Some great points. What you say about solidarity feels right to me. To push
back with traction on this issue a whole lot of people will need to work
together with trust, compassion, and understanding. How do we start building
conditions within the independent school community that will allow guilt to
turn into productive engagement? Diversity efforts like SEED do provide a
great model. How can we leverage that?
Fred
On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Steve Taffee <staffee@castilleja.org>wrote:
> Fred, Peter, et al.
>
> It seems to me that many Independent Schools do, in fact wish to engage in
> this issue but may be hamstrung by old models of "helping." In the case of
> enormous economic disparities, and the inescapable fact that many of us
> teach in privileged schools, there's plenty of guilt for us to deal with.
> Guilt can be immobilizing, and lead to arms-length, intellectualized
> responses.
>
> Where we can gain traction, in my view, is to adopt more of a stance based
> on solidarity. The SEED diversity program that some schools use is a useful
> means of engaging faculty and staff in discussion and action plans
> surrounding social and economic injustice.
>
> It takes fairly mature thinking (I'm thinking of Kohlberg's levels of moral
> development) for students to engage in discussions of justice and fairness
> without assuming undue guilt, misassignment of blame, and so on.
>
> s
>
> -----
> Steve Taffee | Director of Strategic Projects
> Castilleja School | staffee@castilleja.org
> 1310 Bryant Street | www.castilleja.org
> Palo Alto, CA 94301 | taffee.edublogs.org
> 650.924.1040 (Google Voice)
> Women Learning, Women Leading
> <http://twitter.com/sjtaffee> <http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetaffee
> >
> You don't *really* need to print this do you?
>
>
>
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