The Direction of Intention

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I remember leaving the meeting with the school superintendent and being utterly baffled. The district hired me to create art projects in their schools and to inspire and promote experiential learning processes. Apparently, the art projects were becoming too powerful. The experiential learning was uncontrollable. The teachers, students, and parents were debating issues and engaging in meaningful conversations about big ideas, conversations that had no easy answer and required wading neck deep into deeper questions, they’d started digging into issues and challenging superficial responses, in short, they were thinking critically. They were on voyages of discovery and resisting attempts to contain their exploration. They were having fun. The board, through the superintendent, asked me to stop it. They wanted something more tame – the art was meant to be a distraction, an entertainment. It was the first time I truly understood the purpose of the public schools and the revelation was as disorienting as it was breathtaking.

I wrote a letter as part of my resignation explaining the purpose of the arts to the board and to the superintendent: it is through the arts that a community identifies itself (asks, “who are we?”) and engages with the deeper questions (asks, “why are we here?”) and has the capacity to re-imagine itself over time (asks, “what is ours to do?”). A community that reduces its art (and its expectation of education) to entertainment is a community on life support; it is already dead.

I wrote that letter 20 years ago and remembered it today as, more and more, I recognize the work of truly powerful people is to be the agents of retiring the old and make space for the new. The time for life-support is done. We have too many inert old world systems that we pump energy and resources into even though we know the patient is long dead. For instance, it is almost 2012; continuing to entertain the rhetorical blather that testing has anything to do with improving the quality of learning is to support the ill-intended purpose of education as taught to me by the board and the superintendent so many years ago. We’d get more for bang for our buck if we gave teachers bathroom breaks, time to eat lunch everyday, and the capacity to teach (as opposed to feed the insatiable needs of the test).

Or perhaps we should continue to focus on the short-term market gains and losses as the meter for how well we are doing in the world? How well are you doing? Who is explaining the market to you? Is the purpose of the market the same as the purpose of your life on this planet? How might you otherwise meter the worth of your time here? How might we as a nation set a more worthy intention?

Maybe we should continue to protect all the institutions that are “too big to fail” at the expense of the real health of the community; isn’t that the equivalent of saying, “The tumor is too big to remove so we will do nothing and hope that it takes care of itself.” It won’t. The heart continues to beat although the brain is clearly dead.

It is old, old, old, old thinking.

We live in the age of the internet. Bigger is not better. Connectivity and relationship rule the day and our systems and our expectations are decades behind. Better questions to ask in every sector, for a start, might be, “What are we doing?” Followed hard upon with a hearty, healthy series of the question, “Why?”

As Alan said after he returned from his recent teaching trip to Europe, our work as artists and coaches and teachers and leaders is to roll the old paradigm into hospice and become the midwife for the new.

Empowered people empower others when they look at the clearly naked emperor and cease to pretend that they see clothes.

Filed under: Rants, Truly Powerful People |