ external subservience.

This is not just the work of parents and educators. It is a messaging from conscientious and thinking adults to help the next generation to be conscientious and thinking adults. Young people need our role modeling not just our words.

It starts with us.

The August Itch of Preparing to Teach

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Every day I notice, read, and often print out a featured recipe in the New York Times. Today it was an amended recipe for no knead bread. One of the first things I look at is the prescribed preparation steps and the time it takes to prepare a recipe for serving at the table. Prep steps and time are non-negotiable.

It is August and for public school classroom teachers the August itch has begun. The itch is the realization that the number of days until the first day of school is decreasing and it is time to prepare to teach. As the days pass, the itch becomes more severe. For some, there is remorse over the end of the summer vacation and a return-to-work life. Others appreciate the natural cycle of classroom teaching – teach for nine months, not teach for two months – and prepare to teach for the first month of school. For all teachers, there is a tipping day, the day they awake and know it is time to prepare.

What do we know?

For the uninformed, on the first day of school when a teacher and children begin their teaching and learning year, teachers do not walk into a classroom and begin teaching. They prep. The August itch is all about being prepared for the first day and week of teaching. Or being ready to teach the first unit instruction. To be clear, for an elementary teacher readiness means preparing a unit in ELA/reading, a unit in mathematics, a unit in social studies, and a unit in science. For a secondary subject area teacher this means a content and skills rich unit for each course they teach; secondary teachers often teach two or three different courses every day. Every teacher has a lot to prepare.

Using the analogy to the prep steps and time for baking bread, research tells us a teacher spends 30 hours to create 1 hour of aligned direct instruction. Like bread baking, the creation of a lesson from scratch ingredients takes considerable time. The ingredients are the learning needs of each student taught, the curricular standards students need to learn, the curricular materials that support the standards, and the learning environment. Only beginning teachers and teachers given completely new teaching assignments begin from scratch ingredients. Veteran teachers have prior knowledge that shortens the planning process. But aligning preparation still takes critical time. Alignment is the key word because it means that teaching meets student learning needs and specific curricular standards. Unaligned teaching is like teaching to the desks in a classroom without students; it is meaningless.

Prep time for one hour of instruction is still a lot of hours, if teachers taught for full, uninterrupted hours at a time. They do not. In practice, most elementary teachers spend 15-17 minutes of each class hour directly teaching. Secondary grade level subject area teachers spend 20-25 minutes of each class period directly teaching. Parsed out, teachers commit about three to four hours of prep for each teaching day. This planning and teaching cycle, 3-4 hours for each teaching day, continues every week for the 36-week school year.

The August itch is the transformation of a teacher out of the classroom for the summer to a teacher back in the classroom for a school year. The itch, like a person awakening from a long nap, requires predicted scratching that prepare a teacher to do what a teacher knows how to do – cause children to learn.

Digging deeper – prepping the unprepared.

The August itch has a deeper meaning for school principals who will employ people who are not fully licensed to instruct children in their school. The predictions for the 2026-27 school year are that almost 400,000 classrooms in September will NOT have licensed teachers. Students in those classrooms will be taught by people on emergency licenses, long-term substitute status, or who are prepared to teach but not the subjects or the children in their new classroom. That is 1 in every 8 classrooms. Worse, almost 40,000 classrooms will not have any teacher because none could be found. Children assigned to these classrooms will be bundled into other classrooms.

Principals scratch their itch twice. The first scratch is finding someone to be a classroom teacher. The second scratch is helping that emergency teacher to be “trouble free.” Trouble free means managing a classroom of children so there are few disciplinary problems, communicating satisfactorily with parents, collaborating satisfactorily with other teachers, and meeting the school’s calendared timelines for grade reports and staff meetings. If an unprepared teacher satisfies these two scratches, the principal will consider the teaching assignment to be successful!

The itch for the unprepared teachers in these classrooms is completely different. Most of these teachers will be hired on emergency licenses. Their most valid knowledge of a school classroom will be their memories of when they were students. They will try to instruct children just like they were taught when they were children. They will mirror their memories of teacher personalities and teaching strategies. They “fake it until they make it.”

Some of these emergency teachers will be enrolled in state approved teacher preparation programs and will complete foundational education courses during the school year. They will learn to teach while simultaneously instructing children. Miraculously, this works. In fact, after two years teaching with an emergency license those enrolled in educator preparation courses will complete a valid licensing program and receive a professional teaching license. By their third year of employment, newly licensed teachers readily slip into the cadre of veteran teachers.

The Big Duh!

Preparation for the 2026-27 school year will make 3.2 million public school classrooms ready for 49 million children. In numbers only, this annual migration of teachers into school classrooms is ginormous. But it also is usual business for public school professionals. The public is completely oblivious to the August itch. Teachers actually go about prepping like any pre-season professional. Prepping takes time and effort, and it all happens invisibly.

Thank you, teachers for scratching your August itch. Thank you, principals for scratching your school’s itch to put a teacher in every classroom. Thank you, emergency teachers for answering the call to be a teacher.

Next August, we will do it all again.

Ambivalence Instead of Ambition Defines Us Today

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“No bucks – no Buck Rogers!” This is one of my favorite quotes from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. These five words answer the question of what propelled NASA in the 1960s. Beating the Soviets in the race into space was not the result of science or test pilot bravery; government investment of money launched our first astronauts and landed men on the moon. Bucks launched Alan Shepherd, Neil Armstrong, and all other astronauts. This is causation at its fundamental root. Bucks invested in imagination, science, and industry, caused Buck Rogers.

Bucks do a lot. The United States’ hegemony in the 20th century is the result of its vast wealth and productive economics. Our post-WW2 economy just kept growing with the expectation that every year would bring yet more innovation, productivity, and “good times” for almost everyone, though some were left out out. The last half of the 20th century was populated with immense innovation on all fronts of our culture. We built interstates, houses, shopping malls, and factories. We invented and made an unbelievable variety of new “things.” We manufactured our prosperity.

How did this happen? Industrialists reinvested in their industries. Board of Directors and stockholders profited proportionately to the capacity of their business to provide products for the economy. And, the federal government invested in national projects, in the infrastructures of roads, bridges, dams, and national parks. The greater the price tag, the greater the governmental involvement. And, states invested in their universities’ research and development departments, hospitals, and public schools. Growth in population was matched by growth in national, state, and local capacities to serve the new population. America boomed! Investment begat our prosperity.

Our population grew both by domestic births and immigration. Baby Boomer births were matched by millions of people coming to our country. Increased population fed the repetitive cycles of increased consumer buying and increased goods production. Increased population and increased housing construction increased taxes paid and taxes increased public services. We were on the uphill slope of positive trends caused by multiple investing sources that believed investment in the commonwealth of people would grow the prosperity of all people. Increased population begat our prosperity.

Just as investment bucks caused the space race, investment bucks propelled the nation’s innovation and productivity growth of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Bucks fueled the imaginations and ambitions of our nation’s most talented creators and investments funded their productivity in science and industry, agriculture and construction, education and medicine, and large and small business. Talent included both the geniuses of innovation and the educated consumer population that appreciated and was advantaged by the products of genius. Investment begot talent and talent grew more talent. Talent begat our prosperity.

If asked what made America great in the last half of the last century, a straightforward answer was a commitment and investment in the development of national assets and talents.

And then, the good times slowed to a stop. Causation? What happened?

What do we know?

America changed. Our national goals and ambitions have changed. And our commitment to the development of American talent changed.

First, the American Dream changed from being inclusive to being exclusive. Our older generations who achieved the 20th century version of the Dream became more concerned with protecting their holdings than extending opportunities for others to gain any traction in achieving the Dream. National policies began to favor WASPs and became increasingly averse to diverse people. We became protectionists instead of opportunists.

Our government now has annual goals of deporting one million immigrated people from the United States and of holding of 100,000 people in ICE custody pending their deportation. Housing construction, food processing, elder care, and service industries are being decimated by this policy. Immigrants always have come to America seeking a better life and willing to do work that Americans will not do. Thinking we are protecting America by forcibly removing labor and potential talent that we cannot replace is the opposite of what made us prosperous.

Further, government is curtailing visas for foreign students who want to enroll in our schools. We are fed with false fear that America is educating foreign talents that will return to their homeland and compete against us. This falsehood ignores the truth that most foreign students stay in the US and contribute to our talent pool. We are refusing to develop international students who annually beget more talent for our country.

Second, American productivity changed. In the 1960s, manufacturing was 30% of our annual gross domestic product. America was industrial. In 2025 manufacturing was less than 10% of the annual GDP. In 2026 the US economy is based on the wealth of tech companies that produce media and their accoutrements. The US economy today is not based upon tangible wealth but on the vapors of digital and social information and entertainment. We annually become less and less of an industrial nation. The less we produce, the more our economy becomes quicksand and the foundations of our prosperity founder.

The backside and downhill slope of any trend is disturbing. It begs for an explanation. Where the US once led the world in industrial manufacturing, we now trail other nations. Europe and Asia benefited from historically later industrial revolutions than America. This leaves our manufacturers languishing in the American rust belt of pre-WW2 mills and plants. Our once dominant auto industry now only makes SUVs and pick-up trucks. Germany prospers with high productivity in producing machinery, autos, and engineering-intensive equipment. Scandinavia, Netherlands, and Austria prosper with advanced, specialized, high-value manufacturing. Japan and South Korea lead the world in auto production, robotics, ship building, and electronics. The United States cannot compete with China in the making of e-cars, so we ban their import.

And American businesses moved their production sites offshore to Asia, India, South America, and Europe. Business investment traded national interest for their self-interest of profits based upon the lower cost of labor around the world. American steel mills, textile, and microchip producers cannot match international competitors and have shuttered their domestic facilities. We self-inflicted our industrial decline.

Third, America had a strong legacy of investing in education and domestic talent development. Public education provided a literate workforce, and colleges and universities honed American children into world leaders in every field of endeavor. American higher education and American ingenuity were the “think tank” and “skunk works” that drove American innovation and production. No longer.

As the costs of K-12 and college education increase, federal and state investments lag in annual funding commitments. In the early 2000s most, state legislatures cut their education spending to fund other state priorities, such as roads and prisons. The legacy of state funding for heavy cost programs like school buildings, student transportation, and special education gave way to local referenda. By statute, K-12 education is a state responsibility, yet financing local schools is evolving into a local taxpayer responsibility. We annually bemoan low test scores in reading and math and point to teaching and curriculum. However, the blame is ours to own. Classroom teaching no longer attracts talented college students because teachers are the lowest paid profession requiring a baccalaureate degree. Provisionally licensed teachers today teach in more than one million classrooms. We are getting the less educational outcomes we are paying for.

Parallel to decreased support for education, our government attacks colleges and universities and withholds approved congressional funding as leverage to force changes in enrollment and curriculum. The government’s argument is partisan as higher education communities typically are more liberal and favor the Democrat party. Partisanship is shuttering and hamstringing our nation’s research and development centers. The losses of R & D will geometrically increase in the years ahead.

These three causations, a non-productive economy, policy-based attacks on immigrated people, and our diminished education systems are propelling the United States down the backside slope of its international economic hegemony. Our national ambivalence toward the assets that made America – our productive economy, our ambition to be leaders, and our development of American talent- is begetting the decline of the American era.

Ambition turned to ambivalence.

American ambition has turned south with ambivalence. Ask yourself – Excluding energy extraction, digital technology, and biotechnology, what major American industrial breakthrough of the last thirty years has significantly raised broad national productivity? Hard to pinpoint, eh? There are not any.

At the same time, our nation’s production of billionaires is skyrocketing. The wealth of our top .01% is not causing national domestic economic growth. On the contrary their conspicuous consumption and political machinations to secure their personal prosperity have undermined the national ambition. They are the new oligarchs of America, and they make it harder than ever for the non-wealthy to bootstrap their way to middle class security.

What to do.

Start in the middle – at the state level. When national leadership is obstructive and local leadership is without adequate resources, start at the state level where there continues to be is a level of relevant autonomy.

The following are explicit steps a state can take to energize and realize talent development, economic, and civic growth.

  • Provide free K-14 education. We have a tradition of providing education to children in kindergarten through grade 12. Recently, school boards have extended free public education to pre-Kindergarten children. We need to extend a free education for all children to grade 14 – two years of technical college or two years toward a baccalaureate degree.

Grade 14 makes sense because too many college and sophomore students spend two years taking post-high school and introductory college courses as they decide on their degree. It is not until their grade 14 that they really are into a college education. And students who attend technical colleges

The delivery of a free, appropriate, and public education needs this addendum – a free, appropriate, and public education that delivers equitable and high-quality outcomes. Wisconsin’s Choice Program approximates a free K-12 education whether in public, charter, or voucher-supported private schools. However, there are real and significant differences in the outcomes children achieve that are dependent upon their socio-politico-economic community. An education that grows talent cannot abide the arbitrariness of location. Talent development must be achievable in every community.

Redefine grade level promotion, middle school, and high school graduation to a standards-based that will ensure every student, no matter their school choice, meets equitable and high-quality outcome requirements. It is not difficult for school boards to install these requirements, if they are committed to the Wisconsin Promise.

Further, to fulfill the promise of college and career ready promise extend K-12 to K-14. Include the completion of either a technical education or the first two years of a baccalaureate degree in the state/local community financial commitment. There is a current gap between grade 12 and career ready – technical education is missing. A high school graduate is not career ready unless the career is entry-level, non-career employment. Career ready means trained to do career work, and this requires training. By the same token, high school graduates may be academically prepared for college, but they are not prepared for the academic and the financial requirements of college. Too many talented collegians drop out because of the financial burden not the academic work required. If we want to develop talent, we cannot strangle that development with student debt.

  • Develop grade 9-14 apprenticeships. For decades education and industry have recognized the benefits of school/work apprenticeships. However, active apprentice programs are still fringe programs in schools. Instead, apprenticeships should be flagship opportunities in associate and baccalaureate degree programs. High school freshmen and sophomores should be recruited to local apprenticeships using the same in-school representative opportunities as college and university recruiters. In addition, local foundations that give graduates scholarships to attend colleges and universities also need to fund students extending their high school apprenticeships into associate and baccalaureate programs. Grade 9-14 apprentices will be the backbone and pipeline for future productivity.
  • Talent identification and mentorship. Children complete interest inventories as part of their school’s counseling program. Yet few children ever see a connection between the interest inventory and their educational program. The inventory is forgotten data. Instead, schools need to use this data to help children understand their interests and talents AND to create educational pathways that actuate their interests and talents. An easy first extension is connecting every student with a mentor/practitioner/career worker in their interest area. All children have talents, but we allow most to lie fallow without any cultivation. Children just meander on through school. We waste the potentiality that children pose by not actively engaging in their interests and talents.
  • Take advantage of civic projects that require talented workers. Educators extensively use problem-based and project-based teaching and learning strategies to cause children to develop creative academic outcomes. There is tremendous problem-solving commonality in what teachers and students do in the classroom and what civic and community leaders do in town halls. Each uses study, analysis, and creativity to produce problem solutions and project designs. In the future, schools should apply their instructional strategies to their community’s problems and projects, and civic leaders should promote and support students in their production of potential solutions. This will grow local talents prepared for solving local problems and projects. And it will be a substantial cost saving to communities.
  • Restore college and university R & D centers. History already proves the economic benefits of these centers for inquiry, exploration, invention, adaptation, and development. As I sit and write, my workspace and my work tools are the products of R & D efforts. Our leaders need to stop thinking of support for higher education as politically beneficial or as political revenge. R & D is agnostic and non-partisan – everyone benefits. Stop making investment in college and university R & D partisan.
  • Provide childcare subsidies to working parents. The high costs of childcare penalize families by forcing one parent to stop working and become a care provider. Or, by creating a prohibitive debt load for working parents. Making pre-school education part of compulsory education is one way – the subsidy becomes a voucher. Extending compulsory education to year-round schooling for children from birth to grade 5 is a second way. Our schools and our educational work force already are available and can fill these needs.
  • Pay for employee sabbaticals to extend their creative years of work. A longer working life is needed to pay for our living to an older age. Retirement no longer is at age 65 but well into the 70s. A half century of working for a living is a recipe for massive employee burn out. Instead, insert required and employer-paid sabbaticals into all employment agreements. Require all employees to leave their daily work for four months every ten years. International studies of enforced sabbaticals prove that employees return from sabbatical with a refurbished work attitude and productivity. To force old work rules on employees who will be working decades beyond the norm when those rules were written is senseless – we know better.

The Big Duh!

Immediately a reader may believe this is socialist ideology and an overreach of authority. Hogwash! These are 21st century applications of what we have learned to are true and effective over time. We only need the ambition to do them. A harder truth is that American productivity and culture cannot stand another decade of our national ambivalence. Our ambivalence is greasing our slide down the backside of what America once was.

Teachers Teach Doers

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George Bernard Shaw wrote in Man and Superman (1903), “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.” And since that time, an errant yet common belief is that teaching is for those who lack the capacity to succeed at more substantial work. Shaw did it consider teaching to be an esteemed profession.

We need to dig deeper into Shaw to understand his quote. Shaw attended four Dublin schools before dropping out in his early teens and engaging is self-education. Interestingly, one of the world’s great authors hated school. He learned instead from broad reading and constant visits to Dublin museums where he studied the art collection. Shaw learned from literary and artistic exemplars, often declaring that he was the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He considered himself self-taught by his study of the best examples of what he wanted to learn.

There is such fallacy in Shaw’s statement. A stronger argument for teaching lies in “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Educating children grows people and teaching changes the world.

What do we know?

When Shaw was school-age and until the early 2000s, classroom teachers were the primary source of information for learning children. A teacher not only managed classrooms, but a teacher also constructed curriculum, determined the content and skills children learn, and designed the pedagogy of teaching. The teacher, school texts, and the school library were the sources of student information. To use a common analogy, teachers were perceived as the expert in the front of the classroom.

We live in a new age. The teaching Shaw experienced ended in the last century. The Internet provides instant access to worlds of information, and tools of technology put that information at every student’s fingertips. Further, AI gives learners a tool for displaying information, if not answers, to any question a learner thinks to ask. Teachers no longer are, or are considered to be, the information expert in a classroom.

The role of teacher has changed, if not improved, and has become more important than ever. Today’s teachers are not the source of classroom information; teachers are navigators, curators, and elucidators helping children find, understand, and learn from the information they read, hear, watch, and experience. Each of these functions – navigation, curation, and elucidation – is essential for learning children in the digital Information Age.

With ubiquitous AI, children need teachers to help them navigate the world of information. Navigation has been an essential skill in Googling Internet information for decades. Left on their own, children are adrift in an ocean of information, especially information spread in social media. Navigator-teachers help children shape what they want to find out into questions. Questions are structurally worded into prompts. Prompts help AI focus its search so that the information displayed meets the student’s inquiry.

Navigation is an increasingly sophisticated skill set that children in their grade levels and various courses. Inquiries in science use the lens of a student-biologist, chemist, physicist, and earth scientist. The lens is different in the social studies where lenses taken on the inquiries of economists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and behavioral scientists. Each academic discipline presents a lens for how to navigate in the world’s information systems. Successful navigation is knowing and being faithful to your lens.

Teachers help children curate the information they obtain. Curation starts with helping children understand that AI searches are fallible and 15-20% of the information provided by a search is wrong, incorrect, or unsubstantiated. One of the great eye-openers is when children learn that AI hallucinates and often just makes up information. The deeper and more complicated the search, the greater the need for curation.

Curator-teachers work beside and behind children in their information searches. A curator is not like a parent on Halloween unwrapping every piece of candy a child brings home for hidden threats. Curators are information-whisperers helping children create their own filters for deciding the reliability and validity of information. Curation is not just a school skill set, but a function children need to exercise 24/7 in the real world.

Finally, teachers are elucidators. Information derived from an Internet search opens many opportunities for “teachable moments.” Teachers start by asking children, “What does this mean?” And “How does this connect to what you already know?” And “What new questions do you have now?” Elucidators also ask children “So, what?” Elucidation helps children find meaning and teaches them be independent finders of informational meaning.

The Big Duh!

This is my “so, what” moment. I modify Shaw’s quote to “teachers teach doers.” Every great invention and break-through event in our history stands on the shoulders of someone who taught an inventor or exploring person foundational knowledge and skills, who posed a “so, what” challenge, and stood aside to help the doing.

Shakespeare did not learn to write in school. He learned Latin and classical literature at King’s New School in Stratford. More to the point, he learned to write poetry and plays in the reality of his day – on-the-job writing and editing and performance. People in the theaters and local printers critiqued and commented on Shakespeare’s work and he refined his writing into the work we know today. The greatest English writer pre-Shaw used navigators, curators, and elucidators of his day, albeit they were not classroom teachers, to learn and perfect his craft. He could do and learned to become a doer. Shaw was a Shakespeare – he learned from others who indirectly helped him navigate, curate, and elucidate what he learned.

Teachers teach AND create doers.