Tag Archives: bias

Correctly Coloring our World Was Never More Important Than Now

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We are “multi-, and you can fill in the hyphen-linked word. Multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-economicked, and multi-politicked. Let’s start there. And, in our being so multi-, we are constantly engaged in equality and equity arguments based on who has advantages over others in their daily living. This, I think, is an accurate description of our contemporary American society.

Equality and equity are burning issues in our nation that pre-date our founding. And they are huge today. I read that the way for our nation to be fair and equal is to be color blind and the only way to be color blind is to be completely blind to all colors. This is a perspective embraced by several Supreme Court Justices, and they give being color blind a large amount of traction in our political conversations.

Blind to color means paying no attention to color, race, or ethnicity in all aspects of life – ignoring all differences among peoples. The purest outcome of a color-blind society, they say, ensures all people are treated exactly the same. “Exactly” is an important word because “exactly” insures no variance in treatment. There is no advantage or disadvantage to a person’s color, race, or ethnicity.

Well, wake up! Those in power calling loudest for color blindness are trying the hardest to gain the greatest advantages over other people.  Power tilts our world, and power is corrupted by its own existence. Power does not willingly relinquish its status or capacity to affect its world. Power also is expanding in scope while diminishing in the number and characteristics of the people who hold it. The first dictum of power is that those who hold power must commit to sustaining their hold on it. This is United States political and economic theory 101.

So, let’s talk about the coloration the powerful want us to be color blind to. Our nation is split ethnically – 57.5% white and 42.5% non-white. Race and ethnicity are not demographically the same.

Race:

  • White 74.8%
  • Black/African American 13.7%
  • Asian 6.7%
  • American Indian/Alaska Native 1.4%
  • Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander .3%
  • Two or more race 3.1%

Ethnicity

  • White (non-Hispanic) 57.5%
  • Hispanic/Latino 19.5%
  • Black 12%
  • Asian 6%
  • Multi-racial 4.5%

Minorities make up 42% of the US population. Color blindness ignores the historical and cultural background of almost half our population. Consider what we serve as meals at home. How many recipes are ethnic based? At our July 4th picnics, the most American of celebrations, food served will represent all the cultures of our nation. Hot dogs, brats, and all the flavorings on ribs are imported variations.

Primary language at home

  • English 77%
  • Spanish 13.5%
  • Other Indo-European languages 4%
  • Asian/Pacific Island 3.5%
  • Other languages 1%

Color blindness is deaf to all languages but English. Yet our commerce is not. All manuals and directions accompanying a store-bought purchase are in multiple languages, Spanish especially. Manufacturers understand and serve people speaking languages other than English who use their products.

Religious affiliations

  • Christian 62%
  • Non-Christian 7%
  • Religiously unaffiliated 29%

Among Christians

  • Evangelical Protestant 23%
  • Mainline Protestant 11%
  • Catholic 21%
  • Other Christian 2%

Non-Christian

  • Jewish 2%
  • Muslim 1%
  • Hindu 1%

Although our national motto is “In God We Trust,” the peoples of our nation worship a variety of Gods. Notably, almost one-third do not claim religious affiliation. This does not mean they are Godless – it says they are outside the generalizations that we are a church-going nations. Power aligns with the vocal minority who are Evangelical Protestants and America First supporters. But whose America? The powerful’s America. What about the 75% of Christians who are not evangelical nationalists?

Color blindness ignores these real data. Like the ostrich with its head buried in the earth, color blindness does not see or hear any of these real differences. The color blind know the consequences of zeroing out so much in our communities, states, and nation and do not care.

How does this work? Can we reset the game clock and backstory and become color blind?

As a child, I played outdoor games after supper. Tag, hide and seek, and kick the can were our favorites. In our games players had the possibility to stop a game at any time. In their loudest child voice, a player yelled “freeze” and all other players stopped where they were, became statue-like and did not move.

During a “freeze” we allowed players to “unstatue” to retie shoestrings, take care of toileting, get a drink or a snack, get a sweatshirt against the evening chill, or check in with their parents about how long into the evening they could play. We took care of whatever needed attending to so that we could continue playing the game. Sometimes we traded positions with another player because we each thought the other’s position was more favorable.

On some occasions, we even modified the rules of the game. The slowest afoot were allowed to be tagged twice without becoming “it.” If they were “it” they were unlikely to catch anyone but the next slowest. Those of us with poor eyesight could use a flashlight to penetrate the darkness. Home base in hide and seek was larger for girls than for boys. Every modification was intended to “even” the playing field. Interestingly, as children, we knew differences existed among us and we, in our innocence, made compensation.

A “frozen” status held until all players returned to their former or new statue posture and the freezing player yelled “unfreeze.” Then the game continued, often with new rules, as if the game had not stopped.

Ah! If only we could yell “freeze” today and stop the world in its tracks for true time-outs so we could take care of needs and correct or change positions. If only we could yell “freeze” and change or correct the way the world works. But we cannot.

Life does not have a “freeze” possibility. Changing our world from its multi-variants to a color blinded perception of people requires a God-only freeze action, like the end of days and, though it feels end-of-days-like, we are not there yet.

Public education helps us to correctly color the world.

Instead of becoming color blind, we can correctly color the world. Correctly coloring the world means to historically understand time and events from multi-sources, multi-places, and to understand them without prejudice. To say it bluntly, correctly coloring negates a partisan political urgency to whitewash our history, to literally and completely whitewash history without recognition of the world’s multi-back stories. Instead of whitewashing, correctly coloring teaches about all colors in order not to be biased by any color.

Correctly coloring means to consider how each of the multi-perspectives views and addresses a problem in the world. It means understanding the variances in food-, health-, and wealth-security. Coloring correctly knows how various political, economic, and religious systems work in the world for the benefit of the people who live in those areas and how these various systems connect or collide with each other. Correctly coloring the world means studying and learning without bias. It is an equal and equitable knowledge and understanding of a multi-world.

Correctly coloring in public education means that teachers have non-partisan academic freedom to correctly color teaching and learning. They are not pressured to influence or bias what and how they teach, and what and how students learn. Teachers are accountable for creating a correctly color-informed next generation.

Can we do this? Yes. Will we do this? It will be hard.

Our public education is becoming tilted by the powers in our federal and state governments and local governance. While crying for color blindness, the powerful decry the existence and value of color in our world.

As with all change, correctly coloring the world begins small and in small places. Classrooms and schoolhouses are small places. All education begins and ends with grass roots teaching and learning. Children learn from their daily instruction and experiences. Thus, teachers in their classrooms, studios, labs, and fields start with color correct teaching. I will use the word color or coloration to mean races, ethnicities, religious groups, and linguistic groups.

We educate all children with multi-perspectives. There is no “one” viewpoint used to learn about people or our world and national history or the colors of the world. We teach many perspectives so that children will learn there are many ways to view people, places, and events and all colors have worth.

We educate all children with understandings of multi-backgrounds. Understanding applies higher order cognition. Children know the names and characteristics of each coloration. They can objectively analyze and compare each other to the others. They can evaluate how a color lives in the world, its aspirations, its needs, and its challenges.

Teaching children is not relegated only to classrooms. We can educate all children to address each other with dignity and respect. The best way to teach this to children is to model it. I find the greatest satisfaction in the simple act of acknowledging others and being acknowledged by others. In the checkout line at Target, I smile and nod towards people I do not know. Yesterday, I saw a black man with his family two lines over and we looked at each other. I nodded toward him and he nodded toward me. We each smiled. Expressing “I see you” is easy and reciprocal.

I say hello to people on the street, at the mall, while passing, and sitting in waiting rooms. Men, women, children, my color, any color. Recognition and acknowledgement of someone else confirms that we each exist and co-exist. That acknowledgement without prejudice opens opportunities for conversation and conversation for understanding.

I wait for, aid, and help anyone of any color who can use my small assistances as we mutually navigate our communities. Courtesy is free, goodwill is easy, and doing these often is habit-forming. I cannot count the times when, after holding the door for someone, I turn to see a younger person holding the door for others. Is this causation or a coincidence of courteous people? I like causation. Goodwill can be learned.

We can educate all children to know the human story, live in the realities of our multi- nation, and create a future without the prejudice of artificial advantage.

The Big Duh!

A color-blind public education is not color blind but is color real. It teaches all the colors of nature, all the stories of our history without prejudice, and treats all children with dignity and respect.

If we want a color-blind society, we do not deny color but see all the colors so well and with such understanding that we live our colors. And we stop all attachment of advantages or disadvantages to color-relatedness. I swear, the next person who lectures me about our need to be color blind deserves a dope-slap.

I guess my goodwill towards all may know some bounds.

When Self-evident Truths Fail, Teacher Role Modeling Matters

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Sometimes my grandchildren think I was raised in an alien world. And they are right. The era they experience now and the era I experienced as a child are so dissimilar we often seem worlds apart. We are bonded by our love for each other. We share a common last name. We share a common language. We live in the same area of the USA. After that, differences erupt. When we talk about what we believe and value and what we hope for, our worlds begin to disassemble. While I speak of an American life predicated on the balance of freedom and responsibility and our rights of citizenship, and the American Dream, they give real, everyday examples of class-based discrimination, non-accountable behaviors by powerful people, and death of the American Dream. The self-evident truths of an earlier time in our nation no longer hold for children in the early 21st century.

I expand this disassembled reality to the relationship between teachers and students and the generational gap(s) between them. Without a shared trust in self-evident truths, why do we think children should believe what we teach them? Because our actions must be louder than failed words. Teachers have the opportunity and the capacity to show through role modeling that self-evident truths still exist.

What about self-evident truths?

Self-evident truths are propositions that are obviously, intrinsically, and factually true, requiring no other proof or evidence to be accepted and believed as a basis for living. Self-evident truths are mathematical, scientific, and philosophic.

  • Two plus two equals four.
  • Two straight lines cannot enclose a space.
  • The sun rises in the east.
  • Newton’s laws of motion.
  • I think, therefore I am. (I do like Descartes)

And the list goes on.

When they are philosophical, their words have meaning that must be applied to all people in all times. The most famous statement of self-evident truths is in our Declaration of Independence. It says, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Even in the beginning of our nation, this statement held power as an ambitious goal because it was not completely true when it was written. Many of the signers of the Declaration were enslavers. None of the Declaration’s signers believed females were equal to males. And they did not extend equal rights to American Indian peoples. However, slavery was abolished, a Constitutional amendment gave women the right to vote, and in 1924 American Indian people were “granted” citizenship. For the first 150 years of our nation, self-evident truths were not true; they were a goal yet to be obtained by almost 3/4 of the population. In our most recent 100 years, the goal was actualized, and we could faithfully proclaim the philosophic truth of our “self-evident truths.

More importantly, perhaps, self-evident rights were interpreted as every citizen’s right to the American Dream, another ambitious goal for all people in our country and the world. With rights came opportunity and with opportunities fulfilled came “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The right to an American Dream meant that with their hard work all Americans could have employment, a home, and a standard of living that improved with each generation. The American Dream was synonymous with our self-evident truths.

What do my grandchildren and I know?

Sixty years separate my life from the lives of my grandchildren – 1940s and the 00s.

My world.

They hear my stories of childhood when children roamed the world safely. My Schwinn bike and later hitchhiking thumb were all I needed to explore my city of 70,000 people. Be home by supper, live by the Golden Rule, and follow the Boy Scout Oath and Law were my guidelines.

 Boy Scout Oath and Law

The adults in our neighborhood were surrogate parents to the 26 children who lived up and down our block and I obeyed them as I did my parents. At school, teachers led us in the Pledge and the 23rd Psalm every morning. We said “please and thank you” to the ladies who served our lunch. And when Miss Phillips, our principal, told us to take cover under our classroom desks during civil defense drills, we obediently did so. Teachers, principals, Sunday school teachers, pastors, and the judge who lived next door were beacons to me and my friends. If we behaved ourselves and got good grades in school, we would grow up to be like them and take our places in a better America.

It was an honor to meet our Governor. I knew our mayor. And my classmates formed the letters “Hi Ike” on the playground when President Eisenhower flew overhead. That evening, I saw the President walking with minimal escort at the All-Iowa Fair.

The running back on our football team was black, the left tackle was Lebanese, the tight end was a Mormon. Parents of my closest friends were doctors, lawyers, salespeople, and tradesmen. These were facts not things we thought about.

That world did not dissolve easily. Even when our government told lies about Viet Nam, JFK/MLK/RFK were assassinated, Watergate crashed around Nixon, Clinton lied, and GW Bush made up stories about weapons of mass destruction, government gone wrong did not tarnish our self-evident truths. When I once shook hands with former-President Clinton and Mrs. Clinton, I still respected the office held while marveling at their up-close personalities and his long fingers.

Although we knew the world was not perfect, the “American Dream” of our grandparents and parents still beckoned us forward. School was our ladder and higher education was our springboard to a standard of living and quality of life that promised to be better than generations before. And it all came true.

Their world.

My grandchildren tell me their stories. Roaming their world is limited to a radius of several blocks and they will never trust getting into a stranger’s car. Children are victims of depravity in their world; they are assaulted, abused, and killed. These children are not scouts and attend church perhaps once each year. They walk to parks and shops but only in groups, never alone. Today’s media tells frequent stories of children, especially girls, who disappear or euphemistically go missing.

Their school is not a place of safety but of potential danger. Since their enrollment in school, there have been more than1,400 school shootings, more than 550 student deaths, and 1,200 wounded students. Their schools are locked down when a classmate brings a gun to school. They view school violence not as an if but a when. School as a safe place to be is no longer a true statement.

They do not have faith in law enforcement. They see innocent people arrested, jailed, and shot. Even in the smaller cities where they live, good cops are bruised by bad cops. “Officer Friendly” is no longer real to them.

Our nation’s leaders tell them that nightly news is false reporting, alternative facts are real, people of color and different faiths are not real Americans, and all justice is transactional. If the President comes to town, it is for a fundraiser or an attack rally, and my grandchildren stay away. Politicians serve special interests not the people. They would not shake hands with a President. There are few adults in their world serving as beacons.

One grandson is a college graduate and two granddaughters, and another grandson college students. They and their parents are trading significant student debt in the traditional belief that a college degree is a steppingstone into the American Dream though, with this trade they already know that single-family housing is distant in their future. They are not wide-eyed and dreamy but coldly aware that equaling their parents’ standard of living will be the struggle not surpassing it.

To our grandchildren, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not self-evident.

Teachers as role models for self-evident truths

If not taken for their face value, these absent truths can be demonstrated. Self-evident truths are evidentiary. We can prove them today by the ways people interact with other people. And teachers are in the perfect position to be role models for children and adults of all ages.

This is not difficult to do. Teachers do these things every day without chest thumping or attention seeking. These are ingrained in us as public educators.

  • We teach equality without bias or prejudice. We are not color or difference blind, but inclusive and respectful of the children we teach and of their families and their cultures. Our first task is to know and understand the children we teach so that we can meet their learning needs and through our teaching cause each child to learn. Every adult can fall victim to implicit biases at times. However, teachers are not every adult. We are trained to understand and avoid bias and to teach each child without prejudice.
  • We teach children to pursue life with a growth mindset. We teach We are trained in theories and principles of childhood education and apply them in daily instruction that always pushes and causes children to learn. A child’s learning potential is not fixed but is constantly available for growth. The continuum of early childhood education to high school graduation is a constant opportunity for us to help each child to grow and improve their knowledge, skills, and life dispositions.
  • We teach to empower their life with ambition. Every success begets more success. We teach and coach and direct and guide children in academics, activities, arts, and athletics. We are trained to develop the multiple intelligences of children and to bring out the best of their abilities. We value effort and improved outcomes knowing that we can help each experience teach a child that she has the power to decide her life’s goals.
  • We teach children to achieve their dreams by leaning forward. Every lesson is about what comes next in a child’s learning continuum. If we look backwards, it is to understand the child’s background information and preparation for new learning. Dreams are in the future not the past.
  • We teach truths holistically. The humanities matter because they tell real stories of life. Life is not always clean and pure, and the stories and literature used to education children tell how people have struggled. Our history certainly is not always clean and pure. We teach multiple perspectives without bias so that children can learn to see and evaluate complex issues for themselves. We teach skepticism and criticism so that children will not be beguiled.
  • We teach so that children are prepared for their adulthood in our world. There are no “freebies” for the children we teach, so “bootstrapping,” learning from experience, and making the most of opportunities are lessons that matter.
  • We teach with faith in community and the commonwealth. We teach children to view their communities synergistically. As individuals, they can only do so much, but as contributors to community they can do more. Each child receives benefit from the commonwealth and is bound to give back for the benefit of others. This makes our union of peoples and states successful.

The Big Duh!

My grandchildren are accurate and true in their observations and conclusions about out world today. The self-evident truths of our nation are difficult to find in the evening news or online news media. Together, they and I know that America and American values are being shaped not by self-evident truths but by the truth of self-interest.

They and I also know that we are what we do. If individuals mimic self-interested rather than self-evident truths, that is what individuals, then families, then communities become. Values beget intentions and intentions beget actions and actions create outcomes and outcomes reinforce values and on it goes. Our children and grandchildren deserve and need adults in their world who believe in and value self-evident truths. Role modeling matters and teachers can be role models for a better future for all children.

Teaching Critical Thinking Is Essential Education

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Lost and not knowing which way to go is a concept that has greater meaning and worry in our world today. There are an abundance of noises and loud voices with few guiding lights and fewer guardrails for what is real and valid. Thinking critically is a skill set educators can and must teach children to use for finding their way.

What should a person who is lost do to find their way forward? If physically lost, there are a series of well-advised steps to take, like staying calm, stop wandering, retracing your steps, using landmarks, and using devices like GPS and maps to find your way. Finally, stay put and wait for help. As helpless as being physically lost seems, there are real and tangible things to do.

Being figuratively or mentally lost is a similar conundrum, but also significantly different. Staying calm, using devices, and waiting for help can apply. But the mind does what the mind wants to do, and it wanders and often becomes more lost and mired without a way forward. The absence of physical and tangible remedies causes being mentally lost to seem increasingly overwhelming.

What do we know?

Moore’s Law spoke about the rate of transistor development and the increasing speed of change. The world sped through that law, yet Moore and the speed of change can be applied to change in the world as a whole. The political, economic, social and cultural landscapes of our world are changing at Moore-like speed. Given the amount of vastness of changing things and all the crappola flung about, it is easy to feel lost and adrift in the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Facets of this changing landscape are the ever-increasing sources of information that are available to every “connected” student today. On any question, a student can find similar, different, conflicting, fact-based and alternative fact-based information at a moment’s notice and tomorrow there will be more. For a growing mind, noise and voices are bedlam. And to make it even more difficult, listeners in the beldam are told who to believe and who not to believe as often as they are told what to believe.

In the 60s and 70s some young people were so abused by disinformation systems that “dropping out” of mainstreamed culture was an attractive option. In this century, disenchantment with adult voices of all persuasions leads to Millennials and Zers becoming semi-isolates, to prioritize self-reliance and collaboration instead of following and looking for ethical leadership.

Teachers are empowered to teach critical thinking.

Wisconsin Statute 118.01(2)(a)(2) instructs public educators to teach “… analytical skills, including the ability to think rationally, solve problems, use various learning methods, gather and analyze information, make critical and independent judgments and argue persuasively.” It may appear to be cherry picking to isolate this singular statute, but in a culture that is unable to attach whimsical decisions to bedrock, identifying a state statute is a true anchor.

Critical thinking also is an identifiable thread running through each of the disciplines of the Common Core curricula, adopted and incorporated into Wisconsin’s Academic Standards.

https://dpi.wi.gov/standards

What does teaching critical thinking look like?

In its simplest terms, critical thinking is an intellectual, brain-based process of careful evaluation, analysis, and synthesis of various pieces of information to create a rational, and thought-out judgment or decision about a targeted question. Everyone has the capacity for critical thinking. However, many choose to be told rather than to think.

All teachers, regardless of grade level or subject, can teach children to understand and use critical thinking skills. These skills can apply to every question or substantive decision in a child’s school and personal life, though many daily decisions are semi-baked into a child’s education and training. For example, looking both ways before crossing a street does not require critical thinking. But trusting adults a child does not know does. And understanding daily news does. And understanding personal relationships does.

While we do not want to paralyze child decision making, we do want to teach them how and when to exercise deeper thinking skills to navigate through their growing up.

These elements are foundational to critical thinking. As practitioners of critical thinking, we teach children to –

  • evaluate by assessing the credibility and relevance of information. Who says it, why do they say it, who do they represent in saying it, what do they want to achieve by saying it? Children need to understand and recognize bias in information and voices. They need to discern facts from opinions, and in most recent terms, false facts and disinformation. Critical thinkers verify the accuracy of the information they consider by asking questions and reading/listening to diverse points of view.
  • analyze information by finding similarities and differences in what the information says, breaking these into smaller bits from which patterns and relationships in the information can be identified, and creating a concept or theory that explains, in the student’s own words, what she has learned and knows. She understands perspective while knowing that some information does not make sense in a coherent argument.
  • synthesize the bits, connections and disconnection, and relationships needed to make an informed and personal statement. While evaluation and analysis deconstruct information into smaller bits, synthesis is constructing a meaningful statement based upon sorting and valuing the bits.
  • reason with others. This the hardest step in critical thinking. When a student reasons with others, she puts her understandings and informed conclusions against those of others. It is a testing of a student’s evaluation, analysis, and synthesis. Good reasoning sometimes requires accommodating well-reasoned arguments from other students.

If not teachers, then who?

It is difficult to be young today. Maybe it always was, but in this decade even more so. It is hard for adults to sort the chaos and find their own truths when every statement in the news conveys the speaker’s or writer’s self-interests and biases. It is equally difficult to find incontrovertible sources of information. It is hard for adults; it is really hard for children.

We need to make classrooms into laboratories for critical thinking at all ages and levels of cognitive development. As teachers and public education leaders declare classrooms to be apolitical and agnostic regarding social, political, economic, and cultural controversy, teachers and students are free to investigate issues, ask insightful questions, and use critical thinking to derive informed answers. This is why teachers are critical to critical thinking.

Secondly, teachers are prepared to develop critical thinking skills, not rush them. Critical thinking fits well into an educator’s understanding of “developmental appropriateness.” Our youngest primary students can observe, listen, touch and feel, and constructively identify what they learn about things, ideas, people, and their world. They identify information and begin to evaluate it. Primary aged children are not ready for deeper analysis, synthesis, or reasoning.

Intermediate grade level students can begin analyzing information. Hilda Taba, a curricular theorist and student of John Dewey’s, gave us a method for analyzing information and using critical thinking inductively for students to create their own informed concepts and generalizations. Students in the intermediate grades begin using Taba techniques to analyze information on the way toward generalizations.

http://mrbeasleysaigsite.weebly.com/tabas-concept-development-model.html

Secondary school is ripe for critical thinking in every area of our curriculum. Every teacher can meaningfully ask, “what do you know about…”, “what do you observe about …”, “what do you think about …” questions and move students through evaluation and analysis into synthesis and reasoning. Given the range of cognitive development in secondary students, all students, even those still immature in their reasoning skills, benefit from being engaged in formulating their thoughts and explaining and supporting their reasoning.

Taba died in 1962, but her words ring true more than 60 years later.

“One scarcely needs to emphasize the importance of critical thinking as a desirable ingredient in human beings in a democratic society. No matter what views people hold of the chief function of education, they at least agree that people need to learn to think. In a society in which changes come fast, individuals cannot depend on routinized behavior or tradition to make decisions, whether on practical every day or professional matters, moral values, or political issues. In such a society, there is a natural concern that individuals be capable of intelligent and independent thought.”

So, if not teachers, who do we want to teach children to be critical thinkers. Our elected leaders? Our social influencers? AI?

Teachers cause learning.